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I’m Tim McInerney.
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
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Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3.
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Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast.
Yes, hello. And so, Naomi, today we are going to be looking at a war, a war that had a seismic effect on Irish politics, but which people have for a very long time preferred not to speak about. We’re talking, of course, about the Irish Civil War from 1922 to 1923.
In this episode, we’ll be looking at that immensely dark period of Ireland’s history and how it ended up shaping the somewhat unusual political system we have in Ireland today. For example, if you’ve ever wondered why Irish politics has traditionally been dominated by these two rather similar sounding, rather similar acting parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. That’s because they originally represented the two opposing sides of that civil war.
Today, we’ll hear from some top historians on the civil war who will explain exactly why Ireland descended into a dirty and bloody conflict just as it was emerging as an independent nation.
And I’ll visit the houses of the Oireachtas in Dublin to meet some characters who show had the consequences of that period are still playing out, including Senator Mark Daly, a man who is working day in, day out to achieve one of the elusive dreams of that conflict, a united Ireland. And Ian Marshall, a farmer from County Armagh in Northern Ireland who has made history as one of the first unionists elected to the Irish parliament since perhaps the 1920s.
So, Naomi, let’s set out the context a bit for the civil war. Listeners, if you’ve already heard our episode on the 1916 Rising, you’ll know that Ireland in the early 20th century was a political powder keg.
There’d been a steady rise in political nationalism since the mid 19th century really, after the devastation of the great hunger. The disastrous famine not only convinced a lot of people that the U.K. was not equipped to rule Ireland, but it also established an international diaspora who were pretty central to renewed calls for Irish independence from Britain.
This started out largely with calls for home rule. That’s something that would have established a local Irish assembly government within the U.K., but during the First World War that movement kind of snowballed into calls for full independence and separation from Britain as an Irish republic. This led to the momentous Easter Rising in 1916, where republican rebels occupied buildings all around Dublin for about a week and proclaimed an Irish republic outside the general post office on O’Connell Street.
That rebellion was brutally put down by the British Army, but it put a whole set of things into motion. Public support swung behind demands for an outright independent republic, borne out by the 1918 election which returned a sweeping result for the nationalist party Sinn Féin. The lawmakers elected in that election formed an illegal government — The First Dáil — and they oversaw the Irish War of Independence, which was a war between the Irish Republican Army and British forces from 1919 to 1921.
Now it was the way that this war of independence ended, which actually brought on the subsequent civil war. The civil war was an internal struggle between different factions of Irish nationalists that for many ended up being far worse than the war against Britain. In a word, the war of independence ended with a truce which for many came with just some unacceptable compromises, as we’ll see.
Tim, I very much associate the Irish Civil War with Michael Collins. He was a veteran of The Rising and one of the key figures in the whole story. And you remember the big Hollywood film about him, Tim?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. I think a lot of people remember that, particularly for Julia Roberts dodgy Irish accent. The film’s a bit hokey, to be honest, and it’s not enormously historically accurate, but it has been hugely influential on popular memories of the war, particularly in building a popular image of Éamon de Valera, who was a big part of it, as deeply devious. And a lot of historians think that image is a bit unfair.
Tim, did you know I’m actually in the movie?
No. No way. Are you an extra?
Well, if you, you won’t actually see me on screen, or at least I’ve never been able to locate myself, but if you’ve seen it, there’s a scene when Liam Neeson/ Michael Collins is giving a rousing speech in a town square surrounded by crowds.
Yes, I know it well.
Yeah. Well, basically, there’d been a call out for extras to come there dressed in 1920s era hats and suits, and they actually specified men and boys. But we all wanted to take part so I’m in the crowd there somewhere with my hair tucked under my cap.
Oh, brilliant!
Liam Neeson as Michael Collins:
“Our friends in the Royal Irish Constabulary would like to shut me up. Oh yes, jail me again, shoot me, who knows? And I’d like you to send them a message. If they shut me up, who’ll take my place? Who’s going to take my place? I can’t hear you. Who’ll take my place? Will they shut you up?”
You know, you’re not the only one who’s mentioned to me that they were an extra in that film. It sounds like it was a huge production.
I remember it being a huge thing at the time. Everyone was really excited that they were making this movie. And as I remember, they actually converted the centre of Rathdrum Village in Wicklow to look old-timey by hiding electricity and phone wires and stuff into the ground.
Alright. It’s still like that today?
I don’t know, I haven’t been back since.
Alright. Fair enough. Another more recent film, of course about the war of independence and the civil war period, was Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. I think, you know, that one, which a lot of people will know because it won the Palme d’Or, you know, it really got into the personal trauma that came with the kind of conflicts that characterise the civil war, where in many cases people were turning guns on their friends, on their comrades, and even on members of their own families.
Absolutely. Before we get carried away, you better tell us how it all went down, Tim. Let’s hear from your report.
From early morning on the 16th of January 1922, dense crowds had been gathering outside Dublin Castle, a place that for centuries had been the bastion of British rule in Ireland. Today, though, all that would end. Arriving to the cheering mass of Dubliners in three black taxis, Representatives of the Provisional Irish government made their way to the castle. Among them was the man of the moment, the republican leader Michael Collins, who had negotiated the end of the Irish War of Independence and the establishment of an Irish free state. Today, Dublin Castle will be handed over to his hands and very soon thousands of British army troops would march out of Dublin, never to return. As the last battalions embarked the waiting ships, it has said, the army band played an old tune from the Royal Irish Regiment: “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old.” Yet as Union Jacks were lowered all over the country and replaced with the hoisting of the tricolour of the republic, Michael Collins would have known that his real battle had only just begun. The treaty he signed with Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George had not established a republic at all. The so-called Irish free state was to be recognised as a dominion of the British Empire; a status analogous to that of Canada. Ireland would be self-governing, but its ministers would still have to recognise the British monarch as head of state. And even worse for a governing body that had fought a bloody war against Crown forces, they would have to swear an oath of allegiance to King George V. Here’s Dr. Gavin Foster, associate professor of Modern Irish History at Concordia University in Montreal and author of The Irish Civil War and Society.
Basically, the period from about 1912 or 1913 when a third home rule bill was introduced, it created a crisis in Irish, and indeed, British politics. And that sort of set in motion a set of events that we call the Irish Revolution. And then all that culminates in the famous war of independence period, that lasts until the middle of 1921. And then there is a truce and that’s when the revolution gets really complicated.
