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Paving the Way for Peace

British-Irish historical memory: the legacy of the Anglo-Irish conflict in the first four volumes of the Lives Entwined project

La mémoire historique britanno-irlandaise : l’héritage du conflit irlandais dans les quatre premiers volumes du projet Lives Entwined
Slimane Hargas

Résumés

Le nom attribué au projet inauguré par le British Council au milieu des années 2000, c’est-à-dire Lives Entwined, annonçait déjà le ton des quatre volumes d’essais auquel il a jusqu’à présent donné naissance ; et dans lesquels les thèmes principaux sont, en effet, les forts liens culturels et historiques qui unissent Britanniques et Irlandais et les pierres d’achoppement majeures à leur réconciliation dans les décennies antérieures, à savoir l’exacerbation de la mémoire de leur passé conflictuel par l’impérialisme britannique et le nationalisme irlandais, ainsi que les Troubles en Irlande du Nord. Cet article tentera de déterminer dans quelle mesure les récits personnels des contributeurs au projet témoignent du « recalibrage postcolonial » des relations britanno-irlandaises auquel Tony Reilly fait référence dans ses remarques préliminaires du premier volume. Il sera soutenu que si l’affirmation de Reilly n’est pas hors de propos, la majorité écrasante des contributeurs ayant souligné la fin d’une ère marquée par de fortes tensions mémorielles et l’émergence, à sa place, d’une ère nouvelle et plus paisible, ce constat ne doit pas pour autant être trop facilement tenu pour acquis aujourd’hui, étant donné l’agitation politique causée par le Brexit.

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  • 1 This article focuses on the first four volumes of Lives Entwined as the fifth was only published in (...)
  • 2 In a statement issued on 1 June 1997 Tony Blair indicated: “Those who governed in London at the tim (...)
  • 3 Lives Entwined is a follow-up to the Through Irish Eyes study, which was conducted in 2003 by the (...)

1Lives Entwined is a project conducted by the British Council in Ireland, whose aim is to gather politicians, academics and artists from both sides of the Irish Sea to discuss the changing dynamics of British-Irish relations in the aftermath of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the four volumes published to date,1 many contributors have written fairly informal accounts of their own personal experiences of British-Irish relations, and by the same token presented their vision of the legacy of the violent armed conflicts which opposed Britain and Ireland. Contrived in the wake of Tony Blair’s recognition of the British government’s responsibility in the Famine (1997)2 and the signing of the Good Friday agreement (1998),3 the project is meant to take stock of the state of British-Irish relations in light of such landmark developments in the reconciliation process.

  • 4 Tony Reilly, “Introduction”, in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined I, Dublin: British Council Irelan (...)
  • 5 Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé, Paris : Textuel, 1998, 25.

2According to Tony Reilly, director of the British Council Ireland at the inception of the project, British-Irish relations were witnessing a “postcolonial recalibration in the process of working itself out.”4 In this article, the case shall be made that the nature of the aforementioned relations has recently been deemed less and less postcolonial, by analysing the arguments delivered in Lives Entwined and, more precisely, the contributors’ assessment of what could be called the gradual ‘de-postcolonisation’ of Ireland and, to a lesser extent and at a slower pace, of Britain. Of crucial importance in this process have been the socio-economic and identity changes, which impacted the memory of the Anglo-Irish conflict and the two-pronged process of identification and counter-identification of the Irish with colonial and postcolonial societies. In this respect, it turns out that British-Irish relations provide a befitting case study of Henry Rousso’s oft‑quoted assertion that “both academic history and memory change as time goes by.”5

3The Anglo-Irish conflict, as defined broadly here, is not confined to one particular event or period, but straddles several centuries and encompasses many milestones, including conquests, battles, revolutions, counterrevolutions, and wars, the last (or latest) of which being the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1968-1998). Even though it is difficult to ascertain when this long‑lasting conflict started and when it (supposedly) finished, what is blatant is that it has spawned long-term consequences, in terms of both diplomatic and inter‑personal relations. That is why, in Lives Entwined, there are more references to the psychological fallout from the centuries-long domination of Ireland by Britain than to this strife-ridden history per se.

4The key features of the debate dealing with the coloniality and postcoloniality of British-Irish relations shall be outlined in the first part of this article. In the second and third, the emphasis shall be laid on the way in which, with the benefit of hindsight, the contributors to Lives Entwined have retraced the course of British-Irish relations since 1921. Three, and not always mutually exclusive, strands of thought, can be distinguished: the first, regardless of the evolutions undergone by British-Irish relations, focuses on the present remnants of their conflicting past; the second emphasises the manifestations of British-Irish antagonism in the pre-Celtic Tiger period and the incredibly positive changes underway since then; and the third, teetering on the brink of, or engaging altogether in historical revisionism, denounces the large-scale dissemination of a spurious and exclusively catastrophic version of the Anglo-Irish conflict by nationalist and republican zealots, who have been too eager to politically harness its memory.

Memory, Historiography and the (Post)Colonial Paradigm

  • 6 The dissension as to the validity of the parallels drawn between the situation of Ireland and that (...)
  • 7 According to Joe Clearly, the staging of Brian Friel’s Translations by the Field Day Theatre Compan (...)
  • 8 Joe Clearly, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, Dublin: Field Day Publicati (...)
  • 9 Indeed, the line of division is not always that dichotomous. Among historians, many have adopted th (...)

