One day in May 2015, I was wheeling my three-month-old son (already equipped with an Irish passport via his Donegal mother), when a one-man publisher called: how about me trying to write history told through maps and graphics, for £2,000 (€2,300) now and the same again when I delivered a whole book?
Look, I was almost 55, my novels and screenplays had all gone the full Titanic, and nappies don’t buy themselves.
So I said yes. Thank God. I wrote The Shortest History of England (2020) and The Shortest History of Germany (2017) and both were best-sellers. By the early 2020s, I was the over-60 comeback kid himself.
So why, demanded my Irish friends, why the hell throw yourself the ultimate hospital pass? Why, having made it back up on to the pig’s back, insist that of all the countries in all the world, my next shortest history was going to be ... Ireland?! Sure, tell the Germans their own history, fine – but the Irish? And me a Brit?!
RM Block
For as Trinity College Dublin’s Prof Micheál Ó Siochrú was quoted as saying in this very paper just the other week, most British historians “have absolutely no understanding of Ireland, no interest in it, never engaged with it. It doesn’t feature on their radar in any meaningful way”.
Well, I’m not most British historians. Reader, I am a degenerate.
Degeneration is the word used again and again by Westminster authorities from 1297 until 1695 to describe their ultimate nightmare: that people in Ireland who were supposed to be ethnically, politically or religiously loyal just kept on ... going Irish. And I was brought up loyal, indeed loyalist: at 12, I was swaggering around Edinburgh in my first jeans (Wranglers, because the bigger lads in school said Levis were for Catholics) singing: “Hail hail the pope’s in jail, kick him in the goolies.”
My ferocious Highland granny, known in her village as Annie Dhu for her jet-black hair (my mother was Shona Dhu there) lived with us and, being of the Free Presbyterian Kirk, wouldn’t even say the word Catholic. It was like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books: Och aye, the MacDonalds. Well, of course, they’re ... (sniff!) ... you know. But at 19, on an archaeological dig in Wales – the kind that needs picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, not toothbrushes – I bumped into three fun-loving, ballad-singing young Irish guys, over for what they called the craic. After the dig, they invited me back to Ireland. Little did I know that my fate was sealed.
At 19, I knew nothing of the deadly magnetism of Ireland
— James Hawes
If I’d understood Irish history the way I do now, I’d have been warned off by the terrifying fate that befell French-speaking Norman warlords and common Saxon settlers alike in the Middle Ages. They began going Irish almost as soon as they got here. Only 40 years after King Henry II landed, one of the de Burghs patronised a bard who proclaimed him, in Irish, potential High King under Brehon law. By 1297, Dublin Castle was officially denouncing its own settlers for turning Irish, using that dreaded word, degenerate, for the first time.
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The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) forbid the English from speaking Irish, taking Irish names, marrying Irish women, using Irish law, dressing like Irish people, employing Irish musicians ... and playing what the game men called “horling”. Only five years after he fired the starting-musket for the plantation of Ulster, King James I himself complained that his supposedly loyal settlers were marrying Irish women, by which they will degenerate and in a short time become altogether Irish.
Even the victories of Cromwell and King Billy couldn’t keep settlers safe from the fatal infection of Irishness.
By 1727, Dr Jonathan Swift, Protestant Dean of St Patrick’s, was crying: “Burn everything English except their coal!” Meanwhile, Henry Gratton, a member of the sscendancy itself, thundered in the Dublin parliament: “What! are you, with three million of men at your back, with charters in one hand and arms in the other, afraid to say you are a free people?” In 1914, Molly Spring-Rice, Anglican heiress to a huge ancestral pad overlooking the Shannon – her first cousin, Cecil, wrote the British Empire torch-song I Vow to Thee My Country – had degenerated so far that she helped ferry German guns to Howth for the Irish Volunteers ...
But at 19, I knew nothing of the deadly magnetism of Ireland. I thought I was just going over for a few drinks. To cut a long story short, those Irish lads became my friends for life – and to paraphrase Stephen King’s killer strapline for that glorious film Stand by Me: I never had such fun later on as I had in Ireland in my twenties. Jesus, does anyone?