The complications were numerous. The proposed truce, known as the Anglo-Irish Treaty, offered more independence than money in Ireland had thought possible. And yet it stopped short at that crucial status of a fully independent republic, which had been a dream for generations inn the Irish rebel movement. Trickier still was the question of Northern Ireland in 1921. The island of Ireland had already been divided into two separate jurisdictions. Under the fourth home rule bill, this had established a local government for the six northern counties with a unionist majority and another local government for the 26 predominantly nationalist counties to the south. Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, these six northern counties were given an opt-out clause from the new Irish free state, essentially establishing an international border between the two parts of the island. As Michael Collins arrived in Westminster to begin negotiations, he knew that any treaty would involve a massive compromise on the part of the rebels. Here’s Dr. Bill Kissane, Reader in Politics at the London School of Economics and author of The Politics of the Irish Civil War.
Well, I think it’s a little bit like the negotiations that are now taking place between the U.K. government and Brexit, that different groups have different expectations about what can be achieved in the U.K.’s case today, obviously the EU represents twenty eight states so it’s in a much powerful position. And back in 1921, when the Sinn Féin and IRA representatives went to London to negotiate they were also up against much more powerful state and much more powerful negotiating team. And so, it was going to be very hard to square the circle. They were up against it from the word “go” and I think Collins, and maybe even de Valera, they kind of knew before the negotiations in London that they weren’t going to come back with a 32-county republic. I think the British position was an imperial position, that their whole attitude of Ireland was governed by their fear that if Ireland became a republic — and don’t forget, there were no republics in the Commonwealth at that time — it would begin a process of breakup for the British Empire. So, I think their horizons were kind of imperial at the same time compared to what was on offer before the First World War, which was basically Home Rule; dominion status was a considerable advancement in terms of the status of the new state.
Michael Collins signed the treaty. In his view, it gave Ireland the freedom to attain more freedom. In other words, once the Irish government had been established as a dominion, it could steadily work to ultimately attain republic status through the mechanisms of government rather than through the barrel of a gun. When he returned to Ireland, however, he was greeted with a dangerously divided public. Many believed he had done the right thing, guaranteeing an end to the war and bringing stability back to the country, even if it meant abandoning the ideals of the republic. For many others, he was little more than a traitor. Many in the active Irish Republican Army turned their allegiance away from Michael Collins and vowed to continue the war of independence until a complete separation from Britain was attained. Chief among them was Collins’ old comrade and 1916 Rising veteran de Valera, who now headed up an anti-treaty movement all across the country. The toxic seeds of Irish civil war had been planted.
If you go to the beginning of the Irish Revolution, the pre-1916 period, if people talked about a civil war, the assumption was it would be fought between nationalists and unionists that it would not be fought between south and north. Right? But in fact, what we remember as the Irish Civil War was ultimately a fight between two different factions of the republican or independence movement. So, the general picture is often slightly better off people — the establishment– were pro- treaty and that there was more of an agrarian land, hunger, working class, lower middle-class kind of opposition. The problem with that picture a little bit is that, for example, the Labour Party was pro-treaty. It was often very critical of the new state, but it was still, accepted the treaty. And as did many of the unions and many workers, in fact, tens of thousands of Irishmen from the working classes flooded into the Free State Army. And then when you go to the anti-treaty side, it often, it seems that there were a lot of poor rural populations that were fairly aloof from the anti-treaty struggle. And of course, there were also some of the celebrities of the revolution who came from the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocratic community, people like Constance Markievicz and Erskine Childers, were very staunchly anti-treaty as well.
Interestingly, while the separation of Ireland’s six northern counties from this new free state was by far the most significant consequence of the Anglo-Irish treaty, it didn’t play as great a role in civil war politics as you might think. The firmly unionist northern counties were going to be a serious issue no matter how independence was going to be attained. The free state strategy relied on the establishment of a border commission which would potentially reduce the limits of Northern Ireland. The anti-treaty faction also realised that they would probably have to go into battle with the northern unionists if they wanted to see the war of independence to the bitter end. Here’s Bill Kissane again.
Well, I think the republican position was simply “it’s all or nothing.” That if we don’t get what we want, we’ll fight on and we’ll achieve an end to partition, eventually. The logic of that position would be that a rejection of the treaty would mean continued conflict with the British army and ultimately conflict with the Ulster unionists. The opposite view was that there was going to be a boundary commission set up basically to adjudicate and draw the border between the new Irish free state and the existing entity called Northern Ireland. And the pro treatyites, believed that in the negotiations over the boundary commission, basically the British could be persuaded to reduce the size of Northern Ireland to perhaps four counties, in which case partition would be unviable. That didn’t happen, but I think the acceptance of partition by the free state for the time being was very much bound up with their view that violence cannot bring anything more than we’ve already achieved and that ultimately you have to reach out to the unionists. So, there was a kind of implicit split over the question of partition, even though it wasn’t the main issue in the civil war. The main issue in the civil war was the status of the free state and whether it was a republic or not.
In 1922 the rebel’s provisional government, Dáil Éireann, approved the treaty by 64 votes to 57, leading to a bitter split in the nationalist movement. De Valera began to tour the country, preaching to crowds that the fight for freedom was not over yet. Even if that freedom meant, and I quote, “wading through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government and perhaps through that of some members of the Irish government.” 200 IRA anti-treaty militants occupied the Four Courts building in Dublin city centre, preparing for a standoff with the Irish Free State Army. It was a terrible shadow of the 1916 Rising, which had seen many of the same rebels occupy nearby buildings against British imperial forces. On the other side, Collins under huge pressure from his colleagues and from the British government, with whom he had signed the treaty, dug in his heels using field artillery borrowed from the same British government he had spent his life fighting against. He now bombarded his former comrades in the Four Courts, leading once again to blood and bullets on the streets of Dublin. More battles soon ensued, with the anti-treaty IRA resuming their old tactics of guerrilla warfare around the country. Meanwhile, sectarian violence surged in the newly isolated Northern Ireland and the free state was levelled with accusations that they had abandoned the nationalists who lived there. South of the border, attacks on the Protestant minority also surged, especially the remaining landed elite, many of whom were burnt out of their big houses and forced to flee the country. Here’s Dr. Gemma Clarke, lecturer in British and Irish history in the University of Exeter and author of Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War.
