“How
the Church put itself before the needs of starving children in 1913,”
was the headline on a commentary written by my colleague Martina Devlin
in the Irish Independent this week. It certainly was the case that priests campaigned against the children of the Dublin tenements being transported to England for the duration; it was true, too, that there was apprehension that the children might lose their faith (and perhaps pick up Bolshevik ideas) while lodging with English socialists.
But history is usually more complex than it is painted by any black-and-white picture, whoever is doing the painting. I have read Republican histories of Ireland and they are too black-and-white in their portrayal of the ‘Brits’, and even of Irish Protestants (characterised as ‘spies’ if they retained any allegiance to the Crown).
I have read British histories of Ireland which have been too black-and-white in the sense of virtually ignoring the problems of Ireland – or, indeed, blaming Irish republicanism on the ‘Fenianism’ of the Catholic clergy.
I have read Unionist histories and biographies – I’ve done a fair amount of research on the life of Edward Carson – which are, similarly, very black-and-white about the ‘treachery’ and ‘disloyalty’ of the native Irish, who ‘stabbed them in the back’ as Ulstermen were fighting on the Somme.
Trust me: and distrust any black-and-white portrayal of anything that happened in the past.
(Some British historians of the black-and-white school of thinking are now trying to blame the Germans exclusively for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914: thankfully, some others, with a more nuanced understanding, are bringing out the complexities of Serbian nationalism allied to Russian pan-Slavism which were also part of the explosive mix.)
The 1913 lock-out was complex: and the clergy’s role in not wanting the children to be sent away was a mixture of faith values, a strong sense of family and kinship, and a sort of national pride.
(During the Famine, some of the hierarchy such as Archbishop MacHale, proudly refused funds to help feed the starving on the grounds that “we can look after ourselves, thank you”.)
Mind you, if the clergy had agreed to shipping the children off to Manchester and Birmingham in 1913, they’d now be accused of heartlessly exporting the children to strangers.
It is wrong, too, to claim that the clergy cared nothing for the poor of Dublin, or the working men and women.
It was the priests who effectively stopped the dreadful practice of paying dockers their wages in the pubs in the 1900s – whereby the brewers and distillers virtually controlled the men’s wages, and encouraged them, too, to spend their money on drink.
Anyone who writes anything about a historical event should have the words ‘it’s complicated’ first imprinted on their brain.