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CHAPTER TWO

Nationalism and its Discontents

CATHOLIC LOYALTIES

Eamonn McCann and Kevin Boyle went on a month-long holiday to Donegal at the end of the 1950s. The schoolboys had travelled over the border to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish under the watchful eye of Catholic priests. This was what generations of Irish nationalists had been struggling to achieve: the youth of Ireland leaving behind the corruption of the towns and cities to seek their true language and culture among simple rural folk. McCann and Boyle, however, were Western teenagers as well as Irish Catholic schoolboys; they had no intention of devoting their leisure to things of the spirit. Late one night, McCann and Boyle went swimming with some girls. The party was discovered by the priests, who forgave the girls and punished the boys. For their sins, McCann and Boyle were cast out of the Irish nationalist paradise of the Gaeltacht. Fearing what his mother would do if she found out, Boyle took up McCann’s offer to stay with him in Derry rather than head straight home to Newry. The two teenagers enjoyed a carefree couple of days in the city. They ran around shouting their heads off and leaping up aiming to hit street signs with their hands. When a policeman put a stop to their antics, Boyle followed McCann’s lead and gave a false name. The highlight of Boyle’s visit was a trip to the cinema to see Victor Mature in a ‘sword and sandal’ movie – a genre that was at the peak of its international popularity.1

McCann and Boyle were far from the only members of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community to possess complicated and contradictory identities. An attitude survey conducted on the eve of the Troubles found that three-quarters of Catholics described their nationality as ‘Irish’. This did not mean, however, that they embraced a Dublin-designed identity and abandoned all others.2 The minority population was made up of Republicans, citizens of Derry, members of the working class, Roman Catholics, and so on.3 Moreover, what was understood by ‘Irish’ might differ for each individual. For the dominant figure of twentieth-century nationalism, Eamon de Valera, God had ordained that the island of Ireland should be one nation. This sacred land must once again be filled by a frugal, Gaelic, Catholic peasantry. De Valera’s 1937 constitution committed the Southern state to this goal. In turn, many Northern nationalists committed themselves to Dublin. Londonderry Corporation’s Nationalist councillors refused to attend a Battle of Britain commemoration service because ‘Our Government in Dublin declared its neutrality’.4 De Valera, however, was a consummate politician. By presenting Fianna Fáil as a national movement that transcended social divisions, he pushed mere political parties to the margins of public life. But when de Valera said Ireland, he meant only the South. Indeed, almost all politicians did.5 The Nationalist Party repeatedly asked for the right to be seated in the Dáil and the major parties repeatedly refused.6 Such experiences provoked a prominent Nationalist to remark that Northern Catholics were ‘the bastard children of the Republic … sometimes they needs must acknowledge us, but generally speaking they try to keep their distance’.7 By the end of 1967, opinion polls were finding that the great majority of these children were hoping that London and Dublin would finally agree to share custody: a united Ireland with a link ‘of some sort’ with Britain. In the space of four decades, ‘Ourselves Alone’ had become Ireland should not be ‘going it alone’.8

Léon Gambetta, the nineteenth-century French republican leader who had escaped from Paris by balloon during the Franco-Prussian War, said of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, ‘Let us think of it always; let us speak of it never’. Instead, the recovery of the lost provinces became something for French nationalism to rally behind and something that no government ever thought of fighting a war to achieve. A wit reversed Gambetta’s maxim: ‘speak of it always, think of it never’.9 In post-war Europe, Southern Irish parties were not alone in following this injunction. The idea that Germany would one day be reunified was the Lebenslüge, ‘life-lie’, of the Federal Republic. Almost half of the West German population during the 1950s and 1960s felt that reunification was the most important political issue, while almost all of West Germany’s politicians felt that reunification was neither possible nor desirable.10 Dublin and Bonn were not prepared to risk the hard-won political and social stability of their states by embarking upon foolhardy nationalist adventures.

