This week’s sombre centenary of Northern Ireland cannot be understood apart from the civil strife before and after its creation in 1921—five years on from the bloody Easter Rising in Dublin, and a year before the rest of Ireland became independent amid the brutal “black and tans” war with the British army.
The disintegration and horrific violence of the 1920s happened because Gladstone’s devolution plan for Ireland as a whole was rejected by Lord Salisbury’s sectarian, imperialist Tories 35 years before. This history is important because, to this day, it underpins Northern Ireland’s sectarian divisions. Over the last 30 years the Tories had finally turned their back on ruthless exploitation of Irish sectarianism for English political purposes, but today Boris Johnson is harking back to it in his pursuit of Brexit.
Winding back, this is what happened. The union of the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland was forced through by Pitt in 1799 as a security emergency at the start of the Napoleonic wars, after an uprising by an Irish independence movement the year before, supported by a French invasion. The rising was suppressed by British troops with up to 50,000 slain, including its charismatic leader Wolfe Tone.
Born thus, the parliamentary union of 1800—like the preceding union of crowns—was never stable. From the outset, terrorist outrages recurred: by Irish nationalists, Catholic and Protestant, north and south. These intensified after the catastrophic Irish famine of the 1840s—Ireland’s population fell by a third in the 19th century, while England’s quadrupled—exacerbated by the continued exploitation of Ireland’s middle-class tenant farmers by absentee English aristocrats.
As the right to vote was extended, and Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants were allowed to sit in parliament in Westminster, an Irish constitutionalist devolution movement got going. By 1880 this had won most of Ireland’s MPs under the charismatic Charles Stewart Parnell.
By 1886, the Liberal colossus Gladstone—who had already tried things like land reform to “pacify Ireland”—came to the correct conclusion that the only stable basis for maintaining the union was by devolution to a non-sectarian Irish parliament within a reconstituted UK. Crucial to this judgement was his trust in Parnell, a leader drawn from the Protestant gentry, who at this juncture would probably have been able to take power in Ireland as a whole—north and south—without uncontainable sectarianism.
But it was not to be. After havering for a few months, unsure whether he might be risking a revolution in Ireland, Tory leader Lord Salisbury came out against Home Rule, aided by a Liberal split which led to the defeat of Gladstone’s devolution legislation in the Commons. He then took power in coalition with self-styled “Liberal Unionists,” led by Joseph Chamberlain. Several further attempts were made at “home rule” by subsequent Liberal governments before 1916, but all failed. The circumstances in Ireland were never as propitious as they had been in 1886 under Parnell and Gladstone, before bitter north-south, Catholic-Protestant sectarianism got going.
The Tories stoked this sectarianism from the outset. Foremost among them that arch cynic Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who famously announced in 1886 that if Gladstone went for Home Rule, “the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.”
In Tory electoral terms, it was the ace: rallying Protestants to the Tories in places like Lancashire and Liverpool, while weaponising anti-Irish feeling nationwide. But for Ireland, the Orange card was more like a two. And so it continued after 1921, as sectarian tensions burst into full-scale terrorism in the north while an isolated and almost theocratic Republic of Ireland languished economically and socially. Even today. Ireland’s population, at seven million, is more than a million lower than in 1841, while England’s has risen from 14 to 57 million. Civil strife and misgovernment have vast and enduring social consequences.
In retrospect, the turning of the tide was 1973, when Britain and Ireland both “joined Europe” on the same day. British-Irish relations improved steadily, the vital platform upon which, 20 years later, first John Major and then Tony Blair were able to quell the endemic sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, leading to the power-sharing Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
All that is now at risk once again, since Boris Johnson went for Brexit on the same cynical basis on which Randolph Churchill played the “Orange card,” praying it was the electoral ace and not the two. So it turned out—except in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, the DUP’s militant Orange leadership backed Brexit in order to worsen relations with Ireland—its perpetual quest being to keep the north separate from the Republic. But many of the province’s Unionists, as well as virtually all Nationalists, were anxious to maintain the Good Friday Agreement and keep a completely open border and society with southern Ireland, despite Brexit (which a clear majority of the province had voted against in 2016).
An existential battle now looms for the soul of Ulster’s Orange Order—the real significance of Arlene Foster’s enforced resignation as DUP leader and Northern Ireland first minister last week. And another tussle now looms in London for how to approach the province. Let’s hope that the spirit of Gladstone wins, not Randolph Churchill. Otherwise Ireland at large draws another two.
