A cheering irony from a land of many ironies

Having failed to inform myself on what to expect, the first time I visited Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland’s parliament, I was shocked to see the approach dominated by a massive statue.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Why, Edward Carson,” I was told.

The statue of Edward Carson in front of Stormont Castle

Carson? It seemed extraordinary. 

The year 1910 was a strange one in British politics, because there were two general elections that year. In both the Liberals, for the last time in their history, emerged as the biggest single party in the House of Commons. They didn’t, however, have a majority and depended on the votes of Irish Nationalist MPs to cling on to office.

Irish Nationalist MPs? You may be wondering how there were any of them. Well, Ireland – the whole of it – was then still part of the United Kingdom and it sent MPs to the UK parliament in Westminster.

To retain their support, the Prime Minister HH Asquith had  to go some way at least to meet their aspirations. It had once been the policy of his Liberal Party to grant Home Rule to Ireland, giving it back the Dublin parliament that had been done away with early in the nineteenth century. Home Rule had split the Liberals back in the 1880s and cast them into the outermost darkness where there is waling and gnashing of teeth – in other words, opposition – while the Conservatives enjoyed almost uninterrupted power for twenty years.

Parliamentary arithmetic, however, is parliamentary arithmetic. The Irish MPs had to be accommodated. Painful though the previous experience with Home Rule had been, Asquith was going to have to try again.

As before, there was fierce resistance from the official Opposition in Westminster. But even fiercer was the hostility of one community within Ireland itself. Further back in the past, in the early seventeenth century, the then King James VI of Scotland and I of England, had sent Protestant Scotsmen to settle in Ireland, to strengthen Protestant power over the Catholic majority. Nearly four centuries on, their descendants were still living in Ireland, mainly in Ulster, the north-eastern corner of the island. They even formed a majority in a large part of that province.

Carson had played a major role in setting up the organisation that came to be known as the Ulster Volunteer Force. It smuggled arms into the province, mostly from Germany, ready to use them to resist any attempt to bring Protestants under the authority of a Catholic-dominated parliament in Dublin. Carson was one of those Irishmen who believed that the place of Ireland was to be an integral element of the British Empire, benefiting from being part of it and helping to sustain it. That was the position known as Unionist.

He proclaimed a policy of ‘No surrender’, a slogan taken up by another well-known Irish Unionist nearer to our own times, Ian Paisley.

Now what the Ulster Volunteer Force was doing was illegal. Criminal even. Indeed, when another figure, Sir Roger Casement, tried to smuggle in German arms on behalf of the other side, the anti-Union Nationalists, the British authorities hanged him. But Carson remained an MP and indeed, despite having organised armed resistance to one British government, he became a minister in another. Why, he even became a law officer in that government, holding the post of Attorney General of England, upholding the authority of a system of laws he’d flouted himself.

An amusing irony, wouldn’t you say?

Poor old Carson. He wasn’t an Ulsterman but a Dubliner. However, Unionism was in a minority in the south or west of Ireland. He found himself having to concentrate his energies saving Protestants from Catholic supremacy only in Ulster. Indeed, even in Ulster he had to give up on his initial hope of keeping all nine counties of the province united with Britain. With their Catholic and Nationalist majorities, there was no question of separating three of them from the south and west of the country.

Indeed, there was even a question mark of whether two further counties, where the Protestant majority was thin, Fermanagh and Tyrone, might have to be left out of a union with the British Empire. But they stayed in.

At the end of this protracted and, ultimately, vicious struggle, Irish nationalists had moved away from their old allegiance to parties looking for Home Rule, to Sinn Fein which wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less than full independence. And at the end of 1921, it achieved its aim – in part. That part was made up of 26 of the 32 Irish counties, while the remaining six in Ulster, with their Protestant majority, were excluded and remained with Britain.

The six counties got their own parliament at Stormont, and in 1932, their government erected the statue to Carson in front of the building.

Now, let’s be clear what had happened. Those six counties had a Protestant majority, for sure. But it represented a minority of Ireland as a whole. So what had been achieved was to create a separate territory to manufacture a majority out of a minority. Not, perhaps, what a strict democrat would regard as strictly democratic.

