Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution

By Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston

A groundbreaking examination of the colonial legacy and future of Ireland, showing how Ireland’s story is linked to and informs anti-imperialism around the world. 

Colonialism is at the heart of making sense of Irish history and contemporary politics across the island of Ireland. And as Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston argue, Ireland’s experience is central to understanding the history of colonization and anti-colonial politics throughout the world. Part history, part analysis, Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution charts the centuries of Irish colonial history, from England’s proto-imperial engagement with Ireland in 1155 to the Union in 1801, and the subsequent struggles for Irish independence and the legacies of partition from 1921. 

A century later, the plate tectonics of Irishness are shifting once again. The Union is in crisis and alternatives to partition are being seriously considered outside the Republican tradition for the first time in generations. These significant structural changes suggest that the coming times might finally see the completion of the decolonization project – the finishing of the revolution. In the words of the revolutionary Pádraig Pearse: Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh – now the summer is coming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888900499

Book preview

Preface

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right, and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. —Seamus Heaney

Every political conflict is unique, and yet all political conflicts have shared elements, not least those which involve colonial conquest and anti-colonial resistance. There is a tendency to see the Irish experience as quintessentially unique – the first English colony, the first colonial nation of modern times to seriously attempt to break free from the imperial grip, the role model for so many anti-colonial struggles worldwide. In recent times, that label of uniqueness took a particular turn. The conflict in the North since the 1960s confused many observers. The concept of colonialism was seen to be no longer any help, if it ever had been, in understanding what was happening in Ireland. After all, the Free State gained its independence in 1921. The North was incorporated in a stable state, the United Kingdom, the state which, after all, is said to have given parliamentary democracy to the world. The Northern Ireland conflict came to be judged as some anachronistic outlier, its ‘troubles’ due to ethnic hatred, terrorism or simply criminality. Before the Balkans exploded in the 1990s, Northern Ireland was seen to have only one European comparator, the Basque Country.

If the concept of colonialism was already judged inadequate, it received a further body blow in the new millennium. The attack on the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001 spelt the death knell for anti-imperialist struggle. Support for such struggle in less developed countries had already waned with the collapse of the Soviet system, but now there was little space for claiming anti-imperialism as one’s political motivation. Thankfully some struggles, such as that of the ANC in South Africa, had broken through into mainstream politics by this stage so did not have to suffer global opprobrium. For its part, the Irish republican struggle had made similar progress and reached a newly proclaimed plateau of uniqueness. The Irish peace process was touted worldwide, from Colombia to the Philippines, from the Basque Country to Sri Lanka, as a beacon and indeed a model for conflict transformation. Lost from this ideological representation was any suggestion that the deep roots of ‘the troubles’ were in colonial conquest.

This silence was further compounded by academic writing. At a time, the Northern Ireland conflict was the most written about conflict globally proportionate to its population. And while there were many interpretations, sophisticated and otherwise, put forward as to the reasons for the conflict, there were few academics who considered the explanatory value of colonialism. Some rejected the paradigm altogether, while others acknowledged its past but not its contemporary relevance. Most did not even consider the concept at all.

Our starting point is that, now more than ever, it is crucial to retrieve that concept. This is a disruptive moment in human history: climate catastrophe is imminent, the rise of the Right, from Brazil to Hungary, from the US and UK to the Philippines, seems inexorable. And, as we write, Brexit threatens the economic, social and political arrangements in Ireland, Britain and further afield. Former Prime Minister Theresa May spoke frequently of ‘our precious Union’, a catchphrase taken up by the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Arlene Foster. May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appointed himself ‘Minister for the Union’ in 2019. Yet in all this there is a whiff of protesting too much, a reluctant acknowledgement that Brexit is the greatest threat to the Union, at least since it settled into its current form a century ago. The rise of narrow-minded, xenophobic English nationalism threatens to do what Irish republican struggle did not manage to do: break up the United Kingdom and lead to the reunification of Ireland.

As this disruptive moment deepens, not a day goes by without colonialism entering the agenda of the mainstream British news – Cecil Rhodes’ statue at Oxford, the Windrush generation, criticism of ‘white saviours’, the plight of the Chagos islanders, Jeremy Corbyn’s election pledge to launch an audit of Britain’s colonial past. This reveals a fundamental point not always prominent in debates about Brexit, and certainly not in the discourse of the pro-Brexiteers. Brexit represents the death throes of empire (O’Toole 2018). That decline began slowly after the first World War and gained momentum after the second World War. The Commonwealth emerged at a relatively early stage to compensate for this decline, a sort of empire-lite. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that, just as the British empire began with the formation of Great Britain, so it will end there – end of empire, end of Britain, and thereby the circle will be closed.

The existential angst that leaving Europe produces has led to aspirations towards Empire 2.0 (YouGov 2004, Booth 2020). Whether based on economic links with the white former colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, or more widely on a boost to the Commonwealth as an economic and not simply a cultural amalgamation, the bottom line is nostalgia, or what Paul Gilroy (2005) called ‘postcolonial melancholia’. The project rests on a myth of a golden age which never really existed and yet its reconstruction is sought. Most empires in the history of humanity have ended with a whimper rather than a bang. They were not militarily defeated but crumbled from within. It is now Britain’s turn. And one measure of the misguided millenarianism involved in seeking to reconstruct empire is, as David Olusoga (2017) puts it, that, while some Commonwealth members ‘may well be up for a better trade deal or more freedom of movement … they don’t want to be part of Empire 2.0, any more than most of them wanted to be part of Empire 1.0’.

