Just what it means to be Irish these days
Rite and Reason: The challenge for the two nations on this island is to overcome identities which see their own legitimacy and security as grounded in the disappearance or destruction of the other, writes Irene Whelan. The approach of St Patrick's Day with its attendant focus on national identity has rarely been preceded by such a chorus of opinions on what it means to be Irish these days. Fallout from clerical scandals and the exposure of abuse in Catholic-run institutions has shattered, if not destroyed, the almost organic connection between being Irish and Catholic that dominated the national consciousness for so long. The term "post-Catholic" thus gained vogue as a trendy description of contemporary Irish society in the last decade. Recent stinging criticism of President Mary McAleese's interpretation of 1916 also suggests that it may soon be joined by "post-nationalist". But how much of this is superficial glossing over of subjects that are at the heart of who we are as a collective? As we loosen our moorings from the traditional sanctities of faith and fatherland, on what terms are we going to define a new identity, especially if it is one that embraces the other tradition on the island? Does the jettisoning of traditional Catholicism mean that we are now to embrace the antithesis of Rome as the root of all evil and the Pope as the Antichrist? Will overturning the sanctity of 1916 in the national canon mean that we are now to see Patrick Pearse as a fellow traveller of Adolf Hitler or other fascists? This is a prospect that is not without its risks. The recent challenge of the "Love Ulster" march on February 25th was a transparent embarrassment to those who anticipated the event with indifference and nonchalance, as if it was nothing more than an American high school band over for St Patrick's Day. The manner in which reality blew up in their faces brought home to serious observers the difficult path that lies ahead for any effort at reconciliation. If I may be permitted to paraphrase George Orwell, reconciliation in the present and future will most certainly be contingent upon reconciliation of the past - a daunting challenge in a country with a history such as ours. Wise grandmothers and socially aware politicians have always counselled that the interests of civil discourse and good manners are best served when religion and politics are left out of polite conversation. The reality of Irish history, unfortunately, does not allow this luxury. The overpowering reality of our troubled past is that political life in Ireland has always been dominated by religion. The conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries was occasioned and justified by England's fear of domination by Catholic Europe. The architects of the Penal Laws had no trouble vindicating their harsh treatment of Catholics when they could point to Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) that sent Huguenot refugees flooding into every country (including Ireland) that would receive them. In the aftermath of the 1790s religion came powering back in answer to the destabilisation and upheaval unleashed by the "infidelity" of the revolutionary period. What emerged in Ireland, against the backdrop of the Catholic campaign for political freedom and Protestant resistance to it, were two rival nations with oppositional identities, the legitimacy and future security of the one being necessarily grounded in the anticipated disappearance or destruction of the other. Those with faith in the Union convinced themselves that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom and that its character could be changed through a cultural revolution in which the blessings of Protestantism and membership in the "moral empire" would transform the country. But (and herein lies an example that the promoters of western-style freedoms and democracy in the contemporary Middle East would do well to heed) what this attempt at imposing moral and cultural hegemony actually succeeded in doing was to cement the already powerful bond between priests and people, and to provide the Catholic clergy with a position of political leadership that they might otherwise never have aspired to. This ideological division, already securely in place by the 1840s, guaranteed the political division of the country regardless of whether a home government would be realised through Home Rule or a Republic. It has never successfully been transcended. As the dust settles after the upheavals of the last 30 years, the debate of how such transcendence might be achieved will no doubt become more urgent. If there is any lesson that can be garnered from our troubled history, it is that any such debate should begin by removing itself from the polemics and bitterness that created much of the division in the first place. In other words it should take place in the kind of civil and polite manner of which grandmothers might approve. Irene Whelan is the author of The Bible War in Ireland - the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-40 (Lilliput Press, Dublin, and the University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). She teaches history at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
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An Irishman's Diary
