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Northern Ireland’s ’68. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550383
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
Northern Ireland lends itself well to a case study of the global revolt. Thousands and thousands of pages would be required to do proper justice to the ‘long ’68’ in France or the Federal Republic of Germany – to look at the shape of the state; the way mainstream political parties struggled to adapt to a changing world; the attempts made by the extremes of Right and Left to escape the political margins; the rise and fall of social movements; activism at a local level; the impact of international politics and intellectual fashions; and the bewildering array of marches, riots, occupations, meetings, speeches, negotiations, sit-downs, and strikes that made up the revolt itself.
Examining these developments in Northern Ireland is an altogether more manageable task. It is also just as worthwhile. Northern Ireland might have been seen as a provincial backwater, but it was home to no fewer than three of the world’s greatest contemporary poets: Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley.52 Similarly, Northern Ireland’s leading activists should be counted among the star ’68ers. Telling the story of the ‘long ’68’ in Northern Ireland and tying it in with recent research on other Western countries is therefore one way of trying to pin down this ‘elusive revolution’.53 As the nineteenth-century French traveler Gustave de Beaumont observed, ‘Ireland is a small country where the greatest questions of politics, morality and humanity are fought out.’54
CHAPTER ONE
Unionism and its State
BUILDING A PROTESTANT STATE
Sir Basil Brooke sat underneath an oak tree on his family’s estate of Colebrooke, Fermanagh, one night a week for much of 1920 and 1921.1 Brooke began his vigil after accompanying his pregnant wife to Dublin, which he found had been transformed in the four years since the Easter Rising. Sinn Féin, which had won a majority of Irish seats in the 1918 Westminster election, was striving to bring into being the republic that had been proclaimed during the insurrection. The struggle to end British rule was spearheaded by the movement’s military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During Lady Brooke’s confinement, from March to May 1920, the IRA scored a significant victory: Dublin Castle capitulated to Republican hunger strikers and released hundreds of prisoners. Brooke returned from the capital determined to stop the lawlessness that he had seen there from spreading to his part of Ireland. With a dozen other local men, Brooke formed an illegal vigilante force. He had spent the previous decade in the British army – defending the Empire in India and South Africa, at Ypres, Suvla, Vimy, Cambrai and Arras.2 In 1920, the same ‘loyalty and devotion to empire’ required Brooke to ‘fight the agents of murder, anarchy, and terrorism’ in the place of his birth.3
Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to their homes after the First World War to fight similar battles against revolutionary change. Frenchmen formed the Union Civique, Italians the Organizzazione Civile and Germans the Freikorps and the Einwohnerwehr. In rural, conservative and Catholic Bavaria, war weariness allowed a left-wing Jewish journalist from Berlin to transform a massive peace demonstration into a revolution. Between November 1918 and April 1919, this unlikely revolution regressed into an absurd attempt to erect a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Munich’s rag-tag ‘Red Army’ was easily defeated by regular German troops and Bavarian Freikorps units. The brutal suppression of the Räterepublik and the vengeance visited upon its leaders failed to exorcise the fear of revolution. Bavaria’s small farmers and middle classes believed that when the next insurrection came the police and the army would be no match for the Bolsheviks. Concerned citizens reacted by organising themselves into ‘civil guards’, the Einwohnerwehr. By the start of 1920, around 357,000 men had volunteered to serve in the Einwohnerwehr. The Allied governments saw these paramilitary forces as a way for Germany to get round the commitment it had made to reduce its army to 100,000 men. At the Spa disarmament conference in July 1920, Germany agreed to disband the Einwohnerwehr after the Allies had threatened to occupy the Ruhr. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had admitted to the conference that if millions of guns were in the hands of English civilians he would not be able to sleep at night.4
During that same month, Lloyd George agreed to consider enrolling vigilante forces in the North of Ireland into the service of the state. Brooke was one of the men lobbying for official recognition: he told the top British general in Ireland that ‘If the government will help [the people] they will do all they can to help the government.’5 With the war in the South against the IRA escalating, the overstretched British state welcomed the idea of letting loyalists defend the North. In return, Westminster consented to bear the huge costs of arming, equipping and maintaining a Special Constabulary. For leading Ulster Unionists and the British government, this arrangement also had the benefit of calming Protestant fears that they had been left unprotected. Brooke was not alone in worrying that the more extreme loyalists might otherwise have taken matters into their own hands, sparking an accelerating cycle of attack and reprisal.6 Serious sectarian violence did occur – men wearing Special Constabulary uniforms did murder Catholics. But the battle for the North did not degenerate into a full-scale communal conflict. Indeed, it was the new Southern state that descended into civil war following the IRA split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, which had established the Irish Free State. Both factions, however, remained allies in the North. Brooke, County Commandant of the Fermanagh Special Constabulary, led an unsuccessful amphibious assault on the village of Belleek, which had been occupied by IRA irregulars with the help of pro-Treaty forces at the end of May 1922. Although the Belfast government had to turn to the British army to recover the village for the empire, the IRA’s Northern campaign was ultimately defeated by the resistance of the Special Constabulary. When the new Irish Free State army moved against the anti-Treaty IRA in June 1922, incursions across the border ended and Northern volunteers flocked south to fight.7 The immediate threat to the existence of Northern Ireland faded away.
The Special Constabulary not only guarded against the irredentist South, but also against perfidious Albion. With Britain desperately searching for a way out of the Irish bog, Ulster started to lose its friends. The Special Constabulary reduced the North’s dependence upon its doubtful ally. However, the formation of the force did not make the Protestant community master of its own fate. Self-determination required self-government – something that the Unionist population lacked as the crisis came to a head. During the Anglo- Irish truce, which began in July 1921, the British had the Special Constabulary stand down. The IRA’s observance of the truce was not so strict.8 In Fermanagh, volunteers drilled, enforced the economic boycott of Belfast, carried out kidnappings, and attacked police barracks.9 For the British, securing a deal with Sinn Féin mattered more than the security of Northern Ireland. The Unionists therefore were relieved to assume responsibility for law and order under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act at the end of 1921 – just before the IRA’s spring offensive. The Act established the devolved institutions of government, the division of responsibilities between the British and Northern Irish parliaments, the legal requirement for the regime to exercise its legislative and executive powers free from discrimination, and Westminster’s supreme authority. Despite its beginnings as a movement that defended direct rule from Westminster, Unionism had come to embrace devolution as a defence against being abandoned by London. As Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader at the time, explained in the House of Commons debate on the legislation, ‘you cannot knock Parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and, once you have planted them there, you cannot get rid of them.’10 By the summer of 1922, Northern Ireland had become a political fact.
Northern Ireland’s