These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland, Past and Future, by Philip Stephens, Faber & Faber, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0571381470
Philip Stephens’s These Divided Isles is bookended by what surely represents the high watermark of modern Anglo-Irish relations: Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011 state visit to Dublin. The event was widely hailed as symbolic of the normalisation of relations between the two states, to whose wider history its atmosphere of comity and good will stood in welcome relief. This is a history, in Stephens’s words, marked by ‘confusions, complexities and contradictions, as intimate and intertwined as it has so often been violent and traumatic’.
Though not an academic historian, Stephens comes to the task of documenting these islands’ recent history with considerable bona fides. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in modern history, he went on to build a successful career as a journalist, and is now a contributing editor at the Financial Times, for which he writes a weekly column. His books include Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, a well-received 2004 biography of the New Labour prime minister; Politics and the Pound: The Conservatives’ Struggles with Sterling (1996), a commanding portrayal of Tory governments’ recurrent battles with the national currency; and Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit (2021), a sharp account of Brexit and its roots. His years as a reporter and in the lobby have given him a ‘ringside seat’ and access to a variety of political and diplomatic insiders, among whom we could name Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff and lead negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process; Daithí Ó Ceallaigh, a veteran diplomat and Ireland’s former ambassador to London; the late Martin Mansergh, who was instrumental in developing Fianna Fáil’s Northern Ireland policy; and a host of key elected representatives, including John Hume, David Trimble and Bertie Ahern. Close attention to high politics pays particular dividends in Stephens’s impressive Kremlinology surrounding both the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement itself.
Helpful too is that his sympathies encompass both jurisdictions. Although born and raised in London, he spent his childhood summers in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, whence his mother hails, and he considers himself Irish as well as British. Such a background has evidently inoculated him against the kind of condescension once common among British commentators on Ireland, from the more unreconstructed supremacists who for centuries denounced the island as the preserve of a barbarous, warlike people to those who wax lyrical about the place in a quasi-orientalising fashion, associating it with ‘vigour and freshness of feeling, a rural traditionalism, a rediscovered antiquity […]’, in the words of Seamus Deane.
As Stephens humbly recognises when introducing his abridged bibliography, ‘forests have been torn down in the task of chronicling the long, difficult history of Britain and Ireland …’. He demonstrates a creditable command of this vast body of work, though he admits to having some favourites among the abundant secondary literature. To cite only a few, Roy Foster’s now classic Modern Ireland proves unsurprisingly essential, as do Diarmaid Ferriter’s several authoritative works. Other major historians and commentators who feature extensively include Ronan Fanning, Paul Bew, Charles Townshend and Fintan O’Toole, to whose recent We Don’t Know Ourselves Stephens’s book bears some, albeit superficial, resemblances. Perhaps the most critical source, however, and especially given the kind of book that Stephens has written, with its keen focus on political and diplomatic minutiae, is the treasure trove that is the Royal Irish Academy’s fourteen-volume Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, to which he refers liberally. With his background at that most staid of news sources, the Financial Times, such a focus has allowed him to scrupulously avoid anything like polemic, despite the ‘revisionist’, or perhaps ‘post-revisionist’, hue of the corpus on which he relies. As shall be discussed later, his commendably sober account of the Troubles – as well as the book more generally – is largely free of excessive moralism or the usual clichés and catchwords (‘atavistic’, ‘irrational’, ‘Anglophobia’, ‘nationalist pieties’) that pepper historical writing of that kind on Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The early chapters of These Divided Isles offer a lucid, if familiar, account of Ireland’s revolutionary decade. Stephens begins in media res with Lloyd George’s notorious ultimatum threatening ‘immediate and terrible war’ should the Irish delegation refuse his terms for what would become the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. What follows is a careful exposition that moves elegantly between the particular and the general. Choice details and telling anecdotes are plucked from Frank Pakenham’s 1935 blow-by-blow account of the Treaty negotiations, while his wider conclusions echo Ronan Fanning’s argument that revolutionary violence in Ireland was fundamentally reactive, a response to a prevailing dispensation at Westminster – in which Lloyd George’s government depended on the support of unionist-aligned Conservatives – that made a capitulation to unionist threats inevitable. In the end, the settlement that led to partition and Dominion status for the nascent Free State, Stephens writes, ‘was never part of a grand design for a new constitutional settlement in Ireland. Rather, it was the product of the iterative effort to reconcile the competing demands of nationalism and unionism in a way that suited politicians at Westminster. Ultimately, it would represent in turn the sum of Liberal dependence on the votes of Irish nationalists, Conservative determination to use Ireland as a stick with which to beat the Liberals, the threat from unionists to take up arms in defence of Protestant rule, republican rebellion and British exhaustion.’ At a deeper historical and structural level, though, Stephens is under no illusions as to who, in the final analysis, was responsible for partition: ‘the division of the island of Ireland was ultimately the work of British colonial rule and settlement. North and south were different because the English had thrown the native Irish from their lands to make way for English and Scottish Protestants.’ Nevertheless, a persistent blind spot among Irish nationalists has been the belief that such deep-rooted division could be ignored without risking an explosion of discontent in the island’s northeast.
