The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (60 page)

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Authors: Neil Hegarty

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^*Also at this time, many Gaelic Irishmen were rounded up and dispatched to Europe: some six thousand, for example, were shipped off to serve – rather improbably – in the army of Lutheran Sweden, then beginning its ascent into one of Europe’s most influential powers. The Irish presence in Sweden dwindled as men deserted in favour of the armies of Europe’s Catholic powers, especially of Spain – but a detectable Irish presence persisted nevertheless in the Swedish army in the following decades, with several individuals carving out significant careers. See, for example, Harman Murtagh, ‘Irish Soldiers Abroad, 1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (eds),
A Military History of Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 304.

^*Not that this emotional relationship was ever permitted to tilt into sentimentality, for Swift remained sharp in his references to Ireland’s many imperfections: in providing the money to found St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin, for example, he noted acidly that ‘no Nation wanted it so much’.

^*The law forbidding intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was not repealed until 1778; the Tone marriage therefore indicates the extent to which penal legislation went unheeded in everyday life.

^*Cornwallis already had a considerable military and political career behind him: he had been present in 1781 at the Siege of Yorktown, which effectively ended the American War of Independence; later, he was posted to India, where he was credited with instituting widespread reforms to British rule and in the process laying the foundations for the Raj. In 1798, he oversaw the defeat of the French.

^*On occasion, this violence was extreme: gang-rape was a feature of the so-called Rockite uprising in Munster in the early 1820s, which led to the deaths of at least a thousand Protestants. See James S. Collins,
Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–24
(Cork: Collins Press, 2010).

^*An exception was the localized emigration from Waterford and the southeast in order to work on the Newfoundland fishery. This migration had continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the result that a substantial Irish population had become established on the Newfoundland coast. By 1720, the British authorities were remarking ‘the great numbers of Irish roman Catholick servants’ (that is, fishery workers) settled on the coast south of St John’s. (Quoted in Willeen Keough, ‘Creating the “Irish Loop”’, in
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), 12–22, 12.

^*Patrick Geoghegan notes suspicions of a string of affairs, some of which can be given credence. The most notorious scandal involved Ellen Courtenay, who accused O’Connell of rape. It seems more likely that they had an affair, and a child may have been the result. O’Connell’s enemies may have been out to damage him, yet ‘Courtenay’s claims cannot be discarded lightly’. There are indications of a string of other affairs too, including with his daughter’s governess. See Patrick Geoghegan,
King Dan: The Rise of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1829
(Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2008), 181.

^**As in the case of John Magee, prosecuted for printing in his
Dublin Evening Post
a harsh review of government policies. O’Connell, in his defence of Magee, grandstanded his own opposition to the government, in the process earning Magee the harsh sentence of two years’ imprisonment and a £500 fine. Magee, unsurprisingly, later became estranged from O’Connell.

^*Attendance numbers at the Monster Meerings were inevitably a matter of dispute: O’Connell’s supporters claimed that 400,000 gathered at Lismore, Cork and Mallow, and almost a million at Tara; others disagreed.

^*The Free Trade Act signed between Britain and France in 1867 symbolized a wider acceptance of the principles of laissez-faire economics.

^*The effects of the civil war manifested in other ways too: the Union government’s introduction of the draft led to an immediate tapering off of Irish immigration into the United States; and competition for employment between the Irish and free black Americans led to increasing racial tension and occasional acts of extreme violence.

^*Fenian incursions into Canadian territory have been credited with helping to mend the testy relationship between the original Canadian provinces and to nudge them towards Confederation – this came about in July 1867.

^*These fears of Fenian activity were not wholly unjustified, and Gladstone’s implied solution did not work as planned: in the course of the 1880s Fenian bombers targeted Scotland Yard, the Palace of Westminster, London Bridge, the Tower, the city’s fledgling Underground and Greenwich Observatory.

^*The disestablishment bill also relieved the Church of Ireland of the expense of maintaining many ruinous and ageing buildings; as a result, it emerged from the settlement financially rather better off.

^*Davitt viewed the conflict in terms of a clash between the Boers and British. He had little or nothing to say about the denial of political rights to the majority African population. This attitude contrasts sharply with his sharp observations on the situation of the New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginal populations during his 1889–90 tour of the region.

^*Casement was born outside Dublin to a family with Ulster antecedents. He was sent by the Foreign Office as consul to postings in Africa and South America. His reports on the widespread human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo led to changes in the political governance of the territory. He was knighted in 1905.

