The View
Martin Mansergh
Standing outside the church after a funeral last week, a woman volunteered that one of her antecedents had been an RIC District Inspector in North Kerry, who was shot dead by the IRA in 1921.
Having just finished reading Fergal Keane’s Wounds: A Memoir of War & Love about the involvement of his own relations and their neighbours in the War of Independence, I was able to identify at once whom she was speaking of – District Inspector Tobias O’ Sullivan, one of the central characters in the book. He had previously been involved in the successful defence of the RIC barracks in Kilmallock, and bore blame for a reprisal raid on Ballylongford after moving to Kerry.
So O’ Sullivan was a formidable opponent to be eliminated. Walking home for lunch from the barracks in Listowel in January 1921, an IRA team was waiting for him, and he was assassinated.
Fergal Keane, a nephew of the famous writer John B. Keane, is a veteran BBC war correspondent, whose eye-witness experience of savage conflict has shown him ‘the pity of war’ and enables him to recreate exceptionally vividly some of the local events of the Irish revolution, while putting them in a broader international perspective.
Determination
The final sentence of his book is telling: “It was Ireland’s tragedy that people who loved the same land could become such bitter enemies.” There is a determination amongst most people, regardless of what difficulties may arise, not to permit any further eruption of violence that can only lead quite literally to a dead end.
The Church has often sought at many levels to mitigate conflict, and to proffer approaches that might contribute to a political settlement or at least significant progress. One thinks of Archbishop Clune of Perth in Australia, whose mediation efforts in December 1920 were stymied by British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s insistence on the surrender of IRA arms, before engaging in a truce and negotiation.
In the mid-1920s, the Rector of the Irish College in Rome, Msgr John Hagan, helped ease de Valera’s conscience about signing “an empty formula” – the oath – so that Fianna Fáil could participate in the Dáil and the political life of the Irish Free State.
The initiative that came to mind this last week was Cardinal d’Alton’s in early 1957, following the onset the previous autumn of the IRA border campaign and the return of Éamon de Valera to government. D’Alton’s proposal was that a united Ireland as a two-state federation would return to the Commonwealth.
While de Valera would not have objected to the type of association with the Commonwealth that India had since becoming a republic, the British at the time would have demanded as a minimum a return to allegiance, i.e. a reversion to dominion status.
From time to time since, the proposal that the Republic should rejoin the Commonwealth is occasionally raised by individual politicians, nationalist and unionist, but without gaining traction. Both its advocates and detractors tend to avoid giving the full picture, which might explain why this is so.
On the face of it, the Commonwealth today is a loose and largely benign association of about 60 states, mostly one-time British colonies, the majority of them republics. Its headquarters are in London, and Queen Elizabeth is its head, as her successor is also likely to be.
While it is a forum that provides significant networking opportunities, that assists poorer members and tries to foster democratic values, it is not a political alliance or economic bloc nor an adequate substitute for Britain’s EU membership.
Irish reservations about it, strongly held by some, come from a quite negative role it represented in the early decades of independence. The Irish Free State was forced to give up the declared republic, accept dominion status and full membership of the Commonwealth under threat of “immediate and terrible war”, becoming in effect its only involuntary member.
This was conceived by the British Government as a means of preventing 26-county Ireland from becoming a full sovereign state. Attempts to dismantle Treaty restrictions and to maintain Irish neutrality during the Second World War led to sanctions or pressures on vital supplies. To prevent a complete breakdown in relations, a tenuous link involving accreditation of Irish diplomats by the crown was maintained, with ambiguity over whether Ireland was still technically a dominion, though internally a republic with a President.
In 1948-9, when the first Interparty Government decided to declare a republic and break the Commonwealth link, India was about to become a republic within the Commonwealth.
The substance of Ireland’s economic interests with the UK was preserved with the institution of the Common Travel Area, but there were political repercussions in the form of the British guarantee to the unionists, which hardened the British commitment to the Union following Northern Ireland’s help during the Second World War.
A constructive unionist politician, Jeffrey Donaldson, as a guest at a recent Fine Gael conference proposed that the Republic should rejoin the Commonwealth as a conciliatory gesture. The irony was that this was suggested while his party the DUP was advocating a hard Brexit, which is in no way conciliatory and undermines the current frictionless border on the island of Ireland.
The danger is that such a move would be represented by some unionists as heralding Ireland’s return to what they call “the British family of nations” and that it would confuse our EU partners, whose solidarity is vital at the present time to Ireland. No Irish government is likely to want to excite an emotive debate about an issue, where there is minimal public demand for change and where the possible benefits are not clear-cut.
In the context of longer-term Irish unity, Commonwealth membership is not to be dismissed out of hand, but like reformulation of Articles 2 and 3 in the Good Friday Agreement is probably best addressed in comprehensive negotiation rather than unilaterally in advance and as part of a lasting mutual accommodation between unionism and republican separatism.