Britain’s Imperialist Destruction of Ireland Must Never Be Forgotten

In 1972, French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre was heavily criticised for trying to justify the murder of eleven Israeli Olympians by Palestinian organisation Black September in Munich. He claimed that when the disempowered are bereft of hope, terrorism is the only weapon they can use. Sartre was wrong to defend the atrocity, but his reasoned arguments about the use of terror as a last resort are pertinent to the actions of the Irish republican movement against British occupation.

On the second to last episode of Question Time, the spectacularly objectionable Tim Stanley, columnist for the Daily Torygraph, claimed Britain was not occupying the north of Ireland in the seventies, and could ‘no more occupy Northern Ireland than it could Surrey.’ Moderating his fanaticism with a gruesomely chiselled Oxbridge snark, he tore into the shadow chancellor John McDonnell, whose abject performance encapsulates how he and Jeremy Corbyn are already being moulded by the enemies of the working class into vapid conformists. McDonnell, previously an unflappable supporter of Irish independence, had the perfect platform to laud Bobby Sands’s heroism, condemn the historic murder of innocents on all sides and educate ignorant Britons about their history. Tragically, he withered, grovelling pathetically to appease the baying audience.

Demanding Tim Stanley to apologise is like asking a shark to say sorry for tearing off a surfer’s leg. The high priest of Torydom evidently believes that the British Empire was a benevolent child-minding programme, patiently training inferior races how to hate the French efficiently. His contempt for Irish independence mirrors the BBC’s historically repugnant coverage of political unrest in Ireland’s north. Both eagerly whitewash Gaelic and Catholic grievances, portraying them as naturally malevolent people carrying inexplicable rage. I can exclusively reveal that rumours of an Irish PE curriculum involving spitting at posters of William of Orange and throwing javelins at Cromwellian shaped targets have been proved untrue.

The fact is that Britain occupied the north of Ireland in the seventies and still does today. The damage was done many monarchs ago, but arguably the defining event, the consequences of which we still live with, happened in the early 17th century. It was a catastrophic decision that was emblematic of the superciliousness of Britain’s ruling elite, a move that saw James I attempt to turn Ireland into a British pastiche. Protestant traders and farmers were sent to the Ulster region to occupy the land the Catholic nobility vacated for fear of persecution after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601-2. The influx of settlers fatally ruptured Ulster’s social fabric, as the Gaelic majority were forced to work for the new Protestant landowning minority on land they once owned. Those who had the audacity to respond resentfully to the invasion were treated as primitive terrorists. And thus, centuries of sectarianism were born, in Britain’s attempt to ‘solve’ the ‘Irish problem.’

Several questions arise from this vindictive policy: why did the Calvinists come in wave after wave to Ireland if they despised the dominant Catholic population so much? And why do Brits today think that those of Gaelic descent radiate animosity towards British institutions? An aggrieved peasant getting drunk and phoning their local radio station to rant about the extortionate tithe they had to pay was simply not an effective form of protest then, nor I fear is it now.

Whenever Britain’s ruling class has interfered in other states, the Tory press has portrayed their actions as economically civilising or militarily noble. Indigenous populations who resist Western diktats have almost always been dubbed terrorists, thereby making anybody who defends them a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. The same barbaric spin is applied to domestic unrest. Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson acknowledged in ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’ that innocent people were hurt during the Brixton riots of 1981. ‘An wan an two innocent get mar/ but wha / noh so it go sometime inna war ein star’, he mused ominously. Like Sartre, Johnson’s callous dismissal of innocents’ suffering was wrong. The problem, however, is that when oppressed people feel legitimately angry at the British ruling class, violence, as Sartre argued, is the last weapon in the armoury. Resentment, toxic and febrile, mounts so considerably over time that violence becomes the only way to articulate fury. Unfortunately, history has taught us that innocent people are often hurt in the backlash. But were those black Londoners terrorists? Of course not- they were driven to hatred by cumulative socio-political influences, mainly the racist Metropolitan Police, whose officers consistently abused their stop and search powers.

