BELFAST — If you are at the end of your rope about how screwed up the world is, if you think that it has become hopeless and that there will never be peace in this world, you need to go to Northern Ireland.
What has happened is nothing short of a miracle, but it was a miracle brought on by work and perseverance, luck and understanding. To see what I mean, you have to know — as they say there — a “wee bit” of history. Here are the bare bones. (To learn more, click here to read this ancestry.com Web site.)
Ireland was originally settled about 10,000 years ago. It suffered invasions by the Celts, the Vikings and the Normans, just to name a few. Several hundred years after Christ was born, the Church began the job of introducing Christianity to the country. Starting around the last third of the 12th century, England became involved in a long, bloody attempt to control the island. By 1603, England was pretty much in control of Ireland. What followed set the stage for “The Troubles” we read about for years and in which thousands died.
An Englishman named Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) has become the symbol of English savagery in Ireland. Cromwell was a convert to radical Puritanism at a relatively early age. He was involved in both of the English civil wars of the time, was rabidly anti-Catholic and signed the death warrant for King Charles I. In 1649, Charles was executed and the short-lived Commonwealth of England was born.
The Irish had seized on the English civil wars as an opportunity to rid themselves of an invader, and in 1641 a major rebellion began. Both English and Irish civilians were massacred by the other side in a war the Irish had essentially won by the time Cromwell came to power in England.
Cromwell saw Ireland as a threat to the Commonwealth both because of the successful rebellion and because it was heavily Catholic. He invaded Ireland in 1649, threw Catholics off their land, installed Protestant landlords and set the tone for what was to follow. Catholicism was banned, and through execution of Catholics, selling Catholics into slavery in other countries or forcing Catholic emigration, Catholic population in Ireland was reduced from about 1,500,000 to 500,000 in a very short time. Land taken from the Catholics was given to the Protestants from England and Scotland who had supported Cromwell.
The best land was in the north, in what is now Ulster, so that is where the greatest seizures of land took place. The ousted Irish were sent to the part of the island with the worst land, a place called Connacht. The word from the English Parliament was that the Irish could “Go to Connacht or go to Hell.”
The English troops had plenty of swords with which to help those who refused Connacht to go to the other place.
After that, there were repeated rebellions. Some were partially successful for a time. Most were totally unsuccessful, and Ireland developed a band of martyrs, hanged or shot by English hands. Over time, the major landlords had become absentee, preferring London to the wilds of Ireland. The Irish had become largely dependent on the potato crop for food and income. In 1845 there was an ominous partial failure of the potato crop because of a fungus which caused the potatoes to rot in the ground.
In 1846, there was a total failure of the crop and people began starving. England kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the starvation. A debate still rages over whether food was exported from a starving population because of English indifference, ignorance, perceived necessity (the absentee landlords had expenses, after all) or to accomplish genocide. It made little difference to the Irish: They died all the same.
For many, emigration became the only way to avoid certain death. By 1849, the population of Ireland had dropped by more than 2 million people (nearly 40 percent of the population) due to starvation and flight to avoid starvation. If you were an Irish parent, it made little difference if your children died or emigrated. You would neither see nor hear from them again, and if they emigrated, you would never know if they survived.
At Easter, 1916, a particularly pointless rebellion was staged in Dublin. It was met by an equally pointless English reaction. Thinking that England was too bogged down in the trenches of World War I to respond, a group of poets and students seized the General Post Office in Dublin and announced the creation of the Irish Republic. Any military person could have told them that this was the wrong place to make a stand. It was close enough to the river so that English gunboats simply steamed into position and shelled them into surrender. Had it ended there, it likely would have been just another unsuccessful rebellion. But it did not.
The English decided that this was a plot hatched in concert with the Germans, and shot the leaders who had survived the shelling, including one who had been badly injured and was probably dying anyway but was propped up in a chair to face a firing squad. In so doing, England created martyrs.
There was international outrage and pressure on England to cause something to happen, and in 1921, the Irish Free State was created, still a part of the UK, but with somewhat increased home rule. Soon the violence erupted again, and finally, in 1949, the Republic of Ireland was created, an independent nation entirely free of English control. But there was a hitch. The Republic was made from 26 counties. Ireland had 32 counties. The six northern counties remained part of the United Kingdom, loyal to the Crown. It was no accident that they were the counties with the greatest population of descendants of English and Scots settlers, nor was it an accident that these counties contained the bulk of the source of Ireland’s wealth.
But the formation of the Republic did not end the conflict between those loyal to the Republic (the Nationalists) and those loyal to the Crown (the Loyalists). Both had committed paramilitary organizations (the Loyalists also had the Royal Army), and both sides were fueled by a combination of patriotism and religious intolerance. In the eyes of the Nationalists, those loyal to the Crown were traitors to their country by supporting a murderous oppressor. The Loyalists considered the Nationalists to be murderous traitors to the Crown. The two groups were blood enemies, often sworn to kill each other on sight.
The attitude of the Nationalists was summed up in a song written by poet Dominic Behan about a 20-year-old Nationalist fighter killed in the early 1950s. The song is called “The Patriot Game”:
“This Ireland of mine has for long been half free….
Six counties are under John Bull’s tyranny…..
