“The cool heads and shared humility that made the Good Friday Agreement possible are rare exceptions in a troubled, assymetric history.”
You mean the heads that allowed terrorists to go free and left our soldiers – who had risked life and limb – to spend the rest of their lives under threat of prosecution? Those heads? And the IRA still murdering people today…
Exactly.The disgraceful GFA* was one of the worst “sell outs” since we shot ‘Breaker’ Morant’ or indeed, Admiral Byng.
Good to see the recent case against two former members of the Parachute Regiment was dismissed . The Judge was particularly scathing about the Prosecution, who by rights should dragged to Tyburn to suffer the traditional penalty.
Get out of your own way Charles. NI was always going to blow. I’m afraid you’re not in reality if you can’t acknowledge the mistake that was made in giving in to a minority of Protestants in NI who’d been sabre-rattling against Irish Home Rule. These stubborn people can’t and won’t run the show any longer in NI and on the island. They are a small minority of people who have for too long sucked English teat.
Couldn’t agree more. We should have ditched the place in 1914, had Asquith not been, to lapse into the vernacular, such a gobshite.
1921 was a farce, yet it is surprising how long it endured. Still on the ‘home’ straight now!
“The circumspection that the Irish use in their treaties in that court (Spain), who considering that their affairs do in no way pertain to us [v. dishonest], are wont not only curiously to conceal the same from us, but also to desire the King’s ministers not to communicate them with us.”
Thomas Fitzherbert (1602)
An interesting article. English intolerance, insularity and above all ignorance have repeatedly brought damage to Ireland, but paradoxically too they have also provided the solutions for us to that damage. One does not have to go back as far as the seventeenth century either. Along with partition (the wonderful fruits of which we all still reaping, sigh), Britain generated an economic war with Ireland in the early 1930s, in a failed attempt to strangle the infant Irish Republic at birth. It was incredible really. Never in history has a conquering power, after (finally) leaving demanded ‘compensation’ from the ‘natives’ for the lands which they had stolen from them in the first place. Bonkers really. The consequences were legion and profoundly stupid: the ‘sanctions’ were rebuffed as Britain wanted Irish beef, the ‘treaty ports’ were wisely recovered and the whole episode ensured that Ireland effectively had to remain neutral during WWII so as to ensure our independence (though we gave you lots of help, unofficially, of course).
It is amazing really, but many in Britain, appear still to be blissfully unaware (one-sided history teaching perhaps) that Ireland has a v. long history of independent relations with continental Europe. The same incidentally is also true of Scotland, of which I know less, but there was always a strong Scottish-French connection. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries the Irish HQ-in-exile, both church and state were at: Salamanca, then Louvain, then Paris. We have become used to this, you see. Seen from this side of the Irish Sea there is a regular pattern in English history of repeated ‘Brexits’. So, it’s always wise to have a Plan B. Intolerance, envy and spite are a costly business, and ultimately nobody ‘wins’.
The amount of Irish centres in continental Europe between the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and the Act of Union and its aftermath (even later) are legion. I recall being in the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt some time ago at a reception and wondered were there any Irish officers among the portraits of Austrian and Holy Roman Imperial generals. Just above me was Laval Nugent Graf von Westmeath, after which I looked no further (which I regret now). Though these links were heightened after the Reformation and Penal Law period, they built on older links. There was a network of Irish monasteries on continental Europe which proceeded the Norman invasion of Ireland by centuries.
True. Also, I think some evidence has begun to emerge in recent years that there was a domus Scottorum in Rome at a much earlier period than previously known. The eighth century, if not earlier. In hindsight, it was no coincidence that Maynooth was founded, with a royal grant, the same year as the Orange Order. Dividia et imperia, Greeks and their gifts … mar a deirtear!
Somebody ought to do a study of the position that Maynooth and the Pontifical Irish College in Rome took during the Irish Civil War. Maynooth supported the Treaty; the Roman seminary opposed it and made representations to the Vatican on behalf of the Republicans. This is one of the reasons that W T Cosgrave’s government wanted a Nuncio in the Irish Free State and an Irish embassy to the Holy See though the Irish bishops were lukewarm on the topic. The Pope already had an alternative Irish embassy of nearly three centuries standing.
True. I don’t know enough about that, but perhaps the difference was generational too. Were they generally younger men who were seminarians in Rome at that time?
