Confronting the Past for the Sake of the Future(1)

Seamus Murphy SJ,

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.

This article is based on his forthcoming book, Confronting the Irish Past.

The 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement outlined structures of power­ sharing in Northern Ireland and supporting roles for the British and Irish governments. It also contained something new in Irish history, namely, a commitment by unionist and nationalist representatives to the following . principles:

• recognition of the 'legacy of suffering' arising from intercommunal political violence;

• dedication to the 'achievement of reconciliation and mutual trust'·

'• to 'partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands';

• 'absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means' of addressing political differences;

• acknowledgement of 'the substantial differences between our continuing and equally legitimate political aspirations';

• recognition of the right of 'people of Northem Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish, or British, or both, as they may so choose.' 2

The signatories knew that the Agreement was not a conclusion but a beginning, since it meant working towards major cultural change. Can this change be grafted onto our respective identities? Can we change the pattern of history?

The uses of history

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political thinker who survived the Nazis and wrote on totalitarianism, held that certain parts of history needed not just to be understood but also to be confronted.3

Nietzsche said people need history for three purposes:4 (1) to preserve knowledge of the past (the historian's role); (2) to provide inspiring heroes and founders, meaning and identity (the leader's role); and (3) to confront history's dark side (wars and oppression), resisting fatalism 5 about seemingly eternal ethnic conflicts, and giving voice to history's silenced and erased victims (the critic's role). Without falsifying it (1), the historical narrative should be reconstructed and re-membered so as to be life-giving for the needs of the age (2, 3).

In 2007 then-President McAleese expressed a hope for a changed attitude to our history: 'Where previously our history has been characterised by a plundering of the past for things to separate and differentiate us from one another, our future now holds the optimistic possibility that Ireland will become a better place where we will ... revisit the past and find there elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately overlooked. '6

While academic history deals with the past, memory concerns the present. We - not just historians - choose our historical heroes, choose the historical victi1ns to redeem from erasure, and choose whether our choices will be exclusive and bitter or inclusive and forgiving. The 1998 principle of' inclusivity challenges us to confront our history and convert our memories.

The Decade of Centenaries

The recent 'Decade of Centenaries' commemorations marked the events of the fateful 1912-1923 period: the third Home Rule bill in 1912, where Britain conu11itted to devolving government; the formation in 1912-1914 of armed unionist and nationalist militias; the 1916 Rising, Sinn Fein 's victory in the 1918 general election, and the 1919-1921 IRA war; partition and the establishment of a northern Home Rule government; the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the 1922 general election in the south, and the 1922-23 civil war.

Endorsed by referenda in Northern Ireland and the Republic, the 1998 Agreement has overriding moral and political authority underwriting its principles as establishing an ethical framework for the future nationalist­ unionist relationship.

Accordingly the post-1998 historical narrative must not ignore the principles' normative force. That implies interpreting Irish history since 1600, and particularly the decisive 1912-1923 period, within the framework of the principles.

Sadly the Republic commemorated the 1912-1923 events as if nothing in the 1968-1998 period challenged traditional interpretations of the earlier events. The two sets of events are part of the same history: What happened later cannot be understood without knowing its causes in the earlier events, and what happened later casts light on the earlier events. Quarantining interpretation of the earlier events from the later events treats them as (in Nietzsche's term) an antiquarian's collection of pious relics, irrelevant to contemporary life.

The 1998 retrospective

The Agreement's principles reflect the tragic sense of futile suffering and refusal of recognition to the other community, with a note of repentance­ and-promise-of-amendment. This is strongest in principle no. 1, which acknowledges the 'legacy of suffering' from political violence, all but admitting that the violence each side visited on the other was wrong. Nos. 1-5, saying that violence and intolerance must end, logically rule out glorifying past violence and 'commemorating-against' the other community. Implicit in these commitments is recognition that they were denied in previous decades. Thus, the principles cannot but apply also to the violence and intolerance of 1912-1923.

At least the 1968-1998 turmoil ended with recognition that the values and ideas driving and rationalising violence and intolerance were morally wrong because of what they did to the victims, socially corrosive in dividing people and making them fearful of trusting others, and politically destructive in blocking negotiated compromise.7 No such recognition or change of thinking occurred among unionists or nationalists after the violent decade of 1912-1923.