By the late-1980s, I knew all kinds of people, from all kinds of backgrounds: one day, I’d be in pre-tourist Temple Bar with a fiery left-wing film-maker, the next evening in the officers’ mess at the Curragh, after going out with the foot-beagles (“Six Counties, Six Regiments, Six Days!”).
There was also very political girl who, early in 1988, invited me to an “educational camp”, in Co Galway, where we would stay in a caravan belonging to a friend. Though I wasn’t much into politics, I was very much into her, so it was all arranged – but it never happened because her friend was Mairead Farrell, who got shot on the rock of Gibraltar by the SAS. And then, the following year, it got ridiculous: St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, created a job especially for me.
I’d never heard of the place. My PhD funding was up and I’d applied for every lectureship going in Britain but got nowhere. Then Maynooth advertised a job, just weeks before the new term. It was my absolute last chance: I applied, got shortlisted, told my Irish friends I was coming over again, and was naturally offered a bed. In my friend’s Dublin home, his mother (who I’d known for a decade) took me aside and said: “Jim, I’ve often been told I have the second sight and I know things will be all right for you.” Obviously, I thanked her very politely but thought no more of it. I mean, getting jobs is about having the qualifications and talking the talk, right?
I wasn’t surprised when St Patrick’s called the Hideout bar in Kilcullen, where I’d told them they could reach me, to inform me that they’d indeed given the job to someone better qualified. But then came to miracle: they’d created another job on the spot. For me.
As I put the phone down, the landlady took one look at my face and laughed: “Would the Monsignor take a drink?” He did. But how had it come about it? Did my friend’s mother really have the second sight? I was now a university lecturer: Ireland had saved me.
Grand, so: degeneracy it was. Why fight it? I became a sort of Forrest Gump in Charlie Haughey’s Ireland – meaning, the tail-end of Dev’s Ireland. Playing and singing every Thursday night at Brady’s of Dunboyne, today famous as CMAT’s local. Helping one of the Ryanair Ryan’s, proud owners of two or three ex-Romanian planes, get a mad bull into a horsebox (“Jim, get over here, the Bull McCabe’s broken loose!”); waiting in the Oliver St John Gogarty pub in Dublin for the car to go on the Late Late Show about my first novel (based on the time the IRA tried to recruit me, of which the less said the better) until they bumped me with 20 minutes to go because one of the first great clerical scandals had just broken.
Standing at a snow-swept graveside on Achill Island in December, beside the priest, when the mourners demanded he should stop things with the coffin already halfway down – so they could raise the dead man up again, turn his head towards the sea, and place rushes into the grave. I murmured: “Mícheál, that isn’t in the book,” and he whispered: “Ah Jim, out here we’ve always done whatever they tell us.” I was watching, live and in real time, exactly the kind of deal the first Christian missionaries had to make with pagan Ireland ...
Which brings us back to history. Ireland’s unique magnetism is nothing mystical. It is, as explained in the book, because this middle-sized, naturally prosperous European country (it’s only the Famine that smashed Ireland down into a small nation) has a cultural continuum older than any other in Europe. That still echoes, subliminally guiding the ways the Irish act: just as we learn the tones of our speech, the way we hold ourselves, the mode of our eye-contact, from those closest to us in our earliest youth, quite subliminally, so people in Ireland – whatever their DNA – soon go along, whether they know it or not, with those ancient cultural guidelines. It is a simple historical fact that from the Vikings onwards we again and again find that incomers, even the ones who deliberately came as conquerors and settlers, start feeling within a generation or two that they aren’t just in Ireland, but Irish.
Thomas Davis proclaimed an Irishness “which may embrace Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter, Milesian and Cromwellian, the Irishman of a hundred generations, and the stranger who is within our gates”. Well, fate has been waving from your gates to this stranger since 1979. Which gives me no right to be let in. That’s up to you.
Irish identity (unlike British identity, invented by King James I in Ulster) really means something, so it rightly demands proof of real commitment. Now, whether I’ll ever actually apply, I don’t know. I’ll leave that one to fate. But if I do, I’m too old to put my body on the line like Bundee Aki, to prove it. So maybe this book will show that this particular British historian is already pretty damn degenerate.
The Shortest History of Ireland by James Hawes is published by Old Street Publishing
