LITMIR.BIZ

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fighting the ‘criminal machinations of the evil ones’ who ‘set about devouring the foundation of the Catholic religion and of civil society’.14 By contrast, Gambetta observed that ‘bad times for our country are always good times for the Jesuits’.15 The Society of Jesus and other religious orders were supposedly standing in the way of progress. They were teaching children to be superstitious, submissive and, above all, unpatriotic – a grievous crime in the era of nation-building. Through schools, armies, railways, bureaucracies, and newspapers, the states of Europe were turning peasants into Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans.16 Although the Catholic Church was seen as a major obstacle to these transformations, it was also undergoing a process of modernisation. Like the other great capitals of Europe, the Vatican was centralising power and imposing uniformity in its realm. Both sides in the culture wars sought to rally the masses to their respective banners. The resulting mobilisation and polarisation led to the formation of parallel societies: Catholic versus liberal, Protestant, or anti-clerical.17 While the rise of socialist parties at the end of the century pushed liberals and Catholics into a coalition of convenience, these divisions persisted into the inter-war period.18

      As the German army swept towards Paris, a state schoolteacher and a Catholic priest met in a small Alpine village. ‘So, this is it then,’ the instituteur remarked to the curé. ‘Well, we’re friends, we only hate the invader now.’19 In Ireland, however, the First World War brought an end to the Act of Union rather than a union sacrée. Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, culture wars had flared up after significant constitutional changes had taken place. Both sides recognised that an expansion of the franchise or the creation of new institutions presented opportunities and threats.20 Partition and devolution sparked a similar struggle in Northern Ireland. London had appeased the Catholic Church; now it was believed that Dublin would defer to it and Belfast would persecute it. In the ‘Swiss Ireland’, the Bernese Jura, clerics who endorsed the dogma of infallibility agreed at the Vatican Council of 1870 were driven from their offices and replaced by priests loyal to the state. Catholic parishes that resisted the Protestant canton came under military occupation.21 The culture wars in Northern Ireland were not as fierce: Protestants wanted to control the state, not for the state to control the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the result was the same: a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society – although the lines that separated them were never clearly defined.

      Schools were one of the main battlegrounds in Europe’s culture wars. In Northern Ireland, the Church was able to remain responsible for educating Catholic children. However, voluntary Catholic schools received less financial support from Stormont than they had received from Dublin Castle. The Church periodically campaigned for increased state funding – with some degree of success.22 Nevertheless, the consensus within the Catholic community was that the spiritual reward of having its children raised in the traditions of the Church was worth the material sacrifice required to support the schools. As well as receiving religious instruction, Catholic children played Gaelic games and were taught ‘Irish’ history. A civil rights activist observed that pupils in Northern Ireland’s state and voluntary sectors ‘were all learning the same things, the same events, the same periods of time, but the interpretations … given were very different’.23 This was what the 1968 attitude survey had found: half of all the Catholics interviewed remembered having teachers with explicitly nationalist views.24 One such teacher later described how the Church, ‘being greater than Northern Ireland, part of the whole island, of Europe and the world’, ‘lent an ability to think outside the immediate context’.25 This mental world was reflected by the Catholic community’s newspapers. For example, the Derry Journal reported upon the city, the north-west of the island, Catholic organisations and societies, Southern politics, and the latest occurrences at the Vatican.26 Newspapers helped their readers to bring together all the different threads that made up the Catholic counter-society – within which their whole spiritual, social, and cultural lives took place.

      What marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was not the stand-off between a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society. When Stormont’s Education Minister spoke of ‘breaking clerical control’ and the Bishop of Down and Connor warned of the threat posed by ‘anti-Catholic forces’ to Church schools, they were echoing their counterparts in the Europe of a previous generation.27 Neither did Northern Ireland’s minority problem set it apart. Over the centuries, Europe had developed into a maddening mosaic of religious and ethnic groups. Beginning in 1914, however, the pieces that made up the old Europe were removed and rearranged. Three decades that witnessed total war, brutal occupations, the fall of empires, the emergence of new states, the constant redrawing of borders, the forced relocation of entire peoples, and murder on an industrial scale simplified the patterns on the map.28 Northern Ireland was a product of this process, but it had escaped the final and worst phase. Elsewhere in Europe, Hitler and Stalin had found inhuman solutions to human problems. What therefore marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was that these problems survived into the post-war era.

      WE ARE VERY MUCH ON OUR OWN HERE

      In 1936, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) raided the Derry home of the McAteer family. The police officers found weapons hidden in the house and arrested the male members of the family on arms charges. Hugh McAteer, one of the sons, confessed to the crime. He received a heavy prison sentence, but his father and two brothers were set free. Hugh McAteer would subsequently rise to the highest ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Although Eddie McAteer always respected his brother and shared his commitment to Irish unity, he never believed that the armed struggle would end partition.29 Eddie McAteer chose constitutional nationalism over militant nationalism. The many disappointments he endured in the course of his long political career made him cynical, yet he never came to regret this decision.

      At the 1968 Nationalist Party conference, McAteer used the leader’s speech to outline his pragmatic Irish nationalism. He implored delegates to ‘be realistic’: ‘try to remember that we are entrapped minority’ and that ‘there is not much good in looking for help from overseas, from America, or indeed, I regret to say, from our own fellow countrymen.’ ‘My feeling’, the leader confided to the party faithful, ‘is that we are very much on our own here in the North of Ireland.’ Consequently, in McAteer’s opinion, ‘the greatest problem that lies before us at the present moment is the problem of ourselves’. Nationalism suffered from ‘too many splits’, which encouraged loose co-operation rather than a disciplined party structure. The party was at times divided and directionless because it had been condemned to permanent opposition. Unionist domination ensured that reforms – if they were to come at all – would have to be conceded by Stormont. McAteer, however, feared that the desired changes would not come. He suspected that ‘the way to power and advancement in the Unionist Party is by kicking the Nationalist people’.30

      This lecture on Nationalism’s inherent weaknesses was directed at the ‘impatient ones’ inside the conference hall. McAteer was speaking from personal experience: he, too, had once been a young man in a hurry. On the eve of the D-Day landings, Seán Mac Entee, a leading figure within the de Valera government, had attacked the Nationalist Party for condemning its supporters to ‘political futility for 22 years’.31 As war slowly gave way to peace, Europeans were determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1920s and, above all, the 1930s. They wanted to build a new and better world in the post-war era. McAteer was among those Nationalists who believed that the moment had come to revitalise the party and reunify Ireland. Labour’s election victory had fuelled these hopes. Nationalists told themselves that the British Labour movement had sympathised with their cause in the past. Indeed, a number of backbench Labour MPs headed by Geoffrey Bing had honoured that tradition, in November 1945, by forming a pressure group called the Friends of Ireland. The ascendancy of America was also regarded as an opportunity. Nationalists deluded themselves that the Irish diaspora could be mobilised and Washington made to right English wrongs.32 With imperialism in retreat, Nationalists became convinced that the world was going their way. McAteer invoked ‘the mighty spirit of the late Mahatma’ when he proposed a ‘new campaign’ of ‘non-cooperation, no violence’. In his Irish Action pamphlet, McAteer sketched out ways to make ‘local misgovernment’ ‘impossible’: these ranged from delaying tax payments to occupying public buildings.33 The Catholic community, however, was not yet ready to embrace civil disobedience.

      The

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