Green and rank as grass

The most depressing handicap of Irish ultra-republicans is monocular vision. This can be adequately, and inelegantly revealed by any chance scan of 1169 and Counting:

An award-nominated Irish blog on Irish history and Irish politics - from today and yesterday : all 32 Counties!

The essence is to select and scan long-past documents and thereby reveal the horrors British imperialists impose, minute by minute, over the centuries, on one noble but oppressed people. "History", in any objective form, it is not.


The one big lie ...

George Orwell nailed the "Big Lie" technique in 1984:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has became inconvenient, and when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.

The ultra-republican "Big Lie" depends on one inflexible notion: imperial "Britain" somehow wills and maintains a ruthless police state in the Six Counties, contrary to the will of the mass of the Irish people. Everything must be framed into that perspective; and nothing is further from the reality.

... is the father of other lies

Malcolm takes as the shibboleth the word "Protestant" (and its variant grammatical forms). This is not, primarily, because of any denominational commitment on his part, but because it shows up a critical flaw in nationalist/republican thinking: the need to conflate religious demarcations with political ones.

1169 and Counting seem unrelentingly to use "Protestant" as a pejorative. So, in last November's put-down of the Workers' Party (borrowing from a 1983 article lifted from Fortnight magazine):

... some support centred around the academic world which has contributed to a small but growing new Protestant (sic) membership - there is , however , a considerable gap between the political rhetoric which has attracted such new members , and the reality of the party's organisation.

The (sic) is in the original, by the way. Malcolm is not aware that religious affiliation ever was a disclosure required for membership. This aperçu must, therefore, derive from assuming academics are Prods. Hmmm.

Then again, there is this, from a 2005 rip of a 1984 "History of Armagh Jail":

The women's prison in the North of Ireland is situated in the centre of the Protestant/Loyalist city of Armagh.
It was built in the 19th century , a huge granite building which today sports all the trappings of a high-security jail such as barbed wire, guards, arc-lamps , and closed circuit television cameras.

The accuracy of that can be checked against the Census: in 2001 there were 14, 509 residents of the city of Armagh: 68.3% declared themselves to have a Roman Catholic background. Nor is Malcolm, whose knowledge of Armagh goes back to the 1960s, aware of any mass conversions among its populace.

Whose nationalism?

In the history of Irish nationalism, it was the Anglo-Irish who got there first.

Significantly for the history of the next two centuries, the irritant was taxation without representation. In 1576 "the inhabitants of the English pale" are petitioning the Queen's deputy, Surrey, against the taxes "whereby we are reduced to great decay and poverty". When the new Deputy, Sir John Perrot, called a Parliament in 1585-6:

the speaker Walsh, himself a nominee of the Government, delivered a long address setting out the constitutional position. No Government could be autocratic, using power in an arbitrary fashion, king, lords and commons legislated together in parliament. The subject was protected by his status under the crown and there could, therefore, be no discrimination against one in favour of another.

That, by the way, is James Lydon in The Making of Ireland.

A century later, in 1698, William Molyneux challenged the right of English statesmen to make laws for Ireland:

To tax me without my Consent is little better, if at all, than down-right Robbing me.

That was an argument that would be heard an ocean and another century away. And, of course, it was one Swift would refine in Drapier's Letters.

Those precedents, and their natural successors over three centuries, quickly are lost in the miasma of identifying Catholicism as the only true nationalism.

Historical inevitability

Let's persuade Malcolm to leave that long recitation, as least for this posting. Be warned: he will not be cheated of his detailed exposition for ever.

Let's get closer to now, and consider the other falsehood: the great British Imperial plot.

As Malcolm has repeatedly argued in these postings, if there is one constancy of "British" (increasingly a worrying term in itself) governments over decades, since the end of the "economic war", it has been a wish to be out of Ireland, north, south, east, or west. Once Malcolm MacDonald had managed to convince the British Cabinet that de Valera meant what he said, and that Britain's western flank was, literally, neutralised, only the boneheads and self-appointed "Spycatchers" of Margaret Thatcher's honour guard have diverted from the chosen path.

Any real foot-shuffling has been because Dublin, from de Valera to the present day, has shown no wish to take on the "North-east Ulster" business. Even at the moment when "England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity" that policy did not vary. There is, at the very end of Tim Pat Coogan's De Valera, Long Fellow, Long Shadow, a "Most Secret" internal memorandum addressed to Patrick Kennedy in the Department of the Taoiseach. Dated 24 May, 1941, it lists the myriad ways in which strict "neutrality" was being circumvented to the advantage of Britain. Behind that document lurks the reforming zeal of one Seán Lemass, itching to get out from under the dead hand of de Valera's economics, and seek a rapprochement with a post-war Britain.

A fresh future?

The ultra-republicans are also history. The few remaining firebrands may not yet be capable of eyeing that truth. Today we see greater unity of purpose, across four provinces and the four home nations than was conceivable even a few months ago. Even First Minister Salmond, watchful of his subventions from the Exchequer, is losing his shrillness.

The purblind nationalism issue is dead, and as extinct for all time as the diplodocus.

What matters now is using both eyes, and both sides of the brain in defining a mutual post-nationalism. Sphere: Related Content