An independent Dungannon councillor sadly concluded in 1964 that ‘the official attitude down South is … that they no longer want us’.11 Rejected by Dublin as well as Belfast, Northern Ireland’s Catholics were given a home by Rome. The Church hierarchy had been convinced during the early 1920s that either the new Northern state would collapse, London and Dublin would force Belfast to treat the minority fairly or Catholic territory would be transferred to the South. When all these hopes had failed, the Church set about providing the faithful with a state within a state.12 Since the 1850s, Rome had battled against the Kingdom of Italy, the French Republic, and the German Empire. The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church had no intention of capitulating to the Northern Ireland statelet.

The nineteenth-century ‘culture wars’ had not been fought in Ireland. British governments had accepted the dominant position of the Irish Catholic Church and had tried to avoid provoking a conflict with it.13 Readers of The Tablet, however, were able to follow in detail the struggles of their co-religionists on the Continent as the ‘two Europes’ – Catholic Europe and liberal Europe – clashed. The Holy See believed that it was fighting the ‘criminal machinations of the evil ones’ who ‘set about devouring the foundation of the Catholic religion and of civil society’.14 By contrast, Gambetta observed that ‘bad times for our country are always good times for the Jesuits’.15 The Society of Jesus and other religious orders were supposedly standing in the way of progress. They were teaching children to be superstitious, submissive and, above all, unpatriotic – a grievous crime in the era of nation-building. Through schools, armies, railways, bureaucracies, and newspapers, the states of Europe were turning peasants into Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans.16 Although the Catholic Church was seen as a major obstacle to these transformations, it was also undergoing a process of modernisation. Like the other great capitals of Europe, the Vatican was centralising power and imposing uniformity in its realm. Both sides in the culture wars sought to rally the masses to their respective banners. The resulting mobilisation and polarisation led to the formation of parallel societies: Catholic versus liberal, Protestant, or anti-clerical.17 While the rise of socialist parties at the end of the century pushed liberals and Catholics into a coalition of convenience, these divisions persisted into the inter-war period.18

As the German army swept towards Paris, a state schoolteacher and a Catholic priest met in a small Alpine village. ‘So, this is it then,’ the instituteur remarked to the curé. ‘Well, we’re friends, we only hate the invader now.’19 In Ireland, however, the First World War brought an end to the Act of Union rather than a union sacrée. Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, culture wars had flared up after significant constitutional changes had taken place. Both sides recognised that an expansion of the franchise or the creation of new institutions presented opportunities and threats.20 Partition and devolution sparked a similar struggle in Northern Ireland. London had appeased the Catholic Church; now it was believed that Dublin would defer to it and Belfast would persecute it. In the ‘Swiss Ireland’, the Bernese Jura, clerics who endorsed the dogma of infallibility agreed at the Vatican Council of 1870 were driven from their offices and replaced by priests loyal to the state. Catholic parishes that resisted the Protestant canton came under military occupation.21 The culture wars in Northern Ireland were not as fierce: Protestants wanted to control the state, not for the state to control the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the result was the same: a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society – although the lines that separated them were never clearly defined.

Schools were one of the main battlegrounds in Europe’s culture wars. In Northern Ireland, the Church was able to remain responsible for educating Catholic children. However, voluntary Catholic schools received less financial support from Stormont than they had received from Dublin Castle. The Church periodically campaigned for increased state funding – with some degree of success.22 Nevertheless, the consensus within the Catholic community was that the spiritual reward of having its children raised in the traditions of the Church was worth the material sacrifice required to support the schools. As well as receiving religious instruction, Catholic children played Gaelic games and were taught ‘Irish’ history. A civil rights activist observed that pupils in Northern Ireland’s state and voluntary sectors ‘were all learning the same things, the same events, the same periods of time, but the interpretations … given were very different’.23 This was what the 1968 attitude survey had found: half of all the Catholics interviewed remembered having teachers with explicitly nationalist views.24 One such teacher later described how the Church, ‘being greater than Northern Ireland, part of the whole island, of Europe and the world’, ‘lent an ability to think outside the immediate context’.25 This mental world was reflected by the Catholic community’s newspapers. For example, the Derry Journal reported upon the city, the north-west of the island, Catholic organisations and societies, Southern politics, and the latest occurrences at the Vatican.26 Newspapers helped their readers to bring together all the different threads that made up the Catholic counter-society – within which their whole spiritual, social, and cultural lives took place.

What marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was not the stand-off between a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society. When Stormont’s Education Minister spoke of ‘breaking clerical control’ and the Bishop of Down and Connor warned of the threat posed by ‘anti-Catholic forces’ to Church schools, they were echoing their counterparts in the Europe of a previous generation.27 Neither did Northern Ireland’s minority problem set it apart. Over the centuries, Europe had developed into a maddening mosaic of religious and ethnic groups. Beginning in 1914, however, the pieces that made up the old Europe were removed and rearranged. Three decades that witnessed total war, brutal occupations, the fall of empires, the emergence of new states, the constant redrawing of borders, the forced relocation of entire peoples, and murder on an industrial scale simplified the patterns on the map.28 Northern Ireland was a product of this process, but it had escaped the final and worst phase. Elsewhere in Europe, Hitler and Stalin had found inhuman solutions to human problems. What therefore marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was that these problems survived into the post-war era.

WE ARE VERY MUCH ON OUR OWN HERE

In 1936, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) raided the Derry home of the McAteer family. The police officers found weapons hidden in the house and arrested the male members of the family on arms charges. Hugh McAteer, one of the sons, confessed to the crime. He received a heavy prison sentence, but his father and two brothers were set free. Hugh McAteer would subsequently rise to the highest ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Although Eddie McAteer always respected his brother and shared his commitment to Irish unity, he never believed that the armed struggle would end partition.29 Eddie McAteer chose constitutional nationalism over militant nationalism. The many disappointments he endured in the course of his long political career made him cynical, yet he never came to regret this decision.

At the 1968 Nationalist Party conference, McAteer used the leader’s speech to outline his pragmatic Irish nationalism. He implored delegates to ‘be realistic’: ‘try to remember that we are entrapped minority’ and that ‘there is not much good in looking for help from overseas, from America, or indeed, I regret to say, from our own fellow countrymen.’ ‘My feeling’, the leader confided to the party faithful, ‘is that we are very much on our own here in the North of Ireland.’ Consequently, in McAteer’s opinion, ‘the greatest problem that lies before us at the present moment is the problem of ourselves’. Nationalism suffered from ‘too many splits’, which encouraged loose co-operation rather than a disciplined party structure. The party was at times divided and directionless because it had been condemned to permanent opposition. Unionist domination ensured that reforms – if they were to come at all – would have to be conceded by Stormont. McAteer, however, feared that the desired changes would not come. He suspected that ‘the way to power and advancement in the Unionist Party is by kicking the Nationalist people’.30

This lecture on Nationalism’s inherent weaknesses was directed at the ‘impatient ones’ inside the conference hall. McAteer was speaking from personal experience: he, too, had once been a young man in a hurry. On the eve of the D-Day landings, Seán Mac Entee, a leading figure within the de Valera government, had attacked the Nationalist Party for condemning its supporters to ‘political futility for 22 years’.31 As war slowly gave way to peace, Europeans were determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1920s and, above all, the 1930s. They wanted to build a new and better world in the post-war era. McAteer was among those Nationalists who believed that the moment had come to revitalise the party and reunify Ireland. Labour’s election victory had fuelled these hopes. Nationalists told themselves that the British Labour movement had sympathised with their cause in the past. Indeed, a number of backbench Labour MPs headed by Geoffrey Bing had honoured that tradition, in November 1945, by forming a pressure group called the Friends of Ireland. The ascendancy of America was also regarded as an opportunity. Nationalists deluded themselves that the Irish diaspora could be mobilised and Washington made to right English wrongs.32 With imperialism in retreat, Nationalists became convinced that the world was going their way. McAteer invoked ‘the mighty spirit of the late Mahatma’ when he proposed a ‘new campaign’ of ‘non-cooperation, no violence’. In his Irish Action pamphlet, McAteer sketched out ways to make ‘local misgovernment’ ‘impossible’: these ranged from delaying tax payments to occupying public buildings.33 The Catholic community, however, was not yet ready to embrace civil disobedience.

