President hosts second “Machnamh 100” seminar - "Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power and Resistance"

'Machnamh 100' - Opening Words by President Michael D. Higgins Machnamh 100 Seminar II: Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power & Resistance

25th February 2021

We are currently engaged in a Decade of Commemorations which has allowed us, as a nation, to revisit and re-engage with those seminal events of a century ago, that were to have such profound effects on the societies and jurisdictions that emerged on this island, and on our relationships with each other and with our neighbours.

Our commemorative journey to date has allowed us to re-familiarise ourselves with, and think afresh about, key historic moments such as the 1913 Lockout, the First World War,  the ‘Spanish Flu’ Pandemic, the 1918 election, and the first Dáil.  New scholarship, and perhaps further reflection with the passage of time, has given us an opportunity to hear the history of those who may have been excluded from previous tellings, providing us perhaps with a fuller, more informed, more empathetic understanding.

Machnamh 100 is an initiative I have undertaken as Uachtarán na hÉireann to build on this previous work and specifically to allow for reflections on the wider context of, for example, the War of Independence, Civil War and Partition. I have invited leading scholars with diverse perspectives to share their insights on the context and events of that formative period of a century ago and on the nature of the act of commemoration itself.

My motivation in convening Machnamh 100 is not for us to arrive at a singular unifying narrative of the past to which we might all subscribe, but rather to acknowledge that differing, informed perspectives on the past do and can coexist. Machnamh 100 can be, I hope, a welcoming, inclusive forum for listening, for learning and for reflecting.

My hope is that Machnamh 100 will contribute to an inclusive commemoration, one that allows for uncomfortable truths to be acknowledged, one that might free us from the traps of remembered grievances and bitterness, and one that, through the sharing of a deeper understanding, might assist us in our reconciliation with the past and with each other.

May I thank Dr. John Bowman, historian and broadcaster, for agreeing to chair these seminars. I could think of no one more suited to the task.  

Our inaugural seminar was held in December 2020 and examined the nature of commemoration itself in the contexts of today and of the national and global events of a century ago. Speakers included Professors Ciarán Benson, Anne Dolan, Michael Laffan and Joep Leerssen, and together with them we set out our stall of what we are hoping for from this series.  

We have arrived at a point in our commemorative programme now where we are obliged to confront, acknowledge, and come to terms with some of the most contested aspects of the independence struggle, including a consideration of the forms and sources of violence that emerged. This is not an easy task, nor is it a simple story.

Our task requires an open-minded and inclusive reflection if we are to derive an understanding of how and why the multiple divisions within Ireland emerged in the way that they did, how they manifested themselves, and the strategies that were used to further their objectives.  It requires, furthermore, an understanding of context, acknowledging the growing insecurity about the future of the British Empire in 1920, which resulted in an increasingly hostile, aggressive and violent response to civil unrest in Ireland as well as other colonised nations

Today we shall hear a number of considered papers from a range of eminent scholars in the field of Irish history, commencing with Professor John Horne of Trinity College Dublin who will provide an overview of the international order, and consideration of the fall of European empires and, in particular, the status and power of the British Empire circa 1920.

There will then follow four further reflections. Dr. Niamh Gallagher from the University of Cambridge will give particular attention to the impact of World War I and its after-effects on Irish and British society, paying regard to changed attitudes to death, violence, trauma, authority, and health. She will also consider the Irish abroad and minorities in both the North and South of Ireland in relation to partition.

Professor Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College Dublin will examine ‘the crisis of empire’, exploring the roots of the paradox that, throughout the twentieth century, Irish independence has always been seen, not as an existential threat, but merely a tiresome second-order problem for Britain in international affairs.

Professor Alvin Jackson from the University of Edinburgh will give particular attention to the position of Ulster and of Ulster Unionism in the debate on empire, identities and power, with the establishment of Northern Ireland as an outcome of such debate.

Dr. Marie Coleman from Queen’s University Belfast will examine how the War played out in the lives of individuals affected by the conflict and its aftermath, the motivation of those who took arms, the experience of the Protestant minority in the south, and the resonance of partition and the border.

Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the relationship between empire and violence, including how versions of the ‘Other’ may have served as sources of violence.  

I hope you find today’s seminar interesting, thought-provoking and even inspiring.

Fáilte Romhaibh Uilig.  

Thank you for being with us at Machnamh.

Machnamh 100 Seminar II - Empire: Instincts, Interests, Power & Resistance “Versions of the ‘Other’ – As Tool in the Culture of Imperialism, and Rationalisation for Sources of Violence”

25th February 2021

In today’s address, I wish to reflect on the relationship between culture and empire and how their interaction, in the case of an assumed British cultural hegemony at the time, generated versions of the Irish ‘Other’ that accommodated and rationalised violence. It helped, perhaps, in what was described as a project for the restoration of order, to invoke as background, an ongoing project that was one of replacing an inferior set of Irish cultural values with what were perceived to be a superior set of values worthy of an empire. The mind of empire included assumptions as to the ranking of cultures and thus generated what could be a comprehensive ideology for the defence of an empire that was at risk. 

Notions of cultural superiority, of inferior peoples and their cultures has as intellectual background the European Enlightenment, and in particular its concept of modernity which holds a key role in imperialist adventurism. Those of imperialist mind-set sometimes invoked the Enlightenment’s tool of modernity quite openly in the service of imperialist expansion. A significant minority of others, such as Kant, Diderot and Herder, held within Enlightenment thinking an anti-imperialist view. As Sankar Muthu has noted, within the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment era, is an anomalous period in modern European political thought:

“for it is only then that a group of significant thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, not only defending non-European peoples against the injustices of European imperial rule, but also challenging the idea that Europeans had any right to subjugate, colonise, and ‘civilise’ the rest of the world”.

By the nineteenth century, however, a regression had taken place, with prominent European political philosophers choosing to be either agnostic on the issue of imperialism or, like John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, explicitly accepting of what they saw as the inevitability of the extension of European categories on thought and European rule over non-European peoples. Karl Marx, for example, while acknowledging the moral right of Indian rebels against British rule, believed that India could not progress without a European imperialism opening up what were dismissively suggested as closed Asiatic societies.

That a critique of empire emerged at the very moment of expansive imperialisms is a testament to the importance that these radical dissenting minds attached to moral principles in both utopian and inter-people relations. Indeed, at this time imperialist expansion including that of Britain, France and other European empires presented their empires and their expansions almost exclusively as a force for moral good, political stability and economic progress.

Little space was allowed at the time for any consideration of the negative, destructive, distorting or debilitating effects that imperialism was having on the cultural and social development of indigenous societies, or the cultural trauma that results from such subjugation.

As Simon Potter notes in his paper on empire and cultures, stereotyped images of empire and of those peoples and cultures who were being colonised found their way into the homes of empires, including British homes, and may have constituted one of the most basic and pervasive ways in which citizens of empires at home were offered and consumed the experience of empire as a superiority in which they were partners, and thus came to hold as normal not only images of racial and cultural difference, but of superiority, and backwardness of different peoples.

Imperialism, by its very nature, creates, reinforces and maintains unequal relationships between peoples, favouring the more powerful. This is a core aspect of its modus operandi. When we consider cultural imperialism, heavily informed as the concept is by the work of Foucault, Derrida, the seminal work of Edward Said and other post-structuralist and post-colonialist theorists, we can see why within the realm of post-colonial discourse, cultural imperialism is constituted as the cultural legacy of a stage of colonisation that succeeds conquest, and is not limited by it, but rather secures the conquest, by forms of social action, co-operation and administrative institutional arrangements, that contribute to the continuation post formal independence of British and other Western versions of hegemony.

An ideology that regarded those threatening empire as a dangerous ‘Other’, as Richard Kearney might put it, and one prone to violence, is helpful in explaining the violence employed by British Forces, by way of response to guerrilla and random attacks during the Irish War of Independence. What is particularly distinctive of that response is the use of collective punishments and reprisals that resulted in several atrocities, be it Bloody Sunday in Dublin, the sack of Balbriggan, the burning of Cork City, to name just three well-known events. The philosophy behind the reprisals, while rooted in the British attempting to re-assert control, often involved resorting to arbitrary reprisals, not only against republican activists, but often their surrounding civilian population.

An unofficial government policy of reprisals with a community impact began in September 1919 in Fermoy, County Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town, after one of their soldiers, Private William Jones, the first British Army death in the campaign, had been killed in an armed raid by the local IRA.

The pattern of killings and reprisals escalated in the second half of 1920 and into 1921. The policy of reprisals, which involved public denunciation or denial and private approval, was famously satirised by Lord Hugh Cecil who reportedly stated:

“It seems to be agreed that there is no such thing as reprisals but they are having a good effect.”

Many more reprisals occurred, which had a very deep community effect in all classes, such as the indiscriminate killing of Eileen Quinn, shot dead while seven months’ pregnant as she stood outside her house in County Galway with her three children by her side. Much of the reprisal-based violence was not sanctioned; indeed, officially sanctioned reprisals did not begin until January 1921 with the burning of seven houses in Midleton, County Cork.

It is important to bear in mind that the character of the violence between communities in what would become Northern Ireland at this time was different for a number of reasons including the proximity of the communities to each other and that the sources of such violence were not simply on a basis of religious difference. This will be the subject of a closer examination in a further seminar.

The move by the British forces towards attacks on creameries – which were major employers and sources of essential foodstuffs – marked an escalation in both the wider socio-economic impact and the sophistication of reprisal tactics.

The first such attack commenced on 30th September 1920 with the destruction of Tubbercurry Local Co-operative Creamery, during which bombs and rifle fire left the building and machinery beyond use. Nearby Achonry Co-operative Creamery was also destroyed that night. The destruction of the creameries posed longer-term challenges to the economy. Damages to the local dairy industry amounted to £20,000 in buildings, machinery and stock, depriving 1,500 farmers of their main source of income.

