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.

This Day in Irish History (Downing Street Declaration Offers ‘Framework’ for Ulster Peace Process)

Dec. 15, 1993—The leaders of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland advanced the fraught peace process in Northern Ireland by signing the Downing Street Declaration, a joint statement of intentions that capped a year when a change in policy on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to dissolve decades of mistrust and violence in the troubled province.

In this “charter for peace and reconciliation," the UK government forswore any "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland."

At the same time, Ireland agreed that any settlement needed to "respect the democratic dignity and the civil rights and religious liberties of both communities"—not just Catholics who had been pressing for issues like justice, economic gains, and better housing since “The Troubles” broke out in 1969, but also Protestants who feared any agreement that would leave them at a disadvantage.

Above all, both governments pledged to abide by the wish of the majority in any future agreement.

At the time, that was regarded as a concession to the Protestants who had held sway in the province since the 1920s, when a commission to determine the boundary between Ulster and the more republican-dominated region to the south dissolved. Their unsettled work resulted in a de facto gerrymandered Northern Ireland that favored Unionists.

At the time of this partition, Protestants had enjoyed a nearly 2-1 advantage in population over Catholics, based on the 1911 census, and they had retained that edge for decades. But by 1992, higher birth rates for Catholics had left them not far behind Protestants: 42.8 percent versus 38.4 percent.

Now, according to the 2021 census, there are more Catholics than Protestants living in Northern Ireland: 42.3 percent versus 30.5 percent. (A growing 8.2 percent identify as non-Christian religious.) This was a boon welcomed by advocates of Ulster’s unification with Ireland—and a nightmare scenario for those preferring continued association with the United Kingdom.

Although these demographic trends were gathering steam in the 1990s, leaders in Britain, Ireland—and now, the United States—were primarily concerned in the Downing Street negotiations with ending nearly a quarter century of violence between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries that was increasingly exhausting all sides.

On the surface, little seemed to be happening to end the stalemate. But much was happening outside public view, starting with the development of a friendly dialogue over the prior two years between British Prime Minister John Major (left in the photo) and Ireland’s Taoiseach (“Chief” or “Leader”), Albert Reynolds (right).

Neither leader possessed an especially strong hold over either their party or the wider electorate. But both believed, as Major told the House of Commons in his Dec.15 address announcing the agreement, that “we had to make it a personal priority both to seek a permanent end to violence and to establish the basis for a comprehensive and lasting political settlement.”

What they produced was “a framework for peace,” a carefully chosen phrase meant to convey mutual understanding—and a set of principles to guide future diplomacy.

All the same, getting the two governments to agree even on this much would have been well-nigh impossible for the prior 25 years. Even events in the last year before the agreement could have upended everything:

*Whatever warm feelings existing between Major and Reynolds were not replicated between the British leader and Bill Clinton. The Prime Minister had been deeply embarrassed when news leaked in the 1992 campaign that the Home Office had investigated whether as an Oxford student, Clinton had applied for UK citizenship as a means of avoiding military service during the Vietnam War.

*Major could barely command a majority in the House of Commons—and it could all come apart if Ulster’s Unionist MPs thought he was making too many concessions to the nationalists.

*Despite continued denials that it would not deal with the IRA unless it gave up its campaign to drive the British out of Ulster, Major’s government had been forced to admit, in late November 1993, that it had been maintaining back-channel talks with the organization for many years.

*October 1993 was marked by the largest loss of life (27 dead) in Northern Ireland in a single month since 1976, including, most notoriously, nine civilians, all Protestant, and one IRA bomber killed in a bombing on Shankill Road, aimed on faulty intelligence at the leadership of the loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association.

Other factors contributed to the Good Friday Agreement concluded in 1998, including talks between Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, and John Hume, the leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party; Irish-American politicians and lawyers who pushed for justice and peace in Ulster; and more active American facilitation of talks among the parties through President Clinton.

But the Downing Street Declaration created an avenue for paramilitary forces to participate in the political process, and momentum for the IRA to declare its first ceasefire nine months later.

(In light of one massive change in the UK in the last decade, I urge you to read Darren Litter's March 2021 blog post on the role of the European Council in paving the way for the Downing Street Declaration. Given the UK and Irish governments' "sensitivity to leaks and failure to reconcile positions," he argues, two summits held by the council in the fall of 1993 enabled Major and Reynolds to discuss obstacles to compromise "away from the lights" of media gathered in Belfast.)

