Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
public appearance was at a meeting of the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, from which he was borne aloft by a triumphal crowd. Looking back on Hamilton Rowan’s life, William Lecky, the nineteenth-century Irish historian, described him as ‘foolish and impulsive, but also brave, honourable, energetic and charitable’.
Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s son reversed the order of the family name, turning Hamilton Rowan into Rowan Hamilton. According to his great-great-grandson Denys, he did this partly to emphasize the Hamilton side of the family and partly to disassociate himself from his radical and embarrassing father. When Denys was at prep school, two American brothers with the surname Hamilton Rowan entered the school, and Denys has little doubt that they are relatives. ‘To me it is quite obvious that Archibald Hamilton Rowan took a common-law wife while he was in America, and started a family, but when I said to the American Hamilton Rowans, “You’re all from the wrong side of the blanket,” they didn’t like it much. Americans can be churchy.’
However fruitful his American legacy, the extent of Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s Irish legacy – or at least the legacy of the United Irishmen – is considerable. Until the 1800 Act of Union, Britain and Ireland were legally distinct kingdoms with separate Parliaments. The Act brought the kingdoms together to create a ‘United Kingdom’. Some Protestants objected to the Act of Union because it removed any prospect of an independent Ireland. And some Catholics welcomed the Act of Union because it offered the possibility of a more tolerant administration. Over time, however, attitudes migrated into those with which we are familiar today; Protestants came to believe that the union with Britain would guarantee them their ascendancy, and Catholics came to believe that their condition could only be improved by a repeal of the union. These beliefs lie at the very heart of the two communities’ modern identities.
Republican movements arose in the years after the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion; the forerunner of the modern IRA was the Fenian Brotherhood, named after Cuchulainn’s band of warriors, the Fianna. Formed in the aftermath of the Irish famine of 1845–51, during which the population of Ireland fell by as many as two million, the Fenians planted a bomb in a wheelbarrow outside Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867. The bomb killed six people and injured hundreds of others. Rumours spread through London of further planned Fenian attacks, sparking widespread panic. When, six years later, a bridge over Regent’s Canal was destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder on a barge, it was immediately believed – wrongly – to be the work of Fenians: troops based at the nearby Albany Street barracks were mobilized to counteract the supposed Irish threat. Such fears would return a century later, when the Provisional IRA started planting bombs in England. And to this day ‘Fenian’ is a derogatory term used by Protestants to describe a Catholic.
In 1886 the Liberal Party in Westminster, led by William Gladstone, introduced a bill attempting to grant Home Rule to Ireland. Home Rule would have amounted to limited self-government, an early form of devolution. Gladstone’s bill failed and Ulster unionists proceeded to do everything they could to prevent another bill from succeeding. The Presbyterians and Anglicans of Ulster had come to consider themselves defenders of the British empire, fearful for their prosperity and heritage in a Catholic-dominated Ireland. As another Home Rule bill passed through the House of Commons in 1913, a quarter of a million Protestant Ulstermen signed a covenant – some in their own blood – pledging to resist it. An Ulster Volunteer Force of 100,000 men was created, armed with weapons smuggled in from Germany, ready to fight for Ulster’s future. But as the prospect of civil war loomed, the attention of all parties was diverted by the outbreak of a bigger conflict – the First World War. The implementation of Home Rule was delayed until after the end of the war, and young men from both sides of the Irish divide joined the British army; unionists in order to prove their loyalty to the King, nationalists in order to earn the right to have Home Rule implemented once the Great War was over.
On 24 April 1916, at the very height of the war, an event took place in Dublin which had a profound effect on the Irish people, whose attitudes were, to quote Yeats, ‘changed utterly’. A small number of rebels, led by Patrick Pearse – a poet and schoolmaster who once wrote: ‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; slavery is one of them’ – seized public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the formation of ‘the Provisional Government of Ireland’. The rebellion was put down, and its leaders, including Pearse, were executed as traitors. The almost mystical influence that Pearse has come to exert on the modern republican movement was brought home to me by one republican, who told me this story. ‘Patrick Pearse had no republican background. His father was an Englishman. But when he walked down the street he saw the kids in their bare feet on the cobblestones, and their feet hacked with darkened blood. And the kids were playing, and singing about the Grand Old Duke of York, a bastard who had them shoeless and poverty-stricken in their own country. And he went up the stairs, and his brother Willie followed him up and said, “What’s wrong, Patrick?’ He said, “I’ve seen a terrible thing. Children, not fed properly, with their feet hacked, glorifying the Grand Old Duke of York.” Pearse was a sensitive man, and an educated human being, and he was choked up, and the two men hugged, and swore that they would never desist until English rule in Ireland had ceased. It was the last straw. And the last straw wasn’t theological or cultural. It was as simple as that.’
Following the executions of Pearse and the other rebels, Irish expectations changed. No longer was Home Rule considered a sufficient ambition. The national objective became full independence. For two years, between 1919 and 1921, a war (known by one side as the Anglo-Irish War and by the other as the War of Independence) was fought between the British government and the guerrilla IRA, until a truce was called. A treaty was signed which created the Irish Free State, a dominion state, similar in status to Canada, but not the republic for which the IRA had been fighting. Michael Collins, who negotiated the treaty on behalf of the republicans, argued that the treaty gave the Irish ‘the freedom to win freedom’. Other republicans took the view that it represented a betrayal of their principles. A bitter rift developed which gave way to a bloody civil war between recent brothers-in-arms. Yet as republicans argued about the constitutional status of the Free State, they barely questioned another result of the treaty: the formation of a northern state for the Protestants of Ulster.
The new state of Northern Ireland consisted of only six of the nine counties of the old province of Ulster, carefully chosen by unionists to ensure that the new state was large enough to be politically and economically viable, but small enough to embrace a large Protestant majority. Northern Ireland was granted its own Parliament, meaning that it was no longer subject to direct rule from Westminster – and so, with a certain irony, the province that had vowed to take up arms to resist Home Rule became the only part of Ireland actually to receive Home Rule.
The lack of vocal objection from republicans to the creation of Northern Ireland may have been because they expected a forthcoming Boundary Commission to reduce its size to an unviable four counties, forcing it to reintegrate with the Free State. But in the event the Boundary Commission merely ratified the existing border. More than one present-day republican would tell me, with great regret, that had Michael Collins suspected that the border would remain unchanged, he would never have signed the treaty.
Once in place, the government of Northern Ireland became, in the words of its first Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. It viewed itself as an answer to the Free State’s Catholic government. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, sincerely believed that the partition of Ireland would finally solve the ‘Irish problem’, but hundreds of years of antipathy were not to be cancelled out by the stroke of a Boundary Commissioner’s pen. Throughout the Troubles, republicans in Northern Ireland considered the results of the 1918 General Election and the 1920 Local Government Elections – the very last all-Ireland elections – as their mandate for a unified, independent Ireland. In those elections supporters of Irish independence won a majority of votes across the entire island. As a result, say republicans, the subsequent partition of the country was unlawful, and successive IRA campaigns aimed at reversing partition have been legitimate. Yet in the 1918 election unionist candidates won twenty-two out of twenty-nine constituencies in the north-eastern counties. Does this then confer on unionists the right to live in Ulster under British rule? The traditional republican view is that unionists are Irish men and