The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (43 page)

At the same time, the essentially sectarian nature of Northern society grew still more stark. As early as 1923 an attempt was made by the province’s first education secretary, Lord Londonderry, to create an integrated, secular and greatly expanded system of schooling. His proposals ran rapidly into the sand, faced as they were by insurmountable opposition from the Catholic and Protestant establishments that balked at – among other ideas – proposals to remove religious instruction from the school timetable. Education in Northern Ireland continued its evolution into two separate and parallel systems, and a disillusioned Londonderry resigned from the Northern Ireland cabinet in 1926.
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Profoundly insular though it was, the Northern state could not keep the outside world entirely at bay. The global depression that began in 1929, for example, devastated the province’s industrial base and brought buried class-based tensions within Unionism to the fore. The swelling numbers of unemployed in and around Belfast had little in the way of welfare provision on which to fall back; and it took a certain fleetness of foot on the part of the government – including the expansion of relief measures and improved conditions for the police – to put a lid on growing social disturbances in Protestant areas of the city. As the economy of the province continued its decline, meanwhile, the Northern state became ever more dependent on British government subvention – much to the disappointment of London, which had envisaged an economically healthy Northern Ireland being in a position to make modest contributions to the imperial exchequer. In the course of the 1930s this economic dependence would become explicit, with the Unionist establishment increasingly anxious to have an ostensibly autonomous Northern Ireland included in the gradual unrolling of greater welfare provision across the United Kingdom as a whole.

The result was that all sectors of society were able to share in the bounty of gradually expanding welfare payments, more generous pensions and improved healthcare – but such measures were not accompanied by political change. Northern Catholics were systematically discriminated against in the areas of employment and housing; local government was gerrymandered to ensure Protestant domination even in Catholic areas – most notoriously in the case of Derry, where a 1936 reorganization of the city corporation ensured Unionist control of a predominantly nationalist city. The inevitable consequence of such policies was to undermine any tacit nationalist acceptance of the constitutional status quo.

In the Free State, the accession of de Valera’s Fianna Fáil to government in the spring of 1932 was a highly significant political moment. The transfer of power from Cumann na nGaedheal – in contrast to the situation in many other European countries in this fraught period – was accomplished smoothly and without any threat to the state’s democratic institutions. Throughout the election campaign de Valera had emphasized his new party’s social, economic and welfare credentials, in particular pledging to reduce the scourge of unemployment. His enemies had claimed that Fianna Fáil would bring only instability and factionalism to Irish politics: yet in the event, the new government proved to be just as keen as its predecessor on stability and continuity. There was little in the way of revolutionary fervour about its policies: rather, from its first months in power it displayed the pragmatism that soon became the party’s hallmark, with rhetorical calls for pure, traditional nationalism jostling with actual – if modest – increases in the provision of welfare, housing and medical services.

De Valera’s devotion to the principle of economic self-sufficiency, meanwhile, soon saw the erection of tariff walls around Ireland and a range of policies designed to keep foreign capital out and Irish money and investment in. In the traumatic years after the Depression, policies such as these were popular across the developed world. But Ireland had been losing its population since the time of the Famine nearly a hundred years earlier, and the countryside was rapidly depopulating, regardless of de Valera’s belief that it was in the fields and lanes of Ireland that the true, authentic spirit of the nation was to be found. Neither political independence nor claims to self-sufficiency could alter the facts of economic decline and failure – nor disguise the tales of human tragedy that lay behind the statistics.

Fianna Fáil now faced a new parliamentary opposition. The new Fine Gael party consisted mainly of former Cumann na Gaedheal members; it also, however, numbered in its ranks the so-called Blueshirts, an organization that traded on the distinctive straight-armed salute of the Italian and German fascists. The Blueshirt ideology was a heady mixture of Catholic conservatism and anti-Semitism; the movement was headed by Eoin O’Duffy, a former Garda commissioner sacked by de Valera in 1933, and was spiced with a loathing of de Valera that sprang from the ashes of the civil war. The visually arresting aplomb of the organization and its various activities (some of its members fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish civil war) have certainly earned it a place in the history of the period, especially when seen in the context of the rise of European fascism. But there was no appetite in Ireland for fascism – and, in truth, the Irish Blueshirts were no more than a rag-bag movement that faded rapidly, damaged and divided Fine Gael and left little or nothing behind by way of a political legacy. If anything, its existence served only to bolster Fianna Fáil: in taking steps to curb and finally eliminate the Blueshirt threat (such as it was), de Valera’s party was able to assume the mantle of the party of law and order – in the process facilitating its own transition into the realm of constitutional politics.

A decade after the Treaty, de Valera remained eager to return to the issue of the constitutional arrangements between Ireland and the Empire. The measures he took to alter these arrangements were highly effective: the existing governor general was boycotted; in time, de Valera nominated a new appointment to the post, who was instructed to do nothing and remain invisible; the office itself, having been softened up in this way, was eventually abolished in 1936. At the same time, annuities paid to the British government by Irish farmers (the price they were obliged to pay as a result of the Land Acts in order to gain title over their land) were diverted to the Irish exchequer. This was in direct contravention of the terms of the Treaty, and the British government responded by imposing heavy taxes on a wide range of Irish exports to Britain: the Irish government then responded in kind – but this was an economic war in which Ireland came off much the worse.

