Irish Nationalists

A nation and its nationalism are tied together, but they are different and should not be confused with one another. Each of us is born into a nation. We speak the nation’s language from birth and it is the sine qua non of national identity.

The clash of nationalists over Ireland—Irish nationalists confronting their English problem and English nationalists encountering their Irish problem—demonstrates the basic patterns of nationalism. Irish nationalist strategy has been characterized as “England’s difficulty [being] Ireland’s opportunity.” As shown in the potato famine of the 1840s, when the policy of laissez faire led to massive death and a change in the land distribution from subdivision toward consolidation, the English did not ignore the inverse: Ireland’s difficulties could be England’s opportunity.³³

On each side the nationalists of the other persuasion are portrayed as acting from selfish motives, misleading the gullible people of the opposite side. Throughout the writings of Wolfe Tone, for instance, the policies of Britain are at every juncture characterized as tyrannical and sinister.

Likewise, when Irish nationalists have been tried, the English prosecution has sought to demonstrate that a Wolfe Tone, a Robert Emmet, Padric Pearse, James Connolly, or Roger Casement represented not the Irish people but a foreign power. Granted, when Tone insisted on appearing at his trial wearing the full-dress French military uniform, he put himself at a disadvantage for claiming that his cause was Ireland’s and not France’s. Nevertheless, to assert that the loyalty of an Irish nationalist to Ireland is in any measure diminished because of an alliance with England’s enemy, whether France or Germany, is to fly in the face of all common sense and evidence about the intensity of the nationalist’s attachment to the nation.

Nationalism and religion have always been inseparable. Either they will knit together, as they have today in Israel and Iran, or they will stand opposed but in their opposition become dependent upon, even imitate, each other. During the French Revolution, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church was unseated from its privileged position, but under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy the churches were turned into civil temples, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was declared a national catechism, and national rites, hymns, and prayers were introduced. Abbe Raynal claimed that “the state…is not made for religion, but religion is made for the state.… The state has supremacy in everything.”³⁵

The Irish nationalist cause is Catholic, and the Orange Unionist cause is Protestant.

The Unionists, especially the Rev. Ian Paisley, blast Roman Catholicism as the Anti-Christ and call upon their supporters to “Remember 1690” when William of Orange defeated the Catholic Irish at the battle of the Boyne and established a protestant ascendancy. The ascendancy meant the confiscation of Catholic Irish land, legal discrimination against Catholics, and the supremacy of the Protestants who would insist upon English rights and English protection. Irish nationalist resistance to this was not generally understood among the British. “English officials would concede to the Irish,” observes historian Patrick O’Farrell, “no principles, no impulses, other than those of treachery and rebelliousness: claims for religious freedom and individual liberty were a mere pretence.”³⁶

To the British the issue has been political, not religious. Henry VIII’s break with Rome turned all Catholics into potential traitors, and when the Inquisition in 1570 found Queen Elizabeth guilty of heresy and excommunicated her, devout Catholics found it impossible to be loyal to the Queen. An act of 1571, in reply, made it high treason to allege that Elizabeth was a heretic or schismatic.³⁷ Under Cromwell in the next century, while Catholics were tolerated within England, the Irish Catholics suffered massacres at Drogheda and Wexford which have been compared in their savagery to the horrors of the German Thirty Years’ War. Cromwell told the Irish that he intended to enforce the Tudor act which made the Mass illegal.³⁸ Until 1766 Irish Catholics, especially the clergy, were further suspect by the English because the pope continued to recognize the Stuart Pretender to the English throne rather than the Hanoverians.³⁹ Throughout the seventeenth century and far beyond, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was used to discredit Catholics.

In 1796, with the wars of the French Revolution, Irish patriots looked to France for liberation. France, however, looked upon Ireland only as a possible conquest and blow at England. In mid-December an armada of thirty-five French ships and 12,000 men evaded the British blockade and arrived at Bantry Bay, County Cork, ready to invade Ireland, establish a friendly but independent Irish republic, and then prepare to conquer England.⁴⁰ Wolfe Tone, aboard the flagship, had spent five years organizing the United Irish Society, a forerunner of today’s Irish Republican Army (IRA). The aim of the United Irish Society was, in Tone’s words, “to subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-ending source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country.”⁴¹ When Tone had been expelled from Ireland for his organizational activities, he had gone to the United States where he met with and was encouraged by the French minister, who sent him on to France. The French Directory was, after some delay, persuaded of the worth of Tone’s liberation expedition and appointed none other than the commander-in-chief, General Lazare Hoche, to the Irish project. Tone was made a chef de brigade and given a French uniform. After reaching Irish shores, however, the armada met with hurricane-force winds, preventing a landing and driving it out to open sea. Again, as with the 1588 Spanish Armada, England escaped an invasion thanks to the weather at sea.

