Flight of the Earls

plantation of Northern Ireland

plantation of Ulster, shurely?

Anyway the thought experiment is interesting — especially the comparison with land in Scotland — clearances and Famine may perhaps represent different paths from same starting point. But one could also argue that Ireland got its indigenous aristocracy anyway, with the stultifying effects that you describe. Witness the sidelining of the more socialist elements in the Land League and the nationalist movement (from Davitt to Connolly), the sectors of the economy in the Free State/Republic that benefitted from protectionist policies, and then of course the circle that grew up around Fianna Fail even before Haughey (Cement Roadstone) but culminating then in the corruption of his career. Note also Haughey’s careful choice to make Francois Mitterand his role model, perhaps understanding well that the people wouldn’t mind an upper class as long as it had a Republican veneer.

right, sorry, Ulster! Thanks, p.

I suppose what I’m wondering about is the difference between elites that arose from different classes or tribes, and an incumbent aristocracy.

I did think about the quite conscious sidelining of the socialist elements between the Easter Rising and the establishment of Saorstat Eireann, wondering if they might have retained their prominence in a class-oriented politics.

a self-regarding aristocracy may well have arrested our development in many ways, by acting as a conservatising and corrupting force.
It is hard to think of a Western European country with a history more conservative, corrupt, and arrested up until the very recent past – but perhaps with a native aristocracy things would have been even worse. Is that your point?

Thanks for a v. thought-provoking post. On the Famine, the pessimist in me would go with your darker notion. The solidarity of ruling classes with the misery of the poor has been limited, always and everywhere. Even at the time of a spectacular catastrophe, I doubt that sentimental ties of ethnicity would have weighed much against the prospect of more land and more power.

The survival of a native aristocracy might also have contributed to a stronger military and militarist tradition in Ireland. For all Ireland’s faults, militarism in its political culture isn’t currently one of them: I wonder if this might be different if there had been centuries of aristos romanticizing the cavalry, etc.

One thing that occurs to me is that had the Earls remained and reached some kind of accommodation with the English crown, then the overall relations between the two kingdoms would have altered so as to change the way the English, later British, nation evolved. It’s conceivable that the House of Stuart might have survived and thus no Glorious Revolution. As well as altering the trajectory of Britain’s parliamentary system of government, the survival of the Stuart dynasty would have made Britain somehow less resolutely protestant. In other words, militant anti-catholicism might not have been as crucial an instrument in generating the sort of patriotism that was mobilised in “forging the nation”, as the title of Linda Colley’s marvelous book has it.

I remember reading (forget where, alas) that what the Flight of the Earls did was deprive Ireland of a class of educated people, leaving behind the impoverished, illiterate peasants. I do not know if that is really true or not.

However, the cynical side of me surmises that any native Irish aristocracy would have more likely rushed into some kind of accord with its fellow aristocrats in Britain rather than side with their own peasant countrymen. With a few exceptions I believe that butt-covering and personal gain would have trumped national solidarity.

Aristocracies, by and large, don’t have a great track record when it comes to looking after the interests of the poor and working-class. On the other hand, a strong middle class and artisan class (as opposed to a society comprised mostly of aristocrats on the one hand and rural farm laborers on the other) appears to offer the greatest advantage to the largest number of people.

The successors to the earls are still around, though sadly/amusingly infitrated by scammers, like many decayed princely houses. Some apparently want to return as Irish cultural figures.

That website is awesome, and Mr Murphy’s dedication to the cause of transparency and accountability in Irish genealogy truly awe-inspiring (“Something of the labour involved,” he writes, “is shown by the fact that over the past three years I have expended over 1,500 hours (unpaid) checking the pedigrees of Gaelic Chiefs”). Personally, I’m all for taking a hard line against mere pretenders to Gaelic chieftainship: I think they should all be transported to Botany Bay or something.

This post is an interesting thought experiment. But at the risk of sounding snarky, I’d like to register my objection to the underlying whiggishness of the exercise. I mean “whiggish” in an historiographical and not necessarily political sense.

But chatting to some Irish ex-pats in Brussels recently, I found myself wondering aloud if the English actually did us a favour.

The “us” here apparently referring to the citizens of contemporary Ireland, who are, by all (or almost all) accounts, confident, forward-looking, flush with cash, and roaring like Celtic tigers? And more power to them. But then, historical questions having been raised, there’s not just this “us” to consider. There is also the historical “they.” The “them” of the past who are not the “us” of your present, the people who were actually there. Or perhaps it’s the “us” as found in your past, or perhaps it’s the somewhere in between the “us” and the “them” … your mileage may vary.

