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.

It was like an arrow to the heart: it was the same thing I had seen in Ireland that I was seeing at Alert Bay. It would take a great long spiel to work it out, but I was seeing a population that had been interrupted. Only confident among their own; unable or unwilling to walk up to the stranger and just take possession of their own place. They too had been robbed of their history. They too would need a long while to get back on their feet, just to walk out and around the place.
The English were criminals; the Earls were worse.

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.

Alternatively, it could have reduced secessionist tendencies, and maybe accelerated Home Rule in the 1800s/early 1900s (that is, if there’d been parliamentary union in the first place). With the Irish delegation albeit reduced, remaining in Westminister, allied with the liberals, maybe the UK would have had a less domination by the Conservatives. (Or maybe the Irish delegation, being more aristocratic, would have been more aligned with the Tories, and might have reduced Tory opposition to Home Rule.)

If there was no Sinn Fein and 1920s IRA, then there’s no Michael Collins to pioneer urban guerilla tactics: maybe a decade or two more before the car bomb got invented. As early national independence movements used Collins as inspiration (including the Zionists fighting against Britain’s mandate in Palestine), effects could have been far-reaching.

The problem for Ireland was, I believe, not the loss of its native aristocracy but the lack of a class of Catholic artists and writers – the people most likely to give a toss about the poor and disenfranchised. (After all, it was a writer, Charles Dickens, who really made people aware of the plight of the poor in industrial England. Those who don’t care about faceless statistics do care about Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim.)

The anti-catholic Penal Laws made sure that there was no real Irish Catholic educated/creative class for a long while; however, I bet you cold hard cash that any aristos remaining would have circumvented those laws by sending their kids to be educated in France or Spain or somewhere, rather than trying to repeal the laws to the benefit of the illiterate unwashed.

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.

In the North, yes, especially of the paramilitary kind. But one of the remarkable things about the South post-1923 is, first, how small a role all violence played in politics and, second, what a miniscule part the army played in the political and cultural life of the country. (It’s a miniscule army, for one thing.) If there is a great risk for the Republic in the peace process, it is that this largely non-violent political culture might be undermined by increasing Northern influence.

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.

As someone from Australia whose family is untraceable due to the irruptions caused by penury and famine, I do think this is a grossly utilitarian view of the Catholic emancipation problem. A bit like saying American slaves should have waited longer to be freed in the interests of the growth of mass plebeian politics, don’t you think? (Perhaps a long bow to draw, but after all an awful lot of Irish were transported as bonded slaves, for stealing food because they were hungry.)

I think the Irish hold on democracy could be viewed in some circles as still a little tenuous: given that no one will come forward to identify Robert McCartney’s murderers in the 21st century, certainly the rule of law in the North (still, of course, a colony of your great parliamentary teacher) has to be held in question. Ireland probably has more in common with Italy than with any other younger European democracy – also a victim of non-existent central government from the 16th century onwards, and still struggling to control highly sophisticated and corrosive criminal elements (though not for quite the same reasons).

Given that the French, Spanish and English monarchies were the first in Western Europe to enjoy the benefits of centralised power and complete transition from feudal economics in the 16th century, it’s clear that the Irish and Scots never stood a chance of not being colonised, or taken seriously as national entities.

These rather trenchant criticisms aside, I am prepared to take your post more as a rebuttal of the simplistic sentimentalism that seeks to impose a Celtic dreaming on Irish problems, i.e. what would it be like with some Earls?? and in that sense it’s a praiseworthy exercise.

“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.