Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  IRELAND SINCE 1939

  Henry Patterson is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster. His previous books include The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA.

  Ireland Since 1939

  The Persistence of Conflict

  HENRY PATTERSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Ireland 2006

  Published by Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Henry Patterson, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192688-9

  For Alex and Annie

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Legacy of Partition

  2 War and the Welfare State

  3 ‘Minding Our Own Business’: Eire during the Emergency

  4 Stagnation: Ireland 1945–1959

  5 Modernization and Resistance: Northern Ireland 1945–1963

  6 Expansion: Ireland 1959–1973

  7 Terence O'Neill and the Crisis of the Unionist State

  8 Northern Ireland from Insurrection to the Anglo-Irish Agreement

  9 From Crisis to Boom: The Republic 1973–2005

  10 Between War and Peace: Northern Ireland 1985–2005

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without the support, intellectual and otherwise, provided by fellow researchers, colleagues and friends. The project itself was suggested by my friend Paul Bew, who has continued to be a major source of ideas and stimulation, as has my colleague Arthur Aughey. Particular parts of the text have benefited from the work and helpful suggestions of Rogelio Alonso, George Boyce, Paul Dixon, David Fitzpatrick, Tom Garvin, Paddy Gillan, Gordon Gillespie, Arthur Green, Graham Gudgin, Ellen Hazelkorn, Greta Jones, Dennis Kennedy, Steven King, Martin Knox, Anthony McIntyre, Deirdre McMahon, Peter Mair, Patrick Maume, Paul Teague and Graham Walker. C.D.C. Armstrong provided research assistance and information based on his own independent scholarship. Professor Máiréad Nic Craith, Director of the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster, provided generous support for visits to archives and teaching relief. I am grateful for the assistance of the staff in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Public Record Office at Kew, the National Archives, Dublin, the Library at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, the Linenhall Library, Belfast, the National Library of Ireland and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, Schomberg House, Belfast, and to the Party Officers of the Ulster Unionist Council for granting me access to the UUC papers in the PRONI. Eoghan Harris gave encouragement during a difficult period, and Brendan Barrington was an exemplary editor at Penguin Ireland who combined enthusiasm for the book with detailed and productive criticism. Linda Moore was a major source of support throughout.

  Introduction

  Eric Hobsbawm observed that ‘Nobody can write a history of the twentieth century like that of any other era, if only because nobody can write about his or her lifetime as one can (and must) write about a period known only from the outside.’1 My own lifetime has coincided with most of the period covered in this book, and I can date my own first awareness of Irish public affairs to a summer day in 1958. My father had parked our car off the main road from Newry to Dundalk, just south of the border. As my mother got out the flask and sandwiches, she wondered aloud about whether we should have stopped so near the border in the middle of an ongoing IRA campaign. We were on our way to the annual conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in Killarney, where the family would combine our summer holiday with my father's attendance as a delegate. We lived in the largely Protestant town of Bangor in north Down, which was, like much of Northern Ireland, largely unaffected by the IRA campaign. This was a period when the dominant community in Northern Ireland was at least as likely to be exercised by class issues of unemployment, redundancies and rent rises as by the threat from the Republic or the Catholic Church. I now know that intra-Protestant divisions were much more liable to show themselves at times when Protestant–Catholic relations were more relaxed, and there was no strong perceived threat to the ‘Constitution’.

  Those of us who came of age before 1968 have the inestimable advantage of knowing that pre-‘Troubles’ Ireland was another country, with sensibilities and projects that now appear strange and quixotic. Unionist attitudes to the Republic had a complexity that events after 1968 would brutally simplify. Of course many accepted the Stormont regime's focus on official anti-partitionism and confessionalism when they looked across the border. Others, including my father's elder brother, an Orangeman and bin-lorry driver, were only too happy to set off to tour the lakes of Killarney or the Ring of Kerry during the annual fortnight's holiday for the 12th of July. While my uncle's image of the Republic may have been over-determined by the propaganda of the Irish tourist board, my father's took account of more material realities.

  The Irish trade union movement was a thirty-two-county one that included many delegates from British-based unions in Northern Ireland. Some of them would have been, like my father, supporters of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, which looked to the arrival of a Labour government in London to shake up the Stormont regime. They were low-key unionists with a simple ‘live and let live’ attitude to community relations. They were better placed than many northern Protestants to appreciate the epochal economic changes that were being introduced in the Republic at the end of the 1950s. As an official in the hosiery workers' union, my father was well aware that the factories established by US and British firms in the late forties and early 1950s had come to Northern Ireland, in part at least, because of the restrictions on foreign investment that were in place in the Republic. From the early 1960s this northern advantage was removed. Decades of partition and official propaganda that dwelt on the ‘inward-looking’ and backward South meant that the revolutionary implications of Seán Lemass's dismantling of the protectionist regime he had done so much to create in the 1930s were invisible to many in Northern Ireland.

