2017 Ireland Modern

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

     This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history.  Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland.  I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient.  When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly.  Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
     How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history?  That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come.  The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs.  The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
     I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne.  Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
     The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
     The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne.  I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative.  Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
     Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
     Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans.  Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches.  St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome.  Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
     The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016.  I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
   The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015.  The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922.  The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example.  A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin.  James Connolly was one of the executed leaders.  Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage.  Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it?  Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8

  I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status.  One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland.  Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island.  The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
     I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
     Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries.  I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site.  Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s.  A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead.  The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they?  Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by.  Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
      In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom.  There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce.  I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.   
     Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
     Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration.  I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there.  Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo

     The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics.  The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence.  "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region.  Angry birds indeed.
     Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution.  I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me.  I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
     The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union.  "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds.  "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe."  Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ

     I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term.  People know much about the past, but they live in the present.  It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are.  "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my  September, 2017 Ireland trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