Nigel Farage, leader of Britain's most successful nativist political party in the modern era, favours the Irish as ‘kith and kin’ of the British. Compared to other Europeans, he would allow the Irish relatively privileged access to this United Kingdom's sceptred isle. In a way this is odd, for few enmities are as long-lasting or well known as that between Britain and Ireland. But of course, it makes sense once we recognise their entangled history. Mo Moulton's sparklingly written and thoroughly researched book sheds much light on the inter-war period.
At first glance, Moulton makes bold claims. Upon further inspection these tend to dissolve into verbal ambiguity. A principal argument, for example, is that the ‘English dealt with the need to reconcile the local human legacies of empire with a more inward, self-sufficient nationalism’ (p. 336). This raises interesting questions about the changing nature of Englishness, but it seems to make it rather too dependent upon its dialectical relationship with Irishness. Moulton insists that ‘British stability did not exist in spite of Ireland, or outside the Irish frame of reference, but rather it was constructed in part out of reaction to the potential impact of the Irish Question’ (p. 5). Well, no doubt, but the qualifiers ‘in part’ and ‘potential’ carry a heavy load here. Depending upon their force, they render the statement uncontroversial to the point of innocuousness.
The first part of the book does indeed present a provocative thesis: that ‘the Anglo–Irish War and its related conflicts should be seen as a civil war’, ‘fought on English as well as Irish soil’ (pp. 12 and 17). However, what Moulton actually means by ‘civil war’ remains entirely obscure. It is true that as the Irish were asserting their right to secede from the United Kingdom in arms, the independence struggle was, by legalistic definition, a conflict within the United Kingdom, and thus a ‘civil war’ if one pleases. Indeed, there were some on the British side who chose – at certain times, in certain moods – to strike a pose suggesting they felt it as such. Austen Chamberlain referred to the ‘fratricidal strife’ between Britain and Ireland as ‘civil war … the most terrible form of war’.
Moulton's own rich research mostly gives lie to the idea that this was a civil war as customarily understood: the violent tearing apart of an organic community. The British visitors that Moulton quotes almost without exception were impressed by the foreignness of Ireland. Private J. P. Swindlehurst thought Dublin the last place on earth where he would like to live, ‘but then I aren't Irish, that accounts for a lot’. Lieutenant Billy Foster referred to the Irish as ‘the natives’. Crown forces always carried weapons during the War of Independence, the army's official history noting that ‘the only secure base for any body of troops was inside its own barrack walls’. The Labour movement Councils on Action justifiably referred to the ‘British Army of Occupation’ in Ireland. Even the impeccably Anglo–Irish Irish Literary Society in London discussed Anglo–Irish relations in 1920 under the title, ‘The Incompatibles’.
The Irish in Great Britain, when identifying with the independence struggle, were acutely conscious that this was an inter-national conflict. Gladys Hynes, marching in the funeral procession of Terence McSwiney, Mayor of Cork and an IRA commander who died after a long hunger-strike in an English prison, joined her compatriots ‘following our dead through the enemy City – and that City was London!’ Those British who favoured a generous peace based their arguments on the right of self-determination for nations. One such organisation was called, revealingly, the ‘Peace with Ireland Council’. Sir John Simon, a Liberal statesman, realised the implications of Britain's embroilment in an inter-national war in April 1921. The war on Ireland, he said, was ‘turning Lloyd George's heroics about the rights of small nations into nauseating cant’.
What is strikingly absent in Moulton's account is the question of religion. The line of division, after all, ran not between the islands of Ireland and Great Britain, but through the jagged boundaries of Catholic Irish and Protestant British in Ulster. To sustain the idea of civil war, one would have to investigate the British and Ulster Unionist ‘betrayal’ of southern Irish unionists, for this was the union of hearts that was being ripped apart. The union of hearts between Catholic Ireland and Great Britain had long endured little more than a zombie existence.
At the heart of disputation in Great Britain, as Moulton points out, was not heartbreak over an organic union mutilated, but class allegiances (pp. 100–1). The Labour movement saw the Irish question as one aspect of a ruthlessly militaristic ruling class imposing itself. British Conservatives kept their eyes fixed on the main goal of maintaining the integral majesty and power of the Crown and Empire, but according to the Tory Blackwood's Magazine, as Moulton paraphrases, the genteel Anglo–Irish ‘had been “supplanted” by a foreign, Celtic figure’. ‘Old Ireland was dead,’ as Alexander Sullivan QC put it on relocating from Ireland to England.
Moulton wishes to highlight the importance of the Irish in the British imaginary in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘Irishness was a crucial component of interwar Englishness,’ she says (p. 7). Moulton brings to light much information. In the end, however, we are left with an underwhelming impression. Ireland seems to have gone little further than an imagined place of ‘misty romance and political struggle’ always on the periphery of the English imagination. Its legacy was, at most, ‘a sort of colouring agent or decorative element in the broader pageant of British culture’ (p. 181). Even this seems to be forcing the point. Irishness, if anything, presents a brighter shade of green in the tapestry of the United States.
Moulton does indeed make a case that there was a special relationship between the British and the Irish. But it is easy to go too far. In the end, much talk of common ‘kith and kin’ owes more to imperial nostalgia than historical reality.
