Irish HistoryThis book is organised around, and owes its title to what might at first seem a rather insubstantial paradox: that home rule, whose nationalist advocates were defeated by Sinn Féin at the 1916 general election, provided through the Government of Ireland Act 1920 the constitutional basis for the Northern Ireland state.
In this sense home rule did not die with the Irish parliamentary party, but enjoyed "a form of after-life" in Northern Ireland.
This line yields, on the whole, handsome dividends. It avoids the habitual chronological closure of the establishment of an independent Irish state in 1922. It encompasses, as well as a history of Irish parliamentary politics from the era of Butt to that of Redmond and Carson, a survey of the political history of Northern Ireland.
The chief merit of this approach is that it identifies and tracks an elusive thread of commonality in the predicaments of nationalism and unionism in Ireland. Both sides, after all, were wrestling with the same set of political concepts and constitutional formulae, albeit from utterly opposed positions.
Jackson ceaselessly negotiates the frontier between the two great monoliths of modern Irish history. He is adept at identifying moments of objective collusion, instances of hesitations or misgivings on the part of political leaders on both sides, forfeited opportunities for more enlightened political arrangements than those arrived at.
Looking back across the intervening 80 or 90 years one is struck by something which was axiomatic to the historical actors at the time: the terrific sense of finality which pervaded the home-rule crisis and which defined the settlement of 1920-22, to which the proceedings of the Boundary Commission provide little more than a coda.
The nationalist struggle that began in its modern form with Parnell ended in an extraordinary consensus of exhaustion as to the finality of the outcome.
While British policy was not quite as benignly disinterested as Prof Jackson seems to imply, all of the British parties were effectively agreed on disposing of the Irish question once and for all. The audit of the hugely disproportionate role played by Irish affairs in British politics over the previous century informed the common purpose of insulating British politics from the ravages of the Irish question. The patience of nationalist Ireland had been grossly overtaxed. Ulster unionists looked to the bulwark of partition, openly jettisoning what they had privately abandoned some time before, the linkage of their fate with that of the unionists of the south of Ireland.
The "game" was played out on all sides. Irish nationalists and republicans had the greatest difficulty with this in the context of partition, but it was precisely the tacit premise of finality that rendered partition such a traumatic issue in the politics of the independent Irish state. One hundred and twenty years of politics since the Act of Union seemed to bear down on a thin sliver of time within which the future was to be cast. As the shutters went up around the gaming rooms of the old Irish question, history showed up in the guise of a sepulchral croupier. The implacable sense of finality derived from the fundamental rule of the game, the principle of a territorial winner-take-all. Rien ne va plus.
Partition was, of course, anathema to nationalists. It was on any view an instrument of policy of considerable crudity, especially if the notion of the consequential resettlement of populations is reinstated. In July 1914 Asquith sought: "to find out whether C\ and his friends would definitely treat, if I made them an offer to exclude Antrim, Derry, Down (except the Catholic parts of the South), Armagh (except South), North Fermanagh, with the possibility of a split Tyrone: provision to be made on both sides for the migration at State expense of Protestants and Catholics in and out of the excluded area."
The political realities made some form of partition an overwhelmingly probable outcome. The consequences of this for the Catholic nationalist minority, and ultimately for the Northern Ireland state itself, were aggravated by the absence of any serious consideration being given to the workings of politics within the deeply divided Northern Irish state. In terms of the relations between the two states of Ireland, the provision for a Council of Ireland in the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 inevitably proved a dead letter.
The one-dimensionally territorial nature of the settlement was given its starkest expression in a passage which Jackson rightly quotes in full from a speech of Craigavon in 1934: "I am Prime Minister not of one section of the community, but of all, and that as far as I possibly could I was going to see that fair play was meted out to all classes and creeds without any favour whatever on my part . . . the Honourable Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic state. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic state. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State."
Jackson's survey of Northern Ireland extends beyond the collapse of Stormont, which presumably marks the end of home rule in his strained use of the term to the contemporary situation. He writes that James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner fell "because they were increasingly expected, not to govern, but to mediate between Unionist popular opinion and Westminster; and they were unable to accommodate themselves to this diminished and dangerous role".
He notes the intriguing preference of the present leader of the Ulster Unionist Party for James Craig over Edward Carson. In David Trimble's view Craig "did the dirty work. He did the deal with Collins - he went to Dublin to negotiate while Carson lapsed into manic depression."
The chief difficulty with Jackson's approach, as Paul Bew has already pointed out, is that it is overly-orientated towards "high politics", although this is perhaps the price of the book's merits. Jackson at time succumbs to an over-sanguine belief in the prospects for various forms of centrism. This leads to an overly indulgent assessment of the wildly inconstant William O'Brien. Conversely, his strictures on John Dillon's dogged endeavour to maintain the hegemony of the Irish parliamentary party, while very well put, do not do justice either to the terrible inhibitions on the position of the Irish party or to the morose decency of Dillon's liberal nationalism.
Alvin Jackson's important book has a double significance, as a work of historical scholarship and as a statement of how the history of modern constitutional arrangements on the island have come to appear in our time.
Frank Callanan is a lawyer and the author of The Parnell Split and T.M. Healy
Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000 By Alvin Jackson Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 405 pp, £25