Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (115 page)

The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish land.

No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep: his colour can’t be seen

For there’s a cruel law agin’ the Wearing of the Green.
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And no number rivalled the success of a song that exuded pure contentment:

When Irish eyes are smiling sure’tis like a morn in spring;

With a lilt of Irish laughter you can hear the angels sing.

When Irish hearts are happy all the world is bright and gay,

And when Irish eyes are smiling sure they’d steal your heart away.
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Nor were the smiles confined to the native Irish. Parts of Ireland in that era were the preserve of the British elite, the playground of the highest servants of the Crown; some of them would look back on those halcyon pre-war days as the happiest in their lives. One of the most evocative of memoirs was written by a future British prime minister:

My father had gone to Ireland as secretary to his father [who had been] appointed Lord-Lieutenant by Mr Disraeli… We lived in a house called ‘The Little Lodge’, about a stone’s throw from the Viceregal [residence]. Here I spent nearly three years of childhood… I remember my grandfather, the Viceroy, unveiling the Lord Gough statue in 1878. A great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horseback… the old Duke, the formidable grandpapa, talking loudly to the crowd. I recall even a phrase he used: ‘and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy line.’ I quite understood… that a ‘volley’ meant what the black-coated soldiers used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for my morning walks…

In one of these years we paid a visit to Emo Park, the seat of Lord Portarlington, who was explained to me as a sort of uncle… The central point in my memory is a tall white stone tower… [which] had been blown up by Oliver Cromwell. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man.

My nurse, Mrs Everest, was nervous about the Fenians. I gathered these were wicked people… On one occasion when I was out riding on my donkey, we thought we saw a long dark procession of Fenians approaching. I am sure now it [was] the Rifle Brigade… But we were all very much alarmed, particularly the donkey, who expressed his anxiety by kicking. I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics!

It was at ‘The Little Lodge’ I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as ‘the Governess’ was announced… Mrs Everest produced a book called
Reading without Tears.
It certainly did not justify its title in my case… [When] the Governess was due to arrive, I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I hid in the extensive shrubberies… which surrounded ‘The Little Lodge’…

My mother took no part in these impositions… My picture of her in Ireland is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses… [She] always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power… She shone for me like the Evening Star.
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Anyone who spends a few carefree hours in Phoenix Park today will still find many of the attractions that so delighted the young Winston Churchill over a hundred years ago. The ancient herd of fallow deer still grazes on the park’s verdant grassland; the wide open spaces where Lord and Lady Randolph spurred their chargers still welcome riders. The Furry Glen, the People’s Garden and the Dublin Zoo are in place, as are the ruins of the Magazine Fort (1611) and the Testimonial Monument (1864) to the celebrated Dubliner, the duke of Wellington, who was (probably) born at 24 Upper Merrion Street.

Other landmarks have either changed or disappeared. The Viceregal Lodge is now the
Áras an Uachtárain
, the official residence of the Irish president. The Little Lodge is called Ratra House, in memory of the Republic’s first president, Douglas Hyde, who died there; and its shrubberies still bloom. They even tell visitors about the ghost of a little boy who wanders the park in search of his grandfather.
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The Deerfield Residence, once the home of Ireland’s chief secretary, now houses the US ambassador, and medieval Ashdown Castle, newly renovated, the visitors’ centre. There one can buy refreshments, souvenirs and guidebooks. One learns, for example, that the park’s name has nothing to do with phoenixes, but is a corruption of the Gaelic name,
fionn uisce
, meaning ‘clear water’. One can also read about the Phoenix Park murders of 6 May 1882, when two leading British officials were knifed to death by a Fenian group calling themselves the ‘Irish National Invincibles’. One of the victims, Lord Frederick Cavendish, was the chief secretary; the other, Thomas Henry Burke (1829–82), was the permanent secretary, the top civil servant of the day. Burke was a Catholic from Galway, but seen by his assailants as a ‘castle rat’. Three years earlier, he met his young neighbour, Winston Churchill, and gave him the present of a toy drum. The death and the drum are both recalled in
My Early Life
. The statues to Lord Carlisle and to Field Marshal Gough – the latter unveiled by ‘the formidable grandpapa’ – stood in the park until the 1920s, but have since vanished.

The purging of British statues in Dublin went to considerable lengths, but was never completed. In addition to Carlisle and Gough, the nationalists expunged Admiral Nelson from O’Connell Street, King William III from College Green, and Queen Victoria herself from Merrion Square. But interesting exceptions were made. One statue, which once held pride of place in front of Leinster House, was moved to the side of the Dáil, to Leinster Lawn, and is still there in the company of assorted republicans and nationalists. Queen Victoria repeatedly begged for it to be erected, as it was in 1908, seven years after her death, to the memory of Albert – not of Monaco, but of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Since that time, Ireland has been a central player in a historical process that may be described without too much hyperbole or sense of anticipation as the break-up of the United Kingdom. The process, whose seeds were barely perceptible in the early twentieth century, was to surface fifteen years after Queen Victoria’s death and continued to develop for the rest of the century amid the alternating pulsations of centrifugal and centripetal forces. In the early twenty-first century it reached a significant new stage after the introduction of devolution, but was still some distance, even in Ireland, from its ultimate vanishing point.

