Introduction
- isolationist history The
Troubles The
Second World War 1916
The
Great Famine The
rebellion of 1798, the Vendée and Napoleon The
earlier period
'On Ireland, finally, it is utterly impossible for me to speak with moderation, I loathe that romanticism.' Samuel Beckett, 'The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II, 1941 - 1956' (Cambridge University Press).
Some commentary on Irish history and the history of Northern Ireland has made use of isolationist interpretations - ones which isolate the history of Ireland (regarded as the oppressed) and England (regarded as the oppressor) and neglect wider European history and world history. The perspectives which emerge by taking a viewpoint with far less {restriction}, by making an adequate ((survey)), are dramatically different. For example, the conflict in France between the Republic and the Catholic rebels of the Vendée in 1793 and 1794 (according to the most reliable estimates, between 220 000 and 250 000 men, women and children were killed) gives a harrowing perspective on the rebellion of the Croppies in Ireland in 1798. In the most important conflict of the twentieth century, The Second World War, the response of Irish nationalism was in general abject, the response of England and the other countries making up Great Britain, magnificent. The historical surveys of Nationalist apologists have been inadequate. They have failed to take into account such considerations as these.
I don't, of course, consider English history and attitudes to be beyond criticism.'
In this brief discussion, I work back in time, beginning with the period of the Troubles.
See also on this page my references to Malcolm Sutton's index of Troubles related deaths and the quotations from Ken Wharton's very compelling book of Oral History, Bloody Belfast which are concerned with the Falls Road, a heartland of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles, after a mention of my exploration of the Falls Road. See also further quotations from the book in my discussion of 'The Toome Road:' some responses to violence on the part of soldiers of the British army during the Troubles.
The bleakness and harshness of the Troubles in Northern Ireland were compounded by the fact that the Troubles went on for a very long time, longer than The Thirty Years War, although vastly less devastating. There are still sporadic incidents, intensely painful for those caught up in them. But some Irish people succeeded in persuading others that the Troubles were almost uniquely bleak and harsh, that the British 'army of occupation' was the most horrific in history, that Irish sufferings over the centuries have been almost uniquely atrocious, that the English 'oppressors' were the worst there have ever been. Anyone who knows just a little about The Thirty Years War, The Spanish Civil War, The Second World War in the East (Stalingrad and other campaigns), The Second World War in the West, the war against Japan on the Pacific islands, the Second World War in all its areas, the First World War - the Somme, Passchendaele and the rest - realizes that with its just over three thousand dead, the Troubles were not the greatest calamity of the twentieth century or previous centuries. The bombing during the British Blitz, the bombing at Guernica, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hamburg and other places, was on a different scale. In the city where I live, Sheffield, over 600 people were killed in two nights of bombing. This is much higher than the total number of deaths in the peak year of the troubles for the whole of Northern Ireland, with three times the population. See: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Sheffield_Blitz
But I still agree with this, from the review of 'Bloody Belfast' on the Daly History Blog: 'What this book by Ken Wharton tells us, is that we need to rethink what we think of as ‘war’, beyond the two world wars. Just because active service in Belfast and Londonderry and Crossmaglen did not meet our narrow definition of battle, it does not lessen the bravery of the men who served there. Those of us reading from the comfort of our armchairs cannot begin to imagine the human strain of being on service in the Province at the height of the Troubles. If anything Northern Ireland was a more difficult kind of war, as with yellow cards and rules of engagement, the Security Forces were incredibly hamstrung in what they could do.'
A crippling lack of historical knowledge underlies the attitude of those who think that during the Troubles, the British army acted without restraint. The opposite is true. Those who take up arms against a government have in the past generally been treated with the utmost ruthlessness.The British army during the Troubles was obviously benign by comparison with the armies which have executed not just armed insurgents but often their families and hostages with no connection with the insurgents. Anyone who denies this would do well to investigate such incidents as the Nazi reprisals at Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle in France. At Oradour-sur-Glane, they killed 642 of the inhabitants of the village in reprisal for attacks by French maquisards. At Tulle, they hanged 99 men from lamp-posts and balconies, in reprisal for attacks. But in the war in the east, they far exceeded the atrocities which took place in Western Europe.