But anyway, it’s not okay, I think, to answer questions about what happened and to whom in the past, and who did what to whom, or who did what with what impact on whom, and etc., with reference almost solely to how it all turned out in the wash 400 years later. For those who suffered the direct and immediate effects of colonization, colonization was no kind of “favour,” is what I mean to say, I guess. Also, it really sorta sucked to suffer under the penal laws circa 1750, an earlier Catholic emancipation would have been a good thing for the historically particular “they” of that specific past, whose suffering probably not retroactively redeemed by what O’Connell achieved 80 years later, unless the living, breathing people of one era are to be viewed as just so much cannon fodder for, or so many sacrificial lambs to, the march of progressive history? But an interesting thought experiment nonetheless, and I hope I don’t sound too snarky.

In this thread and elsewhere, they are implicitly imagined as having no more substantial relation to the country than a passing cloud.

“Imagined” they may be, but they still control a substantial part of the land of Ireland behing the scenes, whether as absentee landlords living in the UK or still ensconsed in their big houses here.

On the “whiggishness” question, it also bears note that the ‘Earl of Tyrone’ is an English title bestowed on The O’Neills, and that Hugh O’Neill was also Aodh Mór Ó Néill, from what was still a decidedly non-feudal (and non-anglocentric) culture.

The survival of a native aristocracy might also have contributed to a stronger military and militarist tradition in Ireland. For all Ireland’s faults, militarism in its political culture isn’t currently one of them.

Not altogether sure about this. There’s certainly a fair amount of violence in Irish political culture.

genevieve: anyone who describes Northern Ireland as “still a colony” probably shouldn’t say anything at all about anything until he or she has read a book or two.

But one of the remarkable things about the South post-1923 is, first, how small a role all violence played in politics

Apart from the Blueshirts and the IRA. 1920s and 1930s politics in Ireland were certainly more violent than in Britain. They played a small role by European standards, certainly.

and, second, what a miniscule part the army played in the political and cultural life of the country.

Depends which army you mean, doesn’t it? There’s certainly, rightly or wrongly, a good deal of romanticising of “the volunteer” in Irish culture.

Interesting counterfactual: although I remember some theorizing that the strong role the Catholic Church had in (Southern) Irish society up until, oh, 2-3 decades ago was because the priest became a substitute for the local aristo as a figurehead for local communities for e.g. resolving disputes between community members, etc.

Ajay, I have read some books. If you can recommend some others, that would be beaut thanks. If ‘colony’ is too curt and dismissive a word for discussion – and you are probably right about that – nonetheless I think my points about impoverishment of political culture through the effects of colonisation still stand.

#27 You’re right that relative homogeneity was a great help to democracy, but what “cleansing”? Do you mean partition itself or something else?

The percentage of Protestants in the 26 counties dropped substantially over 80 years, but I don’t know the how and why. There were no real pogroms in the early 1920s, unless you count the burning of some of the large estates of Protestant aristocracy. Other than the general influence of the RC Church in intermarriage, education etc., I don’t really know why the Protestant population in the South declined. But my impression is that it was a gradual process, the dissipation of a fairly scattered minority.

Nice post Maria!

I think the big question here is what role might a native aristocracy have taken in the religious wars of the following century, particularly a) the English Civil War, and Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland (perhaps the biggest contributing factor to the ‘famine’) and b) the Williamite war.

Had these wars turned out differently, who knows what might have happened in the 19th century? A major setback for the English Revolution? An early restoration of the English Crown? The consequences not just for Ireland and Britain but for Europe and the world might have been staggering.

We might have seen yet more religious wars, for instance – especially had William been defeated at the Boyne.

A less powerful English parliament might have stunted British imperial and mercantile development. England might have looked more agrarian, more insular, and more like France (say) by the time of the French revolution, not to mention the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848.

But hey – that’s an enormous ‘if’. But I couldn’t see the Puritans ‘buying off’ a catholic aristocracy. I think an extant native aristocracy in Ireland would have strenghtened the hand of the English Crown. By how much? Difficult to say: but one thing people often forget is the relatively comparable size in terms of population of Britain and Ireland at that time. We’re used (post famine) to thinking of Britain as having a much higher population, of being much more important than Ireland. But I remember reading somewhere that in 1798 the population of Britain was 12 million while the population of Ireland was 8 million. (Yes folks – thats 3 million more than today’s Irish population.) So the relative importance of the threat of Catholic Ireland to Protestant Britain was far greater than we can probably imagine.