5While the long-running debate about whether Ireland was a British colony predates the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) by several decades,6 its successor, namely that which revolves around the relevance of the postcolonial paradigm to British-Irish relations, has loomed large in academic and political circles at least since the 1980s.7 Academics from various disciplines, including literary criticism, history and political science, have since churned out an extensive body of publications in which colonialism and its cognates take pride of place. Set against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the lasting economic crisis in the Republic, the introduction of the fledgling field of postcolonial studies into the theoretical bedrock of scholarship intended to explain Irish history and society was by no means the object of a purely academic and scholarly debate. In Joe Clearly’s words, “Methodological differences, different disciplinary protocols and practices, and extra‑academic political ideologies and allegiances all came into contentious, and sometimes confused and confusing, play with each other on this issue.”8 Hence, the fault line, which is sometimes blurred by considerations pertaining to the discipline and the methodology favoured by each scholar,9 between the proponents and the opponents of the (post)colonial paradigm. Given the permeation of academia by politics during the Troubles, the latter group saw the use of the (post)colonial paradigm as giving credence to paramilitary republicanism, and strove to debunk the assumptions displayed by the former group – namely those who were convinced that it was fit-for-purpose – on the following geographical and historical grounds: Ireland is part and parcel of Europe and at a remove from the former colonies of the British and French empires; the Irish would better lay to rest the ghosts of their past and move forwards by setting their eyes on Europe and adopting its mainstream culture; neither the British elites nor Irish nationalists had referred to the Irish situation as being colonial prior to the outbreak of the Troubles, and, in centuries past, the latter had even indulged in actively contributing to the imposition of the British yoke far and wide across the Empire.

  • 10 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford University (...)

6Indeed, perceiving the Irish quest for independence through the prism of anticolonialism was an anachronism, and branding the Troubles as a decolonisation war represented a rupture with the prevailing tradition of Irish nationalism and republicanism in the pre-independence (1921) era. As Stephen Howe puts it, “Modern-day Sinn Fein’s rhetoric of identification with the ANC, PLO and other ‘liberation movements’, whatever its limitations, was a new development rather than the continuation of a tradition.”10 The rationale behind such a reversal of opinion lies in the ideological opportunism of both Irish nationalists and republicans. During the opening two decades of the 20th century, the depiction of Ireland as a British colony would have been self-defeating for them and their calls for reforms would have fallen on deaf ears, insofar as the assumption that colonies are doomed to thraldom was then well-entrenched in the British imagination.

  • 11 INA, Butte Independent, 4 May 1918, 1.
  • 12 INA, “A. E’s Confidence in the Future”, Irish Independent, 22 February 1922, 5.
  • 13 As a case in point, Frederick Boland, Irish foreign secretary in the 1950s, and other Irish diploma (...)

7Thus, Ireland was portrayed as an ancient European nation, whose inhabitants, unlike the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia, were civilised enough to be entitled to freedom and self-government. Arthur Griffith, for instance, proclaimed in 1918: “Ireland is not a colony or dependency.”11 Four years later, the nationalist writer George Russell followed suit, stating also that “Ireland was not a British colony. Ireland was one of the oldest races in Europe whose literature was lost in primitive times.”12 After most colonies had been granted independence from the 1940s onwards, Irish nationalism veered steadily towards a greater toleration, if not the adoption, of the colonial paradigm,13 and Northern Irish republicans perused the works of such postcolonial theorists as Fanon and Memmi, to the extent that they couched their struggle as a decolonisation movement in no uncertain terms. Stephen Howe charts this transition from the dismissal of the colonial paradigm to its endorsement in Irish nationalist and republican thinking:

  • 14 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire, op. cit., 170.

Whereas before 1921 associating Ireland’s demand for independence with the fate of Britain’s overseas colonies was counterproductive both in pragmatic political terms, and in its running athwart pervasive racial beliefs, now the situation was reversed. To link the Ulster conflict with Third World anticolonial struggles was to associate it with revolutionary glamour, with movements which commanded massive sympathy amongst the young and radical in advanced capitalist states including Britain itself, with new and imaginative models of social development, perhaps above all with success.14

8Unionists, for their part, clung to their conviction that Northern Ireland was a fully-fledged overseas British province and rejected their assimilation by republican sympathisers to the colons who put down roots in Africa and Asia and were steeped in racist and supremacist ideologies. Identifying with the latter would have sounded the death knell of their hopes to see the Union Jack still floating above every public building in the six counties, at a time when colonialism was discredited throughout the world.

  • 15 Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire 1800-1960,” in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the (...)
  • 16 Ibid., 150.
  • 17 Ibid.
  • 18 Peter Gray, “Ireland’s Last Fetter Struck off: The Lord-Lieutenancy Debate 1800-67,” in Terence Mc (...)
  • 19 Virginia Crossman, “Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in ibidem, 102-16.
  • 20 Tony Ballantyne, “The Sinews of Empire: Ireland, India and the Construction of British Colonial Kno (...)
  • 21 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 133.

