The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (36 page)

One result was the foundation in 1884 of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) with the intention of promoting interest in such specifically Irish sports as Gaelic football and hurling and in the process countering British cultural dominance. The organization frowned on such ‘British’ sports as cricket, tennis and rugby; and it banned policemen and soldiers from membership. The Gaelic League, meanwhile, was founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893 to foster the Irish language and Irish culture in general: Hyde was a Protestant and his vision was of a national language owned by all of the population, regardless of their denomination. Religion, indeed, was replaced in Hyde’s vision by race: a common Gaelic Ireland that could take its place alongside the modern nations of the world. Joyce, in ‘The Dead’, would capture the popularity of such language-based cultural politics among a certain Irish middle-class constituency: his sharp-tongued Miss Ivors castigates those who prefer to study foreign cultures and languages, who cannot feel her fervent affinity with the ‘national’ language. But the league soon assumed both an explicitly Catholic and a sharper political edge.

Ancient history and myth were additional tools in this gathering discourse. The Fenian movement had looked to the legendary Fianna of ancient mythology, using a notional version of the past as a means of influencing the contemporary world, and now others would rework history in a similar fashion in order to create heroes and villains, winners and losers. The writing of Standish James O’Grady well exemplifies this move, his work of the 1870s and 1880s acting as a midwife to the Irish cultural revival and his self-imposed task of revivifying the myths and legends of Irish history for a modern audience. His version of the history of Ireland was, by his own admission, very largely a work of fiction: an act of reaching back in order to resolve how best to move forward; of creating a glorious and distant past as a means of counteracting the recent bad times of the Famine.

O’Grady’s
History of Ireland
, indeed, was a book that directly inspired the greats of what became known as the Irish Literary Revival: Yeats, who was already publishing poems in English based on a mythical Irish past, declared that his readings set him directly to work on his ‘Wanderings of Oisin’, noting that ‘the only person who while belonging to the head class has the central fire of the old people is O’Grady. Everything he does is a new creation, a new miracle.’
¹⁴
Yeats, his aristocratic confidante Augusta Gregory, the young Protestant playwright John Millington Synge and others combed the rugged western littoral in search of a culture in contact with its past, unadulterated by the contamination and grubbiness of the modern world. The past was being mined and refashioned to suit contemporary needs; and in particular to satisfy the present desire for self-government. Yet Yeats’ notion of a ‘head class’ also indicated the character of his national vision. For one thing, his language was English – and his new national literature was explicitly an English-language project. For another, he – like Gregory and Synge – were Protestants: they were alert to Ireland’s Protestant heritage and they believed in the importance of a Protestant stake in the country’s new future. Yeats was prepared to treat with the Catholic middle-class interests who were driving much of the nationalist debate – but it remained to see whether such a philosophical gap could be bridged.

In these closing years of the nineteenth century, then, the various elements of Irish nationalist culture had so very much to say for themselves that each struggled to be heard; and it was unclear whether, in the midst of such a national debate, a consensus could ever be reached on any future national shape or direction. In the face of this ongoing tumult – and with the clash of unionism and nationalism continuing all the while – it was perhaps easy for the authorities to become complacent. Yet change was on the way – although it would take an event thousands of miles away on the southern tip of Africa to galvanize matters fully: to direct once more the disparate currents of cultural nationalism into explicitly political channels.

Part Five

Two Irelands

Chapter Ten

Schisms

On 21 June 1897 the aged Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Around 3 million people gathered in London to witness the events of Jubilee Day, which included a three-hour-long royal procession through the streets of the city, followed by a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. Victoria herself had made it clear that the Jubilee must be connected explicitly with a celebration of the British Empire, so the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, ensured that representatives were brought together in London from each British possession, protectorate and colony, with an accompanying march-past of some fifty thousand imperial troops. Chamberlain’s own views on the empire were perfectly clear: ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen…. It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world’s surface unless you make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.’

Chamberlain had every reason to be complacent about the future: the empire was at its zenith, and Britain remained the hub of world commerce. And yet discordant voices could be heard. The Scottish labour activist Keir Hardie, for example, baldly condemned Victoria and her large family as parasites. In Ireland, a gathering in Dublin of the disaffected resulted in a march by torchlight from the castle through the centre of the city: at the heart of the throng was an empty coffin, symbolizing the death of the empire. The march was dispersed by the police; the coffin tipped into the river Liffey. Even in this jubilee year, then, the British imperial project faced opposition. Looming events in Ireland and in Africa would soon make this fact abundantly clear.

The situation at the southern tip of Africa was at this time highly unstable and marked by political and commercial tension between the British (in the colonies of Natal and the Cape) and the Boers, the Calvinist descendants of the original Dutch-speaking colonists. For the British government the region had long been of the utmost geopolitical importance, since the Cape controlled the vital sea lanes between Europe and India; as a result Britain had formally acquired the Cape Colony in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Many Boers then migrated northwards to assert a measure of independence from the British; in time they established the twin republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, in the process asserting control over the African majority population. These republics were autonomous entities that nevertheless existed in a state of permanent friction with the British authorities, in whose eyes they were anomalies in the context of a now almost wholly colonized continent. Furthermore, they stood in the way of the desired continuous belt of British occupation from the Cape north to Cairo.

The discovery first of diamond deposits in the Orange Free State and later of gold in the Transvaal had transformed this already tense situation. The
uitlanders
or foreign workers who began to migrate to the region were for the most part British, and their increasing presence would ultimately provide an opportunity for British intervention. The result was the annexation in 1877 of the Transvaal and the attempt to create a Union of South Africa (as seen in Chapter Nine, a process hampered in the Commons by Parnell and his supporters) that would be controlled by British interests. The resulting First Boer War of 1880–1 produced a series of defeats for the British, confirmed the autonomy of the two Boer states and led to the resumption of a fitful peace in the region. Yet migrant workers continued to flood into the Boer republics to work in their burgeoning mining industries: eventually, the
uitlander
population of the Transvaal outnumbered that of the Boers.

