I always was conscious of my British heritage. Until age 18, I had dual British-US citizenship, having been born in Australia to an Australian (British heritage) mother and an American Army officer father whose own father was born on a dairy farm in Wiltshire, England (just down the road from Stonehenge). I had no clue that part of my DNA was what we call Scots-Irish. My great grandmother on my father’s side was Laura Kirkland, daughter of a Presbyterian minister. The Kirklands were a Scottish Lowland family, part of Clans Maxwell and Dougal. Sure enough, when I submitted a saliva sample to ancestry.com, Irish was mixed in with British, German and traces of other. The truth, as my wife Mary Lou likes to say, is that “we are all mutts.” Mary Lou is almost fifty percent Irish. Her mother’s family came from County Fermanagh in what is now Northern Ireland.
Shortly after we were married in 2013, Mary Lou and I travelled to Ireland. We spent a marvelous ten days exploring Ireland’s rugged but beautiful west coast, the North Coast with its Giant’s Causeway, lots of villages, local pubs, Cork, and the wonderful Foyne’s Air Museum just across the river from Shannon Airport. Foyne’s was a key airport during World War II, a key link in the air bridge between Ireland and the US East Coast. Even though Ireland was formally neutral, lots of US troops made the trip over the Atlantic to Ireland, and thence to England. Foyne’s had no runway, just a control tower. How can this be, I asked myself, and then realized that all the transports were airboats, and the “runway” was the Shannon River.
One evening we had supper at a local pub. We noticed a large group of young men clustered at one end of the bar, clearly enjoying too much of the local brew, and singing mournful songs. Several stumbled towards our table, and one put his arm on my shoulder and placed his face directly in front of mine. I started to assume a defensive posture, but one of the men said “don’t worry, he’s just had a few too many pints; he’ll do you no harm.” The songs they sang were a cry for freedom, a remembrance of British conquest and centuries of atrocities, and a prayer for justice. To walk the streets of the villages, you might miss this powerful emotion, but in the pubs, it all comes flowing out. I felt a strange form of kinship with these men, and their plea that Britain return the six northern counties to Ireland. I determined to study the history of these amazing people.
Mary Lou tried to find records of her mother’s family (McConnell), but we learned that the British used the Irish family official records as fuel for their fires and as toilet paper. I could relate to the frustration of my African American brothers and sisters, as they faced similar obstacles in trying to trace their lineage. In both cases, the authorities in control deemed the people they persecuted as subhuman.
One of the major changes brought about by the United Nations Charter in the late 1940’s was a prohibition of acquiring territory from another state by military conquest. And the Fourth Geneva Convention governed foreign military occupation of areas within another country’s borders. Of course, the current world map would be much different had these rules existed centuries earlier. Our Native American brothers and sisters know this all too well. But back to the Irish and the six northern counties.
Humans occupied the island we now know as Ireland as early as 10,500 BC. For most of Ireland’s recorded history, the Irish were primarily a Gaelic people. The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group native to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. They are associated with the Gaelic languages, a branch of the Celtic language family. They were pagan until a young Christian missionary named Patrick entered the island around 400 AD with the message of the Christian Gospel. Against all odds, and with solely the force of God’s love, the masses adopted Christianity. From the ninth century, small numbers of Vikings settled in Ireland. Anglo-Normans conquered parts of Ireland in the twelfth century, and England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth brought many English and Lowland Scots to the north of Ireland.
We all studied the Battle of Hastings (1066), when Duke William of Normandy conquered the forces of the Anglo-Saxon noble, Harold Godwinson. But who were the Normans? In a word, they were descendants of Viking marauders to whom the French king gave a part of northern France in exchange for a halt to further raids on French territory. They became a ruling class in England, intermarried with the native populations, and in relatively short order established control over all of England, parts of Wales, and parts of Scotland. Anglo-Norman barons settled in Ireland from the twelfth century, initially to support Irish regional kings. But King Henry II of England had his eye on Ireland, and following the invasion of 1169-1171, large areas of Ireland were controlled by loyal Anglo-Normans under authority of the British throne. Tudor Henry VIII, that unstable man of many wives, used military force to put down a rebellion and was declared King of Ireland in 1542. Several people who helped establish the Plantations of Ireland also played a part later in the early colonisation of North America. Do you see a pattern here?
I am not trying to cover the entire history of British occupation of Ireland in this post. I just want to ask a question: why would citizens of the United States support Britain in its continued occupation of the six northern counties of Ireland? Which country colonized us, and used military force to try to keep us from independence? And which country impressed our sailors in the early years of our republic, tried to take away our independence, and burned our White House? Not the Irish! But for a tough as nails Scots-Irish General named Andrew Jackson and a rag tag group of combatants in the Battle of New Orleans, the British may have succeeded in conquest of our young country.
The Irish are our brothers. Like our ancestors, they have known oppression at the hands of British Kings and their armed forces. Their lands were confiscated, they were starved to the point of a near genocide by the British during the great potato famine of the mid nineteenth century. To survive, large numbers came to the US with no money but only dreams. They dug tunnels and canals that extended our westward path. They fought on both sides of our Civil War. Many were shipped to Jamaica by their British masters, to work as virtual slaves in the sugar cane fields. The Irish share our willingness to fight for freedom. The only armed revolt against the British colonial authorities in Australia was at a place called Ballarat in my native Victoria. It was not led by Brits, no it was led by Irish and Americans. Unfortunately, the revolt was put down, and the leaders were executed.
The current ruling family in Britain is called Windsor. Sounds very British, doesn’t it? Well, it was actually German, Saxe-Coburg, but during the First World War it was deemed unsuitable for the British royal family, and so instantly became Windsor. They still spoke German. Some of the family collaborated with Hitler. Should we be surprised? The Angles and Saxons were German tribes. These are the people who still retain and claim sovereignty of the six counties in Northern Ireland. Brexit has put new pressure on the British, given that Ireland is still part of the European Union, and trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland is getting complicated.
The colonial era has gone, way back in history. In 1983, when I was stationed in England with the US Air Force, the British came within one Exocet missile of losing the so-called Falklands War. Their logistics train was precariously long and strained, and yet to preserve their honor they came to the defense of their expats on the Falkland Islands. Really? An island off the coast of Argentina? But then there is Gibraltar. There used to be Hong Kong. The British Commonwealth, that group of former colonies, is starting to fray, as the Royal Family shows its true colors.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that the British are not our friends. They have many truly admirable qualities. But...
In my opinion, it is time for the US to encourage and even pressure the British to negotiate independence for the Northern Irish, and, if the people so choose, to be reunited with the Republic of Ireland. Sure, there will be lots of details, but it can be done, and it makes good sense. We should help our friends on both sides to get to an independent free, united 🇮🇪 Ireland.
Two great books I highly recommend. First is The Indomitable Irishman, by Timothy Egan, about Thomas Francis Meagher, the greatest hero, adventurer, rebel, dreamer and combatant you have never heard of...but whom you will never forget. Second, a book that tells the story of the Irish who were transported to Jamaica to work as virtual slaves in the sugar cane fields. The title is The Tide Between Us, by Olive Collins. Well, that’s all for now. I am recuperating from minor eye surgery, so the drooping eye lids I inherited from my father will no longer impair my vision. Have a good evening, and God bless you all.
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