Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (113 page)

Questions of the same sort can be asked about international diplomacy. It is easy enough to point out blameworthy faults among assorted Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ruthenians. Yet all these most interested parties were excluded from the Munich Conference, as were the Soviets. The prime responsibility, therefore, lay with those who arrogated the decisions to themselves – notably with Adolf Hitler, the host, and with Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister and principal guest. Here is the context within which some telling comparisons can be made. Can one seriously suggest that the brands of nationalism favoured by Hitler or Mussolini should be characterized as civic or liberal? Will anyone dare to say that Julian Revay and the Revd Voloshyn were selfish, parochial and short-sighted politicians, unlike the generous, broad-minded and far-seeing statesman from Downing Street? All judgements about the luckless Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine should start from the fact that the Rusyn leadership was desperately trying to cope with the fall-out of policies which were none of their making.

Fortunately, the ‘Ruritanian syndrome’ is now a well-recognized phenomenon in intellectual discourse and is the subject of numerous studies and analyses. Terms such as the ‘imperialism of the imagination’ or ‘narrative colonization’ are coined by scholars exploring Europe’s mental maps and ‘orientalist discourses of otherness’. ‘Balkanization’ is a stereotype with little more validity than Erewhon, Eothen or ‘Dracula-Land’; and it is harmless so long as it is kept in the realm of jokes or operetta. Nonetheless, ‘it is [still] possible for… advanced exponents of European multicultural ideals’, writes one indignant scholar, ‘to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians with the sort of generalised, open condescension which would appall if applied to Somalis or the people of Zaire’.
¹⁴
Nota bene
: the Carpatho-Rusyns don’t even make it onto the list of the slighted.

*
Most unlikely; Commander William Wedgwood-Benn, Viscount Stansgate (1877–1960), was a long-serving Liberal and then Labour MP, who served in the RAF in both world wars.

Éire

The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown's Retreat

since 1916

Éire

The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown’s Retreat

since 1916

I

By all accounts, Prince Albert’s visit to Dublin was a huge success. As befitted a state occasion, he was greeted by a 21-gun salute. He planted an Irish oak, sported a green tie embroidered with shamrocks and drew a large crowd as he strolled along Kildare Street on his way to tea at the Shelbourne Hotel. After visiting a local school, he took leave of the children with the Gaelic words:
go raibh mile maith agat
, meaning ‘Thank you a thousand times’. ‘Prince Albert’, gushed the
Irish Times
(founded 1859), ‘brought a touch of class and ceremony to Dublin.’ Some readers might have blinked and reread the headline. For this was April 2011; it was the Irish Republic; and the visitor was the son of the film star Grace Kelly, Prince Albert II of Monaco.
¹
Observers of Ireland beware: it is full of unexpected echoes of the past.

Until very recently, Ireland was widely esteemed as a fortress of democratic republicanism, and a model of self-made prosperity; it is the republican David, who slung his shot at the British imperial Goliath, and escaped. Ireland is now a sovereign member both of the United Nations and of the European Union. The republican image is strong. Its head of state, the
uachtarán
or ‘president’ of the Republic, is elected directly for a term of seven years, renewable once; the present incumbent is Mary McAleese, a former professor of law born in the Ardoyne district of Belfast.
²
The bi-cameral parliament, the
Oireachtas
, consists of a Senate of 60 members, and the lower house or
Dáil
, whose 166 members are elected under a system of proportional representation and single transferable votes. The
taoiseach
or ‘prime minister’ is appointed by the president after nomination by the parliament. The Republic’s capital is Baile Atha Cliath (Dublin), its official languages Irish Gaelic and English. Its coat of arms displays a golden harp on a deep blue field, its flag is a green-white-and-orange tricolour. And its national anthem is the ‘
Amhrán na bhFiann
’ or ‘Soldier’s Song’, invariably sung in Gaelic:

Sinne Fianna Fáil

Ata fá gheall ag Eirinn,

Buidhean dar sluagh tar ruinn do rainig

Chughainn …
³

The official use of Gaelic, which is no longer the language of everyday speech, is an essential part of the state ethos; the Irish don’t understand much of it, but the English can’t get a word.

Visitors to Dublin see evidence of Ireland’s democratic and republican traditions on every hand. The castle, founded by King John and once the seat of English colonial power, is nowadays used for presidential receptions and inaugurations. Leinster House, once the palace of the Fitzgerald dukes of Leinster, is the home of the Dáil. The Bank of Ireland building, which faces Trinity College, once housed the parliament of the pre-1800 kingdom. The city’s main street is named after Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), ‘the Liberator’, who fought for Catholic Emancipation. It shelters the old General Post Office, where the Irish Republic was first proclaimed in 1916, and, at its northern end, a Garden of Remembrance dedicated to ‘all who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom’. The Mansion House, the home of the lord mayor, where the Republic was proclaimed for the second time in 1919, is situated close to St Stephen’s Green across the river on Dawson Street. The Green saw fierce fighting during the Easter Rising, and entered people’s hearts because both sides stopped firing to let the ducks in the pond be fed.
⁴
It now shelters a monument to Ireland’s most revered female revolutionary, Countess Constance Markiewicz (1868–1927), who fought there as a soldier. The bronze bust sits atop a stone pedestal inscribed: ‘CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ, MAJOR IRISH CITIZEN ARMY, 1916’.

