The memories of the Irish

‘The problem,’ the saying goes, ‘is the English can't remember history, while the Irish can't forget it’. 

My mother gave me a fine illustration of the truth of the notion. Back in the 1930s (the late 1930s, I imagine, since she was born in 1924) an Irish friend invited her to a rally in England addressed by an Irish patriot. I think she said it was the son of the murdered Irish Republican leader, Michael Collins, which would make it a great story, had Collins ever had a son. 

Maybe it was just one of his associates.

‘I should warn you,’ her friend told my mother, ‘he’ll be mentioning Oliver Cromwell within the first ten minutes of his talk.’

In the event, it was under five minutes.

Cromwell, many English people know, was the man who led the New Model Army in seventeenth-century England. The uprising it drove put a big dent in the doctrine of the divine right of kings, by putting a definitive end to a king who believed in it (it cut off Charles I’s head, which is pretty definitive). What a lot fewer remember is that Cromwell was also the man who applied in Ireland what the Roman historian Tacitus accused his compatriots of doing in their conquered territories: Rome, he said, made a desert and called it peace. Cromwell pacified Ireland with sword and flame. The Irish haven’t forgiven him (and they shouldn’t) but nor have they forgotten (which maybe for their peace of mind they should).

I’m an Englishman and therefore cursed – or possibly blessed – by a short memory. Even so, as Danielle and I turned up in Dublin a few days ago, I remembered clearly when we were last there together. It was with two of our sons, then aged five and three, back in 1988. This time, it was on our way to meet one of those sons, now 40, and our daughter-in-law, with their own children, aged five and three. 

As we were reminded by a couple of people in Dublin this time, 1988 was the year of the Dublin millennium. We enjoyed some of the events associated with the celebrations, though they left me a little confused. There were references to all sorts of things happening in Dublin rather over a thousand years earlier, including the foundation of the city, but no mention of anything particular in 988.

In the end, I tackled a young actor in Viking costume who’d been re-enacting tenth-century events.

‘If nothing particular happened in in 988, why are you celebrating the millennium in 1988?’ I asked.

‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘we missed the actual anniversary, but when we saw the success Cork made of its 800th anniversary in 1985, we decided to have a celebration ourselves, even if it’s a few decades late. We promise to get it right next time.’

I think it was the Irish wit of the reply that appealed to me most. 

It was lovely to be back in Dublin with Danielle. And I was intrigued to see a mural on a hoarding near where we spent the night.

Curious mural in Dublin

It showed the face of Michael Collins with a great quotation from him: ‘Give us the future… we’ve had enough of your past…’

The past Britain – specifically England – gifted Ireland was dismal. It was by no means just Cromwell’s massacres that blackened it. His campaign completed an extraordinary transfer of land to alien ownership, specifically to the English and Protestants. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, something like 50% of Irish land had been owned by Irish Catholics. By the time the English Civil War broke out, that proportion was down to 14%. By the end of Cromwell’s time, it was down to 5%. England didn’t just kill in Ireland, it also stole. Massively.

At the end of the following century, one of the better English Prime Ministers, William Pitt the Younger, attempted to bring in legislation to grant Irishmen equality with the English, at least in trade. He was defeated, by a coalition of legislators representing British industry, which was more than happy to see tariffs on Irish trade kept in place – even trade with Britain – to protect their own privileged position. There were regulations, too, about what industries the Irish could engage in and which they were banned from developing, again to protect English interests. In addition, Catholics – and the vast majority of the Irish were Catholics – were banned from holding any kind of public position or teaching in the universities.

The dying also continued. The terrible famine in the late 1840s cost about a million lives and a million emigrants, at a time when the total population before the Famine had been eight and a half million. Even today, the total population, of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland together, is still not seven million. An excellent measure of Britain’s attitude to the disaster was that, when it abolished slavery, in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation to the former slave owners. Its total aid to Ireland during the Famine was £10 million.

Nor did the killings end. Why, some even happened in Collins’s own time, including the Croke Park massacre, when British soldiers entered a stadium in Dublin and fired for a minute and a half into a crowd waiting for the start of a Gaelic football match, killing fourteen, including three children, and wounding sixty others.

So, yes, I understand why Collins felt Ireland was sick of the past. And would like to take over its own future.

Sadly, though, while the British Empire was already in decline, it was still the world’s greatest ever and had huge power. Tired of fighting after the world war and desperately short of money, Britain knew that it could defeat the Irish uprising but only by using massive force, which would be a catastrophic expense and, since it would lead to terrible killing, would be condemned by the world and even by much public opinion in Britain (think Gaza today). 

On the other hand, it was quite impossible, politically, for the British government to allow the Protestant-majority counties of Ulster to be absorbed into a separate, Catholic-dominated Irish state.

