Diarmaid Ferriter: Tory Brexiteers should study War of Independence
Absolutism about the backstop will only drive Britain up a political cul-de-sac
The first Dáil in 1919. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Exactly a century ago there was a muted response from London about the meeting of the first Dáil and the challenge it represented to the British government. As far as Winston Churchill, the secretary for war, was concerned, there was no Irish problem; the cabinet conclusions reached on February 4th, 1919, recorded his view of Ireland that “there was no place in the world where there was less danger at the present time”.
A mixture of condescension and delusion prompted such remarks. Some Irish republicans saw violence as the only way to provoke a British response, which in due course it did. But what is also notable is that even Irish nationalists who abhorred the violence, in historian Michael Laffan’s words, “came to accept the efficacy of violence”. Former Irish nationalist MP TM Healy, for example, suggested of the British in a private letter in July 1919 that “nothing but the threat or use of force will move them to do anything”. The IRA, many of whom disparaged politicians, did its own thing, and politicians such as Sinn Féin’s Arthur Griffith, who had misgivings about the killings, preferred to turn a blind eye because they could see, against their expectations, that the violence was effective in puncturing British self-deception about how it could manage the mere Irish.