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.

Disunion and disarray, or is Cameron just too sly for his own good?

One of the most remarkable result of the British General Election on Thursday was what happened in Scotland.

The Scottish National Party or SNP won 56 of the total of 59 seats in the UK parliament. The Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats have precisely one seat each. Whoever had formed the government in Westminster – as it happens, it’ll be the Tories – they would come from a party practically unrepresented in Scotland.

This state of affairs is far from unprecedented, even in these islands. To see where it’s likely to lead, it’s worth looking at what has happened before. Let’s start with a foreign case.

In 1971, Pakistan was still formed of two wings. In East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh, the more populous component of the country, a protest movement had been building for decades, led above all by a nationalist party, the Awami League.

In that year’s elections, the League won all but two of the 169 seats in the Eastern Wing – and not a single seat in the West. On the other hand, the 169 seats it held gave it a majority in the 307-seat parliament of the whole country, entitling it to form the next government – rather as if the SNP were now in a position to form the government of the UK.

Mujibur Rahman:
iconic figure who achieved Bangladesh's Independence
and was promptly murdered

The West Pakistanis, used to controlling most of the wealth and all of the power – particularly the military – weren’t going to wear that. So war broke out – and, with help from India, East Pakistan won. Pakistan broke up into its two separate wings and Bangladesh was born.

Now let’s return to Britain, but a little further back in the past.

At the 1918 General Election, immediately following the First World War, Ireland, still a part of the United Kingdom, elected 73 Sinn Féin MPs. They were committed to full independence from Britain. They replaced the Irish Parliamentary Party, down from 67 to 5 MPs – shades of the what happened to the Liberal Democrats last Thursday – which had been campaigning for a much more limited programme of Home Rule. The Unionist tendency, favouring maintenance of the existing relationship with Britain, won only 26 seats.

The Sinn Féin MPs refused to take up their seats at Westminster and instead met separately in what came to be known as the Dáil Éireann or Assembly of Ireland. It proclaimed the formation of a Republic of Ireland, which achieved independence four years later, with a great deal of bloodshed and ugly violence in between.

Michael Collins
Iconic figure who helped achieve Irish Independence
and was promptly murdered

Don’t these precedents rather suggest that, when component nations of a larger state, elect dominant blocs of politicians actively campaigning for independence, it is only a matter of time before they achieve it? The best that can be said for the situation in Scotland is that it unlikely we shall face the violence that poisoned independence in Bangladesh and Ireland.

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the SNP, stated before the election that it was not about a new referendum on independence. Since the election, she has made it clear that she intends to stick to her commitment. Consequently, her party’s victory, however extensive it was, did not deliver a mandate for another referendum.

The SNP has, however, also stated that a significant event might trigger a campaign for an independence referendum again. It’s fairly clear that a decision by Britain to withdraw from the European Union would be such an event. And David Cameron, in one of his many attempts to be sly, specifically to draw the sting of the Eurosceptics in his own party and in UKIP, committed himself to there being a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU before the end of 2017. He’s repeated that commitment since his re-election.

So imagine this scenario. Britain votes for withdrawal from the EU, because a substantial majority chooses that option in England. But Scotland votes to stay in. As a result, the SNP campaigns again for independence, this time achieving it. That seems pretty likely anyway, but on this scenario it would happen much earlier than it might otherwise.

Cameron, and Tories generally, like to big up Britain and its role on the world stage. It’s one of the reasons they want to hang on to Trident nuclear weapons (another view opposed by the SNP), in the hope that the international community will take them more seriously as a result.

In this scenario, however, Cameron would have presided over the United Kingdom’s isolation from the rest of Europe – and then the loss of its second biggest constituent nation, with over 8% of its population. On his watch, his nation would have been severely reduced in stature around the world. He might have to wonder whether he’d really been so sly after all, and many of those who voted for him would have to ask themselves whether they had really taken the most judicious of decisions.

A conundrum for him. Particularly as he still has to mollify his Eurosceptics. He must be hoping against hope that he can persuade the electorate to vote against leaving the EU – without actually campaigning openly for that outcome.

Countdown to War, Day 21. 18 July: What's Russia sticking its oar in for? And why's Germany sounding hostile?

