BOOK REVIEW: Anois ar Theacht an tSamhraidh: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution, by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston
THIS is an excellent and critically important book. In an era of 'culture wars' where conservatives castigate 'cancel culture' bent on erasing British history and liberal academics hide behind false objectivity to promote a modernity thesis blind to the massive human suffering on which modern Western "civilisation" was built, Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston employ Ireland's colonial past to dismantle this fusion of neo-liberal economic cruelty and imperial whitewashing.
The book begins by giving readers a choice, which appears as stark as always "whether to stand in solidarity with other victims and survivors of colonialism and imperialism... In 2020, as much as 1800 or 1918, we have to decide whether we should remain subjects or become citizens".
It concludes in a similar vein, declaring that "struggle against colonialism will only be over when the world's is also finished" and that "despite all the determined revisionism that has taken place since the end of the first phase of the colonialisation, neither colonialism nor imperialism can be rehabilitated".
One of the book's most significant points is that colonialism is not an event, it is a structure - earlier economies of colonialism, slavery and racism are the basis of the modern global economic order and Ireland's present-day position therein.
This, then, is also a very brave book; to even contest the liberal academic
consensus is often to place oneself beyond the Pale of acceptable opinion.
Yet, anti-colonialists do not need to invent 'alternative facts' to powerfully articulate their case because 'ordinary' ones suffice. These facts emerge in the book's systematic exposition of the abattoir of Irish history, which leaves little doubt that colonialism represented an inherently violent and barbaric process that exposed the ideology of empire and civilisation as a cruel lie. Ireland suffered in kind with the rest of the colonised world.
Nevertheless, while the authors' analysis is based on "the synergy ... of race and class in the colonial context", there is no elision of Irish culpability in the imperial project or, indeed, any unthinking acceptance of Protestants as non-Irish or irrevocably unionist - rather they point to a decision "to be made by each of us about reclaiming the parts of our past [that] would support liberation".
The colonial motif of mestizaje or mixedness is central to this proposition. In effect, every Irish person has a humanist legacy on which to draw.
This book is enormously welcome then as it begins to break the vice-like grip which a liberal consensus based on sham reconciliation and institutionalised sectarianism holds on the debate surrounding Ireland's future.
It will hardly surprise the reader then that the authors find "nothing democratic or virtuous about the Act of Union - or the polity there created", by "a cynically anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary intervention".
Under the Union, the British state facilitated the death and eviction of one million people due to the famine, where the Irish poor were sacrificed on the altar of economic liberalism.
Between 1800 and 1921, parliament enacted 105 separate coercion acts. As Joseph Chamberlain remarked "the English system in Ireland is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers and count permanently in a hostile country".
Yet "despite the manifest genocide and coercion, British involvement with Ireland was presented as an act of imperial selflessness".
Likewise, 100 years ago, partition was based on a border which held "neither democratic nor ethnic legitimacy" and represented an "expressly sectarian anti-democratic land grab", which "created two state formations without any organic political or ethnic raison d'être".
Northern Ireland represented "a truly reactionary, hyper-imperial offshoot symbolising the antithesis of independence".
In the south, a faction within the revolutionary leadership settled for the position of a white dominion and established a cold house for any progressive or radical voice.
For McVeigh and Rolston, the reality of partition is crucial to understanding
its deliberate mischaracterisation in the political present. They rightly argue that "while it is striking how racist and how violent the northern state was from its inception; this was not significantly different from what the British state was already doing across the whole of Ireland at that point - including martial law".
Nevertheless, the "pre-partition UK state had softened its anti-Catholicism over its duration. It had attempted to secure legitimacy through incorporating rather than repressing the Catholic majority".
Significantly then, Northern Ireland assumed a form that was "less a continuation of the Irish state within the Union", but a "radically new social formation which had to summarily and brutally re-subalternise and re-ghettoize northern Catholics... this reality was enabled by the UK state".
This historical context and its elision underpin the British promotion of 'community' and 'good relations', as 'a lowest common denominator approach' during the Troubles and beyond.
Britain's self-portrayal as neutral arbiter between warring tribes insulates the establishments in Dublin, Belfast and London from valid criticism and underpins the current constitutional framework.
For McVeigh and Rolston, "good relations" becomes a key part of the process of not naming the issue.
In an echo of Lenin, they then ask "What is to be done?" Their answer is obvious: end partition, dismantle the two partition states, and establish a democratic Republic in their place.
To achieve this end, they propose a popular front, conscious of the shortfalls of nationalism and the reality that "there can be no such thing as anti-imperialism in one country".
They also call for the deconstruction of Irish "whiteness" (a relatively novel historical phenomenon) to "mitigate its toxic, racist implications", declaring that "to be Irish is to reject whiteness".
Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh is essential reading for anyone in Ireland committed to a human future since it reclaims the radical humanism of republicanism in the service of the present.
Imperialism was and is a crime - humanity's future depends on decolonisation in this radical humanist sense as the means of transcending the brutal and inhuman capitalist social system on which empire is built.
The empire has no clothes and stands naked, ugly, bloated, blood-stained and exposed - which side are you on? Reading this fine book might help you pick one.
Anois ar Theacht an tSamhraidh: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution by Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh is published by Beyond the Pale Books, beyondthepalebooks.com/colonialism.
Dr Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh is a lecturer in history at St Mary's University College in Belfast.