  This included many Catholics. As an undergraduate at Queen's University in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, I found that a number of my Catholic peers who took an interest in poli
tics saw the republican movement as a collection of old men in a time-warp and mainstream nationalists as ineffectual ‘Green Tories’. Anti-partitionism was very definitely as passé as the music of Irish showbands. The Irish Republic, traditionally disparaged by unionists, was also now viewed with contempt by many younger, educated northern Catholics for its political class's kowtowing to the Catholic Church and its inferior social services. Lemass was more likely to be seen as a superannuated survivor of the 1916 Rising than as the pragmatic and modernizing twenty-six-county nationalist that he most emphatically was. The dominant imaginings of what the future held were of political realignments and a shift to the left. It is all too easy to dismiss these perspectives as a local version of the frothy excesses of 1968 student radicalism. Naive in the extreme they very soon turned out to be; yet at their core was the recognition that the prosecution of conflicting nationalist agendas was a sure recipe for regression. This was implicit in the political projects of the two modernizing premiers of the period, Terence O'Neill and Lemass, who we were all too ready to dismiss at the time. While O'Neill's project failed, Lemass's succeeded, with profound long-term implications for both Irish states.

  The story of Lemass and the Republic's dominant party, Fianna Fáil, is central to this study; the book returns to, while developing and amending, the analysis that Paul Bew and I put forward over two decades ago in Seán Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland. We wrote with access to government archives available only up to the late 1940s; here I have been able to refer to the archives up to and beyond Lemass's retirement. I have also benefited from the major work that has since been done on Lemass and his party by other scholars, particularly Joe Lee, Brian Girvin, Richard Dunphy and John Horgan. The book starts with the high point of de Valera's Ireland: the demonstration of Irish sovereignty through the neutrality policy during the Second World War. By deepening the North–South divide and isolating the Free State from the international post-war economic expansion, neutrality created formidable institutional and ideological obstacles to change. However, a profound economic and demographic crisis in the mid fifties propelled the modernizers into the driving seat. That the Irish state had experienced and resolved its crisis at least a decade before the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ was a fact of profound significance for the subsequent history of the island. For it meant that, although as late as the early seventies the British Ambassador to the Republic could refer to the ‘Isle of Wight syndrome’2 – the tendency of the British political class to forget that the Republic was an independent state – the Republic's post-1959 economic transformation and its associated membership of the EEC made it increasingly attractive as a partner, junior or otherwise, in Britain's search for a solution in Northern Ireland.

  Much of what has been termed ‘revisionism’ in the writing of Irish history has consisted of an attempt to purge it of political partisanship in the service of a nationalist or unionist project. Anyone who has lived on the island and who attempts to write a history of Ireland for all or part of the past century faces a related problem: that their direct experience of public and private life will have been predominantly a southern or northern one, with the attendant dangers of mental partitionism. Of course there is a degree of scholarly interchange and dialogue, but it is still true that historians of twentieth-century Ireland, or at least those based on the island, have tended to focus on their ‘own’ state. I have noticed that my students in Belfast, whether republican, nationalist, unionist or loyalist, are generally united in relative intellectual indifference to what goes on in the Republic. Northern tunnel vision was matched for decades by a view from the Republic of Northern Ireland as a place sunk in repetitive and destructive passions. But, just as it is impossible to comprehend the self-confidence of the Ulster Unionist ruling elite in the 1950s without reference to the economic crisis of the Republic, so it is impossible to comprehend the end of the ‘Troubles’ without a grasp of the Republic's shift from a thirty-two-county anti-partitionist nationalism to a twenty-six-county state patriotism.

  This book was written and then revised over a period that coincided with the signing and enactment of the Belfast Agreement, which seemed to herald an historic political accommodation between unionism and nationalism and between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Eight years after the Agreement, with the dominant political parties in Northern Ireland led by the Reverend Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, and much evidence of an increasingly segregated society, it is clear that a great deal of the immediate post-Agreement optimism was a product of wishful thinking. The Agreement did see some remarkable developments, particularly the republican movement's endorsement, however hedged around by ambiguity, of what their fundamentalist critics denounced as a ‘partitionist settlement’. This followed the IRA's ceasefire declarations of 1994 and 1997, which have ensured that dozens of people are alive today who would not have been if the ‘armed struggle’ had continued. Deaths are still meted out by paramilitary groups, including the IRA, but they have been mercifully few, and, as a former adviser to successive Fianna Fail leaders on Northern Ireland has put it, ‘For the first time since 1922, Irish democracy is no longer seriously challenged by any armed group.’3