Two years later, in 1798, another French invasion was planned, this one to coincide with an Irish rebellion. But because of French involvement in Egypt and poorly coordinated uprisings in Connaught, Wexford, and Dublin, along with insufficient support, the Irish rebels experienced nothing but failure. Most of the Irish rebellion erupted in May and was crushed by September. In the meantime, at the mouth of the Nile, Admiral Nelson decisively defeated Napoleon.

When he was charged with high treason before the court martial in Dublin a month later, Tone’s appearance was not calculated to impress his judges favorably, nor were his words. He was dressed in his

French uniform, complete with “a large and fiercely cocked hat, with a broad gold lace, and the tri-coloured cockade, a blue uniform coat, with gold and embroidered collar, and two large gold epaulets, blue pantaloons with gold laced garters at the knees.” When asked how he pleaded, Tone replied, “Guilty! for I have never in my life stooped to a prevarication.”⁴³

His trial became the occasion for Tone not merely to explain his own actions but to level an indictment against the British. “What I have done has been purely from principle and the fullest conviction of its rectitude,” Tone claimed. “The favourite object of my life has been the independence of my country, and to that object I have made every sac-rifice.… The connection of England I have ever considered as the bane of Ireland, and have done everything in my power to break it, and to raise three million of my countrymen to the rank of citizens.” Here the court stopped Tone, but, after some discussion, allowed him to continue. Tone did not deny that he sought the assistance of France—hardly, as he stood in the dock wearing his French uniform:

In my efforts to accomplish the freedom of my country, I never have had recourse to any other than open and manly war.… In the glorious race of patriotism, I have pursued the path chalked out by Washington in America, and Kosciusco in Poland. Like the latter, I have failed to emancipate my country; and, unlike both, I have forfeited my life—I have done my duty, and I have no doubt the Court will do their’s [sic]—I have only to add, that a man who has thought and acted as I have done, should be armed against the fear of death.⁴⁴

After receiving the death sentence, Wolfe Tone took his own life before he could be executed.

The Irish nationalist revolutionary tradition had its beginnings in the 1798 rebellion and Wolfe Tone’s ideology. Trials of Irish nationalists after Tone’s trial often feature what is known as the “Irish speech from the dock.” When the 24-year-old Robert Emmet traveled to Europe in 1802 seeking support for another expected uprising in Ireland, he spoke with Napoleon and Talleyrand but returned to Dublin with nothing more than promises from France to help if the rebellion were successful. Although Emmet and a few hundred supporters, dressed in green, began the rebellion, killed the lord chief justice and several others, the Emmet forces were soon in disarray, their leader arrested. During his trial for treason and after he had been judged guilty, the judge asked Emmet what he had to say about why he should not be sentenced to death. “Why the sentence of the law should not be passed upon me,” he replied, “I have nothing to say. Why the sentence which in the public mind is usually attached to that of the law, ought to be reversed, I have much to say.”

Emmet then launched into an eloquent refutation of the charge that he conspired to join Ireland to France. His cause was “not for France, but for liberty.” He admitted communication with France, but “God forbid that I should see my country under the hands of a foreign power …. If the French came as a foreign power, Oh, my countrymen! meet them on the shore with a torch in one hand—a sword in the other— receive them with all the destruction of war—immolate them in their boats before our native soil shall be polluted by a foreign foe.” When he proclaimed that his true cause was not France but Ireland, “to effect a separation from England,” the judge interrupted Emmet to remind him that he was called upon to tell the court why the death sentence should not be pronounced, but instead “you are making an avowal of dreadful treasons.” The judge admonished Emmet: “You should make some better atonement to expiate your own crimes and alleviate the misfortunes you have brought upon your country.” Emmet answered that his motive resulted from “an ardent attachment to my country, from a sense of public duty.” If he were not permitted to vindicate his cause and character, then, he told the court, “Let it remain in silence—in charitable silence.… I am going to my cold grave. I have one request to make. Let there be no inscription upon my tomb. Let no man write my epitaph.… Let my character and my motives repose in obscurity and peace, till other times and other men can do them justice; then shall my character be vindicated. Then may my epitaph be written.”⁴⁵