Meanwhile in Ireland the end of the ‘decade of centenaries’ is approaching. The revolutionary decade 1912-22 saw Ireland partitioned and two new states emerge from the ashes of three wars: the ‘Great War’, the Tan War and the Irish Civil War. Despite the surfeit of memorializing of the centenaries of both states, contemporary Ireland is in a fairly grim situation: austerity hegemonic in both states; the southern state still recovering from its fall from Celtic Tiger self-confidence; the North incapable of sustaining power sharing or, indeed, contemplating any alternative to the distinctly colonial model of ‘direct rule’; the Irish diaspora all but silenced and removed from any positive relationship with contemporary Irish politics.¹ Economic stagnation, the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and multiple crises around Brexit all point to significant challenges. Indeed, the realisation that Brexit was to be made in the image of the DUP finally alerted many people to the true character – and multiple dangers – of that particular project. Moreover, despite this late flowering of empire loyalism, the potential disintegration of the UK promises further crisis as the Irish unionist ‘dark eleventh hour’² is finally realised.

Between 2016 and 2019 discussions of the ‘divorce settlement’ between the UK and the EU focused on three items. The first two were predictable and turned out to be capable of solution: the €39 million owed by the UK, and the citizenship status of UK nationals in the EU and EU nationals in the UK. The third agenda item, one not referred to at any point by any British politician in the lead-up to the referendum, was what the media constantly referred to as ‘the Irish border’, more accurately, the British border in Ireland. This proved to be the rock on which negotiations perished. The proposed solution to the problem of a land border of the EU within one island was the so-called ‘backstop’ whereby the whole of the UK would remain within the customs union until such time as new arrangements were in place, while Northern Ireland would continue in the single market indefinitely. This was rejected by many Tories and their DUP allies on the grounds that it would create ‘a border in the Irish Sea’, the outcome that the UK eventually agreed with the EU in December 2020. The irony which was not lost on many Irish commentators is that partition, seen as a solution to Britain’s Irish problem, had come back a century later to plague British politics again – a classic return of the repressed.³

At the same time what is from one perspective an ending is also a beginning. The plate tectonics of Irishness are shifting once again. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history⁴ is focused intently on contemporary Ireland and we can be sure that another transformation of some description is coming. Moreover, behind all the bleakness of the contemporary Irish landscape these significant structural changes suggest that the coming times might finally see the decolonisation project completed – partition ended, the legacies of colonial expropriation and racism and sectarianism finally addressed and excised.

Ireland might finally see the completion of a decolonisation process begun over a century ago – the finishing of the revolution. Seamus Heaney’s pessimism can be channelled and represented as an optimism of the will.⁵ An interrogation of history is fundamental to leaving the ‘abattoir’ of colonialism behind; peace – and decolonisation – offers all sides of the Irish conflict a future beyond our contemporary desolation.

This book is about putting colonialism back in as a lens, a frame to understand where we came from, where we are now and where we might be going. As stated above, the concept is not popular in academia. It is also likely to be dismissed by political elements who want to ‘draw a line under the past’ in favour of reconciliation or who are blind to how they have benefited from colonialism. This book is for those who are open to considering the value of the analysis to understanding this disruptive moment as it affects Ireland. Most of all, the book is for us – that is, the people connected to Ireland, whether living on the island or in the diaspora, whether born on the island or arriving from elsewhere, and especially for the people of the North where the unfinished business of decolonisation is painfully apparent and is becoming more so by the day.

Although we the authors have spent a lifetime in academic teaching and research, we do not present this as an academic text. The book, although it deals with some conceptually complex and difficult issues, is not geared specifically towards an academic audience. More precisely, although it considers a lot of historical facts and interpretations, it is not a history book. Similarly, while it considers social classes and trends as well as statistical evidence, it is not a sociology text. Likewise, it discusses political theories and concepts, but it is not a political science primer. It has elements of all of these approaches and more but none of them is its central purpose.

Put simply, its aim is to reclaim the concept of colonialism as the central frame in understanding Ireland past, present and future. To this end, it seeks to situate Ireland’s experience in a global context. It considers the origins and development of colonial conquest and consolidation in Ireland in the light of these phenomena elsewhere. Likewise, it examines Ireland’s experience of decolonisation alongside that of other decolonising societies. Its scope is at once specific and broad.

Above all, the book is not intended to be academic in the more pejorative sense of that word, that is, aloof and disconnected. It is concerned with the past and the present as providing clues to understand a possible future in which decolonisation is completed on the island of Ireland. That possibility is greater now than it has been in a century and so we seek to examine and indeed help expedite that possibility. At the risk of overstating our goal, we have at the centre of our understanding the admonishment of Karl Marx, the epitaph carved on his gravestone: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’. That is not to say that we provide a political manifesto or programme to guide the task of decolonisation. Rather, we argue that sound political outcomes depend on robust political analysis. There is, we believe, nothing as practical as a sound theory. In the Irish context the failure to consider the role of colonialism in the past and the legacy of colonialism in the present detracts from the possibility of future progress. Ireland was a colony. Ireland, north and south, continues to bear the scars of that colonial experience. The future development of Ireland depends on settling the unfinished business of colonialism.

The bulk of this analysis was completed before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. And in one obvious way, of course, this might have made much of it instantly redundant. The world that our analysis addressed at the end of 2019 – as well as Ireland’s place within it – seems a lifetime away at the start of 2021. A year ago, Ireland, north and south, was particularly absorbed by the challenges facing the future after having been battered by the maelstrom of Brexit. While this crisis is not resolved, much else has obviously changed in the interim. Even the consequences of the two recent elections on the island – including the hegemony of Johnsonism in the British state and the Sinn Féin ‘surge’ in the 26 county elections of December 2020 – seem some distance away. These new discontents give some cause to pause and reflect on what this focus on Ireland and colonialism means in the context of our post-pandemic world. There are two principal elements to this reflection – first, how much has the pandemic changed our prognosis – how different is the world in which we now engage with the legacy of colonialism? Secondly, the other side of that coin – what does the history of Ireland and colonialism teach us about how we make sense of the contemporary pandemic and its consequences?

Belfast

February 2021

¹This may change, at least symbolically, as a result of the proposed referendum on allowing all holders of an Irish passport, whether living in the state or not, to vote in presidential elections from 2025 onwards.