Photo of the Day: Irish Famine Monument, Cambridge MA

Some monuments—notably, those honoring Confederate heroes—are built in a relatively short period of time. Others—including this one, which I photographed on a trip to Boston and its surrounding area in 2008—are erected far later.

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s resulted in an estimated 1 million deaths and another million who emigrated to escape starvation, disease and grinding poverty. But those statistics don’t even begin to convey the trauma suffered by those who endured it. It affected the destinies of two countries—Ireland, which could never forget that a blight affected their potatoes but their British overlords produced the starvation; and the United States, where the Irish became the prototypical immigrant group.

For more than a century, the memory of that catastrophe was an open wound, best left to be forgotten by those who lived through it and their descendants. But in time, as the Irish carved out their niche in the United States, they not only began to probe the causes and effects of the famine, but also sought to commemorate it in tangible form, as in statuary.

Canbridge's Irish Famine Monument, located on Cambridge Common and cast by Maurice Carron, shows a family torn apart by the Great Hunger. It was dedicated in 1997, on the 150^th anniversary of the deadliest year of the famine, by Irish President Mary Robinson.

Carved on the memorial’s base is the central lesson learned about this massive tragedy: “"Never again should a people starve in a world of plenty."

Quote of the Day (John Rodden and John Rossi, Saluting the Irish War of Independence at 100)

 “Unlike most revolutions, the Irish War of Independence ultimately led to a democracy, not an autocracy ruled by a new gang of tyrants. Most independence movements result in unstable coalition governments or boomerang into bloody counterrevolutions. The examples before and after Ireland are legion, from the Soviet Union in 1918 to the colonial revolts that ended in dictatorship throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (India excepted). By contrast, the Irish soon instituted a genuine democracy. Political logrolling and corruption notwithstanding, the Dáil (Irish Parliament) has governed a nation of free men and women.”— John Rodden and John P. Rossi, “From Ireland to Israel, and Beyond: Why the Irish War of Independence Still Matters,” Commonweal, Oct. 2, 2019

(The image accompanying this post shows Seán Hogan's flying column of the IRA's 3rd Tipperary Brigade during the war.)

Flashback, September 1649: Cromwell Enters Irish Infamy at Drogheda

Oliver Cromwell only spent nine months in Ireland, but during that brief time he became a byword for British cruelty and oppression. Much of this owed to the end of the siege of Drogheda, when his army killed wholesale. 

Much about the mass killing on September 12, 1649, remains, surprisingly, in dispute. The massacre, justified by the future self-proclaimed “Lord Protector” as in accordance with the justice of God, certainly exacerbated sectarian unrest in Ireland and spawned a national grievance against the British government as undying as the mid-19^th century Potato Famine.

Proximity to England made Ireland a natural launching pad for rebels against the established order. In years past, this would have been the crown. But after 1642, when a faction against King Charles I seized control (thus becoming the “Parliamentarians”), the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny had aided the Royalists. Seven years later, with Charles seized and executed at Cromwell’s behest but with many still loyal to his son, the head of the “New Model Army” had turned his attention to Ireland as part of the campaign to subdue the last pockets of resistance to the new regime.

For an idea of the fate that Cromwell hoped desperately to avoid, I suggest you rent the Helen Mirren 2005 mini-series, Elizabeth I. In one scene, her counselors, asked about putting down a rebellion in Ireland, look like they’ve been asked to swallow castor oil, and the queen can’t help displaying her scorn. Anybody hoping to tame the island would be facing an emerald briar patch, as the queen’s bratty favorite, the Earl of Essex, was about to find out.

Having arrived in Ireland relatively late in the year, Cromwell felt the necessity to move rapidly and effectively—and unlike precursors such as Essex, he actually did so. His “New Model Army” was more open to men of ability than the Royalists and its members were more motivated by zeal (the religious kind--many of the men shared Cromwell's Puritanism, and  ministers of that faith were assigned to each unit). 

Because Cromwell insisted on being well-provisioned and financed even before leaving England, he would not be as likely to bog down in logistics. When it came time for the attack on Drogheda, the commander also possessed heavy artillery that would make short work of the town’s medieval walls.