That majority remained dominant for decades in the north-eastern corner of the island, the region known as Northern Ireland by the (unionist) community that likes to underline its difference from the rest, but the North of Ireland by the (nationalist) community that wants to stress that it’s still part of the same country.

One person who sticks to the expression ‘North of Ireland’ is Michelle O’Neill, a leading figure in today’s Sinn Fein. And why is she so significant? Because last week she became First Minister. So Nationalist Sinn Fein now holds the top political position in the six counties that were hived off to create an anti-Nationalist majority.

Michelle O'Neill addressing the Assembly at Stormont

Another fine irony.

It reflects the fact that the Protestants’ numerical advantage has been steadily eroding. There are now more Catholics in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland than there are Protestants. That doesn’t mean that reunification of Ireland is on the cards anytime soon. On the contrary, polls suggest that there isn’t yet a majority for it. But, surely, another significant step has been taken along that road.

And here’s another nice irony. 

Every time Michelle O’Neill drives to work at Stormont, she’ll go past that colossal statue of Carson, the stern upholder of the law who felt entirely entitled to break it when it suited him. And it suited him to break it in order to keep anyone like her well away from the kind of post she now holds.

I hope she smiles and waves to him each time.

Terrorist or Freedom fighter?

The phrase ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter’ is generally greeted with cries of horror.

‘Bankrupt relativism’, ‘an apology for terrorism’, ‘softness on crime’ are the most common, or at least most printable reproaches. Inevitably it’s supporters of the establishment who most loudly voice them, those whose outlook is essentially conservative. Unforgiving towards crime of any kind, and certainly towards any threat of violence, they are uncompromising towards a stance that seems ready to make concessions towards illegal military activity.

So this is a good weekend to look back at a time when the British establishment at least took a completely different view. And what emerge was exactly the same kind of moral relativism that it otherwise denounces so robustly.

It’s a commonplace to define the state as the body that holds a monopoly over ultimate violence. Only the state can make arrests (even in that extremely rare occurrence, a ‘citizen’s arrest’, the citizen is acting on state authority, and had better be able to justify himself in those terms if called on). Only the state can legally imprison. And only the state has the authority to raise and use armed forces.

When occasionally groups of individuals try to form themselves into organised armed groups to achieve their political ends, the state tends to take a dim view and most of society usually agrees. The people who try to to do so and, sadly, quite a few who are simply suspected of helping, get gaoled for a long time. Indeed, many of those who make the attempt outside the US may even be granted the privilege of a free trip to that country, where they receive free board and lodging indefinitely, and even have their clothing costs covered, at least at the orange jump suit level.

So it’s instructive to discover that if the establishment itself is sympathetic towards the cause espoused, it tends to be a lot more indulgent towards illegal military activity taken to advance it. When Edward Carson launched the Ulster Covenant 100 years last Friday, he threatened to use ‘all means necessary’ to resist the pressure towards home rule for Ireland.

Since he had already helped found the Ulster Volunteers, which would later accept support from Germany to become a paramilitary organisation, it was clear that the means necessary would not stop short of the use of armed force.

The British establishment was facing a serious threat of violence. But it was aimed at preserving Ireland within the United Kingdom, which wasn’t a view entirely frowned upon by most members of that establishment. A quandary for those fine upstanding figures in society.

So it will come as no surprise that Carson didn’t find himself in the 1912 equivalent of a jump suit, behind bars or in any other way incommoded in his political or social career. Not that he never faced a judge: in fact in February 1921, he faced six of them, all Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. The effect was slightly mitigated, however, by the fact that he had just become the seventh member of their august band, with in compensation for his efforts a peerage to go along with the appointment.

It seems that one man’s jump suit is another man’s ermine cloak.

Lord Carson's statue outside the Northern Ireland Parliament
Honouring a fine patriot or a dangerous rebel?

Since this is the weekend of the centenary of Carson’s insurgency, I intend to raise a glass to the historic event this evening. I hope you’ll join me, in spirit at least. Let’s toast that much-maligned though wonderfully expedient stance, that of moral relativism.