²The phrase is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘Ulster’: ‘The dark eleventh hour/Draws on and sees us sold/To every evil power/We fought against of old.’

³For Brexiteers the reaction to this has not been to question partition but to blame the Irish for derailing what was promised to be an effortless Brexit. Witness Boris Johnson wondering why Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the son of an Indian father and Irish mother, ‘isn’t called Murphy like all the rest of them’ (Stephens 2019). Sections of the British media pursued the same ideological line. ‘This is tough right now, being a proud and loyal British subject who has lived in, and loved, Ireland for more than 60 years. What is tough is watching the ridiculous behaviour of the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his foreign minister, Simon Coveney, trying to destroy, like wilful children, relations with an ancient and friendly neighbour’ (Arnold 2019). And it must not be forgotten that, as with Empire 1.0, ideology in Empire 2.0 is propaganda for and often precursor to policy. Thus, Tory minister Priti Patel, noting that the Irish Republic was likely to experience food shortages as a result of Brexit (Coates 2018), urged that this should be more forcefully emphasised in negotiations, thus revealing a staggering ignorance of Irish-British relations. At least one million Irish subjects of the UK died from famine between 1848 and 1851.

⁴Benjamin (1940) refers to a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. The angel ‘looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.’

⁵‘I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.’ Antonio Gramsci, letter from prison, 19 December 1929.

Section I

Situating Ireland within paradigms of colonialism and imperialism

This Deep, Bloody American Tragedy is now concluded, and my Pen choakt up with Indian Blood and Gore. I have no more to say…. —Bartolomé de las Casas, 1552

All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths – all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire. —James Connolly, 1915

How do we measure the cost of empire to Ireland? The first section of our analysis – comprising chapters one to four – situates Ireland – and the wider Irish experience – within broader analyses of colonialism and imperialism. It offers a schematic overview of both these processes. What were the different forms and stages of colonialism and imperialism? How does the trajectory of the British Empire compare with other empires? What lessons for Ireland can be drawn from these wider histories? We then address the long process of colonisation in Ireland – under first English and then British authority – in more detail. We address the symbiotic development of Union and Empire, assessing Ireland’s specific role within both. Finally, we signal the beginning of the outworking of resistance to – and collapse of – Empire.

The first chapter outlines our broad approach – our theoretical contexts and our methodology and key sources. The second chapter offers a genealogy of colonialism and imperialism – this helps situate British imperialism in comparative context along with Ireland’s place within it. The third chapter opens with a discussion of Ireland as England’s ‘first colony’. It details Irish colonial history from the proto-imperial English engagement with Ireland in 1155 to the Union in 1801. The fourth chapter details the place of Ireland within the expanding British Empire and engages with the complex nexus of Union and Empire over the period 1801-1922. It concludes with the partition of Ireland. This moment marks a key conjuncture not just in Irish history but as, arguably, the first stage in the breakup of the British Empire.

Our overview of colonial expansion from the ‘age of discovery’ to the ‘scramble for Africa’ situates Ireland – and Irish people – within the broader colonial and imperial story. This history is most obviously revealed in the maelstrom of peoples thrown around the world by the forces of colonialism and imperialism. The Irish diaspora itself is the most obvious and tangible evidence of this context – it witnesses the powerful centrifugal forces of colonisation and empire. In his 2019 St Patrick’s Day message, President Michael D Higgins characterised this as our ‘extended family across the world’. He suggested, ‘Wherever you may be, and in whatever circumstances, you are part of Ireland’s global family joining with us as we celebrate our shared Irishness, its culture, heritage and history’ (BBC News 2019d). Mary Robinson reconnected this population with her notion of Irishness and the ‘fifth province’.¹

There are Irish populations across the USA – and all of the former white dominions of the British Empire: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This history is widely known and continues to impact each of these societies. But the diaspora is also found in other less well-known contexts. For example, the Irish in Jamaica formed a large part of the island’s early population, making up two-thirds of the white population on the island in the late 17th century, twice that of the English population. They were brought in as prisoners, indentured labourers and soldiers after the conquest of Jamaica by Cromwell’s forces in 1655.² Most Irish were transported by force as political prisoners of war from Ireland as a result of the ongoing War of the Three Kingdoms at the time. The migration of large numbers of Irish to the island continued into the 18th century. Likewise, the Irish pop up in such seemingly unlikely places as Montserrat and Barbados.³ There is also a huge Irish population in Britain – assuming markedly different forms in England, Scotland and Wales. This has great currency not least because of the number of British people applying for Irish passports in the wake of Brexit. There are also sizeable Irish diaspora populations across other European countries.

Apart from the notable exception of the post-colonial USA, the Irish diaspora developed most obviously within the British Empire. Moreover, much of the migration to the US occurred while this was still a British colony. But there was an even wider diaspora which still survives – from Hennessy Cognac in France⁴ to McIlhinney Tabasco sauce in Louisiana. Irish people played significant roles in other empires – on ‘both sides’; Fitzcarraldo the would-be rubber tycoon in Peru;⁵ the San Patricio Brigade switching sides in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 (Stevens 2005); Antoine Walsh, one of the founders of the first slave trade company in Nantes in 1748 (Stein 1979: 280); John MacBride who formed the Irish Transvaal Brigade to fight with Boers against the British in South Africa, 1899-1902 (Fallon 2015). The most significant legacy of this diaspora was that for many Irish this experience was ‘how the Irish became white’. Ignatiev (1995) classically traces the synergy between whiteness and Irishness that developed in the USA. More recently, Cheng has extended Ignatiev’s approach in specific reference to Irishness and whiteness in the American South (2018: 93-118). A similar process accompanied Irishness within the other white dominions of the British Empire. But this process also denied Irishness to whole sections of the diaspora – the ‘Black Irish’ and mestizo and mestiza Irish – not only in places like Barbados and Montserrat but also in the white dominions. This history of Irishness of colour is hardly acknowledged let alone integrated into the wider story of Ireland and colonialism.

