Session 4: Claiming Sovereignty
Chair: Prof Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College Dublin)
Prof Paul Bew (Queen’s University Belfast). Paul was indisposed and was unable to give his paper.
Nationalism and Unionism: A Churchillian Perspective 1912-22.
The paper was to concentrate on the decline of the Redmondite vision for Ireland and the renewal and transformation of Ulster Unionism during the War. But it was to come from a unique perspective; that of Winston Churchill. Partly because of resentments over Churchill’s attitude towards Irish neutrality in the Second World War, Irish historians have traditionally neglected the content of Churchill’s thinking on Ireland.
Whilst among non Irish historians, Churchill’s thinking on Ireland is almost the only aspect of his career which has not been relentlessly over studied because it appears so marginal in the context of the really big issues, in a strange way the mould set on this subject by George Dangerfield’s ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ (1935) is still in place. This paper hoped to use Churchill’s often surprising views as a means of re-opening a well rehearsed and now somewhat melancholic view on Irish sovereignty.
Dr Fearghal McGarry (Queen’s University Belfast)
1916 and Irish Republicanism
The 1916 Rising – and, in particular, the proclamation of the Irish Republic by Patrick Pearse on Easter Monday – is regarded as a turning point in the history of modern Ireland. But how representative of the militant organisations that brought about the Rising was the progressive republican vision outlined in the Proclamation? This paper argued that the (political) success of the Easter Rising, and the emergence of both the Rising and the Proclamation as iconic symbols of Irish nationhood have obscured the weakness of republican ideology at the time, and the incoherent nature of the competing ideological influences (Fenian republicanism, Griffith’s advanced nationalism, Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism, Catholic nationalism) that shaped Irish separatism after 1916.
Drawing on first-hand accounts by rank-and-file and leading participants in revolutionary organisations such as the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Brotherhood, this paper questions the importance of republicanism as the ideological driving force behind the rebellion. It suggests that the broader wartime context was much more influential in explaining the violence of 1916 (which occurred during a period of republican marginalisation and decline).
How does this relate to commemoration of 1916 and the revolutionary decade? The importance of the wartime context emphasises how the Easter Rising, the displacement of the constitutional nationalist Irish Party by Sinn Féin and the political violence which followed should be interpreted not as a process that occurred parallel to the Great War but as a part of that wider event (as the importance of the conscription crisis to Sinn Féin’s 1918 general election triumph also demonstrates).
A greater awareness of the divergence between the egalitarian ideals of the Proclamation and the ideas and beliefs of ‘ordinary’ revolutionaries provides insight into the gulf between the progressive nature of republican rhetoric and the more conservative realities of the Irish state which emerged after the revolution. It also highlights the inadequacy of imposing a single narrative on the rebels of 1916, and the need to move away from polarised approaches towards the Rising as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing to a more balanced appreciation of its positive and negative consequences.
To be continued