War and an Irish Town

"War and an Irish Town is a powerful memoir by an angry youth possessed of tremendous intellectual and political confidence, whether wisely or not we’ll leave to one side. He occupied a very individual position in the face of events. I find his analysis overly cramped and dogged when it comes to deeper social questions, but intense and immediate in documenting lived experience. Absolutely, and, in that sense, it really does belong to its time. I find McCann doctrinaire in his social philosophy, but I don’t find him doctrinaire about the situation in Northern Ireland. Here he tries to understand — whilst not endorsing — ‘Provisional’ republicanism [the militant wing, which endorses violence]. He is also disposed to criticise the rival Official Irish Republican Army and party. He thus takes issue with a range of nationalist opinion, but I think what is valuable about the book is its on-the-ground perspective. There’s a compelling passage, at one point, where he is talking about experts being wheeled in to discuss the Northern Ireland problem, and pronouncing on the importance and necessity of separating die-hard militants from the moderates in the ghettos. Yet, as McCann points out, what the self-appointed cognoscenti haven’t realised, is that in practice that means separating fathers from sons, brothers from sisters, mothers from fathers… I would certainly say that a very strong and unreconstructed impulse in the book is to ascribe responsibility for the current conflict — as it then was — to one primary agent, and that’s British government forces. I myself see that as overstrained and implausible. Nonetheless, it does capture the sense of Catholic disenfranchisement in the aftermath of 1968. There’s an appeal to the British government against the local Protestant administration, and there’s a sense that that appeal is not going to meet with an adequate response. “Just 10 years previously the Catholic population had been publicly professing a settled reluctance to revisit the issue of partition.” So there is an overwhelming sense of disempowerment, if you like, part of which of course was stoked ideologically by people like McCann. But he remains incisive about popular perceptions. Of course, perception may operate at a remove from truth. His subject matter is less naked reality than the impact of tutored perspectives. The value of the book lies in its capturing sharply a particular viewpoint that ended up being highly consequential. What it succeeds in explaining is why there was such a huge swelling in the ranks of the Provisional republican position. That’s where I think the interest of the book lies, in explaining the drift towards militancy among large sections of the Catholic population, who just 10 years previously had been endorsing an entirely different agenda and publicly professing a settled reluctance to revisit the issue of partition, not to mention the almost absolute absence of support for any form of insurgency. It’s difficult to say that Britain was exactly neglecting it. I suppose, historically, British policy makers felt themselves to be between a rock and a hard place. They had originally supported a particular outcome, namely equitable reunification, but were seen as being identified with the obstacles to that outcome, and by extension with the provincial injustices that had developed in the six counties. Therefore, by the late 60s, Westminster was extremely reluctant to get involved at all. There was still an ongoing historical memory of the catastrophically counterproductive nature of British involvement in the teens and the 20s. World War I was a complicated story because lots of Irish Catholics fought and died in it. Thus a great many Irishmen fought in defence of the British Empire, or, perhaps more accurately, of a reformed Empire; that was the reality on the ground. In the midst of that, there occurred a counter-imperial insurgency, which was largely ridiculed and certainly took place without any ascertainable form of popular endorsement. Nonetheless, despite having been an unpopular, vanguardist insurgency, it belatedly and curiously, after the fact, won for itself popular acclamation. This complicates utterly the Irish relationship to the First World War because the anti-imperial position was, thereafter, in the ascendant. So that’s a very particular and complex moment, which polarised north and south; there’s no doubt about that. Southern Ireland can’t fully own the depth of its investment in the First World War, which it actually, originally did have. Whereas the north— that is to say the northern majority Protestant population — can and does. “Southern Ireland can’t fully own the depth of its investment in the First World War.” The Second World War, I’m not sure was so profoundly formative, though there is no doubt that it entrenched divisions that already existed. Southern Ireland was neutral and Northern Ireland was actively involved, but I don’t think that this experience drastically polarised opinion between north and south; the die was already cast. The post-war period was, in many ways, more consequential than the war itself because it transformed educational and social provision in Northern Ireland, and, in the context of declining industries, this proved deeply significant. It meant that the Catholic working classes achieved new levels of education. The generation of 1968 were beneficiaries of that change. Rising expectations among Catholics heightened awareness about established inequities relating to housing, jobs, the local franchise, and so forth. On the other side, there was a reviving Protestant posture of entitlement to an ascendant position, which, remarkably, was being stoked under conditions of declining economic security on the margins of a dissolving empire. I think that the vigilante situation was indissociable from the lack of a cross-community, effective policing service. From a Catholic perspective there were good reasons to be distrustful in 1968 and 1969, there’s no doubt about that. I think the vigilante role was an outgrowth of the defence role. The defence role emerged especially after 1969, which saw the burning of Catholics out of their homes in ghetto areas. So the population swung behind defence organisations, and the most prominent defence organisations were the assorted versions of the IRA — principally the Official and Provisional IRAs. The story of McCann’s book really is how this popular street-level defence role was the vehicle by means of which popular consent swung behind anti-partitionist politics. “I don’t myself regard this inevitabilism as productive of genuine insight.” He presents this as inevitable. I don’t really see it as having been inevitable. I think you could regroup for defence and hold your ground and not wish to raise the whole underlying constitutional issue again, i.e. the question of whether the state should be partitioned or not. McCann sees this outcome as having been predetermined, or at least inescapable under the circumstances. I don’t myself regard this inevitabilism as productive of genuine insight. Nonetheless, I do think the sense of vulnerability that McCann invokes, which drew people into local defence committees and therefore allied them to a particular political perspective, is a compelling part of his story. No, that’s certainly true. There’s a section in the memoir where McCann comments that he is aware that political turmoil has made the discussion of Irish history itself at once controversial and polemical. He talks about the deployment of history in Ireland for political purposes, parenthetically arguing that ‘of course this would not be understood by Conor Cruise O’Brien’ — namely, that history is a kind of resource, a fallback option, even a form of consolation for those who feel themselves to have lost politically. This, McCann urges, is what needs to be understood: that history had become both a weapon and a means of consolation. That, we can all see, is very unlikely to make for good history, but nonetheless we also need to grasp why people repair to it in that way. Their recourse perhaps deserves to be better understood instead of being made an object of condescending contempt."