In 1913 Joseph Johnston published what has become a classic in Irish studies, Civil War in Ulster. Jon Parry(1) has been reading a re-issue of the book and considers how much has changed.

Some weeks ago, a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland called British soldiers "chinless wonders", a Unionist Party leader was denounced, again, for softening his stance on decommissioning, and for the first time in living memory an Orange Band had been invited to parade on the streets of Dublin. Now the band has cancelled its parade as a result of protests from Sinn Fein and threats from somewhere else. One week after this announcement P. O'Neill issued a statement and it seems as if the Peace Process Show could soon be back on the road and that this time it might really work.

And yet the Unionists are still poring over the detail, what was said, what was not said; over 50 per cent of the Unionist population remain opposed to a return to devolution and many within the movement and the party are incensed at the role being played by Brian Cowen, the Irish Minister for External Affairs. It is likely that the Reverend Martyn Smith and Jeffrey Donaldson will seek to impose further conditions before they might be willing to return to Stormont. We must hope that Trimble, unlike De Valera, does not choose to follow the mob.

On occasions, the politics of Northern Ireland appear jammed in time, and then suddenly there is an announcement, an agreement and everything is changed. Negotiations continue behind closed doors so covertly and imperceptibly that most of the public, on this side of the water at any rate, could probably be forgiven if they thought the crisis was over. Now, however, when news bursts on our screens it is not with reports of atrocities but of the creation of an assembly and cabinet appointments. Home Rule has come to the very region that had opposed it so vehemently decades ago. And it will surely come again.

Despite the furore over decommissioning -- itself something of a camouflage -- and despite the real threat of the Real IRA and its historical continuity, it does look as if political action, however bitter and recriminatory, is at last finding favour over armed struggle. Ninety years ago no one was so confident, not the nationalists, not the Unionists and certainly not the government.

Although Great Britain and Ireland was indeed a parliamentary democracy, the full exercise of democratic rights was some way off. Large sections of the population remained unenfranchised, MPs remained unpaid and despite the political influence of the Liberal Party there was widespread feeling that the Tory Party, and the House of Lords in particular, remained antipathetic to social and political reform. Domestic industrial unrest and rivalry, and instability abroad, contributed to a general air of apprehension and concern. And to concentrate minds there was the ongoing search for the elusive answer to the ever-present Irish Question.

Ireland dominated British politics up to the First World War. The ghosts of Liberals and Tories would have no difficulty relating to Blair, Mandelson, Mowlam and Major. Gladstone had pinned his hopes and beliefs on Home Rule and failed twice. Asquith never really got to grips with the issues but continued the crusade, wary of Churchill and Lloyd George behind him. The Irish Parliamentary Party provided the foot soldiers for the cause. Home Rule was taken to be an intrinsic part of the democratic structure. Within it Ireland could play a part in the imperial process, along with the other major, white colonies of empire - Canada, Australia and South Africa. Indeed, the Canadian federal model would become a particularly favourite for some Unionists, and was canvassed by Walter Long, the most enthusiastic English Uruonist, in the years between 1905 and 1921.

But, for some, democracy could also be used to counter Home Rule arguments. To Protestants in the north of Ireland, Home Rule meant a negation of rights. Fearful of a loss of religious freedom, prosperity and power, opponents of Home Rule called up concepts of justice and mutual loyalty between sovereign and people to support their stance. They had a right to protest if they felt let down by the Crown. They were defending their liberty and their democratic rights, and for support they turned to the Tory Party and to arms. It seemed that all the cards, including the Orange one, were in the hands of the Unionists and their bankers in London.

It was to demonstrate the error of these ways that Joseph Johnston wrote his book Civil War in Ulster (2) which has recently been republished as part of the Classics of Irish History series. Johnston was one of that rare breed now sadly forgotten, a Liberal Protestant who supported Home Rule. He came from a lower middle class family living in Tyrone, went to Trinity College Dublin and thence to Oxford. All of his seven brothers and sisters, with the exception of one who died, went to university.

He returned to Trinity as a Fellow in 1913 and later in that year his book was published. In what is essentially a polemic in rather tedious late Edwardian prose, Johnston sets out to disprove the anti-Home Rule utterances of the Unionists and reveal the sheer futility and dangers of their threat of civil war.

It has been generally accepted that the Lame gun running and the arming of the Protestants in the north were the first major events in the catalogue of political violence in twentieth-century Ireland. It was as a direct consequence of this that the Irish Volunteers were formed in the southern counties and it has been argued that the Irish Republican Brotherhood welcomed aggressive Protestant action as it justified their own inherently violent philosophy.

In fact, very few Irish nationalists either within the volunteer movement or outside the IRB were willing to contemplate force in the struggle for Home Rule or separation. There was no reason to fight for Home Rule; it was, after all, a reformist measure aimed at securing political stability within Britain and Ireland. It would, it was thought, ensure support for the Liberal Party when necessary, and was one of a series of measures which, hopefully, would relieve domestic pressure to allow the government to concentrate on more pressing foreign and imperial affairs.

But to the Protestant community in the north there was every reason to fight. 'Home Rule all round' meant a loss of power, and that power had been hard won. Irish memories from whatever side of the political divide were, and are, long.

Today, in the UK and elsewhere, commemoration goes hand-in-hand with apologising. Back in 1912-13 that was not the case. It had not been that long since nationalists were commemorating the 1798 rising. Up until the 1916 rebellion, 1798 was by far the most important date in the Irish historical calendar. Then Presbyterians and Catholics came together under Protestant Wolfe Tone, though ultimately sectarianism destroyed the goal.