Even with all these advantages—not to mention his more than three-to-one manpower edge, as well as divisions among the loose coalition of Protestant Royalists and Irish Catholics—the defenders at Drogheda fought vigorously. Annoyed that they refused his demand to surrender, Cromwell was downright enraged when the fighting went into its second day with members of his army even dying.

The result: at the end of the battle, following Cromwell’s orders of “no quarter,” not only had the beleaguered Drogheda garrison been butchered wholesale, but the killing had even extended to civilians.

At this point, apologists for Cromwell swing into action. Under formal rules of warfare at the time, they say, once a demand for surrender had been refused, combatants could not expect mercy if they lost. Moreover, because there was not much in the way of protest at the time, they insist that many, if not all, of the subsequent charges against Cromwell represent propaganda.

This last point is rather rich. A number of apologists are quick to point out that atrocities had been perpetrated against Protestants when Catholics had rebelled in Ireland eight years before. Surely there were a number of the latter. But the victors in Cromwell’s war had as much motive—and far more opportunity—to whip up propaganda than Catholics had. As Jane Ohlmeyer pointed out in an essay for A Military History of Ireland,  as few as 4,000 Protestants may have been murdered in the initial months of the 1641 rebellion—a far cry from the 154,000 claimed by the lords justice 10 years later.

In terms of the “propaganda”: The position of Irish Catholics in the two centuries after Cromwell can be likened to “the view from the bottom rail,” the phrase used by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle in After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection to describe former slaves still in the lower classes of society in post-Reconstruction America. These aged slaves were mistrustful of white interviewers dispatched by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s to ask them about life under the “peculiar institution.”

Irish Catholics had equal reason to fear Cromwell and the new colonial regime he helped institute in their land. They had seen neighbors slaughtered. They knew the same thing could happen to them if they agitated openly against the new regime. In addition, many were illiterate, so they could not have provided a written record, even had they wanted to do so. Whatever they remembered, then, survived in the form of folklore, songs, even coded language--the kind of forms generally regarded less trustworthy by historians.

The horrified countrymen who lived on after the depredations of the New Model Army could not, then, be transparent participants in one of the key questions following the end of the siege: How many died at Drogheda? Cromwell put the number at 2,000; later, Catholics claimed 4,000. Historians have tended to split the difference.

There are far worse ways of illustrating the chasm of miscomprehension on both sides of the Irish Sea than with an analysis of how the siege of Drogheda ended. If you are on the Irish side, words such as “butcher,” “massacre” and “genocide” spring to mind. If you’re on the other side of that body of water (or an Irish revisionist), you might say that we don’t know “exactly” what went on.

But in explaining away everything they possibly can, even to the point of offending common sense, the revisionists fail to take into account the words of Cromwell himself. In a letter written a week after Drogheda, he denies any order to kill civilians, but gives the game away when he expresses his true intentions: “This is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.... it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise work remorse and regret.”

In other words: 1) The people of Drugheda had it coming because God was on our side; and 2) the massacre would cause so much fear that nobody would dare to rebel afterward, lest they meet the same fate.

A year and a half ago, while touring London, I spotted Hamo Thornycroft’s statue of Cromwell outside Westminster Hall. At first, I shook my head over the absurdity of Parliament honoring this theocrat who had dismissed it as easily as he had Charles I done away with. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it in keeping with the imperialism the nation was practicing when the statue was first unveiled in 1895.

I didn’t think anything else could make my blood boil as much about Cromwell until I read the assessment of the strongman-turned-dictator by Thomas Babington Macaulay.  For all his almost novelistic vigor as a prose stylist, it is difficult, if not impossible, to take this Victorian politician-historian seriously nowadays because of his blatant biases and his smug self-satisfaction. 

Even given all of that, it came as a shock for me to read Macaulay’s belief that Cromwell’s policy of slaughter, expropriation of land, and forced resettlement in Ireland—what we would term “ethnic cleansing”—didn’t go far enough:  “For it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations.” 

In fact, Macaulay, an unabashed admirer of Cromwell (possessor of a “high, stout, honest, English heart”) was less concerned by the mass murder that occurred at Drogheda than by the “great depravation of the national taste [that] was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the Commonwealth.”