II

If Ireland’s contemporary history begins anywhere, it is with the Easter Rising of 24 April 1916. In a move calculated to exploit Britain’s wartime preoccupations, a few hundred Irish patriot-rebels stormed the General Post Office in Dublin, raised republican flags and pronounced the advent of the Irish Republic:

POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

Irishmen and Irishwomen. In the name of God and of the dead generations, from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to the flag and strikes for her freedom.
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Fighting with British forces lasted for seven days. The surviving insurgents were rounded up, and their leaders tried for treason; ninety were condemned to death. Fifteen of them, including the seven signatories of the Republic’s Proclamation – Clarke, MacDiarmid, MacDonagh, Ceannt, Pearse, Connolly and Plunkett – were executed. The British response was harsh, perhaps because plans for German involvement had been uncovered; the insurgents would not have risked a military operation without hopes of heavyweight foreign assistance. As it was, the executions were creating martyrs. Éamon de Valera, commander of the Irish Volunteers’ Third Brigade, was lucky to be reprieved (see below).
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A republican song from the days immediately after the Rising exudes undiluted bitterness:

Take away the blood-stained bandage from off an Irish brow;

We fought and bled for Ireland and will not shirk it now.

We held on in her struggle, in answer to her call

And because we sought to free her / we are placed against a wall.
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In those same years, the strong Irish presence in the British army was underlined by the most famous of all the Great War’s marching songs. A battalion of the Connaught Rangers was heard singing it as they marched out of Calais for the Front. Recorded by John McCormack, it quickly became a runaway hit:

It’s a long way to Tipperary

It’s a long way to go.

It’s a long way to Tipperary

To the sweetest girl I know.

Good-bye, Piccadilly,

Farewell Leicester Square,

It’s a long, long way to Tipperary

But my heart’s right there.
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The unhurried beat is perfect for swinging along in unison. The melody is compelling. And the bittersweet words are anything but warlike. Tipperary is now known to untold millions round the world who would not otherwise know where it is.

As Britain concentrated all her resources and attention on the war effort, attitudes in Ireland fermented. The insurgents’ political organization, Sinn Féin, meaning ‘Ours Alone’, and its secret military wing, the IRB, attracted far more sympathizers after the Rising than before it. It claimed that the British were reneging on Home Rule, not merely postponing it, that the British government was beholden to the Unionist lobby, and that Irish patriots would have to fight for their rights. In October 1917, Sinn Féin’s convention openly advocated ‘international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic’.
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De Valera, amnestied, became the party’s chairman.

The Unionists, for their part, were dedicated to the integrity of the United Kingdom and regarded Sinn Féin and their like as a bunch of mutineers. Men like Sir Edward Carson – a Protestant barrister from Dublin, who had brought down Oscar Wilde – or Churchill’s friend F. E. Smith, later earl of Birkenhead, saw British law as the sole fount of legitimacy. They waved their Union Jacks, and revered the Ulster Volunteers who had been slaughtered on the Western Front. With few exceptions, they were also supporters of the Protestant Ascendancy. Both the Anglo-Irish landowning class and the Presbyterians of Ulster were embattled Protestant minorities in a largely Catholic land.

The songs to which the Unionists marched drew on a rich and ancient repertoire. ‘King Billy’, that is, William III of Orange (d. 1694), invariably figures as the chief hero, and the pope as the chief villain:

Sons, whose sires with William bled

Offspring of the mighty dead

When the Popish tyrants fled

And this fair land left free.

Yield not now to Popish guile

Trust them least when most they smile

Sun the crafty fowler’s toil.

And keep your liberty!
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The sectarian fervour gripping ‘loyalists’ and ‘Unionists’ had barely changed since the seventeenth century.

In 1917–18 the British government organized a multi-party convention which debated the implementation of Home Rule inconclusively. Then, early in 1918, it sought to bring Ireland into line with Great Britain by introducing military conscription. Objectively, the policy appeared even-handed, and in fact was never applied. But in the fragile Irish context it provided the pebble that set off a landslide,
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refanning passions that might otherwise have died down. Almost everyone united against it – the Church, the unions, the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party and the local councils. Prime Minister David Lloyd George thereupon made the fatal mistake of threatening to withhold Home Rule ‘until the condition of Ireland makes it possible’.
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