From the summer of 1920 onwards, British forces consistently responded to IRA activities by attacking co-operative creameries. By the time a truce between the IRA and the Crown Forces came into effect, 40 co-operative creameries had been destroyed, with another 35 rendered unfit for work. The destruction of each creamery put an estimated 800 farmers out of business.

The death and destruction unleashed by the War of Independence, illustrate how violence in conflict imitates violence, has a brutalising effect, and produces extremes of further forms of violence that are no longer within the control of the original instigators. The cruelties and hardship that ensued in collective punishment were characterised by a decidedly economic dimension. Both guerrilla warfare and reprisals saw loss of life and widespread destruction of property. But, as historian Patrick Doyle has noted, the targeting of co-operative creameries caused maximum economic damage by destroying a cherished public utility and became a key tactic in the security forces’ war against the IRA.

While reprisal-based violence was a key element of the British military strategy in the Irish War of Independence, it was not unique to the Irish experience, and had been used effectively by British ruling forces in India in the previous century. While conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in reprisal for the “India Mutiny”, Amaresh Misra argues that there was an “untold holocaust” in India causing the deaths of several million people over 10 years beginning in 1857, if rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order are counted. Reprisals were, thus, a key tool in defending empire and in the imposition of colonial power, laws, attributes and ideologies.

Collective punishments –were also used some decades later as an official strategy to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952, and again in Cyprus in the same decade in the form of evicting families from their homes and closing shops where British soldiers and police had been murdered.

The use of such punishment, and its justification to those who carry it out, is rooted in the notion of the collective as a version of the dangerous ‘Other’, a community harbouring the perpetrators of violent revolt in their midst. The othering of particular cultures, includes the attribution of particular tendencies and particular ideologies to those perceived as lesser. ‘Othering’, therefore, provided for an insidious rationalisation of collective acts of violence and reprisals.

The perpetrators of such became, of course, the oppressive ‘Other’ in nationalist perceptions, and to whom would be attributed real, and enlarged, fear-inducing attributes of character. The ‘Other’ was perceived as one which was indiscriminate as to who was to be included in reprisal, with tragic consequences for those not involved in the conflict.

As we know from Irish history, this tendency has been employed by militant republicans to enable the contemplation, execution and justification of acts of brutality against those perceived to be agents or beneficiaries, of British rule in Ireland.

The assumption of a cultural hegemony was not confined to the realm of State or military.  In his seminal work, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has shown the impact that imperialist thought and the unquestioned project of colonialism had was quite general on culture, including mainstream written culture, on English and French novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example. Themes of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonisation are well exemplified in the novel Robinson Crusoe whose story centres on a European man who creates a fiefdom in a distant, non-European island. An older example, centuries earlier, is of course, Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

If the novel represents an aesthetic art form influenced by imperial expansion, it can be further argued then, that among Western imperialism’s most effective tools for domination of other cultures, its cultural assumptions of superiority if the powerful, and the lesser value of the culture of the ‘Other’, plays just as strong a role as political and economic strategies. Edward Said has put it succinctly:

“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging”.

By “other narratives” of course he is referring to those that might have been lodged in either ancient practice, as in the Irish case, or indeed in the utopian visions of imagined futures. Either can impede the successful colonisation of a people and thus require to be quenched in the interests of both the security and the expansion of the empire. As Said puts it:

“For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire […] and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then, in turn, imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture.”

His observation is acute, for while the great expansionist ‘age of empire’ largely ended shortly after World War II when most colonies gained independence, imperialism, as a set of assumptions, as a mind of policy, continued to exert considerable cultural influence after formal independence.

Indeed, it is illuminating to examine how colonialists and imperialists have employed ‘culture’ to control distant lands and peoples, how the self-justifying rhetoric in the literature of the past could be utilised to bolster imperialism and rationalise, for example, the West’s dominance and exploitation of non-Western people.

Even in modern writing, invocation of the ‘white man’s burden’ occasionally re-emerges, with its inherent arrogance and racism towards the objects of its gaze, accompanied perhaps with a nostalgia for a world of servants that sought to relieve the discomfort of heat and life among what are perceived as a backward people.

The cultural imperialism that was, and is, at the heart of empire, by its promotion and imposition of the culture of a powerful nation over a less powerful one – an experience that Priya Satia calls, “the imposition of an autocratic, racist, violent, and extractive form of rule” – resulted in the case of Ireland in a form of British cultural hegemony which attempted to shape and influence general cultural values in Ireland and among other peoples that were colonised. Culture is, however, a process, and the dominating culture would come to be changed itself by that with which it interacted, by what it experienced in the effort of colonisation, be it cricket in India or the West Indies or writing in the English language in the Irish case.

In the long sweep of its history, British cultural imperialism in Ireland took various forms, manifesting itself in a set of exclusionary attitudes and ideologies, formal policies that were discriminatory and which subjugated Irish cultural traditions and expressions to a lesser consideration. While there was a religious base to this, it was not exclusively so.

There were significant localised exceptions, such as that of the Presbyterian Church whose members have made, and continue to make, a singular contribution to Irish cultural practices old and new, including the restoration and development of the Irish language and music.

If we are to achieve ethical remembrance and the creation of a shared memory at peace, it is important to recognise the role that the mind of imperialism, and specifically cultural imperialism, had as a precipitating force in the Irish independence struggle, and that we seek to understand the response to it.

Irish cultural subjugation drew, by way of response initially, the re-assertion of what had been a suppressed cultural expression, one that would come in time to support a militant nationalism, as part of the independence movement. This took the form of campaigns for the revival of the Irish language, Irish sport, Irish music, religion and a wider Celtic reclamation. However, revivals that have the character of recovery of what was suppressed carry their own exclusionary danger. It is a danger which we have not been successful in avoiding.

All cultural expressions in all their adaptations to, and inclusions of, each other must be part of a shared future.

If there is a mind of the defence of empire that influenced events in Ireland a century ago, there is also a mind of Irish resistance to, and also anomalous accommodation to, empire, which had its exclusionary flaws, which it would go on to expand with some disastrous institutional consequences.

We also must acknowledge that the British found willing agents of Empire among the native Irish from the earliest days of conquest. While many were drawn through economic necessity, it cannot be denied, that both at home in Ireland, and throughout the expanding Empire, some Irishmen became even enthusiastic accomplices to the excesses, cruelty and hubris of colonialism.

In all of this, there is the grounding fact of humiliation, inflicted, experienced, recalled, remembered or imagined. The psychological impact of the cultural imperialism that was experienced over the centuries in Ireland, was perceived as a deeply ingrained urge to humiliate. This fact requires a profound meditation on a range of questions:

How have our attitudes towards ourselves been influenced by hundreds of years of colonialism, of being constituted lesser, violent, drunk, indolent, backward? – the grotesque dehumanising depictions of the Irish in Punch cartoons are a case in point, but they are of the past. Are there residues of post-colonial inferiority in attitudes to the Irish language and wider Irish culture? Do the terms so often used as something being “very Irish” or even that on occasion decisions are described as “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” reveal a residual belief that a description of being Irish is synonymous with being lesser.

Lifting oneself into the present with the hope of a more fulfilling shared future requires a movement from old assumptions, from both sides of the equation that is the experience of empire.

No more than with other European imperialisms, and there were many, and there are today States and Powers with imperialist tendencies, the legacies of imperialism have never been adequately addressed.

Empire rule, wherever its source, and whenever, has led so often to the exploitation of peoples, and their subjugation on the basis of race and culture in a system maintained via the brutal and systematic violence of an expansionist force. Nostalgia for empire and imperialism is too often combined with a reluctance to see contemporary racism and xenophobia as being sourced in the grounding assumptions of imperial and colonial power.

The time available today has permitted only a brief overview of some key aspects of imperialist-sourced violence, such as that which was part of the violences during the War of Independence, a war which led to the deaths of 2,000 people, of whom 750 were civilians.  We, thankfully, now have an opportunity to transact that which establishes the distance between us as peoples in terms of different narratives of violences recalled, we all can, with much benefit, face and critique the absolutisms that drove those impulses to this violence and all violences, and the careless and dangerous assumptions of ‘the Other’ from which are sown such violences.

The use of such violence on the part of the powerful ultimately became a decisive factor in the outcome of the War of Independence, having resulted in shock and outrage internationally, and garnering increased support for the IRA and the independence movement at home and abroad.

It is important to be wide and generous in our willingness to critique our assumptions. We have, I suggest, shown an energy that is welcome in critiquing nationalism, less so in relation to imperialism. That is why I have today simply sought, with humility, to redress the balance.

Today, we explore this past, not to air inherited grievances or seek justification for injustices perpetrated in our name, nor do we seek to compare atrocities committed in the name of nationalism, unionism or British Imperialism. We must have a deeper purpose: to gain a clearer understanding of what occurred and why, acknowledging the path that has led each of us to where we are today; and, in being open to the perspectives of others, we must hope to extricate ourselves from the grip of any uncritical, simplistic version of our complex story. This, I believe will enable us to grasp together, the possibilities for a brighter future together, based on mutual respect, common interests and trust.

It is my hope that by dwelling on some of the less-examined aspects, including the sources of violence and their repercussions, the context of a conquering empire in decline, and the challenge of fear of the loss of what was its most proximate part, that we can arrive at a more comprehensive narrative of the times, a deeper collective understanding, an ethics of memory and remembrance that may aid a process of healing for us all as we reflect on these events which have marked us so profoundly as a society.

In doing so, the prize of an inclusive commemoration, one that becomes emancipatory in its consequences, becomes possible, one that allows for uncomfortable truths to be acknowledged, and, by doing so, on all sides, becomes achievable, allows us to envisage lives lived together free from the snares of remembered violence.