You would see disruption to daily life. So, the anti-treaty republicans, one of their key tactics was attacking, destroying the infrastructure of the free state. So, you would see things like broken walls, telegraph wires, bridges blown up, you know. So, it did pervade society. Because that’s the thing about civil war, you know, militarisation of two sides within a common jurisdiction. So, you do often have this kind of blurring of lines between the civilian and the soldier. So perhaps more so than the war of independence when we see, you know, we have the IRA clashing against the British authorities, the Black and Tans axillary British soldiers. In the civil war. It’s a bit harder to tell who’s kind of on which side. So, you do see local people getting involved, getting caught in the crossfire or perhaps getting targeted deliberately by violence by one side or the other.
A lot of the recent research has shown pretty clearly that many of the people who died in the civil war were assassinated or executed. It wasn’t a conventional war where people were fighting according to the laws of war. And I think the consequence was that it just produced this poisonous atmosphere.
As the fighting refused to die down and the casualties mounted, the free state began to take more and more drastic action. The anti treatyites deliberate destruction of infrastructure and commerce had already cost the fledgling state tens of thousands of pounds. But even worse, it was increasingly undermining the viability of the 26-county dominion. The free state instituted martial law, allowing for execution of republican sympathisers in possession of firearms. The parallels to the 1916 Rising here were deeply uncomfortable. Many of the republican prisoners, just like the celebrated 1916 veterans, were detained and executed in Kilmainham jail. Among the first victims of the freestyles firing squad was Erskine Childers, whose yacht had once smuggled German weapons into Howth for the 1916 rebels. An eye for an eye strategy was often taken. Each time the republican guerrilla army killed a free stater, one of their prisoners would be led to the jail yard to be shot. Some captured republicans were summarily executed by the Free State Army, such as the nine young men at Ballyseedy, who were strapped to a landmine and detonated. Risks of retaliation were so high that Michael Collins himself was strongly advised against paying a visit to his home county of Cork, a stronghold of anti-treaty activism. Assuring his advisers half-jokingly that no one would shoot him in his own county, he made the trip anyway. Michael Collins was assassinated at Bealnablath on the 20th of August 1922, the victim of an anti-treaty ambush in which two bullets were put in his head. While a fifth of the population attended Michael Collins funeral, no official inquiry was ever carried out into his death. By the time the war died down in the summer of 1923, the country had been wrenched into brother — as the saying goes –had killed brother, and families would be torn apart for generations to come. As the republican anti treatyites steadily lay down their weapons, many of the dreams of the 1916 rebels were laid to rest with them. Indeed, one of the consequences of the new free state was the virtual abandonment of the women’s movement, which it formed such a central part of radical politics in Ireland, just a few years before. In its place came an overpowering hunger for stability and tradition, largely expressed through wholesale church control.
The role of gender in the conflict is really interesting and where arguably there is a deeper strain of kind of a radicalism. And so, for example, famously in the Dáil Éireann, that voted and debated on the treaty in December 1921 and January 1922, all of the female TDs, and I believe there were seven of them, voted against the treaty. The political status of women in Ireland, of course, suffered in the 1920s and 30s and there was a kind of a slow-moving kind of disenfranchisement from the public sphere or the political sphere. So, in many ways, the women who took part in the revolution are often seen as one of the losers of the revolution as a result.
It’s really interesting because we do see almost the disappearance of these, you know, really prominent figures, the likes of Helena Moloney and Constance Markievicz, Margaret Skinnider, who all played a role in the civil war, but often not so much a militant role in the way that they had done previously in 1916. What you see though after the Civil War is a society having to deal with the effects of war, you know its traumatized, this physical damage, psychological impact. And they have to establish their authority. They establish, you know, the new police force, Garda Síochána, and a big part of all of this kind of consolidation of the new state is securing a firmly Catholic state, a conservative society, and part of what happens within this is we do see a bit of a loss of the equality between men and women that has been seen in the revolution. You know, the likes of Constance Markievicz being the first female MP. By 1937, the kind of Ireland that’s emerging and that’s put into the constitution that creates the state known as Éire is the place of the woman in the home is formalized, consolidated within the text of the constitution itself. So, you can really see the civil war as a kind of the end of the movement of revolutionary possibility in terms of social relations, repressing women and perhaps taking away some of those civil liberties and you know that were promised by the proclamation of 1916.
The other great legacy of the Civil War was the total transformation of the Irish political landscape. In 1926, the great anti-treaty figurehead Éamon de Valera formed the Fianna Fáil party, which would go on to become the most successful political party in the history of the state. From the moment Fianna Fáil entered government in 1932, de Valera set about dismantling the treaty and everything it represented, eventually abolishing the Oath of Allegiance; sending the Governor-General home; and in 1937, founding a republic in all but name which he called simply Éire. On the other side, the pro-treaty political party Cumann na nGaedheal merged with a number of smaller groups, including the Fascist Blue Shirt organisation to form an opposition party named Fine Gael. It was in fact a Fine Gael Taoiseach, Johnny Costello, who in 1948 introduced the act that formally declared Ireland a republic and finally took it out of the Commonwealth –somehow after all those years, validating Michael Collins strategy of gaining the freedom to attain freedom.
Instead of a very left, right, centre kind of party divide, you’ve got a pro-treaty side and an anti-treaty enshrined in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil tradition’s respectively. One view, one way of looking at it is while it might be unusual by European standards to not have a very powerful Labour Party or a Communist Party sitting in Parliament or left right and all the different kind of groups you get under many parliamentary systems in 20th century Europe, that the Irish situation is a little bit more reminiscent of sort of a post-colonial country where the main parties that emerge are defined by their relationship to the old colonial power. And in this picture, the Fine Gael or pro-treaty is seen as having a slightly more flexible, receptive attitude towards Britain. The anti-treaty or Fianna Fáil tradition is seen as having a more militant kind of attitude against them.
For all that was fought and won, however, the Irish Civil War had no real winners. It cast such a traumatic shadow on the country, in fact, that for decades afterwards it was a taboo subject. The source of just too much pain and disappointment to even mention.