After the Partition of Ireland in 1921, ratified by the Irish parliament in January 1922, a major part of Ireland was no longer subject to British rule and free to determine its own affairs. The Irish Civil War (1922 - 23) was fought by two factions of the republican movement: the Provisional Government against the Irregulars. Eventually, the Irregulars used guerilla tactics. Armed insurgents were treated far more harshly than during the Troubles. The government imposed the death penalty for those found in possession of arms and executed 77 people for the offence. The orders for execution were signed by Kevin O' Higgins, who was assassinated by the IRA in 1927.
Yeats admired him and his poem 'Death' ('The Winding Stair and Other Poems') was inspired by him. See also Yeats' poem 'The Municipal Gallery Re-visited' ('New Poetry'):
Kevin
O' Higgins countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
The loss of life during the Civil War was much less than during the Troubles - 927 people by June 1923, including the 77 executed. The government of the Irish Free State wasn't especially ruthless by the norms of the time.
The reprisals carried out by the Germans during The Second World War put the restraint of British policy and British troops during the Troubles in context, for example two reprisals in June 1944 in France, the hanging of 99 men from balconies and lamp posts in Tulle and the massacre of men, women and children in Oradour-sur-Glane. They are described in Max Hastings' 'Das Reich.' Referring to the conduct of British troops during the Troubles in terms which would fit the conduct of the German SS at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane is nationalist distortion at its worst.
Henry McDonald's book 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors: How Sinn Féin Dressed up Defeat as Victory' is indispensable for understanding the Troubles. All the injuries and all the lives lost brought a united Ireland no nearer. He concludes that 'Americans at least [not all, of course] had seen through ... the polite fiction that he final outcome had been some sort of honourable draw.' It was the British state that had won.
The bombing of Britain during The Second World War makes it abundantly clear that a modern, technological state has the capacity to withstand catastrophic damage. Henry McDonald writes about the work of the academic Rogelio Alonso, who wrote 'IRA and Armed struggle.' He mentions 'the refreshing honesty of his interviewees, the majority of whom were IRA veterans. One of them, for example, admits to Alonso that 'There was never going to be a military victory. [The British government] is probably one of the most sophisticated fighting governments in the world, so to even think that you were going to face down and defeat a British government was lunacy.
'Another of Alonso's interviewees also muses on the notion of British stubbornness. This IRA volunteer is sceptical about the efficacy of bombs such as the one that devastated Bishopsgate in the City of London in 1993: 'You are not going to bring the financial institutions of capitalism to their knees with one bomb. Hitler couldn't in the Second World War.
Views like the ones above are peppered throughout Alonso's masterly study of the IRA's armed campaign and help debunk the myth of an 'undefeated army', let alone the achievement of some sort of victory.'
During the Troubles, as during the Second World War, Britain fought against a genuinely ruthless and morally depraved regime. Henry McDonald writes '... when Britain went to war over the Falklands in 1982, republicans of all hues backed the Argentine Junta, a vile dictatorship that like all tyrannies invaded the islands as a populist distraction form its crimes and human rights abuses at home. The British defeat of that Junta precipitated its fall and ultimately the restoration of democracy!' I discuss the fight of Britain against a far worse regime, Nazi Germany, in the next section, and the fact that many nationalists were indifferent to the fight or even supported Nazi Germany.
Or, instead of defending the Nazis, some nationalists made morally indefensible linkages. Henry McDonald writes, '... Danny Morrison, while Sinn Fein Publicity Director, drew parallels between the IRA and the Maquis or French Resistance of World War Two. Murals too made comparisons between the Nazi treatment of Jews, Gypsies and any political opponents, and the British treatment of nationalists and republicans in Northern Ireland.
