![Mike Cronin: 'I used to go to Millwall games ... but, you know, [chants of] Lizzie’s in a Box...it was fairly brutal,' says the historian of September's Ireland v England match in Dublin. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/CV2AF6ATH5E65OFVO6BAUIOG7I.JPG?auth=981c90164a1d73145e3653b0eac928c01946b5bbedd6fc9be1e209661d8a5ddc&smart=true&width=1024&height=683)
English football club Millwall, best known in the 1970s and 80s for their “No One Likes Us and We Don’t Care”-chanting supporters, and Irish unity rarely feature in the same sentence, but Boston College academic Mike Cronin has somehow managed it.
He was standing in the Aviva Stadium in Lansdowne Road in September for the national anthems when Ireland played England, with British prime minister Keir Starmer in the stands with then taoiseach Simon Harris.
God Save the King was roundly abused: “I was there, and I was in the Irish section. And I did not open my mouth for 90 minutes because I actually felt unsafe as an English person.”
Dublin-resident Cronin is no snowflake: “I used to go to Millwall games, for God’s sake. But, you know, [chants of] Lizzie’s in a Box, and all that kind of thing. It was fairly brutal.”
Cronan, who was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, and fellow historian Mark Duncan have written Revolutionary Times – Ireland 1913-23: The Forging of a Nation.
The Lansdowne Road experience holds lessons, he believes: “We can sit there and say, ‘Oh, it’s just fun and it’s just the next-door neighbours,’ or say that ‘it’s just a bit silliness around a soccer match. Nobody died.’”
However, Cronin argues that the atmosphere at the match holds deeper clues, since for him it highlights the lack of respect for ‘the other’ than was built into the partition of the island in 1921.
“My point, to use a sporting analogy, is that the end of the War of Independence was a score draw. Everybody shook hands and went back to their own corners without changing a single way they thought. The Free State became a Catholic nationalist state and Northern Ireland became a unionist Protestant state. Neither seemed able to say, ‘Hold on a minute, actually, some of the other side is still on our bus.’”
Cronin knows that if he met those who “happily sang Lizzie’s In A Box” an hour afterwards and told them that it had “been a bit offensive, that they would have quickly said, ‘Oh, I don’t mean you, Mike’.
“Or, they’d say, ‘Oh, no, my uncle Johnny, he’s a northern Protestant. He lives in Magherafelt.’ Or wherever. They would deflect it as having a seriousness.”
And, yet, understanding September’s football match is further complicated by the fact that the vast majority of English visitors who came for the match will have been greeted warmly individually.
Some will have made friends with “Johnny from Essex over for a stag night”, even though they are “slagging off his country because we’ve been locked in this merry dance” for hundreds of years, Cronin contends.
Many of those same people will deflect any kickback, should it come, because they will argue that they “don’t really mean it because they watch EastEnders and they like Jeremy Clarkson”.
Songs, abuse and jeers “about England” formed by history, The Troubles and a desire for unification in Ireland matter little in the relationship between Britain and the Republic, he argues.
[ Leo Varadkar says vote on Irish unity could involve a ‘two-stage referendum’Opens in new window ]
“For somebody who lives in Southend or Southport, it means nothing. It doesn’t matter if Northern Ireland’s gone from the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland is an irrelevance in the UK.”
However, if the conversation about Britishness, anthems, symbols and culture does not matter significantly in the British-Irish relationship, it matters hugely in the North-South one for those unionists who value their sense of Britishness.
And it matters when 64 per cent of people in the Republic tell pollsters when asked that they want to see a united Ireland, even if some are squeamish about costs and giving up treasured symbols.
Researching the book Revolutionary Times brought home for Cronin the key lesson that ordinary people living ordinary lives take time to come to terms with the big issues that dominate the later histories of the era in which they lived.
“When you look at the newspapers in 1912/13, certain stories dominated and they’re not the ones you expect. It’s far more about what we now call cost of living, or the events that led to Dublin Lockout.
“It’s much more about the tenement collapses, or slum landlords; or about the difficulty of living in a place like Dublin, the absolute appalling social conditions, the high infant mortality.
“All of that is up there with Home Rule. The women’s suffrage issue is huge. And then all of that gets washed away by the outbreak of the first World War,” he says.
Equally, people later famous were then unknown: “In 1914, Patrick Pearse is a nobody. He’s a schoolteacher who appears occasionally in a newspaper because there’s been a nice Irish language play at his school.
“He’s not striding inevitably to 1916. The people executed in 1916 only became famous because they got executed. They’re not known entities. If you were a betting person in 1912/13, you would say, ‘OK, Home Rule’s going to happen. It might not be pretty, but nothing’s going to disrupt it’.
“You’d have would put the house on that. Then, between Ulster’s intransigence, the first World War, and Easter 1916, it doesn’t. Everything changes,” he goes on.
