*Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading “The Honorable Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more.” – Sir James Craig There are very few national relationships quite as complicated and enigmatic as the one that exists between the English and the Irish. For two peoples so interconnected by geography and history, the depth of animosity that is often expressed is difficult at times to understand. At the same time, historic links of family and clan, and common Gaelic roots, have at times fostered a degree of mutual regard, interdependence, and cooperation that is also occasionally hard to fathom. During World War I, for example, Ireland fought for the British Empire as part of that empire, and the Irish response to the call to arms was at times just as enthusiastic as that of other British dominions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. An excerpt from one war recruitment poster asked, “What have you done for Ireland? How have you answered the Call? Are you pleased with the part you’re playing in the job that demands us all? Have you changed the tweed for the khaki to serve with rank and file, as your comrades are gladly serving, or isn’t it worth your while?” And yet, at the same time, plots were unearthed to cooperate with the Germans in toppling British rule in Ireland, which would have virtually ensured an Allied defeat. In World War II, despite Irish neutrality, 12,000 Irish soldiers volunteered to join the Khaki line, returning after the war to the scorn and vitriol of a great many of their more radical countrymen. One of the most bitter and divisive struggles in the history of the British Isles, and in the history of the British Empire, played out over the question of Home Rule and Irish independence, and then later still as the British province of Northern Ireland grappled within itself for the right to secede from the United Kingdom or the right to remain. What is it within this complicated relationship that has kept this strange duality of mutual love and hate at play? A rendition of “Danny Boy” has the power to reduce both Irishmen and Englishmen to tears, and yet they have torn at one another in a violent conflict that can be traced to the very dawn of their contact. This history of the British Isles themselves is in part responsible. The fraternal difficulties of two neighbors so closely aligned, but so unequally endowed, can be blamed for much of the trouble. The imperialist tendencies of the English themselves, tendencies that created an empire that embodied the best and worst of humanity, alienated them from not only the Irish, but the Scots and Welsh too. However, the British also extended that colonial duality to other great societies of the world, India not least among them, without the same enduring suspicion and hostility. There is certainly something much more than the sum of its parts in this curious combination of love and loathing that characterizes the Anglo-Irish relationship. The Partition of Ireland and the The History of Northern Ireland from the Irish Civil War to the Good Friday Agreement analyzes the tumultuous events that marked the creation of Northern Ireland, and the conflicts fueled by the partition. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Northern Ireland like never before.
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Part of what drew me to this short book about the Northern Ireland conflict, I will freely confess, was its cover. The cover of The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles shows the island of Ireland, superimposed with flags of the two nations that hold sovereignty over different parts of the island. Most of the island of Ireland is covered by the green-white-and-orange tricolour flag of the Republic of Ireland; about one fourth, in the northeastern part of the island, is adorned with the blue-white-and-red flag of Great Britain, to show that Northern Ireland remains politically linked with Great Britain as part of the United Kingdom.
But one can’t judge a book by its cover – and therefore, let’s get away from the book’s striking front cover to ask how well this study of The History of Northern Ireland from the Irish Civil War to the Good Friday Agreement (the book’s subtitle) works.
The book is officially credited to “Charles River Editors.” The group’s website describes their work by stating that “Charles River Editors is a boutique digital publishing company, specializing in bringing history back to life with educational and engaging books on a wide range of topics” – all of which sounds nice, though I am concerned that there are no names associated with this book or any of the group’s books. Even on the organization’s website, I could find no names. Is no one in the group willing to take, by name, credit (or blame) for what the group publishes?
Because I have both Catholic and Protestant ancestry, and can trace my lineage back to both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and have travelled extensively in both countries, I felt that The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles would give me a good opportunity to evaluate what the author(s) of this book had to say about a topic with which I am somewhat familiar – in this case, 20th-century Ireland – and, in the process, to ascertain exactly what these “Charles River Editors” people might be up to.
The unknown author or authors will be referred to hereafter simply as “C.R.E.”; and C.R.E. begins on a suitably straightforward note, writing that “There are very few national relationships quite as complicated and enigmatic as the one that exists between the English and the Irish” (p. 3) – true enough, I suppose. Without scope, given the constraints on this narrative, to discuss the centuries of oft-contentious history between England and Ireland, C.R.E. moves to how the Easter Rising of 1916 and Sinn Fein’s declaration of an Irish Republic in 1919 led into a bloody Irish War of Independence that was finally resolved by a Government of Ireland Act (1920) and then an Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921).
