It is said that history never repeats itself, though historians often do. Now I’m not so sure. As we face into the centenary of partition next week, the echoes between then and now are shocking: violence on the streets, loyalists on the rampage, a British government in disarray - using deceit and blatant lies to get their way.
The man who brings this strikingly to light is Eamon Phoenix, historian of this parish, and with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the recent history of this place.
In preparation for next week’s centenary of the partition of Ireland, I have been working my way through his magnificent survey of Northern Nationalism which was published by the Ulster Historical Foundation in 1994. On its cover is a fine portrait by Sir John Lavery of a man history has overlooked.
Joe Devlin was born on the lower Falls in 1871, and was one of the first journalists on the Irish News when it was founded in 1891. Wee Joe Devlin was also a commanding presence in the House of Commons, and an articulate spokesman for constitutional change in Ireland as it struggled to free itself of imperial rule.
He was a Cassandra figure though too, warning with uncanny accuracy about the impact of partition on the nationalist population in Northern Ireland. He knew – because he had seen sectarianism at first hand – that a gerrymandered statelet would unleash its evils unchecked. Few who mattered listened.
Devlin saw, before the Sinn Féin government in Dublin did, that British proposals to partition Ireland would permanently entrench unionist majority misrule.
But he was one of the lone Irish voices at Westminster opposing the Government of Ireland Act.
In one of those maddening what-ifs of history, Sinn Féin’s decision to embrace abstentionism had altered the dynamic in Westminster, and gave Ulster unionists sway over the UK’s coalition government (in our time, the part of Lloyd George was played by Theresa May, the mind boggles).
Devlin told Bishop Patrick O’Donnell, later to become archbishop of Armagh: “I propose, if an opportunity is offered, to attack the Bill, and to do so from an Ulster point of view, giving reasons why we Catholics and Nationalists could not, under any circumstances, consent to be placed under the domination of a parliament so skilfully established as to make it impossible for us than to be ever other than a permanent minority, with all the sufferings and tyranny of the present day continued, only in worse form.”
When Devlin talked about the ‘tyranny of the present day’ he was talking about the forces that led to the Belfast pogrom of 1920 – started by an incendiary speech on the Twelfth by Sir Edward Carson.
In a warning to the British government, Carson mobilised the UVF: “We tell you that, come what will, in the last resort, we will rely upon ourselves, and, under God we will defend ourselves.”
He went on to say: “Those are not mere words. I hate words without action.”
There had been some 20 deaths in Derry the previous month. Over the next two years hundreds lost their lives in Belfast, thousands were driven from their jobs and their homes. The phrase generally employed for this violence is ‘sectarian’, which implies a degree of blame on either side.
While the violence was not all one-sided, the Belfast pogrom was the moment when unionism asserted its right to create a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’, a right underwritten by the Government of Ireland Act, imposed by an imperial parliament which turned a deaf ear to Devlin and nationalists in the north east of Ireland.
Referring to the pogroms, Devlin said: “If that is what we get when they have not their parliament, what may we expect when they have that weapon, with wealth and power strongly entrenched? What will we get when they are armed with British rifles, when they have cast round them the imperial garb, what mercy, what pity, much less justice or liberty will be conceded to us then?”
History provide him unerringly right.
Those who are opposed to change should remember next week is not just the centenary of Northern Ireland, it is also the centenary of the United Kingdom in its current form. The UK is not so old that it cannot change again.
Northern Ireland was born out of the lies and deception of another age – nationalists were told it was a temporary measure, unionists assured it was permanent.
It was, is and remains a failed political entity. Its time is up.