From the start, Stephens devotes great attention to the personalities shaping events. While this inevitably obscures other factors, it is surely apt when dealing with men such as Asquith and Lloyd George, individuals for whom self-preservation – Stephens describes the latter’s political career as ‘built on ruthless opportunism’ – was always paramount. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that high politics – influenced, of course, by pressures from below – and the individuals conducting it were not the determining force behind the 1921 settlement. And this is not to mention the other titanic figures directly involved or around the negotiating table: Collins, de Valera and Griffith on the Irish side; Churchill, Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead for the Empire.
Stephens’s treatment of the next period of conflagration – this one far more protracted – is also impressively detailed, readable and measured. While carefully surveying the main events that led to the drastic escalation of violence in the late 1960s, he retains, to his credit, a view of the Northern Ireland Troubles as essentially political in the modern sense. At issue, whatever the many outrages, sectarian or otherwise, carried out by the principal militant groups, was a dispute over democratic legitimacy, self-determination and popular sovereignty. As such, Stephens manages to avoid a significant pitfall into which many an analysis of the conflict has fallen. As the intellectual historian Richard Bourke and the political scientist Brendan O’Leary have shown, the writings of commentators like Conor Cruise O’Brien and the later revisionist historians were for too long wedded to a view of Northern Ireland as beset by ethnic, religious or ‘tribal’ hatred driven by regressive impulses, ideological fanaticism and irrationality. No doubt intense identity-based animosities played their part – and still do, as anyone familiar with contemporary Northern Ireland knows – but Bourke is right to insist that ‘legitimating ideologies’, as he calls them, were the causally salient factors. By this, he means appeals to democratic right and the principle of self-determination. As Stephens documents, for much of Northern Ireland’s history, ‘democracy’ really meant a species of crude majoritarianism that guaranteed unionist hegemony, and as long as the ‘one-party administration’ in Stormont continued to exclude nationalists from political participation – and ultimately from recognition – the statelet would be governed by ‘Protestant law and Protestant order’, in the eyes of most Catholics and nationalists.
The apparent impotence with which political representatives in Westminster grappled with the conflict makes for depressing reading, especially the sorry Sunningdale episode. Faced with pervasive intransigence and escalating violence by republican and loyalist ultras, British governments, from Macmillan to Thatcher, responded with a combination of ineptitude, miscalculation and residual prejudice. Stephens quotes home secretary Roy Jenkins, who was concerned about ‘how to impose the civilised standards of Britain on Northern Ireland’, while an internal MI5 report spoke of ‘two communities with long memories and relatively short tempers’. Whitehall’s 1969 Commission on the Disturbances, for that matter, castigated the Catholic minority for having ‘held [itself] aloof from the community’.
Thatcher, who scarcely concealed her suspicion of nationalist motives, betrayed perhaps the greatest ignorance. Most notoriously, she went so far as to canvass the idea that the border be redrawn to exclude majority Catholic areas and thereby relieve the British state ‘of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom’. A further harbinger of the kind of insular, ‘little England’ politics that would spearhead the United Kingdom’s eventual departure from the European Union was her attitude to Northern Ireland’s subvention. When Garret FitzGerald suggested that the British and Irish governments should collectively seek to attract more international funding for Northern Ireland, she had this to say: ‘Why should they have more money? I need that money for my people in England who don’t have anything like this.’ For Thatcher, the billions transferred to Northern Ireland had always represented unjustifiable largesse.
What most strikes Stephens about the Thatcher years, though, is a fundamental irony. For all her anti-republican rhetoric – he calls her ‘the most avowedly pro-unionist prime minister since Andrew Bonar Law’ – it was she who signed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, widely seen by unionists as a scandalous act of betrayal, as it granted the Republic a consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland in exchange for its acceptance of the principle of unionist consent with regard to the ultimate constitutional question. For unionists, this meant, or at least portended, an erosion of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty over Northern Ireland, while also seeming to reward, in their view, the Provisional IRA, which they claimed would interpret it as evidence of waning British resolve. In Dublin, meanwhile, the agreement was welcomed as the acceptance of a simple reality: that Northern Ireland was not ‘as British as Finchley’, since that London district lacks a sizeable minority which disputes the very legitimacy of the state of which it is a part. Moreover, it also reflected a changing international context. The United States, where an Irish-American bloc wielded significant influence, had been steadily increasing pressure on the Westminster government to reach an agreement; in his memoirs, Garret FitzGerald reports privately asking President Reagan to have a word with his ideological comrade-in-arms, Mrs Thatcher, with whom he had a close working and personal relationship. More broadly, the Cold War meant that erstwhile concerns, stretching back hundreds of years, that Ireland would be used by a hostile power as a backdoor through which to invade Britain were no longer credible. As is well known, and Stephens demonstrates, the United States dimension would prove critical in securing the 1998 settlement.
