Fanning Diverse Republic

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7390863-3-6
Verlag: UCD Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The Republic of Ireland has changed much in the last few decades. It has become much more socially liberal, urban, secular and wealthy. It has also experienced large-scale immigration during a period when other Anglophone and many other European countries mainstream political parties have witnessed the exploitation of anti-immigrant nativism by some political mainstream parties as well as by the far right. Diverse Republic examines, as part of a wider focus on how immigration has changed Irish society, the emergence of antiimmigrant far-right groups through a focus on some key figures within these. It also considers the response of mainstream politics to immigration and examines efforts to encourage the integration of newcomers.The first part of the book examines how Irish society and identity has changed since the foundation of the state. This is relevant to the second part, which examines how and to what extent far right anti-immigration politics are likely to flourish or not in the Irish case. The second part of the book examines the appeal of far-right political responses to immigration in a context where some Irish citizens no longer appear to be represented by the political mainstream and where nativist populists lay claim to the symbols and heroes of the Republic.Diverse Republic makes the case for proactive measures to promote immigrant integration and social cohesion through citizenship, social policy and community development. It engages with shifting nationalist understandings of Irishness and makes the case for taking these seriously even if anti-immigrant nativist nationalism has found only fringe support in Irish politics to date. The symbols and history of what has become a diverse Republic should not become the property of those who would exclude some of its citizens.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fanning, Bryan