9For the advocates of the colonial paradigm, Ireland is “Britain’s ‘oldest colony’ [which] became Britain’s first major ex-colony of the twentieth century.”15 Alvin Jackson propounded the view that Ireland’s anomalous and ambivalent position, due to its oscillation between the United Kingdom and the Empire during the 19th century, was “the worst of all worlds, for both Ireland and indeed Britain”16 because the former was given only “a glimpse of full metropolitan status” and was simultaneously “subjected to a series of colonial-style impositions.”17 Chief among them were the existence of a local executive at Dublin Castle, at the head of which stood the Lord Lieutenant,18 the maintenance of a strong military force on the island, the coercion foisted upon the Irish by the police, the recurrent recourse to emergency measures, including the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the reliance on resident magistrates, whose role was tantamount to that of government agents in India, to manage local affairs,19 and the representation of the Irish as “racial Others,”20 who were prone to make use of criminal means to achieve their ends. Besides, it is the shared opinion of the defenders of Ireland’s postcolonial identity that the guiding principles underlying the Irish revolution held considerable sway on anti-colonial organisations. As specified by Declan Kiberd: “The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century programme of cultural decolonisation in Ireland is an important precursor of a related struggle in Africa more than forty years later.”21

  • 22 The claim voiced by a number of scholars and politicians that Ireland was a postcolonial state was (...)

10Whatever divergences there may be as to the validity of the postcolonial paradigm, it is widely accepted that some sections of British and Irish societies have, duly or unduly, regarded Ireland as a former colony, in which the death throes of British imperialism and the birth pangs of the Free State bore much resemblance to the decolonisation process that would take place elsewhere a couple of decades later.22 It therefore comes as no surprise that Lives Entwined is studded with references to such questions as the perpetuation of the superiority and inferiority complexes on both sides of the Irish Sea, the anti-Britishness enshrined in the Irish school curriculum, the anti-Irish jokes in circulation in Great Britain, the suspicion and discrimination meted out to the Irish in Britain, their resort to a kind of “ghetto” mentality as a psychological defence mechanism, and the unease felt by some British people about subsequent Irish accomplishments.

Present and Past Manifestations of Postcoloniality in British-Irish Relations

  • 23 Mary Hickman, “I am but I am not? A view of/from Britain,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 91.

11Much as the British and Irish governments have sought to enhance the relations between both islands and both communities – i.e. Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists – in Northern Ireland, the embers of hostility seem to have hitherto survived and to flare up every now and then. For some contributors to Lives Entwined, notwithstanding the fact that resentment between Irish and British people has been abating for decades, some attitudes redolent of Anglo-Irish past enmity can be noticed in the present. Neither the Good Friday Agreement nor Irish economic prosperity put a sudden end to long-established negative perceptions. Mary Hickman, a former professor at the London Metropolitan University, states: “Although there has been a change in public perceptions about Ireland in the past decade, this does not mean that there is necessarily an across-the-board transformation in attitudes towards the Irish in Britain. The Irish, for example, are in certain contexts differentiated as drunks, navvies, scroungers and violent. These negative stereotypes were the dominant public representations of Irishness until very recently.”23

  • 24 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined II, Dublin: (...)
  • 25 Ibid.

12Likewise, John A. Murphy, an Irish historian and former senator, mentions that “there is occasional British resentment of Irish success stories, particularly in business, since they are at odds with the ‘paddy’ stereotype.”24 As a matter of fact, the discrepancy between the historical perception of the Irish as lazy and idle and the headway their country achieved in the economic and political fields caused a substantial number of British people to be caught off guard. The ideological heirs of “those Tory circles that felt the integrity of the United Kingdom had been violated by Irish secession”25 and bore a grudge against Ireland for its independence and freedom of action were the first to frown upon Irish prosperity. Murphy’s analysis of the negative responses of some British people to the gentrification of the previously ‘lumpen Irish’ is substantiated by Olivia O’Leary:

  • 26 Olivia O’Leary, “Separate but Equal,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined III, Dublin: British Cou (...)

British romantics are appalled by our materialist new Ireland, with its SUV clogged roads and its pushy developers buying up the Savoy. They preferred us when we were dreamy and simple and poor, but they also looked down on us because we couldn’t support our own people. Now we can. That self-sufficiency gives us pride and confidence. It makes us easier neighbours – to use my mother’s words, separate but equal.26

  • 27 Edna Longley, “No Passports,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 127.
  • 28 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” op. cit., 112.

13Some comments delivered by leading figures in British politics, including those of Boris Johnson (then MP and editor of the Spectator) in 2004 about Liverpool’s ‘victim culture’, have been said to be rife with anti-Irish connotations.27 The fact that countless British journalists subsume Ireland into the ‘British Isles’ is also often construed, especially among militant nationalists or republicans, as evidence of the undying imperialist tendency to disregard the move of the 26 southern counties towards independence from the United Kingdom in 1921; and the Irish who are not offended by such an inaccurate categorisation of their nation are accused of “mental servility”. Even more problematic than the quasi systematic inclusion of Ireland into the British Isles is the clear delineation between Great Britain, referred to as the ‘mainland’, and Ireland, its periphery. John A. Murphy, who does not find the use of the phrase ‘British Isles’ to depict Great Britain as well as Ireland unbecoming and considers that “having postcolonial hang-ups on such a matter indicates the real slave mentality,” objects to “the unthinkingly patronising habit of some British politicians and commentators of referring to the larger of the two islands as ‘the mainland’.”28

  • 29 Bernadette McAliskey, “Lives Entangled,” in Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 130.
  • 30 Ibid., 131.
  • 31 David McWilliams, “Hi Brits – Irish Blood, English Heart,” in Lives Entwined III, op. cit., 118.
  • 32 Ibid.