During the nineteenth century, after the 1801 Act of Union merging Ireland with Great Britain and after the catastrophic famine of the 1840s—which the Irish saw as directly related to the union—the secret Fenian Brotherhood was founded “to keep alive a spirit of hatred to the British Crown and Government.”⁴⁶ A spy and provocateur, Pierce Nagle, who worked in the editorial offices of the Fenian weekly The Irish People, supplied the police with information about the editors. John O’Leary and the other editors were arrested, tried, and convicted in 1865 for treason. The prosecution was based in large part on letters they had received from Irish nationalist zealots. One letter, from a “half-crazed” man named O’Keeffe, urged that “the French exterminated their aristocracy, and every honest revolution must imitate that of France. We must do the same.” This led the government to charge that “the operation of this revolution, as it is called, [was] to be commenced by an indiscriminate massacre by the assassination of all those above the lower classes, including the Roman Catholic clergy, against whom their animosity appears, from their writings, to be especially directed.”⁴⁷

In his speech from the dock O’Leary asked the meaning of treason. “Treason is a foul crime. The poet Dante consigned traitors to, I believe, the ninth circle of hell, but what kind of traitors? Traitors against king, against country, against friends and benefactors. England is not my country; I have betrayed no friend, no benefactor.” O’Leary pointed out that Algernon Sidney would be a legal traitor because he was convicted by the infamous hanging judge, George Jeffreys. So would Robert Emmet. Yet Jeffreys and the judge who tried Emmet, Lord Norbury, would be loyal men under the law.⁴⁸ With his reductio ad absurdum of treason and loyalty, which was absurd to the thinking of an Irish nationalist but probably made good sense to an English nationalist, O’Leary finished his speech and received a sentence of twenty years of penal servitude.

The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, another rebellion prompted by an English war in Europe, was put down within a week. Fifteen leaders, including Padraic Pearse, Sean MacDermott, and James Connolly, were arrested, given a hearing before a court martial, and shot. Connolly’s statement to the court summarized their position: “Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence in any one generation of Irishmen of even a respectable minority ready to die to affirm that truth makes that government for ever an usurpation and a crime against human progress.”⁴⁹ Pearse in his statement made an effort to emphasize that their cause was Ireland, not Germany, that they were not German agents financed with German gold:

I repudiate the assertion of the prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy, Germany. Germany is no more to me than England is.… My aim was to win Irish freedom; we struck the first blow ourselves but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume I am speaking to Englishmen who value their own freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it.… If you strike us down now we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom; if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom then our children will win it by a better deed.⁵⁰

Likewise, when Sir Roger Casement was tried in the Old Bailey for going to Germany and returning to Ireland in a German submarine in time for the Easter rising, he ordered his counsel not to attempt to clear him but rather “to defend and make clear an extreme Irish Nationalist’s standpoint—that I wanted to put up a straight fight for Ireland,” that he was not an English traitor, not a dreamer, and not a fool, but an Irish patriot. Casement told the jury that “the rebellion was not made in Germany, and that not one penny of German gold went to finance it.” He said he had never sold himself to any government, but he always claimed that an Irishman “has no right to fight for any land but Ireland.… From the first moment I landed on the Continent until I came home again to Ireland I never asked for nor accepted a single penny of foreign money…for only the money of Irishmen.”⁵¹ He like the others in 1916 was executed as a traitor.

By itself the Easter Rising did little to attain Irish independence. Few Irish became involved. The nationalist leaders seized the Dublin Post Office and fought valiantly, but the Irish people only watched with interest. What kindled the real rebellion and civil war was the court martial and execution of the Easter Rising leaders. From that followed the formation of the Irish Republican Army and the creation in 1921 of the Free State. What was “a harebrained romantic adventure,” as it was called by George Bernard Shaw, was turned by the British trials and executions into a “heroic episode in the struggle for Irish freedom.” “Those who were executed,” Shaw observed, “accordingly became not only national heroes, but the martyrs whose blood was the seed of the present Irish Free State.… Nothing more blindly savage, stupid, and terror-mad could have been devised by England’s worst enemies.”⁵² Within a few weeks after the executions the mood of Ireland changed. Picture postcards of the executed leaders were displayed and copies of the “last and inspiring” speeches were sold on the streets.⁵³ What the Rising failed to achieve the English court martials and executions clinched.

In each of the Irish nationalist trials the accused, instead of denying the charges, affirmed them and indicted the British with the real wrongdoing: ruling the Irish. From the dock they insisted that they, not the British, represented the Irish people. Whether in fact that was true at the time of their trials is another matter. Tone, Emmet, O’Leary, and the 1916 leaders presumed to speak for the Irish people. The trial gave each of the nationalists a retrospective mantle of authority to speak in the name of the Irish nation. Whether or not they genuinely possessed that authority at the time they were tried, they possess it now.