The Irish – like many other colonised peoples – also played a significant part in supporting the imperial project – as settlers, soldiers and administrators. For example, Irish people played a key part in establishing Newfoundland – England’s first extra-European colony. Some 400 years later, the Gilbert Islands bookended imperial settler colonisation – and this also featured an Irish lead. The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme was begun in 1938 in the western Pacific Ocean as the ‘last attempt at human colonisation within the British Empire’ (Maude 1969). The first officer-in-charge for the Colonial Administrative Service of the UK was Gerald Bernard ‘Irish’ Gallagher. He died in the colony and was buried on the parade ground beneath a union flag (King 2000).

Throughout the former British Empire, there are constant, and sometimes surprising, traces of Irish connections. Even where Irish settlement did not occur, an imperial reference often signals some deeper resonance of colonial commonality. Thus, ‘Connaught Place’, the epicentre of the Lutyens’ imperial New Delhi and the financial and commercial hub of post-colonial India bears the name of an Irish province.⁶ Kipling references this contradictory location of Irishness throughout his work (Nagai 2006). He does this most famously in his novel Kim – in which the Irishness of the hero ‘Kimball O’Hara’ is used to negotiate between the worlds of the white colonisers and the black colonised of the Raj. But it is perhaps most poignantly evoked in one of his Humorous Tales. This story portrays a contrasting mestizo and mestiza Irish experience as a group of red-haired, mixed-race children recite the ‘Wearing of the Green’ in memory of their absent father (McNally 2016). These kinds of half-remembered colonial connections can also remerge in all sorts of unexpected ways that directly affect Ireland. Most recently, Brexit threatens to the reignite the longstanding controversy around ownership of Rockall.⁷

Thus, right across the reach of empire – from Ireland’s dubious distinction as the ‘first colony’ in 1155 to ‘Irish’ Gallagher’s ‘last’ attempt at settler colonisation within the British empire – there is a connection between empire and Irishness. This briefest of examinations gives some sense of the extent of the Irish diaspora – and already suggests a connection to colonialism and imperialism. But just how to make sense of this nexus presents a less straightforward and more contested challenge.

Most immediately, despite the longevity of English engagement with Ireland, some analyses insist that Ireland itself was never colonised at all. In particular, in his book, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (2002), Stephen Howe complained of ‘a growing band of historians, political commentators, and cultural critics’ who ‘sought to analyse Ireland’s past and present in colonial terms’. He signalled the tension between Irish republicans, for whom this was ‘the only proper framework for understanding Ireland’ and the outrage that the use of the term provoked in Unionists. Unfortunately, his analysis leaves Ireland in a form of imperial limbo – signalling the complexity of Ireland’s location without ever committing on whether Ireland was colonised or not: ‘The modern conflict in Northern Ireland is a colonial one in the eyes of Irish Republicans and of many international observers, emphatically not so in those of British governments and of Ulster Unionists’ (Howe 2002: 32).⁸

The simplest and most immediate repudiation of Howe’s ‘Ireland was (perhaps) never colonised’ thesis comes from those who remain broadly sympathetic to the British Empire and its legacy. Thus, we do not need to turn to Marx or Connolly to support the notion that Ireland was indeed colonised but rather to British experts on empire like Ferguson and Morris (1968; 1973; 2004).

For Ferguson (2012: 57):

Ireland was the experimental laboratory of British colonization and Ulster was the prototype plantation. What it seemed to show was that empire could be built not only by commerce and conquest but by migration and settlement.

Thus, the general conclusion for a range of historians from both pro- and anti-imperialist stances is that we can move swiftly on from the Ireland ‘never colonised’ or ‘too complicated to say’ arguments: Ireland was colonised.

Others, drawing on their own experience of colonialism, had no difficulty seeing the Irish experience as colonial (McVeigh and Rolston 2009). They took Ireland’s resistance to colonialism as an inspiration for their own struggles.⁹ This explains why Sivanandan (1983) had no difficulty including the Irish as a constituent part of what was ‘politically Black’. Of course, Sivanandan was not suggesting that the experience of Africans and Asians and Irish – or even the experience of African Caribbean and South Asian and Irish migrants in post-war Britain – was identical. Likewise, Ireland’s trajectory within empire was different from that of India or Jamaica or South Africa. Each one of these colonial situations carried a degree of specificity. Significantly Ireland was unique among all British colonies in that it had representation at the imperial parliament – albeit this was emphatically not democratic. It was inside rather than outside the Union. This made Ireland different; not just from India and South Africa but also from Australia and Canada and the other white dominions. There were costs as well as benefits of this location and it makes Ireland’s experience atypical; but it does not make it ‘not colonial’.

The ‘de-imperialising’ of Irish history dovetails with a wider process of reconsideration and rehabilitation of empire more generally. There is an overweening need to forgive and to find a positive legacy to the whole process. This is also, of course, a reminder that none of these battles is ever over. Recent years have revealed a broader recrudescence of pro-colonial analysis across academic and political debates on the subject (Prashad 2017a, b; McQuade 2017).

In Ireland there have been generations of ideological intervention – community relations, good relations, cultural relations – designed to ‘balance’ perspectives. As Roy Foster declared, ‘we are all revisionists now’. Here empire, even in its most grotesque manifestations – from the slaughters of plantation through An Gorta Mór to the Somme – is subtly rehabilitated. At this point, this ‘cultural war’ in Ireland is helpfully reframed by the wider reference. The flipside of imperial revisionism is that the colonised rarely exhibit this need to rework or sanctify the memory of empire. While the coloniser insists on the virtues of empire, the colonised continue to contest and resist.