Beir beannacht.

John Horne: Ireland at the Crossroad, 1920-21. Nation, Empire, Partition Professor John Horne

25 February 2021

A Úachtaráin agus a chairde.

Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to address this second session of Machnamh 100 on the events of a century ago. You asked me to put them in a wider context. It is no easy task.

Nothing less was at stake in 1920-1921 than Ireland’s sovereignty, its contested future, its fractured territory and the outcome of a war. A crossroad - that still shapes our lives today. Yet it was, indeed, part of a wider context, a ‘world crisis’, and reflecting on this may help us to think about our national history. However, this is not history for history’s sake. You also ask us to think about ‘ethical commemoration’. I take this seriously and shall do so at the end. But first, and bearing that in mind, let me reflect on Ireland’s crossroad in terms of nation, empire and partition, through all of which runs the theme of violence. 

Nation

Ireland a century ago, we know, was embroiled in a war fought in the name of Irish sovereignty by nationalists and opposed not just by the British but by those in Ireland who wished to preserve the Union. Put thus, it has the ring of inevitability. That comes from what went before (the home rule crisis, the Great War, Easter 1916, the rise of Sinn Féin) and from what came after, including the eventual Republic. Also, nationality has since become the basis of state-hood and citizenship worldwide. In 1948 the UN declared it a human right.

So it seems to me vital to break this teleology, this logic of inevitability, and recall just how fluid relations between nation, state and empire were in the era of the First World War (1912-23) and how diverse the sources of sovereignty were (by which I mean political authority). Colonial empires were at their peak, the British the largest. Dynastic empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) which had ruled Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East for centuries only collapsed with the war, leaving multiple nationalities and new nation-states. And nationality did not always imply statehood. Nations might exist inside a state or an empire. If a nation became a state, who belonged to it? How did it assert its sovereignty?

Ireland before 1914, was a laboratory of such ideas. Regarding the state, physical force for full independence vied with a legislated path to home rule. As for the nation, Thomas Davis imagined it in the 1840s open to ‘the stranger within our gates’ as to ‘the Irishman of a hundred generations.’ Later, there were more overtly cultural views, to which the Anglo-Irish (like Davis) contributed. Cultural nationalism mapped onto home rule politics even if a new generation urged full independence (Roy Foster’s ‘vivid faces’). In Ulster, mobilisation against home rule honed an opposed (and also cultural) sense of nationality in defence of the union. All this shaped plans ranging from home rule in 1914 to the Irish Convention of 1917, from the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, with its two parliaments, north and south (plus federal elements), to the Free State’s limited sovereignty. But such solutions were not just Irish. They also abounded elsewhere in the world, e.g. in Austria-Hungary (Arthur Griffith’s model for a joint Anglo-Irish monarchy) or Britain’s settler dominions. 

However, in the second half of the First World War, Irish nationalists radically redefined the relations of nation, state and sovereignty. We can find purely Irish reasons for this (which it is how it is usually seen). But I want to suggest that it was also part of the ‘world crisis’ that I mentioned at the beginning. For the Great War was above all an existential war. It mobilised whole peoples but at the cost of huge sacrifice. With German defeat, the fall of Europe’s empires, the Russian revolution and colonial revolt, it galvanised the issue of sovereignty. Who ruled, by what authority, to what end? What was to be the role of the people in politics? US president Woodrow Wilson caught this Zeitgeist with his idea of ‘self-determination.’ Briefly, he was a secular Messiah.

Sean T. O’Kelly, famously went to Wilson in Paris in 1919 with the First Dáil’s ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’. This summoned other sovereign nations to support ‘the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland’s national status and her right to its vindication at the [Paris] Peace Congress.’ The case was not dismissed as that of a colony (as were those of India, Egypt and others) but because the Allies saw Ireland as a matter of internal British sovereignty.

Ireland was thus caught up in the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of 1919 despite Wilson ignoring Ireland. But while the Allies sought to build a European order with the new nation-states and through the League of Nations, Ireland was initially barred from this. It was ironic. There was something deeply European both in Ireland’s claim to be part of this new order and in the form it took at home. For the first Dáil acted as a classic constituent assembly in the tradition of the French Revolution, while also invoking the nation proclaimed by insurrection in 1916. Remarkably, it also forged an underground state in resistance to the British. This was national sovereignty in action. Could it have been pursued non-violently, as Gandhi tried in India at the same time? We shall never know.

That such a zero-sum clash over sovereignty (Irish versus British) led to war in Ireland is not surprising. But neither was it uniquely Irish. I have argued elsewhere that a ‘greater war’ prolonged something of the violence of the Great War until c.1923. The Allies tried to make a Europe of nation-states but they did so in a world still in flames. Their writ was limited by wars, national revolutions, counter-revolutions and the world threat of Bolshevism. For example, the Poland they decreed ended up twice as big after wars with Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ireland’s war of independence (and civil war) were part of this ‘greater war.’ A century ago, Ireland shared a specific European context.

Since the loyalties and identities of ordinary people were at stake in these border, national and revolutionary wars in Europe, and since the combatants included militias and paramilitaries, civilians tended to be both subjects and actors of violence. We could draw a grim diagram of mutual dehumanisation. One side might stigmatise the foe as collaborators or informers, the other as rebels, terrorists or ‘Bolsheviks’, feeding a spiral of repressive or dissuasive brutality. When Major Bernard Montgomery (the victor of El Alamein, who had Donegal roots) recalled that in battling the IRA in Cork in early 1921: ‘It never bothered me how many houses were burned. I regarded all civilians as Shinners’ (Sinn Féiners), he was voicing a sentiment heard from Silesia to Latvia, the Ruhr to Budapest. Yet this does not mean that violence was the same on both sides in Ireland, let alone everywhere else. The violence varied in nature and intensity, which brings me to my second theme, empire.

Empire

One way to understand the war of independence is as a colonial conflict. This was often how it was portrayed by republicans at the time. This is perhaps not self-evident, if only because the ‘colonial’ was so multi-layered in Ireland and its meaning varied so much. The union, after all, was the status quo of the British state itself. That made the First Dáil, let alone the IRA’s guerrilla war, a head-on challenge unlike any other colonial war. The Great War, the Sinn Féin challenge and a Europe of nation-states meant even Lloyd George’s Conservative-led coalition now took some Irish devolution to be inevitable. The die-hard unionist, Walter Long, told cabinet as much in 1919, referring to the new European order. Ireland might, it was accepted, have autonomy within the UK. But the price (signalled by the pre-war home rule crisis) was the exclusion of Ulster unionists, with their claim to be a distinct people. On this reckoning, nation and sovereignty, not empire, drove the Anglo-Irish war.

Yet in other, often paradoxical, ways, the language and realities of empire enveloped the conflict. The insurgents saw themselves as battling not just Britain but its global imperialism. In this they reflected back Britain’s own self-image of an imperial mobilisation for the Great War. They drew on the legacy of those like James Connolly who put Ireland firmly in the camp of India or Egypt when condemning British oppression. This view was reinforced by events like the Amritsar massacre in India or the nationalist revolt of Saad Zaghloul in Egypt, both in 1919. As Art O’Brien, president of the Sinn Féin Association of Great Britain, remarked after Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike in 1920: ‘From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean it is the same combat against the same enemy. Today, we’re the avant-garde. But it isn’t just for Ireland that the Lord Mayor has died, it is so that the whole British empire is destroyed.’

As for the British, they faced what some at the time saw as a ‘crisis’ of empire. Historians debate the point. Did the empire reach its apex in 1919-20, as it absorbed ex-German colonies and the former Ottoman Middle East, or did protests in India, Egypt, Palestine and Ireland signal, as Art O’Brien hoped, the beginning of the end? I think both are true. It would take another world war to bring decolonisation but from 1919 to 1923, imperial over-reach amid post-war retrenchment prompted a crisis of which Ireland was part. In mid-1920, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, feared ‘the loss of Ireland to begin with; the loss of the Empire in the second place; and the loss of England itself to finish up with.’ A southern unionist (he was a Longford man, killed by two IRA gunmen in 1922), he saw through the glass darkly. But the sentiment typified British Conservatism more generally.

Colonialism shaped British responses in other ways. Reactions to the famine seventy years earlier exposed a double standard in behaviour imbued with the racial ‘othering’ which characterised rule in the non-settler colonies. Now, to see Sinn Féiners (and by extension the Irish) as barbaric, even ‘Bolshevik,’ justified a use of force by the regular army and above all by the RIC Auxiliaries that would not have been tolerated in Britain despite a wave of social unrest in the post-war years. It indeed echoed that used in India and Egypt. Yet many in Britain did not see the Irish like this. The 1920s were not the 1840s. Much had changed, including reforms in Ireland on the land, in education and  welfare. Plans for home rule were proof of this. Ironically, home rule also suggested empire, but a quite different one - the self-governing dominion. It was a model enhanced by the dominions’ role in the war (especially Canada and Australia) and their independent status at the Paris peace conference.

These different threads of empire were woven into the ending of the war. By mid-1921, there was deadlock. Militarily, the IRA could not win, but the British had lost the battle for legitimacy. The price of enforcing rule in nationalist Ireland was a revolt by liberal opinion at home. This remained convinced that Britain had fought the Great War for liberal values, including the rights of small nations. It accused the crown forces in Ireland of ‘Prussianism’, that is to say of atrocities (burning Balbriggan, Cork) like those of the Germans in Belgium in 1914. Sir Neville Macready, Commander-in-Chief, advised Lloyd George to negotiate - or fight a different war: ‘Will the cabinet begin to howl when they hear of us shooting a hundred men in one week?’ he asked. It was, I think, that tipping-point of counter-insurgency. In the 1950s, for the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria, it was when the violence spun out of control.