Condemnation of 1912-1923 leaders (Redmond, Carson, Clarke, Pearse, Craig, Collins, de Valera) is pointless: the past cannot be changed. What we can do is evaluate the influence of their ideas and example on our mentality and political culture. The dead were responsible for their actions that would have foreseeably destructive effects on future generations; today, we alone are responsible for how we let ourselves be influenced by them.8 No false piety should prevent us from seeing the ways in which their values and actions are incompatible with the Agreement's principles or refusing to dissociate our politics and values from theirs.

Reviewing 1912-1923

John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) achieved Home Rule when the 1912 Home Rule bill became law in 1914. Their hardline John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) achieved Home Rule when the 1912 Home Rule bill became law in 1914. Their hardline opponents Sinn Fein (SF) crushed the IPP in the 1918 election. SF's political descendants, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, have ruled the South since 1922. They felt their political legitimacy depended on the 1916 Rising and the 1919-1921 IRA war being seen as necessary and justified.9 That required discrediting Home Rule as illusory and constitutional politics as ineffective. The historical narrative trivialised Home Rule and denounced the IPP as traitors for refusing to coerce Ulster and seeking compromise with unionists

- in a word, for loving politics too much and failing to appreciate the value of violence.

That meant ignoring not just how revolutionary the granting of Home Rule was for the UK at the high tide of pre-1914 imperialism, but also how unionists viewed it as a kind of Armageddon for their community. In 1910, Redmond, believing it was now-or-never for Home Rule, demanded it as the price of keeping the Liberals in power. While he and the other IPP leaders hoped the unionists would 'settle down' with Home Rule, the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912 and the subsequent formation of the Ulster Volunteers made it clear that some compromise, some opt-out, would have to be granted to the North.

Home Rule was revolutionary also in that it amounted to a partial British withdrawal. It meant that the nationalist challenge was no longer how to get out from under Britain but how to compromise with the unionists on governing Ireland. That was difficult for nationalists: the IPP slowly moved towards it, but the outbreak of World War I overwhelmed them, derailing constitutional nationalism and with it all hope of a deal with the unionists. Serious nationalist-unionist talks would not occur again until 1973.

The formation and arming of the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers in 1912-1914 threatened civil war between Catholics and Protestants. The long Irish perspective points to its antecedents from 1641 to the Belfast sectarian riots in the 1890s. Principles 1 and 4 are a post-factum repudiation of those actions and the thinking behind them.

Principles 2, 3, 5 and 6 implicitly reject refusal of recognition to the other community. The refusal is present in the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Proclamation, influential statements of each community's position. The Covenant's protest against Home Rule never mentions Catholics or nationalists, nor their desire for self-government. While the 1916 Proclamation mentions a 'minority', it doesn't recognise its identity as Protestant or unionist. It dismisses its opposition to Home Rule as unreal, manipulated into existence by Britain.10

The unionists were paranoid about the Catholics, while the nationalists pretended the unionists didn't matter. The United Irishmen's republican tradition had proclaimed the ideal of Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter united under the common name of Irishman. While laudable, it suggested that Protestant-Catholic division was minor, and gaining independence from Britain was major. But after 1912, it was the other way around, even though nationalists did not see it until the 1970s. The 1921 Treaty contained many things that nationalists disliked, but they all disappeared in less than twenty years, save that which Britain could not give, viz. unionist consent to a united Ireland. To southerners in the 1970s, it came as a surprise to read how little partition had figured in the Dail debate on the Treaty.

Nationalists also deluded themselves into thinking of themselves as tolerant since they, unlike unionists, were not bigoted about religion. What they were intolerant of was unionism. That has not gone away: principle 6 notwithstanding, many nationalists still feel that to be a unionist is to be morally deficient.

Three civil conflicts

Between 1912 and 1923 Ireland experienced three civil wars: a Catholic v. Protestant clash (1912-1922), the war of independence (1919-1921) and the South's civil war (1922-1923). The third, the 1922-1923 civil war, has long been acknowledged as tragic, and those on each side are remembered as belonging to the Irish nation: mutual recognition and reconciliation has happened there. The same cannot be said of the other conflicts.

The Catholic v. Protestant clash loomed in 1914 with the threat of civil war between two armed militias. The 1916 Rising widened the gulf, since unionists saw any nationalist war against Britain as a war against them. As the IRA's 1970-1998 war was in practice a war against unionists so the 1919-1921 war of independence was in the North a Catholic v. Protestant conflict.11 There were pogroms against Catholics in Belfast and massacres of Protestants in the Bandon Valley, County Cork, and at Altnaveigh, County Armagh, in early 1922.