Underlying the President's dreadful speech at UCC last weekend was the clear predication that Irish nationalism was invented with the 1916 insurgency, writes Kevin Myers. Thus, wiped from our public history, yet again, were the achievements of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who two years before had peacefully secured Home Rule. So Ireland in 1916 stood on the verge of self-government, once the Great War was over. Then along came the murderous lunatics. . . We cannot remotely guess what path Home Rule Ireland might have followed without the Rising. But we can certainly deny that the Irish nationalism resulting from Easter 1916 was the absurdly benign confection of Mary McAleese's fantasies: "[not] the domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over others", but, "from the start. . . a multilateral enterprise, attempting to escape the dominance of a single class, and in our case a largely foreign class, into a wider world". This is utter rubbish. Between 1920 and 1925, some 50,000 Irish Protestants were effectively driven out of the 26 counties. Another 10,000 Protestant artisans left Dublin. Thousands of (mostly Catholic) RIC men were forced into exile, and attacks on rural Protestants were widespread in the new State. When King George VII was crowned in 1938, some of the remaining Protestants in West Cork gathered in a church to hear the BBC radio report on the ceremony, with the doors locked, and with sturdy young men patrolling outside, on the look-out for attack. That's how confident the Protestant minority felt in the new "multilateral" Ireland. Independent Ireland, first under Cumann na nGael, then Fianna F‰Ül, became an increasingly intolerant and confessional State. The sale of condoms, hitherto legal, was outlawed in 1926, and remained so for nearly 70 years, into the 1990s. The abolition of divorce laws inherited from the British followed. The official censor, James Montgomery, deliberately imposed Catholic teaching on all films. So he cut all mention of divorce from fictive films, as he frankly confessed, "even if it spoils the story." The same for "birth control", or abortion. All references deemed critical or offensive to the Catholic Church were similarly cut. And finally, under de Valera, the film censor's unofficial remit became official government policy, and the Catholic Church achieved special legal status not just over cinema, but over the entire State. The full Monty. Thus Ireland retreated from the world, plummeting into poverty and cultural isolation. As I said recently: "In 1910, emigration notwithstanding, Ireland was one of the richest countries in a desperately poor world, and was more prosperous than, for example, Norway, Sweden, Italy and Finland. By 1970, self-governing Ireland, though untouched by the second World War, had become just about the poorest country in Europe." For over 50 years, emigration was the destiny for the majority of Irish-born people. Moreover, as dismaying as the factual inaccuracy of the President's address was its smugly sectarianly tribal silliness. Thus: "Those who think of Irish nationalism as narrow miss for example, the membership many of them had of a universal church which brought them into contact with a vastly wider segment of the world than that open to even the most travelled imperial English gentleman." Now this, surely, is one of the most fatuous observations in the entire history of the presidency (Come in, Catholic Paraguay: this is Catholic Ireland calling). A British imperialist at UCC comparably alleging that the empire provided a powerful cultural link between a crofter with his donkey in the Hebrides and a Mahratta lancer in Poona would have been hooted off the stage. The truth is that the post-1916 convergence of both religion and nationality - the two becoming virtually indistinguishable by the 1950s - produced a cultural and economic disaster. Ireland was a bleak and impoverished madhouse, effectively run by a savage and parasitic caste of crozier-wielding bishops. Yet this was an utter contradiction of what pre-1916 Irish nationalism had been or sought: then it had been neither isolationist nor narrow, and had attracted widespread Protestant support. (The 1914 Howth and Kilcoole gun-running operations to the Irish Volunteers, and the Gaelic revival, were largely Protestant affairs.) Tom Kettle, Stephen Gwynne, Willie Redmond, John Esmonde - Irish Parliamentary Party MPs - all enlisted in the British army in 1914 because they saw it as their duty to protect a fellow European country against the rapine and murder inflicted by the Germans in 1914 (who of course by 1916 were the insurgents' "gallant allies"). But the most depressing aspect of the President's direly chauvinist and reactionary address was that, contemporary references aside, it could have been made in 1966, as if all the scholarship and bloodshed of the past decades had never occurred. Certainly, her allusions to the public school administrators of Ireland gathering round the fire at the Kildare Street Club, to the "heroes" in the GPO, and to the largely (but not quite entirely) mythical "glass ceiling" for Catholics belong to the wretchedly simplistic and nationalist caricatures of 40 years ago. As insightful as her wretched speech was the balance of the UCC conference itself, and its complete exclusion of some serious critics of the Rising - most notably Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Sunday Independent's superb columnist, and the author of easily the finest biography of Pearse. It is absolutely extraordinary, but dismayingly revealing of the underlying agenda therein, that she was not even invited. There's another, though lesser fellow who wasn't asked and who might have made a minor contribution or two. UCD history graduate. Writes a fair a bit about 1916: not a fan. But for the life of me, can't remember his name.
