Page 14 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

CREATING A NEW STATE

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Party MPs in the early 20 century drove the Imperial Parliament
to distraction by their habit of asking a multitude of questions
about local issues, details of land purchase, the drainage of
rivers in South Galway, and the provision of roads and piers.
James O’ Mara MP for South Kilkenny even received a request
forwarded by a local priest in 1906 to put down a parliamentary
question on behalf of a woman who was complaining about a
neighbour’s cow that was trespassing on her land. Putting down
a question ‘could provide tangible evidence of an MP’s efforts on
behalf of his constituents’, even though some MPs came back
by boat and train nearly every weekend, a journey that took nine
hours just to Dublin. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his famous
book The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, there was a lot
more continuity pre- and post-revolution in Ireland as well as in
France. Irish politicians stay close to the people, perhaps one
reason that extremism is kept in check.

The Union was initially promoted by the British as akin to a
marriage, but as the perceptive writer and guardedly pro-Union
Maria Edgeworth, who like Jane Austen avoided marriage, was
aware, a married woman in 1800 had no rights, and if a union
lacked passion or affection it could be disastrous. So it proved.
Most British statesmen and commentators were scornful of the
very idea of an Irish nation; it did not mean that they embraced
the Irish as part of any British nation. While Napoleon
successfully pulled out all the stops to prevent famine in France
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at the beginning of the 19 century, Britain in the 1840s was
more concerned to put on the brakes, for fear of creating
permanent dependency. National solidarity across the two
islands was completely absent. The UK remains a very lopsided
state in terms of English dominance. Isaac Butt, initially a
unionist, later first leader of the Home Rule party, noted at the
time: ‘When calamity falls upon us, we then recover our separate
existence as a nation’.

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