Equally, Collins knew that the Irish Republican forces, which he commanded, hadn’t the resources to impose their will on the British. Indeed, keeping the army in the field was draining the new country’s already stressed finances. 

The compromise was to partition the island. Six counties of the northeast would remain within the United Kingdom. The other twenty-six would be given quasi-independence as the Irish Free State. The compromise took the form of a Peace Treaty signed by the British and the Irish delegation to the negotiations, led by Michael Collins. 

After the signing, Collins confided to his diary ‘I tell you this, early this morning I signed my death warrant.’

Eight months later, he was proved right, when he was gunned down by members of the anti-Treaty forces led by his former comrade, Éamon De Valera.

Not many people in England know much of this. But plenty do in Ireland.

Across the Collins mural, somebody had scrawled the word ‘Traitor’.

Ah, yes. The Irish have long memories. It was fun to be back in the country and have it proved to me again.

 

Backing Brexit, because I know it makes sense. Or ought to, apparently

Ah, the pride and joy of Britain as a great power
Putting down the Kenya Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s

Normally I don’t get into debates on Twitter – or what passes as debate – but I’m on leave so I felt I could put in half an hour or so yesterday and today.

What was the issue? Well, the one that’s going to dominate British politics for years. As our local MP points out, if he’s lucky enough to be re-elected for the next ten years, his professional life is going to be dominated by Brexit.

So, as you can imagine, it was Brexiters who were – how shall I put this? – a little exasperated with me.

“What an infantile perspective he has.” That was one of the politer comments. Still, note that referring to me in the third person is delightfully dismissive. Seen as witty, too, I expect. In certain quarters.

Slightly less courteous were references such as “…hundreds of people … ripping the piss out of your preposterous assertion... Pompous ass!”

It’s never easy to come up with an effective response to an argument as well constructed and closely reasoned as that.

Some people decided to focus on another major shortcoming of mine.

“…well you are a fiction writer – a bad one at that.”

It had never struck me that my skill as a writer, or lack of it, was going to be an issue in the Brexit process. But, hey, that process has already amazed me repeatedly, so perhaps I should contain my capacity for surprise.

At the crux of the argument, aside from the gentle remarks on my personality, was the proposition that Britain would be better off out of the EU. I suggested that this view was based on the belief that Britain remains a global power which, I pointed out, struck me as illusory. At work, I felt, was nostalgia, a backward-looking sense of greatness, which has little or no contact with current reality.

“We are a global power,” I was told indignantly. “Despite the best attempts of some. Recognising that doesn't involve 'going backwards'.”

Another commentator put up a pair of tables, showing that Britain still accounts for 3.9% of global GDP, and that the country is fifth in spending on defence, making it a major military force too.

On the face of it, this sounds compelling. At least, if you see military might as an essential component of global importance, a proposition I might question if it weren’t a digression from the main point here. 

In any case, this writer failed to set his claims in historical perspective.

Comparative GDP

As far as GDP is concerned, Britain’s 3.9%, according to my correspondent’s own figures, represents US$2.9 trillion. That compares with the US’s GDP of $18 trillion – over six times more. When Britain was a genuine world power, its GDP was close behind the US’s: in 1890, British GDP was moving towards $250 billion dollars, when in the US it was nearly $350 billion.

Comparative military strength

It’s also telling that, according to my critic’s other table, Britain, still the fifth most powerful military nation, has a total of 205,330 serving in the three branches of the forces – army, navy and air force. Now, when Britain was still clinging on to its status as a leading power, in 1914, it was criticised for the weakness of its army. On the brink of World War 1, the army’s strength was only 733,514.

A weak force and it made for a difficult start in the fighting that engulfed Europe. And yet – it was slightly more than the three and half times more than the total in all three branches today.

Hence my suggestion that aspiring to be a global power is a backward-looking, vain aspiration for Britain. We simply don’t have the economic muscle or, if military strength really is a key factor, the firepower to play that role. Once, maybe, but not now. “We are a global power”? Wake up and smell the cordite.

And that is my quarrel with these people. They’re refusing to wake up to the reality of our real status. We remain a power, but an intermediate one. In the same league as Germany, France or Italy. To be taken seriously, but in no position to dictate terms to great powers.

Not that I regard the situations as anything to regret. I don’t want to go back to Britain as a world power. When it was, it chalked up a string of horrors: genocide of the aboriginal population of Australia, the cruel putting down of the Indian ‘mutiny’ (in reality, an uprising against a colonial presence that had no right to be installed there), the Amritsar massacre, the hunting of insurgents in Malaya or Kenya or Cameroon – the list goes on and on. Indeed, the British Empire provided the first trial of an innovation that marked the twentieth century: concentration camps used against its Boer adversaries – civilians and not just fighters – in South Africa. Torture, of course, was commonplace across the Empire.