Colonialism reduced and depleted Ireland in a whole range of ways: from a nation to a province; from something that was equal to England – in size, in population, in culture – to something less. It reduced whole swathes of Irish life and culture: from multilingual Irish speakers to monoglot speakers of English; from earls to refugees; from soldiers to mercenaries; from free people to peasants; from peasants to felons; from the feasts of Tara to the great hunger of Skibbereen. At the nadir of this process of reduction, Ireland itself was to be expunged from the imperial record. In Westminster in 1834, the Unionist MP Thomas Spring Rice insisted that ‘I should prefer the name of West Britain to that of Ireland’.¹⁰ This is a reduction from which Ireland has hardly begun to recover – despite all the talk about post-colonialism in Ireland or, indeed, the brief ascent of the Celtic Tiger economy.

Of course, it is important to keep returning to the broader context to emphasise the fact that it was not only Ireland that was diminished in this way. This profound denudation was a much more general consequence of the parasitism of empire. Columbus found Haiti awash with gold; five hundred years later it is the poorest country in the Americas. The English went to Bengal – twenty times the size of England – and reduced it in much the same fashion.¹¹ This broader referent makes it clear that there is no way to represent this process positively. It is a characteristic of contemporary apologists for imperialism that they do not ignore the bad – they list the piracy, and the opium monopoly, and the enslavement, and the starvation, and the genocide – but they then insist, ‘It wasn’t all bad’. Ferguson admits that British colonialism didn’t always live up to its own high ideals but it still ‘more than justified its own existence’ in the twentieth century; Paxman lists the wrongdoings of the British empire in considerable detail but then cannot help but conclude his analysis under the banner ‘Doing Good’.¹² In the hands of less sophisticated commentators this special pleading is simply reworked as a contemporary imperialism. As Margaret Thatcher opined: ‘I believe in the acceptance of personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the British Empire, which took freedom and the rule of law to countries which would never have known it otherwise’.¹³

This kind of apologism discords horribly, however, with the perspective of the colonised. As with any violation people may learn to live, to cope, to survive, even sometimes to triumph. But that does not make it alright. Indeed, the one simple conclusion regarding colonialism that emerges more or less in unison from the colonised world is that it should not have happened. This may in the end be the prosaic epitaph of empire – it would have been better if it had not happened – for you, for us, for the world. Colonialism and imperialism, however, did happen. And Irishness was part of that process. The rest of our analysis is dedicated to making sense of the place of Ireland and the Irish within that history.

A crucial point in all of this is that it is always something more than history. In the second half of the analysis, we turn from history to the present. We examine how our broader analysis of colonialism and imperialism frames the experience of the two contemporary Irish states. Both states – ‘the Republic of Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ – emerged from Ireland’s long and bitter struggle against its colonising power. Both are still dealing with the legacies of Ireland’s colonial past – a fault line still based on native/settler divisions that runs through the body politic in the North but also haunts the South. Ireland is not simply a country with a colonial history. Colonialism continues to structure the lived experience of Irish citizens, north and south, in the most profound ways. Finally, we address the question of what all this past might mean for Ireland’s future. Put simply, the key issue is therefore not whether Ireland was colonised but when or indeed if it was ever decolonised. Did this ‘first colony’ become ‘post-colonial’, and if so, when and how?

For some the answer is yes and the ‘when’ and ‘how’ are encapsulated in the Act of Union 1801. While it is true that Ireland was in the heart of imperial decision-making in a way that no other colony was, not even the white dominions, we will demonstrate at a later point that this did not constitute decolonisation. A stronger candidate for acceptance is the answer that decolonisation occurred with the Treaty in 1922. There are two problems with this conclusion. First, it would take a particularly perverse kind of denial to fail to see the ways in which Northern Ireland remained colonised over the last century. Those of us who have remained ‘British subjects’ since partition find it singularly difficult to recognise our particular part of Ireland as decolonised. Equally significant is the long and difficult journey the Free State and later the Republic took to decouple from empire after 1922, a process that arguably may only become realisable because of Brexit. But, even if one concedes an element of decolonisation on the island, the crucial point is that decolonisation is unfinished business. Here we emphatically reject the O’Leary notion – put forward in his monumental history of Northern Ireland – that the GFA represented the ‘final decolonisaton’ of Ireland (2019: 131). The unresolved status of the North is the most obvious measure of the unfinished revolution, but there are other elements. They may be as simple as the continuation of the use of ‘royal’ for institutions in the South – the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal Irish Academy. More fundamentally, there are real and substantial legacies of colonialism in the economy, culture, politics, and the law, which speak clearly of the long shadow of empire North and South. There are commentators, English and otherwise, who accuse the Irish of being fixated with history and of having a collective mental disorder which means they continue to fight old battles endlessly. But if history is taken in the simplest sense as an account of the past, that is, of something that is over, then in a sense Ireland does not have a history. Rather, it has an ongoing experience, albeit periodised, whereby the past is not yet over. Consequently, one of the goals of this book is to attempt to indicate how Ireland can come to have a history, and thereby a future. This approach assumes that, whatever futures are possible on the island of Ireland, they cannot be realised without reference to the long shadow cast by colonial history. Making sense of this reality – alongside engaging with the question of what needs to be done to change it – is the core problematic of this book.

¹‘Inaugural Speech Given by Her Excellency Mary Robinson, President of Ireland, in Dublin Castle on Monday, December 3, 1990.’

²There has been a tendency in recent years to see the Irish transported to the Caribbean by the likes of Cromwell’s son Henry as ‘slaves’ (O’Callaghan 2000; McCafferty 2002), a trope taken up by white supremacists in the US. Two characteristics ensured that they were not slaves like the Africans alongside whom they often worked: despite often harsh work conditions, their period of imprisonment or indenture could come to an end, and their children were not automatically indentured. The transport of Irish felons continued long after Cromwell’s time, with 18,500 transportees during the 18th century. Although some of these were petty criminals and political prisoners, a large number were simply ‘vagrants’ (Fitzgerald 2001: 117). There were actual Irish slaves in the 17th century, captured by Barbary Corsairs and brought to North Africa. These included hundreds of inhabitants of Baltimore in County Cork who were seized in 1631 (Clissold 1977: 54).

