Just Finished Reading: Fatal Path – British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 by Ronan Fanning (FP: 2013)

Between 1910 and 1922 the British government followed, according to the author, a fatal path that moved Ireland from a part of the British Isles and the Empire (indeed often seen as a vital component of both) to being an independent and deeply divided state along religious boundaries. Largely through inaction, vacillation, ignorance and not a little arrogance – to say nothing of the reluctance to face up to the issues and actually attempt to resolve them – the British lost Ireland and gained a new and problematically co-dependent partner in Ulster, which almost 100 years later is still awaiting a resolution satisfactory to all parties.

Of course Ireland has been a problem to the English crown for centuries before the third attempt at Home Rule (far short of independence) was raised in the early years of the 20th century in an attempt to quiet the Irish on the issue of an independence that the British mainland nation thought them incapable of. Inevitably though things quickly founded on the issue of religion. Ireland as a whole was largely a Catholic nation with a small Protestant minority largely concentrated in the 6 (or 9 depending on who you spoke to) northern counties. Determined not to be ruled by the Catholics they despised they demanded exclusion from any deal struck with the rest of the country. With the British government in London strongly sympathetic they got the hearing they wanted and, just to be sure, imported a significant number of rifles and other equipment under the noses (or more likely the blind eyes) of the existing authorities. If they were not given autonomy they would simply take it. Inevitably this was unacceptable to the majority southern Catholics and any possibility of successful talks collapsed. Then, in 1914, the Irish Question was shelved to deal with something far more pressing – The Great War.

It was a war that no one really expected to last very long. So when it dragged on and on both sides – North and South – dug in, accumulated arms (far more in the North than the South) and waited impatiently. But seeing England’s difficulty as Ireland’s opportunity a small group of Catholics tried to move things along with the Easter Uprising in 1916. The expected backlash by the British was brutal (after all they had, they felt, just been stabbed in the back whilst fighting for their lives in Europe) and paradoxically did the Republican’s work for them. After that there was much less talk of Home Rule and more talk of Independence. When the war ended (sadly not the war to end all wars) and things began moving – rather inching – forward the stumbling block of Ulster would not go away. Nor did it after the 6 counties effectively declared themselves fully separate from the rest of the island of Ireland. The existence (or promise or even hope) of a boundary commission to settle things once and for all turned out to be little more than an agreeable political fiction. The short sharp Civil War that followed – between the Nationalists and Republicans in the South and against the Unionists in the North finally settled things to no one’s satisfaction with the emergence of the Irish Free State later to become Eire. So it has lasted to the present.

I knew a little bit about this – it’s a subject difficult to avoid living just across a small patch of water from the country involved, being born a Catholic in Liverpool and living through the Troubles (again fortunately at some distance from them!). It was interesting just to see how we got into this mess through years of political manoeuvre, shady deals, compromise, misunderstanding and, to be honest, not a little cynical double-dealing. As I said: politics.  Although clearly an expert on the period I did think that the author laboured his points a little too much and I thought repeated himself a few times too often. I suppose that I should have realised that the focus of the book was on the British government’s side of things and I did find myself wondering about the Irish side of things. Of course this wasn’t really what the thrust of the book was about, so it’s my own fault that I found things a little slow, or sometimes went into detail regarding things I didn’t find particularly interesting.

Fortunately (for me anyway) the last book in this triple-header on Ireland is exactly that – largely the same slice of time but from the Republican viewpoint. Overall this certainly wasn’t a bad book though I did find parts a bit of a struggle and a bit dull. But I’d lay the fault at my door rather than at the author’s. A valuable book for anyone interested in the period.