'The double irony of the Nazi parallels is that present-day republicans still revere IRA leaders who were allied to Nazi Germany in the Second World War. They still gather every September to honour Sean Russell at a statue of the IRA commander during World War Two in Dublin's Fairview Park.' [Sean Russell was] 'an ally of the Nazis who died on a German submarine on route back to Ireland to foment a terror campaign aimed at undermining Britain's and the Allies' war effort.'
If his main criticism is reserved for the delusions of nationalists who supported bombs and bullets, and those who planted the bombs and fired the bullets, he's unsparing of the Protestant paramilitaries and their supporters. '... the loyalist paramilitary groups were inflicting almost daily acts of blatant sectarian butchery on vulnerable Catholics. Their so-called 'terrorise the terrorists' strategy was in reality the terrorisation of an entire community.'
I comment on two poems of Seamus Heaney which deal with one aspect of life during the Troubles on the page which gives analysis of The Toome Road and From the Frontier of Writing. My entry on 'The Toome Road' contains more accounts of experience of the Troubles.
There are startling gaps and omissions in the Irish nationalist view of history - these are relative, not absolute, of course. The most important single omission is The Second World War - not, obviously, a minor one. Nationalists often give the impression that nobody has suffered like the Irish, nobody has exploited others like the English. But in a conflict which was more devastating than any other in history, which inflicted suffering on a greater scale than any other, the English, and the other countries of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom, carried on the war against Hitler alone, for a time, with exiled groups from many countries and volunteers from many countries, including volunteers from the Irish Republic, who served in large numbers. Irish nationalism and the Irish Free State stood aside and did nothing. The IRA actively sought help from the Germans. During The Second World War, the Irish Free State was neutral. After the death of Hitler, condolences were offered from only two sources, Portugal and the government of The Irish Republic. 'The Cruel Sea' is a popular novel by Nicholas Monsarrat.' The factual claims here are confirmed by Brian Girvin in his scholarly 'The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939 - 1945).
'...it was difficult to withhold one's contempt from a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict at this moment posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing.
'Irish neutrality, on which she placed a generous interpretation, permitted the Germans to maintain in Dublin an espionage-centre, a window into Britain, which operated throughout the war and did incalculable harm to the Allied cause. But from the naval point of view there was an even more deadly factor: this was the loss of the naval bases in southern and western Ireland, which had been available to the Royal Navy during the first world war but were now forbidden them. To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month, was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic.
'From a narrow legal angle, Ireland was within her rights: she had opted for neutrality, and the rest of the story flowed from this decision. She was in fact at liberty to stand aside from the struggle, whatever harm this did to the Allied cause. But sailors, watching the ships go down and counting the number of their friends who might have been alive instead of dead, saw the thing in simpler terms. They saw Ireland safe under the British umbrella, fed by her convoys, and protected by her air force, her very neutrality guaranteed by the British armed forces: they saw no return for this protection save a condoned sabotage of the Allied war effort: and they were angry - permanently angry. As they sailed past this smug coastline, past people who did not give a damn how the war went as long as they could live on in their fairy-tale world, they had time to ponder a new aspect of indecency. In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.'
Brian Girvin writes, 'Eire did remarkably little to ensure that Germany did not win the war. The government acted in public as if it did not care who won and hinted at times that there was no real difference between the two sides. Yet Germany was a continuing threat to Irish sovereignty. Hitler was contemptuous of neutrality in general and if the Nazis had won the war, the likelihood of any neutral state remaining independent seems very low indeed.'
There's an implicit claim in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, as in the nationalist ideology, to occupation of the moral high ground. Far too often, commentators on the poetry have accepted this claim. Like Vichy France, but not to nearly the same extent, nationalism showed moral failure in confronting the worst challenge of all. The challenge that many nationalists still prefer to address is completely different in scale and kind: the prejudices of Northern Irish unionism, prejudices which made it less likely for a Catholic to find a job, not the Nazi prejudices which made it overwhelmingly unlikely that the victim of prejudice would escape death, the occasional excesses of the British Army (which generally acted with restraint, given the dangers it faced), such as the shooting of 'the thirteen men in Derry' on Bloody Sunday, not the killing by the Nazis of 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, by shooting, explosion and burning alive, or the killing of countless other civilians.