One hundred years ago today, on Saturday 18 July 1914, Martin and the other railwaymen in his crew would have opened their Manchester Guardian to read that a movement was gaining steam to reducing the working week for city corporation workers to 48 hours. A meeting had been held, at which:

...the chair was taken by Councillor Davy, who spoke of the work that had always been done by the Labour group in the City Council in advocating the eight-hour day.

An eight-hour day and a six-day week? Everyone in the tracklayer gang agreed in wishing them luck. Who wouldn’t want the working week to be that short?

More generally, most of the news was gloomy. In Ireland, a new organisation rejoicing in the name “Sinn Fein” claimed to have come across a document circulated to police chiefs by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell.

Augustine Birrell
Cartoon by "Spy" for Vanity Fair

Sinn Fein quoted Birrell’s document:

When preparing your monthly confidential report, for the present please give a concise report in paragraph 1 of the development of the Irish Volunteer force in your county...

Class of persons who are joining.

Is the force now supported by all sections of Nationalists? ... Is it supported by the Roman Catholic clergy? ...

[On the Protestant Ulster Volunteers] The state of party feeling, and whether any change for the better or worse is noticeable.

Is anything known definitely with regard to the proposed establishment of the Provisional Government?

Still, Martin and his friends had become used to Ireland as the source of bad news that never went away. More worrying were reports from the Continent, starting with one from Vienna:

The “Neue Freie Presse” learns with reference to the present tension between Austria and Servia, due to the Bosnian murders, that the Russian Government hopes the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy will not make demands threatening the national independence of Servia, but is willing, in the interests of peace, to support the demands of Austria-Hungary in Belgrade if they are moderate.

The Russians? What were they sticking their noses in for? It was bad enough that there was “tension” between Austria and Serbia without someone else getting stuck in. And he didn’t like talk of “the interests of peace”. Why was anyone saying they were suddenly at risk?

It seemed that Russia also had a “use for England”. Another article revealed that the German newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt had reported on rumours of an Anglo-Russian naval agreement. And just at the time, as the Guardian had reported before, that Britain was conducting its biggest ever naval review. The German editor seemed to be quite a cynic:

”Certainly,” he says, “the existence of negotiations over a naval agreement between England and Russia have been denied. Not indeed by Sir Edward Grey [the Foreign Secretary], who chose his words wisely, and stated with perfect truth that there were no negotiations for an alliance. It was the ‘Westminster Gazette’ which denied fully and completely all that had been said on the authority of an absolutely reliable and exactly informed Paris source.

What sort of source is absolutely reliable? A spy?

The German paper was convinced the French, allies of Russia and in their Entente Cordiale with Britain, were involved.

No sensible person in Germany will say that the Entente presents an insurmountable obstacle to better Anglo-German relations... [but] it is just because English statesmen and a very large part of the English people have within the last few months shown with undeniable openness of feeling how valuable to them a good and friendly relationship between the English and German nation appears, that those in Germany who have the same desire ... must express their fears when these friendly wishes ... are undermined from a third side with clever measures and proposals.

Poincaré on his visit to Russia
With Tsar Nicholas II on the imperial yacht Alexandria

It seemed that the French President Raymond Poincaré, who was then on a visit to Russia, would be acting as an intermediary in the supposed negotiations with Britain. Would that undermine relations with Germany?

Certainly those ties were close at the moment. It was with a lighter heart that Martin read out another piece.

The “London Gazette” last night contained the announcement that the King has ordained that the children born to their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick and Luneburg shall at all times hold and enjoy the style and attribute of “highness,” with their titular dignity of prince or princess prefixed to their respective Christian names... and that the designation of the children shall be “a prince (or princess) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.”

“Good thing,” one of Martin’s mates pointed out, “we have to keep the traditions going.”

Martin smiled.

“Good thing,” said another, “I’d rather keep them Germans on our side if things do turn nasty. Bloody good soldiers. And I never did trust the Frogs.”

Martin’s smile faded as he looked at him in some surprise. Solders? Things turning nasty? It was no more than he’d been thinking these last couple of days, but it somehow hurt to have it said out loud.