14Bernadette McAliskey, an eminent civil rights activist in Northern Ireland, reports that a “wise woman” once told her that “it took three generations for the wounds and scars of wars to heal, especially if you were on the losing side.”29 In her view, the absence of a long interlude in the war-making process between the two islands and the resulting animosity, which has been bequeathed from one generation to another, account for “the distrust and antipathy that is masked by good manners among the upper classes, and not masked at all by soccer fans.”30 Through these words, she casts doubts on the sincerity of the diplomatic posturings aimed at showcasing so idealistic an ‘entente’ that some of its features can hardly be reflected in the daily lives of the common people. Irish football fans, for instance, regularly “applaud the dexterity of continental goalkeepers at penalty shootouts,”31 when the English national team plays against one of its contenders at the Euro finals knockout stages. For David McWilliams, “History reserves us that right. But proximity and familiarity breed not so much contempt as resignation. When we are repelled, it is by our similarities as much as our differences.”32 Adopting a fairly balanced perspective, McWilliams reckons that sheer ambivalence is one of the idiosyncrasies of British-Irish relations, for they oscillate paradoxically between animosity and proximity:

  • 33 Ibid.

Our mutual animosity is the ethnographic pantomime of These Islands; we all ham it up when we need to. It’s easier to play to the crowd than to delve more deeply into our complexities. When talking to a Frenchman, it is demanded that the true Irishman should dislike the Englishman. But it’s not true. Ask any Irishman on a two-week summer holiday abroad who he’d rather go out with for a few drinks, and the Englishman wins hands down every time.33

  • 34 Rachel Hooper and Joseph O’Connor, “Irish Blood English Heart,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwine (...)

15According to Joseph O’Connor, who also sheds a positive light on the state of British-Irish relations, animosity remains the exception rather than the rule: “I think even while all of that bitterness and ignorance and fear which has existed on both sides has gone on, there’ve been people who make an exception.”34 In fact, apart from the above-cited contributors, the overwhelming majority of those who, in Lives Entwined, assert the postcolonial nature of British-Irish relations usually consolidate their point of view with examples drawn from the distant, and sometimes harrowing, memories dredged up either by the Irish who attended primary school in post-independence Ireland or by their counterparts who decided, at some point in their lives, to settle in Great Britain. In so doing, they imply that the postcoloniality of British-Irish relations belongs to a bygone past.

  • 35 Piaras Mac Éinrí, “Britain and Ireland,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 36-37.
  • 36 In Catherine Dunne’s An Unconsidered People, two interviewees, namely Kathleen Morrissey and Sheila (...)
  • 37 Rachel Hooper and Joseph O’Connor, “Irish Blood English Heart,” op. cit., 25.

16Going back to the 1970s, Piaras Mac Éinrí, lecturer at UCC (University College Cork), recalls his experience as an Irish factory worker in London. What he characterises as “a brutal encounter with the heart of the former Empire” was an insightful immersion into the hierarchical nature of British society. As regards the Irish in Britain, they were, according to him, in an intermediate position between the English and the Welsh, who used to hold the whip hand, and the category of Black and minority individuals, who were on the receiving end of their supercilious bullying. From this perspective, Irish immigrants could be regarded as ‘semi-postcolonial’ subjects. Mac Éinrí, albeit admitting his own “unstated and inchoate anti-Britishness” at the time, was shocked to encounter such a racial pecking order, but what most stands out in his memory are the lectures delivered by “patronising if well meaning, white-coated staff, standing on tables and literally talking down to us about personal hygiene.”35 In the same vein, Ivana Bacik’s reminiscences bespeak how hostile a place London was in the 1980s, when Irish students, on an equal footing with Irish construction workers, were “the butt of anti-Irish jokes.” Far more unsettling for them was the housing discrimination they fell prey to, epitomised by the infamous shibboleth ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’36 whose existence has repeatedly been underscored in various testimonies given by the Irish who lived in Britain in the post-war period. Joseph O’Connor, for example, points out that his own father-in-law, John Casey, “[…] remembered seeing the signs in the boarding house windows saying no Irish could stay there.”37

  • 38 Ivana Bacik, “The Hybrid Generation,” in Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 86.
  • 39 Mary Fitzgerald, “Drawing on a larger canvas”, in Lives Entwined III, op. cit., 40.

17The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the accretion of a palpable and conspicuous suspicion directed towards the Irish, mainly owing to the Troubles and the security problems bedevilling Northern Ireland, onto the various forms of discrimination they had long been wont to go through, ever since the Middle Ages. In addition to the fact that they were debased through jokes, suspicion around the Irish was commonplace, not least when they crossed the British border and were looked at askance by customs officers. “Male friends were routinely strip-searched under the Prevention of Terrorism Act when coming across on the ferry through Holyhead,”38 Ivana Bacik reports. Discrimination ushered in the emergence of Irish ghettos scattered across Great-Britain and, according to Mary Fitzgerald, “[s]uch enclaves remain in several British cities, a legacy in part of the dark decades of the Troubles, when anti-Irish sentiment and suspicion caused by the IRA’s bombing campaign resulted in many Irish communities drawing in on themselves.”39

  • 40 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” op. cit., 111.
  • 41 Olivia O’Leary, “Separate but Equal,” op. cit., 67-8.

18Ethnic prejudice was not a one-way phenomenon, as anti-Irish feelings in Britain flourished concurrently with anti-British ones in Ireland. John A. Murphy argues that British attitudes towards the Irish and vice versa were still conditioned by their past relationship twenty-five years before the publication of the second volume of Lives Entwined, in 2006. Historical tension continued to plague British-Irish relations by reason of “a lingering post-imperial tendency to patronise on the British side” and an adamant disposition “to display the prickly sensitivity of the scarred ex-colonial”40 on the Irish side. To underpin her statement regarding the ex‑colonial feelings harboured by the Irish, Olivia O’Leary gives some details about her experience at primary school in Ireland, where “anti-Britishness was part of the curriculum” and teachers were urged to hark back to the pre-1921 period and reiterate “how the British had suppressed our economy and our language – and how they had failed to suppress our religion.”41 O’Leary does not venture to impugn such perceived historical truths, but regrets that their political exploitation immured Irish society in “martyrdom” for generations.

