The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (14 page)

Central as it is to the Irish Republican myth, the rising was a squalid affair led by a small, secretive segment of the nationalist movement. It was despicable in its betrayal of the 1914 Home Rule agreement (which was to go into effect after the war); it was treason (including against the nearly one hundred thousand Irish Catholics fighting the real war in France); and it was an incompetent and miserable failure (its German arms shipments were intercepted by the Royal Navy, the Irish people were resolutely opposed to
the gunmen, and the number of active Irish rebels was fewer than a thousand). The Easter Rising set the tone for Irish misery for the next half dozen years as Ireland was held hostage to the politics of the gun, and to reprisals.

The reprisals began with the imposition of courts-martial, which resulted in the execution of sixteen of the traitors, making martyrs of them and undermining the loyalist sympathies of most Irishmen. This political sin was compounded with the threat of imposing conscription on Ireland—not in itself an unjust thing (it was already the law in Britain) but a political line in the sand that it had been presumed the Parliament in Westminster would not cross. In any event, conscription was never enforced on Ireland; the war ended and so, alas, did the dominant position of John Redmond's moderate-nationalist Irish Party. Redmond died in 1918 knowing that the radicals of Sinn Fein were going to seize and ruin his life's work.

While Sinn Fein candidates won the clear majority of Irish seats in the December 1918 elections, they refused to sit at Westminster and instead, as a show of independence, created their own Dublin-based Parliament, the Dail Eireann, in January 1919. The Dail soon went into hiding, and the Irish Republican Army, led by the boisterous, charming thug Michael Collins, became its militant wing. The IRA fought the British Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the Constabulary's hastily assembled supporting units of discharged British servicemen, the soon to be notorious Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, judged by the IRA to be “super fighters and all but invincible.”
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It is important to remember that throughout the undeclared, small-scale Anglo-Irish War (1919–21) most of Ireland remained at peace, the violence was isolated, and given the hecatombs of the First World War and the cost of other post-war police actions around the globe the death toll was small. It was nevertheless disconcerting, to say the least, to have Dublin
patrolled by military units in armored cars, for ordinary citizens to be subjected to searches, for the IRA to punish or kill “collaborators,” for a regular pattern to be established of vicious murder and assassination, arson and looting, too often followed by irresponsible reprisals (frequently by the Black and Tans). If the purpose was to drive Britain from Southern Ireland, the IRA succeeded—not by defeating the British militarily but by making them heartily sick of the place, which seemed to make a ghastly mockery of everything Britain thought it stood for: compromise, tolerance, and fair play. Instead, however small their numbers, the IRA had made Ireland the gunman's republic—and did so to its own cost.

In 1921, a treaty was reached between the British government and the representatives of Sinn Fein led by Arthur Griffith, an Irish nationalist and monarchist (who, earlier, had rather admired the czar and the kaiser), and Michael Collins. The treaty provided for the partition of Northern Ireland and an Irish Free State within the British Commonwealth owing allegiance to the Crown. The Irish people applauded, but many of their nationalist representatives stubbornly did not—the Dail narrowly approving the treaty in 1922, and the Irish people increasing that treaty-supporting majority in elections that summer. The legacy of the gunman's republic, however, was more violence—an Irish civil war between the treaty's supporters and detractors. Among the dead was Michael Collins, assassinated, as he believed he would be, by nationalists more extreme than himself in 1922. The government of the Irish Free State sent to the firing squad far more Irish nationalist rebels than the British ever did (among those executed was the
English soldier, sailor, airman, novelist, and Irish nationalist Erskine Childers, whose son became the fourth president of the Irish Republic). By 1923, the authorities of the Irish Free State had imprisoned more than eleven thousand IRA supporters. Proscribed and hunted by the Irish Free State, the IRA lost the war in the South, leaving it with no better cause than terrorism in Northern Ireland and against the British government that honored Ulster's desire to remain within the United Kingdom.

Britain calmly accepted the new constitution Eamon de Valera wrote in the 1930s. The British did not much care how the Irish governed themselves as long as they remained in the Empire (Ireland did not become a full republic and leave the commonwealth until 1949); and in fact the Irish governed themselves much along British parliamentary lines, though Ireland's professed neutrality in the Second World War was an obvious source of bitterness made to look all the worse by the tremendous loyalty of the farmers, industrial workers, and soldiers of Ulster. Belfast shipbuilders launched more than 170 ships during World War II, and 120,000 American troops trained in Northern Ireland.