The ten MPs returned to the Northern Irish Parliament in 1945 decided to set up the Anti-Partition League (APL). It sought to unite all Nationalists around a common platform, fight winnable Stormont and Westminster seats, and make the party more accountable to its supporters. In 1947, the APL co-operated with the Friends of Ireland’s fruitless efforts to stop the passage of legislation that relaxed some of the restrictions imposed upon Stormont by the Government of Ireland Act. The parliamentary debate, however, did provide a rare opportunity to criticise the Unionist regime.34 The APL also publicised perceived injustices through a series of pamphlets. The most notable of these, Mutilation of a Nation, was written by Cahir Healy, who entered politics as a founding member of Sinn Féin and ended up as a Nationalist MP. These efforts to attack partition in print were supported and supplemented by the Southern political parties. In 1949, they came together to create the Mansion House Committee to support Nationalist candidates in the Stormont election.35 Its publications became the raw material for The Indivisible Island. As well as powerfully restating the traditional Irish nationalist reading of history, this book presented exposures of gerrymandering and of discrimination in public employment.36 But all these labours were in vain.

As frustration at the APL’s lack of success mounted, McAteer’s branch chose to march through Derry in defiance of Stormont’s bans. Conflicts over the right to march through areas identified with the other community had marked the region since the nineteenth century. When McAteer had discussed in Irish Action the possibility of marching through Protestant territory, he had maintained that the ‘important thing’ would be to ‘be seen by foreign observers’.37 On St Patrick’s Day 1951, McAteer and a small number of APL members attempted to parade with the Irish tricolour through the walled city. Although the march itself was legal, the organisers had consciously violated the law by publicly displaying the Republican flag. The marchers succeeded in provoking the police, which encouraged the local APL branch to plan a larger protest for the following year. This demonstration was banned and baton-charged. In the opinion of many who were present on both occasions, the violence that ensued was comparable to that unleashed on 5 October 1968. The difference between the two marches was that one was seen by foreign observers on television and the other was not.38

This was one of the last in a sequence of disappointments that fatally undermined the APL. In September 1951, the American House of Representatives voted against a resolution calling for an all-Ireland plebiscite on partition.39 At the height of the Cold War, the American political establishment was reluctant to damage its alliance with Britain. Strategic concerns also superseded Labour’s sympathy with Irish nationalism. The North’s commitment during the Second World War – in sharp contrast to Southern neutrality – had transformed the attitude of many Labour ministers. Herbert Morrison, while limited to influence rather than direct involvement, was the champion of the Unionist cause.40 In 1946, Morrison produced a memorandum for the Cabinet based upon private visits to both Irish states. He recommended that partition should be maintained.41 The Friends of Ireland not only proved impotent when confronted with the opposition of the party leadership, but also disagreed with the APL over the solution to the Irish question. The Friends of Ireland looked at the other island through British eyes. The 1950 Tribune pamphlet, John Bull’s Other Island, assumed that class rather than communal divisions lay behind discrimination in Northern Ireland. The best way of achieving unity, therefore, was for the different Irish Labour parties to take office on both sides of the border.42

Domestic politics similarly dominated the calculations of the Southern parties. Following a long period of Fianna Fáil rule, politics had become more competitive. The parties sought to gain an advantage over their rivals by parading their respective republican credentials. This climaxed in September 1948 when the interparty government declared the Republic. The wider consequences of this action were apparently overlooked. It brought an immediate British guarantee that reunification would require the consent of the Stormont Parliament: the Ireland Act of 1949. The Unionists quickly called an election to exploit their stronger constitutional position and the South’s republican rhetoric. For the APL, the South’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth and the passage of the Ireland Act ended the hopes of progress that had inspired the new departure. Support for the APL declined, divisions within Nationalism re-emerged, and Republicans exploited the polarised political climate to reassert themselves.43 McAteer had witnessed at first hand confidence give way to collapse; the experience was to leave its mark upon him.

