Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (121 page)

The British government itself was experiencing a change of heart. The Saville Inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ reported in June 2010, firmly rejecting the whitewash of the earlier Widgery Report and condemning killings by the British army as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’. It destroyed the notion that the ‘Provos’ could be blamed for everything. The new prime minister, David Cameron, made an unreserved apology in the House of Commons, and the chairman of the official Unionists (the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP), once the bedrock of British control in Ulster, resigned: in 2010 the UUP vote had slumped from 46 per cent in 1974 to 15 per cent.
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The first minister of the province, Peter Robinson of the DUP, was embroiled in a damaging scandal.
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Times were changing. The city of Derry/Londonderry, where the initial killings had taken place in 1972, was chosen as the UK’s ‘City of Culture’.

The Republic, meanwhile, was sinking deeper into the mire. Though the financial bubble had burst in 2008 in line with the global recession, the most serious consequences did not surface immediately. The Fianna Fáil government took over the debts of two failing banks, the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster, and pretended that the problem was solved. In the spring of 2010, when Greece was forced to accept a Eurozone bail-out, ministers in Dublin were still mocking suggestions that Ireland might have to follow suit. But self-criticism crept into public debate. ‘We’re very narcissistic,’ one woman lamented; ‘we believed our boom was better than anyone else’s.’ And moral reflections returned. ‘People lost interest in the other world,’ commented the abbot of Glenstal, ‘while they were so successful in this one.’
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The government denied all until reality caught up with them in November. Inspectors from the EU Commission and the IMF flew in to examine Ireland’s books. Their investigations led to an 85-billion-euro rescue package that would tie the Republic into austerity, tax rises and social pain for decades to come.
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The Celtic Tiger, if not dead, was floored. The Republic found itself in intensive care; a land of smiles became a land of woe, and its image as a brave pioneer evaporated.

Political meltdown followed swiftly on economic meltdown. The
taoiseach
, Brian Cowen, announced his imminent departure, his government’s reputation in shreds. In a mere five years, Ireland’s position in the Quality of Life Index had dived from 5th in the world to 41st, sixteen places behind the United Kingdom. Inward immigration had stopped, and outward emigration had restarted at the rate of 1,000 per week. Unemployment was soaring. Popular anger reached fever pitch. A general election brought forward to 25 February 2011 voted massively for change. Fianna Fáil was battered by the voters, its representation in the Dáil falling from 70 to 16. Its coalition partner, the Green Party, was annihilated. Fine Gael triumphed, increasing its seats from 51 to 68; its leader, Enda Kenny, hastened to form a cabinet. The Labour Party almost doubled its representation, from 20 to 35, and Sinn Féin’s tiny support was more than tripled, from 4 seats to 13. Gerry Adams, who had resigned from his unoccupied seat at Westminster, topped the contest in County Louth, in the nearest part of the country to Belfast; he had declared his ambition of becoming the Republic’s president within five years. Sinn Féin’s decline had been arrested, but the ‘fortress of democratic republicanism’, which it had once founded, looked distinctly sick.
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Éamon de Valera ‘was spinning in his grave’.
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James Joyce’s novel
Ulysses
(1922) was completed in the year that the Irish Free State was proclaimed. One of the characters says, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ Despite the passage of nearly a century, the sentiment still strikes chords. The British nightmare is perpetuated by the Irish Question still hanging like a millstone round London’s neck; the Republic’s nightmare is fed by shame that so many accomplishments have repeatedly been squandered, and the nightmare of principled republicans by their inability to win majority backing. In Northern Ireland, the most recent nightmare has ended, but people have woken up to an apparent stalemate.

Hence, as the centenary of the Easter Rising rose over the horizon, the main participants in the chain of conflicts – the British, the Irish, the Unionists and the republicans – had all been duly chastened; everyone’s pride had been humbled in turn. The long retreat of British rule in Ireland had slowed to an imperceptible crawl. The British queen, who still reigned over six Irish counties, accepted an invitation to visit Dublin for the first formal royal visit there since her grandfather’s in 1911.
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Unionists were holding on to their corner of the island, but only by sharing power. Nationalists and republicans, in whose eyes the country was only three-quarters free, were marking time, believing it to be on their side. Monarchy in Ireland had still not vanished. It had reached a moment reminiscent of a king of Ireland’s famous last words; lying on his deathbed in 1685, Charles II, who was equally king of England and king of Scotland, apologized for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’.
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III

That the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion. Sooner or later, all states
do
collapse, and ramshackle, asymmetric dynastic amalgamations are more vulnerable than cohesive nation-states. Only the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ are mysteries of the future.

An exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built – ranging from the monarchy, the Royal Navy and the Empire to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Industrial Revolution, Parliament and Sterling – indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later.
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Nothing implies that the end will necessarily be violent; some political organisms dissolve quietly. All it means is that present structures will one day disappear, and be replaced by something else.

The contending forces of centralization and decentralization have ebbed and flowed in modern British history like the tides of the sea. The Home Rule Bill for Ireland (1912) was matched by a Scottish Home Rule Bill (1914); both suffered the same fate, because the Great War demanded the tightening of ties to the imperial government in London. Lloyd George, one of Britain’s wartime prime ministers, had started his career calling for Welsh Home Rule and working for an organization,
Cymru Fydd
or ‘Young Wales’, that also faded. But the Armistice was followed in the inter-war period by the opposite tendency. Ireland’s secession from the United Kingdom was accompanied by the founding in 1920 of the Scottish National League, the forerunner of the Scottish National Party (SNP), and in 1925 of
Plaid Cymru
in Wales; as we have seen, Home Rule for Northern Ireland began to operate in 1921.