In 1895, a British attempt to incite an
uitlander
rising against Boer rule in the Transvaal – the so-called Jameson Raid – failed: in its aftermath, the two Boer states drew together in a tighter alliance and to prepare for war. The jingoism of the British press on this issue, however, ignored the stark fact that the empire’s military strength at the Cape was weak: Britain was simply not in a position to easily win a war against the Boers on their home ground. Tensions came to a head in September 1899, when Chamberlain demanded the extension of voting rights to all
uitlanders
living and working in the Transvaal; the Boer authorities refused and in their turn demanded the removal of the British troops clustered on the borders of the Republic. On 11 October the Boer governments took the initiative: their forces crossed into Natal and the Cape Colony and the Second Boer War began.

Events in southern Africa had long been of great interest to Irish nationalists. It was not difficult to see the Boers as the put-upon victims of monstrous imperialist aggression – an independent-minded pastoral culture that wanted only to be free of the predatory British. Moreover, connections with the region were relatively strong: great floods of Irish emigrants might not have washed up on the shores of southern Africa as they had in Australia and North America, but a small core of Irish had gone to the Transvaal in the hope of making their fortune in the goldfields. They included John (‘Foxy Jack’) MacBride, a shopkeeper’s son from County Mayo, who had emigrated in 1896; and the Irish-language enthusiast and Gaelic League founder member Arthur Griffith, who had come to Johannesburg in 1897 for a two-year stint with a gold company. Griffith found the atmosphere on the high veldt much to his liking: Boer society, he said, demonstrated that ‘God Almighty had not made the earth for the sole use of the Anglo-Saxon race’.
¹

This thousand-strong community was more than ample, in those days of improving communications, to spread the word quickly and efficiently of Boer suffering at the hands of the British; and its political complexion was demonstrated in the form of the boisterous celebrations that took place at Johannesburg to mark the centenary of the 1798 rising. With the outbreak of war, the sight of another small, white Christian nation struggling for freedom electrified Irish nationalism. Constitutional politicians had already patched up their bitter post-Parnell factionalism, with the result that a united Irish Party now re-established itself under the leadership of John Redmond. The movement had been only mildly invigorated: its performance – lacking the heady energy of the Parnell era – was frequently anaemic. Yet it remained the dominant force in nationalist politics for years to come.

Other nationalists, meanwhile, continued to reject the parliamentary route. Shortly after his return from Africa, for example, Griffith established the
United Irishman
newspaper, which would provide a vital media platform in the succeeding years. It first appeared in March 1899, and enabled further airing of the plethora of fiery debates and disputes that at this time characterized Irish cultural life. The
United Irishman
was kept afloat financially with the assistance of Maud Gonne, the wealthy daughter of an English army officer who is best known for her long association with the poet W. B. Yeats. Early in her life Gonne had come to identify fiercely with the world of nationalist Ireland, and she penned many campaigning pieces for the paper.

These were exciting times – so exciting, indeed, that there was neither time nor inclination to reflect on certain problematic aspects of the African situation. The deeply ingrained anti-Catholic nature of Boer society was widely recognized: it was for this reason that England’s Catholic bishops lent their support to the British government’s policies in Southern Africa. In Irish nationalist circles, by contrast, this question of religion tended to be dismissed: national liberation was what mattered, and other factors were regarded as essentially immaterial. As to the marginal place allotted to black Africans in Boer society, the prevailing lack of attention given to this question reflected much broader European racist attitudes – to which Irish nationalism was certainly not immune.

So Irish nationalism threw its weight behind the Boer cause: the
vierkleur
flag of the Transvaal became a familiar sight on the streets of Dublin as the southern African war rapidly developed into a
cause célèbre
, while the pages of the
United Irishman
filled with articles calling for resistance and fellowship with the Boers and urging those who might enlist in the British army for pressing economic reasons to reconsider. ‘Think on this, Irish mothers,’ Gonne proclaimed in a piece anatomizing the plight of British soldiers left maimed and disabled in the course of a variety of imperial campaigns, ‘even when there is hunger in your cabins and things look dark and hopeless for the land we love.’
²
In October 1899, Griffith, Gonne and James Connolly were instrumental in the foundation of the Irish Transvaal Committee: in the same month a crowd of twenty thousand gathered in front of Custom House in Dublin to show solidarity for the Boer cause; and Michael Davitt – who had been elected to represent South Mayo in 1895 but who thoroughly disliked Westminster and its atmosphere – resigned his seat in the Commons, telling his fellow members: ‘When I go I shall tell my boys, “I have been some five years in this House, and the conclusion with which I leave it is that no cause, however just, will find support, no wrong, however pressing or apparent, will find redress here, unless backed up by force.”’
³

In southern Africa itself, figures within the Irish community had come together in September that year to organize a fighting force, to be placed at the disposal of the authorities in the Transvaal; President Kruger gave his assent a few weeks later. The resulting Irish Brigade, commanded by MacBride, was composed of Irish, Irish–Americans and other nationalities: it was but one of several such overseas brigades (Dutch, Italian, German and Russian; and there might have been more, had Kruger permitted it) that turned out for the Boers. Each member of the Irish Brigade – never more than five hundred strong – swore an oath ‘to the people of the South African Republic…that I will work for nothing but the prosperity, the welfare, and the independence of the land and people of the Republic, so truly help me, God Almighty’.