If there is anything more shocking than mass murder, it may be a public intellectual justifying it. And then, Macaulay tops even this, as he considers likens the resettlement of English settlers to Ireland--a colonization project pushed by Cromwell--to a phenomenon occurring across the Atlantic Ocean in his time: "This tide of population ran almost as strongly as that which now runs from Massachusetts and Connecticut to the states behind the Ohio. The native race was driven back before the advancing van of the Anglo-Saxon population, as the American Indians or the tribes of Southern Africa are now driven back before the white settlers."

It's much easier to become "the first responsible European to espouse 'civilizing slaughter'" (as biographer Robert E. Sullivan of Notre Dame has called Macaulay) when you regard a subject people as innately inferior to a master race, as Cromwell did.

Song Lyric of the Day (Black 47, on Michael Collins)

“We fought against each other, two brothers steeped in blood

But I never doubted that your heart was broken in the flood

And though we had to shoot you down in golden Béal na Blath

I always knew that Ireland lost her greatest son of all.”—Larry Kirwan, “The Big Fellah,” performed by Black 47 on their Home of the Brave CD (1994)

Like their song “Bobby Kennedy,” the tribute by Black 47 to Michael Collins examines, with vast historical awareness that matches its songwriting craft, a legendarily tough, surprisingly vulnerable leader struck down before he could fulfill his potential. 

And, as with RFK, the fate of Collins’ country was altered fundamentally when “The Big Fellah” was ambushed on this date in 1922.

Those of Irish descent are likely to look at both Collins and Kennedy with a mixture of Celtic romanticism and Greek fatalism. Both men died much too soon—RFK at 42, Collins a decade younger. And both had seemingly courted death by brushing off warnings by aides to be more careful.

The Béal na Blath allusion in the song comes from Gaelic: “Mouth of Flowers.” It beckons with all the soft seductiveness of death itself in its early stages. 

Indeed, the Irish revolutionary leader, now commander-in-chief of the National Army of the new Irish Free State, couldn’t conceive that this valley in the county that he called home would contain people in any way hostile to him.

Two lines from “Bobby Kennedy” could be inserted, almost as appropriately, into “Big Fellah”: “Don't get mad, just get even/Keep on going though your heart is bleeding.” 

The reference is obvious in the song about Kennedy—Bobby’s searing sorrow over the assassination of brother Jack—and, in Collins’ case, it applies to someone he regarded as close to a brother: his comrade in arms Harry Boland. They split over the free state issue, but when Collins heard of Boland’s death in the Irish Civil War, he burst out weeping at the news.

The loss of two men so young and full of life as Kennedy and Collins, along with tumultuous struggles that engaged them at the time of their deaths, may account as much as any other factor for the conspiracy theories that flourished after their deaths. You can take your pick who wanted Bobby dead: the Mafia, the Teamsters, LBJ, etc. Such was Britain’s longstanding spying on the Irish that many Collins partisans believed he had been set up by the British Secret Service. 

Probably the most vivid demonstration of a different line came from a Catholic priest in Cork who delivered a stinging sermon about Eamon de Valera's part in the unfolding events: "There was a scowling face at a window looking out over that lonely valley and de Valera could tell who it was."

RFK and Collins have also inspired countless ruminations on what might have transpired, both for themselves and their countries, had they not been struck down by bullets. 

Bobby, his partisans think, would have kept the Democratic Party from fracturing into the “New Politics” factions that championed his opponent in the primaries, Gene McCarthy, and the old guard of labor unions and blue-collar ethnic groups. Thus, he would have defeated Richard Nixon for the Presidency in November 1968. He would have pulled America out of Vietnam more quickly, and, of course, there would not have been a Watergate.

With Collins, the speculation is based on less wishful thinking. He would have sought, far more than the old boss who had become his opponent over Ireland’s treaty with Britain, Eamon de Valera, to ameliorate divisions between Protestants and Catholics. 

Just as crucially, the onetime Minister of Finance for the Irish revolutionary movement had far-reaching, specific development ideas that would have steered the nation away from both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. 

In short, Ireland would not be afflicted with what became its characteristics over the next four decades dominated by de Valera, according to Tim Pat Coogan’s 1992 biography of Collins, The Man Who Made Ireland: “Bitterness, cynicism, disillusionment, emigration, censorship, clericalism and stagnation.”

The image here comes from John Lavery’s painting Michael Collins (Love of Ireland), in the Dublin City Gallery, Hugh Lane.