Irish nationalists often show a gross failure of {adjustment}, a failure to take account of changed moral realities.
I think that Seamus Heaney mentions the Second World War only once in his poetry, in part 1 of 'To a Dutch potter in Ireland,' dedicated to Sonja Landweer, who was in the occupied Netherlands during the Second World War - and a section 'from the Dutch of J C Bloem.' (I discuss Seamus Heaney's translation in 'Seamus Heaney: translations and versions.') It was a mistake to use this Dutch poem as a starting point. The 'mention' of the war is a bare mention. The poem could have mentioned the terrors of everyday life in that place, at that time, the executions, the reprisals, and of course the deportations to the extermination camps. There's mention of only one aspect of the war, this:
Night after night instead,
in the Netherlands,
You watched the bombers kill ...
This is unnecessarily obscure. The allusion could and should have been expressed more plainly, 'the bombers' identified. For the Dutch, there was an absolute difference between the two, representing the difference between death and hopes of survival and hopes of liberation. The German bombers were the ones that bombed Rotterdam in May 1940, killing 800 people. The death toll would have been far higher but for the fact that much of the population had already fled the centre for safety. The British bombers were the ones which dropped food to the starving Dutch during 'Operation Manna' near the end of the war.
Although I think Seamus Heaney retained uncritically some of the nationalist distortions of history, this isn't an objection to his poetry. The chief responsibility of a poet isn't to give a scrupulous, comprehensive and well-argued survey of history. The 1916 uprising is instructive. In 'Outcasts from Eden,' Edward Picot has interesting comments:
'...like the 1798 rebellion, the 1916 uprising itself has become so thoroughly mythologized and impregnated with symbolic meaning that it seems almost impossible to cut away the layers of heroic glamour and see it in more dispassionate, objective terms.
'Recent Irish historians have begun a much-needed demythologizing process: here is David Fitzpatrick, in the Oxford History of Ireland [quoting from the longer extract provided by Edward Picot]:
"Joseph Mary Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh, like Pearse, revelled in the vulgar wartime lie that the shedding of blood was 'a cleansing and sanctifying thing'...The main victims of the 'proclamation of the Irish Republic' were...unarmed civilians, whose suffering was compounded by the wreckage of central Dublin..."
'Fitzpatrick argues that only after the English Government obliged the rebels by over-reacting to the uprising, were the ringleaders gradually transfigured into folk-heroes:
"...a sentimental cult of veneration for the martyrs developed outside as after previous failed uprisings."
'The 'sentimental cult' which came to surround the 1916 uprising certainly owed a great deal to the work of W. B. Yeats; and there can be little doubt that Heaney is following in the same tradition by making his own contribution to the 'sentimental cult' of 1798.' (See also my comments on his poem Requiem for the Croppies.
But I think that W. H. Auden was completely correct in 'attempting to account for the fact that a better poem had been written about a small Irish uprising in 1916 than any about the whole of World War II.' (Daniel Albright, the editor of 'W. B. Yeats: The Poems.')
The Great Famine is heartbreaking, like so much else in Irish history - and the history of other countries - and I hope that nobody will take my discussion here - or anywhere else - to be heartless. It follows two poems of mine on the famine which will be reminders, I hope, that analytical discussion isn't the only way of approaching this and other historical tragedies.
Irish famine: Doo Lough
By the waters of Doo Lough we lay down and slept,
and all our prayers were answered at once,
Mary, Mother of God, be thanked -
for an end to the sleet,
the unendurable sleet,
an end to the hunger
that gnawed our bones,
the unendurable hunger,
an end to our lives,
their unendurable lives.