After the war, Northern Ireland was relatively prosperous—so much so that when the IRA tried to ignite a sectarian border war (1956–62) they found themselves utterly unsupported by Catholics in the province. Though discriminated against to an appalling degree by the Protestant majority, Catholics remained loyal to the Crown and were content
with a standard of living better than they could expect in the Irish Republic. But even Northern Ireland was not immune from the turbulent mood of the late 1960s that drove Republicans, wrapping themselves in the civil rights movement, and Unionists, reacting virulently against even modest reforms, to political extremes. British troops were dispatched to Northern Ireland to protect the Catholic minority in 1969—only to see their peacekeeping seized upon as an excuse for violence by the militant Provisional IRA, which worked diligently at a campaign of terrorism, including bloody attacks on the British mainland (one such attack being an attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). The IRA hoped to deepen the sectarian divide and drive the English out of Northern Ireland. But given that the Parliament at Westminster was actually a moderating influence on the Ulster Unionists this would have been a Pyrrhic victory. In any event, by the 1970s the Provisional IRA was simply another branch of international terrorism, with arms coming from Libya and support coming from other leftist terrorist groups. The regular IRA, itself now thoroughly Marxist, gave birth to splinter movements, none of which represented traditional Irish Catholics. Indeed, it could be argued that the British government did a better job of that with its Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 that gave the Irish Republic a consultative role in Northern Irish affairs.

But what really advanced the cause of peace in Northern Ireland were the dramatic 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. These convinced the Provisional IRA to more fully cooperate with Anglo-Irish agreements on decommissioning arms, because it seemed unlikely that even the most sentimentally misguided Irish-Americans could any longer in good conscience support the terrorist IRA. In Ireland, it often takes a war to prevent a war—a bellicose attitude that seven centuries of English involvement in the Emerald Isle never managed to erase. The English left Ireland language, laws, and parliamentary government, but did nothing to tame the stubborn pugnacity of Ireland's Celts.

If Southern Ireland is lost, and Northern Ireland is as attractive to most Englishmen as a mother-in-law, there is still Gibraltar, the Rock, seized by the British from Spain in 1704 and officially surrendered to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Gibraltar remains, despite Spanish protests, a British possession—and a durable one that has weathered Spanish attempts at reconquest, the Napoleonic wars, and two World Wars, giving the Royal Navy a base at “the Pillars of Hercules” guarding the Mediterranean. As with the Falklands and Northern Ireland, the people of Gibraltar want no other sovereign than the British Crown; so the British are obliged to hold on—and, the story has it, they will stay for as long as Gibraltar's famous monkeys, the Barbary Macaques, do.

The British took Malta from the French in 1800, during France's Revolutionary wars, and became the defender of the Catholic Church and Catholic Maltese (who asked to be annexed by the British Crown) against French anti-clericals. The British introduced a free press, secret ballots, and a modest dose of democracy. In World War II, Malta heroically endured massive bombing by Nazi Germany; and in 1942, the island was awarded the George Cross (it is now part of the Maltese flag), Britain's highest award for civilian courage—the only time it has been given to an entire country. Malta gained its independence in 1964, the last British forces withdrew in 1979, and though it annoyingly declared itself a “non-aligned nation” the following year, preferring not to choose sides in the Cold War, it remains in the Commonwealth.

Cyprus offers the least happy story, because, as sometimes happened in the Empire, the British were left in the middle between competing forces they could not control. The British inherited Cyprus as a protectorate from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and then annexed it in 1914 after the Ottomans joined the Axis Powers in World War I. More than three-quarters of Cyprus's people were and are Greek (the minority being Turks), and during the First
World War Britain offered Cyprus to Greece if the Greeks would take a more active role on the side of the Allies, but the Greeks refused. After that Britain's interest in Cyprus was to defend the minority Turks, block political movements of union with Greece, and preserve its military bases on the island (which were particularly important after the British left Egypt in 1956). But it is never a good idea to place oneself between a Greek and a Turk, and after the usual nationalist-terrorist campaign (the nationalist party was fronted by a Greek Orthodox archbishop, Makarios III, bearing a striking, bearded resemblance to Peter Sellers), the British finally came up with a compromise solution that guaranteed the island would neither be partitioned between Greek and Turk nor absorbed by Greece; and both peoples were guaranteed power in the government. The British granted Cyprus independence in 1960, all the wonderful guarantees the British had written into the Cypriot constitution were repealed by the Greek majority, and the country eventually ended up partitioned—with Turkey invading north Cyprus in 1974 and annexing that part of the island. Still, Britain retains its bases in Cyprus, which is the important thing, so that at least a small reservoir of good sense is always available on the island.

As for the Ionian islands, we will save them for later, when we meet an eccentric British general who once held them as his own little dominion.