The Troubles in Ireland
Cronin, Sean
BOOKS THE TROUBLES IN IRELAND SEAN CRONIN Northern I r e l a n d : Captive of H i s t o r y GARY MacEOIN Holt, Rinehart, $10 The H i t t e r Harvest: Church and S t a t e in Northern I r e...
...Semmel previously edited a reprint of Hal6vy's seminal essay The Birth o/ Methodism in England, preceding it with an illuminating analysis of Hal6vy's intellectual milieu...
...The poor suffer and the poor die in the battle for Ireland's future...
...This important book combines several knotty historiographical concerns which have long exercised historians by interweaving Eli Hal6vy's famous thesis about Methodism warding off revolution in England with the more recent problems of the relationship of Evangelical Protestantism to the Enlightenment and to social reform...
...Menendez's book suffers from poor proof-reading: the aforementioned Rev...
...A general strike of Protestants killed it outright in 14 days...
...Both parts of Ireland are economic appendages of Britain...
...As matters stand, Ian Paisley's coalition of rightists and fundamentalist Protestants will control th e convention...
...now he is working with the ultras led by William Craig, Harry West and John Taylormthree right-wing ex Ministers of the Stormont governmen --who want an independent Ulster ol the Rhodesia model...
...In the North of Ireland, the main ingredient in the mix is religion rather than economics, as in the South, and Mr...
...MacEoin describes the Republic as a "cryptotheocracy," but on his own accumulation of facts there is nothing "crypto" about it at all: it's as near a theocracy as makes no difference...
...That overstates it, I think...
...pect, is thorough, well-documented and above all, fair-minded...
...He is an outsider, which is a strength in this kind of situation...
...Paisley is th( man to rally the "Bible Protestant' masses for them...
...He has a solution involving the U.N...
...MacEoin's words) and that divorce will never be permitted while Ireland has a Catholic majority...
...But both books were written when Edward Heath's solution was the topic of the hourmthe sharing of whatever power Ulster's regional assembly would have by Catholics and Protestants...
...William of Orange had still another...
...In the twentieth century there was partition, now combined in Northern Ireland with something called "power sharing...
...Bacon didn't plan the Great Plantation but he thought it a good idea...
...Surprisingly, that may not be a utopian vision: some voices out of Protestant Ulster are urging something like it...
...And there's Article 40 which is the basis for censorship...
...MacEoin says that "some 2,500 foreign corporations dominate the 'growth sector' of Ireland, north and south . . . . " Foreign capital pours in and Irishmen pour out because "the economy remains incapable of providing employment to all the citizens, and concentration of capital in technologically sophisticated activities with low labor content makes the worker ever more marginal...
...Northern Ireland is a small society and each "God knows, rd like to help, but...
...But what...
...The alternative obviously is a pluralist society and a secular state--with politics and religion rigidly separated...
...Cosgrave silently insisted that the government had a place in every citizen's bedroom, be he Catholic or Protestant, and assertt:l it--silently--in the face of history and his countrymen...
...It is common sense of course, but is Ireland ready for it...
...MacEoin errs in some details such as calling Paisley a Presbyterian minister--he founded his own church and called it the Free Presbyterian Church of Ireland--and confuses Henry II, the monarch who tangled with Becket, and Richard II, who lost his crown to Bolingbroke...
...To put the whole blame on religion is to ignore the British role, curiously and foolishly colonial even to this day, which exploited religion in the name of Empire even as it did in India and Palestine and much later in Cyprus...
...But men have killed and been killed in the name of politics, not in the name of God...
...MacEoin's book, as one would ex...
...Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971...
...Menendez, for example, examines the Republic's Constitution--a fine nonsectarian document until it comes to Article 41 which imposes "Catholic morality on the non-Catholic sector of population...
...dispossess and transplant the natives...
...Carl McIntire of Cape May, N.J...
...and Swiss troops--although Switzerland is not a member of the U.N.--that I find far-fetched...
...It may be the final solution of the Irish Question...
...Commonweal 67 man no doubt values the integrity of his hatreds, as someone said, and he can find historical evidence for his bigotry and indeed his right to be a bigot...
...For these and related economic and political reasons the Republic of Ireland is quite rightly unacceptable to Ulster Protestants...
...And he seems...
