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From International Socialism, No.44, July/August 1970, pp.39-41.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Ulster 1969
Max Hastings
Gollancz, 42s
Divided Ulster
Liam de Paor
Penguin, 5s
The Sins of Our Fathers
Owen Dudley Edwards
Gill & Macmillan, 50s
In 1914-18, faced with the capitulation of thousands of British workers to chauvinism and imperialist rhetoric, John McLean persistently proclaimed: ‘there is only one war worth fighting – the class war’. In 1970, faced with the conflict in Ireland a similar sentiment is frequently expressed by present-day socialists. Certainly an instinctive aversion to things religious, together with the daunting complexity of a situation aptly symbolised by a denominational map of Belfast with its streets twisted into a bitter pattern of rival allegiances, leads the British left to view the situation with reluctant disdain. In Scotland, where a man will still swing a boot for religion, the problem is more appreciable, even if there is a similar reticence in tackling it.
But what exactly is the problem? These three books present three ways of seeing it, each varying in its level of perception and therefore of merit. Max Hastings’ account of last years’ events probably reflects the attitude of many in Britain as they viewed the conflict through the eyes of the media and the Press. Apparently by mid-August the wild uncivilised Irish had behaved so badly that: ‘A state of spiritual anarchy had been created, in which the authorities must do the best they could to weld the fragments back into some kind of manageable entity.’ Pity the poor British when their dormant presence in the Six Counties was forced into the open with the deployment of the military in the streets because those damned Ulstermen insisted on making a show of their repression! ‘In this atmosphere, reasonable men had to attempt to urge sanity on Ulster.’ For Mr Hastings the unleashed communal strife was the problem, and the desperate savagery it aroused was, for him, just too much. Unfortunately, the painfully sincere platitudes of a shocked Englishman may make ‘sensitive’ journalism but they provide little by way of a solution.
Liam de Paor’s historical study looks as if it will do much better in that respect. Beginning at the sixth century, he traces through to 1969, ‘not a history of Ulster, but a view of the problem of the divisions ofUlster as these appear in history’. In doing so he provides a cheap and detailed navigational chart, invaluable to anyone who has no prior experience of these troubled waters. Most of the salient features are indicated. The settlement of Ulster in the early 17th century when tenants as well as lairds moved over from Presbyterian Scotland to displace and dispossess the native Irish is the first major landmark, and from this his line is plotted. The ‘Catholic’ rising of 1641, and the bitter fears it aroused among Protestants, together with the subsequent Cromwellian repression and the campaigns of James II and William of Orange, are seen as high points in a continuing struggle between a ruined and fragmented Gaelic culture and a defensive struggle settler society who viewed their Irish surrounds from limestone towers and musket-looped farmyard walls.
What was at issue is correctly defined. ‘In England the Protestant constitution was at issue; in Ireland too, but also the ownership of the land.’ But as the political manifestations of this struggle are indicated, the basic flaws in de Paor’s approach begin to reveal themselves. His baseline is a fracture line drawn along a cultural hiatus, the persistent and repetitive collisions along it being his definition of the ‘colonial’ problem. The view from the bridge through captain de Paor’s prismatic glasses may therefore reveal well-known landmarks in a different, more intense light, but this cannot overcome the more serious consequences of wrong bearings. The texture of Orangeism in the 19th century, as well as the social and cultural ties Ulster Unionism had with the English ruling class in the first two decades of this century show up well, but this can hardly compensate for the way in which economic underpinnings are never revealed. It is not enough to say that opposition to Home rule was led by those ‘who had learned in the course of the crises and adjustments of the 19th century that the steadily deepening divisions of Ulster provided them with a means of retaining power and wealth in a changing world’. What was the basis of this wealth, what was the substance of this power, and how did they create and manipulate these ‘divisions’? Mr de Paor has allowed his initial fracture to develop into so great a chasm all he can see are two diverging walls and an impenetrable void.
Looked at from the other end, the divisions de Paor traces can be seen as the negative back-bearings of his own despair. Having scant faith in the potential dynamic of a unified working class himself, he gives only a cursory glance at those who have in the past. Seeing only an ‘Orange State’, which has institutionalised sectarianism and divided the working class facing a civil rights movement which has little hope of escaping the ‘old pattern’, he does not bother to critically examine the latter’s components. There being nowhere to go, what does their politics matter? Consequently, despite the blurb, the books greatest weakness is that it does not close ‘with a careful political analysis of the fighting in 1969’.
In marked contrast, Owen Dudley Edwards approaches the subject with all the optimism and wit of the stage-Irishman. It was part of Gramsci’s analysis of ruling-class hegemony and power in advanced capitalism that peripheral countries in the West tend to have a large intermediate strata which mediates this hegemony through a superstructure which has its own peculiarities. Edwards does not pose such a problematic, but the importance of the specific moments he does isolate and examine only shows the need for a thorough Marxist (Gramscian) analysis. In the meantime, Derry Young Hooligans should, I suppose, be thankful for his interest in ‘the phenomenon of the ghetto’. After all his work has its uses. Anyone wishing to get down to the real ‘nitty-gritty’ of ‘Ulster’ politics would be well advised to read it, especially the three chapters on extreme Unionism, the working class, and the fabric of Catholic life in the ghettoes. One central theme emerges, ‘working-class solidarity is no Utopian left-wing dream in the Northern Ireland context. It has existed before, within living memory, and there is little valid reason to assume it cannot be born again.’ Furthermore, ‘Belfast was the growth point of Irish Socialism ... when the working class in Belfast was broken the Irish working class was broken.’ This still applies as the PD is well aware.
Unfortunately, when he turns from the ‘phenomenon’ to the reality the author reveals his bourgeois academic bloomers. Edwards is a Catholic-pacifist-anarchist. In other words, he doesn’t want to get involved, but he’s with us all in spirit. As a proof of this sympathy he submits the PD to an anachronistic analysis that tells us nothing about the PD, but a lot about the author’s idealism and aversion to practical politics. To salve his conscience he has a good go at the British Left. Apparently,
‘When the Bogside erupted and the barricades went up in Belfast, several well-meaning students hurried over to Ireland to teach the workers how to do their job properly ... and patience became strained when harassed and beleagured slum-dwellers found themselves receiving elegantly-fashioned directions about the need to see that their conduct conformed to the finer points of Anti-Dühring or The Critique of the Gotha Programme.’
No doubt such crude anti-British, anti-student sentiments will help Mr Edwards to sell a lot of books to the more reactionary elements in the Free State, but such a slanderous lack of concern for the truth can only earn him the unreserved contempt of committed revolutionaries on both sides of the Irish Channel.
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