On 30 March, 1849, hundreds of starving people applied for famine relief in Louisburgh, County Mayo. They were ordered to report to the Westport Poor Law Union at Delphi, ten miles to the south, at 7 a.m. the next day. They walked through the night, in rain, sleet and snow. They were refused famine relief and began the walk back. By Doo Lough, an unknown number died. An annual famine walk from Louisburgh to Doo Lough commemorates the event. The first line of the poem recalls the first line of Psalm 137, 'By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept ...'
This poem belongs to the series I call 'Responses.' The lines spoken by a single person except for the lines in italics, which are spoken by a number of people, perhaps members of an audience. This recalls the words of the priest and the responses of the congregation. The series is intended particularly to give opportunities for performance and interpretation to the people attending a poetry reading, to make their role far more of an active one. There should preferably be practice, rehearsal, directed at changes of tempo, the giving of weight to the words, variations in weight, above all reaching towards the bitterness and tragic intensity of the experience.
Irish famine: Black and White
The
trees were barely white.
The sky was largely grey.
The stored potatoes turned black.
That winter, all the family starved.
The children were buried in potato sacks.
Another poem in the series 'Responses.' Each line can be spoken by a different person.
This extended quotation, on agriculture, industry and famine, is taken from my page on Radical Feminism. (The page has an extended section on 'the material conditions of life' which is relevant as well.) Britain's response to The Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century was worse than inadequate, but Britain had this to its credit. It was the place where The Industrial Revolution began, where so many of the inventions and innovations which transformed life were devised, the place where for a long period of time The Industrial Revolution was most vigorous by far. There wasn't one famine in history, of course, which dwarfed all other famines, this period of famine in Ireland. By then, there had been famines in every country in the world, very often less severe, sometimes more severe. It was The Industrial Revolution which ended the threat of famine in industrialised countries. When Ireland eventually became an industrialised country itself, it was with British help.
'On the back cover of Peter Mathias's 'The First Industrial Nation:' 'The fate of the overwhelming mass of the population in any pre-industrial society is to pass their lives on the margins of subsistence. It was only in the eighteenth century that society in north-west Europe, particularly in England, began the break with all former traditions of economic life.'
'In the 'Prologue,' this is elaborated: 'The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country before its industrial revolution and modernization is poverty. Life on the margin of subsistence is an inevitable condition for the masses of any nation. Doubtless there will be a ruling class, based on the economic surplus produced from the land or trade and office, often living in extreme luxury. There may well be magnificent cultural monuments and very wealthy religious institutions. But with low productivity, low output per head, in traditional agriculture, any economy which has agriculture as the main constituent of its national income and its working force does not produce much of a surplus above the immediate requirements of consumption from its economic system as a whole ... The population as a whole, whether of medieval or seventeenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India, lives close to the tyranny of nature under the threat of harvest failure or disease ... The graphs which show high real wages and good purchasing power of wages in some periods tend to reflect conditions in the aftermath of plague and endemic disease.'
'Larry Zuckerman, 'The Potato:' 'Famine struck France thirteen times in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth, and sixteen in the eighteenth. And this tally is an estimate, perhaps incomplete, and includes general outbreaks only. It doesn't count local famines that ravaged one area or another almost yearly.'
Christian Wolmar's 'Blood, Iron and Gold: how the railways transformed the world' includes this, after pointing out one way in which diet was improved by the coming of the railways: 'There were countless other examples of the railways improving not only people's diets but their very ability to obtain food. France, for example, had periodically suffered famines as a result of adverse weather conditions right up to the 1840s, but once the railways began reaching the most rural parts of the country food could easily be sent to districts suffering shortages. Moreover, it would be at a price people could afford ... The consumption of fruit and vegetables by the French urban masses doubled in the second half of the nineteenth century almost solely as a result of the railways.'
