Scotland was not the only country where the Celts were pressed into the service of nationalism. Belgium, which became independent from the Netherlands in 1830, took its name from the Belgae and promoted Ambiorix as a national hero. Viriathus became a national hero in Spain and Portugal. The French emperor Napoleon III sponsored excavations of the oppida at Alesia and Bibracte, the sites of fierce Gallic resistance to the Romans, as part of a campaign to inspire a spirit of national resistance at a time when France was threatened by the rise of Prussian power. A heroic statue of Vercingetorix, which Napoleon erected at Alesia, is thought by some to have more than a passing resemblance to the emperor. It would not be inappropriate if it did as, just like Vercingetorix, Napoleon turned out to be a loser and he ended his life in exile in England two years after France’s humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1871.
Nowhere did the Celtic revival play a more important role in the development of the modern national identity than in Ireland. While in Scotland
The Celtic revival helped create a national identity that the vast majority of Scots could subscribe to, in Ireland it helped to divide still further an already deeply divided society. Modern Irish nationalism and republicanism began to develop at the end of the eighteenth century with support from Catholics and Protestants alike. The man often credited with founding the republican movement, Wolfe Tone, was a Protestant, and the Society of United Irishmen, which he and others founded in 1791, drew its support equally from Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. Opposition to the Act of Union, which abolished the Irish Parliament and incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1801, was actually strongest among Protestants. These early nationalists were inspired by the non-sectarian ideals of the American and French revolutions, rather than romantic visions of the Celtic past, but as the movement developed this was to change. The Celtic revival stimulated an interest in Ireland’s prehistory and in Gaelic language and literature, which was shared across religious divides. The first society for the preservation of the Gaelic language was even founded by a group of Ulster Protestants in 1795. Yet within a hundred years most Irish Protestants had come to see the Gaelic language as a threat to their identity. Many still do. One of the many difficulties in reaching the 1998 Good Friday Agreement on the future of Northern Ireland was the Nationalist demand that Gaelic be given equal status with English. Gaelic was already extinct as an everyday spoken language in the Six Counties at the time of the partition of Ireland in 1921, and neither Unionists nor Nationalists believed that giving it equal status was going to produce a sudden revival: it was what the language had come to symbolise that made its status so controversial.
It was perhaps inevitable that as Irish nationalism developed in the course of the nineteenth century it would increasingly come to be defined by the country’s Catholic majority. As England was held to be responsible for all of Ireland’s problems, nationalists rejected eight centuries of English influence on Ireland and the Irish as having no part of true Irishness. Instead they looked for the roots of Irishness in an idealised Catholic-Celtic past of saints, scholars and legendary kings and warriors. Before the twentieth century, nationalism expressed itself mainly through peaceful activities. Political action, aimed at achieving home rule rather than outright independence, is the most obvious, but there were also many recreational and cultural organisations with a nationalist agenda, such as the Gaelic Athletic Association that promoted traditional Irish games, like hurling and Gaelic football, and the Gaelic League, which promoted the Gaelic language. Through the League’s activities, Gaelic became closely associated with nationalism, though this did not halt the language’s decline in everyday use.
Unfortunately, with the notable exception of Gladstone, most British politicians were either indifferent or hostile to nationalist demands for land reform and home rule. Inevitably, frustration with the lack of progress led to sporadic outbreaks of violence, as in the Fenian risings in 1867 and the Land War of the 1880s. None of these remotely threatened British rule but they were often followed by concessions to head off full-scale rebellions. Tragically, by acting only under threat, the British government undermined constitutional nationalism and, by demonstrating that it was the only way to get results, encouraged the growth of the tradition of political violence that still blights Ireland. Those who chose the path of violent nationalism cast a romantic aura over their terrorist activities by closely identifying themselves with the legendary Celtic past. The popular name of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Fenians, derives from legendary Irish warriors, while a statue of the dying hero Cuchulainn was chosen to commemorate those Republicans who fell in the 1916 Easter Rising, which was led by the IRB.
By the late nineteenth century it was getting very difficult for a Protestant to be accepted as a real Irishman. Immersion in the mythical pre-Christian past was one way, exemplified by the poet W. B. Yeats, whose influential collection of Irish folklore The Celtic Twilight was published in 1893. Most Protestants, however, felt threatened and alienated by the rise of a nationalism that was intolerant of their cultural identity, and their support for Unionism grew rapidly in the later nineteenth century. Increasingly Protestants began to identify themselves as British rather than Irish. By the early twentieth century Protestants were even stockpiling weapons in order to resist home rule by force. Sinn Fein’s sweeping victories in the 1918 elections on a ticket of complete independence and the Anglo-Irish war (1919-21) that followed made the continuance of British rule untenable. To avert the threat of armed Unionist resistance to a settlement with the nationalists, the British government decided upon the partition of Ireland. The greater part of Ireland achieved independence as the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) in 1922 while six counties of Ulster, which had Unionist majorities, formed the province of Northern Ireland and remained part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland preserved a fragile stability until Protestant attempts to stifle the Catholic Civil Rights movement led to the outbreak of the inter-communal violence of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969 from which the province is only now emerging. As the ruling power, the British government must bear the largest share of the responsibility for the outbreak of the Troubles, but it also deserves to be recognised that it was the failure of nationalism to develop an inclusive Irish identity that set Ireland on the road to partition and that has stood in the way of rapprochement between the country’s two traditions ever since.
World History