...BOOKS THE TROUBLES IN IRELAND SEAN CRONIN Northern I r e l a n d : Captive of H i s t o r y GARY MacEOIN Holt, Rinehart, $10 The H i t t e r Harvest: Church and S t a t e in Northern I r e l a n d ALBERT J. MENENDEZ Robert B. Luce Inc., $7.50 Francis Bacon's solution to the Irish problem was the Great Plantation of Ulster: Send in Scottish and English Protestant colonists...
...Harold Wilson's solution is a 78-member constitutional convention to draft a new political structure for Northern Ireland that the British Parliament can accept...
...He is a native of Ireland and began his journalistic career there...
...He probably put back the cause of Irish unity at least 50 years...
...Menendez observes, Ireland would be a united nation if its people were of the same religion...
...Bishops in Ireland speak in loud whispers...
...Carl Mclntire has his name spelled two ways in the same paragraph...
...Only the other day the head of government there, Liam Cosgrave, voted against a proposal by his own government legalizing contraceptives...
...He knows the country and its history...
...Further, several recent authors have sought to qualify the usual assumptions about "conservative" and "liberal" in the eighteenth-century by emphasizing the Colonial American Great Awakening as a vehicle of social protest and as related to the Enlightenment in complex ways (Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolu18 October 1974:68...
...He went to Ireland for the magazine Church and State and what he found there obviously appalled him as a partisan of the strict separation of Church and State...
...Menendez' examination of the subject is one of the best I've read...
...Mr...
...to make a case for a secular united Ireland...
...At one point Paisley opted for a Northern Ireland fully integrated in the United Kingdom...
...Religion has always been a divisive force in Ireland...
...But he does shuffle the main factors convincingly: religion and politics and economics 2nd whatever culture remaining that is not thoroughly Anglicized...
...The Methodist Revolution BERNARD SEMMEL Basic Books, $10.95 DEWEY D. WALLACE, JR...
...There are political problems in the world for which there are no solutions and that of Ireland may be one...
...It is surely overdue...
...Early in this century Hal6vy had asserted that between 1789 and 1815 Methodism had innoculated the English working class against the virus of revolutionary disorder, thereby sparing England the upheaval of the continent...
...Both authors make that point abundantly dear...
...Sir William Petty, the father of political economy, also had a solution to the Irish problem: "there being about 1,300,000 people in Ireland, that to bring a million of them into England, and to leave the other 300,000 for herdsmen and dairy-women behind, and to quit all other trades in Ireland but that of cattle only . . ." Petty's master, Cromwell, had a less kindly solution...
...It is clear that at some point the Irish people themselves must resolve their problems if the island is to have peace and prosperity...
...The key figure in the continuing Ulster drama is Paisley, an opportunist in religion and politics whose closest associate in this country is the Rev...
...what they want is power...
...Many have disagreed with Hal6vy since his views were first broached, hut meanwhile the wider relationship of evangelicalism to social reform has been investigated, for both Britain and America, in such books as Charles I. Foster's An Errand of Mercy, Timothy L. Smith's Revivalism and Social Reform, and Raymond G. Cowherd's The Politics of English Dissent, to mention but a few...
...Even in this ecumenical age that's an impossibility...
...Then there was the dark night of the Irish, the eighteenth century and the Penal Laws...
...As Mr...
...MacEoin says that Cardinal Conway, Primate of All Ireland, declared in 1972 that the majority has the right "to prevent the minority from doing things their conscience allows" (Mr...
...None of these solutions worked...
...That the attempt, for all its well-argued and significant conclusions, is far from flawless is an indication of the difficulty of the task...
...These are minor shortcomings...
...but the book's strength is his treatment of the contemporary scene...
...at another, he said he had an open mind on a united Ireland...
...These two books suggest solutions, too: Gary MacEoin's more than Albert Menendez...
...Menendez says, and I have no evidence to dispute him, that "one can search in vain for Zola, Anatole France, Voltaire, Kant, Gide, Sartre, Bergson, Gibbon, Paine, Balzac, Hugo and many other literary luminaries in Irish public libraries...
...and a hundred years later "the great hunger...
...The idea never got off the ground...
...Both authors agree that the Republic is a near-theocratic state...
...Even their hints are Holy Writ for most politicians: when it comes to a clash between canon law and civil law the Church always prevails...
...In the Republic, denominational education to university level is the rule and just recently when some weak-minded persons suggested that perhaps integrated education might be a good thing for a country with Ireland's problems, the bishops led by their Cardinal said no...
...Despite protestations to the contrary," he writes, "this is truly the most vivid contemporary example of a religious war, despite very real economic and political factors...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 3
