Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.