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President reinventing our history
In her speech at a UCC conference on the 1916 Rising, President Mary McAleese did not so much attempt to rewrite large chunks of recent Irish history, as try to reinvent it completely, writes David Adams. She did not just apply a touch of gloss to some awkward little pieces of historical furniture, but tried to deconstruct and refurbish an entire, 90-year, historical edifice. According to Mrs McAleese, the Easter Rising was neither exclusive nor sectarian. Yet how, other than exclusive, to describe an unelected, unaccountable, elite embarking on armed insurrection against the wishes of the vast majority of its fellow citizens? What appellation, other than sectarian, can be attached to the subsequent campaign of intimidation, assault and murder directed against scores of Irish Protestants on the pretext that, because of their religion, they must surely be British sympathisers and collaborators? To suggest, as the President did, that the 1916 Rising was inclusive and non-sectarian simply because some women and a very few highborn Protestants played a part, is risible. That is like arguing that the National Party of South Africa wasn't racist because, as was the case, it had a tiny sprinkling of ethnic Asians and Africans within its midst. Similarly, Mrs McAleese claimed that Irish nationalism was never narrow. Bizarrely, she based this assertion largely on the fact that many nationalists "belonged to a universal church that brought them into contact with a vastly wider segment of the world than that open to even the most travelled imperial English gentleman". There is something deeply ironic in the President taking a sideswipe at English (notably, not British?) imperialism while, in the same breath, lauding the supposed benefits of belonging to a "universal church" that historically has been more imperial in outlook and operation than any nation. More telling, though, is her failure to recognise that it was precisely because of its unhealthily close association with one religious denomination to the exclusion of all others that Irish nationalism was so narrow and partial. President McAleese dismissed those who might have suspected that post-1916 nationalism would seek "the domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over others", though she did concede that it was easy to see how people might have "fallen into that mistaken view". A "mistaken view"? Did the President not notice, then, the virtual theocracy that, between them, the church and a subservient nationalism created and maintained in Ireland from independence until recent times? I agree with President McAleese that today's Republic of Ireland is a modern, prosperous, democracy with, as she put it, a widely shared political philosophy of equality, social inclusion, human rights and anti-confessionalism. I disagree profoundly, however, with her on how it arrived at that point. The President would have us believe that the liberal democracy of today flowed from the 1916 Proclamation. The truth is that prosperity flowed directly from Ireland's membership of the European Union, and liberal democracy from the implosion of an institution given so much rope in the form of unelected and unaccountable power and influence, that eventually it hanged itself. The 1916 leaders could not possibly have foreseen the first, or even begun to imagine the second, much less plan for either. I have no strong view on whether or not there should be an official parade to commemorate the 1916 Rising: that is a matter entirely for the people of the Republic and their elected representatives. What I do take exception to, is propaganda posing as historical truth: irrespective of whether the object is to reclaim a particular event, elevate a political party or rehabilitate a religious organisation. Last Friday, the President did not present a differing "analysis and interpretation" of recent Irish history but, rather, a history almost totally divorced from fact. Far worse, there was nothing in what she had to say about the "idealistic and heroic founding fathers and mothers" that could not equally be said in defence of the Provisional IRA and its actions (or, for that matter, its would-be successors in the Continuity and Real IRAs). After all, they too were a tiny elite of extreme nationalists who took it upon themselves to drive out the British at the point of a gun. They too, claimed to be wedded to the principles of equality and civil and religious liberty for all, while prosecuting a murderous campaign against their Protestant neighbours. If we follow President McAleese's uncritical analysis and reasoning to its logical conclusion, in intellectual terms, all that separated the modern IRA from the rebels of 1916 was the passage of time. To heap retrospective adulation upon the leaders of the 1916 Rising while denying it to the Provisionals, is to differentiate only on the grounds of the relative success of one and complete failure of the other. Surely, it is not beyond the President and others to find a way of celebrating independence without glorifying the manner in which it was achieved. Until then, nationalism will continue handing a blank cheque to successive generations of "freedom fighters".
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Pearse's putsch in 1916 was against the wishes of vast majority
DR BRIAN MURPHY OSB, of Glenstal Abbey, states that "the Easter Rising, while not mandated by the normal voting process, became a mandatory obligation of democrats" (Irish Examiner letters, November 28). Far from being "a mandatory obligation," whatever that may mean, Patrick Pearse undemocratically mounted a putsch against the wishes of the vast majority of the Irish people, Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers. This constituted a treasonable act. Arms were supplied by Germany, the country against which Britain and some 150,000 Irishmen were fighting at a time when the outcome of this war was very undecided. It should never be forgotten that about 30,000 Irishmen from this island fell in the Great War fighting for the freedom of small nations and they are still not honoured in their own country. Another legacy of 1916. In addition, Pearse was bound by the IRB constitution, which stated: "The IRB shall await the decision of the Irish nation, as expressed by a majority of the Irish people, as to the fit hour of inaugurating a war against England." Does Dr Murphy think that "a mandatory obligation" meant it was proper to ignore the fact that the great majority of the Irish people thought it was wrong to support politics as violence? The immediate consequences of the doomed mission were the deaths of almost 400 innocent Dubliners, the destruction of parts of their city and the imprisonment of hundreds of suspected supporters of Pearse. The Jesuit historian, Francis Shaw, wrote of 1916 that Pearse considered his generation of Irishmen to be "nationally degenerate" and "in need of redemption by the shedding of blood". In effect, to be law-abiding and peace-loving was to be considered "nationally degenerate"! The murderous consequences of that warped belief are still with us even now. IRA/Sinn Féin saw 1916 as the holy grail in their bloody terror campaign against Ulster Protestants. About 3,000 died in that rampage. Such are the long-term effects of Dr Murphy's so-called "mandatory obligation". And that is why Fianna Fáil and the PDs should go cold turkey on 1916. Instead, they should celebrate the success of real democrats like O'Connell, Parnell and John Redmond. There is simply no moral justification for continuing to mourn the likes of Pearse
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