Irish nationalists are forgetting their history
Ireland’s intransigence on the Protocol today mimics the behaviour of Unionist politicians a century ago
Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government, King’s College, London. His books include ‘Britain and Europe in a Troubled World’
‘War and war within three days”. So Lloyd George threatened Irish leaders on December 5 1921 if they would not accept a partitioned, independent Ireland as a dominion within the British Empire. The Irish did not want to be a dominion and stay within the British orbit. They had had enough of Britain. But in the early hours of December 6, one hundred years ago today, they acquiesced and the Anglo-irish Treaty was signed, leading to the creation of the Irish Free State a year later. Given the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol, the lessons are still relevant.
The Anglo-irish Treaty was meant to end centuries of enmity, but misunderstandings were inherent from the start. Dominion status was said to be voluntary, yet the Irish were coerced into accepting it.
Many in Britain also wanted Ireland outside the British orbit. They had had enough of Ireland, north and south. In 1920 the Government of Ireland Act had enacted partition but had made Irish unity easy to achieve by giving Northern Ireland a parliament she did not want and a Council of Ireland which could facilitate reunification. In 1921 Lloyd George sought to coerce Northern Ireland into joining the new Irish Free State, but was frustrated by Conservative opposition. He then proposed a boundary commission which, he hinted, might make Northern Ireland unviable. The other dominions except for New Zealand – Canada, Australia, South Africa – had all begun with partition and then been unified.
Irish nationalists resented partition. It wasn’t until the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement that they acknowledged reunification depended on the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland. But the grievance which led to civil war in the Free State after the Anglo-irish Treaty was signed was not partition, but the oath to the King which legislators were required to take. For Ireland, unlike the other dominions, was not a colony of settlement, indeed not a colony at all, but a mother country which had herself peopled foreign diasporas.
Irish nationalists had sought a republic in 1921. But Eamon de Valera, who opposed the Treaty, had suggested a compromise. He would accept the King as externally associated with Ireland and, as such, head of the association. This was the formula by which, in 1949, republican status for India and other ex-colonies, of which Barbados is the latest, was made compatible with Commonwealth membership, with the Queen as head of the association. De Valera, regarded by many in Britain as a nationalist fanatic, was in a sense the founder of the modern Commonwealth. He would not have taken Ireland out of it as a Fine Gael government did in 1949.
However, the Anglo-irish Treaty could not last. Few in Ireland regarded it as a final settlement but rather, in the words of Michael Collins, as giving the freedom to achieve freedom. In Britain, suspicion of Ireland grew as De Valera proved Collins right by progressively whittling away provisions of the Treaty and declaring Ireland neutral in the war against Hitler.
Irish membership of the EU, which she joined with Britain in 1973, gave her the chance to carve a future independently of her overbearing neighbour. But distrust of Britain remains deep in the Irish subconscious, as brilliantly described in Conor Cruise O’brien’s book Ancestral Voices, and it surfaces at sensitive times such as Brexit. Some in Ireland now feel schadenfreude at Britain’s post-brexit discomfiture and the loosening of ties between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. They regard this as just punishment for Brexit. They are wrong to do so.
For, just as intransigent Unionism could not reconcile Ireland to the British connection, so also intransigent nationalism cannot resolve the problems of Northern Ireland and the Protocol. Ireland, happy to whittle away the Anglo-irish Treaty as unsuitable to her needs, now presses the EU to maintain the Protocol by appealing to eternal and immutable principles of the EU, principles which the EU has been happy to discard left, right and centre during the euro and Covid crises.
The post-brexit problem of the relationship between Britain and Ireland cannot be resolved by the EU, but only by a realisation in both countries of the essential truth of Gladstone’s perception that amity depends upon recognising the distinctive identities within these islands but also their essential unity.