For a year and a half in the mid-1970s the Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provo-IRA) had carried out more than 60 terrorist missions in England, mostly in and around London. These included 32 bombings, 19 murders, 3 kidnappings, and 9 shootings—acts such as random mailbox bombings, the assassination of Ross McWhirter, publisher of the Guinness Book of World Records who had offered a reward of £50,000 for the capture of the terrorists, and most notably the October 5, 1974, pub bombing in Guildford, which killed 5 and injured more than 50.

The Active Service Unit, a small undercover team of commandos in their early to mid 20s had been formed in 1973 by a leading Provo, Brian Keenan, then 32, the director of operations for England. Until December 1975 the police had no knowledge of who they were or from where they worked. Through a combination of what appears to be complacency among Keenan’s band of terrorists and luck by a massive police effort (Operation Combo), two plain-clothes police officers witnessed an attack on a Mayfair restaurant. Four members of the ASU (the Balcombe Street 4—Hugh Doherty, Joseph O’Connell, Eddie Butler, and Harry Duggan) were caught, tried, and convicted.⁵⁴ Keenan was discovered and arrested in 1979, tried and convicted in 1980.⁵⁵

The reign of terrorism conducted by the ASU prompted Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in November 1974 to introduce the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, which allowed the police extensive powers to arrest and detain persons suspected of terrorism up to 48 hours, or to 7 days, with the approval of the home secretary. It passed the House of Commons to become law in near-record time. Two days later, November 28, Paul Hill, who had been wanted in Belfast for the murder of a British soldier, was arrested in London. During interrogation by the Surrey police, Hill confessed to the Guildford bombing as well to the Belfast killing and he also implicated his friend, Gerard Conlon. Conlon was arrested the next day in Belfast and under interrogation implicated his aunt, Anne Maguire, for making bombs in her north London home, and through her, the rest of the Maguire family as well as his father, Giuseppe Conlon, and two family friends, the Maguire 7. All were convicted— the Guildford 4 in 1975 and the Maguire 7 in 1976—and sent to prison.

During the 1977 trial of the Balcombe Street 4, O’Connell, Duggan, and Butler refused to plead because the Guildford bombing and another at Woolwich were missing from the indictment. “I refuse to plead,” O’Connell told the court, “because the indictment does not include two charges concerning the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. I took part in both, for which innocent people have been convicted.”⁵⁶ During the testimony two explosives experts, who had testified at the Maguire trial, admitted under cross-examination that they had found evidence linking both pub bombings to the defendants but that the Surrey police had advised them to leave the connection out of the report.⁵⁷ The Court of Appeal in 1977 did not consider this sufficient grounds for reopening the cases. In the 1980 trial of Keenan neither the Guildford nor the Maguire cases were mentioned.⁵⁸

By 1989 the Guildford 4 had spent fourteen years in prison, the Maguire 7 were incarcerated eleven years, the ASU had been convicted for terrorist acts and had admitted to the Guildford bombing. The wheels of justice then began to turn, recognizing that the Hill and Conlon confessions, upon which the entire set of Guildford and Maguire convictions were based, were of doubtful value. This recognition evoked public concern, especially as it was accompanied by the release of the Guildford 4 and realization that Guiseppe Conlon had died while in prison and that the other Maguires had served their terms. Among the prominent leaders criticizing the judicial mistakes were the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, Basil Cardinal Hume, Roy Jenkins, and two Law Lords, Devlin and Scarman. In addition the cases were the subjects of two widely read books and several investigative television documentaries.⁵⁹

Sir John May, a retired Court of Appeal judge, headed an inquiry into the cases, which in a 1990 interim report completely vindicated the Maguire 7 and strongly criticized the trial judge, Justice John Donaldson (later Lord Donaldson, Master of the Rolls). Nevertheless, the Court of Appeal in 1991, while overturning the convictions, hedged its judgment with a suggestion that someone in the Maguire household may have handled explosives and contaminated the others.⁶⁰

In April 1994 a Belfast appeals court quashed Hill’s conviction for murdering a British soldier. In July of that year Sir John May issued a 300-page final report which criticized the Surrey police for their treatment of the evidence and the confessions. “Where the police feel certain they have indeed arrested the right people, perhaps on the basis of what is regarded as reliable intelligence, but have little or no admissible evidence to prove their guilt, there may be a strong temptation to persuade those persons to confess.”⁶¹ The erroneous conviction of the Guildford 4 was not sinister or deliberate, according to Sir John, but a result of human failings. In fact, he noted intelligence records dating from 1971 which identify Gerard Conlon and Paul Hill as members of the D Company in the Provo IRA’s 2nd Battalion. At a press conference Sir John expressed the hope that this report would end the mat-ter.⁶² Hardly. The folklore remained and, kept alive by a popular movie, In the Name of the Father, has continued to grow.