³The Irish in the Caribbean were regarded as ‘a riotous and unruly lot’. In 1666, the Irish servants and freemen on St. Kitts celebrated the announcement of war between England and France by rising up against the English and aiding the French to take control of the island. The following year, the Irish on Montserrat also helped the French to take the island from the English. In 1689, when word reached the Caribbean of William of Orange’s accession to the English throne, the Irish again revolted on St. Kitts and plundered English estates in support of the ousted King James. One leading St. Kitts planter wrote in 1673: ‘Scotchmen and Welshmen we esteem the best servants, and the Irish the worst, many of them being good for nothing but mischief’ (quoted in Beckles 1990: 511).

⁴Founded by Irish Jacobite military officer Richard Hennessy in 1765. His son James Hennessy gave the family name to the company in 1813.

⁵Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known locally as Fitzcarraldo, was the central character in Werner Herzog’s eponymous film from 1982, starring Klaus Kinski in the title role.

⁶It was actually named for Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught – third son of Queen Victoria – whose only connection with Connacht was a prodigious appetite for imperial titles. He did have a long career as an army officer across the British Empire, including service in South Africa, Canada, Egypt and India. He was Commander-in-Chief of Ireland from January 1900 to 1904. He also enjoyed a more direct military engagement with Irishness in Canada. There Arthur was an officer with the Rifle Brigade and was involved in defending this white dominion from the Fenian Raids. There were concerns that his involvement might put the Prince in specific danger from Fenian supporters in the United States. In 1870 he was engaged in repulsing Fenian invaders during the Battle of Eccles Hill, for which he received the ‘Fenian Medal’.

⁷Rockall is a small uninhabitable granite island 180 miles west of Scotland and 260 miles north-west of Ireland. Britain claimed it in 1955, a claim Ireland rejects.

⁸Howe is by far the most direct in rejecting the concept of colonisation, but it is a motif which runs through much of mainstream history writing on Ireland. Take the doyen of the profession, Roy Foster. Like Howe, he presents a dichotomy but fails to directly come down on one side or another (Foster 1988). That said, through much of what follows it is clear that he finds little mileage in employing colonisation as an explanatory concept.

⁹For example, newly-freed slaves in the United States offered support to the Fenians and Indian nationalists in Bengal named their military organisation the IRA, Indian Republican Army. However, there was another side to the story. In India, the Connaught Rangers, famous for their mutiny in support of the Easter Rising, were hated by the local people. ‘The Connaughts were strong believers in the saying that what had been conquered by the sword must be kept by the sword; but not being issued with swords they used their boots and fists to such purpose that they were more respected and feared by the natives than any other British unit in India’ (Richards 2003: 22). In Australia in 1837 a missionary had blankets carefully sewn together as winter clothing for Aborigines. On a later visit he found they ‘had unpicked all the stitches and turned them back into blankets, because they thought them Irish cloaks’. The Aborigines rejected left-over convict slops with the words, ‘No good – all same like croppy’, thus turning an Irish badge of honour into a label of disdain (Hughes 1987: 279).

¹⁰‘Repeal of the Union – Adjourned Debate’. Hansard House of Commons Debate, 23 April 1834. Col. 1194.

¹¹To take one measure: 2 million people died of starvation in India in 1860, another 2.6 million in 1910. ‘India was largely free of famine under the Mogul emperors…’ (Jones 2006: 43).

¹²This is the title of the fifth and final episode of Jeremy Paxman’s BBC series Empire in which he ‘tells the extraordinary story of how a desire for conquest became a mission to improve the rest of mankind, especially in Africa, and how that mission shaded into an unquestioning belief that Britain could – and should – rule the world’.

¹³House of Commons, 17 February 1983.

Chapter 1

Methodologies: interpreting Ireland in order to change it

We shall reclaim them from their barbarous manners … populate, plant and make civil all the provinces of that kingdom … as we are persuaded that it is one of the chief causes for which God hath brought us to the Imperial Crown of these Kingdoms. —Francis Bacon, 1603

Truth will out. Elgar, who wrote the paean of Empire, lived to compose its elegy. —Jan Morris, 1968

We prefaced our analysis with Seamus Heaney paraphrasing Tacitus, suggesting that peace is no more than the ‘desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power’. In the original speech, this is followed by Tacitus’ excoriating characterisation of the Roman Empire.

Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desolation and call it peace. (Tacitus 2010: 20)

The speech is a devastating critique of imperial power and greed and hubris. But in fact the recorded speech involves Tacitus reporting Roman General Julius Agricola quoting Caledonian chieftain Calgach – the leader of resistance to Agricola’s campaign against the Celts in Scotland. It is Calgach not Tacitus – a colonised Celt not a colonising Roman – who provided the withering critique to whom the quote is attributed. Calgach left Scotland after the defeat by Agricola at Mons Graupius and probably went on – as a political refugee from Roman imperialism – to found the city of Derry in Ireland (originally Doire Calgach, later Doire Colmcille). Calgach’s voice is mediated through Agricola – a military commander of the very imperial project that is so devastatingly addressed by the speech. If it was made in the form it is presented, it was spoken neither in English nor Latin (the language in which it is recorded) but in Gaelic (or a pre-Gaelic Celtic language). In other words, it is necessary to work fairly hard – or dig deep as Heaney would have it – before even beginning to decide whether Tacitus ‘was right’ about the instructiveness of history.