THE PROBLEM OF OURSELVES

In December 1956, the IRA began ‘Operation Harvest’. McAteer lamented the failure of constitutionalism and the pointless waste of life. ‘The present outbreak would be quelled for a time,’ he told the Department of External Affairs, ‘only to recur again in five or ten years.’ McAteer feared that Catholic politics had become trapped in a endlessly repeating cycle: the IRA campaign would be abandoned; a peaceful approach to the Northern Ireland problem would be developed; expectations of change would be raised to unrealistic levels; enthusiasm would fade away as the failure of the strategy became obvious; the resulting disenchantment would be exploited by Republicanism to renew the armed struggle. McAteer, however, found some comfort in rumours that certain leading Unionists had reached the same wearied conclusion. These Unionists had supposedly recognised that IRA violence was a product of the ‘secondary aspects of partition’ – anti-Catholic discrimination. McAteer recommended that the matter should be raised with the British. Instead, the proposal was merely absorbed into Dublin’s wider policy reappraisal.44

Although McAteer pictured a gloomy future for Nationalism, he was not prepared to give up on the party. He battled against a return to the ineffectiveness that had stamped the period before the APL. As a statement of intent, McAteer attacked Derry’s Nationalist MP – a symbol of the old order. He represented the Catholics of the second city, yet he usually abstained from attending Parliament and remained aloof from his constituents. McAteer challenged for the seat in the 1953 election, promising to use Stormont as a platform to expose Unionist abuses. Fighting alongside McAteer was James Doherty, his electoral agent. The Derry businessmen and Londonderry Corporation councillor had worked closely with McAteer in the APL.45 At an election rally, Doherty urged the crowd to support ‘the vigorous policy carried out by McAteer and his colleagues’.46 Derry duly elected McAteer to represent the Foyle division at Stormont.

At times, however, McAteer seemed to have joined the old guard of the party. Following the 1956 Stormont election he successfully blocked an attempt to bring together all the Catholic parliamentarians. He would not unite with Belfast’s various Labour groupings, nor would he support this new party becoming the Official Opposition. Three years later, McAteer again rebuffed agitation for Nationalism to adopt this status. He was not ready to recognise the legitimacy of the Northern state. In 1958, McAteer similarly resisted pressure from the Catholic Social Study conference for greater engagement with Stormont.47 McAteer, writing in the Sunday Independent, pleaded with readers to ‘spare a little pity for an uncouth Northern Nationalist so far removed from the genteel tinkling of intellectual coffee cups in the purified air of Garron Tower’.48

McAteer was himself opposed in the Stormont elections of 1958 and 1962 by a candidate who urged Derry’s Catholics to break with the past. The Independent Labour challenger claimed that the Nationalist MP’s ‘policy throughout his public life had produced nothing in the way of improvement of standards of living’. It was ‘one of negative denunciation without constructive effort’.49 The most glaring example of this was the Nationalist Party’s decision to welcome the closure of the local naval base in 1958: Doherty had announced that ‘any Irishman who said he was sorry to see “occupying forces” leave would be a renegade’. There were many loyal Irishmen, however, who were angry that their representatives were welcoming the loss of almost 4,000 jobs.50 For Northern Catholics, economic and social issues mattered as much as political principles. Nationalism had failed to recognise how aspirations and concerns had changed since 1945.

West Germany’s Social Democrats found themselves in the same position during the 1950s. In the first years of peace, the party naively believed that the occupying powers would allow a united and neutral Germany to be built on the ruins of the Third Reich. The Social Democrats were confident that they would be the natural party of government in the new Germany. The first Federal Republic elections in 1949 were fought on a platform of nationalisation, unification, and neutrality. The party lost. The years that followed saw the ‘economic miracle’, the start of European integration, and West Germany joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). While everything around them had changed, the Social Democrats had stayed the same – with predictable results in the elections of 1953 and 1957. At the Bad Godesberg congress of 1959, the party finally accepted that it would be forever condemned to opposition unless it accommodated itself to the post-war world. Henceforth, the Social Democratic Party would be a Volkspartei – a ‘people’s party’ – rather than an exclusively working-class party. Dropping the formal commitment to Marxism was the symbol of this transformation.51