Despite this, the episode ended well for de Valera: in April 1938 the British government agreed to give up its rights to the land annuities in return for a one-off payment of £10 million. Furthermore, it relinquished control of the Treaty ports in Cork and Donegal: a British assessment had concluded that, in the event of war, it would not be worthwhile retaining the ports against the explicit wishes of a restive and unhappy host country; furthermore, the British could rest assured that the Free State would now have no excuse to open its territory to German arms. De Valera, of course, had no intention of allowing any such situation to develop if it could possibly be avoided – so the return of the ports and the removal of this British presence from the Free State thus represented pure victory. Fianna Fáil, then, might not have declared a republic overnight: but the ground was being laid for such a step in the fullness of time – and the drawing up of a new constitution was another piece in this jigsaw.

The constitution of 1937 was a carefully poised document and one that sought, by means of a combination of clear assertion, allusion and implication, the allegiance and loyalty of all. On the one hand, the constitution reflected the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of the state by means of a clause enshrining the special position of the Catholic Church in Irish life, and through others banning divorce and blasphemy. At the same time, however, the constitution defended the position of the Protestant denominations and (not insignificantly, given the state of affairs in 1930s’ Europe when the document was formulated) the country’s small Jewish community. The Catholic Church may have been ‘special’, therefore, but it was certainly not the established Church – a situation quite unlike that of many of Ireland’s European neighbours – and there was therefore no compulsion for certain office-holders to be Catholic.

This elusive quality was further reflected in other passages. The constitution adhered to the ambitions and aspirations of an independent republic – but it did not actually declare the country to be a republic. It reestablished a bicameral legislature and founded the office of president – but neither this new Senate nor the head of state would have much to offer by way of powers or authority. It called on the loyalty of Irish nationalism by declaring Irish to be the principal national language and by laying claim overtly to the entire island of Ireland and its surrounding seas – but at the same time it acknowledged the reality of partition by conceding that Dublin’s legal writ ran, for the time being, only to the territory of the Free State. And while the document referred frequently to ‘the Nation’ – Article 9 stated that ‘fidelity to the Nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens’ – at no point did it offer a definition of this term. This was a crucial issue in a constitution so wholly shadowed by the fact and existence of partition and of a sizeable Northern population that had rejected rule from Dublin in the recent past – and that would do so again, given the opportunity.
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In July 1937, the constitution was passed by referendum: on a turn-out of a little over 50 per cent, there were some 685,000 votes in favour and 527,000 against. The people had accepted the constitution, thus lending it weight and authority – but such a vote did not indicate a resounding affirmation of the document; and in the general election held on the same day Fianna Fáil lost its absolute majority in parliament. Yet the state was now on a new footing and a republic in all but name. Soon too de Valera’s suppression of his former IRA allies, by means of the Offences against the State Act of 1939, would underscore his authority. Threats to the state could no longer be tolerated, and the deaths of nine IRA men – through execution and on hunger strike – in the years that followed underlined the government’s determination on this point.

War was declared in Europe in September 1939 – and Ireland, in common with many other European nations, at once announced its neutrality in the face of what the government termed the ‘Emergency’. That the country would choose this status had long been apparent: there was neither public nor political appetite to enter any conflict on the side of Britain, and the memories of the civil war were still too vivid. The country was, in any case, entirely unprepared. Defence spending had steadily declined in the 1930s, and did not begin to increase until after the war. The size of the army grew only after the German capture of Paris in June 1940, at which point the potential dangers for the country had become glaringly evident. Throughout the war, army training was hampered by faulty, obsolete or non-existent equipment; and the country had only the most slender naval and air defences.

Neutrality, then, was de Valera’s only possible option – but this did not prevent the British making several overtures to the Irish government. In June 1940 – with Germany in the ascendant across Europe – a firm offer was tabled: the British authorities would publicly announce a preference for Irish unity in return for an Irish declaration of war against Germany. De Valera rejected the offer: at this moment, Germany looked likely to win the war; and quite apart from the internal resistance he would certainly face, he could not contemplate Ireland joining the British side at such a very inauspicious moment. Eighteen months later another offer was made, and now the timing was rather less hopeless: the United States had entered the war, and its eventual outcome seemed rather clearer. From the British point of view, of course, an Allied Ireland was greatly to be wished for: it would secure the flow of foodstuffs across the Irish Sea; it would enable the placing of a military presence in Ireland to see off any possible German landings; and it would open Irish seaports – so useful in aiding the vital Atlantic convoys – to British ships. De Valera, however, again rejected the offer: he knew that internal opposition would be no less ferocious than it had been a year before, and that the government and Unionist population of Northern Ireland were unlikely to go along meekly with any such plan, regardless of how much British pressure was heaped upon them.

Irish neutrality, however, was another shadowy affair shot through with ambiguity. Ireland was both living and not living in a world of war. The Luftwaffe dropped bombs on the capital in January and May 1941, killing thirty Dubliners; a sea mine washed up on a Donegal beach in 1943 and exploded, killing nineteen men and boys who had gone to investigate; and dead bodies from torpedoed shipping – the exploding bombs themselves sometimes clearly audible from the shore – became a common sight along the coasts for the duration of the war.

Censorship – as was the case across Europe in these years – became more ubiquitous, with the daily newspapers presenting their copy to the censor in advance of publication and newsreels filleted of any disturbing content. Irish audiences saw and heard little from Stalingrad, for example; there were few details made available of the fall of France, or of the various bloody engagements that characterized the war in the Pacific; and the gradually accumulating knowledge of Nazi atrocities in Europe was also kept from Irish readers. Irish immigration policies were highly illiberal: the country was essentially closed to Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. In May 1945, indeed, de Valera himself visited Dublin’s German legation to offer his government’s commiserations on the death of Hitler: it was a diplomatic move that caused consternation both among the staff at the legation and abroad – though de Valera claimed that not to have paid such a visit ‘would have been an act of unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation’.
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