An isolationist interpretation of the Great Famine will focus attention on the callousness of the English response. A ((survey)) will take account of that but also such a factor as the incalculable benefits of the railway revolution, which began in this country. Christian Wolmar quotes Michael Robbins: 'Until about 1870 ... Britain was the heart and centre of railway activity throughout the world.' Writers on the evils of English colonialism have generally failed to acknowledge these incalculable benefits. Their ((survey)) has been defective.
The rebellion of 1798 which ended in the defeat of the rebels at Vinegar Hill is the subject of Seamus Heaney's poem Requiem for the Croppies which I analyze and discuss in detail. The rebels themselves were far from blameless. They carried out atrocities before General Lake defeated them at Vinegar Hill. 'A group of at least 100 prisoners, overwhelmingly Protestant, and including women and children, was forced into a barn at Scullabogue, six miles east of New Ross, and burned alive. No one survived.' According to a survivor of the battle, 'about 95 Protestant hostages were taken out of prison on the day before the battle and stabbed to death by the pikemen on Wexford bridge.'
Desperate people don't, usually, have a wide choice of potential helpers, from the very enlightened to the very unenlightened. The rebels chose France. France was aggressive and militarist, if in a more high-minded way than than some other aggressive and militarist states have been. France declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792 and on Britain and Holland in 1793. In his essay, 'Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland,' Seamus Heaney writes, 'When England declared war on Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticipated intensity ....' but this is incorrect. It was France that declared war on Britain, on 1 February 1793.
France was not only the enemy of Britain, it would also have been, in time, the enemy of Ireland. There's no indication at all that a victorious France would have been more enlightened in its relations to Ireland than Britain. The suffering that Napoleon brought to Europe was incalculable. Napoleon was an aggressive invader of other countries. Britain feared invasion by Napoleon and prepared against it. If Napoleon had not been defeated, it's very likely that he would have invaded Britain and that if he had been successful, he would have added Ireland to his list of conquests. The rebels of 1798 looked for help to France and the rebels of 1916 looked for help to Germany. Both appeals, for a Britain with survival at stake, amounted to treachery. All these considerations of international power politics are uncomfortable but inescapable.
The rebels were following the lead of a secret society, the United Irishmen. From 'Ireland's Holy Wars,' by Marcus Tanner: '... while radical Protestants were thick on the ground among the intellectual leaders of the United Irishmen, they were thinly represented at the other end ... The leaders might preach the secular nationalism of the French Revolution. The ordinary pikemen were motivated by an age-old hatred of Protestants of all classes ... the rebels called their prisoners 'heretics.' '
David A Bell, in his very impressive book 'The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare' has a chapter on the rebellion in the Vendée in 1793 - 1794. He mentions the killing in Southern France after the Protestant revolt of 1702 - 4 and in the Highlands of Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but he writes 'the Vendée, however, occupies a different dimension of horror.' It occupies a different dimension of horror from the rebellion of 1798 as well. In the Vendée, 'According to the most reliable estimates, from 220 000 to 250 000 men, women and children - over a quarter of the population of the insurgent region - lost their lives there in 193 - 94. The principal campaign against the Vendée's "Catholic and Royal" peasant armies, [Compare the predominantly Catholic, peasant armies of the Irish rebellion] which lasted from March to December of 1793, set a new European standard in atrocities. Then, at the start of 1794, the Republican general Louis-Marie Turreau sent twelve detachments of two to three thousand soldiers each marching across the territory in grid fashion, with orders to make it uninhabitable. These "hell columns" burned houses and woods, confiscated or destroyed stores of food, killed livestock, and engaged in large-scale rape, pillage, and slaughter. In some cases they killed only suspected rebels. In others, as at La Frocelière, they liquidated men, women and children indiscriminately, including "patriots" who had remained loyal to the Republic, on the grounds that no one still living in the Vendée could truly be loyal. In the port city of Nantes, the Republican authorities devised appalling new methods of mass murder to eliminate the "brigands" more efficiently and to reduce stress on the killers. Most hideously, they lashed thousands of prisoners into barges and lighters, which they then towed out into the Loire estuary and sank.'