The taking of an innocent life does not bring back the dead, but the righteous anger of those who fought British imperialism and state oppression expressed itself in legitimate forms of concentrated resistance against state apparatus, which, inexcusably, had terrible consequences for working–class Britons on too many occasions. Black Britons had had enough of the ruling class actively discriminating against them through legal and political measures, and they expressed their disenfranchisement violently – how can one be surprised by that? Passive methods of protest, such as writing letters en masse to local police chiefs complaining in the strongest possible terms that racial profiling is alienating is not the way to secure justice. Irish communities of yesterday and black communities of today chose to fight back, rather than lie down and die. Targeted resistance against state apparatus is a transformative process, turning the working-class from subjects of oppression into agents of positive change. When people have been humiliated ad infinitum, violence is all too often the only language that can colonise the eyes and ears of the state.

The effects of British occupation have been documented by Irish intellectuals caught in the tension between criticising Britain and writing in the oppressor’s language. Satirist Jonathan Swift’s 1729 A Modest Proposal wittily mocked imperialistic cruelty by suggesting the rural poor could sell their children as food to the Protestant ruling class to make a living. Poet Eavan Boland explores the dissolution of the Gaelic tongue in poems like ‘A Habitable Grief’, in which Gaelic is presented as a strange relic from an obsolete world. By the end of the 19th century, English was Ireland’s first language, having been forced upon the population by the ruling class. Whereas English was intertwined with commerce, Gaelic was quarantined in rural areas and plagued by associations with backwardness. Sadly, Swift, Boland and others like them could only immortalise suffering in literature for future generations to absorb, rather than instigate a peaceful revolution resulting in the total expulsion of the British ruling class.

All of which brings us back to Sartre’s argument. IRA members believed, and rightly so, that Britain was an occupying force arrogantly trying to bend Ireland to its will. The IRA however tarnished the cause for Irish independence, perhaps forever, by killing innocent British civilians. Arguably, their actions were motivated not just by independence, but a desire to give innocent Britons a taste of what innocent Catholics and Presbyterians experienced under British terror. It is utterly unjustifiable, but not quite as shocking as politicians of all stripes responding with sneering incredulity to a dispossessed people retaliating against their bullying oppressor. The IRA’s motives were echoed by the terrorists who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. Their striking claims that they wanted to give Britain a taste of the terror Islamic populations in the Middle East face every day as a result of Western imperialism were brushed aside by the ruling class. Like Rigby’s killers, the IRA did not materialise out of thin air: they were a symptom of British terror that Tory commentators like Stanley try to veil. ‘Democratic’ policies like internment, introduced under the odious Edward Heath, and Margaret Thatcher’s suppression of Sinn Fein during the eighties, are banished to columns penned by the famously obscure. These injustices are ignored every time social disquiet in Ireland’s north occurs. The BBC’s coverage neglects intellectual nuance due to their pro-establishment bias, perpetuating ignorance and prejudice.

Republicans, peaceful and murderous, lived the history of their forebears who wanted Irish self-determination. The question for proponents of a united Ireland like myself is would I be happy if, Jimi Hendrix forbid, a family member or friend was killed or maimed in the cause for independence? The answer today, tomorrow and forever is unequivocally no. Regrettably, I have to waste precious words spelling out that I despise the murder of the British working-class at the bombs of the IRA, the first victims of the backlash against British imperialism, due to my support for independence.

This article is not intended to speak for the whole of Ireland, apologise for murder or perpetuate a whining sense of victimhood. I am a proud member of the Irish diaspora, articulating a sense of injustice which I feel is ignored by some of the population and the BBC. Suffering, rebellion and treachery are significant constituents of modern Irish identities, but are subordinate to the cultural and literary influence of writers like Swift and Boland, the true sculptors of Irish identities.

The IRA didn’t spring out of the ground: they lived a history of suffering their ancestors experienced and taught them, but murdering innocent Britons was a crime that made them no better than the imperialists who raped Ireland. McDonnell was made to apologise for backing murderous Republicans, but there appears to be no sign of the current government, our wretched monarch and the ruling elite collectively apologising for the damage done to Ireland. Acknowledging your predecessors’ crimes is one way the current ruling class can atone for the past and show the descendants of the oppressed that they are attempting to reshape Britain’s image. This is, however, fanciful thinking: the closest Ireland has gotten to an apology was during the Queen’s visit to Ireland in 2011, in which she sidled up to expiation, took a look and veered away, terrified of what it might unlock.

Britain’s bloody legacy must never be forgotten, and reparations should be paid to the victims of British imperialism, wherever they may be.