There was no official end. There was no amnesty, or you know treaty to end the fighting. The treaty that started it established a free state, but there was no official peace agreement or amnesty. There was no kind of truth and reconciliation commissions like we’ve seen in other post-conflict societies, like South Africa and Latin America. So, yes, I think in many ways whilst the fighting stopped, it was more of a sense of the anti-treaty republicans, the faction that opposed independence on the terms set out by the treaty, kind of dropped their arms — sort of with the idea that they would one day pick them up again. Which arguably they did, not the same people but you could argue the same tradition in the Northern Ireland Troubles. And I think because this, you know, this violence was almost so taboo, hadn’t really been looked at very closely by historians until late into the 1980s, 1990s. It was something that was very difficult to remember. Difficult to talk about, difficult to research. So, you could argue that, yes, as so long as there are things that remain unsaid and untalked about and relatively under-researched, then in some ways the divisions and the factions continue.
I mean, you asked the question earlier whether it was a taboo subject in our society. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But it certainly wasn’t something people look back on with pride.
Are we still living the civil war? Is it still going on?
I think that’s still going on simply because the partition issue on the Northern Ireland conflict has slowed down the process of coming to terms with the civil war. All of these things would be much easier to deal with if they were past tense but they’re not past tense, they’re actually present tense. so, in that sense, you know, T.S. Eliot, the poet, you know, has this quote, “I question whether any genuine civil war really ends.”
This question of whether the civil war is still with us is something that kind of constantly hovers over Irish politics.
Right. There’s no getting away from the shadows of the civil war sometimes, especially when one of the major parties in government does something that would be seen as typically pro-treaty or anti-treaty, you know, even 100 years after the fact.
Of course, while it’s still symbolically significant, most politicians today will tell you that it’s receded in importance. Of course, as the conflict passed out of living memory and the generations have moved on, the bitterness has decreased.
Yeah. And amazing as it sounds, it has taken this long really to get to that place. Until not so long ago, most people would have had older relatives who really did live through the civil war. So, it would’ve been quite close to home in many cases. And sometimes it was difficult for people, you know, to live often side by side with their former enemies.
Yeah, we’re talking about intimate splits within families and everything. And it’s a really good point, you know, we have to remember that we’re dealing with a really small population here. And it was even smaller back then, just a few million. The likelihood that the person who you were sent out to kill was someone you knew or was the brother or sister or son or friend of someone who you knew was pretty huge. So, to go back to normality after some of the closest people to you may have carried out atrocities against you and your family must have been incredibly painful.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A friend of mine actually once told me a funny story about two elderly neighbours of his, two women, who were like best friends, and they lived in houses next to each other. And he used to drop in sometimes do some chores for them or fix something or what have you. But he said that one of them had a big framed photo of Michael Collins on her mantelpiece. And she you know; she was quite slow moving. She was very old. But every time the other friend rang the doorbell, she would actually leap up and run and hide the picture before she let the other friend in. And then she put it back up when the friend was gone.
I’d put a photo of Big Mick on my wall, wheh wheh.
Naomi!
That kind of thing wasn’t unusual, I’d say. Like to a large extent, the position that your family took in the civil war defined your politics, and it certainly decided whether you would go to vote for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael until quite recently.
Yeah, absolutely. Right now I mentioned Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in that report, Maybe for our non-Gaelophone listeners, we should explain that Fianna Fáil the anti-treaty party, for memory, that means “soldiers of destiny” and that title, it echoes a lyric in the Irish national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann. Fianna Fáil came into being quite soon after the civil war, like I said, in 1926, and they were headed for decades by Éamon de Valera.
Finn Gael, the pro-treaty party, means “family” or “tribe of the Gaels.” They formed from a coalition of pro-treaty parties in 1933. Finn Gael spent much of the 20th century as an opposition party, but it has now been in government since 2007 and it’s the largest party in the country just about.
Now, you know, foreign media variously describes both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as centre right or sometimes centre or the odd time, you even hear centre left. But you know that that confusion just gives the lie, I think, to how hard it is to pin them down on the traditional left-right spectrum. Both parties have generally been quite traditionalist in their own ways, and both can be surprisingly progressive at times too.
Fine Gael traditionally aligned with the old guard establishment and status quo. People would associate them sometimes with big farmers and business owners, but that that’s something of a stereotype and it’s been changing fast in the last few years when they’ve been in power, particularly since it’s been on Fine Gael’s watch that Ireland has made many of its most socially liberal leaps forward, like the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion.
Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, have often been seen as appealing to quite populist politics and they still stand for some seriously traditional positions. Actually, a group of TDs in their party were the main voice against the legalisation of abortion in our most recent referendum, for example. They also, unfortunately for them, presided over the economic crash in 2007, and they’ve been struggling really to regain their political status ever since. But Naomi, can the civil war really have an influence on what those parties do now in 2018?
Well, I actually got a taste of just how powerful that memory can be recently when I met with Senator Mark Daly.
Now, before we go on, we should probably explain what a senator is in an Irish context. So, the Irish Parliament is called the Oireachtas. That’s made up of three bodies: the Uachtarán na hÉireann or president, the Dáil which is the lower house and the Seanad which is the upper house. Lawmakers in the Dáil are known as Teachta Dála or TDs, which is more or less equivalent to MPs in the British system. Members of the Seanad are officially called seanadóirí, but everyone just calls them senators.
Right. And to understand the Seanad, we have to understand Ireland’s bicameral system, which is somewhat mysterious even to people within Ireland and sometimes even to Irish politicians, as we’ll hear from Daly.
It is 100 percent mysterious to me. Bicameral. My God. So, the Senate or Seanad Éireann in its current form, that’s yet another product of de Valera’s 1937 constitution. It basically acts as a revising chamber for the ordinary lawmakers that are voters in general elections to the Dáil.
In that way, you could compare it to the House of Lords in the U.K. The Seanad has an advisory role and it can delay bills passed by the lower house, but it doesn’t have very much power. Senators work in committees to study issues and produce reports and sometimes together with members of the lower house. If there were to be some kind of mad Dáil that was going off the rails, the Seanad does have some powers to kick up a fuss and rein it in but not very many.
Also, the way in which the Seanad is elected is quite bizarre. Right?
