Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [122]
As it turned out, the system broke first in Ireland.
How to contain or channel the persistent demands of nationalist opinion in Ireland had been a constant descant in British imperial politics for centuries. There had never been much the British wanted in Ireland – no great seams of gold, spices or expanses of prairie awaiting farmers – nothing but strategic security. Without being confident that Ireland would not provide a back door into Britain, it was impossible to plan expansion abroad. Yet throughout the centuries of British rule the Irish simply refused to abandon their campaigns to be free. It had been recognized in nineteenth-century debates over Home Rule that what was needed was some mechanism which would balance Irish demands for freedom with imperial demands for security. Perhaps – as was increasingly to be suggested for India – Ireland might be accommodated within the empire by being given dominion status, like Canada or Australia. But the critical difference with those places was that the people of Ireland had their own history, culture, mythology, religion and traditions long before the English, Scottish and Welsh soldiers had arrived to claim the place for the Crown. From an imperial point of view the other places were settlements. Ireland was a nation.
Since 1800, Irish MPs had had seats at Westminster, so it was not, technically, a colony. Irish people emigrated across the empire in huge numbers. Irish soldiers fought in Britain’s colonial wars, in ranks from private to general. Ascendancy Irish, like Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, picked up colonial baubles as readily as their English and Scottish counterparts: Blackwood became viceroy of India and a marquess. Yet the way Ireland was treated by the government in London indicated that it was anything but an integral part of the Kingdom, for it is inconceivable that politicians would have allowed a million people to perish in the Great Famine of the 1840s had they been living in industrial Yorkshire or rural East Anglia instead of Ireland. The depth of the political hypocrisy about Ireland was shown when Gladstone began to espouse the cause of Home Rule. Lord Randolph Churchill told him that the idea amounted to a plan to ‘plunge his knife into the heart of the British Empire’, which rather gave the game away. In Conservative circles, this was a widely held view, and when Gladstone died without achieving his ambition, the opportunity to find a peaceful settlement died with him. Of course, the vast military resources of the British Empire could (just about) keep a lid on things by deploying the usual mechanisms of official inquiries and overwhelming force, as they demonstrated when the 1916 Easter Rising was put down within seven days and its leaders executed by firing squad. But the consequence was merely to radicalize a much larger section of the population.
In 1919 Jan Smuts, who had served in the War Cabinet and was about to become prime minister of South Africa, claimed that ‘the Irish wound’ was spreading poison – if the country was not given its freedom (he favoured some sort of dominion status), the British Empire ‘must cease to exist’. Smuts had spotted the corrosive potential of the Irish question, even if his convictions prevented him from seeing how things would eventually turn out. (Two years later he drafted a speech on Ireland for the king to deliver which contained the