'Writers favorable to the Revolution, meanwhile, while deploring "excesses," have insisted that horrors were committed on both sides and that the insurgents did, after all, side with France's enemies during wartime.' I'm not in the least an apologist for the Britain which quelled the Irish rebellion of 1798 but it's true that horrors were committed by both the British and the Irish and that Irish insurgents sided with Britain's enemy, France, during wartime. The France they sided with was the state which had perpetrated these atrocities.
The relevance of this to Ireland, not just the action taken against Roman Catholicism but the pikes and scythes of the peasants (compare Seamus Heaney's Requiem for the Croppies) will be obvious: 'In many of the more isolated areas, the Revolution's subjection of the Catholic Church to secular state authority cut deep into the tissue of communal life, with villages enraged at the dismissal of long-serving priests. In reaction, bubbles of anxiety and rage burst angrily on the surface of rural life. The most serious rioting took place after the fall of the monarchy in the fall of 1792, when crowds of peasants armed mainly with pikes and scythes occupied several towns in the region, leading to fighting that left up to a hundred dead.' The parallels extend too to the tactics of the rebels. 'Even after capturing several cannon, they rarely managed to stand in formal, pitched battles against the Republican forces. They preferred ambushes in the broken up and overgrown terrain and sudden, frenzied charges ...'
'What sustained them, above all, was religion. Witnesses described them marching in solemn silence, telling rosary beads, stopping for prayers, and crossing themselves before charging into combat. Priests accompanied them and before battles gave out remissions of punishments for sin.'
Like the croppies, the rebels in the Vendée committed atrocities themselves. 'Both sides routinely put captured enemy soldiers to death. Each side justified its conduct by reference to the other. The Irish rebels looked for help from France, the enemy of Britain. The French rebels looked for help from Britain, the enemy of France. They retreated towards the English channel, in 'a forlorn attempt ... to open a French port to the British navy, which had been seeking one since France and Britain had gone to war in the spring.'
'The remnants of the Catholic and Royal Army made a futile last stand near the village of Savenay, on December 23, and were annihilated.' This was the rebels' battle of Vinegar Hill. Westermans wrote to the authorities in Paris, 'I do not have a single prisoner with which to reproach myself.' But the killing of the rebels went on and on after the annihilation of the rebels' army.
English misrule In Ireland was a fact, but it's easy to forget - Seamus Heaney certainly finds it easy to forget - that enlightened rule was very scarce in the eighteenth century, as in other centuries.
In 'Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland,' Richard English writes, 'Much of the old orthodoxy regarding eighteenth-century Ireland has now been reconsidered in scholarly analysis: stark assumptions concerning the supposedly appalling oppression of Catholics, the antagonism between aristocracy and peasantry, the idea of English misrule as the cause of Irish economic problems, or even the colonial quality of the Irish-English relationship itself - all of these have been questioned to some degree.'
If the English had failed to defeat the rebels, historically almost impossible, and failed to defeat Napoleon, not at all impossible, if the rebels had set up a nationalist Roman Catholic state, it's historically probable that Napoleon, the secularist and enemy of such states, would have turned his attention to it and invaded. The armed forces of this new Irish state would have opposed him and been crushed.
'By 1812 France held effective sway over nearly the entire European continent, excluding the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Turkish empire. Most of the territory either fell under the direct rule of Paris or belonged to an ally or satellite state ... ' (David A Bell, 'The First Total War.') There were insurrections against French control between 1806 - 10 but it was in Spain that resistance to French control was greatest, where the fighting was most bitter, the atrocities the worst, the number of those killed the greatest. Goya illustrated some of the atrocities - the executions in Madrid in 1808 (Tres de Mayo) and the atrocities carried out by both sides in his etchings, 'The Disasters of War.' During the siege of Saragossa in 1808 the French bombarded the city with more than 40 000 explosive shells, the city still refused to surrender, the French broke in and 'there then began some of the worst urban combat ever seen in Europe before the twentieth century, ' but as was the norm in war before the twentieth century, more people died of disease than from shells, mines and small arms.