^*‘A typical volunteer’, writes Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘was James English, a 38-year-old labourer from County Waterford, married with five children. By enlisting, he instantly increased his family’s earnings by 154 per cent, and if anything was to happen to him, his wife was guaranteed a pension.’ (Quoted in Ferriter,
The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000
[London: Profile, 2004], 133.)

^*In the course of the voyage, the
Libau
was disguised as a Norwegian cargo vessel (complete with a consignment of kitchen equipment) and renamed the
Aud
. The ship was eventually captured by British naval vessels on 22 April and escorted into Cork harbour, where she was scuttled by her captain. Casement was captured at the same time on the Kerry coast.

^*Several leading players in the rising escaped death, including Markiewicz (officially by reason of her gender). It is often supposed that de Valera, who was American by birth, was spared in order not to give offence to the United States government, now a crucial ally in the war with Germany; de Valera himself, however, claimed that he avoided execution only because his court-martial and sentence came very late in the day, after most of the other executions had already taken place. See Diarmaid Ferriter,
Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Éamon de Valera
(Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), 28–9.

^*By 1939, most towns in the Free State had been connected to the national grid – at which point the outbreak of war slowed the process considerably. The last districts in
rural
Ireland, however, were not electrified until 1973; and some of the islands were connected later still.

^*Joe Lee notes that ‘teaching infants through Irish provided one further bulwark for the existing social structure in that it inevitably discriminated against already deprived children, and ensured that when they were despatched from the country as emigrants they would be equipped to serve their new masters only as hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (in
Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 134.

^*In the general election of 1933 Unionist candidates accounted for thirty-nine seats, nationalist candidates a third of that number.

^*Londonderry – a descendant of Lord Castlereagh, who had been instrumental in the passing of the Act of Union – went on to follow his ancestor in carving out a political career at Westminster. His highly visible attempts in the 1930s to forge alliances with Germany would lead to his condemnation as a Nazi appeaser.

^*See Lee,
Ireland 1912–1985,
206. The constitution’s attitude to women too was founded in unreality. It was clear in its view that the correct position of women was within the home; and it envisaged a situation in which no woman would be obliged by economic necessity to go out to work. But no attempt was made either to pay the menfolk of Ireland enough to enable their women to stay at home, even if they so wished; or to ensure that the majority of the mothers of Ireland could raise their children in tolerable comfort; or to create the economic circumstances that would enable thousands of women to remain in Ireland and start a family, rather than board an emigrant boat to Britain or America. This gap between constitutional rhetoric and cold political reality was best exemplified in the aspiration to direct the energies and finances of the state towards the welfare and betterment of the people while at the same time explicitly ruling out recourse to the courts as a means of ensuring that these principles were actually applied.

^*Louis MacNeice, ‘Neutrality’, in
Selected Poems
, ed. W. H. Auden (London: Faber, 1964), 77. In one excellent illustration of Irish cooperation with the Allies, the meteorological station at Belmullet in County Mayo fed the Allied naval authorities with weather reports that were crucial to the timing of the Normandy landings.

^*The Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947 mirrored the provisions of the 1944 Education Act (the ‘Butler Act’) in Britain.

^*Thirteen men had died on the day itself; a fourteenth died later from his injuries.

^*The Provisional IRA emerged in 1969 from an ideological split with the ranks of the Irish Republican Army. The Provisional wing of the IRA embraced the use of force in the context of rising disorder in Northern Ireland; the ‘Official IRA’ embraced Marxist, class-based politics.

^*This was the second hunger strike to take place at the Maze; the first had lasted from October to December 1980.

^*A 1993 British television documentary alleged that the Dublin and Monaghan bombers had had the assistance of elements in the British security services. The subsequent Barron Report commissioned by the Irish government found that these allegations, though they could not be proven, were ‘neither fanciful nor absurd’, and drew attention to the lack of cooperation offered to investigators by the British government. A later report added that the actions of the Irish police after the bombings had ‘failed to meet an adequate and proper standard’.

^*The legislation in question had been passed by the Westminster parliament in 1885, and had remained on the statute books following independence. The most notorious prosecution stemming from this law was of course that of an Irishman, Oscar Wilde, in 1895. Interestingly, two future presidents of Ireland – first Mary McAleese and then Mary Robinson – acted as legal advisers to the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform established in Ireland in the 1970s.

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Part 1: Gods and Warriors