For Cronin, it highlights the fact that life is not predictable, and if it is ever understood then it is only understood looking back, and not when people are going through times later deemed “historic”.
The past unravelled by Revolutionary Times holds lessons for today, he believes, since assumptions long held inviolate were left in tatters by the 2016 Brexit referendum, just like the assumptions of 1913 quickly withered.
“Suddenly, Brexit completely transforms the debate about Irish unity. If you’d said to me in 2015 that a unified island was going to happen in my lifetime, I would have said, ‘Absolutely not.’
Look at the resurgence of the Wolfe Tones or the rise of Kneecap. They’re all great things ... But what are they actually saying? What they’re actually saying is, ‘We’re us, and they’re them’. That to me is a real problem
— Mike Cronin
“I just could not see a road to that. Now, I think I can kind of see it. I might not quite make it, but in the next 20, 30 years, I think it’s probably going to happen. So, the idea has become real again,” he declares.
However, that poses questions for those who want that outcome, questions that will challenge those who think it acceptable or fun to boo God Save The King in football stadiums.
“I cannot conceive if you’re bringing in more than 800,000 Northern Protestants, that you can have a unified island that stands for the same flag and the same anthem that is here today.
“Others might say, ‘I don’t have a problem with that. They’ve just got to suck it up’,” says Cronin, whose own wider family illustrates the ties between the two islands, the questions over identity and the ways in which it is lost and found.
One of his ancestors left Cork in the early 1800s for Liverpool: “They moved to one street in Toxteth near the docks in Liverpool. And for the next seven generations, they lived on the same street.
“And all of them worked as carpenters on the Liverpool docks until my grandfather left Liverpool, so they had the most boring 19th and 20th century on the streets of Toxteth imaginable.”
The Irish background was lost in the Mersey mists: “My dad was Catholic because he had an Italian mother. My mother was Anglican. My dad didn’t practice, so we grew up in a secular household.
“Occasionally we would go to the local church, the local Anglican church. We had no Irish relatives. Even the people who were left in Liverpool didn’t identify as Irish in any way, shape or form,” he goes on.
Now 20 years in Dublin, Cronin is married to Moynagh, born in England to Northern Irish parents, but who came to Ireland when little more than a baby – first near the Border, and later in Kerry – where her father served as a Church of Ireland priest.
His son is very much Irish: “During one of the European Championships and I walked into the bar in France with my England shirt on. My son and his mate turned, and they’re like, ‘It’s not coming home, it’s not coming home.’
“I’m like, ‘You could actually cheer on your dad’s team here, no?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m Irish, not English. Why would I cheer on your lot?’” says Cronin, amused by the story, but mindful, too, of the complexities it displays.
His own career reveals other tensions: “The whole idea of being English and working here as an academic in Irish history is a strange one. People are quite surprised when I turn up because of the name.
“They’re expecting an Irish person, not an English one. That’s caught people making TV programmes. They’ll mine me for the information, but they won’t use me on TV, because they do not want an English person talking about Irish history.”
The rise in cultural nationalism in Ireland in recent years is notable, too: “Look at the resurgence of the Wolfe Tones and the Electric Picnic, with all the young kids loving it, or the rise of Kneecap.
“They’re all great things, they’re cultural, they’re fun, they’re leisure. They’re all those softer ideas. But what are they actually saying? What they’re actually saying is, ‘We’re us, and they’re them’. That to me is a real problem.
“But it is not a problem that has been caused by people now. It’s a problem that the two states on this island just weren’t built with any kind of mutual space, they were built on division.
“Go back to 1920/21, to that score draw. Both sides were able to go away and say, ‘Actually, we won.’ And they both took that into the DNA of their state.
“The North won because it kept their little piece. The South won because it freed itself from Britain. That notion of ‘We won’, that lack of respect has passed through into the 21st century.
[ From the archive: Seamus Mallon: Irish unity by numbers won’t workOpens in new window ]
“If you say to a hundred people at a match, you know what? If we reunify, you can’t have your flag any more. You can’t have your anthem. We’re going to have to design some nice new neutral thing, just like South Africa did. They’ll tell you to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, in no uncertain terms.
“If we unify, the attitude of those who want that will be ‘We’ve won’, that we have arrived at the natural state of an island of 32 counties. And they, the British, and, de facto, the Protestants in Northern Ireland, have lost.”
A debate about unification should be organised, and it should take time, he argues: “It’s not simply Yes, or No, on a ballot sheet. The effort needed into winning hearts and minds is two, three decades’ work.
“You’re going to have to convince people who are not in favour of unification that there’s something in it for them, and that they will be respected,” he concludes. In a land of score draws, everybody loses.
Revolutionary Times – Ireland 1913-23: The Forging of a Nation by Mike Cronin and Mark Duncan is published by Irish Academic Press