I think it was more the staff than the students – there was little age difference between the student groups in both colleges. It could be that the bishops preferred to locate academically gifted firebrands in Rome rather than at home where they could do less harm.
By the way Peadar, a chara. In the end, as far as I know, Thomas Fitzherbert (quoted above) and his family were reconciled to the Faith. They perhaps made the mistake of leaving him too long in Madrid! Interestingly, while loudly denounced back home for ‘going pope’, he had one very vocal defender re rights of conscience; none other than Dr Bedell of Kilmore, optimus Anglorum.
Over roughly the same time period say 1600-1812, where the British failed to eradicate Catholicism in Ireland the Germans*, succeeded in Bohemia with the outstanding assistance of the Society of Jesus, it must be said.
After the Battle of the White Mountain, in 1620, (which precipitated the 30 years War), no effort was spared to exterminate the heresy of the Hussites.
German ruthlessness triumphed over British indolence.
(* In this particular case mainly a sub-species known today as Austrians).
This was once the jewell in the crown of Irish colleges overseas. Though the mid-20th century Irish bishops didn’t want young priests coming back from Spain with Falangist sympathies, they way they treated the last rector of the college was shameful.
I think its probably the clearest example of an Irish monastery right now. But at various times, Bobbio, Salzburg, Würzburg or Regensburg might have taken the leading position. A lot of people in Ireland missed the fact Benedict XVI included the badge of the Irish monastery in Regensburg in his papal arms.
You might have mentioned that Laval Nugent Graf von Westmeath, spent his later years crushing both Italian and Hungarian insurgents with some brutality it must be said.
True. I suppose he was acknowledging the sacrifice of the sons of Ulster. Thousands, from both sides of Ireland fought in WWII but the Ulstermen suffered huge losses in France. Also, Churchill had ‘offered’ the North during the war to Ireland in exchange for neutrality, but was rebuffed by De Valera, though I’m not sure that was common knowledge immediately after the war. It certainly wouldn’t have been broadcast in east Belfast! Dev’s own visit to the German embassy after Hitler’s death has to be similarly contextualized. It was a move that was largely for ‘domestic’ consumption. Ireland had only come through a bitter civil war, and Dev came down hard on some former comrades in the IRA. It would have been suicide to have allowed a British soldier to set foot in the country.
The Irish state has since ‘disappeared’ many of it’s records for the period, but there was much more interaction than is generally known. While there was a minister ‘officially’ in Berlin (Charles Bewley, a Quaker (of the Dublin coffee shops) and fervent republican) who spent his time throughly annoying the British, there was also Daniel Binchy (uncle of novelist Maeve Binchy), who had been, before the war, the Irish Minister for External Affairs. He acted as a special (British) envoy to the Vatican throughout the war, but remained in as much contact with Dublin as London. Also, although not in any of the official British biographies, it’s ‘well-known round the village’ (as we say over here) that Churchill’s special protege, Brendan Bracken, was a much more frequent visitor to his homeland than he was often letting on.
German POWs when intercepted were imprisoned in the Curragh for the duration of the war, British ones were driven immediately to the border.
In his younger gun-ho days, Churchill was all for sending the Royal Navy to Belfast during the 1914 ‘crisis’ and shelling the Loyalists into line. He was no supporter of the Curragh disobedience either.
I have heard of many ‘breaches of neutrality’ by the Free State Authorities during the War. Vital parts of Halifax bombers being retrieved etc.
Wasn’t it also a Irish Weather Station that gave the ‘OK’ for D-Day?
Plus the Dublin Fire Brigade went north to assist in the Belfast Blitz.
So, as usual, as is not necessarily as it appears.
Yes, I think you’re right about the D-Day thing. My mother grew up in Dublin city. In the years after the war there were regular visits of (unionist) kids from the north, Belfast especially, and some of them stayed with Dublin families for a few weeks each year and went to my mum’s school. You might find this difficult to believe, but one of the things she most remembered about them was their amazement on arrival that the people ‘down south’ lived in cities, had houses, with roofs, running water, cars … that we didn’t actually eat our children, etc. God only knows what they were told from the cradle. With the Covid thing of late, there was plenty of cooperation, with quite a few of their hospital overspill being brought down to be treated here. Of course, it’s possible that Arlene Foster has forgotten to mention that!
