THE CAUSES OF IRISH UNREST

BY DARRELL FIGGIS

[It will be remembered that Mr. Darrell Figgis was for seven years one of the leaders of the Sinn Fein Party, and that during the time of the Black and Tan Terror he, with the other leaders, lived in hourly peril of his life. Indeed, on one famed occasion he was put to the ordeal of seeing the rope prepared for his hanging, when he had fallen into the hands of one of these men mad with drink. In the elections of last June, however, he broke with Sinn Fein over the Michael Collins-De Valera Pact, and was returned at the head of the poll for County Dublin, receiving the largest vote in Ireland. He was Chairman of the Convention that drafted the Free State Constitution, and is now one of the most prominent members of its Legislature. In this article, writing out of his full and special knowledge, he throws a striking light on the present troubles in Ireland. THE EDITORS.]

Ar the outset it is essential to get out of mind one persistent fallacy, the causes for the dissemination of which lie in history. It is that Ireland is, and has ever been, given over to special and peculiar forms of perversity, and therefore cannot be accounted for by the rules that ordinarily apply to mankind. It would indeed be odd if it were to be found that these rules fell inoperative at the threshold of Irish consciousness: that Irish nature was, if not persistently superhuman, at least pertinaciously extra-human. A new and remarkable field of inquiry would be opened; and in fact Science might with justice be reproached that it had for so long neglected separate study of this new race of Martians. For everywhere, whatever fresh facet of Irish character history has turned to the light, the quaint assumption has always been that here is another extraordinary quality of this quite strange and altogether remarkable people. Either (so runs the legend) they are uncompromising idealists as never were uncompromising idealists before; or their foolhardy courage is of a foolhardiness peculiar to itself; or they are undiluted, mischievous criminals of an unplumbed and unplumbable depth of mischief and perversity unimaginable.

All this is, of course, mere nonsense. There are no such altogether exceptional races. Our human nature everywhere is compact of the same elements; and if the parts are variously mixed, the ingredients are the same. It reacts to the same causes. It is operated upon by the same laws. And to understand its curious displays it is necessary first to examine these causes and laws, and not to give hostages to ignorance and superstition by supposing the incredible.

There is, indeed, nothing incredible about the present position in Ireland. What would be incredible, rather, is if, given the same causes, any greatly different result had been attained. It is of course true that the Irish people have a distinct racial personality; but it is also true that had any other people passed through the same experience, they would today be in much the same case as the Irish. And inasmuch as Today, besides being the child of Yesterday, is the father of Tomorrow, before there can be any attempt to read the future, it is essential to tell the past, and so seize the continuity of events.

When it is looked at in this way, the present unrest in Ireland will be seen to fall into its right place, without the summoning of gnomes of evil to explain the mystery. It is not my intention to travel far backward in any detail. It is not necessary to do so. A brief survey is enough to enable one to catch the sequence of which the present troubles are but the outcome.

I

It will be admitted that seldom in the history of the world has the constitution of a nation been conceived under less promising circumstances. Yet even in this Ireland is not exceptional. Most nations that have founded new constitutions during these past few years have done so under conditions of upheaval and war, social and political. Indeed, in the nature of things, the prescription of a new constitution implies a period of disorder, either immediately preceding or then existent. Otherwise, it would generally happen, a new constitution would not be required; for a new constitution supposes that new sanctions and a new authority are necessary, under perhaps new forms

of political and social organization, for laws and combinations of necessity that are as old as the first groupings of humankind together.

In the case of Ireland, however, this previous decay of authority had lasted a very long time. There is not, within the range of my reading, any country that can even distantly approach the experience of Ireland in this matter. Out of seven centuries of dogged, intermittent war, many periods of which were continued for long stretches of years together, the first three, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, were spent under a fairly authoritative inland order, into the side of which the barb of a disputing outland order had stuck, threatening the very life by which it existed. The next two, the sixteenth and seventeenth, were spent under conditions of war that no historian has yet had the hardihood to defend, when the inland order was torn up by its roots, and an alien ascendancy planted in the country as landlords, taking rents from a people who until then had owned the land they tilled. The next century, the eighteenth, was spent by the nation in a state of acknowledged outlawry, in a misery and squalor that, despite the accounts of travellers, remain almost unbelievable. And the next, the nineteenth, was spent in almost unceasing revolt, revolt of one form or another, revolt that sprang, in all its forms, from an angry repudiation of the political and social and economic State that held sway in the country, and rebellion against the forms of law by which that State was maintained.