Nationalists, however, could only follow the Social Democrats part way along this road. Social Democrats could win West German voters away from the Christian Democrats; Nationalists could not win Protestant voters away from the Unionists. Each election in Northern Ireland was effectively two parallel elections. Nationalists campaigned to increase their share of the Catholic vote while Unionists campaigned to increase their share of the Protestant vote. Nationalists needed to adapt to the post-war era not to defeat the Unionists, but to remain the political leaders of the Catholic community.

During the same year that West German socialists recognised the new political realities, similar voices were heard within Northern Ireland’s Catholic community. Michael McKeown wrote a Hibernia article in 1959 suggesting that ‘nationally-minded people’ should organise themselves into a more professional and pragmatic political party. They then ‘might hope to secure some reforms within the Northern system’. Among those intrigued by what McKeown called this ‘appallingly ingenuous’ appeal was James Scott, a lecturer at Queen’s University. As a convert, Scott understood Catholicism and Irish nationalism differently from people ‘nurtured in those cradles’. He felt that Northern Catholics needed to get involved in public life as a first step towards persuading Protestants that their future lay with a united Ireland. Scott’s house became the meeting place for a wide array of politically active individuals. This circle developed into National Unity, which can probably be best described as a part-time Irish nationalist think-tank.52 The Special Branch investigation into the new organisation highlighted National Unity’s commitment to achieving unity through consent, to co-operating with ‘all elected representatives of the National people’, to reassuring Protestants, and to non-violent methods. The RUC concluded that ‘there would not appear to be anything of a subversive nature attached to it’.53

From a Nationalist perspective, however, the group was subversive. Scott attempted to reassure McAteer that it merely wished to serve ‘as a link between all people who believe in a united Ireland’. But the Nationalist MP paid rather more attention to National Unity’s attacks on his party made at a meeting in Derry and its move into electoral politics.54 Fears that the group intended to assume the political leadership of the minority community were to reach their peak in April 1964. National Unity invited all Catholic politicians and other interested parties to a convention in Maghery to discuss forming an umbrella body to co-ordinate future political activity. The result was the National Political Front. A spokesman for the independent candidates in the Dungannon local elections described it as the ‘something new’ that was ‘needed’ to take the ‘place’ of the ‘dying’ Nationalist Party.55 McAteer was therefore not too disappointed when splits – a familiar problem for Irish nationalist organisations – led to the Front’s rapid demise.56 He told the press that Nationalist MPs had ‘found it impossible to abdicate our position as elected representatives in favour of people who have no claim to representation whatsoever’.57

McAteer was undermining attempts to unite all the ‘nationally- minded people’ and to build democratic structures, yet he had previously pushed for such changes. This apparent contradiction between the progressive and the reactionary can be resolved. McAteer had to fill the conflicting roles of statesman, de facto party leader, and local party boss. He generally pursued the policies that he felt were in the best interests of Northern Catholics. But McAteer occasionally had to make tactical deviations to protect the party against potential rivals and to defend his Derry fastness. However, he was also able to exploit the challenge posed by the National Unity critique to help justify change to the old guard.

The decision to embark upon a major shift in strategy was finally taken during mid-1962. The timing was influenced by a combination of international, national, and local developments: the Second Vatican Council, London and Dublin’s joint application for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), the formal end of the IRA’s failed campaign, and Nationalist successes in the Stormont election. Doherty later recalled that Nationalists felt that this would be an opportune moment to offer the Unionists the ‘hand of friend- ship’ in the hope of winning concessions – to adopt a policy of normalisation.58 Senator James Lennon explained the party’s position at a rally staged in Omagh by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Orange Order’s Catholic counterpart: ‘faced with the present terrible unemployment conditions in this area and the unknown consequences of the advent of the Common Market we owe it to our country as a whole to make every effort within the framework of our National aspirations to find … solutions’.59