These measure set forth “partition as a solution to the deepening Catholic/Protestant split in Ireland. Ireland was divided into 26 counties in the south and 6 in the north, each given de facto home rule, with the former governed from Dublin and the latter from Belfast” (p. 16). Under the Anglo-Irish treaty, “the British agreed to concede dominion status to the south, which would thereafter be known as the Irish Free State” (p. 19). What the treaty meant for Northern Ireland was that “the 1921 treaty formalized partition, with the understanding that the two would merge again at some point” (p. 20).
The signing of the treaty was followed by the initial formation of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, both unionist and nationalist, and by the beginnings of sectarian violence. A civil war ensued between Free State government forces and Irish Republican Army rebels. “Ultimately, anti-treaty forces were compelled to surrender in May 1923, and the divided sides eventually amalgamated to form the progenitors of Ireland’s future political parties, Fine Gael and the Fianna Fáil” (p. 23). What C.R.E. doesn’t have time to mention is that both of these parties still hawk their emotional links with Ireland’s revolutionary past -- Fianna Fáil still calls itself “The Republican Party” – and that the two parties have center-right platforms so similar that it can be difficult to see much political daylight between them.
C.R.E provides a comparably swift explanation of subsequent steps of the Irish Free State’s development into a republic. “In 1937, the Irish Free State eradicated any and all references to the British Crown from its constitution, other than allowing the king to act on behalf of Ireland in foreign affairs, but soon afterwards this too was expunged. The country was renamed Éire” (p. 25). Twelve years later, “In 1949, Éire assumed the name of the Irish Republic and withdrew from the British Commonwealth” (p. 25). While the name “Éire,” with its mythic and emotional connotations, still appears on Irish postage stamps, it is considered a solecism to refer to the modern Republic of Ireland as “Éire” – something some unionist politicians in the Northern Ireland Assembly will still do from time to time, in hopes of getting a rise out of their nationalist counterparts. “And meanwhile, down in Éire…” “Shame! Shame!”
The section on “The Beginning of the Troubles” quotes the young nationalist politician Bernadette Devlin – “To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything” (p. 34) – and as Devlin was quite a firebrand back in the day, I suppose a quote from her does capture how aggressive the mindset was, on both sides, during the 1969-98 period. C.R.E. goes back to early periods of low-level militancy – “The first orchestrated series of attacks in the post-war period began in December 1956, in what was codenamed ‘Operation Harvest,’ but [was] more widely known as the ‘Border Campaign’” (p. 34) – through the time when the Ulster Volunteer Force formed in 1966, after which, “In 1971, a second Unionist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, came into being” (p. 34).
Eventually, C.R.E. gets to 1969 and the time that most students of the Northern Ireland conflict would see as the true beginning of the Troubles. When “The Battle of the Bogside took place in Londonderry from August 12-14, 1969” (p. 37), C.R.E. correctly sets forth the larger significance of that particular outbreak of civil violence; it led to the first direct military intervention, anywhere on the island of Ireland, by British troops since the partition of the island in 1921.
Where I saw problems with C.R.E.’s treatment of the Northern Ireland conflict was in terms of a great deal of oversimplification, as when C.R.E. refers to Northern Ireland’s second-largest city as “Londonderry, now known as Derry” (p. 37). Really? I ndáiríre? It’s really not that simple. Unionists and Protestants tend to call the city “Londonderry,” after the London guilds that helped King James I with his Plantation-of-Ulster efforts in the early 17th century. Nationalists and Catholics tend to prefer the city’s original name, “Derry.” Wits on both sides of the cultural divide will call it “Stroke City,” for the keystroke that connects the two names of the city in many news accounts: “Derry/Londonderry.” Like so much else in Northern Ireland, it’s complicated.