No, I want those things behind us. I’d like us to recognise that they already are. I’d like us to come to the realisation, as Germany, France and Italy have, that we are now intermediate powers. Alone, we’ll be pushed around by the US, China, Russia, Japan and others who may well grant us free trade deals, but on terms we’re not going to like. Together, on the other hand, in the European Union, we, Germany, France, Italy and 24 other countries can truly influence the way the world travels.

That’s why I feel the Brexiters are missing the point. They’re grasping at a mirage. And missing the real opportunity in front of us.

But, hey, who am I to have a view? It seems that “the arrogance of [my] position is breathtaking. And hilariously stupid”. The hilariously stupid should, presumably, just shut up and let others do the talking.

Which is what I’m going to do now.

Warm memories of hard times

It’s a pleasure to write this post in the dining room at Basel railway station in Switzerland, a setting of some historical importance for my family.

Basel station dining room: tasteful, pleasant, even luxurious
Now as it was 70 years ago

1946 was a hard year for Britain. The Second World War finished the country as a world power. By loading itself with debt and throwing all its resources into the fight, along with quite a few from its imperial possessions, the country managed to defend its home soil against Nazi Germany. It couldn’t go over to the offensive without support from the US. There was no question of its playing a significant role in the Pacific Theatre. That lack of strength and its crippling debts would spell the end of the empire in the first couple of decades after the war, a time when the country would also awaken to a sense that it should perhaps be less concerned with playing the world power, and focus instead on internal justice and opportunity.

That’s a lesson the nation could do well to learn again, in the face of the great power nostalgia that expressed itself in the Brexit vote. Why, Prime Minister Theresa May even suggests Britain can be a truly global player, a notion which would be amusingly quaint if it weren’t also a toxic delusion.

One of the organisations that was trying to improve internal conditions back in 1946, was the Fabian Society, one of the founding organisations of the British Labour Party.

“You didn’t work for the Fabian Society,” says my mother, who did, “if you wanted to make money. You did it for the principle.”

Bankrupt Britain was living with rationing. You could go abroad, but couldn’t take more than £10 with you. That’s the equivalent of nearly £400 today, hardly a princely sum – a yearly membership at Trump’s golf club in Scotland costs six times more. On a Fabian Society salary, however, even scraping together £10 wasn’t easy. To enjoy a foreign holiday, only the second in her life – the first had been nineteen years earlier, when she was three – my mother had to find an inexpensive option.

Fortunately, she had a German friend also working for the Fabians. The friend’s mother had managed to get out of Germany with her daughter during the Nazi period, after having spent some time producing clandestine opposition publications. The daughter reckoned she could sleep anywhere, having got used to being put to bed in cellars with the press clattering in the background.

Her friend told my mother about an organisation that was helping Germans trying to put themselves back together after the Hitler regime – Jews in some cases, but generally any Socialists, Communists, or others who’d opposed the Nazis and had suffered mental or physical injuries from which they needed to recover. The organisation had an Alpine chalet in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton. Whenever there were spare places, they could be made available to Fabians who wanted a holiday at reasonable cost.

It turned out to be one of my mother’s best holidays, one she remembers with pleasure and in detail seventy years on.

One of the key moments came after an overnight train journey down to Basel, her first stop in Switzerland. While they waited for the train out, they repaired to the station dining room for breakfast. Where, to use an anachronistic expression, they had their minds blown.

“The piles of fine white bread!” she tells me, “the heaps of butter! The jam! The coffee with creamy milk swimming in it!”

Bankrupt Britain, cold and with food rationed, could offer nothing to rival it. This, for the generation whose youth had been broken by the war, was luxury.

No wonder she remembers it so fondly to this day. So should we, who take such riches for granted. To say nothing of the international collaboration that guarantees the peace on which they rest.

Uncomfortable inside a time warp wrapped in a historical anomaly

Years ago, I was delighted to have the opportunity to set foot, for the first time in my life, on a little corner of the rapidly dwindling British Empire. I broke a journey to Australia in Hong Kong, just a few months before it became independent. Or rather, was handed back to China, which I suppose is independence, though not for any meaning of the word that I would recognise.

I only had 36 hours there, but I enjoyed every moment, even the bit when I got drenched to the skin in a sudden tropical downpour – just the kind of thing that ought to happen, one feels, in South East Asia. I took the tram up Victoria Peak, I took the ferry across to Kowloon, I had that strange but quintessentially far Eastern experience of being plunged into a human wave, as I walked in the rush hour towards a commuter train that was just emptying: extraordinary how those thousands poured past me without jostling me or even coming close to infringing the little bubble of private space they left around me.

