July 6 1974
All history, being the story of men, is full of irony; Anglo-Irish history has perhaps more than its fair share of it. So small a country, so great a burden; so straightforward a problem, so infinitely complicated and circumlocutory the attempts to solve it.
“Ireland”, as the New Statesman said in 1971, “undermined the regime of Richard II, it darkened the last years of the great Queen Elizabeth, it broke Charles I’s personal dictatorship, it forced William Pitt out of office, split Gladstone’s Party in two, brought Britain in 1914 to the verge of military insurrection and destroyed the triumphant coalition of Lloyd George”.
It did indeed, and a good deal more beside. And it continues, into the late twentieth century, into the world of the Common Market and Nato and global politics, to cost the people and government of Britain dearly in men, money, time and energy.
The supreme irony of this is that it is principally due to past British policies, to a long, drawn-out unwillingness to face disagreeable facts, and to a certain amount of political laziness that modern Britain is faced with a completely anachronistic state of affairs.
To hold Ireland as an outer defence of Britain and later of her empire, the poisonous weed of sectarianism was introduced and fostered by the importation of outsiders to whom the hatred of Catholicism was not only a way of life but the high road to wealth and prosperity and power. How clever it must have seemed at the time, even if some consciences trembled a little at the blasphemy. How sadly out of date, how sterile, how shaming it all is today.
To hold Ireland as an outer defence of Britain and later of her empire, the poisonous weed of sectarianism was introduced and fostered by the importation of outsiders to whom the hatred of Catholicism was not only a way of life but the high road to wealth and prosperity and power
Now all three political parties in Britain and voters who elect them are well aware of the root cause of the trouble in Northern Ireland and have no intention of paying out more men and money to sustain it. The irony is that there are those who still can hardly believe this.
The British White Paper has reiterated the basic necessity for power-sharing. But there remain factions who hope that if only they hold out long enough they will get subsidised sectarianism back again. And, with history’s usual irony, it now lies with the British themselves to disabuse them finally of the idea that sectarianism can pay.