All true – the Dundalk and Drogheda fire brigades also went north during the Belfast Blitz. There was recently a piece in the Irish Times about the weather station assistant in Belmullet who noticed the squall on the Atlantic which narrowed the time frame for a successful landing in Normandy and passed the information on. These things were kept quiet. The US envoy to Ireland was David Grey, who shared Roosevelt’s hatred for de Valera, who did much to publicise Ireland’s Axis leanings at the time.
Binchy was a Celtic scholar who was engaged in research in German institutes in the 1920s and served as representative of the Free State to Weimar Germany. Bewley, though originally Quaker, became a Catholic via High Church Anglicanism (which is why he ended up as a diplomat to the Holy See). I gather he was an unpleasant character in many ways. Bracken is a fascinating character complete with a Fenian family. I like the story of him being stranded in Shannon when he was supposed to be on the way to a conference in Canada with his Conservative cabinet colleagues (I heard Anthony Eden might have been among them). He invited them to see where he was from in Tipperary and brought them. They thought he was making it up on one of the rare occasions he was being truthful about his background.
Excellent insight in the historical and continuing attitude of “imperial” England to Ireland.
Eamonn Toland
3 years ago
Pre Brexit Ireland imported twice as much from the UK than it exported – the UK had a substantial trade surplus. UK exports of goods to Ireland have fallen sharply since January – by more than 50% in February 2021, while Irish exports of goods to the UK fell 11% in the same period.
Pendular swings in policy – seeing a massive spike in cases after relaxing controls over Christmas to having one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. Some of the trade issues are covid-related, others due to stocking up in advance of the Withdrawal Agreement taking effect. Hopefully trade on both sides will recover soon.
“The cool heads and shared humility that made the Good Friday Agreement possible are rare exceptions in a troubled, assymetric history.”
You mean the heads that allowed terrorists to go free and left our soldiers – who had risked life and limb – to spend the rest of their lives under threat of prosecution? Those heads? And the IRA still murdering people today…
Exactly.The disgraceful GFA* was one of the worst “sell outs” since we shot ‘Breaker’ Morant’ or indeed, Admiral Byng.
Good to see the recent case against two former members of the Parachute Regiment was dismissed . The Judge was particularly scathing about the Prosecution, who by rights should dragged to Tyburn to suffer the traditional penalty.
(*Good Friday Agreement)
Get out of your own way Charles. NI was always going to blow. I’m afraid you’re not in reality if you can’t acknowledge the mistake that was made in giving in to a minority of Protestants in NI who’d been sabre-rattling against Irish Home Rule. These stubborn people can’t and won’t run the show any longer in NI and on the island. They are a small minority of people who have for too long sucked English teat.
Couldn’t agree more. We should have ditched the place in 1914, had Asquith not been, to lapse into the vernacular, such a gobshite.
1921 was a farce, yet it is surprising how long it endured. Still on the ‘home’ straight now!
Extraordinary institutional failures, tut, tut
“The circumspection that the Irish use in their treaties in that court (Spain), who considering that their affairs do in no way pertain to us [v. dishonest], are wont not only curiously to conceal the same from us, but also to desire the King’s ministers not to communicate them with us.”
Thomas Fitzherbert (1602)
An interesting article. English intolerance, insularity and above all ignorance have repeatedly brought damage to Ireland, but paradoxically too they have also provided the solutions for us to that damage. One does not have to go back as far as the seventeenth century either. Along with partition (the wonderful fruits of which we all still reaping, sigh), Britain generated an economic war with Ireland in the early 1930s, in a failed attempt to strangle the infant Irish Republic at birth. It was incredible really. Never in history has a conquering power, after (finally) leaving demanded ‘compensation’ from the ‘natives’ for the lands which they had stolen from them in the first place. Bonkers really. The consequences were legion and profoundly stupid: the ‘sanctions’ were rebuffed as Britain wanted Irish beef, the ‘treaty ports’ were wisely recovered and the whole episode ensured that Ireland effectively had to remain neutral during WWII so as to ensure our independence (though we gave you lots of help, unofficially, of course).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_trade_war
It is amazing really, but many in Britain, appear still to be blissfully unaware (one-sided history teaching perhaps) that Ireland has a v. long history of independent relations with continental Europe. The same incidentally is also true of Scotland, of which I know less, but there was always a strong Scottish-French connection. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries the Irish HQ-in-exile, both church and state were at: Salamanca, then Louvain, then Paris. We have become used to this, you see. Seen from this side of the Irish Sea there is a regular pattern in English history of repeated ‘Brexits’. So, it’s always wise to have a Plan B. Intolerance, envy and spite are a costly business, and ultimately nobody ‘wins’.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/56201463.amp
The amount of Irish centres in continental Europe between the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and the Act of Union and its aftermath (even later) are legion. I recall being in the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt some time ago at a reception and wondered were there any Irish officers among the portraits of Austrian and Holy Roman Imperial generals. Just above me was Laval Nugent Graf von Westmeath, after which I looked no further (which I regret now). Though these links were heightened after the Reformation and Penal Law period, they built on older links. There was a network of Irish monasteries on continental Europe which proceeded the Norman invasion of Ireland by centuries.
