The Claims of History: Ireland

Thursday, September 13, 2018

     "The claims of history" have become less important to Ireland than in the recent or distant past, Irish speaker Fergal Keane said near the end of The Story of Ireland, a 300-minute film series co-produced in 2011 by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Ulster section and Raidio Teilifis Eireann (RTE), the Irish national radio and television service.
     History has become less important?  Not at all, I thought when I heard this.  I therefore write what follows.
     History shaped us and influences our futures.  Those who downplay history typically emerged powerful from history.  They prefer forgetting the origins of their current power to seeing the descendants of the people from whom their ancestors took that power get some or all of that power.  Ask an Indigenous person in Canada, Palestine, or another settler-colonial state.  Such people would right historical wrongs, which requires knowing history.

Different histories
 
     Different people tell different versions of history, I remembered as I watched this film series I borrowed in digital video disc (DVD) form from my local public library.  For example, the film says that most Irish were uninterested in, or against, the Easter 1916 Rising, an attempt to end British rule of Ireland.  The film supports the idea that the Irish preferred British rule to the independent Irish republic sought via the Rising.  I would expect the British-based BBC to say this, and RTE to agree, for it began during the Irish Free State era a few years after the Rising; RTE seems to have remained anti-republican, like as BBC was, and remains.  Morgan Llywelyn's pro-republican five-novel Irish historical series which I recently read, 1916, 1921, 1949, 1972, and 1999, says that most Irish opposed the Easter 1916 Rising.  She and film narrator Keane agree that after the British executed Uprising leaders, most Irish came to oppose British rule.

"The Troubles."
  
     Keane and Llywelyn tell opposing versions of history in at least two areas, however:  the source of "The Troubles" that plagued Northern Ireland for decades, until late-1990s peace efforts; and the portrayal of Charles Haughey, a recent Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister).
     Keane says that that militants loyal to Britain attacked republicans in the north after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacked northern civilians.  Llywelyn writes that the  IRA defended Northern Catholics against attack by loyalist militants, after loyalist attack began.
     As I watched this part of the film series, I thought of the words from fighting children telling their adult arbitrator, "He started it." "No, he started it."  Keane's narration implies such an arbitrator exists in the form of Northern Irish law, but Llywelyn's book says that the arbitrator was unfair because it was partial to the loyalist side.
     Cork-born Keane does say that his great grandfather was in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the colonial era's pro-British police and that his grandfather was a republican, Keane speaks Irish in a Cork pub during the series, and he says that pro-British Northerners range from liberals who accept Catholics to reactionaries who fear that Popery drives every peace march, although the whole pro-British spectrum opposes republicanism; but he describes RIC and loyalist savagery less than Llywelyn's books do.  Perhaps her books under-represent republican savagery.  Llywelyn joins republicanism and Catholicism, whereas Keane bases "The Troubles" only on religion.

Charles Haughey

     Llywelyn portrays Prime Minister Charles Haughey more positively than Keane does.  Haughey raised Irish living standards, Llywelyn and Keane agree.  They also say that Haughey took bribes from business people.  Both note the financial corruption legal troubles that plagued Haughey during and after his leadership.  Only Llywelyn mentions Haughey's efforts, when he was a government minister, to send arms to Northern Ireland to help the IRA defend Catholics, and attack the paramilitary and government forces that attacked Catholics.  These efforts brought Haughey legal trouble before financial corruption did.  Haughey is more detailed and looks better in the novels than in the film series.
     To Llywelyn, Haughey retained some republican ideals, but to Keane, Haughey merely wanted to enrich himself, unlike the "austere" leaders who preceded him, such as Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass.  They were veterans of the armed struggle to free Ireland from British rule, and of the consequent armed struggle of the Irish Free State, which replaced British rule in most of Ireland, against the republicans who continued fighting to replace British rule in all of Ireland.

He who controls the past, controls the present.  He who controls the present, controls the future.  -George Orwell

     The Irish Free State became the Irish Republic in 1949 after Lemass took it out of the British Commonwealth, which had replaced the British Empire after World War Two ended in 1945.  Neither the Free State nor the Republic was militarily strong enough to protect Northern Irish republicans and Catholics from loyalist and Protestant and government oppression, nor was either version of Southern Ireland capable of making Northern Ireland part of itself.  Loyalists openly armed themselves for decades, while British, and later Northern Irish loyalist and even Republican Irish authorities worked against Northern republicans and Catholics arming themselves.  By 2000, the Republic repealed its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland.  By 2005 the IRA disarmed, an implicit admission that it could no longer defend Northern Irish republicans and Catholics against paramilitary and state violence, let alone militarily defeat those forces and therefore make the island one Ireland.  Of all this, Keane mentions only the IRA disarming.  Llywelyn mentions all of it, and more.
     For Keane rejects "the claims of history," a winner ignoring the historical blood that made his victory.
     English author George Orwell wrote a cautionary novel about the tyranny that could result from encouraging people to see history as irrelevant to the present:  1984.