Absolutely. 100 percent certified bizarre. So, there’s a few different types of senators and we’ll meet two of them shortly. 11 senators are directly appointed by the Taoiseach. Six senators are elected by graduates of universities, but only some universities, so both Tim and I get a vote because we went to Trinity, but if you went to the University of Limerick or Dublin City University you’re out of luck, you don’t get a vote.
Oh, God. Right. Well, that’s pretty unfair by any standard, I suppose. There was actually a referendum to change that in 1979, but it’s never been enacted into law, partly because, well, a lot of people think that the Seanad needs, you know, more reform than that. You know, a lot of people really think that the Seanad should be abolished altogether. Irish people were even asked in 2013 whether they wanted to abolish the Seanad or not, and they did choose to keep it going to be fair. But anyway, carry on.
The third category of senator is perhaps the most difficult to understand. 43 senators, the majority, are elected by what are called vocational panels. The idea of vocational panels is actually inspired by a specific period of Catholic thought, specifically the ideas of Pope Pius XI in the 1930s. Back then, he was arguing against the Marxist idea of class conflict and said instead the various vocational groups of society should work together cooperatively
Oh God. All right. OK, so this is getting more complicated. What does he mean, vocational groups? What does he mean by that?
Well, the way that it’s interpreted for the purposes of designing Seanad Éireann, is various panels. So, there’s the administrative panel, the agricultural panel, the cultural and educational panel, the industrial and commercial panel and the labour panel. And organisations that are relevant to these as supposed sections of society can nominate candidates. So, for example, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions can nominate a candidate for the Labour panel. And the Royal Irish Academy can nominate people for the cultural and educational panel. And the electorate, the voters, are made up of all as members of the outgoing Seanad, the incoming Dáil and all of Ireland’s city and county councillors. So, all the members of local government all around the country. So basically, all the politicians are the electorate.
Oh, Naomi, that is so complicated. Who came up with that system? Honestly, that is like, it’s like somebody was making some kind of like very intellectual game show or a board game or something.
Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like. Yeah, but I bet like if we were unfamiliar with our current systems of other things, it would seem like the same.
I trust you.
But anyway, you are not alone in finding it complicated, Tim. It translates into a situation basically where political parties are, you know, the powers here because the electorate are made up of politicians and no one else really understands it. But one man did manage to crack the system and he did it using the potency of the memory of the civil war. So, let’s hear from Senator Mark Daly. The Irish Senate meets in the former ballroom of a Duke. In the 1700s, this ornately plastered room was part of the winter palace of the Dukes of Leinster. It was a focal point of a large social circle of aristocrats who would gather in Dublin for the winter season.
I received notice from the following senators that have proposed to raise the following matters. Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee: the need for the minister of health to consider including…
Now, Leinster House is both home to the Irish Houses of Parliament and the phrase that has come to refer to Irish politics in general. As in, “Leinster House senses an election in the air.” Many of the aristocrats who once danced across the floors of Leinster House in the 1700s were themselves parliamentarians. They held offices as Lords or MPs in the parliament that then stood on nearby College Green. This parliament was subordinate to rule from Britain. Catholics were largely banned from voting for it or serving in it. It represented the Anglo-Irish ruling elite, who lived very different lives to the impoverished, rural and Irish-speaking Catholic majority. In 1798, a rebellion arrived that smashed this arrangement forever, but not in the way intended. A group of Presbyterians and Catholics who were excluded from power and inspired by the French and American revolutions rose in rebellion in an attempt to replace British rule with a republic. They were bloodily suppressed by British forces in response, and the Irish Parliament was abolished by the Act of Union. Ireland was no longer trusted to be ruled by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and it came under the direct rule of London. It was to be 120 years before another parliament sat in Dublin. When it did, the members of Dáil Éireann believed they were finally achieving what the rebels of 1798 had tried and failed to create: An Irish Republic. The old parliament building on College Green was still standing, but it was unsuitable to hold the Dáil for two reasons. First, it was now owned by the Bank of Ireland and secondly, it was difficult to militarily defend. The Dáil was a parliament at war. first with British forces and then with the anti-treaty side of the civil war. It needed a building that was less open to physical attack, and that’s how the new Irish Houses of Parliament came to Leinster House. It had not been home to the Dukes that built it for over a century. Because when Ireland was brought under direct rule from London, there was no longer any reason for aristocrats to gather in Dublin. The social circles that once held their balls in Dublin in the winter season withered away and the city became a backwater, palatial townhouses gradually being subdivided into tenements. The Dukes sold Leinster House to the Dublin Society, a philanthropic organisation dedicated to furthering knowledge in industry, farming and the arts. It’s known in its modern form as the RDS. The RDS had added a museum, a library and exhibition spaces onto the palace. The Senate was put in the old ballroom. The museums still ring the parliament buildings today and it was the RDS’ lecture theatre that the Dáil chose to become the debating chamber of the Irish Lower House of Parliament.
Now we’ll take leaders questions under Standing Order 29, Dara Calleary please…
I concur. Taoiseach, six years ago…
I met Senator Mark Daly in his office deep within this cluster of state institutions. I was there to speak to him about his efforts to achieve an elusive dream held by that first Dáil: a 32 county Ireland. Daly is a senator with a Fianna Fáil party, which grew out of the anti-treaty side of the civil war — the side that didn’t accept the 26-county dominion offered by the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Immediately after the U.K. voted for Brexit, Daly concluded that the Irish state should start actively planning and preparing for a referendum on Irish unity. I’m sitting in the office of Senator Mark Daly who has produced Brexit and the future of Ireland.
Uniting Ireland and its people at peace and prosperity is the full title. But it’s the first report in the history of the Irish Parliament on how to achieve the main aim of the state in Articles two and three of the constitution about the peaceful reunification of Ireland.
But what kind of gaps did it reveal in practical provisions for such an eventuality?
It reveals that there is no provision. Like, the Irish government doesn’t have a policy, isn’t preparing a policy on how to achieve the main aim with the state.
The belief that unification is the main aim of the Irish state is an interesting and rather unusual interpretation of the Irish constitution, but the possibility is set down in law by the Good Friday Agreement. The peace deal states that a referendum can take place when the British secretary of state deems there to be majority support for unity. It doesn’t specify how this majority should be measured, but that’s a story for another day.
