‘We’re not the country we were in 1921 ...thankfully’

Malachi O’doherty on NI’S centenary

ARLENE Foster tweets that we must “remember and celebrate the last 100 years”. I have some difficulty with that, since I was only around for 69 of them. Even the years I lived through in Northern Ireland have often turned out to be meaningful in ways I didn’t notice at the time. I am, therefore, a committed revisionist. I love the historical details that surprise, because they don’t quite fit the broad narrative.

Like Brian Faulkner having been educated in Dublin. Like Jack Lynch wanting to introduce internment, but taking advice that it would breach European law. Like former prime minister Sir Alec Douglas Home (pronounced Hume) urging the government to make a united Ireland the goal of policy. He was actually prime minister at the time the IRA ended its Fifties’ campaign for lack of interest.

The challenge this year is to remember the partition of Ireland and to celebrate what was good about Northern Ireland. I’m not going to join with the nationalists, who say that partition was an evil that they could never endorse. It was, in fact, the product of a treaty which the Irish signed.

When its terms were changed in 1998, the Irish government and the nationalist parties were also in agreement. This acknowledged the right of Northern Ireland to continue to exist until a majority chose otherwise and no such majority has yet declared itself.

The big jibe against the DUP — entirely warranted, in my view — is they should own the Brexit they demanded. Well, in the same way, nationalists should own the Anglo-irish treaty.

Republicans trace their legitimacy back to the general election of 1918, which produced the Irish parliament, which declared independence. That same Dail voted on the treaty and approved it, despite the fact that it required the Irish to have the British monarch as a head of state and MPS to swear fidelity.

Of course, they were bullied into this by the threat of war, but no treaty is ever signed to end a war between two parties which are equally matched in power. That the British were the stronger power and could dictate terms was as simple a truth as that the EU is stronger than the UK and could dictate terms in the Brexit deal. That may lead to some British being disgruntled, but it doesn’t invalidate the deal. The Irish did pretty well wriggling out of the dominion status they had signed up to in 1921 and created a republic and pulled out of the Commonwealth.

The north, which had exercised the right under the treaty to exclude itself from the Free State, having resisted Home Rule, became the only part of Ireland to accept it.

It evolved, along with Great Britain, into a welfare state.

We know the consequences of creating two virtually theocratic states back then; the massive abuse of power by the Catholic Church in the south and the sectarianism in the north.

The Catholic state and the Orange state each amplified their distinctions from each other. Unity, if it had been possible, might have been an outcome with more creative potential, perhaps a state in which the fanatical religious movements would have moderated each other. That didn’t happen. Still, one of those confessional states, the Irish Republic, has no difficulty celebrating its origins in the Easter Rising while half the political culture in the north wants nothing to do with marking the centenary.

Both s t ates have much to be ashamed of. All states have. But both states also outgrew much of their shameful past and have a right to be proud of that.

There is a maxim that winners write history, but in Ireland it is not true. Here losers write history. Here we are plagued with a myth that Ireland has a destiny; that it is somehow written in the stars that it must one day be a single jurisdiction. There is nothing inevitable about that. There is no way in which that outcome is more right, or justified, than any other.

The democratic way is for the people to decide for themselves what they want. Accordingly, when the border poll comes, as it no doubt will, I will decide on the conditions of the time.

I feel myself under no onus to vote one way or the other according to my birth certificate, or baptismal lines, or clan ancestry. I owe no debt to the past.

Incidentally, the last border poll was Ted Heath’s idea and he promoted it as a means of reassuring the unionists and undermining Taoiseach Jack Lynch’s claim that all Catholics in “the Six Counties” wanted a united Ireland. That’s another little anomaly in the historical record.

There are people who read in the Bible a prophesy that Britain would not ultimately be part of the EEC (now the EU). Evangelicals used to produce a magazine called The Plain Truth, which interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue with a head of gold and feet of clay as a vision of successive empires, ending in the 10 toes of the Common Market. The problem with that interpretation today is that the EU has 27 toes.

Pearse’s vision of Ireland as a unified, Gaelic, self-sufficient and Catholic republic is as meaningless as that evangelical vision of a 10-state Europe.

And violently resisting partition after it was agreed was as unwarranted as a campaign would be now against Brexit. We Remainers are in the position as those opposed to the Anglo-irish treaty in 1922. I don’t think there would be much indulgence of us taking up arms against it. Or of the Labour party refusing to acknowledge it.

Of course, we can campaign politically for anything we like. But it’s more a unionist thing to arm yourself against the Union of which you want to retain your membership.

Yet, in the 20th century, not only did fanatical chauvinists arm themselves against partition, but successive Irish governments bemoaned the injustice of it and even enshrined their rejection of it in the Irish constitution. Which is not to say that there won’t be a united Ireland, or that I won’t vote for it when the option is presented to me.

Many have argued that unionists might find a united Ireland more acceptable after it had secularised a bit, but it is equally plausible that the Irish-identifying people living in Northern Ireland would be content with partition when they were no longer discriminated against, or denied access to power.

We are not the country, or the people, we were 100 years ago. That is worth remembering — and celebrating.