A century later the same was true, in an increasingly imperial society there was no place for nationalism or republicanism, and in order to retain their place in the sun Protestants turned increasingly to the Tory Party. No matter what their class roots, religion and the need for security within the economic and political empire prevailed, just as it did in Lancashire and in London.

Against this background, "normal" politics struggled. James Connolly and James Larkin hoped that class loyalty would overcome all in the great Belfast Strike of 1907. It did not. Working class politics with leaders like Joe Devlin and Harry Widgery (Midgley? RJ), remained solidly based m religious loyalties.

The later nationalist movement after 1916 was constantly Catholic and uneasy about social reform. Here at least it would share similarities with the Unionist Party. That party took Home Rule to be the break up of empire both at home and abroad. It accused nationalist and Liberal supporters of undermining Church and State.

In his book, Johnston, in meticulous detail, sets out to correct what he saw as erroneous and deliberately misleading assumptions. In less than two hundred pages he explains the intricacies of taxation and the controversy over land reform; he discusses the ro1e of religion and makes interesting if erroneous comparisons with the campaign for Welsh disestablishment. He raises the whole question of mutiny within the British military establishment and the threat of force, and he comes to the conclusion that these are spurious and misleading threats aimed at duping the "ordinary" Protestant unionist. His son, who has written the main introduction to the book, believes that Johnston saw the Unionist threat of 1912-13 as being part of the lead-up to the first World War when modern, prosperous societies began the march towards violence rather than progress.

Johnston feared the sundering of the empire under the blows of civil war in Ulster. He was convinced that the everyday man or woman, whether in Ulster or anywhere else in Ireland, did not wish to see this. And he was undoubtedly correct. The events in the north added fuel to the south and 1916 was the worst possible outcome in both directions. It led to partition and the creation of two states which nobody wanted, neither of which acknowledged each other until the mid 1960s. A social and economic divide remains to this day but with the emphasis having shifted as the "pluralist" Irish Republic embraces the Euro and the once Liberal Harland and Wolff shipyard faces demise.

The issues which Johnston raised in 1913 are still with us. Sectarian violence and hooliganism remain endemic in the north. The Ulster Unionist Party grew to great strength and the government of Northern Ireland atrophied in a Tory nirvana. While in theory enjoying the fruits of inter-war and post-war prosperity within the modern British reformist state, in practice an undemocratic single caucus was able to persist in right-wing government -- evoking the shibboleth of "Roman" Catholic Europe whenever there was the slightest hint of social protest.

And in the meantime, Britain -- or the UK as it had become -- could ignore a part of its "mainland". Consequently, the north was able to float around just off the Isle of Man -- secure, but at the same time totally insecure. Terence O'Neill spoke with amusement and frustration when he recalled how in the Sixties some members of the British Establishment had been more interested in his being related to Bamber Casgoigne than in his ro1e as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

The events of recent times have demonstrated just how fragile and dependent the Union position is, and was. A modern European government cannot afford to have soldiers on its streets. Blair (and Major before him) wants to talk to the first ministers of significant world players, not with David Trimble or Geoffrey Donaldson, even if the former is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Being a "Prime Minister" of six counties has not been easy.

As the peace processes moved forward then halted, so the similarities with Johnston's period become more evident; reform, outcry, threat, negotiation, stalemate, threat. The arrival of the Northern Ireland Assembly and the positioning of Martin McGuinness, much to the annoyance of Donaldson's old school, Bairbre de Bruin, and even members of the SDLP, was anathema to traditional unionists. It created a new political structure; it opened up Northern Ireland and its politics.

Whereas once a northern Prime Minister might talk only with his opposite number in the UK, should the Assembly succeed, then the First Minister and the various parties will be talking to politicians from all over Europe and beyond. This the Unionists, and opponents of agreement, fear more than anything. They have no conception of mainland Europe; they fear its liberalism and its apparent inclusivity. They can no longer turn to the Tory Party for succour for it has none to give; it no longer has the political clout to conspire; it is worried about the UK position in Europe, but it is not concerned with that of the north of Ireland.

Furthermore, the Assembly reveals the Unionist Party's dearth of policies -- just like ninety years ago everything is subsumed under the Home Rule question. Politics are symbolic rather than dynamic, though this goes for some of Sinn Fein's statements too. Arms, it is said, must be laid down; the RUC must be preserved, name and all, before the terrible state of stasis can be broken. Fair play, everybody wants to negotiate from a position of strength, but these demands have more to do with the retention of power. Even in 1913 Johnston saw this.

The right wing of the UUP are still unwilling to move forward. They feel vindicated amongst their own, but with no one else. It seems that the British government was going to ignore them on the question of RUC reform and the flying of the Union flag. Now Mandelson may offer them some token concessions but even this is not certain as the Irish government is opposed to such offers.

What will the UUP do then? Will there be that most lasting of Irish contributions to political science, "the Split"? Will Martin Smythe and Geoffrey Donaldson, gingered up by Burnside (based in London), form another new unionist party? Will more liberal unionists break away, as encouraged to do by Seamus Mallon? How far round in circles must they go? In the meantime, the sensible negotiations will continue. The British government will talk with a very united Sinn Fein and SDLP, a commitment to peace will replace decommissioning and there might even be some troops out.

The devolving of government, which Johnston so supported, will surely occur; nationalists will have to come to terms with no longer being second-class subjects in a Protestant State, and have to stand on their own two feet unsupported by the USA. Unionists will have to realise that politics are about health, education, agriculture and industry as well as power. Both Johnston and his son, in his introduction, believe this, and the latter makes much of the possible inclusivity of politics in a Home Rule structure. Neither father nor son sees civil war in Ulster as an option. Let us hope that others read this book and come to the same conclusion.

Notes and References

2. New edition, edited by Roy Johnston, University College Dublin Press, ĢIR 13.95.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999