AUGUST 10, 2016
Winston Churchill, 3 December 1925.
Debates over Winston Churchill lend themselves to easy stereotypes, and this is particularly so when discussing his career in relation to Ireland. Churchill’s defense of imperialism, his family’s prominent role (father and son) in the tortured history of Home Rule and modern Irish nationalism, and his occasional use of pungent language in describing Irish traits, history, and leaders all lend themselves to caricature.
The accomplished Belfast-born historian Paul Bew refuses to fall victim to this temptation in his new concise book,Churchill and Ireland. He weaves a story of Churchill’s engagement on Irish issues that highlights consistency rather than excess, a deep but ultimately unrealizable belief in shared Anglo-Irish cultural ties that could overcome often deep political hostility, and a ruthless and pragmatic willingness to continue to try to engineer a satisfactory answer to a deep, complex, and enduring political rivalry. The book is a nuanced and ultimately fair portrait of a politician wrestling with a problem that ultimately proved intractable — at least in his lifetime. It will also make many readers squirm with discomfort, because it is inherently sympathetic to the man.
The first section of the book examines Churchill’s father Randolph and his impact on the Irish problem — the ongoing struggle to incorporate Irish identity into the United Kingdom after the Act of Union in 1801. As Bew points out, bothfather and son followed an interesting political transformation. Each began with a strong unionist stance. Each then engaged closely with constitutional nationalism, which meant, in the father’s case, building a friendship with Charles Stewart Parnell, whose Irish party was indirectly linked to more radical and violent activism in the form of the Land League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Winston, of course, converted to becoming one of the strongest supporters of Home Rule — the effort to enable some level of Irish self-government by creating an Irish parliament with limited powers under Westminster — in the Liberal Party. Both then shifted course again to a defense of Ulster Unionism — recognizing that the Protestant community of Northern Ireland had its own unique identity and relationship to the United Kingdom. This required a stark act of political manipulation on the part of the father, playing the “Orange Card” — mobilizing the most sectarian sentiments in the Protestant community and threatening unconstitutional opposition to any Parliamentary legislation if necessary – to defeat Gladstone’s Home Rule bill in 1886. This mobilization of militancy ironically came back to haunt the son with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers and near-civil war in 1914 — but Winston, like his father, ultimately defended the Ulster Unionist community and became an architect of Ireland’s partition.