Leseproben

one Irish-Ireland
A century ago a nationalist revolution resulted in the creation of an independent Irish state. This was followed by a civil war between nationalists who viewed the twenty-six country Free State as an unacceptable compromise and other nationalists who were willing, temporarily at least, to accept the partition of the island as a necessarily pragmatic compromise. Sides taken in the civil war defined for generations the politics of the Free State that was declared the Republic of Ireland in 1948. Yet the protagonists of this conflict and their descendants otherwise shared a common Irish identity that had been mostly forged since the Great Famine.1 This had been ideologically shaped by romantic nationalism opposed to colonialism and made possible by modernity. English-language mass literacy and mass education mostly controlled by the Catholic Church and a Gaelic cultural revival promoted by nationalist writers and artists had fostered a specific imagined community whereby Irish people who might never meet but were exposed to the same ideas and influences through education and what they read, came to assume that they shared a common identity.2 The distinctive components of Irish identity or the kinds of debates that have been held about what it is to be Irish have shifted in the century since independence. It is useful in considering twenty-first century efforts to define Irishness to reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same over the last hundred years. Religion mattered then to an extent that is probably hard now for many people in the Republic of Ireland to really grasp though not in Northern Ireland where politics and culture are still defined by religious conflicts that can be traced back to the Reformation. Although the revolutionary organisations that sought Irish independence were predominantly influenced by Catholicism, some of the leading cultural nationalist thinkers and writers like Douglas Hyde, the founder of the Gaelic League and first President of the Irish Free State, were Protestants. However, the new state came to reflect the Catholicism of the vast majority of the population and – the opposite of what occurred in Northern Ireland – Protestants came to be marginalised after independence. The Catholic Church and the new state became close allies in a defensive project of cultural isolationism that pitted Faith and Fatherland against a liberal worldview that many Catholic nationalists associated with colonialism. Hyde, in a seminal speech in 1892 entitled ‘The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’, called for a cultural revolution through the promotion of Irish literature, language and native sports.3 Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism also evoked an idealised ruralism that embodied values that were seen as distinct from British culture.4 This Irish-Ireland nationalism came symbolically to dominate the new state from the 1920s to at least the 1960s. As put in 1997 by Tom Garvin: Religious traditionalism, a small-town and rural nationalism and a political and cultural isolationism, attempted to preserve itself against its perceived enemies of liberalism, cosmopolitanism and non-Catholic, commonly-British, freethinking. Battles were won or lost in the democratic arena, but the process was one of a continuous politics of cultural defense which certainly dated back to the late nineteenth century. In many ways, that battle is still being waged in the late 1990s, although the defenders have suffered very substantial, perhaps decisive, defeats.5 The mostly Catholic Irish Free State contained a Protestant minority that was accommodated constitutionally yet also came to be marginalised after independence and declined in size over time. In 1901 Protestants comprised 10.7 per cent (343,552) of the total population of what would become the twenty-six-county Free State. By 1926 this had fallen to just over 200,000. During and after the War of Independence at least 285 country houses owned by Protestant landowners were burned down by the IRA.6 Some Irish Protestants who emigrated during this period were refugees. The membership of the Church of Ireland declined by 42 per cent between 1911 and 1926 – from 250,000 to 146,000 – a fall that was closely paralleled within the other Protestant Churches and which included deaths during the First World War as well as emigration.7 By 1991 just 3.2 per cent (111,699) of the population of the state were Protestants.8 Ireland’s post-independence politics were preoccupied with cultural nationalism and de-colonisation. Its education system prioritised the intergenerational reproduction of Catholicism and, with less success, the revival of the Irish language. Prominent intellectuals as well as clerics made the case for censorship. Cultural protectionism was paralleled after 1932 by economic protectionism that included a prohibition on the investment of foreign capital. Irish politics continued to be preoccupied with the ideal of a thirty-two-county united Ireland. Éamon de Valera, the dominant political figure for the next two decades, preached a doctrine of economic self-sufficiency that meant, above all, ending dependence on the UK. The Fianna Fáil party he founded governed Ireland under his leadership from 1932 to 1947 and from 1953 to 1957. Once elected in 1932 he introduced the Control of Manufactures Act. This required that most of the capital in Irish companies should be Irish-owned. The aim was to undermine British dominance within Irish industry. De Valera also imposed tariff barriers aimed at fostering import substitution. This precipitated the so-called ‘economic war’ with the United Kingdom whereby mutual tariff barriers lasted until 1938.9 * * * When considering where Ireland fits into wider twenty-first-century political trends that have seen the rise of nativism in some other democratic countries in recent years, it is worth reflecting on the history of Irish nationalism. For two centuries this oscillated between a constitutional version focused on achieving its goals through the ballot box and a militant one willing to engage in violence to achieve its aims. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a succession of revolutionary nationalist movements and constitutional ones focused on achieving electoral success. Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of the ‘Penal Law’ discrimination against Catholics, was won by the Catholic Association led by Daniel O’Connell in 1829. The Catholic Association was Europe’s first mass political party. It had hundreds of thousands of members and elected MPs to the Westminster Parliament who made alliances with the Liberal Party to push for reforms. In 1848 the members of the Young Irelander movement, engaged in an unsuccessful revolution. Some Young Irelanders entered electoral politics later in life, others, such as John Mitchel, were and became the intellectual leaders of the Fenian nationalist movement that developed in the United States amongst Irish immigrants. Some of those who participated in the unsuccessful Fenian Rising of 1867 became involved in the Land League led by Charles Stewart Parnell and some became members of parliament in the Irish Party when it campaigned for Home Rule in Westminster. The foundation of Sinn Féin in 1905 heralded another generation of insurrectionary nationalism. The 1916 Rising was followed by the War of Independence and then by a civil war between nationalists who were willing to accept a twenty-six-county Free State and nationalists who wished to keep fighting for an all-island, independent Ireland. Whilst these movements came to accept the ballot box there still persisted throughout the twentieth century fringe nationalist movements willing to engage in violence in pursuit of their political goals. Some of these fringe nationalists participated in groups that were the forerunners of twenty-first-century anti-immigrant groups. Nationalist violence flared up briefly during the 1950s IRA Border Campaign and from 1969 to the 1990s when Sinn Féin was the political wing of the IRA. Yet Sinn Féin also managed a similar kind of transition into democratic politics pulled off by earlier nationalist movements. De Valera and many of his ministers had been revolutionaries, as were their political opponents in Cumann na nGaedheal, which had governed the country before 1932. In The Irish Republic, a history of the 1916–1923 revolutionary period commissioned by de Valera, Dorothy Macardle wrote that: ‘The instinctive craving for national freedom was in the blood of the Irish people; the tradition of armed resistance was in their families.’10 Elsewhere in The Irish Republic she acknowledged that the main rationale for the 1916 Rising had been to galvanise a people who might otherwise be content to accept Home Rule.11 Much has been made of the willingness of twenty-first-century national populists to undermine political norms and tear down institutions. But this has generally been mild stuff compared to the insurgency of Irish revolutionary nationalists. In his essay ‘The Coming Revolution’, Patrick Pearse, the teacher and poet who...