C.R.E. continues dutifully through major events of “the Troubles”: the Bloody Sunday shootings of 30 January 1972, when 13 nationalist civilians were shot dead by British soldiers from the 1st Parachute Regiment; the acceleration of violence into what one historian called “the bloody watershed” of the mid-1970’s; the hunger strikes in which a group of IRA prisoners voluntarily starved themselves to death over the question of whether paramilitary prisoners should have “political status” in British jails, rather than being clothed and treated as common criminals; the way in which an IRA bombing of a Remembrance Day gathering at Enniskillen killed a large group of older people and galvanized a peace movement that had long seemed moribund, or at best dormant.
Portraits of the leading militants – e,g, Ian Paisley for the unionists, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for the nationalists – make for disheartening reading, because of the way all of these men minimize or excuse violence against civilians by militants on “their” side – because what the “other” side is doing is, for them, so much worse. A happy contrast can be found in the portrayal of peace leader John Hume of the Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP). “[S]ufficiently unthreatening to raise no hackles”, Hume was “a quiet, avuncular man who nonetheless wielded great political skill” (p. 57). I’m glad that C.R.E. mentioned Hume’s achievements. I wish that C.R.E. had also mentioned David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader who worked with Hume on peace efforts, and who shared with Hume the Nobel Peace Prize that both men so richly deserved.
It also helped, to be sure, that “The populations of both territories [Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland] were ready, and it had by then become manifestly clear that outright victory for either side was impossible” (p. 58). It was against this background that the Good Friday Accords of 1998 were agreed upon and ratified, producing a peace that has held for 25 years now.
The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles ends, on a hopeful note, in 2007, with unionist Ian Paisley as First Minister, and nationalist Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister. C.R.E. states that “The fact that two such polar opposites, a decade earlier at one another’s throats, could cooperate on the floor of the same assembly served as a symbol of just how far Northern Ireland had come from the darkest days of the Troubles” (p. 63).
Like much of this book, its conclusion provides a reductive and oversimplified picture of the Northern Ireland conflict. There is still plenty of tension in the province, particularly around the summertime “marching season” when the more strident people of both sides like to hold parades that seem designed to do little more than stir up negative feelings of hatred, resentment, and fear. The British Government’s “Brexit” policy of taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union briefly raised fears of a “closed border” between Northern Ireland and the still-E.U.-affiliated Republic of Ireland – something that, in theory, could have led to economic downturns and renewed tensions on both sides of the Irish border, and even to a renewal of the Troubles.
Such a scenario, fortunately, has not yet come to pass; and if The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles reminds even a few readers how important it is that peace continue to prevail on the too-oft-troubled island of Ireland, then I suppose it will have done some measure of good.
As I read this book I found errors and misrepresentations of some events. As the author jumps back and forth in time he seems to get lost. He mentions incursions across the border in 1922 and then jumps back to May of 1921 when the IRA took the Customs House in Dublin and refers to this as a major event in Northern Ireland, then continues to say two IRA were killed and a few captured while the rest escaped. Eighty captured IRA men was a large part of the Dublin Brigade. Later in the book the author describes the events of Bloody Sunday, 1972 in terms of the British press releases, having the civil rights marchers throwing rocks and object at them. To the writers credit he does finally mentioned that Tony Blair as PM some thirty years later ordered another inquiry which found what eyewitnesses had reported at the time more reliable and he apologized in the name of the British people. I was very disappointed with this book.
Despite being a 90s baby, I had no idea how long the conflict had been going on or that conflicts continued into the early 2000s. The book goes into the details of various deaths and who was in power at the time but its chronology is a bit too jumbled to maintain a clear timeline as I was following along. Very brief but I'm sure anyone interested in learning more about the conflict from a completely outside perspective will learn the basics if they are just delving into the troubles.
Very nice short, concise, and yet very informative history of the class between Ireland and Britain. It is a relatively short book, as I finished it in less than a day, but it is still very good. There are longer and much more in-depth books out there, but if you want a short course, this is the book which you should do it. He did lose a star, though, because there are some proofing issues.
Brief but informative. Allot of good information provided in an entertaining way. Good background information for anyone looking for more information on the troubles.
It’s a concise brief history of that time and place—not for history buffs but gives an outline of the major events and personnel so it helps in reading Milkman and other recent books about Ireland. 4stars as it gave me what I needed.