Rupture Radio Interview: Partition and its Discontents
Link to Rupture Radio to listen to full episode.
The following is an excerpt from a Rupture Radio interview with Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh - the authors of Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution - focusing on the development of the northern and southern statelets after partition.
Minor edits have been made to some sentences for readability purposes.
How did the northern statelet develop after the partition of the island?
Robbie McVeigh
The striking thing about partition and particularly with the state that emerged in the six counties, is you see a reinstatement of very traditional colonial relations. If you look at Irish history through the nineteenth century, certainly from An Gorta Mór on, it's basically a process of liberalisation. For the first time, Catholics begin to find a place within the state through a gradual and far from perfect process of opening up to a new form of inclusive administrative colonialism. This allows Catholics or natives to be part of the state and the process of government. In the six counties that ends very abruptly with partition and returns to something which the Prime Minister characterised as ‘A Protestant State for a Protestant people’ based on old notions of Protestant ascendancy.
It's very hard to imagine just how stark that transformation was for Catholics based in the north because they had seen nearly 100 years of improvement and movement towards a form of equality, and then suddenly they're back to square one in terms of an exclusive sectarian Protestant state. That formation as it existed was to reproduce itself for fifty years until 1972 when it collapsed in the face of a civil rights organisation.
Bill Rolston
Of course it collapsed at a formal level in 1972 but it didn't it didn't die overnight. So much of what it had set in place as structures were still there governing what was going on. The task that was facing British administrators was to try to drag this entity squealing and kicking into some sort of modern liberal egalitarian state.
The culmination of it all eventually is the ‘Good Relations’ state. The notion that there should be respect for either side and that there should be none of this sectarianism [or majoritarianism. The prime example of that in a formal sense is how the Good Friday Agreement sets up the political arrangements whereby there's weighted considerations for who gets what post. You can't have a majority vote to pass anything of substance. The ‘Good Relations’ state is to date the final stage of trying to sweep up the vestiges of the hyper-sectarian state that was put in place with partition.
Robbie McVeigh
One of our arguments is that it would be silly to suggest that nothing has changed in the north. The early days of the Orange State were defined by a Minister for Justice who proudly boasted that there ‘wasn't a Catholic about the place’ and that Catholics couldn’t get a job anywhere inside the Civil Service. For a number of years now, Catholics have been in the majority in the Civil Service in the six counties. Demographic transition explains that a wee bit. Catholics, if they're not in the majority among the people of working age, are very close to it. But at the same time the state also had to reinvent itself as a space in which Catholics could work and have some sense of belonging.
Part of the ideology of ‘Good Relations’ is to say that the days of ‘A Protestant State for a Protestant People’ have been firmly consigned to history and we're trying to do something else with the state. Of course, whether that's been achieved is a moot point, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge that the state formation we're dealing with now is very different to the one that was established in 1920 with partition and collapsed in 1972.
Bill Rolston
That said, we're not fans of ‘Good Relations’. It's a dangerous position to have only a sound bite about because it seems that you're against goodness and niceness and civilization and all things positive. One way in which I would start to explain to somebody who doesn't know why anybody would be against ‘Good Relations’ as a way to run a state is to say I remember my children went to an integrated school here. Only about 7% of kids go to integrated schools. A friend of mine, his kid was at the same school, and I remember him saying to me how great it was because his wee boy had Catholic friends and Protestant friends in the class, and he didn't know which was which. And I thought, no, that's not right. I want my kid to know which is which, and that not be a problem. I want them to know about history. I want them to know about politics. I don't want to have something that's built on ‘let's pretend’.
Robbie McVeigh
What started the whole journey for us was a ‘Good Relations’ approach to the plantation in the north which says if that’s the history of half the population, then therefore it's something that has to be celebrated. It's not that different from saying, well, if part of your tradition in South Africa was to have apartheid, then we should celebrate that on your behalf. If part of your tradition in North America was to genocide Native Americans, then we should celebrate that too. It's an approach which removes politics from any reading of history and just regards cultural identity as sufficient to justify merit. From our point of view, if you're trying to understand the complex reality and legacy of the colonial process in Ireland, the last thing you want to do is start off by acting as if everybody was the same in that process or that we should celebrate every politics involved in it. Clearly if you have anything approaching an anti-colonial reading you cannot do that.
Bill Rolston
Of course, some Native Americans have rejected that celebration of Columbus Day. The thing about that is when you become the one that doesn't accept the paradigm, you're the one that looks like a problem. But yet the point is just so obvious if you think about it. Why would they celebrate their disenfranchisement? Why would they celebrate being conquered? Why would they celebrate that possibly 80 million Native Indigenous Americans on those two continents died in a process of conquest? What is there to celebrate there? The parallel to here is to say that some things should not be celebrated. There should not be a demand for equal celebration.
What about the 26 county state, how has its relationship with empire changed since partition?
Robbie McVeigh
I would start with the position that the twenty-six counties were given by empire. It was very consciously constructed as a white dominion. We use that term not provocatively, but because it accurately describes what empire thought the 26 county state was meant to do and which certainly part of the domestic political establishment also thought as well. This entailed giving up a commitment to separation and republic and accepting that white dominion status had many different attractions. The striking thing about that is for the first time whiteness features in Irish political identity. It's not a choice that either party to the civil war in Ireland chose. It's thrust upon Irish people. But once partition happens the role that this new state is meant to assume is quite clearly one of white dominion. It's not meant to look like an anti-imperialist state. It's meant to look like Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and, crucially for us, South Africa.
South Africa shows you what white dominion status was really about. It had a black majority but white dominion didn't mean democracy, it meant who controls parliament's dominions. It's a white settler bloc which will continue to operate and control power in a very conservative way. In that sense the model for the state still obtains. Of course we know that things change over time. Ireland developed towards declaration of republic in 1949 but the one thing that’s quite clear is the status that it finally gets is completely different to the one that was envisaged in 1916 and then democratically sanctioned by the Irish electorate in the 1918 election. The tension between the promise of the summer that was supposed to come and the reality of the Irish state is so stark that it continues to structure the way that people think about their place in the world today.
The other point that comes out of the comparative work that we do in the book is that no state which comes out of anti-imperialist struggle is perfect. India, which has been a great model for many people, or even democratic South Africa, both have profound contradictions which are legacies of colonialism. That political tension within states after they free themselves from a direct colonial link is effectively a universal one and it's resolved by politics not through identity. Just being Irish doesn't make us either imperialist or anti-imperialist. It's a political choice that we make. And at the minute, sadly, I think our political establishment is making the wrong choice in terms of this drift towards NATO. But that doesn't mean that Irish people either north or south of the border have to make that choice and I hope we will resist it.
Bill Rolston
Here in the north we were umbilically linked to one of the imperial inventors of whiteness. So if there was a tension in the south, it was a much less obvious tension in the north. One of the interesting things is that this debate about reunification, it's not just a matter of sticking these two bits together again and calling it a country because everything has to be looked at. To me, one of the things that's going to be really interesting to look at is this question of a radical decolonial push in Irish society. For example, parts of NATO's ballistic ‘shield’ for northwest Europe is spread across the north of Ireland. So what happens to that in reunification? Do we say it's going to be like the treaty ports and we'll have to hold on to them for some time? Or do we say no, the new Ireland is going to be nonaligned, it's going to be neutral, and it's going to turn its face towards the majority world and not towards the white minority world. That's a big question, which is scary for some people, but I find it very fascinating that we might be in a position where we're able to discuss that, debate that, and come up with some decent outcome.