In Ireland, this did not happen. Following King George V’s appeal on opening the new Northern Ireland Parliament, came the Truce in July 1921. I don’t mean to downplay the violence that did occur. But maybe the fact that Irish nationalists fought a state to which they also talked distinguished the war from bloodier inter-ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe where the imperial state had collapsed. Deaths in the Anglo-Irish war (as Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin have shown) were low by comparison. Moreover, if the war was less violent than some later wars of decolonisation, perhaps it foreshadowed those later wars, in that the colonial power ultimately had a limited stake while the rebels used the twin-track Irish model, political and military. Yet the tool used in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of January 1922 to square the circle over sovereignty and give a peaceful path to full independence (‘the freedom to achieve freedom’) was dominion status. Partition was the pre-condition, civil war the price.

Partition

Partition, my last theme, puts Ulster at the heart of Ireland’s crossroad. We can see partition (the segregation of religious and ethnic groups by dividing territories) as one more tool of empire. It had been tried before 1914 in India, with the failed attempt to partition Bengal, as it would be in the new colony in Palestine. Yet we can also see it in the European context I began with in terms of the contradictions of nationalism.

For the Allies at the peace conference wrestled with overlapping ethnic and religious identities as they tried to reconcile frontiers with peoples. Many new nation-states had other national elements within while claiming nationals of their own in neighbouring states. Nation and minority were inextricably linked (indeed, ‘minority’ as a political term dates from this period) and the relationship was often framed in terms of ‘disloyalty’ and irredentism. This mattered less for a civic, pluralist idea of nationality, as espoused by Woodrow Wilson. But with the singular ethno-nationalism that so often prevailed in the new Europe (as later in the post-colonial world), minority protection was vital. Minority rights were stitched into the new state constitutions (e.g. that of Poland guaranteed the Jewish sabbath) and their protection concerned the League of Nations.

The ‘two Irelands’ created in 1920-21 faced this question, albeit in unequal measure. In the south, during the War of Independence, the Protestant population fell by a third. Reasons for emigration varied - economic, cultural, intimidation, alleged ‘collaboration’ - but it occurred on a patchy basis. The IRA was not sectarian as such and Protestants were a minority of those killed, if disproportionately so. Any tendency to stigmatise a minority by its religion or old loyalties was local, limited and not endorsed by the new state - which is not to say that Protestants always felt at ease in the post-war south.

In Northern Ireland, however, the failure of the union to provide a one-state solution for both islands threatened unionists with minority status in the event of an all-island republic. The answer was to reconfigure the union in Ireland as a territorial enclave. While the Ulster covenant of 1912 had shown the ability of unionists to defend ‘equal citizenship’ in the United Kingdom, the logic of events since 1916 pushed them towards a devolved state in order to do so. It realigned state, nation and sovereignty in opposition to Sinn Féin.

Catholics and nationalists caught in this enclave became, in the modern sense, a minority. Tensions going back to the colonisation and subsequent industrialisation of Ulster were brutally redefined a century ago in ways that made Northern Ireland more akin to central and eastern Europe. Timothy Wilson has shown this in his comparison with Silesia, where Germans and Poles fought a bitter ethnic war in 1919-21. Shipyard expulsions in Belfast, in July 1920, and the ‘pogroms’ of 1920 to 1922 used violence to corral and redefine the living space of a minority that was not leaving. This was less guerrilla war than inter-communal conflict in the form of local siege. Battles in Belfast even reminded some of the western front, only the victims were mainly civilians.

The irony is that a form of home rule enabled northern unionists to invest their own identity as a distinct people in a partly autonomous state. The cost was institutionalised discrimination against a supposedly ‘disloyal’ minority. So much is commonplace. Less commonly acknowledged are the implications for the United Kingdom as a whole as it adjusted to partition. For it is a further irony that the UK, which had played a key role in creating the new European order, including its minorities protections, acquired its own minority in Northern Ireland. But because Ireland had been treated in Paris as a purely UK matter, the northern minority remained unrecognised as such and outside the remit of the League of Nations (despite the Free State joining the League and the new European order). For that - and for many other reasons - this consequence of partition remained frozen for nearly fifty years.

A Úachtaráin, I have tried to highlight the historical significance of Ireland’s crossroad a century ago by seeing it in the contexts of Europe, the British empire and a ‘world crisis’ down to 1923. I am conscious of what I’ve left out. For example, the class conflict (and socialism) of these years, epitomised by revolutionary Russia, gave a strong undertow to events in Ireland. But there remains your challenge of commemoration. This, as you explored in the first seminar, means recovery: of actors (the ‘vivid faces’), of victims, of the unheard. Yet the point of commemoration is also to interrogate the past for the sake of the present, and of ‘ethical’ commemoration, to do so not for pious or political reasons but in order to be critical and self-critical - in a word pluralist. I hope the frameworks I’ve suggested help in this endeavour. For me, commemoration includes using hindsight (but always understanding the past in its own terms) to ask what is important about the past now. Since the link of past to present changes all the time, answers are provisional and subjective. But in this spirit, let me end with four reflections from the present as I see it now.

First, sovereignty is relative, not absolute, a lesson sovereigns themselves have learned throughout history. It is a fiction, but one by which societies order their politics at home and abroad. It can be declined in degrees and practised at different levels. The only test is effectiveness, which includes being accepted. The events of a century ago were a hard, divisive lesson; but the Ireland which found a place briefly as a British dominion and later in Europe learned it to good effect. Now I find it striking to see the United Kingdom, whose empire dissolved mid-century, whose re-engagement with Europe has now ended and whose own union is under strain, wrestle with this same issue.

Second, the nation, too, is something we construct, though it is rooted in lived reality. It is also the main entity in which sovereignty has been vested over the past century, for good or evil. Often it has been for evil, as when a unitary or majority identity defines the nation (and so the state) to the cost of its minorities. With the rise of fascism and communism, this led to irredentist wars, the redrawing of borders and the destruction of minorities, contributing to the Second World War. A Europe premised on civic, pluralist politics had to be painfully rebuilt. Ireland clearly suffered nothing like this. But was it totally exempt? The south fashioned a robust democracy, no mean feat for a new state. But a conservative social consensus left a heavy burden, one that also weighed on relations with the north. In the north, however, the Irish version of the inter-war minority question did not merely persist. It took a thirty-year conflict before equal nationalities, a layering of sovereignty, civic rights and an end to southern irredentism addressed this legacy of partition.

Third, the nature of nationalism should not obscure the legacy of imperialism. Complex, many-sided (how could it be otherwise with a British Empire that ruled nearly a quarter of humankind in 1920?), this provided a way forward in Ireland in the dominion form I’ve described. That really is worthy of reflection. But it also resulted in the violence visited by the crown forces on Irish civilians and the Irish landscape. Cork city or Balbriggan, destroyed in late 1920, ought perhaps, in Anglo-Irish relations a century later, to be ‘sites of memory’ (to use the concept of historian Pierre Nora) or even of reconciliation (they were decried in Britain at the time). But are they? If Ireland was Britain’s oldest colony, the war of independence was its first war of decolonisation since the loss of America. It was part of a process (including Palestine, India, Malaya, Kenya) that lasted till the 1960s. I wonder if the UK has yet come to terms with this side of empire, its violence, and in particular that of decolonisation.

Finally, violence as such. The legitimacy of using violence to resist empire or occupation and assert sovereignty or defend a nation is an eternal debate. But violence always comes at a cost. In the era of the Great War, violence and politics were more closely linked than ever. Along with enrolment in legal mass armies, civilians took up arms as paramilitaries (for and against the state), as guerrillas, and so on. The Irish rebels were examples of this trend. But so, too, were the British irregulars and unionist paramilitaries in the north. The brutal short cut by which the gunman on any side presumes to incarnate the state or the national will cast a long shadow in Ireland (as elsewhere). Getting rid of armed paramilitaries, many of whose organisations trace their descent from the Great War era, has played out differently, south and north. But a hundred years on, it seems – seems – to have worked. Not the least important legacy of events a century ago may be our hard-won knowledge in both Ireland and the UK that peace (like sovereignty and the nation) is a process.

Thank you. And I look forward to your comments.

Niamh Gallagher: Unpacking the history of nation, sovereignty and empire

25th February 2021

A Úachtaráin, colleagues,

Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to respond to Professor Horne’s paper on the wider dimensions of the centenary we are now living through.

I want to take this opportunity to reflect further on the themes of sovereignty, nation, and empire which he raises. I have found, President, your own reflections on ‘ethical remembering’, Richard Kearney’s ‘hospitality of narratives’, and on challenging what you call a ‘feigned amnesia’ around the uncomfortable aspects of the shared history between Britain and Ireland to be very useful when contemplating the themes of sovereignty, nation and empire.

Prof Horne reminds us that sources of sovereignty were not fixed in the period leading up to and after the First World War. He has reminded us that the world of 1920–21 looked very different to that of today. We are often accustomed to remembering only one empire when we think of Ireland in these years, but this was a world made up of empires. The British Empire was joined by the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German Empires, whose  territories extended across continents and incorporated a diverse array of peoples, ethnicities, and nationalities.

This is to say nothing of the East, where the Qing Dynasty of China had recently ruled large parts of the Asian continent, and the Empire of Japan continued to exercise rule across sections of what we would now call Russia, China and the pacific. Some of these entities, such as the Ottoman Empire, had existed for over 600 years. We often anticipate the demise of empire when we think about Ireland one hundred years ago, but we have forgotten just how powerful these entities seemed to the people who lived in their midst, and that many Irish and British people of all backgrounds came up with solutions to the question of Irish self-government in an imperial, rather than a post-imperial, world.