Stephens is unequivocal in his condemnation of Provisional IRA violence, which, he says, virtually on page one, nothing could justify. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the comparatively little ink that he spills driving home this point when compared with many comparable studies of twentieth-century Irish and Anglo-Irish history, as well as the absence of the kind of highly emotive language common in even the more dispassionate of these works. The reason for this seems fairly clear. It is now almost universally accepted that the actions of the IRA were wrong. Where disputes do arise among historians and commentators, these tend to be about whether it is analytically sensible to categorise militant republicanism as ‘atavistic’, fundamentally irrational or even psychopathic, not about whether or not killing per se should be condemned. Moreover, the chief merit of Stephens’s book lies less in its originality than in the clarity with which it distils today’s ambient consensus on twentieth and early twenty-first-century Anglo-Irish history. This consensus is a long way from that which prevailed in the 1980s, where an iconoclastic and later hegemonic revisionism – in part a polemical reaction to IRA enormities – was at pains to deny the Provisionals anything like historical legitimacy.
In this respect, and though its background research is rooted heavily in the revisionist and post-revisionist historiographical canon, These Divided Isles differs considerably from a book like Fintan O’Toole’s recent We Don’t Know Ourselves. As I wrote in these pages, that book, for all its virtues, gave off a distinct sense of déjà lu at a rhetorical and analytical level, especially when it came to its approach to the Troubles, tending to reduce nationalism to republicanism, and republicanism in turn to savagery or to fanatical Catholicism. No doubt, this had much to do with O’Toole’s stature as one of Ireland’s pre-eminent public intellectuals, critics and cultural commentators. He could assume the role of prophet and iconoclast, landing home truths from firmly within the tribe regarding, for example, our incorrigible tendency to venerate and posthumously redeem men of violence.
This difference in background is also perhaps evident in Stephens’s approach to twentieth century Ireland’s broader social and economic history, and how this differed from that of our more powerful neighbour and former master. Although Stephens, to a great extent, shares O’Toole’s highly jaundiced view of the conservative state that emerged post-Independence – at one point he calls the Free State and later Republic an ‘isolated backwater’ over which de Valera had woven a ‘psychological spell’ – a palpable sense of embarrassment was apt to emerge when the Irish Times columnist began waxing condemnatory about our socio-economic underdevelopment and mortifying cultural backwardness. Stephens, on the other hand, is careful not to frame the young Irish state as somehow uniquely crisis-prone. Indeed, mid-century Britain, as he points out, was not without its own troubles, namely its ‘unravelling’ empire and the challenge posed to its leading industries by post-war reconstruction across continental Europe.
Nevertheless, O’Toole’s and Stephens’s distinctly whiggish readings of the Republic’s economic transformation dovetail almost seamlessly. In both of their accounts, Seán Lemass and especially TK Whitaker emerge as the indisputable heroes who set in train a rather suspiciously linear process of modernisation that would produce the liberal, cosmopolitan and prosperous state that we know today. Of course, these figures were instrumental to this history, but as in O’Toole’s account, Stephens conveys little of the friction and complexity, or the deeper social forces, that marked these decades. Indeed, the odd glib observation, such as his inference that a Chinese restaurant appearing in Kiltimagh was some providential sign of worldly enlightenment penetrating ‘even into de Valera’s rural Ireland’, risks undermining an otherwise serious history.
The treatment of arguably the most powerful of these social forces, the Catholic church, is also one of the book’s weaker aspects. As Maurice Earls wrote in the Dublin Review of Books in February 2023, few have managed to produce anything like a satisfying account of how Ireland went so rapidly from being among the most apparently observant Catholic polities in the world to the broadly liberal society it is today. Earls’s counterintuitive but nonetheless compelling argument was that this entire narrative was belied by reality: the Irish had never been nearly as religious as has typically been assumed. For Earls, what was pervasive in twentieth century Ireland was a species of social conformism, not sincere adherence to Catholic teaching. As he puts it, ‘Catholicism offered a framework of dogma endorsing already chosen behaviours, issuing from prevailing cultural and material conditions. The Church deluded itself that these behaviours derived from obedience to its teaching.’ Stephens’s account of how Ireland transitioned from being a ‘deeply conservative’, ‘closed’, ‘inward-looking’ society ‘consumed by grievance’ and governed by ‘Gaelic mysticism’ to being a ‘modern’, culturally liberal European state is of a piece with the accounts that Earls has in mind – and among which we could include O’Toole’s – which mystify as much as they clarify, simply stating that a transformation took place as opposed to showing how it did.
Nevertheless, to demand that Stephens provide such a sociology would be to ask him to write a different book. These Divided Isles is not intended as an original intervention aimed at professional historians, but is meant, rather, to summarise a tumultuous century in what has always been a vexed, and sometimes brutal, relationship. Assessed on these –the book’s own – terms, Stephens has succeeded, producing a fluent, well-researched history that is personal but rarely polemical, fair but honest, and which will be of particular benefit to readers more unfamiliar with modern Anglo-Irish relations.
1/10/2025
Luke Warde is a writer based in London. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times and the Sunday Independent. He holds a PhD in French from the University of Cambridge.