19Among the contributors to Lives Entwined, there is a consensus on the fact that neither tolerance nor mutual understanding, let alone the recognition of a shared cultural heritage, were common commodities in Britain or in Ireland well up until the dawn of the 1990s, when a tipping point was reached and old habits gave way to new ones more congruent with the challenges of the time.

Post-Postcolonial and Anti-Postcolonial Stances on British-Irish Relations in the 21st Century

  • 42 Liz O’Donnell, “Not for the faint-hearted: reflections on the Good Friday Agreement, 8 years on,” L (...)

20The postcolonial paradigm, however applicable it may have been to Ireland when it was in the throes of a newly independent nation’s trials and tribulations, has started to fall into disuse in the 21st century. The transformations brought about by the thriving economy of the Celtic-Tiger era changed Ireland beyond recognition and thereby relegated hostility towards Britain to the side-lines of political and social debates. From being two nations at loggerheads over a myriad of issues, Britain and Ireland morphed into equal and friendly partners, whose cooperation was instrumental in bringing the Troubles to an end. Peace in Northern Ireland unquestionably gave a new impetus to the relations between both islands. To quote Liz O’Donnell, “Burying the hatchet on the vexed quarrel arising from our legacy of colonisation is long overdue. Now that the current and future constitutional position of Northern Ireland is firmly in the hands of the people of Northern Ireland themselves, Ireland and Britain can both move on.”42 But the seeds of change had been sown back in the 1970s with European integration, whose virtues are extolled by Maurice Hayes:

  • 43 Maurice Hayes, “The Crazy Knot,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 143.

A great deal of this is linked to EEC membership. Perhaps the single most important effect of EU membership on the relationship between the two countries has been the psychological boost of this spectacular economic turnaround. Ireland, it may be argued, by giving up a little sovereignty to Europe, found itself as a nation, and was thereby able to overcome an inherited colonial attitude, an inferiority complex when faced with the economic strength and diplomatic clout of the former metropolitan power.43

  • 44 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture and Philosophy, London & New York: Rout (...)
  • 45 Richard Kearney, “British-Irish Relations in a Postcolonialist Context,” Theoria: A Journal of Soci (...)

21Thanks to EEC and EU membership, Ireland freed itself from the shackles of the inferiority complex which marred its relations with Britain and caused, at times, diplomatic mishaps. Its once exacerbated nationalism, embodied by those – like De Valera – who had risked life and limb for Irish independence, has incrementally subsided and turned into a more moderate and less antagonistic ideology. Some academics, such as Richard Kearney,44 have even dwelt on the concept of ‘postnationalist Ireland’, whereby they recommended to “abandon our mutually reinforcing myths of superiority (largely British) and purity (largely Irish) and face our more mundane post-imperial, post-nationalist reality.”45

  • 46 Mac Éinrí, “Britain and Ireland,” op. cit., 44.
  • 47 Ibid.
  • 48 Ibid., 40.

22Be it Britain or Ireland, both managed to overcome the dichotomy between Britishness and Irishness and were led to accept the undeniable fact that their identities are entwined, hybridised and overlapped on account of the fusion of cultures resulting from centuries of close contacts. In the past, Samuel Beckett’s famous ‘au contraire’, which was uttered in reply to a French journalist asking him if he was English, was indicative that “being Irish was sometimes collapsed to a mere ‘not Britishness’.”46 Just as Mary Fitzgerald, who dismisses Beckett’s riposte as no longer relevant, Mac Éinrí celebrates the syncretism inherent in British-Irish relations by contending that “there is more than a little British in the Irish and something of the Irish in the British as well”47 and proceeding with a reminder of his personal journey towards the realisation that his “own views of Britishness were not the whole story” and that his “own identity and culture was far more influenced by them [the British] than [he] had ever admitted.”48

  • 49 Ibid.
  • 50 CAIN Online Archives, “Prime Minister Tony Blair's address to the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas”, (...)

23With its economy running at full tilt between the mid-1990s and the late 2010s, Ireland exuded more confidence and, to use Piaras Mac Éinrí’s parlance, “old moulds were broken.”49 While the Irish have proven to be intent on weeding out their alleged victim mentality, generational renewal has also enabled a sizeable portion of British society to gradually get rid of its colonial airs and graces, as indicated by Tony Blair during his address to the Joint Houses of the Irish Parliament. On that occasion, not only did he heap praise on Ireland for its conversion into “a modern and open” nation, but he also gave in to smugness when he described “a Britain emerging from its post-Empire malaise.”50 The celebration of Britain’s and Ireland’s coming to terms with their mutual historical legacy reached its apex when Queen Elizabeth went on a state visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011. Fintan O’Toole’s words vividly capture the emotional significance of the moment when she laid a wreath and bowed her head at the Garden of Remembrance, in tribute to those who fought for Irish independence:

  • 51 Fintan O’Toole, “Chums?” in Lives Entwined IV, op. cit., 38.

