When violence erupted in Derry in August 1969, the British ambassador in Dublin drew his government's attention to a comment in The Irish Times after the Irish government had urged clemency for the IRA Coventry bombers in August 1939: "The Irish are a dangerously emotional people . . . liable to condone any crime, however horrible, if it can be connected directly or even remotely with a political cause." ("If I were a fire insurance company I would not like to have the British embassy on my books," the ambassador suggested, adding with black humour: "Fortunately, though highly flammable, it isn't ours.")
Invoking a 30-year old opinion, echoing British views going back centuries before that, said much about the British response to the 1969 crisis. Sadly for all concerned, it took them a long time to develop a more nuanced understanding.
Their biggest difficulty, perhaps, was to get past the constitutional dogma that the crisis was an internal UK issue, in which the government of the Irish Republic had no part to play (beyond doing nothing to annoy Britain). The London government at least realised that Jack Lynch was the best Irish leader it was ever likely to get, but resolutely refused to give him the policy input that could have transformed northern nationalist opinion.
The British believed they could play the role of neutral umpire between unionists and nationalists, exerting enough pressure to persuade the Northern Ireland government to implement reforms that would defuse nationalist discontent.
Partisan measure
The Irish government considered the first of these a dangerous illusion and was deeply sceptical of the second. Rightly so, as would become clear. The British simply could not grasp that the 1949 Ireland Act, guaranteeing majority control of Northern Ireland, was seen by nationalists as a partisan measure.
A key point of contention was the deployment of the British army in place of the discredited RUC. Even if the Irish hope of securing a United Nations peacekeeping force was a pipe dream, the British belief that the army was the best force available was dangerously deluded.
The British failed to grasp how fleeting was the moment in which the army would be accepted as nonpartisan. The Irish minister for external affairs, Patrick Hillery, was spot on in insisting that the welcome “only showed that people were frightened of the police”, and that the army’s presence would soon “provide extremists with pretexts for intervention”.
The Irish government could see more clearly than the British on some issues, but its perceptions even when accurate stemmed from a highly prejudiced historical vision (striking the British, naturally, as “pretty neurotic”). Liam Cosgrave’s remark that “British politicians never have, and never will, understand Ireland or the Irish people” combined accuracy with self-deception.
The Irish government believed partition was “an act of fundamental injustice” and Northern Ireland a failed political experiment. Its conviction that only reunification could bring about a lasting solution was rooted in the venerable nationalist idea that all Ireland’s problems stemmed from the British “connection”. Hillery’s confident 1970 assertion that “we shall see an end to partition within, at most, a generation” was far from helpful.
Conflicting perceptions
As Daniel Williamson points out in his careful study of relations between the two governments, it took years to get beyond the repetition of fundamentally conflicting perceptions. The British held that reforms could only work once security was restored, and the Irish that security could only be restored after substantial reforms were implemented. Possible exit strategies, such a repartition, did not get on to the agenda.
The ultimate way out – power-sharing – began to be adumbrated in 1971. But until the disaster of Bloody Sunday it had no greater appeal to the British than “internationalisation”.
One of the few possible ways this equilibrium could have been tilted in the direction of change would have been American pressure on Britain, which Ireland tried (perhaps too politely) to suggest, always to be met with the dogma that the US could not take any position on what was a British domestic matter. It could not judge any past actions or suggest any future ones, “judge, condemn or advocate any particular solution”, even in private. After Bloody Sunday, the US Congress became more engaged, but the official position did not change.
Williamson is not the first to focus on this short but obviously crucial period. He follows historians such as Thomas Hennessey and Anthony Craig, and his rather four-square narrative, a traditional piece of diplomatic history writing, does not major on interpretative mould-breaking. He is reluctant to pass judgement on issues such as prime minister Edward Heath’s blinkered insistence (unknowingly parroting David Lloyd George 50 years previously) that the key to progress was to “get on top of the gunmen”.
The nature of the reforms on which Britain’s policy depended remains rather unclear in his account. The internal dynamics of the unionist party are cursorily treated, and the police more or less drop out of it, although the fact that (as Lord Scarman crushingly reported in 1972) it had completely lost the confidence of the Catholic community was fundamental in the resumption of direct rule.
Always reacting
Still, Williamson’s extensive quotation from official memoranda helps to highlight the emergence of cabinet secretary Sir Burke Trend from the anonymity of officialdom. It becomes clear just how novel was Trend’s perception that Britain was locked into crisis management, “always reacting to events and hoping that things will get better”, with “no light at the end of the tunnel”; and equally Trend’s argument that it would have to rethink its “political and constitutional assumptions” about Northern Ireland.
The result was Sunningdale, which, but for the miners’ strike that brought down Heath’s government, might have brought the Belfast Agreement forward by a quarter of a century.
Thinking about those decades of Troubles summons up a slew of “if onlys”. If only the Republic’s ministers had not trumpeted the need for reunification so loudly, if only the British had been prepared to look beyond “reform” to some new political order, and if only the United States had been prepared to get off the fence, the conflict might not have become so intractable.
Any of these might have happened, but all of them – and more – would have been needed for anything like a rapid shift of positions that had silted up over half a century.
Charles Townshend's latest work is The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923.
