Struggles in Ireland

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
--W. B. Yeats

Today, Seattle is immobilized by one of our rare great snowfalls. But last night, the sidewalks were still clear enough for me to walk 1½ miles to the UW campus to attend the first of a three part lecture series entitled "Revenge and Reconciliation in Modern Ireland." The cold and snow outside the hall served as an appropriate metaphor for the hunger and bleakness of so much of Irish history.

The lecturer, Prof. George K. Behlmer of the University history department, discussed in a fast-paced two hours the period from the Rebellion of 1789 up to the end of the nineteenth century. He argued that nothing inherent in the Irish character predisposes them to violence, and that the Irish have suffered from a poor image -- both as harbored within themselves and as revealed to the world at large -- an image of self-loathing, tendency to violence, and adherence to an improbable national mythology, an image that is, to a large degree, one of its own creation. Ireland's greatest writers, such as Yeats and Joyce, have, in their writings, certainly contributed to this image.

Dr. Behlmer discussed specifically the short lives and careers of three Irish revolutionaries -- all, interestingly, themselves Protestant -- Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), Thomas Davis (1814-45), and Charles Parnell (1846-91), and how each had attempted to develop a sense of Irish identity apart from Britain, and to secure independence or -- at least in Parnell's case -- home rule for Ireland.

The speaker also discussed Ireland's greatest socio-economic crisis of the nineteenth century, the so-called Potato Famine of 1845-50. Ireland, already overpopulated relative to its resources, lost 5/8 of its population to starvation, disease, and emigration. But Behlmer -- though challenged by audience members following the lecture -- disagreed with Irish contentions that Britain's response to the famine -- a natural disaster resulting directly from rapid spread of a potato plant blight -- constituted "genocide."

Britain's prime minister in 1845, Sir Robert Peel, made attempts to alleviate starvation in Ireland, which included forcing through Parliament the bitterly resisted repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws. Despite Peel's efforts (which contributed to the fall of his government), Behlmer suggested that the overall climate of the times was opposed to any intervention in the economic realm that might have alleviated Irish suffering more directly -- an early display of "libertarian" philosophy, I suppose. Beginning in 1846, under the Whig ministry that followed the fall of the Peel government, the Irish were left to the mercies of the laws of supply and demand.

If genocide denotes the deliberate killing of a national group, then the British were not guilty of genocide; the sentiment in Parliament at the time was simply to allow the natural laws of economics to work themselves out. Which reminds us of the "modernization" of the ten commandments by Arthur Hugh Clough:

Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive ...

Professor Behlmer's first lecture brought to life the brutal hardships and suffering -- the results of both natural causes and British rule -- from which Ireland suffered in the nineteenth century. Whether these hardships affected the way that Irish children were reared -- making the Irish inclined to violence from early childhood, bearing within themselves Yeats's "fanatic heart" -- remains, for me at least, a question for further exploration in the succeeding two lectures.