The Decade of Centenaries commemorations virtually ignored the Catholic v. Protestant conflict. That was a violation of principles 1 and 4. While nobody denies that such atrocities happened, the tendency has been to dismiss them as isolated events, devoid of political or structural significance. After the 1970-1998 conflict, where the IRA's 'war of liberation' was an anti­-unionist war, that tendency is unacceptable: reconciliation between unionist and nationalist cannot happen without the larger nationalist community acknowledging that it happened back then, and not just recently.

Turning to the 1919-1921 war of independence, in the South it was really a southern civil war launched by a Gaelic nationalist alliance of the Volunteers, SF, the IRB, and cultural nationalists against a nationalist establishment of the IPP, a 'green' section of Dublin Castle, a rising Catholic middle class, the Catholic bishops and the RlC.12 The 1916 Rising did no damage to Britain, gladdened unionist hearts, and undermined the IPP. As SF's main enemy in Northern Ireland since the 1970s was the SDLP, so the enemy of SF and the Volunteers in 1916 and 1919-1921 was the IPP. In 1918, the Volunteers and SF feared most a Home Rule administration led by the IPP. In the words of one: 'Better martial law and General Maxwell'. 13

Starting at Soloheadbeg, the 1919-1921 war was initiated by the Volunteers/IRA against the RIC, whose lower ranks were mainly Catholic nationalists. In consequence, the South has had an uneasy conscience about the RlC: reluctance to shoot members of their own community was one reason why many counties were inactive in the war.14 This unease has been covered up by referring to the conflict as the Tan War (the Tans being British), even though the Tans arrived late in the war, or, as Frank O'Connor did in his short story 'Guests of the Nation', presenting it as a normally 'gallant' war between British and Irish soldiers.

As it has done with both sides of the 1922-1923 civil war, nationalist Ireland must (a) recognize the Catholic v. Protestant conflict and (b) commemorate both sides of the 1919-1921 war. The principles require inclusiveness with respect to the IPP and the RlC.15

The political vacuum

In the 1918 election, SF became the largest nationalist party. It was not ready to govern.16 While the IPP had been moving to dialogue with the unionists, SF was in denial about the problem, imagining the unionists could be crushed by force. lt had no worked-out policies, other than Arthur Griffith's apolitical idea of withdrawing from Westminster and pretending that they actual1y governed Ireland.

In late 1918, the IPP had begun to lobby Westminster for dominion status for Ireland. In January 1919, Lloyd George sent Lord Haldane to sound out SF on dominion status for the South.17 SF's lack of leadership meant the initiative went nowhere. Instead, SF withdrew from political engagement with Westminster by declaring independence and setting up the First Dail as a constituent assembly on January 21 without any other parties being represented and with only a minority of its own elected members present.18

By refusing to engage Westminster or the unionists, and pretending it governed all Ireland, SF failed to use the power the electorate had given it, thereby creating a political vacuum. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum, and into it entered the gunmen: on the day the Dail first met the Volunteers initiated their war at Soloheadbeg. The Dail did not know if it wanted a war and did not endorse it until a few months before the truce in July 1921. It neither would nor could control the Volunteers, who did not want Dail control.

The Treaty granted dominion status. But since that was possible before the war began, the war was pointless. Also, the IRA's tactic of destroying the civil administration and police was irrational, since any incoming devolved government would need them.

SF's policies and actions from 1919 to 1921 are incompatible with the 1998 principles. They are not models to commemorate uncritically or to imitate.

We choose our memories

The 1998 principles reject war and intolerance and require political openness and engagement. However, narratives of political negotiations do not easily make for stirring and inspiring history in the way heroic battles (like the GPO or the Somme in 1916) do. Changing that requires elevating the constructive political leaders and indulging less in admiring the gunmen.

Nietzsche holds that our heroes and identity-forming models must be life­ giving. Violence makes victims: the killed, maimed, and terrorized, and the perpetrators who have to live afterwards with what they have done.19 The Agreement means gunmen can no longer be our heroes. As Nietzsche also indicated, we need to recover the victims of nationalist-unionist conflicts: the victims come first, not the heroes. Our heroes must be those who made peace, not those who made victims.

