Negotiating Ireland's 'Decade of Centenaries' in the New Age of Brexit

In March 2012, in the week before St Patrick's Day, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his Irish counterpart, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, issued a joint statement following a successful meeting at Downing Street in London, 'British Irish relations, the next decade'.¹ By and large, it was a fond and forward-looking text and in the press conference that followed both men spoke warmly of the Anglo-Irish relationship. Long dominated by the Northern Ireland conflict, it was now time to put that all behind. Friendship, cultural connections and familial ties would from here on form the basis of a strong political, trading and European partnership. But there was one striking difference in their statements. For the Irish leader the decade anticipated in the document held an inescapable significance to which the British man made no reference whatsoever.²

Ireland is currently waist deep in a 'decade of centenaries' commemorating the series of events – encompassing war, civil strife, and revolution – that culminated in partition and the founding of two separate polities on the island. It was the formative moment of both the Irish state and the United Kingdom in its current form. Beginning in 2012, a generous 'long decade' of eleven years will take us through to the end of the Civil War that racked and scarred the nascent Irish Free State, and the erection of a customs barrier on the border on April Fools' Day 1923. It has been well noted that commemoration is never wholly (or even largely) about remembering the past. What is publicly recalled, brushed over or forgotten is inevitably a choice and, in Ireland as elsewhere, to memorialize the past is to act politically in the present.³ But with bloody memories still to wade through before we reach the other side, the ground on the distant bank may be shifting once again.

2012 marked one hundred years since the passing of the third Home Rule Bill by the British House of Commons – a scheme long promoted by Liberal and Irish Nationalist MPs to devolve limited powers to a parliament in Dublin. The reformist cause had defined Irish politics since the 1870s, and had at last achieved an apparent victory. The Bill's two nineteenth-century predecessors had foundered on the rocks of parliamentary opposition, first in the Commons and later in the House of Lords. The latter had lost its veto via the Parliament Act 1911, retaining power only to delay a piece of law it did not like. As such, the Irish Bill was put on hold – initially intended for two years – by the chastened but still Tory-dominated second chamber. Although it did formally reach the statute book in 1914, it had by then been overtaken by the rush to war. In securing its passage, the Home Rulers looked finally to have their goal within their grasp, but this was to prove to be a victory from which they would never recover.⁴

Had the Tories and their allies accepted parliamentary defeat in 1912, then Ireland's subsequent history might have been different and the centennials of its present constitutional arrangements mercifully short. As it was, while excitement gripped nationalist Ireland in the interregnum created by delay, it invited and attracted fearsome opposition from amongst the mostly anti-devolution Protestant minority. Concentrated in parts of the province of Ulster to the north, Unionism had already emerged as a powerful regional force. More than two hundred thousand men responded to the introduction of the Bill by putting their names to a 'Solemn League and Covenant' pledging to resist the plan by 'all means'. A similar number of women signed a more passive but no less determined 'Declaration'.⁵ Styling themselves the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), many thousands took up arms to display their preparedness to fight, and the path towards partition started to come clear.

Ten years of anniversaries are long enough to offer something to satisfy almost every taste and, despite their capacity to overwhelm the complexities of the Irish past, Ulster and communal confrontation were not the only source of crisis...