It was to this continuity that the Treaty of 1921 succeeded. It may be complained that this is to go back a long way in search for the causes of the present trouble. But it must be remembered that in no country today have law and order been given from the flame-clothed heights of a Sinai. They are the bequests of tradition, of experience remembered in the blood, of venerable practice and habit. In Ireland, however, experience, tradition, practice and habit, all run the other way. Law and order, instead of being a mystic good, have been a mysterious evil, against which children have been taught to rebel, in veneration of antiquity and in hope for the future of their country. In other countries an unarmed policeman has been clothed with

so mysterious an authority that his very appearance brings a majesty and begets a fear that no soldier in the full panoply of war can arouse. In Ireland a policeman has been regarded as an enemy-soldier. He has been armed and equipped in this expectation. No majesty about him. So far from being the will of the people incarnate, he has represented the thwarting of the people's will; and even when he pursued acknowledged criminals, he was left to his pursuit alone, because of the memory that he would be as willing to pursue acknowledged patriots.

These things cannot be forgotten in an hour or undone in a day. What other nations have slowly built up, cannot be wrought in Ireland in the twinkling of an eye. It can only be wrought by conscious teaching and conscious effort, under the most favourable conditions, which Ireland (for reasons yet to be examined) has been denied. Where other peoples rely on the unconscious memory, Ireland must for many years rely on conscious effort and deliberate will. And chiefly it must be done by singular and reciprocal confidence between Government and people. For where the conscious effort is invoked the utmost publicity is required. Naturally. For in other countries Government may retain its secrets of State, and the people will continue to trust, for they have developed that habit. But, since in Ireland the very contrary habit has been developed, there can be no secrets. Affairs of State must be the noise of the marketplace, lest silence and reticence, proper elsewhere, breed suspicion, or at least undermine that confidence that is the best security of all States.

Here too, perhaps, Ireland has not been as well served as might have been expected. The circumstances are largely to blame, but these circumstances cannot bear the whole blame. Inexperience, no doubt, is most to blame-inexperience, and excessive reliance on the forms and practices of Government in other countries, where the unconscious can successfully be invoked as it cannot in Ireland. Among us, yet awhile, the left hand must know what the right hand doeth, or it will not coöperate with the right hand in the perfect functions of the body politic. For we are learning a new game, and cannot yet rely upon our reflexes.

II

So the history of Ireland, noble in many ways, and of a constancy of purpose, indomitable and undefeated in the darkest of places, has told against us, as it must inevitably have told against us, in this the beginning of a new day. The Constitution of the Free State not only, as in the foundation of new constitutions elsewhere, creates new sanctions, authorities and organizations for old laws and necessities, but it has actually to create recognition of those laws and necessities. It has to undo the teaching of history; and that is a hard, a formidable, withal a most necessary, task to accomplish.

It could have been accomplished, as it happened, I believe, in a very short space of time, but for other causes nearer to our own day. For the latest phase of our age-old war brought new forces into existence. It was desperately fought; and all history teaches that every desperately fought war produces terrible reactions. Only a little barrier separates our proud human nature from the beast; and when anger, fury, blood-letting and the accursed habit of destruction have broken that barrier, only with difficulty will it be built again. Every nation today knows that. They may praise their war-heroes, but they know them; and the more reflective of those heroes know themselves, and curse the loosening of the beast in themselves.

In Ireland, however, the war was of a peculiar kind. It was guerrilla warfare. It was not fought by disciplined phalanxes or by deployed armies, that could be moved on command and called back by command. It was man against man, and band against band, acting on both sides (though to differing degrees) largely on local initiative. Hunters and hunted changed places by swift turns in the same place, according to their local skill and enterprise. Knowing this, in the desperate odds with which the flight was ever weighed, they struck not only at one another, but at the other's resources and bases, each in order that the other might be left helplessly in the open.

I wish to be studious, even to fault, in the distribution of blame, as a strong partisan who bore his risks at that time may do without censure. I am not now concerned with blame,