True. Also, I think some evidence has begun to emerge in recent years that there was a domus Scottorum in Rome at a much earlier period than previously known. The eighth century, if not earlier. In hindsight, it was no coincidence that Maynooth was founded, with a royal grant, the same year as the Orange Order. Dividia et imperia, Greeks and their gifts … mar a deirtear!
Somebody ought to do a study of the position that Maynooth and the Pontifical Irish College in Rome took during the Irish Civil War. Maynooth supported the Treaty; the Roman seminary opposed it and made representations to the Vatican on behalf of the Republicans. This is one of the reasons that W T Cosgrave’s government wanted a Nuncio in the Irish Free State and an Irish embassy to the Holy See though the Irish bishops were lukewarm on the topic. The Pope already had an alternative Irish embassy of nearly three centuries standing.
True. I don’t know enough about that, but perhaps the difference was generational too. Were they generally younger men who were seminarians in Rome at that time?
I think it was more the staff than the students – there was little age difference between the student groups in both colleges. It could be that the bishops preferred to locate academically gifted firebrands in Rome rather than at home where they could do less harm.
Very possible. Wouldn’t be the first time.
By the way Peadar, a chara. In the end, as far as I know, Thomas Fitzherbert (quoted above) and his family were reconciled to the Faith. They perhaps made the mistake of leaving him too long in Madrid! Interestingly, while loudly denounced back home for ‘going pope’, he had one very vocal defender re rights of conscience; none other than Dr Bedell of Kilmore, optimus Anglorum.
First translator of the Old Testament into Irish.
“Divide et impera”, or alternatively “Divide ut regnes”.
Stand corrected. Míle buíochas.
tá fáilte romhat!
Over roughly the same time period say 1600-1812, where the British failed to eradicate Catholicism in Ireland the Germans*, succeeded in Bohemia with the outstanding assistance of the Society of Jesus, it must be said.
After the Battle of the White Mountain, in 1620, (which precipitated the 30 years War), no effort was spared to exterminate the heresy of the Hussites.
German ruthlessness triumphed over British indolence.
(* In this particular case mainly a sub-species known today as Austrians).
Indeed. Nor should be forgotten the shameful treatment of the French Protestants, following the revoking of the Edict of Nantes.
You’ve seen the 16th century Irish College at the University of Salamanca?
This was once the jewell in the crown of Irish colleges overseas. Though the mid-20th century Irish bishops didn’t want young priests coming back from Spain with Falangist sympathies, they way they treated the last rector of the college was shameful.
St Gallen being perhaps the most famous?
I think its probably the clearest example of an Irish monastery right now. But at various times, Bobbio, Salzburg, Würzburg or Regensburg might have taken the leading position. A lot of people in Ireland missed the fact Benedict XVI included the badge of the Irish monastery in Regensburg in his papal arms.
You might have mentioned that Laval Nugent Graf von Westmeath, spent his later years crushing both Italian and Hungarian insurgents with some brutality it must be said.
The Wild Geese were far from perfect, but I will leave that aspect to the Cancel Culture
The performed well at Fontenoy, as I recall. Taking quite a few British Colours in the process.
Churchill’s vilification of the Eire in 1945 didn’t help.
