The Irish Difference: Our tangled 800 years of history with Britain unpicked with style and insight

As the heavyweight boxer apocryphally declared of his opponent pre-fight: “We’re gonna get it on, ’cause we don’t get along”. So it has been, seemingly forever, between Ireland and Britain.

he two islands endured a simmering hostility for centuries until Irish independence 100 years ago; it continued, at a lower heat setting throughout the 20th century, while the Troubles turned up the gas once more from the 1970s.

These days, partly exacerbated by Brexit — plus a decade and more of Tory rule over there — anti-British (in truth, anti-English) antipathy is increasingly fashionable among our gilded elites. Some of the prejudiced tirades you hear from our politicians or read from columnists would cause outrage in the reverse: “It’s like something from Punch magazine, Joe! English bigotry rears its ugly head again.”

Of course, this is almost all one-way. And as Fergal Tobin points out in The Irish Difference, it has been from the start. A thousand years ago, the British were vaguely aware of this island; but it was so far from their centre of power, and held such little evident treasures (mineral, security and others) that they essentially didn’t bother with it.

And there’s a modern echo of that: Boris Johnson’s government seemed genuinely caught by surprise when the not-insignificant matter of the Irish Border and the peace process came up during Brexit negotiations. It wasn’t so much a conscious desire to harm Ireland, more that it simply hadn’t occurred to them — which hurts just a little bit. One wonders if this British indifference to Ireland makes our green-flag-waving heroes angrier than outright enmity would. At least that would show they noticed us.

Tobin’s book carries the humorous subtitle A Tumultuous History of Ireland’s Breakup With Britain, and that’s what it’s always been like: we’re the partner in a failed relationship who can’t move on. I hate him but still need him. I want her to leave but am furious when she does. Why won’t they pay me attention any more?

“We may be different,” Tobin writes, “but we are still cousins. Irish people need to reflect on the historical and strategic imperatives that drive British indifference towards Ireland: they are not just being bad-minded. A little mutual knowledge and understanding will cut both ways. That is the primary purpose of this book.”

An admirable philosophy, all but the most narrow-minded could agree. The English/British did some terrible things here, for sure; but that was in the past. Nowadays, as Tobin notes, we share many of the same cultural touchstones — “fish and chips, double-decker buses and Manchester United”. For me, these are the ties that bind people; in the end, these are the important things in life, not political grandstanding, economic blathering and all the rest of those dismal sciences.

A writer and historian, Tobin has previously (under the pen name Richard Killeen) produced a number of well-received books such as Ireland in Brick and Stone. He’s a beautiful writer, with a graceful prose style, and he takes a contemplative and nuanced approach to an incredibly tangled story.

It moves from 1169, when an ill-advised invite to the Normans to help settle a Leinster-based dynastic dispute turned into, well, the timeworn “800 years of oppression”. Those initial invaders — Tobin labels them Old English — became, famously, “more Irish than the Irish themselves”: while they retained vestigial loyalty to the English monarch, they remained Catholic and became a sort of hybrid grouping: Hiberno-Norman.

Video of the Day

For centuries, England (Great Britain wouldn’t officially come into being until the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) took a laissez-faire approach to Ireland. Irish vassals ran the island for the king, taxes were paid, everyone lumped along happily enough.

That changed when Henry VIII forcibly converted much of England to Protestantism. A series of rebellions followed and the Crown sent in the shock troops, a group Tobin calls New English: “Elizabethan and Stuart adventurers and conquistadores”. These took over most of Leinster and Munster; Anglo-Scottish planters took care of Ulster. Connacht, notoriously, was left to its own devices.

He identifies a third group of interlopers, “Creoles”: Cromwellian settlers from the mid-17th century on, who also claimed land in Leinster and Munster and would eventually become the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The rest, you know: Penal Laws, Daniel O’Connell, Fenians, Young Irelanders, Parnell, the Land League, the Easter Rising, nascent nationalism expressed in the Irish language and Gaelic games… But the beauty of this book is in the telling: The Irish Difference lays out its themes and chronologies with impeccable clarity, and is full of fascinating detail, a lot of it unknown to me.

For instance, the ultimate losers, economically and politically, of the Famine were Protestant landlords, bankrupted by the bald fact that dead or emigrated tenants can’t pay rent; the winners were Catholic farmers who had survived and, supported by Crown funds, bought their own land. Many of these property holdings endure to the present day; a reminder that, while it may be a foreign country, the past can exert an influence on us today. This exemplary book opens up that past with finesse and insight.