Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 Sean Farrell Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006, by Paul Bew, 632 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. $75.00 Burke is back. One of the hallmarks of recent scholarship on late eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Ireland has been a renewed appreciation for the subtlety and significance of Edmund Burke’s thought. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paul Bew’s important and thoughtful new study of modern Irish politics. Bew’s overarching argument centers on Burke’s notion that Anglo-Irish relations would only work if there were a real and substantive union between Britain and Ireland, and specifically, one that featured Catholic emancipation and political integration. While Bew details a wide and often surprising range of advocates for such an approach—the portrayals of Castlereagh and Pitt are particularly memorable—it is the consistent failure to act along Burkean lines that dominates British governance in Ireland across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Henry Grattan famously argued, this was a legislative union rather than the true identification of two nations, a point made most clearly by British policy failures during the horrors of the Great Famine. Bew is at his caustic best when describing the yawning gap between British and Irish sentiment: “For Trevelyan, contemplating his role in feeding of hundreds of thousands, this could only be a benign development; Ireland now knew how much England cared. For many in Ireland, however, that was precisely the problem.” Although Bew’s narrative starts with this searching critique of the British political class’s lack of generosity and creativity, Irish nationalism does not escape unscathed. For all of the rhetorical celebration of Tone and Davis, Bew finds that Irish nationalism has rarely risen above its essentially sectarian core. Throughout the book Bew’s argument underlines nationalists’ and Unionists’ trenchant consistency in failing to construct a workable via media. Among many poignant examples, Daniel O’Connell’s remarkable inability to make even the smallest gestures of inclusivity to William Sharman Crawford and potentially sympathetic Ulster Presbyterian reformers remains the most illustrative of this failure of imagination. There is nothing particularly novel about writing an historical narrative around the British failure to construct humane and generous relationships with Ireland and the Irish failure to bridge sectarian enmities; in lesser hands, this challenging book would have run the risk of caricature. That it does not do so testifies to Bew’s skill as an historian and his unrivaled knowledge of this complex terrain. He weaves together portraits of well-known leaders (among whom Parnell, predictably, stands out) with unheralded figures like Cooke Taylor and [End Page 145] William Cusack Smith. Moreover, Bew manages to acknowledge sectarianism’s central place in modern Irish history without sacrificing the nuance and complexity that the best modern scholarship has infused into our understanding of the modern Irish experience. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws. It is much stronger on the nineteenth century than on the twentieth, particularly after 1914. In part this is a simple matter of space; Bew’s book devotes seven-and-a-half chapters to the nineteenth century and a mere three-and-a-half to the twentieth. Given Bew’s expertise on the latter century, one wonders whether this was a decision made in the offices of the publisher. If so, it does real damage: much of the richness and nuance that marks Bew’s handling of nineteenth-century material is simply not there in later chapters. Given the recent work on de Valéra, his treatment here seems particularly undeveloped. But the problem is not just brevity. The Burkean framework that gives the nineteenth-century material power and coherence does not work as well for the twentieth century, except in Bew’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where it gives rise to some creative and provocative comparisons. And the abbreviated focus on political enmity gives short shrift to such crucial developments as the Republic’s entry into the European Community. But it would be wrong to end on such a negative note. This is significant and humane work, a “must read” for anyone interested in modern...