There is no better allegory for the complexity of the task of making sense of imperial history in general and Irish history in particular. Listening to Calgach’s voice gives some sense of the methodological challenge that we have set ourselves in this analysis – to ask how to ‘read’ colonialism and its enduring influence on Ireland and Irishness. We seek to answer the question of what an anti-imperialist analysis of Ireland means in 2020. It is instructive, therefore, to begin this process by recalling that the imperial project embodied a dense, multi-layered complexity from the first. However, the difficulty of this task does not provide an excuse for any retreat into post-truth relativism. We start from the position that the world is knowable. History matters; and, for all its complexity, it can be read. On the one hand history is continuously reinterpreted. On the other, however, history happened, and this provides a kind of Cartesian platform for analysis. History of course can be revised – and even distorted and denied – but it cannot be undone.

Nevertheless, in the contemporary world the traditional notion of truth – historical or otherwise – is no longer a given. This idea has been around for some time – it was perhaps never more boldly articulated than by Nietzsche.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche 2001: 1174)

But this broader challenge is compounded by the post-truth signs of the times. In this regard, the confusion around truth value has achieved epochal proportions in the 21st century – as the notion of ‘alternative facts’ is no longer risible but has become part of the discourse of the most powerful state in the world. Arguably the scholarly project is the same as it has always been – to work towards truth – but the obstacles are much greater. The process of distortion is reified to new levels.

This twisting of truth is also a strategic intervention – it is often about clouding the waters and deliberate misinformation. States have always been aware of the coercive power of propaganda and disinformation. But this is elevated in the age of the internet. At this point, this confusion can become not just an epistemology but also an ethics. Thus, with Berlusconi it becomes a masterly defence against the abuse of power: ‘If all are guilty, none are guilty’. In one deft finesse the abuser’s self-excuse – from Bush and Blair to Trump – is evident. It follows, of course, that truth value disappears as part of this most reactionary nihilism – if we are all liars then it doesn’t really matter if anyone is lying.

But it is possible to resist this process. Just as those who most vehemently deny the existence of hierarchies are usually found near the top of them, so those who most benefit from the relativizing of knowledge are loudest in their claims of post-truth. Once again it helps to ground the debate in the history of colonialism. As already suggested, Calgach’s critique of empire pre-echoes all subsequent analysis. As Calgach and Tacitus implied, from the very start empire was perhaps the biggest lie in history. It was the original progeniture of alternative facts, of propaganda and censorship. This presents no small challenge. But it also grounds our approach in years of anti-imperialist practice. Here we can suggest that history and truth are on our side. As Michael Ignatieff (1996: 113) observed about truth commissions, they may not be able to achieve full truth, but they can work diligently to ‘reduce the amount of permissible lies’.

But, how do we know what we know in a post-truth world? There are two problems involved. First is the postmodernist notion that there is no ‘regime of truth’ (as Foucault would argue), no vantage point to stand on outside of things in order to judge truth. The second problem is the valid critique of truth absolutism coming from societies in the global south, especially in relation to notions of universal human rights (Mutua 2001). But it is undeniable that there are certain bedrocks of a worthwhile society – equality, justice, respect for diversity – which are undermined by colonialism, imperialism and their aftermath. Moreover, a powerful form of anti-colonial practice is to insist on those bedrocks and to seek their full implementation. In the case of Ireland, it could be argued that the insistence of republicans on equality in the North proved to be their most powerful weapon. A state built on inequality finds the demand for equality metaphysically threatening. It may ultimately be impossible to concede, but often the demand has effects long before the ultimate point is reached. The demand for concessions to the marginalised even at the level of respect and acknowledgment can lead to the collapse of structures.

Central to our approach is the notion that interpreting the world is a key element in changing it. From this perspective, we seek to understand Irish history not simply for the historical record but because this is part of making Ireland – and the world – a better place, more equal, less violent – less ‘desolate’ as Heaney would have it.

In other words, the truths addressed in this analysis are existential and dialectical. For example, we are preoccupied by An Gorta Mór because millions of Irish people should not have starved and died and emigrated under what Kipling exalted as the ‘English flag’. They deserve to be remembered and their treatment by empire foregrounded in any assessment of the legacy of colonialism. Equally importantly, however, this catastrophic episode in Irish history is important because of what it teaches people about the contemporary world – how does it help to prevent this happening again? How does a reflection on the horrors of imperial starvation – alongside all the other brutalities to be found in the ‘abattoir’ of Irish history – help to make Ireland – and the world – a better place?

Colonialism, imperialism and the state

Beyond this broad epistemological approach, our analysis engages a series of key insights. First, we have to tease out the overlap and differences between the concepts of colonialism and imperialism. These words run through history – as they do our analysis – often conjoined but less often deconstructed. It is difficult to overstate the classical legacy that underpins both notions. Here – in the ‘glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome’ – was the evidence of the beneficence of empire for all budding imperialists to see. As Gibbon (1996: 93) famously declared:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [96 AD] to the accession of Commodus [180 AD].

Thus, in the eyes of lovers of empire at least, Pax Romana became idealised for eternity.

From this point onwards, however, subtle differences between the two phenomena become discernible. They both invoke the novel idea of a metropolitan state sending out satellite populations as a strategy of conquest over other peoples. In this manner, Greek colonisation created a Magna Graecia – Greater Greece. But this template for colonialism appears defined by its very banality – transplanting people and ideas from classical Greece to other parts of the Mediterranean. ‘Empire’ conveys something altogether grander – it evokes imperial arches and statuary and colosseums, suggesting borders bounded by fortified walls that have lasted two millennia. This reflects some of the hubris of empire – something closer to the German notion of Reich than any idea of ‘commonwealth’.