There will be a referendum, which is quite clear, at some stage. Of course, the lesson of Brexit is this: you do not have a referendum and then tell everybody what the future looks like. Unless now Brexit is, you only have a referendum at the very end of a long process where you debate all the issues, outline what the future would look like. And in that regard, the unionists’ concerns are probably one of the key ones,
Daly’s report found one policy priority should be improving the lives of young people in disadvantaged loyalist communities. Because with the lack of other options, there was a real risk they could be radicalised and turned to violence if a unity referendum loomed.
So preventing young people living in the most disadvantaged Protestant communities or loyalist communities being exploited by essentially drug dealers and business people, most of whom who were running racketeering and extortion enterprises and empires, in those communities, who masquerade as leaders and paramilitary leaders and would radicalize them or utilise them or exploit them into the future and in the future in the run up to a referendum and how to prevent them being radicalised and exploited now. And that is a combination of education, housing, hope and opportunity. But if nothing is done now, then that is certain to happen.
As we spoke, I noticed that the wall behind Daly’s head was covered with framed items relating to the civil war. Can you just explain these framed documents that you have on your wall? You’ve got The Wind That Shakes the Barley. You’ve got a war of independence civil War service record for a Charlie Daly.
That’s my grandfather, yeah, who was only 17 and I joined the war of independence and the civil war. And he, I have his medals at home. I wear them at Easter. He was sent out at 17 years of age to go off and attack a railway junction. He was a scout and he reported back that there was someone on the bridge, a free state soldier on the bridge, and he was told to lead up the attack and to shoot the guy in the bridge and he said he didn’t want to do it. And he said he wouldn’t do it because the guy on the bridge was his neighbour, who’s the same age as himself. But anyway, he went to attack the bridge and when they went back to attack the bridge, your man was gone, and he was delighted he said.
Beside the service records of Mark Daly’s grandfather hung another relic of another anti-treaty rebel ancestor, also called Charlie Daly. This Charlie wrote a letter to his father in a cell where he was imprisoned with three other anti-treaty rebels, hours before their execution by the forces of the Irish free state in 1923. “I will say nothing now about my life or its history,” he wrote. “Except that I hope that both have been what a good Irishman’s and Catholics’ should have been. I think that I have now done my best in both capacities and hold no vain regrets. Perhaps I may have been more conscientious in the service of my country than in God’s, but the service of both are so closely identified that I trust in his mercy for forgiveness, if it is happened that I have been more diligent in the service of Ireland than in his.” The execution of daily and his comrades was commemorated by then fellow rebel and later Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance, James Ryan, in a song imploring so-called Free Staters not to fly the Irish tricolour. It’s sung here by Dominic Behan.
“With Daly and Sullivan, the bold. We’ll break down the English connection. And bring back the nation you sold. Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors, the flag we Republicans claim. It can never belong to Free Staters, you’ve brought on it nothing but shame.
Then I asked Mark Daly about the third civil war-themed piece of memorabilia on his wall, a poster of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Daly explained that this film, along with copies of the execution letter of Charlie Daly, was what got him elected.
I ran for the Senate in 2007 and I was told by a friend of mine, Brian Crowley, who’s a member of the European Parliament. I was asking his advice about running for the Senate and he said, you need five things: support of the party leader; support of headquarters; support of your local organisation; support of your local member of parliament, and you need to be a public representative already. And if you had that, you have some chance of getting elected. I’m going to use bad language here so you can bleep this out. And he said, “You have none of them. You’re out of your fucking mind.” So, I said, “No chance, Brian?” And he said, “No chance.” I said, “Alight.” So, what I did was I interviewed 20 guys who ran for the Senate and didn’t get elected. And found out why they didn’t get elected. It’s the most complicated electoral system in the whole wide world and the number of voters, is less, is just a thousand. And I literally what I knew at the start could fit in a stamp, but one of the things was one of the things was to get known. So what I did was I sent out a copy of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which had just won the Palme d’Or to the Fianna Fáil county and city councillors who were voters in the Irish Senate election, and just before Christmas, with a copy of the last ever my cousin wrote before his execution during the Irish Civil War in 1923. Because most of the voters would have been like in their 50s, 60s, they hadn’t been to the cinema, but all of them would have had a connection to the war of independence, a civil war, to family, uncles, grand-uncles, fathers, grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers in Cumann na mBan. And they got it. So when I went to the doors, I rang them up saying I’d like to meet with you to sit down — it’s like a job interview with 500 people –they all said, “Oh, you’re the guy who sent The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” By the time I finished the election process, it was the equivalent of driving from Kenmare, County Kerry where I’m from to Perth in Australia. 15,000 miles is what I drove around the country to visit all these people, and I beat three sitting Fianna Fáil senators on the first count and won a seat. And Brian Crowley said to me, “I didn’t think you could do it.”
If a split between Irish people who shared the same ultimate aim can be so powerful it can decide an election nearly a century later, what hope does Mark Daley hold for integrating loyalists in a united Ireland, including those who are implacably opposed to ever joining the Republic? I asked him his thoughts. The people who were in the anti-treaty IRA couldn’t even accept other Irish people who were willing to support the treaty. But you say now Ireland does have a place even for unionists.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s in the flag. In Ireland, in the Republic now, depending who’s took the numbers, 1 in 8 people are from somewhere else, were born somewhere else. Nobody would ever question someone being Polish and Irish or just Polish if they want, and nobody questions someone being Romanian and Irish or if you want to live in Ireland and be English, that’s fine. If you want to be English and Irish or Anglo-Irish, that’s fine too. If you’re in Northern Ireland and you want to be British, it can be that. Or you can be British and Irish, you can be both. We have no problem having Irish Americans or the Irish in Australia. The Irish in Argentina or New Zealand or wherever. We can accommodate all of that Irishness in its broadest sense well then surely, we can also accommodate those who live in Northern Ireland, who see themselves as British.
Daly links the story of his Senate election to the report on uniting Ireland on his desk. In both cases, he sought to find a way forward by studying the failures, the hopeful senators who didn’t get elected. Other countries that have sought to end partition and failed. And the mistakes made by his own predecessors in the past.
The people who were experts in the Senate election, weren’t the guys who got elected because they tell you nothing. It’s the people who didn’t get elected. Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world, said once upon a time, said, “The poor man learns from his own mistakes. A rich man learns from other people’s mistakes.” What I tried to learn in this report is looking at what mistakes were made by others. Bear in mind, we are 849 years at this problem. Brexit and the changing demographics of Northern Ireland is going to see the end of it.
