In these days when everyone from Tory “universalists” to communists look askance at Irish “ethnonationalism” it is perhaps time for someone to say a word on behalf of the silent ethnonationalists of the past.
In that spirit, I propose to defend the Defenders. Many students of Irish history will be familiar with the term. Usually for the reason that the anonymous Defenders were the “reactionary Catholic” foil to generations of “progressive” civic nationalists of left and right.
At best the Defenders and the other ‘peasant’ secret societies are portrayed as parochial reactionaries blindly striking out at the landlords and the colonial state. At worst, the critics say, they were the Catholic equivalents of the Peep O’Day Boys and the Orange Order who were impeding the coming together of the native Irish and the settler population.
That proposed union was under the wise leadership of a bunch of déclassé Dublin and Belfast bourgeois Protestant Jacobins in the United Irishmen – most of whom knew no more about the ‘peasants’ than Katherine Hepburn did about the natives she went to save in the African Queen. Other than as with the Russian Jacobin Trotsky’s folks, some of them employed the natives as slavies on their estates or in their big houses.
The Defenders were the underground resistance of Gaelic Ireland, one that dated back even before the major Protestant Plantations. The colonists had been English Catholics for centuries before that. The Defenders were not the mirror image of the Orange Order. The latter was founded in 1795 as, and continues to be, an organisation solely dedicated to the dominance of the settler-descended Protestants.
The Order is no more a ‘benevolent society’ than the Zionist settler organisations which have the backing of the Israeli state to take other people’s land and to ensure that those displaced do not take the land back. The Orange Order has had state backing for more than 200 years during which it has acted for much of the time as a quasi-state paramilitary group in consort with over-lapping loyalist paramilitary groups. The acceptance of Partition by most nationalists means that such means are currently unnecessary.
The Defenders were in the line of the ‘Tories’ and ‘Raparees’ which were the Gaelic resistance to the Cromwellian and earlier and later expropriators of the land. These are preserved within our tradition in the historical knowledge that is found in the béaloideas and sean nós, and the thousands of surviving lámhscribhinní which are what remains of what was a cultural as well as an attempted physical ethnic genocide.
This is why that tradition has been mostly disparaged, not only by the Anglo historians from Froude to Lecky and R.B McDowell but by many of the modern progressive liberal civic nationalists. They profess sympathy with the “peasant masses” but still regard the latter as priest-ridden chaps casting around in obscurantist darkness until the lads from Trinners arrived to help them “organise.”
Which is another myth, because without the peasants and their organisational skills and roots in our people the United Irishmen were no more than a lot of student union chaps sitting around quaffing claret and fantasising about the French revolution.
When the Orange terror forced the people to defend themselves in 1798, just as in Belfast in 1969, the Jacobin ideologists proved themselves to be mostly less than useless. It is no coincidence that the original Provos were mocked as Defenders who had failed to be won over by the Communist Party infiltrators.
In 1797 and 1798 there were few arms other than what the ‘peasants’ made themselves, the French arrived hopelessly late, and tens of thousands of ‘peasants’ were tortured and murdered and transported and press ganged while most of the United Irishmen ‘leaders’ failed to show.
When pinched for the greater part they made gentlemen’s agreements with the Crown – as Tone himself had done in 1795 – and at worst did a few soft years in Fort George after touting on the peasants who had no such recourse. Read some of the trials and depositions if you doubt me.
The reason for the dismissal and disparagement of the Defender Gaelic resistance is often rooted in ignorance, a literal ignorance, for as Vincent Morely has pointed out, Anglophone Irish historians of the 17th and 18th centuries were writing about a country without being able to speak nor read the majority language. It was the equivalent of somebody writing the history of France without being able to read French.
That ignorance was shared by the United Irishmen for the most part and has been carried over even into nationalist/republican historiography because the narrative was set by the Anglo academy and by the ‘progressive’ civic nationalists. They all unthinkingly adopted the United Irishmen’s slogans about unifying the natives and settlers in the belief that ethnicity was a ‘social construct’ or a cunning plan by ‘imperialism’ to prevent the coming together of Green and Orange to create an Ireland for all.
There is nothing cunning about taking other people’s stuff and giving it to other people. Only the deluded believe that the beneficiaries are going to find common cause with the expropriated.
The persistence of the ethnic divisions that were created by the successive plantations of Ireland give the lie to that myth. They also strongly suggest that if people who live a stone’s throw from one another in Belfast – on either side of ‘peace lines’ designed to prevent the stones reaching their target – cannot find accommodation how do they expect a million new immigrants to do so?
Only those Irish nationalists who recognised the ethnonationalist roots of the conflict here were able to suggest a plausible means of accommodating the ‘two communities.’ Desmond Fennell, in the midst of the northern conflict, had declared bluntly that “To say that the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are “all Irishmen” gets us nowhere.”
That realism influenced Provisional Sinn Féin which in Éire Nua, first published in 1972, set out proposals for a federal state that would follow a British withdrawal. Ironically the Adams faction which took over the IRA and Sinn Féin ditched Éire Nua as a “sop to unionism” and as “right wing” while already in the early stages of forming a strategy that would lead to the acceptance of Partition and Sinn Féin’s becoming part of the devolved Stormont administration.
Éire Nua proposed the radical dismantling of both states on the island and the creation of a decentralised regional administration with most power resting at local level back to parish councils. They would, as the best placed, be responsible for all aspects of local administration including as far as possible economic governance with the emphasis on locally owned and run businesses including co-operatives.
A measure of how far the new Sinn Féin has travelled is that it now accepts not only Partition but subservience to the EU and to foreign Capital – all brought to you by the “republican socialist left.” With that has come acceptance of all the rest of the socially destructive appendages of globalism from mass immigration to abortion and the absorption of bottom feeding commercial ‘culture.’
What mostly brought attention to Éire Nua was its proposal to create – but only following a British intent to withdraw – an autonomous 9 county Ulster region with its own elected assembly and a local executive with strong administrative, economic and other powers. That local body would operate under the jurisdiction of a 32 county republic in which all of the provinces had similar autonomy.
It was a recognition that the Ulster Protestants were not just going to wake up one morning with a thirst for Seán Ó Riada, hurling and ‘curry my yoghurt’. They would be recognised as an ethnic group who had been here that long that they were not going anywhere. And that being here they were entitled to that recognition once they accepted that sovereignty now lay with the Irish Republic and not London.
Might Éire Nua still provide a framework not only for potentially resolving the ‘national question’ but as a means to address other pressing issues? A ‘border poll’ is no more than an Aunt Sally as the main promoters of it know only too well. They know that the Good Friday Agreement spells out that it is a non-runner which even if did get into the stalls would be well beaten.
A border poll is only currently revived for electoral reasons to add something to the Presidential campaign of Catherine Connolly whose fervour, and that of her political roots, for a united Ireland has not been noticeable heretofore.
The “dreary steeples” of ethnonationalism have not gone away. Despite all the counter claims of the Tory universalists and the left liberal civic nationalists we still live in a world where ethnicity matters. You may ignore it, but it will not ignore you. For proof, look at Gaza and Ukraine.
We might resolve our main and lingering “ethnonationalist” issue by finding a radical accommodation outside of the forces which framed the Good Friday Agreement. We might resolve and pre-empt newer and future ones by ensuring that we will not be faced with more large ethnic minorities that Ireland is not capable of assimilating short of ceasing to be what we know as Ireland.