W2B-002 History review-0.txt
Lyke allwaye to contynue?

Bruce Stewart

JONATHAN BARDON'S History of Ulster serves as a researcher's vade mecum, and a good read of a very high order. This latter trait, in a comprehensive digest of the social, cultural, and political course of affairs in north-east Ireland from the earliest times, is a notable achievement, even at the expense of handing over the narration of certain events almost entirely to other commentators. Of course there can be no doubt that the book has an ideological agenda, but it remains gracefully indulgent towards alternative readings of the past at variance with the brand of liberal unionism that pervasively informs its chapters. Taking its ground on the political fact of independent (though not sovereign) stateship in Northern Ireland since 1920, and devoting almost exactly half of its 830 pages to the record of that state in various arenas, it reads in places like a vindication of partition. In other places, however, it is a stern indictment of the error of excluding Northern Catholics from civil rights, especially in matters of housing and employment but also in regard to education and political participation - though the damage appears to have been largely self-inflicted by the hierarchy in these latter areas.

The final impact of this book is to demonstrate that there has been, in practical fact, a separate historical process in Ulster, reflecting the particular m/elange of national and religious elements ensconced there since the plantation period. And since the so-called Peace Process in which the leaderships of &/Eire/Ireland, the United Kingdom and the majority parties in Northern Ireland are now engaged seems to presuppose a recognition of the validity of this premises on all sides, there can hardly be much to criticise about its operations in a history textbook. It is very likely, moreover, that the official participants are all going to school with Headmaster Bardon as of now, and it would therefore be impertinent to regard his History as just another tome about 'the Province'. If J. H. Whyte's last published book, Interpreting Northern Ireland (1990) remains the indispensable guide to arguments and practices among politicians and worker folks on either side of the chief divisions of Ulster society, Bardon's is the text that draws all such positions into a single narrative. Virtually everything else written about Ulster is more or less partis pris compared with it, and nothing else is really half as witty - though Professor Lee's mordant account of economic failure in the southern state provides occasion for endlessly sardonic chortles - not all intentional, in view of his recurrent anxiety fits about the missing 'elites' of liberated Ireland.

Bardon's History offers something like the definitive script of liberal unionist Ulster in our generation. It provides the schedule of information, understandings, even levities, by which intelligent Ulster men and women will be assaying their historical experience for quite some time to come. Ultra-unionists (still more ultra-Protestants) will not find much comfort in it; but liberal unionists will enjoy the fun of seeing Nationalists at their most callow and other Unionists at their most intellectually fossilised. With impressive assurance Bardon tells the story of an Irish region that constitutes itself as a separate historical zone not because of its claim to geographical distinctiveness - give or take a drumlin or two it has none - but because it has provided the setting for an apparently endless series of socio-political disturbances which no Land War or subsequent freedom-fighting shenanigans could resolve.

The book kicks off in the approved Evansite fashion by insisting on the long-term interaction of various waves of natives and settlers in Ulster from neolithic times down to the present moment - or down, at least, to the American invasion which &/Eamon de Valera officially protested in 1941. All of this is fascinating to the present reviewer who lives some hundred yards from Mountsandel, County Derry, where the Cruitin first feasted on boar and salmon on a steep escarpment above the River Bann. What James Joyce - the unacknowledged master of Irish pluralism - calls 'miscegenations upon miscegenation' ensued through several millennia, and though a more or less uniform Gaelic culture emerged first and lasted longest in Ulster, the question is posed: why should the migration and emigration of Celts from parts of Scotland (together with their British neighbours) not be regarded as an additional ingredient to the brew rather than an (in) alienable foreign element? And - if that sounds like an own-goal - why should the heterogeneous Gaelic Irish consider themselves radically different from other inhabitants of the British Isles when "the genepool of Irish population probably was set by the Stone Age" ?

In such a view, "Celtic civilisation was not the creation of a separate race but a language and a way of life spread from one people to another." The tendency of this argument is patently inimical to the pieties of Irish-Ireland history and its notion of a continuous, undivided Irish nation of Gaelic racial origin; nor is it friendly to an imperialist whitewashing of the mixed legacies of a country made up of closely interwoven ethnic and cultural components. At the same time, this pleasant smorgasbord of physical and cultural aggregates does not by any means abolish the underlying problems presented by living Irish history, and kosher Gaelic Catholic nationalism is just not going to go away at the behest of centralised economic and political rationalism streaming outwards along ley-lines focussed in Whitehall and Westminster.

There is more than a trace of special pleading in the way Bardon orchestrates selected passages from the Irish annals, from the journals of shipwrecked Spanish Armadeers, dejected Gaelic bards, bemused English administrators, and Irish nationalist historians themselves, in order to portray a politically dysfunctional ancient Irish community in which tribal wars and man-made famines - punctuated by bouts of cannibalism - prevented the passing of the nation over the threshold of modern statehood. It all reads a little like David Hume's derogatory chapter in the History of England, and one almost expects to see Charles O'Connor and Sylvester O'Halloran rising from their graves to dispute such calumnies about their people. But this kind of erudite Gael-bashing is little more than a curtainraiser, and it may even be that the author has struck the very note that will laugh the nationalist historians out of their own earnestness about the glory of God and the honour of Ireland which has been the touchstone of Gaelic historiography since Four Masters.