The Winslow Boy: come back, we need you again

Courtroom dramas, even the ones that don’t actually have a scene set in a courtroom, I just can’t resist. 

But I have to admit that my real weak spot is that I’m an absolute sucker for sentimentalism. An apparently deeply unsympathetic character who suddenly breathes some noble sentiment finds a sure way to my heart, if not my tear ducts.

So Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, whether as a play or a film, is my kind of show. A fourteen-year old wrongly accused of stealing a postal order; a father prepared to court ruin to clear his name; the hard-boiled lawyer, perhaps a little taken by the boy’s radical sister, persuaded to be his advocate.

It’s that lawyer who, faced with the quandary of a subject trying to sue the Royal Navy, and therefore his monarch, turns to the archaic device of a petition of right. Whenever I hear him explain that the words on the petition read ‘let right be done’ it brings a lump to my throat.

In other words, the play has everything you could possibly want. Or at least that I could possibly want.

Curiously, however, this is a wonderful illustration of the principle that fact can be far stranger than fiction. Behind the play stands the real case of George Archer-Shee. The defence of young George, who was indeed a Cadet at the Royal Naval College at Osbourne on the Isle of Wight and expelled for stealing a postal order, was taken up by one of the great barristers of the day. His name? Edward Carson.

Martin Archer-Shee with his son George

Now there’ll be plenty more talk of Carson at the end of this month, in Britain but above all in Northern Ireland. For the moment, let me just say that it is instructive to compare his history with that of another dominant figure in Irish politics of the time, Roger Casement. The latter took support and weapons from Germany during the first World War to arm an illegal, insurgent force of Irish Nationalists for an uprising to end British rule. He was convicted of treason and hanged. 

Carson took support and weapons from Imperial Germany to arm an illegal, insurgent force of Irish loyalists, for an uprising to maintain British rule. If not in the whole of Ireland, at least in six counties of the North. His action didn’t take place in wartime which perhaps explains why he escaped the death penalty, but it might seem surprising that he wasn’t gaoled. But only until you realise that the establishment he was railing against in large part sympathised with him.

Instead, he was given a statue that stands to this day outside the parliament of Northern Ireland at Stormont. Larger than life, it’s a dominant sight, and to me at least a deeply ironic one: a legislature honouring a man to whom it owes its existence, thanks to his illegal act.

Carson: dominant as ever

And yet it wasn’t any of this that struck me as I was reading about The Winslow Boy this weekend. No, the words that sprung off the page at me came from a Wikipedia entry on the Archer-Shee case. Talking about the boy’s father, who worked at the Bank of England, it told us that one of the reasons he campaigned so hard to clear his son was that his ‘background in bank management meant all the sons had been brought up to regard misuse of money as sinful.’

Well. These days, that’s an idea as extraordinary as Carson being honoured by the establishment for rising against it. I’d nearly forgotten that there was a time when banking was much duller than today but a lot safer and a lot straighter, making a virtue of prudence, reliability and absolute honesty.

Those were the days, weren’t they? Feel long gone now, when the likes of Bob Diamond and Fred Goodwin can find themselves heading those formerly august institutions. 

Can’t imagine Terence Rattigan writing a play about one of them risking all in the pursuit of justice.

Postscript: what happened next

You might be wondering what became of the original Winslow boy afterwards.

He won his case in 1910, and his family was awarded substantial compensation. He didn’t go back to the Navy – that, as it were, was a ship that had sailed – but completed a civilian education before heading to New York to work in a Wall Street bank: yes, they too enjoyed rather more honourable reputations then than now.

But if you’ve doing any arithmetic on dates, you’ll have worked out that 1910 was a bad year to be a teenager. By August 1914, when the guns of the First World War first roared out, George Archer-Shee was nineteen and old enough to serve. He came back to join the army and lasted only a couple of months: he was killed at the first battle of Ypres in October.

He suffered injustice, but then right was done by him. And finally an irremediable wrong. All at the hands of the same establishment.

Couldn’t make it up, could you?