That moment appealed to something far beyond the rational. It reached into places where no speech or declaration could, or should, try to go: the irrational, psychological terrain of superiority and inferiority complexes, of inherited insult and thoughtless condescension. It hit all the raw nerves that lie just beneath the surface of this knotty relationship, delivering a shock that was, paradoxically, soothing. Before the queen did that, the visit was overwhelmingly about us, the Irish. It was about the Irish proving to ourselves that we are mature, that we’re over all that bitterness, that the chip on our shoulders is now a mere mole. The ceremony in the Garden of Remembrance transformed the visit by making it also about them, the English. It wasn’t just the Irish who were being bravely mature: it was also the English. Generations of English superciliousness towards Ireland (the suave, upper-class, good-natured sort being the worst) was disavowed in that moment.51

  • 52 Fitzgerald, “Drawing on a larger canvas,” op. cit., 32-33.

24The fact that British-Irish relations are less and less encumbered by the weight of history has, according to some observers, remained unbeknown to the rest of the world. For Mary Fitzgerald, it is no easy task to ingrain in foreign people’s minds, especially those hailing from the former colonies and who still hold Ireland in high regard for its resistance to British imperialism, the idea that commonly held assumptions about British-Irish relations require complete reappraisal. To the leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who purported that Egyptian and Irish people are “relatives” by comparing their plight at the hands of British imperialists, to a self-proclaimed jihadist who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and, by way of explanation, told her that “your people fought occupiers, too”, and to the Palestinians who confided in her that they loathe the British as much as the Irish do, she was apparently hard-pressed to explain that “things have moved on quite a bit since then;”52 in other words, that past conflicts between Britain and Ireland are no longer a reliable yardstick to measure their present relations.

25While a handful of contributors to Lives Entwined highlight the ongoing historical antagonism between Britain and Ireland in postcolonial terms, the bulk of them insist on the demise of postcolonial Ireland and the emergence of equal – or what could be dubbed ‘post‑postcolonial’ – relations with Britain. Nevertheless, postcolonialist and post‑postcolonialist stances on British-Irish relations have suffered harsh criticism from a couple of anti‑postcolonialist contributors – namely those who contend that Ireland could not have been postcolonial at any period, insofar as it had never been a British colony, and in whose ranks revisionist elements prevail. It is worth mentioning at this stage, that revisionism is not a new historiographical trend and is unlikely to expand in the near future, for want of up-and-coming historians embracing its tenets. As of late, some observers have even prophesised its doom because recent events have not given it a new lease of life and have not allowed a surge of interest in its theories akin to that it enjoyed in its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, the Republic of Ireland saw the efflorescence of revisionism, the advocates of which were the iconoclasts who refused to toe the line of the erstwhile dominant nationalist orthodoxy. Their ambition was to counter the dubious and often baseless arguments that Sinn Féin and the IRA drew from Irish history to legitimise their political or military actions. For revisionists, British presence in Ireland was benign when compared with colonialism in Africa and Asia.

  • 53 Eoghan Harris, “My Secret Life,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 79.
  • 54 It was Liam Kennedy who first coined this acronym, which would be reused as the title of one of his (...)
  • 55 Harris, “My Secret Life,” op. cit., 65.
  • 56 Ibid., 77.
  • 57 Marianne Elliott, “Hyphenated hybrids: Irishness, Englishness and religious identities in Britain a (...)

26In Lives Entwined, Eoghan Harris, for example, portrays the supporters of the postcolonial paradigm as “educated barbarians”53 and castigates them for their propensity to subscribe to the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) mentality.54 For him, “far too often the theorists of post-colonialism are simply peddling the malign myth (by which I mean stories that are neither factual nor true) of Irish ‘exceptionalism’,” which is defined by himself as “the delusion that Ireland, compared with the other peoples of the world, experienced exceptional suffering.”55 The primary responsibility for this “false memory syndrome” is ascribed to Irish nationalist ideologues. Though he denies absolving Britain of any blame whatsoever, Harris claims “that what happened was neither as nasty as we believe, nor did it last as long as we believe, nor was it all the work of some beastly British soldier passing by.”56 As for Marianne Elliott, she does not go so far as to revile the members of the opposing group, but disapproves of “a victim-reading of the past enhancing every hint of anti-Irishness or anti-Catholicism encountered in the present”57 on the part of both the Irish in Britain and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Her description of Ireland as a nation previously endowed with a unique, not to say uncanny, status – as it hovered in the twilight zone between a colony of the Empire and a member of the United Kingdom – the Irish in Britain have eventually benefitted from is a sturdy and cogent argument in favour of the thesis that the latter have occupied a privileged position compared to that of, say, Windrush immigrants and their offspring:

  • 58 Ibid., 54-5.

Suffice it to say that the strange status of Ireland vis-à-vis England – not quite ‘conquered’, not quite a ‘colony’, not quite fully assimilated into the UK – continued to be reflected even after Irish independence. Until 1948, Irish people were still entitled to British citizenship, and today the Irish are the only non-British group entitled to enter without passports and have the same rights as British-born to social services and to vote in elections.58

  • 59 Ibid., 55.

27Elliott’s conclusion that, “much of it [the ‘passive victim’ reading of Irish migration to England] is based on assumptions about anti-Irishness in England, which are not necessarily valid,”59 is much more debatable though.