Prof Horne has discussed how physical force nationalists vied with home rulers over the question of Irish sovereignty, and how resistance in Ulster cultivated an opposed sense of nationality, but there are complexities within these binaries; a ‘hospitality of narratives’ that are often neglected when we think of nationalists and unionists before and after 1914.

To give three examples: in 1904, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, devoted himself to thinking about what the future of Ireland might look like. He published a series of articles, later included in the second edition of his book, The Resurrection of Hungary, in which he dwelt on what he considered to be the historic fallacies of British governance in Ireland. He argued that the late eighteenth-century Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Younger), had missed an historic opportunity to create an Anglo-Hibernian empire, modelled on what would later become the Austro-Hungarian empire under the 1867 Ausgleich. Griffith’s analysis of empire was not one of subjugation, or repression, but was instead about the spread of power relations across Europe, in which he felt that Ireland could have been co-equal with Britain in managing its overseas empire. His vision for the future, two kingdoms of Ireland and Britain modelled on the Austro-Hungarian example, was an imaginative use of empire to solve the question of Irish sovereignty.

These ideas were the very opposite of what James Connolly proposed. In his 1910 work, Labour in Irish History, Connolly wrote that ‘the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must …keep pace with … the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation.’ For Connolly, democracy, and the essential sovereignty of the people, lay within the working classes, not within the middle and upper classes, who had been corrupted by capitalism and exploited the workers for their own gain. For Connolly, these were the true imperialists. No question of sovereignty could be solved by territory alone when the imperialist class continued to exploit the sovereign—the working classes of the world who had no territorial boundaries.

Both of these nationalists used ideas of empire and imperialism in different ways to explore the question of Irish sovereignty, and the same is true for those who resisted Irish self-government. Leopold Amery, a renowned academic, journalist, imperialist, and British Conservative politician, wrote an extended essay in 1912 called Home rule and the colonial analogy to make the Unionist case against self-government. Nationalists such as John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule party, and Erskine Childers, a one-time imperialist turned republican, had repeatedly referred to some colonies within the British Empire where self-government had been a success. Amery argued that their comparisons were ‘based on a series of confusions due… to … the vagueness of the phrase ‘Home Rule’, and to the general ignorance of the origin and real nature of the British Colonial system.’

Quite simply, Amery showed that governance within the British Empire took a wide variety of forms; there was no easy parallel between Ireland’s case and the colonial model. Canada was practically a sovereign nation state, whereas South Africa had little more than county council powers; the Isle of Man continued to be operated on the age-old principle of ascendancy that resembled the much-hated law in Ireland, Poynings’s Act, passed in 1494 and repealed only in 1782.

After demonstrating that there was no single model of colonial legislation, and that nationalists who dwelt on the colonial analogy were fudging a complicated reality, Amery went on to dismiss the much-touted Unionist case against Home Rule—that Ireland was richer because of the 1801 Act of Union. He argued that the Union had never really united all of Ireland with Britain; it had privileged some parts and exploited others. In contrast to many nationalists however, his solution was not one of separation, but of further integration by extensive social and economic improvement.

For Griffith, Connolly and Amery, their respective visions for Ireland involved, resisted, and complicated empire in ways we are not accustomed to remembering. In our rush to explain our past in simple binaries, such as imperialists versus the colonised; physical force versus Home Rulers; nationalists versus unionists; we have done our own shared history a disservice. We have simplified complicated realities into easily accessible narratives about our past.

This is especially true when we think of the First World War. In recent years, Ireland has engaged in much soul-searching about this contested conflict, and the efforts of the President and former President McAleese have been of tremendous significance in bringing the Irish who served in that war back into the forefront of our national memory. It is difficult for us today to understand what that conflict was about. It has none of the certainty that comes with the Second World War, where moral judgements on good versus evil are much easier for us to make today. But participation in the First World War made sense to millions of Irish people at the time. Motivations to back it were wide ranging and varied.

We are used to hearing the well-worn view that many nationalists signed up to secure Home Rule while unionists did so to prevent it, but the reality is less stark than this simple binary suggests. To take a few examples: Francis Ledwidge, the Catholic poet, famously joined up after a spat with his girlfriend; Charles Brett, a northern Presbyterian, couldn’t really work out his motivation until he saw the hundreds of dead civilians washed up in Cobh in Cork, following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-Boat on 7 May 1915.

The Home Rule MP Thomas Kettle was in Belgium when the conflict began, and the atrocities he witnessed by the invading German Army encouraged him to join the Allies as ‘an Irish soldier in the army of Europe’.

These men undoubtedly had other motivations as well, which differed from the incentives that enabled them to endure the war. And a similar variety can be seen in the millions of Irish women who rendered support on various home fronts and in field hospitals near the front lines.

But all of this was framed by a general belief that we can find difficult to understand today, that the Allies were fundamentally in the right while Germany was in the wrong, and Prof Horne has shown how the discourse of Prussianism, that Britain had resorted to barbaric methods, even endured in the War of Independence.

He has also reminded us that the war did not end in 1918 and has suggested that it was part of a greater crisis that lasted until 1923. I would add that other chronologies are equally important. Grief and disability had timelines which do not map onto the dates we commonly recall when thinking about centenaries.

In 1915, the former Trinity College Dublin student, Captain David Campbell, lost his friend, Levis, at Gallipoli. Campbell wrote his memoirs in the 1970s and said that ‘I remember him every Armistice Day, and mourn his loss afresh’. Two weeks ago I read a story in The Guardian of the second eldest person in France, who had just celebrated her 117th birthday. Sister Andrée, born in 1904, now in a care home in the south of France, had miraculously survived COVID. When asked why she felt she had lived so long, she answered ‘no idea… I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life and during the 1914–18 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else’.

For Sister Andrée, that conflict was still painfully present in her recollections. For David Campbell, and the tens of thousands of Irish families who also lost loved ones in that war, the conflict did not end in 1918 or in 1923 but had its own timeline. For all of us who have experienced grief, and the present moment deserves its own reflection, a common humanity that transcends time and space can assist us when relating to historical actors even if our ability to understand the events that they participated in has changed.

The binary of nationalist versus unionist enlistment in the First World War, and the problems of marking start and end points when thinking about centenaries, is especially clear in the years that followed the War of Independence. Remembrance Day ceremonies across Ireland, which began in 1919, accelerated after 1923 when the civil war formally came to a close. They often demonstrated a sense of solidarity between Protestants and Catholics which had been fostered in various capacities during the war. The First World War may have honed the politics of nationalism and unionism, but other forms of understanding based on a shared sense of loss, participation and, for a time, righteousness, inspired other forms of inclusivity that continued to endure throughout much of the 1920s and even into the 1930s despite changing domestic political realities.

I wish to briefly say a few words on some other aspects of empire which we are not accustomed to remembering. The historian, Cormac O’ Gráda, has reminded us that in the devastating famine of the 1840s, emigration was a vital lifeline that allowed many Irish people to survive. It enabled them to gain employment, freed up resources in Ireland so that those who stayed could manage, and helped successive generations build futures that were simply not possible in Ireland.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, parts of Africa and of course the United States all became homes for Irish people during the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries, all of which had been part of the British Empire at one time. The ‘feigned amnesia’ that the Empire was somehow divorced from the dominions and territories through which millions of Irish people actively chose to make their home, is an important reality that co-existed with the more negative narratives of Empire that are more commonly recalled.

Prof Horne has reminded us of the hard power and abuses wielded by imperial administrators. But if we look at the processes by which ‘hard power’ was wielded, it continued to have a history in independent Ireland both before and after the constitutional changes of 1921, 1937 and 1949.

Civil society, the state, and religious institutions wielded forms of repression that victims would find difficult to distinguish from the imperial power exercised within the British Empire. Penalties enacted on single mothers, separated families, those suffering mental disorders, and people of different sexualities were just as severe as some of the repression meted out to populations that were marginalised, incarcerated, and who were forced to suffer civil disabilities within the Empire. Ireland was not unique in marginalising groups of citizens and interwar Europe was hardly a beacon of popular liberalism, but some penalties did endure in Ireland longer than elsewhere. If we are to really adopt a ‘hospitality of narratives’ about our past, we need to think harder about the processes behind nationhood, power, and Empire, and to recognise that after 1921, sovereignty was not granted to all of our citizens in an equal share.

Briefly, I want to say a few words about partition, which created new majorities and minorities across the island. The creation of two states came with a corresponding sense of statelessness for southern Protestants, northern Catholics, and republicans, both north and south. In Northern Ireland, two hegemonic narratives of nationality and sovereignty are deeply intertwined with modern political identities, yet here too history can show us that a multiplicity of experiences existed which temper these dominant narratives. My hope is that the President’s call to ‘ethically remember’ the past might inspire a capacity for reflectivity that can assist and complicate, rather than threaten and simplify, different understandings of nationhood and sovereignty.

Thank you, President Higgins, for giving me the opportunity to reflect on Professor Horne’s paper today and I hope my response provokes some tho

Alvin Jackson: Empire, war and partition

25th February 2021

Uachtarán,

I am most grateful to you for the invitation to speak today, and I am honoured to be part of this event.

Can I begin, perhaps, with the theme of empire, since you have placed this at the heart of your concerns for our discussion – and since Professor John Horne has highlighted the issue in his eloquent introduction.

Let me then move to consider partition, particularly in relation to unionism, since this has a relevance and challenge in terms of the President’s emphasis on ethical commemoration. Let me also attempt to follow John, if I can, in his European and global approach to the history of Ireland a century ago.

Empire

As John has said, there is indeed a distinction between the great dynastic empires of the early 20th century, such as those of the Habsburgs, and the contemporary colonial empires of (for example) the French and the British. But there are also ways in which these categories overlap – and there are even senses in which there is an overlap between the concept of empire and that of union.

