Book Review

Road to a precarious peace

Ireland: the politics of enmity 1789-2006

  That the Irish have a strong sense of the past, as Harold Nicolson once remarked, is untrue: "it is just that for the Irish, the present begins in 1170". The British, on the other hand, have only the sketchiest awareness of Irish history and of the often malign part Britain has played in it. It is a feature of the asymmetry between the two countries that Ireland tends to fade from the collective British consciousness as soon as the latest spasm of trouble seems to have subsided. Few people in Britain who are neither Irish nor professional historians could describe the background to the 1916 Rising or the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, let alone the 1798 Rebellion or the Land War. Even the furore over Irish neutrality in the Second World War is largely forgotten today. Now that peace appears to have broken out again in Northern Ireland, even the origins of the current "peace process" are beginning, as Lord Moyne said of the origins of the Guinness family, to be "lost in the mists of the recent past".

The mutual incomprehension resulting from this British amnesia about Ireland has contributed significantly to the animosity which has plagued the Anglo-Irish political relationship for so long. Lord Bew, who as well as being a distinguished political historian has been closely involved in the peace process, has therefore done students of Anglo-Irish relations an important service in producing a narrative account of the relationship over the past 200 years which is detailed, coherent and digestible, demonstrating how relentlessly each successive crisis has created the conditions for the next: from the 1798 Rebellion to the Union; from the delay over Catholic Emancipation to the Famine, the Land War and the frustrated demand for Home Rule; from the 1916 Rising to the Treaty and Partition; from Partition to the recent Troubles.

A fully comprehensive history of the "politics of enmity" would indeed have to start in 1170, when the Anglo-Normans defeated the Men of Waterford at Baginbun and "Ireland was lost and never won." It would include the Elizabethan Wars, the Rising of 1641 and its suppression, the Cromwellian Settlement, the Plantations of Ulster and Munster and the Penal Laws against Catholics. Paul Bew begins his narrative with the French Revolution, because, as he explains, its impact changed the terms of the political debate within Ireland, led directly to the formation of the United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion; and thence to the Act of Union. In one form or another, pressure for the repeal of the Union dominated Irish politics from 1801 until 1921; and Sinn Fein and the IRA can be regarded as lineal descendants of the radical wing of the United Irishmen.

As Bew tells us in his preface, he has concentrated on achieving factual accuracy and his account comes as close to being objective as the highly charged nature of his subject permits. He has a detectable sympathy (shared by this reviewer) for Burke at the end of the eighteenth century and for Redmond at the turn of the nineteenth, but on the whole eschews condemnation or commendation and allows readers to make their own judgements. His examination of the pros and cons of Irish neutrality in the Second World War is even- handed, describing Churchill's offer in 1940 (rejected by de Valera) of an end to Partition in return for the Republic's entry into the war as well as the ways in which the Irish Government, despite the anti-British character of much southern Irish opinion, covertly helped the Allied cause in ways which, in Garret FitzGerald's words, were "scarcely compa-

tible with the concept of neutrality in international law". At the same time Bew emphasises the damaging consequences for Britain of the Irish refusal to allow British use of the Treaty Ports, adding mildly that "it has to be acknowledged that the self-referential culture of Irish nationalism was ill-equipped to rise to the moral challenges of world war".

Closer to the present, we learn of Harold Wilson's interest in the possibility of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland (no hint there of Mrs Thatcher's "Northern Ireland is as British as Finchley") and also of the Irish Government's dismay at the prospect. The relative advantages of a continued British presence in the North were so great, the Taoiseach was told in 1975 by his Cabinet secretary, "that we should do everything possible to bring it about". (The Irish Government could neither afford to match Britain's economic subvention to the North nor face the prospect of an armed confrontation with militant unionism.)

Bew's account of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is predictably dense and does not make for easy reading. But he would appear to endorse the view that the Agreement was essentially "Sunningdale for slow learners" and is inclined to discount the earlier 1985 Agreement as no more than "direct rule with a green tinge", important for involving the Republic irreversibly in a share of responsibility (albeit only "consultative") for the North, but having a "poisonous impact on community relations". Arguably, however, it was the durability of that unpalatable Agreement which brought the unionists to the negotiating table in 1998.

The narrative ends just before the peace process reached its consummation in the improbable partnership between Dr Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein, and it leaves open the question of whether this latest settlement, like its predecessors, contains the seeds of a further breakdown. Without underestimating the other contributory factors, Bew sees the most important obstacles to Unionist acceptance of Irish unity in recent years as having been the narrowly sectarian character of the southern state and its relative economic backwardness. Given the economic transformation of the Republic into today's Celtic Tiger and the decline in the influence of the Catholic Church in the South, these obstacles would seem to have gone.

But historic antipathies die hard, the betrayals and tergiversations of the peace process have left scars, and for many in the North the pull of the United Kingdom will always be as strong as the pull of Dublin for nationalists. As this impressive study of the uniquely close and uniquely troubled relationship between the two islands makes clear, no foreseeable settlement of "the Irish Question" is likely to be other than precarious.

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