Conclusion

28Lives Entwined has given a wide range of people directly involved in academia, politics or culture on both sides of the Irish Sea the opportunity to ponder, from multifarious perspectives, on how the economic and political progress achieved by Ireland not only set a new a course for its relations with Britain, but also laid the ground for an inter-island dialogue based on a less strained and a more peaceful memory of the Anglo-Irish conflict. The contributors to the project generally agreed that the modernisation of Irish nationalism has coincided with the decay of imperialism – especially vis-à-vis Ireland – in Britain and suggested a transition from postcolonial relations to ones celebrating the tight bonds linking both islands. However, no Northern Irish militant republican, for whom British domination in Ireland is possibly not quite over, has taken part in the project. For all its efforts to draw contributors from across the political spectrum, the absence of such a tradition in Lives Entwined indicates, on the one hand, that all attitudes towards the legacy of the Anglo-Irish conflict are not equally represented and, on the other, that the conclusion asserting the postcoloniality of British-Irish relations has been on the wane for many years should not be taken for granted too easily. The reality is perhaps more complex, if taken from a broader perspective, including Northern Ireland. And it is even more so amid the vicissitudes of Brexit, which has, at times, reignited past tensions and practices and thereby been perceived by some as the thin end of the wedge. Brexit teaches us indeed that reconciliation is a less linear and more fragile process than assumed in the first four volumes of Lives Entwined.

  • 60 To render the comparison fairer, it is worth pointing out that even if Lives Entwined received the (...)

29Despite its shortcomings, Lives Entwined is an enterprise worthy of being acknowledged and cited outside the realm of British-Irish relations. Inviting former colonies of the British and French empires to take a leaf out of Ireland’s book as regards the economic and political breakthroughs it has achieved would be incongruous, given the geostrategic and historical specificities of each case. But nations such as France and Algeria, whose relations are incredibly entwined, would be well-advised to embark on similarly ambitious enterprises, notably through the Institut français in Algeria and the Centre culturel algérien in Paris,60 instead of merely entrusting an eminent historian (B. Stora) with the mission of freely making recommendations aimed at fostering the reconciliation between the French and Algerian peoples.

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Bibliographie

Primary sources

Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined, Vols. I (2005), II (2006), III (2008) and IV (2012).

CAIN Online Archives

Irish Newspaper Archives (INA)

The Archives of the Irish in Britain

Secondary sources

CLEARLY Joe, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007.

CLEARLY Joe, “Misplaced ideas? Locating and dislocating Ireland in colonial and postcolonial studies,” in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (eds.), Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 101-124.

DUNNE Catherine, An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London, New Island Books, 2003.

GILLISSEN Christophe, “Ireland, France and the question of Algeria at the United Nations, 1955-62,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 19, 2008, 151-167.

HOWE Stephen, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2000.

JACKSON Alvin, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire 1800-1960,” in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2004, 123-153.

KEARNEY Richard, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

KEARNEY Richard, “British-Irish Relations in a Postcolonialist Context,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 94, December 1999, 83-9.

KENNEDY Liam, “Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?” The Irish Review (Cork), No. 13, Winter 1992/1993, 107-121.

KENNEDY Liam, Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2016.

KIBERD Declan, The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

MCDONOUGH Terence (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005.

ROUSSO Henry, La hantise du passé, Paris : Textuel, 1998.

RUANE Joseph, “Colonialism and the Interpretation of Irish Historical Development,” in Marilyn Silverman and PH. Gulliver (eds.), Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology through Irish Case Studies, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 293-323.

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Notes

1 This article focuses on the first four volumes of Lives Entwined as the fifth was only published in 2020.

2 In a statement issued on 1 June 1997 Tony Blair indicated: “Those who governed in London at the time [of the Famine] failed their people.”

3 Lives Entwined is a follow-up to the Through Irish Eyes study, which was conducted in 2003 by the British Council Ireland. The latter had also run an ambitious programme of research to evaluate the perception of Britain in 30 Irish counties, between 1999 and 2000.

4 Tony Reilly, “Introduction”, in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined I, Dublin: British Council Ireland, 2005, 8.

5 Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé, Paris : Textuel, 1998, 25.

6 The dissension as to the validity of the parallels drawn between the situation of Ireland and that of various African and Asian colonies dates back to the time of Daniel O’Connell, who referred to Ireland as ‘provincial’ and made it clear that its status was different from that enjoyed by colonies. See Sean Ryder, “Defining Colony and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Nationalism,” in Terence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005, 165.

7 According to Joe Clearly, the staging of Brian Friel’s Translations by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 heralded the dawn of colonial and postcolonial studies in Ireland. See Joe Clearly, “Misplaced ideas? Locating and dislocating Ireland in colonial and postcolonial studies,” in Crystal Bartolovich & Neil Lazarus (eds.), Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 101-102.

8 Joe Clearly, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007, 19.

9 Indeed, the line of division is not always that dichotomous. Among historians, many have adopted the language pertaining to the issue of colonialism (intrusion, conquest, displacement, control), if not the colonial paradigm itself, when analysing the situation of Ireland during the late medieval period, the 16th and 17th centuries, but only a few of them have construed the period from the 19th century onwards as colonial. See Joseph Ruane, “Colonialism and the Interpretation of Irish Historical Development,” in Marilyn Silverman & PH. Gulliver (eds.), Approaching the Past, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 296.

10 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2000, 54.

11 INA, Butte Independent, 4 May 1918, 1.

12 INA, “A. E’s Confidence in the Future”, Irish Independent, 22 February 1922, 5.

13 As a case in point, Frederick Boland, Irish foreign secretary in the 1950s, and other Irish diplomatic officials backed, at times, the cause of some anti-colonial movements, notably the Algerian F.L.N., at the United Nations by drawing analogies with the Irish war of independence. See Christophe Gillissen, “Ireland, France and the question of Algeria at the United Nations, 1955-62,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 19, 2008, 151-167.