With wonderful food on top of the rest, it was a sheer joy, but it wasn’t actually terribly British Empire. It felt like a little bit of China where the street signs happened to be in English. Which, after all, was what it really was.

So it was fascinating, while we were in Southern Spain on our recent holiday, to pop over to Gibraltar. Now that really is a little corner of the British Empire. In fact, it’s a little bit of England set down in the Mediterranean. The experience was doubly like stepping into a time warp. 

In the first place, because it represents a bizarre anomaly, British by virtue of England having been on the right side of a war fought alongside the Germans and against the French over who should rule Spain – don’t ask, just another ghastly mess of the kind the so-called Great Powers liked to spring on their own subjects and each other from time to time.

A historical gun at a bizarre angle:
an appropriate symbol for Gib? 

Turns out to have been a depressing gun.
I should say. Think how the Spaniards must have felt.

Gibraltar’s had plenty of time since 1704 to squeeze all the Spanishness out of itself, and in my view isn't any the better for it: I felt much more comfortable in nearby Andalucia. 

Because the rock’s so small, the place feels crowded; because the only thing to do there is take advantage of the tax status to make money, it feels as though it’s in a constant rush; and because it’s completely artificial, owing its existence to a strange anomaly of the history of war, it feels out of joint with its surroundings. Claustrophobia, self-obsession, dislocation. Those were the feelings that predominated for me.

The other sense of being in a time warp came from Gibraltar's particular form of Englishness. It’s out of date by forty or fifty years. We naturally had to have a pub lunch – you can't avoid so English a gesture if you’ve travelled all the way from England to the other side of Spain and another little bit of England. And it was a completely authentic experience: exactly the stereotypical English pub lunch. But not of 2011. It was exactly as I remember from 1970. 

Just to spell it out, to make sure there’s no ambiguity in my message, let me stress that these days I delight in amazing foreign visitors by taking them for meals in pubs, just to show how well you can eat in them (well, some of them). It shatters the shameful reputation of the British for serving unspeakable food.

1970 was right slap in the period when Britain earned itself that reputation.

The Spanish like to make it difficult to leave the rock, so that people who go there are uncomfortable about the experience. Personally, I already felt quite uncomfortable enough, but I naturally had to queue at the border just like everyone else. The impatience of those around us was palpable, and frankly I shared it. Visiting the place had been fascinating, and I'm really pleased I went there, but at the end of the day I was anxious to get back to the twenty-first century and something a bit more like civilisation.

Queuing to get out of Gib, and back to reality

So, how do I feel now about the British Empire? If I’d needed any proof that British imperialism had little to commend it, Gib provided it. And as for the rock itself? If the Spaniards want it, then as far as I’m concerned, they can have it. But poor things: do they really know what they’re wishing for? 

Buttering up the imperialists

Here, glimpsed at Oxford Circus station on the London Underground, is a contribution to what is becoming a veritable series on outstanding advertising.

A breakfast for an all-British hero?

The poster’s dominated by a picture of a classic British breakfast. Golden yolk is beginning to flow from a soft-boiled egg while in the foreground are those strips of toast that we call ‘soldiers’ and which are certainly best when buttered. Below the picture, a small photo of a pack of Lurpak acts as signature.

And the strapline? ‘Empires were never built on Muesli bars’.

Brilliant. Doesn’t it just underline the point I was making the other day about nostalgia for the past glories of this country?

It also says so much about how we should be bringing up our children. After all, breakfast is a key meal. It’s the time to set the tone for the entire day, when we can frame principles for our families as part of the effort we owe to society to guide and mould the development of the next generation.

Lurpak is clear about what we want from that generation. Or at least from the boys. Presumably the girls should just concentrate on learning to serve up this kind of breakfast to their menfolk, with the accent firmly on ‘men’.

We want the lads to recreate that breed of Brits who weren’t afraid to go out into the world with its uncouth and inferior races and exact the proper level of respect from them, using whatever degree of force is necessary. Actually, it doesn’t really have to be necessary. Force, necessary or not, has a way of instilling the right degree of awe: you know what they say, spare the rod and spoil the child.

Good of Lurpak, which is Danish, to bathe me in such a warm glow of sentiment over British imperialism.

But stop right there! Let’s focus on a detail of the picture. What’s that on the tub of butter?

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
And you keep a sharper eye on the calories, too

Does it really say ‘lighter’?

Now we may have mixed, or even completely unmixed, feelings about that special strain of British hero who set out each day with pith helmet on head and firearm in hand, reinforced by a good breakfast, to wreak Pax Britannica on good old Johnny native. But I have to say that my image of the warrior hero of those legendary times is difficult to reconcile with the thought that while he was doing his bit for God and Empire, he was also counting calories.

I think I might pop out for a muesli bar.