Indeed, they too are featured here, or rather their lament at the ill-advised Flight of the Earls whose 'undutifulle departure' - in the words of an English administrator - provided the excuse for the plantation of Ulster under James I. Such inclusions make for a useful primer in all-Irish history also, and only occasionally does the writing tilt towards undue insistence, as when we hear that Red Hugh O'Donnell 'died of illness' - as Bardon puts it - in Simancas. O'Donnell was assassinated by poison at the hands of an Anglo-Irishman called Burke, or so the DNB and Standish O'Grady firmly believed and Irish historians after them. It hardly seems fair to airbrush the Ninja quotient out of Anglo-Irish history in order to show that the Gaelic Ireland was an incorrigibly ungovernable society which finally committed suicide out of aristocratic pique when the local rent-roll diminished below the level that the tyrannical native princes'amour proper could tolerate.

In the eighteenth-century chapters we hear much about the failure of nerve of the Protestant Ascendancy in the face of Catholic Emancipation, and of course the stupid exclusion of Presbyterians from citizenship, with obvious consequences in 1798. We also hear the stentorian voice of Burke chanting his marvellous description of the penal laws, a "machine of elaborate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of Man." We see the birth of the Orange Order, with its early pogrom-type attacks on rural Catholics in Tyrone-Fermanagh. We follow the struggles of the emancipationists, including notably the inept descent of Daniel O'Connell on County Down, where he was met and challenged by Henry Cooke, DD, the man who forged the union that really counts - that between the Presbyterian Synod and the Church of Ireland. By 1857 an interchange of religious and political opinions in Belfast 'on the basis of basalt' was a regular feature of the riotous scene. This sickening aspect of social and political history in Ulster is traced equitably down the generations, though much - if not most - energy from mid-way in the book goes into the economic narrative of Ulster which is this historian's particular forte (and this includes the narrative of the war-time air raids on the tragically overcrowded ghetto-slums). All in all, linen, cotton and steel spelt the momentary triumph of the Ulster entrepreneurial class but, in various fatal combinations with religion and tuberculosis, they also wove the cerements of Ulster working class - that unfortunate and profoundly self-destructive class of Irishmen and women.

A punctilious account of each tawdry phase of sectarian antagonism in Ulster - and in Ireland - since the Act of Union is perhaps the salient feature of this book. It is all done with a high impartiality that makes it clear that Ulster Catholics and Protestants have always reacted to one another in such a way as to join forces only in a downward spiral. Whether reporting the rattle of muskets at the Diamond or the various crawthumping revivalisms of both factions, the tale is told with a sardonic relish for detail that looks forward to good documentary treatment. If so, a leading figure will be Ian Paisley - arguably the premium mobile of the present troubles - who emerges in the chapters that concern him as a barbarian on a footing with the very worst in Ireland's saga of self-righteous bigots. The moment when, immediately after the death of John XXIII, he assured his congregation that the scarlet prelate was already roasting in Hell perfectly illustrates the tragicomedy of antediluvian religiosity and its hateful consequences. Equally comic, if not equally tragic, is the prospect of the Catholic hierarchy repudiating the benefits of the Welfare State on behalf of its charges for fear of Creeping Communism. It is to Archbishop Cardinal McRory that the credit goes for broadcasting in a Paschal sermon the view that the Church of Ireland (let alone Ian Paisley) is 'not even a part of the Church of Christ'."

The saga of Home Rule, the Ulster Covenant, the Rising, and the establishment of northern and southern statelets is powerfully narrated, with a number of amusing stories indicating the degree to which partition was not only grudgingly accepted but actively engineered by Irishmen of both persuasions in spite of knee-jerk protestations to the contrary. One such protest, cited from James Craig's journal following his visit to de Valera in Dublin, amusingly encapsulates the element of fantasy-life in the Irish leader's mental make-up that made it possible for Craig to posture as a modern democrat of some urbanity faced with a political troglodyte.

"After half an hour he reached the era of Brian Boru. After another half hour he had and advanced to the period of some king a century or two later. By this time I was getting tired. Fortunately, a fine Kerry Blue entered the room..."

Bardon digs particularly deep in his portrayal of Carson (deeper than A. T. Q. Stewart in the Macmillan series), and if Kevin Myers is still in listening-distance, he may note the Dublin Unionist was not the law-abiding pacificist and crypto-socialist that Irishman's Diary has been tempted to suppose: "'Crawford,' he said decisively to the organiser of the gun-running, 'I 'll see you through this business if I have to go to prison for it.' "

The one nationalist who shines in Bardon's narrative - other than many named and unnamed figures who availed of the 1947 Education Act to become administrators, civil servants, entrepreneurs, professionals and poets - is Gerry Fitt, who first vocally insisted on the necessity of recognising the roots of Unionism in a popular way of feeling and sought, accordingly, a political solution to the inter-community strife in the context of the Northern Ireland state. Indeed, Bardon reiterates the Fittite precept more than once in the form of a reproof to leaders north and south. "Southern politicians assumed that leaders in the North were responsible for dividing the people there but the roots of sectarianism ran deep in Northern Ireland society"; so much for the 'Orange Card' an the British conspiracy theory. He continues, "while they [the Ulster Protestant leaders] can be condemned for failing to give a positive lead in promoting reconciliation, such men were merely reflecting views very widely held." None of this of course exonerates those governors of Northern Ireland who advertised and supported principles of outright political prejudice in the government of the Northern state, such as - notoriously - Basil Brooke. Bardon comments: "No doubt a sizeable proportion of Catholics would never have been reconciled to the political status quo but the tragedy was that Brookeborough seemed incapable of recognising the benefits of reconciling any of the minority to the regime."
