Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland, 1800–1921, by K. Theodore Hoppen

Abstract

This is a masterly study from a scholar who, over a fifty-year career, has securely established his claim to be regarded as one of the greatest historians of modern Ireland. This present book exhibits Hoppen’s characteristic strengths: witty and pellucid prose, careful but firm judgement and, above all, a vigorous analytical intelligence, which is simultaneously suspicious of airy theorising but unafraid of Big Ideas and their application. In fact, the central Big Idea of this compelling book is that, on the back of lengthy and bitter experience, British governments moved from the coercive application of ‘peculiarly Hibernian measures’ in the twenty years after about 1808, through a period in mid-century characterised by an essentially integrationist approach to the challenges of Ireland. After the mid-1860s, policy-makers shifted finally towards a process of differentiation which culminated logically in Home Rule and the grant of dominion status in 1921. The application of distinctive and coercive policies in the first decades of union failed, in Hoppen’s assessment, because, on the whole, the complexities of Ireland were bound with an indefatigable official and metropolitan ignorance of the island. Generally a measured judge, Hoppen combines summary justice with compelling detail in developing this case. Thus he argues that ‘British politicians in general ... seem almost to have gloried in their lack of interest in and knowledge of Irish affairs’: in particular Henry Addington ‘throughout his career seem to have possessed the attention span of a gnat when it came to Ireland’ (p. 34); Robert Peel, on assuming the office of Chief Secretary in 1812, found that Dublin Castle had no working library (p. 51); while Irish viceroys were consistently selected on the grounds of their wealth (and their concomitant ability to sustain the trappings of office) rather than for any symptoms of talent (p. 45). Assimilation or integration was pursued heroically (though not always consistently or well) for nearly half a century, but ultimately failed because, as Hoppen argues, from the mid-1860s ‘the whole character of the debate about how to secure a prosperous future for Ireland was beginning to change direction in response to sudden economic shocks, to more militant forms of nationalism in Ireland itself, and to ideological shifts among those who had thought most closely about how economic development might best be encouraged’ (p. 174).