In many ways, it seems like Irish politics is stuck in the past, but in recent years there’s been a massive shift.
Right. Yeah. The dramatic fall of Fianna Fáil back in 2007, that kind of rocked the whole system. You know, they had dominated Irish politics for most of the 20th century. And in the 2011 election, just after that crash, it got just, that party got just 17 percent of the vote, which was a huge blow to them. In the place of Fianna Fáil, came a big surge of independent candidates. And then there was, of course, this renewed Fine Gael party, which, you know, decked itself out with a new generation of very young and relatively quite popular ministers.
Yeah. You have to give Fine Gael credit for managing generational transition quite well compared to other parties. It can be a problem all over the world. Remember historically, either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael have led the government, occasionally with the support of smaller parties in coalition. Despite their many similarities, though, they had never ruled together and because of the civil war, such a thing was unthinkable until 2016. The very splintered result of that election created a result where the most workable solution was for Fine Gael to form a minority government with the support of Fianna Fáil.
Right. So, the unthinkable happens before our eyes and could we say that a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together for the first time, does this put an end to civil war politics?
Some people thought so. And there were, you know, op-eds and stuff about it. And then came the reports that the parties were still bitter enemies and it wasn’t all that simple. But Tim, honestly, I think it kind of did mark an end of sorts to civil war politics.
Okay, well, explain. Explain your point.
Well, in practical terms, this government that we have now and that’s been in place for the last two years, it means that you have a whole generation of politicians that have worked together, you know, day to day, and that just builds relationships. It’s also psychologically important. Fianna Fáil had, you know, it had this big barrier about coalitions because it had been the dominant, defining force in Irish politics for so many decades. It was difficult for the party to come to terms with its reduced position. It was humiliating for them to be supporting, you know, the old rivals, Fine Gael, which were always the smaller party. But this is the reality of the political landscape across Europe. Fianna Fáil has never recovered from the electoral battering it got for being blamed for Ireland’s massive economic crisis and property crash, just like all over Europe. In Ireland, political preferences have splintered, and support has sapped for old traditional parties, and governments are increasingly having to be cobbled out of complicated and unexpected coalitions.
Now, of course, in the face of these two big, old political parties, we should point out that Ireland has also a very old, very storied left-wing party, too. Of course, the Labour Party. But they have always struggled really against the titans of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. In recent times, they managed to reach new lows, really, when they supported Fine Gael in the last government. And they ended up just being blamed for much of the austerity that came in those years.
As you know, listeners, this is a time of change in Ireland, a time when old certainties are suddenly being renegotiated. And in this context, into Dáil Éireann, came a person from another political tradition altogether, a unionist. His name is Ian Marshall and he’s the first elected unionist politician in Dáil Éireann in many, many decades. We’re going to finish up this episode with an interview with him.
Now, this is a good opportunity, actually, to address a question that I’ve gotten quite a bit, actually, which is, you know, are there any unionists in the Republic, like me in particular, are there any political parties that still want to be part of the United Kingdom?
Yeah, I’ve gotten that one as well. Like sometimes people in Britain assume that it’s kind of a contested matter, you know. And that some people might be agitating, you know, against, sort of, Ireland being an independent nation or whatever.
Yeah, it’s interesting, I suppose. I mean, they presume, which is understandable, that it might be a bit like Scotland with, you know, very much a divided political establishment, but no. Yeah. The short answer is no. Like we’ve said before, you know, both the major political parties are nationalists, obviously, and so are all the parties really to varying degrees. There’s only really a handful of Southern Irish unionists really in the population and their number is so low that it is politically non-existent really.
That fact is really interesting because before independence, the unionist voice in Ireland was a small but quite powerful minority. So just to give you an idea, in the 1918 election, three unionists were elected in the South. There was one by Rathmines in South Dublin, two by our own constituency, Tim, the University of Dublin. But of course, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered even then. Sinn Féin, which as we said, wanted outright independence, won 73 seats, becoming by far the biggest party on the island. The only constituency in what’s now the republic that Sinn Fein didn’t win went to another nationalist party. The unionist politicians in the South were so hugely outnumbered that rather than fighting the last cause of opposing the coming Irish independence, they focused on opposing partition and working for an accommodation for themselves within the new state. And much of the Senate actually exists for that reason as a place for unionists and the remaining Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
Right. Yeah. Of course, we can’t forget this during the civil war as well, we have to remember that, you know, there were plenty more unionists around in what is now the Republic of Ireland back then then there would be today. And for those people, you know, often, you know, small unionists who were just happy with the union and just didn’t want to rock the boat, really, you know, for them, this was one of the advantages of Ireland, you know, having Dominion status after the Anglo-Irish treaty. It was a place that could accommodate them as well. You know, a lot of them happened also to come from the colonial elite and therefore happened to be some of the wealthiest people in the country. So, it served the country well to have somewhere like the Seanad where their economic interests could be taken into account. So, lots of unionists were happy enough with the new free state arrangement when it finally came about. Lots of others who weren’t happy simply left Ireland at that point after independence or during the civil war, lots of unionists were, let’s say, convinced to leave quite violently by the IRA.
The last unionist political representatives in Ireland were around in the 1920s, and they supported Cumann na nGaedheal, which is the predecessor of today’s Fine Gael.
Right? So that is until now, then?
Exactly. Until now. And for those reasons, Ian Marshall is really quite historic. He’s going back to the tradition of giving unionists a political place in the Irish Seanad. And he was elected for his seat. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar approached him and asked him to run in a by-election for two vacant Senate seats. And Marshall topped the poll by some distance. And what’s more, he was supported by Sinn Féin.
Oh, wow, that’s something else. OK, so let’s meet Senator Ian Marshall.
Ian Marshall never had his sights set on Leinster House. He grew up in a Protestant farming family in Markethill in south Armagh, and when he first came to Dublin after his election, he had to consult a map.
