Politics: Everybody reading this review is aware that British and Irish life interweave. It is a truth made unavoidable to anyone drinking in a bar in Ireland while a Manchester United game is being shown on the television. But it is also a reality evident in the success of Irish writers and musicians among British audiences or, much more gravely, in the tangled history of Northern Ireland.
Many of us have an autobiographical version of this, and I am no exception: born in Belfast, growing up mostly in England, and then spending most of my adult life in Ireland. The British Council's new volume of essays, Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined, brings together a distinguished team of writers who frequently use their own autobiographical reflections in order to illuminate the complex and changing relationship between the neighbouring islands.
It is frequently entertaining stuff. Eoghan Harris impishly tells us that he finally feels it safe now "to come out of the closet" and admit that he is "a practising anglophiliac". In a brilliantly entertaining essay, he does just that (along the way suggesting that, "By and large, I believe that Irish nationalism is a narcissistic exercise in self-pity"). Mary Hickman justifiably points to certain asymmetries in the relations between larger and smaller island ("Irishness, however defined, is not as visible or important to the British/ English as Englishness/ Britishness is to the Irish").
And several of the book's contributors underline the extent of the great change which has occurred in the British-Irish relationship, a relationship which obviously continues to evolve.
For example, as Edna Longley rightly observes in her own essay, "Independent Ireland is no longer consumed by the ideological or rhetorical need to maximize its differences from the British state". Indeed, as the prefaces to this volume by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair both suggest, one crucial change in recent years has been the emergence of much more harmonious and close relations between the Dublin and London governments.
This more friendly arrangement (which has included the productive collaboration of British and Irish civil servants) has underpinned benign political developments in that most painful of British-Irish interactions, Northern Irish politics. For one vital feature of the peace process in the North has been the degree to which shared perspectives have at times been achieved between London and Dublin, and the extent to which that harmony has strengthened efforts to end the Northern Ireland conflict.
Behind such changes has been a growing sense that Irishness and Britishness are not necessarily exclusive of one another, and recent years have seen something of an erosion of the power of arguments suggesting that they were.
In his own thoughtful essay in this volume, Maurice Hayes observes that the IRA violence deployed in order to further the cause of an aggressive Irish separatism, ultimately failed to work: "If the objective was to achieve a United Ireland, the methods used and the ferocity employed put back indefinitely the date on which it might be accomplished".
This slim volume contains many such valuably lucid statements of where we are in the Ireland of the new century and its relation with its nearest neighbour. The central idea behind this book is simple enough: namely, that Irishness and Britishness each contain a significant bit of each other. Of course, recognition of this fact does not, in itself, resolve the tensions of the British-Irish relationship. Many IRA volunteers during the 20th century had their thinking formed by cultural influences many of which were profoundly British, but this did not in any way make them less committedly anti-British in terms of their hard-edged politics.
But recognition of the subtle interconnectedness of Irishness and Britishness should make it more difficult for most people to sustain the dismissive stereotypes and rigid simplicities which have so often marred mutual perceptions in these islands. In reflecting helpfully on such questions, this new volume makes a contribution to such benign self-knowledge.
Richard English's book Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA won the UK Political Studies Association's Politics Book of the Year Award for 2003
Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined. British Council, 154pp.