Book: Home Rule
Author: Alvin Jackson
Price: (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ?25)
The greatest failing of protagonists in Irish conflicts is their seemingly endless tolerance of repetition. Scan the readers' letters pages of the Irish Times or Belfast Telegraph and ask yourself how many of these letters could have appeared, word for word, in an edition of ten, 20 or 30 years ago? How many of the arguments you have had yourself on those issues could have the same thing said of them? Alvin Jackson's splendid Home Rule notes repeatedly how a matching syndrome has operated on the level of high politics. From the advent of the union in 1801, through Gladstone's and Asquith's battles over their successive home rule bills, to the rise and fall of Stormont and the 1998 Good Friday agreement, very similar constitutional schemes, almost identical kinds of manoeuvre and deal-making, clashes, misunderstandings and fudges, even the personal failings among the key actors, recur time and again.
Yet a taste for repetition, although hard to avoid in British-Irish history, can obscure just how much has changed and is changing. Not just the obvious things-the Good Friday agreement, the partial ending of paramilitary violence-but also slower, less evident, but in the end maybe more significant developments. Above all, perhaps, there has been the long, slow thaw in relations between Irish and British governments, and more broadly in the two societies' images of one another. Jackson's later pages provide the best recent account of the relationship's ups and downs, its rifts and misunderstandings, but also the steady accretion in trust and intimacy.
When Margaret Thatcher and Charles Haughey achieved a certain personal rapport in the 1980s, it appeared rather astonishing. Today, the evident cordiality between Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern can be taken for granted, barely worth remark; while the vast amount of common ground they share on Northern Ireland's future, as on broader European and global issues, is equally obvious. Both men travel light, carrying little ideological or historical baggage. Indeed, Northern Irish politicians-from all sides-often complain how those they now deal with in London and Dublin show distressingly little interest in or knowledge of Irish history. Perhaps this is Blair and Ahern's strength.
Celebrations of British-Irish rapprochement or convergence have often been conservative in inspiration, with commentators like Kevin Myers and Ruth Dudley Edwards celebrating Ireland's contributions to British military history, or the Republic's unprecedented official mourning for the Queen Mother's death last year. But there is a renewed readiness in other quarters to recall shared liberal, social democratic and socialist traditions too. Above all, the interpenetration of populations and of popular cultures is ever more publicly displayed and acclaimed. During 2002, the enthusiasm in England for the Irish World Cup team was obvious, as (perhaps more surprisingly) was that in Ireland for England-and almost everybody could unite in detesting Roy Keane.
Many of the reasons for convergence are straightforward. Relative peace in Ulster has helped. Irish economic success has not only brought a new self-confidence, but also more reciprocal patterns of migration: you are now almost as likely to hear an English accent behind the bar-or the computer desk-in Dublin as you are an Irish one in London. Europeanisation and Atlanticism have reshaped both societies. Changes in Britain's political system have brought it closer to that of the Republic: a fall in class-based voting (while in Ireland, simultaneously, social class has become if anything more important to political choice), semi-abolition of a hereditary legislature, devolution, a human rights act. Ireland has become steadily less religious-especially in respect of the church's authority as a moral regulator-while Britain, if neither as fully secularised nor as comfortably multi-faith as is sometimes proclaimed, has long ceased to be a distinctively "Protestant" culture. Irish cities are, slowly, becoming almost as multicoloured and polyglot as most British ones. Even more fundamentally, the senses of Irish, British and (more ambiguously) of English national identity, have become more inclusive, diverse, interestingly unstable.
Historians might argue that the gulf to be closed was never very great anyway. The perception of two-or four if you include Wales and Scotland-societies with profoundly divergent and even antagonistic cultures was always an illusion. They have for centuries mostly shared a language, despite all the strenuous efforts to revive, sustain and popularise Irish. The endeavour to promote "Gaelic" games and traditional music was more successful, but still the countries' tastes in sport and song, as in films and television shows, overlap more than those of almost any other two sovereign states in the world. The Irish Republic's political system broke decisively from the British inheritance, with a proportional electoral system and an elected head of state. Yet in other respects that legacy remains dominant, as with the structure of cabinet government, the legal system, the civil service, local authorities and policing.
Increasing, or renewed, similarity does not, of course, necessarily imply particular friendliness-but by many measures the latter too is strongly apparent. Despite assiduous research on anti-Irish prejudice in Britain, culminating in a much-criticised 1997 commission for racial equality report, opinion polls seem to show overwhelmingly positive British attitudes toward Ireland; while every account concurs that anti-British feeling in the Republic was a marginal phenomenon, even at the height of the northern violence. A certain, less definable, ethos of civility, too, is substantially shared between Britain and Ireland. Those who celebrate and mythologise a supposedly unique British, or even English, peaceableness and sense of civic virtue often forget how many of the philosophers of that civility, from Edmund Burke onwards, had Irish roots or links.
Why, then, the strength of that illusion of divergence? Its persistence might, according to ideological taste, be blamed mainly on a prickly, vainglorious Irish cultural nationalism; or perhaps an arrogantly colonialist, then nostalgic-for-empire official Britishness; or on the special sorrows of Ireland's northeastern corner; or simply on the mutual misunderstandings of political leaders over several generations. Jackson's book provides much ammunition for the last view, though without itself plumping for such a monocausal explanation. He suggests repeatedly that the reasons for failing to reach a lasting settlement of Britain's Irish question were not preordained by deep-rooted antagonism, but highly contingent. Often-perhaps too often-Jackson holds leaders' personal foibles and failings responsible for agreements not being struck or stuck to. One strikingly recurrent theme is British prime ministers' failure to keep even their closest colleagues properly informed of their Irish policies or aims: it is a motif which returns time after time from Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George to Major and even Blair.
Irish historians have tended to give undue weight to the militants and fundamentalists within both traditions. If much British history writing has rather smugly stressed a national talent for peaceful compromise-and done so partly by "forgetting" Ireland and indeed the empire-then its Irish counterpart has perhaps over-emphasised violence and misery. In part, this stems from what Liam Kennedy mockingly called the Mope-Most Oppressed People Ever-syndrome in Irish popular consciousness. If Ireland's new prosperity, pluralism and self-confidence, and better Anglo-Irish relations, have eroded the syndrome from one direction, Jackson is just one of many younger historians who have undermined it from another. The strength of the nonviolent home rule tradition is underlined also in recent books by Senia Paseta and Patrick Maume. Others have urged how-far from displaying a congenital disposition to pursue bloody, atavistic quarrels-Irish people repeatedly pulled themselves back from the brink, as they did in 1921-23 or after 1969. Much of the new work on the contemporary history of Northern Ireland also seeks to recuperate various moderate and centrist traditions. New visions of recent history offer multiple, hopeful pathways for the future. It is, as Jackson insists, still too soon to be confident that Ulster's fractious politicians will take any of them-but if they do not, it can no longer be claimed that they are helpless prisoners of history.