  The government of the Irish Republic, whose right to be involved in the affairs of Northern Ireland had been officially rejected by successive British governments up to the 1980s, has since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 been accorded an institutionalized role in the governance of the province. It played a central role in the 1990s in the development of the peace process and in the negotiations that, led to the Belfast Agreement. These developments occurred at a time when the growth rates in the economy of the Irish Republic have destroyed for ever the perception of it as a poor nation on the fringe of Europe. In 1997 real per capita GDP was 3.6 times what it had been in 1960,4 and much of this was down to the spectacular growth rates of the 1990s. There was much talk of a new self-confident and more pluralist and inclusive Irish identity. Decades of membership of the European Union reduced the economic dependence on the UK and provided a broader framework in which to renegotiate both Anglo-Irish and North–South relations.

  As early as 1995 Bertie Ahern, the new leader of Fianna Fáil, declared that ‘Irish nationalism has changed. Irredentism is dead. I know of no one who believes it is feasible or desirable to attempt to incorporate Northern Ireland into the Republic against the will of a majority there, either by force or coercion.’5 Such sentiments reflected one of the major processes that has occurred since the 1960s: the deepening of the perception in the Republic of the North as a place apart, one riven by primordial sectarian animosities and with an economy sustained only by a massive subvention from the British Exchequer. If the Republic had once been too poor to afford unity, now the prospect of unity with Northern Ireland could be seen as a sort of Banquo's ghost threatening to disrupt the consumerist celebration of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. This is one reason why there is a much larger degree of realism in the official discourse of the Republic about the limits of what is possible in Northern Ireland and in North–South relations.

  An element of unionist hostility to post-ceasefire republicanism lay in the feeling that the republican movement had been successful in propagating an image of pre-‘Troubles’ Northern Ireland as an ‘apartheid state’. This book, based in part on the archives of the state itself and also on those of its ruling party, depicts a regime that, contrary to some unionist apologetics, did practise discrimination. The extent and the intensity of that discrimination, and the degree of inequality for which the state at both local and central level was responsible, have sometimes been exaggerated. However, what cannot be denied was the incapacity of the Stormont regime to provide an opportunity for Catholics to feel themselves as a respected and valued part of the community. Too many unionists, even of the liberal variety, tended to dwell on the undoubted material advantages of being part of the UK, as if these in themselves excused a state that remained encrusted with ethnic particularism. Yet neither the
inequalities nor the discrimination that existed in Northern Ireland provided any justification for the IRA's disastrous and futile resort to the ‘armed struggle’.

  Out of the crisis provoked by the attempt to reform Northern Ireland in the 1960s came the quarter century of what is euphemistically termed the ‘Troubles’. But, as two political scientists have pointed out,6 given the number of casualties compared to Northern Ireland's population, a true linguistic rendering of that horrendous experience would be to term it a war. A comprehensive accounting of that period is only beginning to be written. But already a self-serving ‘conflict-resolution’ paradigm has been imposed on Northern Ireland's recent history. From this perspective the violence flowed ineluctably from the structural inequalities, discrimination and oppression of the Northern Ireland state in its heyday. This provides a convenient denial of any significant responsibility on the part of the paramilitary organizations that practised violence. It also has the distorting effect of treating the history of Ireland, North and South, before 1969 as little more than an antechamber to the ‘Troubles’. This book tries to view the earlier decades in their own terms. The Republic in the 1960s under Seán Lemass and Northern Ireland with Terence O'Neill as Prime Minister bore a closer resemblance to the Free State under William Cosgrave and the North of Sir James Craig than they do to Ireland, North and South, in the early years of the new millennium.

  Since the 1970s the economy of Northern Ireland has become heavily dependent on the public sector. In the 1960s the North had a thriving manufacturing sector, employing over 30 per cent of the workforce and returning the highest rates of productivity growth amongst the UK regions. Since then deindustrialization has devastated the manufacturing sector, while the onset of the ‘Troubles’ insured that the British state adopted more interventionist policies to prevent massively high levels of unemployment with their potential to exacerbate levels of violence. The British Treasury's subvention to Northern Ireland, which was tiny in the 1970s, had become huge by the 1990s, standing at about £3.7 billion.7 The result was what the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, described in 2005 as an economy that ‘was not sustainable in the long term’.8 Referring to the fast rates of growth in the Republic, Hain added that ‘in future decades it is going to be increasingly difficult to look at the economy of north and south except as a sort of island of Ireland economy.’