THESE DIVIDED ISLES

Troubled neighbors.

Irish and British journalist Stevens, author of Politics and the Pound, Tony Blair, and Britain Alone, concentrates on the past century. By late in Victoria’s reign, Ireland’s persistent disorder finally energized the establishment, and a powerful leader, Prime Minister William Gladstone, proposed granting a measure of independence: Home Rule. Wildly controversial, this split his Liberal Party and Ireland itself. Its six largely Protestant northern counties armed themselves and vowed to resist rule by a largely Catholic Ireland, and supporters in Britain and parliament carried the day. Gladstone failed, but debate persisted, although everyone agreed to suspend it when World War I broke out. The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin outraged Britons, then in the midst of war. It was quickly suppressed, but Stephen writes that “it fell to the British to turn military victory into political defeat.” Mass execution of rebel leaders produced an international outcry, energized Irish revolutionaries, and led to the vicious 1921-23 rebellion and Ireland’s independence—minus the northern counties that remained within the empire. “Partition was never part of a grand design,” writes the author, but largely Britain’s effort to wash its hands of the Irish. Never prosperous, the new nation stagnated as leaders emphasized Irish culture over economics and tolerated “the most conservative, clericalist and reactionary government in Europe.” Matters did not improve after World War II, when Northern Ireland alone benefited from Britain’s welfare state and Marshall Plan prosperity. Persistent northern oppression of its Catholic minority encouraged a splinter IRA group to begin a terrorist campaign that provoked a clumsy British response. Eventually, exhaustive negotiations extending from the 1970s to the ’90s produced a surprisingly effective modus operandi. By the 21st century, Ireland was prospering, and a peaceful reunion became a possibility until Britain’s exit from the European Union turned the vanishing border between north and south into a solid international frontier.

Astute insights into a seemingly endless problem.