Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History. Hugh Williams
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Название: Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

Автор: Hugh Williams

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9780007309504

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СКАЧАТЬ had arrived in Ulster. But despite the large numbers of new arrivals they remained in a minority, often resented and viewed with suspicion. The plantation would never succeed in its purpose of trying to turn Ireland into a compliant offshoot of Britain.

      It seemed to many people in Ireland as if their country, owned by absentee landlords and ruled by a government that had no knowledge of its problems, had been abandoned to its fate. The cause of independence, born out of resentment, was now imbued with hatred.

      Gladstone had already carried out some Irish reforms by the time he presented his Home Rule Bill in 1886. In his first administration between 1868 and 1874 he had disestablished the Irish Church, abolishing the taxes people had to pay to a Church they did not believe in and redistributing much of its wealth to the Poor Law Board to provide relief for the impoverished. He had also tried to improve conditions for Irish tenant farmers by introducing legislation to protect them against being charged excessive rents by their landlords, but this had not been particularly effective. Home Rule was a far bigger step and one where Gladstone, among British politicians, was very much on his own. The Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant Anglo-Irishman converted to the cause of Irish independence, had been campaigning for self-government since the 1870s, and helped convince Gladstone of the need to do something. Parnell did not much like the bill Gladstone proposed – in his view it did not go far enough – but he decided to support it because it seemed to be better than nothing. It gave Ireland its own assembly through which it could legislate on its own affairs, but matters of foreign policy and trade would continue to reside with Britain whose Lord Lieutenant retained executive power. It was more devolution than Home Rule – but for the time in which it was presented it was still radical. Gladstone, by now seventy-six years old, defended it in one of the greatest speeches of his long career: ‘Go into the length and breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find, if you can, a single voice, a single book … in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation.’ Finishing with a passionate flourish, he declared: ‘Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this bill.’ History is what it is: it does not allow for hindsight. But anyone surveying Britain’s relations with Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day and then reading Gladstone’s words in defence of Home Rule would be forgiven for sighing ‘If only’, or wondering ‘What if?’

      ‘find, if you can, a single voice, a single book … in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation

      Gladstone’s bill was rejected by thirty votes. In the election that followed his government was defeated. He came back to power in 1892 when once again he brought a Home Rule Bill before Parliament. This time he won a majority in the House of Commons, but the House of Lords threw it out. Gladstone was by this time eighty-three. In 1894 he retired from politics and died four years later. Parnell, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, died in 1891: his health deteriorated after he was forced out of power following a scandal in which he was cited as corespondent in a divorce case. Home Rule had lost its boldest and most energetic evangelists. Caution tempered by misgiving was now its guide: the result for Britain and Ireland was disastrous.

      The Liberals were in government again from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War. They did not possess the same vision for Home Rule as Gladstone but they were grateful for the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party in their battle with the Conservative House of Lords. In 1911 they brought forward a Home Rule Bill very similar to the one Gladstone had proposed eighteen years before. This time it was not just Conservative opposition they faced. The Ulster Protestants, led by Sir Edward Carson, set their face against any notion of separation from Britain. Carson was a leading lawyer who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde in 1895 with, in Wilde’s phrase, ‘all the added bitterness of an old friend’. (The two men had been at Trinity College, Dublin together.) Carson led Protestant opposition to Home Rule. In 1912 he organised the signing of the ‘Ulster Covenant’ by half a million men and women, which declared they would ‘use all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’. All means necessary appeared to include force: Carson founded a militia group called the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912.

      The Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, dithered and then compromised. As war began in Europe in 1914 a Home Rule Bill received royal assent – but with two significant amendments. The first was that Ulster was to be temporarily excluded from the agreement: its final position was to be decided at a later stage. The second – and in the end most significant – was that the whole bill was not to be enacted for at least a year when the confident politicians of early twentieth-century Britain expected the war to be over. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, encouraged Irishmen to join Britain and its allies in the fight against Germany. There was not long to wait before Ireland would be free and the war would be won.

      While Britain’s warlike optimism died in the trenches of the Western Front, Ireland’s dreams of peace were killed on the streets of Dublin. At Easter 1916, a group of Irish republicans staged a rebellion against British rule. It was suppressed and its leaders executed, but an armed struggle against British occupation had begun. In 1921 the British government agreed to the creation of an Irish Free State, but the six counties of Northern Ireland were allowed to secede and remain part of the United Kingdom. Ireland had been partitioned and divided along sectarian lines. This was something which all those who had fought for Home Rule, both Catholic and Protestant, and many of the Ulstermen who had opposed it, including Edward Carson, had never wanted and never envisaged.

      Today, in 2008, a power-sharing assembly with devolved powers administers the affairs of Northern Ireland. After thirty years of dissension and bloodshed peace has returned to Ulster.

      The Good Friday Agreement 1998

      Attempts to end ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland have had many false starts. In 1997, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, anxious to bring them to an end once and for all, announced the beginning of a new series of all-party talks. They started in September 1997 and ended the following Easter with the Good Friday Agreement.

      The Good Friday Agreement of 10th April 1998 was an important turning point in the modern history of Ireland. It announced the introduction of devolved government to Northern Ireland on what it called a ‘stable and inclusive basis’ and created human rights and equality commissions. It agreed to the early release of terrorist prisoners. It demanded the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. It promised reforms of the criminal justice system and the police. The government of the Republic of Ireland was brought into the process through a formal ‘ministerial conference’ in which it would meet regularly and formally with members of the Northern Ireland administration.

      The Agreement was ratified by two referendums – one in the North, in which 71 per cent of the people agreed to it, the other in the South when more than 94 per cent agreed. There was one further significant terrorist incident. A group calling itself the ‘Real IRA’ set off a bomb in Omagh in August 1998, killing twenty-nine people. Failure to agree on the process for decommissioning weapons delayed final agreement even further, but in May 2007, following local elections, the Northern Ireland Assembly resumed its administration of the province on a power-sharing basis.

      ‘The Troubles’, as they are called, began in the late 1960s when the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland began to protest against what they believed to be discrimination by the Protestant majority. Their grievances developed into violent civil unrest. The Catholic cause was supported by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, ‘the Provos’, whose members saw themselves as the direct descendants of those who had first fought on the streets of Dublin in 1916. The Protestants had their own militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which took its name, although СКАЧАТЬ