I spent four years in London in the afterglow of Queen Elizabeth’s historic state visit to Ireland which one senior courtier described to me as “one of the defining moments of Her Majesty’s reign”.
That was followed by President Higgins’ return visit in 2014 whose success confirmed that British-Irish relations had entered a halcyon era, a kind of “end of history” moment when the warmth of friendship had appeared to spread a balm over our fractured past.
I can recall an aura of gratification about a “job well done”, but then along came Brexit to plunge Dublin-London ties into a cold storage from which they have only just re-emerged. It would not take too many political twists in the coming years to leave relations in the hands of a left-leaning coalition in Dublin facing a Reform UK administration in London. Whither then?
In These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland Past and Future, Philip Stephens describes the record of British political leaders with regard to Ireland as one of “insouciant neglect”, veering between “ignorance, irritation and indifference”.
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The conclusion to be drawn is that, if Ireland is to be steered in a positive direction, most of the navigation will need to be done from Dublin, although Stephens is critical of Irish governments for having kept Northern Ireland mostly out of sight until the outbreak of violence there made such a strategy impossible to sustain.
There is, of course, a defining asymmetry in Anglo-Irish relations, born of our respective size and contrasting historical experience. It means that, while many Irish people have at least a passing knowledge of Britain, that is not often reciprocated. We must hope that the sensitive treatment of Irish history in massively popular podcasts such as The Rest is History and Empire will help rectify that comprehension gap.
Stephens, a storied Financial Times columnist, is a valuable witness, well-placed to pass judgement on the vexed chronicle of Anglo-Irish history, as he sees himself as both British and Irish, having spent childhood summers in the Co Mayo homeplace of his mother, where his experience was refreshingly positive.
He is also an admirer of Ireland’s emergence as a liberal European state and an unrelenting critic of Brexit Britain. My sense is that Ireland’s economic transformation has been a key factor in reshaping British perceptions and enabling the emergence of the more mature, respectful British-Irish dialogue of recent vintage.
Stephens draws on Irish as well as British sources, giving credit for the ultimate success of the peace process to British and Irish politicians and officials alike. Department of the Taoiseach secretary general Dermot Nally’s rapport with his British counterpart, Robert Armstrong, is rightly credited with having helped steer relations through some very tricky times in the 1980s.
He flags the importance of John Major’s unlikely friendship with Albert Reynolds forged at EU finance ministers’ meetings before the pair became heads of government.
Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair are given equal recognition for having laboriously shunted the parties towards agreement in 1998.
Stephens sketches the historical background with reliable pithiness in a manner that will be enlightening to his British readers, although familiar ground for many in Ireland. His observation that even after the Act of Union Ireland was treated as a colony rather than a partner rings true.
Some version of a partnership was what O’Connell, Parnell and Redmond actually wanted, but that option was passed up.
The Famine was the ultimate expression of a neglectful colonial mindset, in that it is difficult to imagine such an existential crisis being permitted to unfold in Yorkshire or Lancashire. He sees the Famine as a “reservoir of Irish rebellion”, not least because it created exiled Irish communities animated by a grievance against Britain that persisted across the generations and ultimately, through the political influence of Irish America, impinged on British policy in Ireland.
What comes across from his analysis is how little account was taken of Irish affairs in London, except when they encroached on British political life as occasionally occurred – during the Home Rule crisis of 1912-1914, at the height of the Troubles and most recently during the fallout from the Brexit referendum.
Even unionists enjoyed little sympathy in Whitehall and Westminster, often being seen as an awkward anachronism. There is a revealing quote from Tony Blair, reflecting his irritation when he was prime minister at being treated by his vocally-British unionist interlocutors, as if he himself had nothing to do with Britain.
These Divided Isles gives a lively account of the negotiations that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty in which the Collins-Churchill relationship occupies centre stage. He shows Michael Collins to have had a clear-eyed view of the British negotiators. Churchill was always in pursuit of “political gain” while Lloyd George was “all craft and wiliness”.
As soon as the Treaty arrangements had bedded in, the British government was eager to wash its hands of Ireland, regarding it as “a burden shed”.
Stephens quotes Churchill’s well-known depiction of “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” and “the integrity of their quarrel”, but a slightly earlier Churchillian observation is more telling. It reflects his resentment that a small, sparsely-populated island “sways our councils, shakes our parties, infects us with her bitterness, convulses our passions, and deranges our actions”. As far as Churchill was concerned, with the empire intact it was good riddance to Ireland in 1922.
