A Nation Once Again
“It’s time for England a truth to face, they will never defeat the Celtic Race,” The Irish Brigade. We’re Celts. Mulligan Records, 2001.
For over 800 years the Irish have resisted the tyranny and wrath of the Kingdom of England. The English have tried everything from ethnic segregation, religious division, famine, and military occupation to weaken and destroy the Irish people, though time and time again their efforts have been thwarted by the resilience of the Irish. Through national pride and opposition to foreign rule, the Irish people, culture, and language have survived countless attempts at erasure. However, there still lies much division within Ireland and we must recognize that the Irish cannot be truly free until the 6 remaining counties under British rule are rightfully returned to the Irish people.
Ethnic and religious division of English versus Irish and Catholic versus Protestant first gained prominence in the year 1607, during the “Plantation of Ulster”, where the Irish Catholic population was replaced by loyalist English Protestants. Originally, the land owned by the Irish was stolen from them and given to the Anglican settlers from Britain, and through discriminatory laws across Ireland, the Irish were made second-class citizens and had everything from their sports to their language restricted. Today, the province remains under British grasp through continued maintenance of the foundation laid in 1607, utilizing ethnic and religious division between Irish Catholics and Unionist Protestants to maintain a divided Ireland.
This isn’t the only example of the intentional crippling of the Irish people by the English however. The Irish potato famine, though many know it simply as a crop failure, was a deliberate attempt to exterminate the people of Ireland through starvation. It is true that potatoes sustained Ireland in the 19th century and that the blight was a worldwide issue at the time, but unlike most nations, Irish citizens got next to nothing in terms of relief. The British government deliberately left the Irish to starve as they continued using any food grown on the island to import back to the mainland to sustain the pockets of English landowners. This act to wipe out the Irish population and to destroy the nation at large is a failure that the British should remember with shame and a truth that has been recognized since the famine’s first enactment with Irish writers such as John Mitchel at the time stating that, “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.” To this day, the population still has yet to recover to the point it was at before the famine, with emigration and death sending the Irish to their graves or far away from their home.
Though weakened, their resilience gave them the strength to fight for and win their freedom in 1921, battling the British troops through guerrilla warfare for an Ireland free of British rule. However, only 3 of the 4 provinces of Ireland got that independence. Despite the Catholic Irish majority of the island, the province of Ulster had refused independence. The cause of this was rooted in the demographics of the province, where many were Protestant and loyalist towards the British crown and opposed independence. A division mind you, that was artificially created during the Plantation of Ulster.
Conflict continued in the North between Republicans, Unionists, and the British army, sparking up through the 60s-90s in a period known as “The Troubles” which largely shapes the modern framework for an understanding of the conflict in Ulster. The British army’s presence under the pretense of “Protecting the peace,” as an easy guise to see through as they arrested and killed merely based on suspicion of connections with Republican paramilitary groups (such as the Irish Republican Army [IRA]) while favoring and protecting Unionists. Many of those suspected of being involved with the IRA were sent to internment camps in cities like Belfast and Derry, where they were often tortured for information regarding the IRA alongside having family members and friends harassed for information. One of the most renowned prisoners was Bobby Sands, who died after 66 days on hunger strike at the age of 27. He often wrote while being kept in prison; he once wrote that “They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken.” The strength exhibited by Sands and other prisoners beckoned the support of the public, with over 100,000 lining the street during his funeral in 1981. This support hadn’t started with Sands’ sacrifice though, and neither did Britain’s cruelty, when on the 30th of January in 1972 the British Paratrooper Regiment shot 26 unarmed anti-internment protestors marching in Derry, killing 14. These deaths, when combined with Sands’ death are only the surface of a deep pool of cruelty at the hands of the British government during The Troubles.
The wounds of The Troubles still have yet to heal for many Northerners, with cities like Belfast still being littered with “peace walls” made to separate republican Irish catholic and unionist British protestant neighborhoods. Long overstaying their welcome, these walls serve as a physical and metaphorical reminder for the hardened division sewn between the groups. As the people of Northern Ireland heal and move forward from conflict, they must recognize the root of these issues and expel British rule for once and for all.
Today the fight is continued onward into the future, not with the pikes and muskets of old, nor the Armalites and Barretts that spread fear in The Troubles, but through unity, education, and persistence. After all these years, the time of a united Ireland is just on the horizon with Unification support rising by the year. We must recognize that the division in Northern Ireland does not truly lie between Protestants and Catholics but between the Irish people and England’s unionist sent to divide them. For it is not faith that splits Ireland, but loyalty to one’s nation or to its oppressors. The time has come for Ireland to unite with the occupied Ulster, to become a nation once again.