The interesting thing is that when I came down to Leinster House, I had to Google where Leinster House was. So, first point, I didn’t know where Leinster House was and remember because someone of my age who lived through the Troubles, actually Dublin wasn’t somewhere we went to a lot. So, it was interesting because on my first trip to that site. I was quite in awe of it because this is national government where we have a devolved parliament in Belfast. So, this was national government and I was impressed by it. And I think the thing that has impressed me with Leinster House is the maturity of the discussion there we have. There are party political parties on issues that go on all the time, that’s the very nature of politics. However, what I find in Leinster House is that there’s a very much a family spirit, a collegiate spirit. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the case of men or women on security, whether it’s the ushers, whether it’s the admin staff or whether it’s the TDs or senators, there’s a fantastic family spirit within the building that actually we’re all here to deliver for the greater good. That’s been impressive.
Marshall’s maiden speech to the Seanad had a strong theme of acceptance. He quoted the nationalist politician, fellow Markethill man and peace negotiator Seamus Mallon saying, “I don’t care what they call the land. As long as they call it home.”
“It’s a truly historic day for both this house and for myself. As the first northern unionist elected to the Seanad, and to represent the views and opinions of the people of Northern Ireland and to give their perspective, this position carries with it significant responsibility. The time is right. Public opinion supports this across Northern Ireland and across the Republic of Ireland. I don’t plan to speak on Brexit. My thoughts are well documented, only to say very often in life you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Europe isn’t perfect and it has flaws, but to quote one of the panel members in Belfast two weeks ago, “Leaving is a profound mistake.”
I sat down with Senator Marshall to ask him about the reasons he wants Northern Ireland, and the whole U.K., to stay part of the European Union.
I’m strongly opposed to Brexit. This came about by as; I suppose a consequence of living and working in an embassy and agri-food for the last 35 years. I’m acutely aware of the importance and significance of our closeness and linkage to Europe, to the U.K. and to the rest of world for trading of food. And remember, I live in an industry where we import 80-odd percent of our raw materials into the island of Ireland. And in the Northern Irish context, we then subsequently export 85 percent of what we produce. So, I’m acutely aware of the significance and the importance of being part of this big trading bloc. I think we’re hugely dependent on them as a trading partner, especially in agri-food. I think my concerns are that we took a point, took a position in the U.K. on the 23rd of June, which was based on the information we had at that time. In hindsight, and hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but in hindsight, we now recognise that there was a lot of misleading information. There was lot of incorrect information and there were a lot of untruths. And this was on both sides of the discussion. But what my position would be that that was then, this is now. The discussions going on at the moment are about a deal that can work for everyone, whether that’s business or you talk to business leaders. I work in the university. If I talk to academics, they’re saying this is crazy. The linkages and the value in that linkage is immense. And when I look at the legal profession, because we’ve woven together the structure that is you with U.K. as part of the European model. So, I think that’s important that we look at all those reasons that we should actually consider staying. And I think that if we’re genuinely serious in taking this forward, I as part of the 48 percent of people who voted in a U.K. context to remain, and remember the northern context actually it was, there were more people voting to remain than to leave, but if we consider it in a U.K. context, I was part of the 48 percent. If I’m taken out of Europe, at the moment, against my will, I will hold this against those people for the next 20 years.
Marshall likes to refer to a quote, “silent majority” in Northern Ireland. He believes that this majority has a far greater desire for reconciliation, peace and co-operation than their political representatives profess. He told me there’s a need to take a global perspective and understand that this is one tiny island in a big world and that we need to stick together.
All that I’m representing now is the majority, the vast majority of northern unionist opinion. And the reality is that people are tired. People are, there’s a lot of apathy about a lack of an executive. There’s a lot of apathy about a siege mentality. So what people are saying is, look, this is what needs, this is really what needs to happen. And, you know, it’s interesting because I am a unionist. And, it’s been told many, many times in Leinster House you’re here because you’re northern. You’re here as, you’re unionist, you’re a Protestant. No one’s concerned about that in Leinster House. It’s about to represent the views and opinions of the people on this island. Both the people in Northern Ireland and the people in the south of Ireland. So, I think the notion that I don’t represent unionism is actually incorrect. I’m a very strong unionist. And I think that what I’d like to think is I represent unionism going forward because it must be cognizant of what’s going on behind. There’s an interesting analogy I say when I drove down in the car this morning, you know, I focus on the road in front of me because I have to because that’s important, that’s where I’m going, but I have to be cognizant of what’s going on behind me so I check my rear view mirror. I’m always aware of what’s going on behind, but I’m focusing on the front, in front of me. And, you know, I think that’s what if we look at this, this is similar. I think what makes the appointment in Leinster House easier is that I’m very, very confident and secure in the fact that I’m a unionist, I’m not another a weak unionist, I’m not a soft unionist, I’m not pandering to some sort of Republican agenda. It’s black and white. I’m a unionist. That’s my position. And what’s been a breath of fresh air is complete respect for that in Leinster House and an acknowledgement that that’s where I am. All the people in Leinster House will not agree with, will never subscribe to that. But they acknowledge that that’s where I come from. And I can respect their position. They can respect my position. Let’s get on with this and do business.
Marshall concluded his maiden speech with a quotation attributed to the Spanish bullfighter, Domingo Ortega. It’s a reflection on the limitations of those who would seek to judge a situation from afar.
“Bullfight critics ranked in rows, crowd the enormous plaza full. But only one is there who knows. And he’s the man who fights the bull.” Thank you.”
I spoke to Marshall for far longer than we have time to play here, and the whole interview was fascinating, touching on everything from his experiences growing up and living through the times of conflict in South Armagh to why he describes himself as a pragmatic unionist and his thoughts on a unity referendum. We’re posting the full interview as a Halfpint episode, the extra content we make to thank our supporters on Patreon www.patreon.com/theirishpassport.
That’s a fascinating interview, Naomi. It really is so interesting how the appointment of Ian Marshall is in many ways a nod to the original politics of the Seanad. But it’s coming back in this entirely different context after the Good Friday agreement, where all communities on the island are making efforts to listen to each other properly and to be heard themselves.
Yeah, I loved hearing his perspective. And particularly when he told me that he was so unfamiliar with Dublin when he first came, he had to locate the house of the Oireachtas on Google Maps.
Probably a first for a senator. OK, well, whatever about the civil war, I think that one thing is certain and that is that history just doesn’t stop happening.
Certainly doesn’t.
No. Right. That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget, if you liked this episode, do share it on social media and tell your friends about it. Word of mouth really helps us so much.
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Slán, everyone.