December 8, 2021
The Partition of Ireland 1921-2021
Fintan O’Toole
Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Lecturer in Irish Studies, Princeton University
George Bustin, Introducer, and Fintan O'Toole
Minutes of the 13th Meeting of the 80th Year
Old Guard president, Stephen Schreiber opened and presided over the meeting, and Michael Mathews read the minutes. One hundred thirty-six unique viewers attended by Zoom, including members and guests: Velga Stokes, guest of Marcia Snowden; Costa Papastephanou, guest of Ralph Widener; Ted Martinsen and Tom Corl, guests of John Cotton; and John Connorton, guest of Dermot Gately. Greg Dobbs presented the election slate of six nominated new members (Kathy Lynne Ales; Florence Baumann Kahn; Ricardo J. Fernandez de Quincoces; Max Salas; Frances Fowler Slade; and Robert Frank Stengel), all of whom were approved by 89 voting members with none opposed.
Beaming through the ether to the zoomed-in faithful, Stephen Schreiber convened the meeting and George Bustin introduced our speaker, Fintan O’Toole, Princeton’s Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies, who spoke to us on “The Partition of Ireland 1921-2021.”
O'Toole serves as an editor, theater critic, and long-time columnist for the Irish Times. He also writes for other prominent publications including the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Observer. O’Toole himself later confided to us that, within hours, his latest work, We Don't Know Ourselves, would be officially anointed the Irish “Nonfiction Book of the Year.”
Raised in Dublin during The Troubles, that wonderfully understated Irish euphemism for the civil strife and bloodshed of the 1960s up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, O’Toole interwove his personal recollections with his account of events unfolding on the larger stage.
He commenced his remarks by noting the timely “resonance” of his topic, his countrymen having just celebrated the centennial of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. O’Toole then reminded us of the striking imbalance between the parties at that time. Britain having just emerged victorious from World War I and her global empire still at its zenith, it had been far from obvious that she would negotiate with the upstart Sein Fein partisans.
Inevitably, compromise was involved. Britain accepted an Irish Free State on most of the island, one with its own government and army, but with two major qualifications—the first being the perpetuation of partition itself between North and South. Secondly, the new State would remain in the empire, an imperative for Britain given the ramifications throughout its colonies of conceding the alternative. This meant that members of the Irish Parliament would swear an oath of loyalty to the English monarch.
Mainstream Irish nationalists, with forbearance, accepted these compromises as temporary. Remarkedly, within just 17 years, Ireland had managed to “wriggle out of the empire,” with a new constitution that conferred republican status in all but name.
However, partition still prevails—a destiny that O’Toole, as a self-styled “theater guy,” views as, at once, inevitable and tragic. Why inevitable? He finds the answer in the historical fusion of religion with political identity when overlayed on the map of a then rural agricultural South and an urbanized, industrial, tech-savvy North.
Strangely enough, this schism suited both sides, letting the northern Protestants impose their will upon their Catholic enclaves--at least until the Troubles exploded. And it allowed the Catholic South free to perpetuate an off-the-chart (by post-war European standards) fusion of church and state, with legal suppression of divorce, homosexuality, and contraception.
Over time, this schism of convenience has proved untenable. In the North, the Catholic populace has grown in numbers, perhaps, by the next census, certifiable as the new majority. Meantime, especially during the fifties, Western Europe (and England) boomed while only southern Ireland and East Germany lost population. Since then, however, economic fortunes have flipped, with Ireland’s emergence as a tech-savvy phenom as the North’s heavy industrial belt has rusted away. Moreover, the British Empire is no more; the Catholic Church has lost its moral authority (with Catholicism decoupled from the idea of Irishness), and, most recently, Brexit has stressed the Unionist hardcore.
In sum, O’Toole concludes that, although objective reasons for partition no longer exist, subjective ones prevail, with the prospect of unification still elusive.
One final note: O’Toole mentioned, just in passing, that each of the Irish literary greats of the early 20th century (Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Beckett) hailed from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish family, but that he was a Dubliner, raised in the the Catholic South, an intriguing coincidence—or perhaps not—but a most tantalizing aside to his presentation and perhaps a promising subject for another talk with the Old Guard.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein
Beaming through the ether to the zoomed-in faithful, Stephen Schreiber convened the meeting and George Bustin introduced our speaker, Fintan O’Toole, Princeton’s Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies, who spoke to us on “The Partition of Ireland 1921-2021.”
O'Toole serves as an editor, theater critic, and long-time columnist for the Irish Times. He also writes for other prominent publications including the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Observer. O’Toole himself later confided to us that, within hours, his latest work, We Don't Know Ourselves, would be officially anointed the Irish “Nonfiction Book of the Year.”
Raised in Dublin during The Troubles, that wonderfully understated Irish euphemism for the civil strife and bloodshed of the 1960s up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, O’Toole interwove his personal recollections with his account of events unfolding on the larger stage.
He commenced his remarks by noting the timely “resonance” of his topic, his countrymen having just celebrated the centennial of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. O’Toole then reminded us of the striking imbalance between the parties at that time. Britain having just emerged victorious from World War I and her global empire still at its zenith, it had been far from obvious that she would negotiate with the upstart Sein Fein partisans.
Inevitably, compromise was involved. Britain accepted an Irish Free State on most of the island, one with its own government and army, but with two major qualifications—the first being the perpetuation of partition itself between North and South. Secondly, the new State would remain in the empire, an imperative for Britain given the ramifications throughout its colonies of conceding the alternative. This meant that members of the Irish Parliament would swear an oath of loyalty to the English monarch.
Mainstream Irish nationalists, with forbearance, accepted these compromises as temporary. Remarkedly, within just 17 years, Ireland had managed to “wriggle out of the empire,” with a new constitution that conferred republican status in all but name.
However, partition still prevails—a destiny that O’Toole, as a self-styled “theater guy,” views as, at once, inevitable and tragic. Why inevitable? He finds the answer in the historical fusion of religion with political identity when overlayed on the map of a then rural agricultural South and an urbanized, industrial, tech-savvy North.
Strangely enough, this schism suited both sides, letting the northern Protestants impose their will upon their Catholic enclaves--at least until the Troubles exploded. And it allowed the Catholic South free to perpetuate an off-the-chart (by post-war European standards) fusion of church and state, with legal suppression of divorce, homosexuality, and contraception.
Over time, this schism of convenience has proved untenable. In the North, the Catholic populace has grown in numbers, perhaps, by the next census, certifiable as the new majority. Meantime, especially during the fifties, Western Europe (and England) boomed while only southern Ireland and East Germany lost population. Since then, however, economic fortunes have flipped, with Ireland’s emergence as a tech-savvy phenom as the North’s heavy industrial belt has rusted away. Moreover, the British Empire is no more; the Catholic Church has lost its moral authority (with Catholicism decoupled from the idea of Irishness), and, most recently, Brexit has stressed the Unionist hardcore.
In sum, O’Toole concludes that, although objective reasons for partition no longer exist, subjective ones prevail, with the prospect of unification still elusive.
One final note: O’Toole mentioned, just in passing, that each of the Irish literary greats of the early 20th century (Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Beckett) hailed from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish family, but that he was a Dubliner, raised in the the Catholic South, an intriguing coincidence—or perhaps not—but a most tantalizing aside to his presentation and perhaps a promising subject for another talk with the Old Guard.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein