Dr Martin ManserghWe need to reflect more self-critically on how peace for the future might be improved, writes Martin Mansergh
The consolidation of peace takes precedence over everything else. Prince Charles’ recent visit to Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, helped to remove a cloud hanging over the town, since Lord Mountbatten and some of his family and friends were blown up without warning in the harbour on a beautiful summer’s day.
He had been in the habit of taking family holidays there, occupying Classiebawn Castle, which had passed down to his wife Edwina, having been built, like the harbour, for absentee Irish landowner and British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. The local community had no part in an IRA assassination that very unfairly befell their town.
Media attention also focused on the handshake and short informal conversation in Sligo between the prince and Gerry Adams, which annoyed opponents of the peace process. It was an important and necessary act of reconciliation that must have cost a lot, both to the future British King, for whom Mountbatten was a beloved great-uncle and mentor, and to the President of Sinn Féin.
Attitudes to Irishmen who participated in World War I with official Nationalist encouragement, certainly to begin with, have softened greatly. The same more relaxed attitude is becoming the norm vis-à-vis visiting British royals, as the Republic is not in danger, having elected Presidents of whom we can be proud. Such visits are good for tourism. Even Charles Haughey, a man of strong Republican attitudes and no anglophile, once confided privately that the British would be mad to get rid of the royals for that reason. All constitutional monarchies depend for their continuance on popular democratic consent.
Request
The late John Armstrong of The Irish Times telephoned home in Tipperary that August afternoon in 1979, looking for my father to write an appreciation of Mountbatten. A former Commonwealth professor at Cambridge, who had been a boy in Tipperary during the war of independence, Nicholas Mansergh was editing India Office papers in 12 volumes on the transfer of power completed in 1947. He took this on at the request of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who wanted to document a crowning achievement of the Attlee Administration. Mountbatten was the last Viceroy, who oversaw the timetable for British withdrawal from India, a template that Republicans pressed the British to adopt in Northern Ireland.
According to Ireland, India and Empire by Kate O’Malley (2008), one of Mountbatten’s last engagements as Governor-General in 1948 was to host a lunch in New Delhi for Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Eamon de Valera, recently out of office, who was visiting.
De Valera and Mount-batten got on famously, and Mountbatten wrote to Dev soon afterwards from Mullaghmore, where “all the people are so friendly”, saying how much “my wife and I enjoyed having you and Mr Aiken to stay with us in Delhi, and I shall never forget our interesting conversations”.
O’Malley corroborates that de Valera favoured Ireland and India remaining as Republics within the Commonwealth, without rupture. What happened in Mullaghmore in 1979 was a horrible recompense for the good will and hospitality given for the first time by anyone connected to the royal family to Ireland’s best-known Republican leader.
The intensity of my father’s dismay is conveyed in his conclusion: “What terrible irony is there in the reported manner of the death of one who was instrumental in bringing about the greatest act of decolonisation in the 20th Century.”
Approved
Although one perpetrator was convicted, the attack must have been approved at a high level. Adams’ reaction at the time, which he declines to amend, that Mountbatten knew the risks, implies that it was partly the victim’s fault. Even his predecessor as Sinn Féin President, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, later conceded ignorance of Mountbatten’s previous role.
The attack fits the comment of Napoleon’s police minister in 1804, after a Bourbon prince, the duc d’Enghien, was abducted across the frontier, summarily tried and executed: “It is more than a crime. It is a mistake.”
If the IRA’s intention was to sicken the establishment and hasten British withdrawal, it had the opposite effect, reinforcing the hard-line approach emphasising security that would continue for 11 years under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The IRA hunger strikers did not succeed in facing her down, nor she them.
At present, there is an Oireachtas enquiry into the banking collapse, which caused severe collateral economic damage. The Northern Ireland conflict was a much bigger disaster affecting the whole island for 30 years. All of us above a certain age need to reflect more self-critically on that, and everyone on how peace for the future might be improved. The natural tendency is to dwell on the success of the peace process, and to brush aside hard questions about the preceding conflict.
The peace process was not a validation of the IRA (or Loyalist) campaign or of every position and action previously taken by other parties, including governments.
It was about how best to move forward, taking a holistic view of the sources of conflict and what could be acceptable to all sides. The struggle for independence now being commemorated along with other events during the decade of centenaries does not provide justification for the later conflict. Of course, no combatant wishes to believe that they fought in vain, and it would be naïve to think that violence and use of force makes no difference to outcomes, simply because, morally speaking, they ought not to.
The Good Friday Agreement won overwhelming support from Nationalist Ireland, North and South. Unionists were more hesitant, but even the DUP came on board for its sequel, the St Andrews Agreement, in 2006. A very high price had been paid in death and bereavement, injury and destruction, lost jobs and investment in order to reach that point. Those most involved would be wise to accept that the Irish State and public, while gratefully acknowledging all contributions to the peace process, will not be converted to retrospective approval of paramilitary campaigns or the ‘dirty war’ and collusion dimension engaged in by the British State.