I learned all my life cruel England’s to blame,
So now I am part of the patriot game.”
By the late 1960s, both parts of the island had descended into a hell that became known as “The Troubles.” For the next 30 years, thousands of Loyalists and Nationalists alike were bombed, kidnapped, murdered, tortured and imprisoned. British troops and tanks patrolled the streets of Belfast, further inflaming Nationalist anger. Checkpoints were set up everywhere. There were casualties on both sides, but the brunt of the violence was visited on the population of the North, especially Belfast.
The population of Ireland is less than half that of Los Angeles County. Very few people immigrated into Ireland during The Troubles. The people who did not leave Ireland tended to stay in the areas where they were born. These three factors dictated that it was not long before much of the population of both North and South knew or knew of someone whose lives had been visited with tragedy by this horror. This was especially true of those who lived in the North. There, both Loyalists and Nationalists; Protestants and Catholics had plenty of reason to hate and hate.
We have a friend named Andrew. Andrew was born in the mid-’50s and was raised in the Irish Republic in Dublin. As a young man, he was employed by a number of companies teaching people how to use computer applications. His job took him to Belfast regularly.
In those days, passage from the Republic to Ulster (as the North is known) was either by train or car. If by car, it was on a two-lane road with heavily armored checkpoints manned by people with machine guns. Once into Ulster, British Army fortifications could be seen everywhere. There were parts of Belfast in which the life expectancy of a Loyalist would be measured in minutes, and other parts where a Nationalist would suffer a similar fate.
On April 12, 2008, we drove from Dublin around the beautiful Mountains of Mourne up to Belfast with Andrew. It was a gorgeous day, mostly sunshine with a few occasional drops of rain (after all, we were in Ireland). As they say here, it was lovely.
We drove north on a four-lane freeway and would not have known we had crossed the border from the Republic to Ulster if Andrew had not told us. Not only are there no checkpoints, the fortifications around the old checkpoints have been removed, so there are no reminders that they even existed.
Once in the city, one can see some of the armored gates that were installed to separate the warring factions, but now they are blocked open instead of being blocked shut. They were left as tourist attractions, not because of a fear they will be needed again.
We spent a few days traveling all over Ulster in a car with license plates from the Republic, with a friend who speaks with an obvious Dublin accent, and yet, we could not have been treated better.
You have to understand — much of the carnage of The Troubles was paid for by Americans of Irish descent who donated money to pay for guns and bombs. The guns were fired and the bombs were detonated by people from the Republic, but Americans paid for them. The citizens of Ulster are very well aware of those facts.
We were the enemy a few short years ago; one Nationalist and two Americans in a car with Republic license plates. It would have been worth our lives just a dozen years ago to do what we did. I not only felt no threat, I felt welcome and safe, warmly greeted wherever we went.
How did this happen? Blood enemies, people deemed responsible for death and destruction driving around the Ulster countryside, being treated very well?
Several things came together. Foremost was that the advent of the computer and the Internet made the Irish Republic into an international economic force. In short, the people of the Republic were no longer looking at the riches of the North as their birthright. They were blessed with the fastest growing economy in Europe, if not the world. Second, along with that, it finally appeared to all parties that what had, for hundreds of years, been cast as a religious war was really all about economics.
The English had, as was their wont, kept the part of the country where the industry and money was. With the economic upturn in the South, the formerly poor relations in the Republic no longer needed to claim those riches because they got rich on their own. Suddenly, whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant made no difference. Your money spent as well as anybody else’s money did.
Finally, people just got sick of it. Maybe that was the most important part. And it was not just the people in Ireland. Irish-Americans who had been supporting the IRA started listening to the people at home who did not want to have fighting and killing going on anymore. That support began drying up.
In 1998, the parties signed an agreement to stop the fighting. The fortresses and checkpoints were torn down, the tanks and soldiers went back to England and the mayhem stopped. It just stopped. It stopped after over 400 years of bloodshed and hatred because people no longer envied one another, or thought God was only on their side. And no group was left in crushing poverty.
There are lessons in here. One lesson might be that until the English occupation, the Irish did not have a central government. Nothing unites people like a common enemy. Another might be that calling a war religious does not really change the fact that it is probably about money and power. Another might be that people who think they have been cheated will fight forever. People who feel they are being treated fairly will figure out a way to get along.
All I know for sure is that as we sailed across the border from the Irish Republic into Ulster without even slowing down, I said to Andrew, “I cannot imagine what a wonderful feeling this must be.” And he said, “You have no idea, my man.”
He is right. I don’t.
Dugan Barr started practicing law in Redding in 1967 as an insurance defense lawyer working for William W. Coshow
In 1973, he formed his own firm doing plaintiff and defense work, primarily in the areas of personal injury and wrongful death. Since that time he has tried more than 200 civil jury cases to verdict. These cases cover a broad spectrum of the law,including personal injury, wrongful death, products liability, airplane crashes, boating accidents, dangerous condition of public property, legal malpractice, medical malpractice, realtor malpractice, accountant malpractice, insurance bad faith, lender liability and securities fraud.
He is married and has five children.
The offices of Barr & Mudford, LLP, are located at 1824 Court St. in Redding and can be reached at 243-8008.