The Second World War reinvigorated the centre, only to be followed once again by a centrifugal surge. Ireland’s exit from the Commonwealth in 1949 formed part of the general retreat from Empire; the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969 coincided with a phase when the SNP and Plaid Cymru had been winning their first seats in Westminster, where they joined the Ulster Unionists in a spectrum of regional parties. As half a century earlier, when Constance Markiewicz had been elected the first British woman MP, Sinn Féin refused to take the oath to the Crown or to occupy the seats it had won. Yet the tide was already on the turn when the British government ceded referendums on devolution in Scotland and Wales in 1979, and defeat of the devolutionists preceded twenty years of respite.
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The demands from the ‘UK’s regions’ inexorably built up again in the 1990s, and immediately after their general election victory in 1997 the ‘Scotto-Brits’ of New Labour introduced a devolved parliament and government in Edinburgh for Scotland, a devolved Assembly and Executive in Cardiff for Wales, and proposals for similar devolved arrangements in Northern Ireland.
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They had come together under the late John Smith, MP for North Lanarkshire and leader of the Labour Party 1992–4, in circumstances making them acutely conscious of the electoral threat to the Scottish Labour Party from the SNP; they understood far better that any English politicians that the interplay of Westminster politics with that of the new ‘regional centres’ was becoming a key feature of the overall system. Under Tony Blair in 1997–2007 and Gordon Brown in 2007–10, they stayed loyal to their devolutionary principles, but took no steps either to apply them to the regions within England or to create a devolved English legislature. Their hesitations have left the political architecture of the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century inherently unbalanced. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland cannot develop any sense of equality with their over-mighty English partner; and the English have little incentive to address the inbuilt instability. The kingdom is not well prepared for the next turn of the tide; resentments grow, and solidarity is sapped.

The introduction of self-government undoubtedly deflates centrifugal pressures, and wins time for re-consolidation. But the history of other empires that decided to decentralize – like Austria-Hungary after 1867 – proves equally that life in autonomous provinces provides a school for separatists, who see their autonomy as a step towards national independence. (Before 1916, as we saw, Arthur Griffith had been pressing for an Austro-Hungarian solution in Ireland.) The British case is interesting because the united state has always contained within itself three consciously non-English nations, whose tectonic plates have long been drifting away from London’s central control. There may be a devolutionary lull, but it will not last for ever. The events of 1998 are still too close to see if devolution – which has a secondary meaning of ‘degeneration’
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– is going to hold up for another generation or not. Time is always the hardest dimension to judge.

Ireland played the key role in the first stage of the United Kingdom’s disintegration in 1919–22, and it will no doubt play its part in the stages still to come. It split off in less than ideal circumstances when British imperial confidence was still strong; it took dominion status within the Commonwealth as a stepping stone towards the final shore; and it weathered many adverse forecasts. Yet it held its own, and in due course reached its intended destination. The little boy from the Little Lodge lived to see it pass most of the stops on the way: from Republic to Free State, from Free State back to Republic, and from Commonwealth member to aspirant candidate of the European Economic Community. ‘We have always found the Irish a bit odd,’ Churchill once remarked, no doubt with a grin. ‘They refuse to be English.’ Ireland’s present financial plight is bad – worse, it is said, than the United Kingdom’s – but is unlikely to be terminal given the prop supplied by the Eurozone. Assuming that it recovers, the Republic will again be minded to assist any who contemplate following its lead. For the time being, a significant new factor lies in the rise of the Nationalists in the North and their growing impact on the Republic. In the British general election of 2010, the combined vote of the Unionist parties (DUP plus UUP) fell below that of the combined anti-Unionists (Sinn Féin plus SDLP). Gerry Adams was preparing to present himself not only as the democratic majority leader in the North but also as the only true champion of republicanism in the island as a whole.

However, just as the construction of the British state and nation took place by stages over many years, its deconstruction can only be expected to proceed in like manner – in an extended process involving successive lurches, lulls and landslips. It will also depend on the continued health and strength of the European Union. Would-be separatists in Britain are encouraged by the existence of a European home, where they can take refuge. Yet in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, the Community is less open to newcomers than previously, and it is far from certain that the EU can continue to drift in its present unwieldy and ineffectual form.
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The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis.

The fate of the monarchy will inevitably form another element in the drama. The United Kingdom has been a monarchical state from the start, and the weakening or termination of the monarchy must necessarily have far-reaching consequences. Most analysts, however, do not look beyond the hoary arguments between constitutional monarchy and republicanism. More recently, the monarchists appeared to have the upper hand, maintaining that the modern monarchy, far from being democracy’s enemy, adds stability and legitimacy to the democratic institutions, with which it co-operates.
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One prominent pundit wrote a book
On Royalty
only to find that he was losing faith in his initial republican sympathies.
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Criticism is widespread about individual royals, as it is about primogeniture and the exclusion of Catholics, but not about the basic issue of the monarchy’s existence. British republicanism remains weak. A campaign group called ‘Republic’ was founded in 1983, and is frequently asked politely for comments.
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Its activities have been facilitated by a ruling of the law lords which determined in 2003 that the moribund Treason (Felony) Act could not be invoked against peaceful advocacy of a republic. The realms of possibility do not exclude the chance that the heirs and successors of Elizabeth II might just fall by the wayside without warning; no one who remembers the abdication crisis of 1936 would bet on the monarchy failing to serve up a surprise. But the joyous wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April 2011 seemed to be pointing in the opposite direction, as were the opinion polls.
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All indications suggested that nothing radical would happen during Elizabeth II’s lifetime, and her longevity looked assured.