The Irish Tragedy
SPINNER, THOMAS J. Jr.
The Irish Tragedy THE DAMNABLE QUESTION: A STUDY OF ANGLO-IRISH RELATIONS, by George Dangerfield. Little, Brown. 400 pp. $14.95. THOMAS J. SPINNER JR. Writing to his wife from Dublin, a few weeks...
...Thomas J. Spinner Jr...
...They rescheduled the Rising for noon on Monday...
...It was a remarkable reconstruction of those frantic years just before World War I when women demanded the vote, the working class insisted upon equality, and the Conservative Party acted unconstitutionally because of its opposition to Home Rule for Ireland...
...Pearse, part fanatic, part saint, and among the first to be shot on May 3, had no doubt that they would be "remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations...
...teaches Irish and English history at the University of Vermont...
...They wanted independence, not an enlarged local government called Home Rule...
...If these proposals were rejected, Lloyd George promised total war within three days...
...Terrible atrocities were committed by both sides...
...For Dangerfield, born in England but a long-time resident of the United States, it is a return to familiar territory...
...The plans for Easter Sunday were scuttled but a small group of dedicated people were determined to act...
...With wit, paradox, and compassion, George Dangerfield, in The Damnable Question: A Study of Anglo-Irish Relations, has reflected upon Anglo-Irish relations from the Act of Union in 1800 which eliminated the Dublin Parliament until that tragic moment when the Irish revolutionary movement dissolved into fratricidal agony over the terms offered by the English in 1921...
...One need only read the morning paper to know that the "damnable question" of Northern Ireland is still much alive...
...Dangerfield is convinced that this was a "gigantic bluff," but the moderate Arthur Griffith and the militant Michael Collins decided they must accept...
...By Good Friday all was chaos in the rebel camp...
...The rebels did manage to hold parts of Dublin until Saturday, when they surrendered...
...Sir Roger Casement had been arrested...
...This splendid new book is an investigation of why the Easter Rising was the "great watershed" of Anglo-Irish relations...
...William Butler Yeats, a poet of genius, would celebrate the "terrible beauty" that was born...
...Dublin jeered when the rebels capitulated...
...Nevertheless, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, pledged Ireland's support at the start of World War I. The radical and extremist groups — Irish Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Fein, Citizen Army — had little mass support but were convinced that Redmond had lost his senses...
...The Republic has been characterized by late marriages, continued emigration, economic stagnation, censorship, and little social justice...
...Connolly, however, was a revolutionary socialist who believed the national problem must be resolved before the social question could be tackled...
...Despite the Liberal Party's dependence upon Irish Nationalist votes after 1910, it failed to deliver a satisfactory form of Home Rule due to Conservative and Ulster Protestant intransigence...
...It was a minor miracle that an insurrection ever occurred in 1916...
...Eamon de Valera said, "No...
...Revulsion swept most of Ireland when the wounded Connolly was propped in a chair and executed on May 12...
...it soon changed...
...Forty years ago he astonished the scholarly world with the publication of The Strange Death of Liberal England...
...Between 1919 and 1921 a reasonably united national liberation front fought the English to a standstill...
...Lloyd George's Conservative-dominated government reluctantly conceded Dominion status to an Irish Free State, but it insisted upon an oath of allegiance and demanded that six of Ulster's nine counties have the right to remain within the United Kingdom...
...He demanded a unified Ireland, with safeguards for Ulster, in External Association with Great Britain...
...He is the author of "George Joachim Goschen: The Transformation of a Victorian Liberal...
...There is a fine summary and evaluation of events prior to 1906, but the emphasis is on the period which followed...
...Dangerfield argues persuasively that this marked a tragedy for the Irish Revolution: "it was not allowed to complete itself" and so never had the chance "under revolutionary conditions to test the concept of an Irish Republic for a United Ireland...
...Padraic Pearse and James Connolly became the best known of the seven signatories of the proclamation of the Irish Republic...
...Little help came from their countrymen but the noble deaths of the executed sixteen, the foolish policies of the English, and the contours of Irish history gave them immortality and partial victory...
...His confession is a succinct summary of England's 700-year inability to understand the Irish people's desire to define their own future for themselves...
...It appeared almost certain that there would be hardly a whimper in Dublin...
...Dangerfield's view of the future is not optimistic: if Anglo-Irish relations "have today been reduced to a squalid and protracted death in the back streets of Belfast, it is because the Anglo-Irish past has not yet been put to rest in a United Ireland...
...England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity...
...Neither Pearse nor Connolly would have appreciated the last sixty years of Irish history...
...The Easter Rising, the change in Irish opinion, and the united opposition to the introduction of conscription drove Ireland from constitutionalism to revolution...
...They were two remarkable men though it should always be remembered that one man's patriotic hero is another man's terrorist...
...Writing to his wife from Dublin, a few weeks after the Easter Rising of 1916, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith dejectedly admitted: "You will never get to the bottom of this most perplexing and damnable country...
...German weapons failed to arrive...
...As Pearse and Connolly emerged from Liberty Hall on Easter Monday, Connolly whispered 10 a friend that they were marching off to be slaughtered...
...After an acrimonious debate, the Irish Parliament voted 64-57 to accept the English plan...
...A mystical nationalist, Pearse prepared for a blood sacrifice that would redeem the Irish people...
...The Irish Free State was still within the Empire, Northern Ireland was lost, and a horrible Civil War would soon follow...
...Sharing a common devotion to the cause of Ireland, they differed profoundly on other matters...
Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11
