Ireland Eternal and External

by G. BERNARD SHAW

ETERNAL is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish whatever variety of mongrel he or she may derive from, British or Iberian, Piet or Scot, Dane or Saxon, Down or Kerry, Hittite or Philistine: Ireland acclimatized them all. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first; and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.

External is harder to define; and until Mr. Costello bounced it into the headlines the other day it meant nothing for me except house repairs that the landlord and not the tenant has to pay for. When I was born Ireland was governed by Dublin Castle and by grand juries of Protestant country gentlemen. They were as Irish as Irish could be, though the figurehead was Queen Victoria, an Englishwoman married to a consort then frequently alluded to in Reynolds’s Newspaper as a pudding-faced German. The royal pair were represented in Ireland by a British Lord Lieutenant. But he too was an Irish institution; and when his term of office expired his wife wept publicly in her open carriage as she drove through the streets from the city in which she was an Irish queen to the foggy British island where she was a nobody.

Not that this intense Irishness meant Irish unity. Irish faction to the verge of civil war, and sometimes over it, never ceased for a moment. North and South, Protestant and Catholic, Republican and Vice-Royalist, each holding the other to be eternally damned, were irreconcilable.

Mr. St. John Ervine’s Fabian political apprenticeship in London could not wash oul of him the Orange dye of his native Belfast. He can hardly write the words Southern Ireland without spitting as my Orange maternal grandfather used to spit when he uttered the word Papist. But call Mr. Ervine an Englishman and he will knock you down. This grandfather, by the way, living midway between north and south, had a sister who was a Catholic Abbess.

Such is the eternal Ireland. Certain English historians, and even Irish Gaelic Leaguers, have tried to steal Swift and Berkeley, Sheridan and Yeats (to say nothing of myself), as Anglo-Irish. There never was any such species as Anglo-Irish; and there never will be. It is hard to make Englishmen understand this, because America can change an Englishman into a Yankee before his boots are worn out. But America has never Changed an Irishman. I am not for a moment implying that this is not greatly to the Englishman’s credit: I am only slating an ethnological fact. Nor when I add that ihe Irish leave Hitler and Houston Chamberlain nowhere in their conviction that the Irish are The Chosen Race am I defending that illusion. I can only say that it exists, and that I share it in spite of reason and common sense.

Now as to external relations. I am by birth a British subject. I have always so described myself when applying for passports, though I never stood up nor took my hat off while the English national anthem was being played until Ireland became a so-called Irish Free State. I am also a registered citizen of my native Ireland.

When Mr. Costello shot out of the blue his intention to abolish external relations a wild hope arose in me that as a citizen of Nowhere I might be able to escape taxation Anywhere. This would not matter to me in Ireland, where I have municipalized my property and pay no taxes. But in England, where I am being beggared by surtaxes called Capital Levies to humbug the Labor Left (which ought to know better), my citizenship is allimportant.

Why on earth has the question been raised? We were getting along quite comfortably as citizens of the Commonwealth. To me it seemed that Mr. Costello and his Coalition were anxious to shew that they were even more Irish, more Nationalist, more Anti-Partition than Mr. de Valera, and could think of nothing else that would do the trick than knocking off the Crown. As the King will be more comfortable in his bowler hat, I do not think he will greatly care provided he can still sell me up if I do not pay British taxes. Beyond this I can make neither head nor tail of the move.

As to Partition, I have always held that when the Labor Movement is fully developed in Ireland, the manufacturers and shipbuilders of the North, finding themselves, like all plutocratic regimes, unable to carry on without the support of a predominant agricultural Catholic vote, will themselves join up with Eire.

Partition saved Mr. de Valera’s neutrality in the war; for without if England would have had to reoccupy Ireland from the east, and the U.S.A. invade it from the west. The possession by these allied and irresistible Powers of bases in Northern Ireland saved the situation for once; but if it recurs and finds Ireland an independent Republic right in the fairway and open to enemy invasion, a British reconquest will be inevitable.

Such Independence was Roger Casement’s aim; and England promptly hanged him for it. He hoped that the jealousies of the Powers would secure the neutrality of Ireland, as it had so long secured the neutrality of the Netherlands; but that is now a forlorn hope. As the Conference of Prime Ministers has declared unanimously for arming to the teeth, some Anglo-Irish link must be contrived were it only to confer Commonwealth citizenship on the Irish as privileged lunatics. So I shall not bother myself aboul it. I shall not even say “I told you so" when the trick is done.