From the perspective of the colonised, however, the most important lesson from the classical world was Plutarch’s account of Spartan Law: that it is not wrong to steal but only to be caught stealing. Arguably this method underpinned the whole ideology of western imperialism. The approach was to expropriate wherever and whenever empire deemed desirable – but then to reframe colonial theft as something else. This probably gets as close as possible to the difference between colonialism and imperialism: colonialism was the act of theft; imperialism was the act of reframing the theft as a moral rather than an immoral act. For proof of the legacy of this approach, there is no need to go further than the British Museum or the Louvre or the Pergamon or the Prada. How did these imperial institutions acquire their cornucopia of treasures from around the world? How did these great museums across the capitals of Europe acquire such bounty from outside the continent? Why do these museums house the Benin bronzes or the treasures of Magdala or, indeed, half the Lane pictures? In short, what was the provenance – skilful curating or colonial looting?¹

Already imbued with religious justification, European colonialism and imperialism quickly assumed other ideological forms. At one level, this was simply functional – reflecting traditional psychological mechanisms of projection and transference. How could you treat humans this badly without somehow transferring the guilt? With this finesse the colonist was able to conclude that ‘we treat them horribly because they deserve to be treated this way’.² We enslave them because it is their natural condition. But there was a flipside to this process – not only were the colonised to be dehumanised, but the coloniser was to be exalted. The stereotypes from the high colonial period seem almost laughable in their conceit from a contemporary perspective, but there is no doubt that people often internalised the nonsense.

Young’s (2001: 17) distinction is also helpful:

Imperialism … operated from the centre as a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power. Thus, while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept … colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice…

However, regarding imperialism as the theory and colonialism the practice, does not tell the whole story. A similar dichotomy between imperialism as an ideological project and colonialism as a material project is also imperfect. From the classical period to the present the two words overlap and synergise – but never quite become synonyms.

In practical terms, however, imperialism was most transparent when empires acted in concert. Certain key moments at the beginning and end of this process are worth attention. In 1494 Spain and Portugal divided the whole world between themselves in the Treaty of Tordesillas; four hundred years later in 1885, the fourteen imperial participants at the Berlin Conference did the same thing to Africa. The Eight-Nation Alliance sacking of Beijing in 1900 was an even cruder example of such multi-imperial cooperation. Eight empires banded together to ‘encourage’ China to ‘open up’ to free trade in what became the ‘biggest looting expedition since Pizarro’ (Lynch 1901: 179).³ This imperial alliance approach reached its nadir in 1914, however, as two multi-imperial formations vied for global dominion. In the process they dragged almost the entire peoples of the planet into the brutal reality of imperial world war. In these moments the reality of imperialism as a European and a western project is laid bare. Nor has this imperial collectivism gone away – we need look no further than the security council of the UN to see the long shadow of empire. This institution is controlled by five former empires and a white dominion, all but one predominantly white. Only the Chinese presence offers a fig leaf in terms of both colour and colonial history. More recently the concept of the ‘five eyes’ has offered an even narrower contemporary perspective – now the whole world is expected to feel reassured by the combined surveillance capacity of these former white dominions.⁴

In other words, then as now, the focus must be on the structural reality of empire. Empire was primarily a practice with an ideological infrastructure. State power is the base on which ideologies of imperialism are built. This functional reality is manifest in every colonial situation, from the expropriation of land to the collection of taxes. It was always supported by powerful capacity for violence and repression in navies and armies and militias and police forces. For example, the British Empire was not just dependent upon but also defined by the state apparatus that emerged in each of its colonies – both repressive and ideological. In Ireland this embraces the full gamut of colonial models over the course of 900 years: direct rule and indirect rule; lordship, kingship and commonwealth; home rule and dominion.

From the beginning, therefore, our analysis pays close attention to what the state is doing. The colonial state mediates different interests and classes across the entire history of imperialism. Ireland provides plenty of examples of the state making these kinds of decisions: deciding who could own land, who could vote, who could bear arms, who could own a horse worth more than £5.⁵ Lest this last seem a trivial issue, consider Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire – perhaps the greatest of Irish anti-imperialist poems. Art Ó Laoghaire – one of the ‘wild geese’ and uncle of Daniel O’Connell – was ‘legally’ murdered for being Catholic and in possession of just such a horse. At its apogee the colonial state could render Ireland and its native population non-existent. As Morris observes (1968: 469):

Irish Catholics had virtually no rights at all – as was said in an Irish court case in 1759, the law ‘does not presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor can they as much as breathe here without the consent of the Government’.

In consequence, there is a constant interest in the state and its institutions through our journey tracing the nexus of Irishness and colonialism. At any given stage it is illuminating to ask: what is the state trying to do with the colonial project? Of course, across an eight-hundred-year journey the state is hardly identifiable as the same phenomenon – this entity changes profoundly over time. There are, of course, a few constants. For example, the institution of the ‘Crown’ plays a key integrating role for nearly all of this period. But the Dutch and the French and even the English – albeit briefly – found that republics could colonise just as brutally and effectively as monarchies. Likewise, the apparatus of occupation was fairly continuous. For example, Carrickfergus Castle was a colonial military garrison from its erection in 1177 during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland until 1928, when ownership transferred from the British Army to the Government of Northern Ireland for preservation as an ancient monument.

None of the many colonial continuities, however, can disguise the dynamic, chimeric nature of the colonial state. In Ireland, for example, even the appropriate adjective is not a given – is it the ‘English’ or the ‘British’ or the ‘UK’ or the ‘imperial’ state or the ‘Irish colonial’ state that we need to address? Which element within these overlapping state structures drives the colonial process? Nevertheless, at the heart of the story there is always an identifiable state structure doing something specific in its role of mediating between Englishness and Irishness, institutionalising native/settler difference and using some combination of force and ideology to reproduce those differences. However the character of English rule is formulated, the relationship is defined by English dominance and Irish subordination. In other words, it involves – definitively – a colonial state structure. The core institutions of state – government, parliament, church and crown – all combine to make and keep Ireland institutionally subaltern. Even during the brief legislative independence after 1782, the English privy council could still veto legislation of the Irish parliament and the Irish executive remained headed by the lord lieutenant and the chief secretary – British politicians who were members of the British government and accountable to the British rather than the Irish parliament. This colonial state structure holds across