In pursuing the idea of empire and imperialism, let me first take an example which was much invoked in the Home Rule era, and which has been mentioned already by others. Austria-Hungary, the Dual Monarchy, was the focus of a great deal of earnest Irish nationalist and British liberal reflection, most famously by Arthur Griffith, in his ‘Resurrection of Hungary’, but also by John Redmond and other home rulers in Ireland and Britain, including Gladstone and the Scottish scholar of central Europe, Robert Seton-Watson. All saw various forms of parallel or paradigm between Ireland and Britain and the constitutional relations within Austria-Hungary. Some of these efforts to find an ideal in central Europe were unrealistic. However, a careful comparison of the two, the UK and the Dual Monarchy, remains instructive as we reflect upon the history of Ireland’s relationship with union a century ago.

Austria-Hungary lacked an overseas colonial empire; but it was associated with periodic efforts at annexation and settlement in southern and eastern Europe, including, in 1908, Bosnia. Austria was associated with the military subjugation of its insurgent peoples. I would therefore add to the taxonomies already mentioned the notion of ‘internal colonialism’ – the idea that polities like the Dual Monarchy - or the United Kingdom - a century ago were characterised by complex colonial or colonial-style relationships with neighbouring territories, as well as having (in the case of the UK) an overseas imperial enterprise.

Such empires were commonly associated with different forms of social as well as territorial division, with in particular the notion of divide and rule; and this was applicable both in a dynastic empire like Austria-Hungary as well as in the multinational union and empire that was the United Kingdom. In Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century there were favoured nationalities and political classes through which Habsburg rule was sustained; and indeed the very basis of the compromise of 1867 which shaped the Dual Monarchy was essentially an agreement between the emperor and the Hungarian political elites to the exclusion of others. So, too, in Ireland: the union was effectively founded upon an agreement in 1801 between the British government and the Irish elite, that is to say the protestant ascendancy interest. Ireland under the union (certainly at first) was ruled in association with a privileged social and economic class, just as other continental European empires were held together partly through the agency of similarly privileged groups.

Associated with ‘divide and rule’, however, were other policies of (what might be defined as) partial reinforcement, and which were practised throughout the history of the Habsburg monarchy as well as of the British and Irish unions: these embraced the simultaneous application of periodic reform as well as (often together with) suppression, and were captured in the notion of ‘constructive unionism’, which characterised so much of British policy in Ireland (and Scotland) in the 19th and early 20th century, as well as in a variety of Habsburg stratagems.

Expressing this in another way, British government applied both coercion and conciliation, ‘kicks and ha’pence’, in Ireland, where the Habsburgs and the Magyars applied what were sometimes labelled as ‘horsewhips and oats’ in the Dual Monarchy.

Unions and empires survived for a time both because they demonstrated flexibility with the violent suppression of dissent. But since both in the United Kingdom and the Dual Monarchy the imperial centre held control over power and resource, so-called ‘subsidiary’ nationalities and groups were effectively encouraged to apply pressure and negotiate there, rather than to negotiate and deal with each other. And these were lessons learned and deployed both by Unionists and Nationalists.

Empires and unions were similarly affected by the First World War, a conflict which has been described as being both between and against empires and empire. We still tend to define the War in terms of the victors and the defeated; and there are obvious reasons for this continuing emphasis, given the complete collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

In fact the impact of the war on complex multinational polities like the United Kingdom bears some comparison with its multinational and imperial adversaries. In both Austria-Hungary and the United Kingdom war brought the further marginalisation of ‘subsidiary’ nationalities such as the Irish. In both central Europe and the United Kingdom war brought the escalation of existing national tensions, as the smaller nations within wider unions saw themselves as being failed by their dominant partners.

War brought the hugely increased influence of imperial military establishments, whether in London, Vienna and elsewhere across Europe, with concomitant restrictions on civil liberties. War brought an end to the kinds of flexibility and ambiguity which had hitherto been essential in sustaining the governance of these complex multinational polities.

In short, war magnified a set of tensions which were evident in different multinational unions and empires across Europe before 1914, and in the case of the Austro-Hungarian empire it opened up a pathway to failure and dissolution. But even in the United Kingdom, one of the victors, and one of the arbiters of the post-war settlement, the impact of the war was felt in some broadly similar ways, and ultimately with some similar results: the relegation, alienation and insurgency of a ‘subsidiary’ nationality, the Irish.

Partition

Empires were, as John has said, closely embroiled with partition in terms of the appropriation and delineation of conquests or territorial acquisitions. Partition has been closely associated with both the processes of decolonisation in Ireland, India and Palestine. It has also been closely associated with the fall-out from the First World War, with the deconstruction of the great European empires after 1918 and the complex definition of the boundaries of successor States.

Let me finish by reflecting a little on these issues, not least because they have a bearing on the President’s theme of ethical commemoration. My particular focus today is on partition and unionism.

First I would recall that for unionists in Ireland partition was originally a means to an end. Throughout the home rule era Irish unionists, including Ulster unionists, rejected Irish nationalism because they said that they feared for their civil and religious liberties, and for their economic prosperity, in the event of Irish legislative independence. This was their repeated message across the home rule era; and it was enshrined in their central canonical text, the Solemn League and Covenant of September 1912.

Unionists, including Ulster unionists, for the first 28 years of their movement (between 1885 and 1913) did not seek the division of Ireland – because the division of Ireland was also the fundamental division of unionism itself. They worked with (what was originally) an outside suggestion of partition as a means by which to weaken, or even wreck, home rule; and they moved from nine county to six county partition, and from there to, again, an outside notion of a six county home rule scheme. Into this they subsequently entrenched themselves. But the purpose of their political agitation had now often been replaced by the means; that is to say the effective upholding (as they saw it) of their civil and religious and economic rights had been overshadowed by the agency of partition. Means had overtaken ends.

Second, and related to this, I would suggest that, in a sense, unionism after partition became that which it had ostensibly opposed. Just as the dissolution of the European multi-national empires produced successor states which were often themselves forms of mini-empire or indeed mini-union, so with the redesign of the United Kingdom in 1920-22, Northern Ireland was a form of successor ‘state’ to a failed union, and an empire in crisis.

Northern Ireland possessed home rule, or devolution, within a sovereign United Kingdom state: it was not itself sovereign, but it had some of the markers of a State. And it bore some comparison to other interwar continental European polities, products of the dissolution of empire, and with their own dominant and subordinate nationalities and cultures. The North was closely linked to an evolving ‘Ulster’ identity, which developed alongside unionism, and which was by definition exclusively protestant; and it drew upon an imagined colonial or planter narrative of challenge and survival. There was very little space or sanction in the North for those who lay beyond this dominant identity; and the consequences of this for northern Nationalists and their civil rights were very bleak indeed.

Putting this another way, unionism was originally (at least in terms of its expressed ideals) about integration within a supranational union, and about protecting rights that (they said) were under imminent threat; and yet unionists later embraced an exclusivist set of identities and at times unjust set of actions which they themselves had once fearfully attributed to their purported enemies. They became a version of that which they had claimed to oppose.

The third point that I’d suggest is that, while partition has for long been associated with the single British parliamentary measure, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, it was in fact a process, and not a single event. Partition was a dynamic which ultimately produced a radically different form of border to that which was originally and painfully debated by Edward Carson and John Redmond in 1912-1916.

Partition in Ireland (as then conceived) involved the possible creation of an administrative border between two polities associated with a substantially redesigned United Kingdom; and even the Government of Ireland Act itself envisioned two home rule territories in Ireland which could have remained closely interconnected. The partition settlement which was finally confirmed in 1925 was reached by incremental steps, but it ultimately involved an economically and politically much more profound division of the island and of its people than had been foreseen when the notion had first gained traction in the years before the First World War. Expressing this another way, the story of partition is in part the story of unintended consequences in Irish history.

Let me make a brief, fourth and final point in relation to partition and empire, and in doing so return to central Europe. One of the major themes within the current history-writing on Austria-Hungary is a focus on those who lived their lives, pursuing their personal, familial, social and professional priorities relatively distant from the wider political and military concerns of nation and empire; people whose values, ideals and integrity were expressed within the intimate and the local rather than any wider canvas. These notions have a wider relevance, including for Ireland, as the first ‘Machnamh 100’ seminar discussed.

It is worth underlining that not everyone a hundred years ago was a hero either of the union, or of the nation and of its revolution; and that (as the work of different scholars has pointed out) Irish people often led their lives quietly and in politically undemonstrative ways far removed from the epic struggles of resistance and liberation.

Ethical commemoration

‘The point of commemoration’, John has rightly said, ‘is to interrogate the past for the sake of the present’. And perhaps it may be about the interrogation of the past for the shaping of our vision of the future.

Historians are ever-conscious of the burden of presentism and of the dangers of unduly shaping their work according to contemporary preoccupations. They are also, at best, sceptical or unwilling futurologists, as the Scots historian Tom Devine has said, “the future is not my period.”

The complexity of the past, and an unquenchable curiosity, are historians’ stock-in-trade. It is certainly instructive to reflect on past ideals and idealists, and upon the distance sometimes separating them and subsequent history. It is instructive, too, to pursue the comparative contexts within which Ireland and its future were defined and envisioned in the age of home rule and revolution. And it is surely worth reflecting on the contingent and dynamic nature of our history – and on the extent to which past commemorations, both North and South, may have sought to isolate or photo-shop particular moments or particular people or particular classes to the exclusion of a much richer whole.

Eunan O’Halpin: Nation, empire, partition and commemoration

25th February 2021

A Úachtaráin agus a chairde, 

Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to participate in this series of reflections on John Horne’s framing document. 