True. I suppose he was acknowledging the sacrifice of the sons of Ulster. Thousands, from both sides of Ireland fought in WWII but the Ulstermen suffered huge losses in France. Also, Churchill had ‘offered’ the North during the war to Ireland in exchange for neutrality, but was rebuffed by De Valera, though I’m not sure that was common knowledge immediately after the war. It certainly wouldn’t have been broadcast in east Belfast! Dev’s own visit to the German embassy after Hitler’s death has to be similarly contextualized. It was a move that was largely for ‘domestic’ consumption. Ireland had only come through a bitter civil war, and Dev came down hard on some former comrades in the IRA. It would have been suicide to have allowed a British soldier to set foot in the country.
The Irish state has since ‘disappeared’ many of it’s records for the period, but there was much more interaction than is generally known. While there was a minister ‘officially’ in Berlin (Charles Bewley, a Quaker (of the Dublin coffee shops) and fervent republican) who spent his time throughly annoying the British, there was also Daniel Binchy (uncle of novelist Maeve Binchy), who had been, before the war, the Irish Minister for External Affairs. He acted as a special (British) envoy to the Vatican throughout the war, but remained in as much contact with Dublin as London. Also, although not in any of the official British biographies, it’s ‘well-known round the village’ (as we say over here) that Churchill’s special protege, Brendan Bracken, was a much more frequent visitor to his homeland than he was often letting on.
German POWs when intercepted were imprisoned in the Curragh for the duration of the war, British ones were driven immediately to the border.
In his younger gun-ho days, Churchill was all for sending the Royal Navy to Belfast during the 1914 ‘crisis’ and shelling the Loyalists into line. He was no supporter of the Curragh disobedience either.
I have heard of many ‘breaches of neutrality’ by the Free State Authorities during the War. Vital parts of Halifax bombers being retrieved etc.
Wasn’t it also a Irish Weather Station that gave the ‘OK’ for D-Day?
Plus the Dublin Fire Brigade went north to assist in the Belfast Blitz.
So, as usual, as is not necessarily as it appears.
Too true. Fact is often more interesting than fiction.
Yes, I think you’re right about the D-Day thing. My mother grew up in Dublin city. In the years after the war there were regular visits of (unionist) kids from the north, Belfast especially, and some of them stayed with Dublin families for a few weeks each year and went to my mum’s school. You might find this difficult to believe, but one of the things she most remembered about them was their amazement on arrival that the people ‘down south’ lived in cities, had houses, with roofs, running water, cars … that we didn’t actually eat our children, etc. God only knows what they were told from the cradle. With the Covid thing of late, there was plenty of cooperation, with quite a few of their hospital overspill being brought down to be treated here. Of course, it’s possible that Arlene Foster has forgotten to mention that!
All true – the Dundalk and Drogheda fire brigades also went north during the Belfast Blitz. There was recently a piece in the Irish Times about the weather station assistant in Belmullet who noticed the squall on the Atlantic which narrowed the time frame for a successful landing in Normandy and passed the information on. These things were kept quiet. The US envoy to Ireland was David Grey, who shared Roosevelt’s hatred for de Valera, who did much to publicise Ireland’s Axis leanings at the time.
Binchy was a Celtic scholar who was engaged in research in German institutes in the 1920s and served as representative of the Free State to Weimar Germany. Bewley, though originally Quaker, became a Catholic via High Church Anglicanism (which is why he ended up as a diplomat to the Holy See). I gather he was an unpleasant character in many ways. Bracken is a fascinating character complete with a Fenian family. I like the story of him being stranded in Shannon when he was supposed to be on the way to a conference in Canada with his Conservative cabinet colleagues (I heard Anthony Eden might have been among them). He invited them to see where he was from in Tipperary and brought them. They thought he was making it up on one of the rare occasions he was being truthful about his background.
‘Intolerance, envy and spite’ – just so.
Very good read, thank you Ed!
Excellent insight in the historical and continuing attitude of “imperial” England to Ireland.
Pre Brexit Ireland imported twice as much from the UK than it exported – the UK had a substantial trade surplus. UK exports of goods to Ireland have fallen sharply since January – by more than 50% in February 2021, while Irish exports of goods to the UK fell 11% in the same period.
Presumably Ireland has followed plucky Sweden and had a fairly relaxed Lockdown?
Pendular swings in policy – seeing a massive spike in cases after relaxing controls over Christmas to having one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. Some of the trade issues are covid-related, others due to stocking up in advance of the Withdrawal Agreement taking effect. Hopefully trade on both sides will recover soon.
Many thanks.