Saragossa eventually surrendered but in the Spanish countryside, guerilla war went on. It was their Roman Catholic religion which gave the guerillas their absolute enmity towards the French. The priests, monks and nuns preached against the French at every opportunity. A Spanish catechism of 1808 called the French 'former Christians and modern heretics' and remission from punishment for sin was promised to those who fought against them. It's a safe assumption that for Irish Catholics as well as Protestants, British control was a lesser evil than French control would have been. It's also a safe assumption that at this time in history, Ireland would not have had a great chance of being left unmolested as a peaceful, free and independent state.
The very harsh suppression of Catholicism by Britain during the earlier period of British rule of Ireland, the massacres of Catholics by the British - few in number, but atrocious - the whole of this shameful period of history, have been viewed in complete isolation by too many commentators on Seamus Heaney. The missing context includes the long era of religious intolerance in Europe during which Protestants executed Catholics and Catholics executed Protestants, by burning alive, hanging drawing and quartering, and other methods, during which Protestants massacred Catholics and Catholics massacred Protestants, during which Protestants imposed severe restrictions on the life of Catholics and Catholics imposed severe restrictions on the life of Protestants. The Christian killing of individuals shouldn't be forgotten either. Ludovic Kennedy, in 'All in the Mind: a Farewell to God' writes about an execution in France in 1766: '... the young Chevalier de la Barre was walking along a street in Abbeville. A Capuchin religious procession passed by. Because it was raining the chevalier did not doff his hat as was then the custom. This was observed and reported on, and the chevalier was arrested. The charge against him was blasphemy. He was found guilty. The sentence of the court was amputation of the hands, the tongue to be torn out with pincers and then for him to be burned alive ... Voltaire said he was haunted by the story for the rest of his life.'
When Christianity became less powerful, when Christians began to lose their taste for repressing and killing other Christians and repressing and killing non-believers, the repression and killing carried out by Moslems and non-believers (who have tortured and killed on a massive scale) ensured that there was no end, no slackening, of humanity's atrocious record of inhumanity. Secularism has brought many benefits, but not, unfortunately, an end to ideology or an end to bloodshed. (In all this, it's obvious, of course, that I'm referring to some Christians, some Moslems and some non-believers, not all. )
This, then, is the harsh context of the sufferings of Catholics at the hands of the Protestant British.
One massacre among many,
recounted by Michel de Waele, at http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id
=g9781405184649_chunk_g97814051846491300
'The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was one of the bloodiest events of the Wars of Religion that shook France from 1562 to 1598. Catholics in Paris killed between 2,000 and 4,000 Protestants between August 24 (St. Bartholomew's Day) and August 30, 1572, and then thousands more in various provincial towns between August 24 and October 6. Estimates of the total number of Protestants massacred in France during that period vary from 10,000 to 100,000.The conflict was not purely religious; its roots were primarily social and political. The aristocracy in France was deeply split into two rival parties, one of which adopted Calvinism as an ideology with which to challenge its Catholic opponents. As the conflict deepened, the religious identities solidified, and as the two noble factions enlisted support among other segments of the population, the struggle evolved into fullblown civil war between Catholic and Protestant (Huguenot) communities.'
A later conflict, The Thirty Years War, which devastated large areas of Central Europe and above all Germany between 1618 and 1648, had social and political aspects but it was a religious war too, and again, Protestants killed Catholics and Catholics killed Protestants in enormous numbers. Almost a third of the 15 million people in Germany perished.
The responsibilities of critics are different from those of poets. The 'much-needed demythologizing' of Irish History which recent Irish Historians have carried out is in stark contrast with 'the much-needed demythologizing' of Seamus Heaney and many other poets, past and contemporary, which critics haven't attempted. And many critics haven't made use of demythologized Irish History in their interpretations of Seamus Heaney, but a tired and routine history to go with their tired and routine criticism, perpetuating questionable or indefensible claims.