The Irish ‘nation’ and the challenge of ethical commemoration

Nationalist Ireland was unified, and to an extent radicalised, as much by the conscription crisis of 1918 as by the 1916 Rising and its aftermath.  We citizens of Ireland should be careful that we in turn don’t now attempt to conscript everyone on the island into a single commemorative cohort.  Our island includes people who see themselves both as Irish and as British, and others who are British through and through.  

Commemoration is not legitimised simply by inclusiveness, by remembering Ulster’s as well as nationalist Ireland’s dead of the First World War, or by belatedly discovering the role of women in the Irish revolution. Richard Kearney’s cheery nostrum of a ‘Hospitality of narratives’ is all very well, but we must recognise that some people will not wish to avail of it, just as we expect others to respect James McClean’s well-grounded unwillingness to wear the poppy. 

In 2018, I complacently observed how the selection of Heather Humphreys, a Border Protestant woman, to handle centenary commemorations had been an inclusive masterstroke. Afterwards a man who identified himself as a ‘Donegal Protestant’ told me that the use of the defence forces to bring the national flag and the proclamation to primary schools in 2016 had greatly troubled some in his community. Furthermore, precisely because of her commemorations role, Minister Humphreys could no longer ‘speak for us’.  Not only nationalists north and south continue to grieve about the consequences of partition: there are families and communities in this state who feel still on the wrong side of the frontier. What should we expect of them as the centenary cycle continues?  Should that cycle conclude not in 2023, with the miserable trailing away of the civil war, but with the rejection of the Boundary Commission’s report in 1925 and the dashing of faint hopes along the unchanged frontier?

 Equally, how should we commemorate the nationalist experience in the newly created Northern Ireland, enduring what Diarmaid Ferriter terms ‘the tyranny of the ‘Special’’?  

In 1921-2 many hundreds of them lost their homes and livelihoods, and scores their lives, in sectarian attacks. In 1922 my newly married Co. Down republican grandparents had to choose between the near certainty of my grandfather’s indefinite detention, or exile in the new Ireland.2 How many other republicans faced that choice I don’t know, but the vast majority of Northern Ireland Catholics remained in a home rule Ulster which neither trusted nor respected them. Though not oppressed by the state’s agents, many Unionists and Protestants in the new Ireland felt the same, and at least until 1924 had every reason to be fearful and resentful of unofficial intimidation and violence.  Should we commemorate such difficulties, or is it best to follow Basil Fawlty, and just not ‘mention the war’?   

This leads on to the question of whether we can ethically commemorate what we don’t yet fully understand. The 1916 centenary was notable for good humour more or less all round, but it did valorise rather than problematize the use of physical force by a small unsanctioned militant minority operating in tandem with ‘gallant allies’ who themselves were, incidentally, genocidal imperialists in colonial Africa. Former Taoiseach John Bruton was scarcely alone in arguing that an uncritical focus on the Rising risked discrediting the achievements of peaceful constitutional politics under John Redmond, which had culminated in the 1914 Government of Ireland Act. Valorising 1916 might also validate the use of armed force ever since, provided only that this was in the name of the unachieved sacred republic.  Where does that leave electoral politics? People will differ on the achievements and limitations of the Irish state since 1922; most would surely recognise that Ireland’s unbroken century as a functioning electoral democracy merits both explanation and respect, rather than passing acknowledgement on the margins of 1916 and War of Independence pageantry.

The same phenomenon is visible in contemporary India. The overwhelmingly peaceful political means by which India - and Pakistan - won independence and partition are largely overlooked in favour of a teleological public narrative of successful armed struggle, although with never a mention of the one group which remained unconquered, the Pashtuns (Pathans) of the ‘tribal areas’ of the North West frontier –these are Muslim, and in any case are now their hated neighbour Pakistan’s problem.  

The state has done well in enabling family, communal and academic research into the revolutionary era through the release online of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, the Bureau of Military History records and the extraordinary Military Service Pensions archive.  These initiatives made long-closed records available uncensored and unfiltered not only in Ireland but across the world.  Yet acute problems remain.

Firstly, revolutionary records intensify focus on political violence and the relatively small number of people involved, at the expense of wider reflection on Irish society.  That is why work such as Fionnuala Walsh’s new study of Irish Women and the Great War, exploring women’s lives on this island within a wider international framework, and Padraig Yeates’s quartet of studies of Dublin life between 1913 and 1923, are so valuable.4  We need far more such scholarship on what might be termed prosaic lives and ordinary living on the island during and after the revolutionary era, if we are to have holistic histories. Such studies in social, economic and cultural histories are far more advanced elsewhere, not least in Northern Ireland.

But to study ordinary lives in extraordinary times, people need records.  This state is failing in that ethical and democratic challenge: the inaccessibility of the 1926 census records, and of the Land Commission’s vast archive, have delayed the systematic exploration of key human questions relating alike to ordinary lives and to the experiences of religious minorities during and immediately after the revolutionary decade.  How can we understand what forces drove the dramatic decrease in independent Ireland’s non-Catholic population between 1911 and 1926 without data?  How can we work out how many northern minority families migrated south after partition, if they did not just emigrate?  These are questions of rather greater moment and moral weight than how many people were in the GPO in 1916, or the size of Tom Barry’s pension. Yet without these sources which we know the state possesses, we cannot meaningfully explore the questions which John Horne’s paper begs, of how politically driven Irish migration and emigration compare with what was experienced in the new Europe created by the collapse of the continent’s empires.  In this, the state is failing in its duty both to the past and to the present.

Partition

The new states of post-First World War Europe all contained uncomfortable minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Almost all nursed ethno-territorial grievances which poisoned relations with their new neighbours. Even today, Hungary mourns the loss of Transylvania. Russian minorities implanted by Stalin in the Baltic states after 1940 are both resented and resentful. Germany herself became two states after the defeat of Hitler, and although reunified in 1990 – not without help from Charles Haughey during Ireland’s EU Presidency – never regained her pre-1938 eastern borders. What was once German Konigsberg is now, bizarrely, part of Russia. 

What is striking about Irish partition is, in comparative terms, not its existence, its anomalies and its arguable injustices – still quietly felt as much in minority communities in parts of East Donegal or Cavan or Monaghan, as amongst Irish nationalists generally - but its persistence.  The Irish/UK land border is one of very few confirmed in the early 1920s – Turkey and Afghanistan are other rare instances – which have remained unchanged for a century. British India was partitioned in 1937, when Burma was hived off. Neither of the two states created in 1947 – Pakistan, which lost secessionist East Pakistan in 1971 after decades of brutal misgovernment, and India, which ceded territory to China in the 1962 war – hold the borders which the British left them.

Empires

Empire, imperialism and colonialism are easily denounced in the abstract. Varieties of conquest, migration, exploitation and expropriation have been the way of the world for as long ago as history and archaeology permit us to look. We may indict Christopher Columbus and stout Cortez for bringing European hegemony, despoilation and cultural ruin to the Americas, but colonisation and imperialism did not begin with them. Spain had itself just been freed from Moorish domination. Writing with all the confidence of modernity in the 5th century b.c., Thucydides speculated that there had once been a time when places and peoples had not communicated, traded, fought with and conquered each other. But he wrote of the struggle for mastery of the Greek world between democratic and yet relentlessly colonising Athens, and authoritarian, monarchical, austere and colonising Sparta, with the Persian empire waiting in the wings. His work still shapes how we conceptualise interstate conflict and conquest.  

John Horne’s paper reminds us that we must appraise Irish independence in parallel with the break-up of European empires and the emergence at the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of a range of new states, all of which faced complex internal ethnic and other difficulties.  Irish separatists certainly looked to Versailles in 1919, but the British government was thinking of Ireland entirely in imperial terms. Britain was facing what the late Keith Jeffery termed ‘a crisis of empire’, yet that was then seen as a crisis essentially of expansion, not of disintegration.5  Russia’s collapse in 1917 appeared to reduce future competition in Persia and Central Asia; the Middle Eastern mandates conferred on Britain and France promised opportunities as well as responsibilities. Compared to these challenges, fixing Ireland, once the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was in the bag, was an irritating second-order problem. 

It is no accident that the British Treaty delegation’s key advisor on constitutional matters in 1921 was neither diplomat nor lawyer but Lionel Curtis, apostle and architect of empire reform. He had already drafted the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms introduced in India in 1919, designed as the first step towards home rule and perhaps even qualified dominion status once Indians acquired sufficient experience in disciplined governance.

A cynical friend wrote: ‘he was anxious, by bringing India into a parliamentary system, to cast her for a chief role in his master plan … He it was who had the chief part in devising the constitution of the two Irelands … while his theories did much to advance popular causes both in India and in Ireland, there were many who forecast that his main political objectives –a united Empire – would never get off the ground’.(6)

The British aim in the Treaty negotiations, partition being already a reality, was to achieve an autonomous twenty-six county Ireland which over time would blossom within an empire reimagined by Curtis as a Commonwealth of near-equals.7 To an extent they succeeded: the new Ireland and the United Kingdom concluded a treaty which more or less disposed of the Irish question in British politics for fifty years, and produced a surprisingly robust working relationship which generally met the needs of both states.  Ireland under Cosgrave proved a surprisingly ‘restless dominion’, to borrow from David Harkness, but not an impossibly difficult one (indeed, in 1933 a party stalwart appealed personally to Curtis to secure ‘financial support for the Party supporting Mr Cosgrave’, to ensure that ‘Ireland is to remain in the British Commonwealth’).(8) Free movement of people was maintained without fuss or fanfare until the Second World War, and quietly reinstated as soon as possible thereafter.(9)

Britain’s overseas empire remained an employment magnet for Irish people in civil, military, police and missionary roles. Even de Valera, seen as an unpredictable anti-Christ when elected in 1932, did, through the ingenious External Relations Act 1936, maintain what Britain regarded as the essential unity of the empire as he methodically dismantled obnoxious features of the 1921 Treaty.