The Republic’s territory, some 27,450 square miles, is divided into twenty-six counties (since 1999, the Republic does not lay formal claim to the six counties of British-ruled Northern Ireland). Its area is smaller than both England and Scotland, but almost four times larger than Wales. The island forms a rough rectangle, the western coast constituting Europe’s most westerly rampart against the Atlantic Ocean.

The Republic’s population, which stands at 4.442 million (2008) is considerably lower than the highest historical levels. In 1800 Ireland was home to some 8 million inhabitants, not far behind England’s then total of
c
. 10 million, a ratio of 1  :  1.25. Largely as the result of famine, emigration and the absence of Irish modernization and industrialization, the ratio had fallen by 1900 to 1 : 12.

Ireland’s political system survived great turbuluence before it gained stability. Two main political parties trace their roots to the 1920s.
Fianna Fáil
or ‘Soldiers of Destiny’, once the party of Éamon de Valera, the ‘Father of the Republic’, has often dominated, forming the government for sixty of the state’s eighty years and most recently from 1997 to February 2011.
⁵
The rival
Fine Gael
or ‘Clan of the Gaels’, otherwise the United Ireland Party, which also boasts republican roots, has usually headed the opposition. Its father-figure is De Valera’s rival, Michael Collins.
⁶
Three other parties are represented. The Labour Party has a similar profile to its namesake in Britain; the environmentalist Green Party, founded in 1981, entered government with Fianna Fáil in 2007; and
Sinn Féin
, the oldest of Irish republican groupings, is looking to rebuild after decades of marginality.

The Irish Republic experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thanks to investment in education and modern technology, and to membership of the European Union, remarkable advances took place from the 1960s onwards; Ireland’s GDP per capita rose decade by decade until at the beginning of the twenty-first century it overtook that of the United Kingdom. For a time, Irish citizens enjoyed the top ranking in the Worldwide Quality of Life Index.
⁷
Not until the global recession of 2008–9 did the ‘Celtic Tiger’ (so named in 1994) stumble, and with it the political elite’s reputation. Out of Prince Albert’s hearing, the talk in Dublin was of ineffectual leadership, and of ‘a culture of clientilism, cronyism and corruption’.

The official Irish version of Irish history is built round a three-part scheme of periodization. Two or three millennia of the ‘Era of Ancient Celtic Freedom’, stretching from prehistory to the twelfth century AD, are followed by the ‘Era of Foreign Domination’ (1171–1916) and then by the ‘Era of National Liberation’, which is still in progress. (Liberation is judged incomplete because the Republic’s territory does not yet encompass the whole of the island of Ireland.) Present-day academics might reject the scheme as politically driven and ‘archaic’ in comparison to their own advanced researches; but academic histories do not have the last word in any country.

Ireland’s Era of Ancient Celtic Freedom is by any standards one of the marvels of European history. The Gaelic-speaking nation, secure in its seagirt fortress, was ruled by bards and tribal chieftains, among whom a long succession of
ard rí
or ‘high kings’ exercised supreme authority. The Irish king lists, compiled by medieval monks, contain some 200 names, the earliest of which, like Slaine (1934–1933 BC) or Bres (1897–1890 BC), are clearly mythical; the precise-looking dates are the product of pure guesswork. The latest names such as Muirchertach Mac-Lochlain (d. AD 1166) or Ruaidre Ua Chobar (d. 1186) were unable to exert anything more than nominal authority.
⁸
The high point is often taken to have been reached by Brian Bóraimhe, Brian Boru (r. 1002–14), who is described in the medieval
Book of Armagh
as
Imperator Scottorum
or ‘emperor of the Irish’.
⁹
He battled the Vikings, briefly established hegemony over all the island, and died at the Battle of Clontarf, the ‘Bull’s Meadow’, near Dublin. Mael Sechneill mac Domnaill, king of Meath (r. 980–1002, 1014–22), known as Malachi Mor, was deposed by Brian Boru, but regained the high kingship after Clontarf.
¹⁰

The Era of Foreign Domination, which lasted more than 700 years, is conventionally divided into three sub-periods. The first, under the heading of the ‘Lordship of Ireland (1171–1541)’, saw the kings of England ruling as overlords but not annexing the country. The second, under the heading of the ‘Kingdom of Ireland (1541–1801)’, was launched by Henry VIII’s Crown of Ireland Act and terminated by the the Napoleonic Wars; it saw the English monarchs (and from 1707 British monarchs) reigning in parallel over realms joined by personal union. The third sub-period, under the heading of ‘British Ireland (from 1801)’ saw ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ integrated into the expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Presuming that British rule in Ireland can be recognized as legitimate – which purists do not accept – republican teaching holds that it ended in the years 1916–18; in the eyes of unreconciled unionists, it has never ended.