Stephens shows that British politicians were well aware of what was happening in Belfast after partition, but declined to do anything about it because they feared pushback from unionists against any intervention they might have contemplated, and concluded that Northern Ireland was best left to its own devices.
The British government thus missed an opportunity for reconciliation just as their early 19th century predecessors had done by failing to accompany the Act of Union with Catholic emancipation.
What would have happened had the British government kept a careful eye on the actions of the unionist administration in Belfast, insisting that it pay more attention to the welfare of the Catholic minority? Alas, they were preoccupied with protecting the empire and propping up the UK’s declining international standing in the interwar period and beyond.
Stephens is correct to point a finger too at successive Dublin governments for doing little or nothing to back up their expressed desire for unity.
He quotes WB Yeats as a lonely voice urging a more inclusive “system of culture” that could represent “the whole of the country”. It has to be said, though, that no amount of cultural gymnastics is likely to have lured unionists towards any acceptance of unity.
His analysis is strongest when dealing with the shift from conflict to peace which he witnessed as a journalist. He has benefited from being able to consult Irish officials such as Daithí Ó Ceallaigh, Seán O’hUiginn, Noel Dorr and Michael Lillis as well as their British counterparts.
One of the real plusses of recent times has been the comfortable rapport developed between senior officials on both sides, which contrasts with the dismissive attitudes of past generations of British mandarins. In 1970, British ambassador John Peck was warned by colleagues in London that the Irish were “untrustworthy, idle and irresponsible”.
It is no wonder that Stephens judges the British system to have been woefully unprepared for the outbreak of violence in 1969. He shows that Harold Wilson toyed with the idea of Britain washing its hands of Northern Ireland, but later stood aside as the Sunningdale Agreement was overturned by loyalist resistance.
Stephens’ gaze into the future deserves to be taken seriously. His analysis will disappoint those who want to rush the fences on unity. He judges a united Ireland to be plausible but not yet probable and wants to know “what unity would look like?”
Removal of the Border would create a different Ireland, something whose design needs to be worked on in advance of a referendum. He argues convincingly that a narrow majority for unity, while legally decisive, would not be conducive to a successful future for Ireland, and notes the polling evidence suggesting resistance to moves designed to accommodate unionist traditions within a united Ireland.
The work of the New Ireland Forum is rarely referred to these days but Stephens resurrects its exploration of federal and confederal solutions, wondering if they might offer an option for dealing with the British question in a new Ireland.
In the event of a unity vote, he argues that London would retain a responsibility to help make a success of the new dispensation, including by being willing to defray some of the costs of unity during a transitional period.
Seamus Mallon’s warning about the prospect of a future Ireland being ungovernable if a sizeable number of Ulster unionists withheld their consent reverberates through his concluding chapter as does essayist Hubert Butler’s argument that “the passage of time be left to work its magic”. Stephens points to the importance of securing “loser’s consent”. As he puts it, “majoritarianism has been tested to destruction in Ireland”.
The recent record of the two governments in labouring together in search of solutions for Northern Ireland gives me confidence that, whatever may come their way, they will ultimately be able to figure things out between them. As for a future accommodation between nationalism and unionism, that is the key Irish question that needs answering. With an indifferent Britain looking in other directions, it’s now a matter for ourselves alone.
Further reading
The Isles: A History by Norman Davies (Macmillan, 1999). A bit of a door-stopper, but an interesting attempt by a major historian to look at the Irish and British stories in parallel.
One Good Day: My Journey to the Good Friday Agreement by David Donoghue (Gill, 2022). A rare account of the peace process by an Irish official. There ought to be more of them for the historical record.
Fatal Path: British Government and the Irish Revolution, 1910-1922 by Ronan Fanning (Faber & Faber, 2013). A compelling account of those decisive years in Anglo-Irish relations.
The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter (Profile, 2019). Covers the same ground as Philip Stephens but, as a historian, eschews looking into the future.
Making Sense of a United Ireland by Brendan O’Leary (Sandycove, 2022). The leading academic analysis of the outlook for Irish unity.
The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 by Charles Townshend (Allen Lane, 2021). An engaging account of how partition came about.
Daniel Mulhall is a former Irish ambassador in Berlin, London and Washington. His latest publication is Pilgrim Soul: WB Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (Dublin: New Island Books, 2023)