Irish religious denominations continued to colonise souls abroad, inside and outside the British empire. 2018 marked the centenary of the Maynooth Mission to China, now the Columban Missionaries, in which order two of my uncles made their lives. However noble their intentions, or those of the longer-established Dublin University Mission, we might reflect on the ethical implications of challenging indigenous belief systems across Asia and Africa. The trope of the Irish, whether as soldiers, policemen, officials, or male and female missionaries, as somehow magically capable of relating to indigenous peoples runs through British writings.  We don’t have to rely on Kipling for examples: an English woman missionary, reflecting on Assam in the 1930s, recalled ‘the Irishness of the Dublin University Mission … the Irish folk are far more like the Indians than the English, in that time means nothing to them, they sit there, accepting people as they are’.  

It is perhaps too easy to congratulate ourselves as having a special empathy for the oppressed because of our own preferred narrative of colonisation, of exploitation, of famine and of a freedom paid for in blood. In Africa and Asia, we may not have been all that much holier than the British ‘thou’.

Marie Coleman: Nation and Empire

25th February 2021

Uachtaráin,

Go raibh maith agat as an gcuireadh le páirt a ghlacadh i seimineár Machnamh 100.

Prof John Horne has offered us a comprehensive yet succinct perspective on the themes of nation, empire and partition in the context of this island, and its wider place within the British empire and beyond, 100 years ago.

I would like to explore how these themes affected the personal experiences of some of those who lived through the events and to reflect on how we remember, a century later, a distance sufficiently safe to allow for more inclusive reflection.

Nation and empire

Prof Horne has suggested that the dynamics of nation and sovereignty were stronger driving forces behind the Irish revolution, than were concerns of empire. That is a convincing analysis from the perspective of the insurgents. But have we looked sufficiently at the factors motivating their adversaries, members of the Crown Forces who served in Ireland during these years – from the Irish perspective, the ‘other’ referred to by the President in his remarks launching this series in December?

In that reflection, the President noted how the violent actions of the crown forces were strategic tools employed to defend empire, and certainly that was the vision of the political and military leaders who deployed these men to Ireland. But what of the individual motivations of the men who defended the British nation and empire in Ireland throughout 1920 and 1921? We know something of what triggered reprisals, whether knee-jerk reactions to deaths of comrades or the inevitable consequence of over-indulgence in alcohol.

These events took place in Ireland, but what brought these men to Ireland in the first place? The President has cautioned against stereotypical depictions of ‘the other’. A way to avoid this in the case of the ‘enemy’, in this case the Crown forces, is to look to their own personal experience and testimonies in an effort to identify their motivations, while remaining cognisant of the later Prof David Fitzpatrick’s warning that personal motivation is notoriously resistant to historical enquiry.

Just over one hundred years ago, on 2 February 1921, a group of nineteen men including engineers, mechanics, clerks, a messenger, a dairy assistant, an actor, a spinner, and a teacher and preacher, all of whom were members of M Company of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC, were ambushed by the North Longford flying column of the IRA in the isolated townland of Clonfin between the town of Grandard and the village of Ballinalee. Four Auxiliaries were killed and a further seven were subsequently discharged as medically unfit, never to serve again on account of the injuries which they sustained.

The vast majority had been in Ireland for six weeks at most and their original training, for trench or airborne warfare during the First World War left them ill-prepared for an ambush on a quiet Irish country road. Testimonies of the injured and the families of the deceased in claims for compensation offer some insight into what led them to such strange surroundings.

One survivor, William Bellingham, said he ‘joined the Auxiliaries merely to tide him over in the crisis in the engineering trade’. Harold Clayton, one of the fatalities, had been sending home £5 weekly to his pregnant wife and child. The most unusual member of the group, a South African Boer War veteran who had served on the side of his own former enemy during the recent Great War somewhat cryptically hoped ‘that something would come out of joining’ the RIC - indicating a possible ideological motive. Though the fact of his divorce later in 1921 suggests a possible element of escapism to his brief Irish adventure.

Exploring the lives of the individual members of the Crown forces, allows us to view events in Ireland in 1920 and 1921 from the perspective of ‘the other’ and suggests that while at the marco level considerations of nation, identity, loyalty and empire drove the conflict, at the micro level of the individual participants more mundane considerations of job security and economic stability go some way to explaining how it was that many British men who served in the Crown forces during the War of Independence found themselves in Ireland in the first place.

The centenary commemoration of the Clonfin ambush took place earlier this month, a much more muted event in the context of the pandemic and the restrictions on public gatherings. The event epitomised the spirit of ethical remembering which the president has done much to encourage. In a similar vein, the personal journey of reconciliation undertaken by Sr Maeve Brady, whose father, Tom Brady was a member of the IRA ambush party at Clonfin, to visit the four cemeteries in England where the deceased auxiliaries were laid to rest, was at once a simple but powerful and significant gesture.

Partition

In the final section of his discourse, dealing with the effects of partition, Prof Horne drew attention to the Catholic and nationalist minority ‘trapped’ in the ‘enclave’ of the newly created Northern Ireland and has also alluded to the problems that ensue when a nation or state becomes defined by the identity of the majority.

One hundred years on, as we live through the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland, we face one of the most challenging contexts for all of the events that have to date been marked during this past decade of centenaries. For one community it is a heroic tale of survival against the odds and for the other of abandonment, alienation and discrimination. How can a middle ground be found between those extremes? Perhaps the answer is that one can not, and therefore should not, be sought.

The role of scholars is to expose the complexity of the facts from which the various competing narratives draw their interpretations. We should be wary of those who seek to appropriate conveniently cherry-picked events to make a statement relevant to current issues. In a similar vein, cheerful prognostications about the potential of the coming century, made in the context of centenary commemorations, runs the risk of ignoring how the present has been conditioned by past painful experience.

The issues of identity, loyalty and nationhood explored at the outset by Prof Horne, are also pertinent to the experience of Ireland’s other minority population which found itself left behind in a majoritarian jurisdiction – the southern Protestants. When the first census of the Irish Free State was held in 1926 it revealed a significant demographic change – the reduction by 1/3 of the non-Catholic population of the twenty-six counties from the time the last (an all-island) census had been conducted in 1911.

There is a relative level of scholarly consensus that this phenomenon was the result of a myriad of economic and demographic factors which played out over a long period of time, pre-dating the revolutionary period, but intensifying during it. Voluntary emigration for economic reasons; natural decline, where birth rates failed to keep pace with mortality; and the departure of the British garrison and other servants of the state in 1922, all contributed to the significant downturn, though there is dispute as to which of these were the most significant.

While scholars reject the emotive claims alleging ethnic cleansing, that is not to say that the revolutionary upheaval of the period was not a factor in Protestant departures, especially in the most violent years between 1920 and 1922. If Protestants were not targeted specifically because of their religion alone, their denominational affiliation was often part of a wider associational culture – such as membership of the Orange Order, or fraternising in church or social groups with co-religionists who were members of the Crown Forces – that was part of the explanation for them coming under suspicion.

In January 1922 southern Protestants faced an unknown future. The decline in their numbers by 1926 indicate that some at least departed, to Britain or Northern Ireland in many cases. However, the focus on departures can distract focus from the fact that the majority elected to remain. An editorial in the Church of Ireland Gazette in January 1922, soon after the ratification of the treaty by Dáil Éireann, recognised that ‘loyalists of the south and west’ did not ‘regard the change which is impending with any great enthusiasm’, but asserted that ‘they are determined to make the best of things’, promising to ‘give their whole-hearted and active support to the Irish Free State’.

The enormity of that decision, and the wrench which it entailed for many in abandoning an integral part of their identity and association with ‘nation’ is one which should not be over-looked in our current commemorative landscape. For the descendants of those Protestant remainers, commemorating certain actions from the War of Independence and Civil War in the south will evoke painful memories of past family experiences.

The faith placed in the new state by Protestants was not always reciprocated. Discrimination against Protestants in the south was never comparable to that of Catholics in the north. Yet, in his memoir of early life in south east Leinster, the late Church of Ireland canon, Norman Ruddock, recalled the ghettoisation of life live around sectarian institutions, the divisions within families caused by Catholic insistence on Ne Temere and the difficulties of navigating heightened local tensions as a recently ordained cleric during the Fethard-on-Sea boycott of the 1950s.

We may think of these experiences as now belonging, thankfully, to the history books. Yet, similarities can be observed between the choice facing southern loyalists in 1921 - of whether to leave or to remain - and the choices that might yet face unionists in Northern Ireland in the current context of discussions about border polls and the constitutional future of the entity created by the partition that we are focusing on here today.

During an interview with the comedian Patrick Kielty, for a television documentary made not long after the Brexit referendum, the NI First Minister, Arlene Foster, speculated that in the hypothetical event of Irish unity she did not feel she would be able to continue living in Ireland. These views were far from unanimous within unionism; by contrast, Lady Sylvia Hermon, then a sitting independent unionist MP for North Down, declared forthrightly “I’ll be staying, I’ve always loved this country … I will not leave it, even if it was ruled by Dublin.’

While wary of drawing anachronistic parallels between the past and the present, we can still look to the past to inform the future. In the event of a united Ireland, are there lessons to be learned from the experience of the integration of the southern unionists after 1921, that could inform any future status of northern unionists in such an entity?

Commemoration is a contemporary process. The events belong to the past. The commemorative act reflects current sensibilities, opinions and priorities. The future also has a role in this process. Reflecting in the present on how we did things in the past offers the opportunity to inform future practice.