Why Ireland Has Changed Utterly

Men that God made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland. Jonathan Cape
£18.99.
022307296X

You often encounter genteel English horror at the vision of those terrible people in Ulster fighting over religion. This shocked disapproval comes from the same psychological wellspring whereby former 40-a-day cigarette smokers become anti-smoking prigs: when the English were in full flight, they too were well able to persecute their opponents on grounds of religion. The Anglican church was not always meek and mild: the 18th-century “Penal Laws” – enacted in the Age of Englightenment – not only dispossessed Irish Papists of all entitlements in their own country: they were pretty mean-spirited to the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians too.

Indeed, one of the points that Derek Lundy brings out in this personable and flavoursome journey through the history and adventures of Ulster and Ulstermen is that the catch-all “Protestant” clan in Northern Ireland contains two distinct Protestant clans: the Anglicans, with their roots in Englishness, and the Presbyterians and Dissenters, whose forefathers were much more fierce Scots. Indeed, the English, tired to death of trying to run Ulster – even by Elizabeth I’s time they were beginning to flag – brought in the Scots because they were a rougher, tougher, more robust people. (How has mighty Scotland fallen: now an overweight, unhealthy, short-lived people unable to sufficiently reproduce themselves, represented by a ludicrous Parliament debating breast-feeding.)

But the quarrels in Ulster were not, in any case, ever simply about religion. They were about agriculturalists versus settlers, as in North America or, indeed, Africa. “The Irish had used the land as pastoralists, grazing their cattle in the old way…The settlers did a proper job of clearing trees and planting the fertile fields. They built neat cottages and tidy, orderly towns. Their countryside looked like England or lowland Scotland, not like the rough fields or the unameliorated forest, bog, and hills of the Irish.

“The settlers saw this transformation as an improvement, the land used as it should be, as God intended.” Small wonder they felt a sense of superior to the “rough rug-headed Kernes,” as Shakespeare described the native Irish. Take a look at Martin McGuinness: he is the archetypal physical descendent of those rug-headed kerns who, over the centuries, revolted – in every sense – the Scotch-Irish who had turned so much of the province of Ulster into a neat, tidy, well-run model of Protestant husbandry. But still the struggle wasn’t just about religion: it was land, power and way of worship: or “plough, sword and Book”.

Mr Lundy traces the drama, conflicts, settlements, risings, sieges, battles and general Troubles which have continued in Northern Ireland for at least the last five hundred years, partly through historical characters in his own family: and partly through a diffuse variety of sources. (The title comes from Chesterton: “The great Gaels of Erin: the men that God made mad: for all their wars were merry: and all their songs were sad.”)

Derek Lundy wonders if the turning-point of settler versus native Gael has now arrived with the Peace agreement in Belfast, and the rug-headed kerns – Provisional IRA, say – agreeing to take the path to politics rather than revolt. Maybe so. But I would say he – as well as so many other commentators – misses the most significant development in the Irish story, which is the rise of the Irish Republic as an exceptionally rich society, which has, over the past couple of years, imported 100,000 Polish immigrant workers: and whose economy is growing, annually, by a staggering 5 per cent in 2005. Lundy makes reference to the Celtic Tiger, with the usual received idea that this is all about European funds being invested in Ireland. No, it is not: it is about a profound change in capitalism which, willy-nilly, rewrites the basis of the Ulster conflict.

The wealth of nations arose, at first, accompanied by Protestant virtue: prudence, thrift, honesty, early to bed and early to rise, sobriety. But our neo-capitalism today is of a different order: it is built on salesmanship, marketing, risk, ideas, networking, blarney. The rug-headed kerns have found their metier at last: they’re brilliant with money, selling, commerce. (That’s why “the Irish Catholic narrative” has world-wide resonence: because the kerns know about global marketing of an idea.)The extremist old Prods growling “No Pope Here” are the rump of a decadent people flicking arrows at a ghostly target.

The truth is that the whole Irish story has been based on poverty, deprivation, dispossession. But now, Irish conditions are about wealth, acquisition, maximising market opportunities. Pleasing as this tour d’horizon of the Ulster myth is, it fails to grasp how the game has changed. It’s the economy, stoopid…

Lundy is good at conjuring up dramatic moments from the past: the romantic flight of the Earls, when the Irish clan leaders sailed from Lough Swilly in 1607 to fight in the armies of Spain and France: the colourful life of his kinsman William Lundy, ordained as minister in 1771, who was something of a political radical – a strain which has frequently appeared among Ulster Dissenters: the tale of Sir Phelim O’Neill, who accepted English rule until they exasperated him into rebellion. But some of the points about Irish history and society are superficial: the Brehon (old Gaelic) laws did allow for divorce, but these were clan-based, not proceeding from personal choice – the bride got sent back if the bride-price in cattle was not sufficient. And the fracas over the Playboy of the Western World 1907 was a complicated mixture of national pride and mischief-making.

However, his tone is witty, fair and wry and he repeats with some jovialty the Ballymena joke: “What’s the difference between a Ballymena man and a coconut?” “You can get a drink out of a coconut.” Ballymena is Ian Paisley’s home ground: on the other hand it sells more Louis Feraud frocks than anywhere else in Northern Ireland, which surely augurs most optimistically of all for the future.

Literary Review: February 2006.