The Easter Sunday Parade celebrating the 1916 rising The View
Martin Mansergh
Shortly, the people of the Irish State will be celebrating 100 years of independence, mostly with pride, despite the difficult circumstances of its birth. This will be done without trying to hide subsequent disappointments, failures and betrayals, or ignoring basic work that still has to be done.
Commemoration will also have to take account of those who would have wished to be part of an independent Ireland, but who found themselves on the wrong side of a hard border. It also has to acknowledge the attachment of another community over the same period to Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom.
There are those who feel Ireland should have held back because of this, but most people wanted to go ahead and to demonstrate what independence could achieve in most of Ireland. In any case, unionist opposition was to any form of self-government in Ireland, however diluted. The potential historic compromise of Home Rule for the whole of Ireland within the Union was adamantly rejected.
Achievements
To return to the achievements, first of all, the State survived a difficult early period, better than most European States that emerged at the same period.
This was partly a question of geography, but also a matter of leadership on both sides of the post-civil war divide. There was already a strong parliamentary tradition going back to the time of Daniel O’Connell.
Over the first quarter of a century, the journey to full political independence was completed. Democratic alternation took place. The State had its own constitution.
Financial viability was maintained. Political stability remains, despite periodic challenges, and the country is not threatened by an extremist takeover from any direction.
The whole point of independence was to enable the Irish people to have a national life of their own, not in total isolation from the rest of the world, but with priorities, emphases and values of their own, a life that would evolve and change over time. Religion was an enormously important factor that transcended often bitter political divisions and that joined with the State in the early days in managing many of the institutions and organisations providing health, education and some social services.
Nobody could quibble with the description of Ireland (26 counties) as a Catholic country during the early decades of independence, though less self-evident today.
A columnist in the Irish Times recently described the break involved in independence as an economic disaster, something that was certainly the view of that newspaper 100 years ago. It prompted the reflection that, while there had certainly been several economic disasters in Irish history, independence was not one of them.
The previous 120 years since the Union saw the population of Ireland roughly halved, both as a result of deaths and emigration during the Famine and the heavy outflow of population mainly to the US in the decades that followed. This is not to suggest that everything flowing from the Union was negative.
One of the main aims of independence was to stem the haemorrhage of population and provide adequate employment opportunities here at home. The policy of self-sufficiency, while it achieved some advances, by the 1950s was proving inadequate. In a post-war world of rapidly increasing dynamism and mobility, Ireland had to provide a quality of life and a standard of living that could compete, or at least hold its own.
This meant opening up the domestic market to trade, and availing of the opportunity to join the EEC. Economic progress and prowess today is far more important to national self-esteem than it was originally.
Failures
On two fronts, often dubbed as failures, there was actually qualified progress. The Irish language, threatened with extinction in the 1890s, was salvaged, and to this day is an integral part of the school education system, albeit with mixed results. The ambition of some in the early years that it would become the country’s main spoken language never had the necessary popular support, with English too much the language of employment opportunities at home and abroad.
Really successful parts of the Gaelic tradition are the GAA, music and dancing, and the Celtic motif that permeates much of the arts.
It would be easy to say that no progress has been made towards unifying the country, but we have come a long way from the 1920s.
The political apartheid is over, and today we are debating in a Brexit context how the imperative of maintaining an open border that was a consequence of both the European Single Market and the Good Friday Agreement is to be achieved. The leadership changeover in Sinn Féin provides a further reminder of the trauma involved, much of it avoidable, on the way to a complete remaking of the 1920-1 settlement regarding Northern Ireland.
To adapt the words of the late Fr Francis Shaw SJ, the civil rights movement will always be part of the canon of Irish history, in a way the Provisional IRA campaign never will be.
The place of religion in Irish society is changing. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has emphasised the importance of maintaining the integrity of the message, and, by implication, regardless of societal choices. Desmond Fennell is right in noting that socio-moral changes of the past 50 years have been brought about by Catholics (including those of Catholic background), notwithstanding the use of a pluralist rationale in the 1970s and 1980s. Irish society as a whole is nonetheless still very far from wishing to discard its religious beliefs, practices and traditions.
On the other hand, political philosophies transcending parties are rarely purely based on abstract truth. Their ultimate test is their ability to deliver. In the times ahead, Ireland is likely to become more European-oriented.
Past realities, both good and bad, should not be tendentiously ignored, but abusive language and confrontational and exclusionary ideologies should be avoided.
If there is to be any hope of managing a transition to a more consensual all-Ireland constitutional arrangement, we have to become more serious about creating and cherishing a broader Irish identity.