Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000

"This is a book that is not just about unionism. I chose it because it deals with unionism a great deal, and, also, because you can’t understand unionism properly without having the full context. Just as Buckland is very good on the politics, Jackson is very good on the constitution. He’s very good on what Gladstone was prepared to concede in 1886, what was in the Second Home Rule Bill, what was in the fight over who controlled customs and excise and the idea of federalism as a potential solution in World War I—as against the independence of the Free State that eventually occurred. Also, interestingly, the Scottish devolution settlement of 1998 was based on Gladstone’s 1885-6 sketches for Irish Home Rule, and the first Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886. A lot of the thinking that Alvin Jackson goes through—what’s the future relationship between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom?—is the same kind of language and debate that’s been going on in the Scottish context for 20/30/40 years. It’s very similar to the way the Irish debate unfolded except that the exact environment and political situation are different. So, from this book, you get a really good sense of the constitutional problems that politicians were trying to address. He goes right up to the modern period, but he’s particularly good on the early period and why those constitutional problems proved so intractable. It was urgent they were addressed because there was a threat of violence, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be properly or consistently addressed because the threat of violence was always there. That was the paradox. Both sides ultimately resorted to violence. Jackson, like other writers before him, is very clear that one of the worrying things about the time before World War I is the way a lot of British parliamentary politicians turned a blind eye to gunrunning that supported unionism. That helped to feed the idea that the political process was ineradicably one-sided, and to feed gunrunning for nationalism. You possibly ended up in a violent situation because of the inability to tackle Home Rule in a constitutional way before World War I. I know it’s old history, but we are still living with it. Because Northern Ireland itself was the only way the British government thought it could satisfy unionist demands and avoid civil conflict. Nobody, in 1900, would have conceived of the present Northern Ireland as a satisfactory political entity. The unionists would have wanted a whole Ireland, or, failing that, the whole 9 counties of Ulster, and the nationalists would have wanted the whole 32 counties of Ireland, North and South. The British government produced what was, basically, a compromise, in order to minimize conflict on the island and to protect elements of the unionist community. And that’s what we’ve got. A compromise. All the political problems and the Troubles of Northern Ireland stem from that compromise—which is not to say that there was any other solution. Just over a century ago, Northern Ireland is a place that nobody conceived of as existing, in its current form. Home Rule is a slippery concept. It effectively meant near-independence. When they finally got it in 1922, the Free State presented it as independence. It was actually closer, formally speaking, to dominion status. The Home Rule bills ranged from a situation which was actually rather like the current devolved settlement of Scotland, to a settlement where there would be no Irish MPs sent to Westminster, so a quasi-independent settlement. There were also federal solutions proposed. The settlement that eventually occurred, as a result of the Anglo-Irish War and the negotiations that followed it, was a settlement that was quite akin—in shape and form—to the settlement of the Canadian or New Zealand government. But, the spirit behind it was totally different. Hardly anybody in the Irish Dáil thought of themselves as Irish and British. They thought of themselves as enemies of the British state—at least all the nationalists did, and that was nearly everybody. So it was very different in terms of the ethos behind it. It became independent in 1922, but what it formally had was dominion status, because it had a Governor-General and was under the Crown. The Governor-General wasn’t got rid of until the end of 1936, and Ireland didn’t become a Republic until 1949. One of the reasons there was a civil war in Ireland, following the grant of Free State status in 1922 was that hard-line Republicans didn’t think that was enough. The argument of Michael Collins—who had negotiated the treaty—that the Free State gave us the freedom to achieve freedom (i.e. the Republic would come from the Free State) wasn’t accepted and there was a civil war. Eventually the Republic did come from the Free State. Ireland became an independent Republic, and left the Commonwealth. Basically, the British government knew there wasn’t a great deal of support for it in Ireland. Ireland wasn’t very friendly or helpful. It was neutral in World War II—and none of the other dominions were neutral. It did pass information to Great Britain under the counter, but it was a very small country that had clearly not acted like Australia or Canada. It didn’t see the UK as the mother country: it saw the UK as an opponent. Now, of course, relations are much better. But it did require full independence for that to happen."