THE question of whether Ireland can be a united independent country, free from Britain, has always been someone else’s business as well as our own. It has always been asked within an international context. When Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, prepared to fight England in Elizabeth I’s time, he sought an alliance with Spain.
Spain was a Catholic country and O’Neill said that Ireland should declare itself Catholic and seek Spanish help.
It didn’t work out well but it might have done, in which case I might be writing this article in Spanish.
Wolfe Tone, a leader of the United Irishmen in 1798 turned to France for help, England’s prime enemy at that time. The French saw a strategic advantage in their own interest and tried to land an army in Ireland. The weather went against them, otherwise I might be writing this article in French.
Patrick Pearse and Sir Roger Casement - who like Hugh O’Neill had received his title from an English monarch - took advantage of Britain’s war with Germany. The weapons Germany provided were captured and the Easter Rising, among some confusion, was largely confined to Dublin.
In the 1940s the rump of the IRA which had been defeated in the Irish civil war turned to Nazi Germany for help. Hitler was inclined to oblige in a limited way but probably didn’t want to unsettle Irish neutrality.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the IRA asked China and the Soviet Union to help them and received considerable support in arms and money from Irish America. The international context that energised the IRA of 1970 was the range of self determination struggles that it could identify with, in Palestine, South Africa and elsewhere. The major benefactor from the 1980s was Colonel Gaddafi, the eccentric leader of Libya.
Enthusiasm for Irish revolution thrived when the international context made it seem feasible. And stresses in the relations between nations often gave countries an interest in what they might achieve through Ireland.
Improved trading relationships between Britain and Ireland in the 20th century settled the old acrimony between them. So, in 1998, both governments were able to work together to frame a constitutional compromise for Northern Ireland. That’s how we got power sharing there, with a future prospect of a referendum on Irish unity.
The idea that Britain and Ireland would be enemies again seemed as absurd by then as that the US and Canada might fall out.
But things change.
In 2016 Britain’s decision to leave the European Union didn’t just introduce tension between Britain and Ireland it affected thinking within Ireland about what a united Ireland might mean. It provided a new rationale for unity, bringing Northern Ireland back into the EU, to its own economic advantage.
A legacy of the Anglo Irish wars was a decision that Ireland in the first century of independence would not develop as a military power. This suited Britain who, in return, would provide defence for Ireland.
We might imagine that if Ireland had had significant military resources when a generation of violence began in 1968, stronger arguments would have been made for a forceful intervention from south of the border.
Now the balance of power is shifting in the world with a retraction of US interest in Europe at the same time as enhanced prospects of war on several fronts.
And that question of Ireland’s neutrality has returned with the move to build up a European force that might hold the line in Ukraine after a peace deal.
Another concern for Ireland there is the question of how Trump’s application of tariffs on trade with Britain and the EU might affect the Irish border. There were years of unsettling negotiations on how that border might be kept open after Brexit, to preserve the spirit of the 1998 Agreement and to allow the fullest possible expression of Irish identity to those living in the North who wished it.
The lesson of history is that the question of Irish unity and independence is not, and never has been, a question of concern to the Irish and the British alone, to be sorted out between them.
Winston Churchill smugly spoke after the first world war of how, once the deluge had subsided, the ‘dreary steeples’ of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerged, and the ancient quarrel resumed, as if the Irish Question was simply a preoccupation of sectarian chauvinists who were indifferent to global upheaval.
He was wrong, as was Patrick Pearse when, in the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916, he spoke of the recurrence of revolution in Ireland, ‘six times in the last three hundred years’ as if every demand for independence was the same in character and driven by the same motivation.
We will not be deciding alone and without reference to a broader international context, whether a united Ireland is a good idea because Ireland is not actually an island at all.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: EU, Politics, Trump, United Ireland
