Review
Gerry Murray runs the rule over two just-published histories which chart the changing face of Ireland.
- Ireland since 1939: the Persistence of Conflict
- Penguin
Old Troubles for New (Part II)
Henry Patterson’s masterly narrative is ambitious in its conception - but realises those ambitions in an exhaustive and gripping manner.
Beginning almost two decades after Ireland was partitioned and moving seamlessly to the present day, Patterson paints a warts and all picture of political life in the two Irish states, whose political protagonists are never onedimensional. The book places politics in its economic and social context. With regard to Northern Ireland, he shows that the politics of both unionism and nationalism was often devoid of any economic thought. The constitutional issue dominated to the exclusion of all others, and labour politics only emerged to be marginalized by the flag waving of the political elites. The modern reader is reminded by Patterson that unionism was not as homogeneous as its opponents have often claimed. Liberal unionism emerges throughout the period in figures such as the Marquess of Londonderry and Col. Samuel Hall-Thompson, both education ministers.
Basil Brooke, later Lord Brookborough, later LB, was not, according to Patterson, the one-dimensional caricature portrayed by nationalist politicians and historians.
Patterson reminds the modern reader that both unionist and nationalist leaders were responsible for bringing Northern Ireland to the fatal impasse of the late
1960s. In 1945, for example, Sean McEntee, a prominent member of De Valera’s government publicly criticised the Nationalist Party for condemning its
supporters to ‘political futility for 22 years’, while Londonderry unionists lobbied the Stormont government in the late 1950s opposing further industrial development in Derry to safeguard their own dominant position. As Patterson notes, the perversity of this caused the Prime Minister Lord Brookeborough to exclaim, “No government can stand idly by and allow possible industries not to develop.”
The book charts the roller coaster economic ride in the southern jurisdiction in considerable detail - the lost years after Partition with massive emigration, the new dawn of the Lemass years, the basket-case economy of the seventies and eighties and finally the emergence of the Celtic Tiger. The Republic’s economic miracle is illustrated by the remark of an American commentator, “Ireland’s well-educated workforce today offers multinational businesses perhaps Europe’s best ratio of skills to jobs.’ By contrast, Patterson’s history of the northern state highlights a procession of missed opportunities in both economics and politics.
Taken together, Aldous and Patterson provide a treasure for anyone interested in the resonance of historical characters and events for the modern age and illustrate the multi-layered interconnections between the island of Ireland and its geographically close neighbour.
See the first part of this review here: Part One
Gerry Murray