14 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire, op. cit., 170.

15 Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire 1800-1960,” in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2004, 142.

16 Ibid., 150.

17 Ibid.

18 Peter Gray, “Ireland’s Last Fetter Struck off: The Lord-Lieutenancy Debate 1800-67,” in Terence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony?, op. cit., 87-101.

19 Virginia Crossman, “Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in ibidem, 102-16.

20 Tony Ballantyne, “The Sinews of Empire: Ireland, India and the Construction of British Colonial Knowledge,” in ibidem, 146-7.

21 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 133.

22 The claim voiced by a number of scholars and politicians that Ireland was a postcolonial state was also rejected by Liam Kennedy, who compared its privileged economic, educational and social state with that of several African and Asian colonies hard on the heels of their independence. See Liam Kennedy, “Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?” The Irish Review (Cork), No. 13, Winter 1992/1993, 107-121.

23 Mary Hickman, “I am but I am not? A view of/from Britain,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 91.

24 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined II, Dublin: British Council Ireland, 2006, 109.

25 Ibid.

26 Olivia O’Leary, “Separate but Equal,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined III, Dublin: British Council Ireland, 2008, 77.

27 Edna Longley, “No Passports,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 127.

28 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” op. cit., 112.

29 Bernadette McAliskey, “Lives Entangled,” in Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 130.

30 Ibid., 131.

31 David McWilliams, “Hi Brits – Irish Blood, English Heart,” in Lives Entwined III, op. cit., 118.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Rachel Hooper and Joseph O’Connor, “Irish Blood English Heart,” in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined IV, Belfast: British Council Northern Ireland, 2012, 25.

35 Piaras Mac Éinrí, “Britain and Ireland,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 36-37.

36 In Catherine Dunne’s An Unconsidered People, two interviewees, namely Kathleen Morrissey and Sheila Dillon, reported having seen the ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ signs in London. But the lack of concrete evidence (only the Archive of the Irish in Britain holds a photograph of a shop window bearing such a sign) and the reliance on the witness accounts by a number of post-war Irish immigrants have given rise to controversies as to their very existence. See Catherine Dunne, An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London, New Island Books, 2003, 83 & 195.

37 Rachel Hooper and Joseph O’Connor, “Irish Blood English Heart,” op. cit., 25.

38 Ivana Bacik, “The Hybrid Generation,” in Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 86.

39 Mary Fitzgerald, “Drawing on a larger canvas”, in Lives Entwined III, op. cit., 40.

40 John A. Murphy, “Colonial chains, domestic links,” op. cit., 111.

41 Olivia O’Leary, “Separate but Equal,” op. cit., 67-8.

42 Liz O’Donnell, “Not for the faint-hearted: reflections on the Good Friday Agreement, 8 years on,” Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 147. In her contribution, O’Donnell does not paint a rosy picture of British-Irish relations and remains realistic about what can be achieved in the near future and what cannot. She writes: “(…) We may never have a shared view of history. Certainly, it is far too early for the clear attribution of truth and justice.” Ibid.

43 Maurice Hayes, “The Crazy Knot,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 143.

44 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture and Philosophy, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

45 Richard Kearney, “British-Irish Relations in a Postcolonialist Context,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 94, December 1999, 88.

46 Mac Éinrí, “Britain and Ireland,” op. cit., 44.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 40.

49 Ibid.

50 CAIN Online Archives, “Prime Minister Tony Blair's address to the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas”, 26 November 1998.

51 Fintan O’Toole, “Chums?” in Lives Entwined IV, op. cit., 38.

52 Fitzgerald, “Drawing on a larger canvas,” op. cit., 32-33.

53 Eoghan Harris, “My Secret Life,” in Lives Entwined I, op. cit., 79.

54 It was Liam Kennedy who first coined this acronym, which would be reused as the title of one of his books. Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2016.

55 Harris, “My Secret Life,” op. cit., 65.

56 Ibid., 77.

57 Marianne Elliott, “Hyphenated hybrids: Irishness, Englishness and religious identities in Britain and Ireland,” in Lives Entwined II, op. cit., 55.

58 Ibid., 54-5.

59 Ibid., 55.

60 To render the comparison fairer, it is worth pointing out that even if Lives Entwined received the support of Tony Blair, who, alongside Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, prefaced the first volume in 2005, it was not launched on the initiative of the British government. Unlike the Institut français, which works under the tutelage of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the British Council, though a public body receiving grants from the Foreign Office, is operationally independent. It was thus Tony Reilly who spearheaded the project.

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Slimane Hargas, « British-Irish historical memory: the legacy of the Anglo-Irish conflict in the first four volumes of the Lives Entwined project »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol. 20-n°53 | 2022, mis en ligne le 13 juin 2022, consulté le 08 novembre 2024. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/lisa/14235 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/lisa.14235

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Auteur

Slimane Hargas

Slimane Hargas is a PhD candidate in British History and Society at the University of Sorbonne Paris-Nord and a member of the university’s “Pléiade” research centre. In his thesis, which is supervised by Professor Rose-May Pham Dinh, he seeks to unravel the ways in which comparisons with, or references to, the British-Irish situation were politically harnessed in the Franco-Algerian one and vice versa at different key stages between 1830 and 1998. His research interests also include questions of memory and reconciliation, especially in the British-Irish and Franco-Algerian contexts.

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