We cannot change our history, and academic objectivity forbids falsifying the narrative. But we can choose which parts of our history to highlight so as to shape the future identity to which we aspire. And we can choose to downplay and no longer glorify the gunmen.20 These are not easy choices. But commitment to living the 1998 Agreement's principles requires taking responsibility for the political effects of memory.

Footnotes:

1  George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949):'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.' Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1775), IV. Ii: ' ... we will not anticipate the past. So mind, young people - our retrospection will be all to the future' (Mrs Malaprop).

2  Nos. l-5 appear in The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, chapter l (Declaration of Support), and no. 6 in chapter 2 (Constitutional Issues), sect 1 (vi).

3  See Hannah Arendt, The Origin oJTotalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. viii. See also Tony Judt, 'The Past ls Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe', Daedalus 121.4 (1992), 83-118 on a nation's duty to face its past.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Hisfo,y for Life, in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67: 'History [the narrative] pertains to the living person in three respects: as a being who acts, a being who preserves and reveres, a being who suffers and seeks deliverance.'

5 Fatalism refers here to the superstitious Marxist-fascist idea that the god History 'decides'. One historian, asked whether it was wrong for the Volunteers to have killed the RIC constables at Soloheadbeg in January 1919, thereby starting the 1919-1921 war, replied: 'The RIC men were on the wrong side of History.' This amoral position essentially says that might makes right and losers should be forgotten. It was not Nietzsche's view.

6 President Mary McAleese, the Longford Lecture 'Changing History', 2007 < https://www. longfordtrust.org/longford-lecture/past-lectures/lectures-archive/president-mary-mcaleese­ changing-history/ >. Easy optimism is risky: such sentiments have been expressed before. In 1829, proposing the Catholic Emancipation bill in the House of Commons, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel spoke in similar terms.

7 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 56: 'Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.' She means the power of citizens, once free of tribal terror, to work out their political structures freely and dialogically.

8 Unlike Pearse, who sought to shift responsibility to the dead in his essay 'Ghosts', where he claimed that he (and all true Gaels) had no choice but to obey the ghosts of the dead generations commanding war.

9 Republican legitimacy comes from the consent of the (living) people. The legitimacy of the current British government comes from the last general election, not from Magna Carta or Parliament's victory over Charles I.

lO SF's l918 election manifesto attacked the IPP as the enemy of the Irish people. It ignored the unionists, as did the First Dail's Declaration of Independence.

11 See Robert Lynch, The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition, 1920-1922 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006).

12 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of independence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2002), p. 202: '... the conflict resembled a civil war, and shared responsibility with the later conflict for many of the divisions ... which persisted for the rest of the century'; Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 581: 'The paradox of 1916 remains: a Catholic revolt against a Catholic political establishment ... '; Art O'Connor, Director of Agriculture in the first Dail, stated: 'The struggle of the Volunteers was a struggle with the Irish people more than a struggle with the invader and indeed the real uphill fight which Sinn Fein has had is with the lrish people', cited in Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble (London: Profile, 2015), p. 186; John Ellis, 'The Degenerate and the Martyr: Nationalist Propaganda and the Contestation of lrishness,1913-1918', Eire-Ireland, 35, nos. 3-4 (2000).

13 R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923 (New York: Norton, 2014), p. 260.

14 Conor McNamara, War and Revolution in the West of Ireland: Galway, 1913-22 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2018), p. 216: 'While subsequent generations superimposed a retrospective romance onto the independence struggle, the hostility that the growth of the physical force movement generated within the nationalist community was jettisoned from popular and historical memory.'

15 In 2020, the government gave way to protests against commemorating the RIC. Jeffrey Donaldson, DUP leader, commented that the refusal to accept RIC members as part of the nationalist community showed the hollowness of Southern protestations of willingness to embrace unionists in some future agreed Ireland.

16 Fr O'Flanagan, SF vice-president, remarked: 'The people have voted Sinn Fein. What we have to do now is explain to people what Sinn Fein is' (Derry Journal, I January 1919).

17 For details, see Trevor Lloyd, 'Partition-within-partition', International Journal, 53/3 (1998), 505-521. Like so much else in the British 'constitution', dominion status had the vi1tue of being vague.

18 De Valera, Griffith, and Collins were absent. De Valera was abroad for most of the 1919-192 l war.

I9 Many IRA combatants of 1919-1923 never wanted to speak of it later.

20 Tn 2016, prominent Southern politicians said that we 'must rescue the 1916 Rising from the men of violence'. One wonders if they understood the contradiction in what they were saying.