Dublin is covered in signs commemorating the Easter Rising which occurred in 1916 and started a process leading to Irish independence as well as sectarian strife offering an example of the long terms affects of politicizing religion and also the possibility of overcoming seemingly hopeless conflict in the goodness of time.
The Easter Rising
While the English government was preoccupied with World War I, a group of approximately 1,500 Irish rebels attempted to take control of strategic points across Dublin and thus spark a general rebellion against English rule in Ireland. Although the rebels were quickly put down, the rising and the subsequent crack down, which included 16 executions, eventually led to an awakening of Irish nationalism and the start of a brutal Guerrilla war led by Michael Collins.
The war and political pressure from the U.S. eventually led to the negotiation of an agreement with England for its withdrawal from the 26 counties of the South in exchange for allegiance to the Brittish Crown and acceptance of the 6 northern most counties remaining as part of England. The Irish civil war then ensued as not all of the republicans including the nominal head of the movement, Éamon de Valera, and many of the fighters accepted the treaty.
The Politicization of religion
Well before the Rising, there were parliamentary attempts to achieve home rule for Ireland as there were a large number of Irish Members of Parliament in the Westminster led by Charles Parnell. According to Tim Pat Googan, an Irish journalist, William Gladstone’s Liberal party was ready to approve home rule in 1880s and it was the conservatives who deliberately played “The Orange Card” and to use fear of Catholic control over protestants living in the North to block it.
In 1913, as Home Rule was again being discussed, Edward Carson formed a paramilitary organization, the Ulster Volunteer Force, to forcible resist any attempt to impose Home Rule on the 6 northern counties. A mirror image was then created on the Catholic side which was a forerunner to the Irish Republican Army.
One aspect of the new Irish Free State was the apparently deep religious conviction of many of its political leaders who seemed to go out of their way to pass legislation to show their piety despite opposition from the Protestants who lived in the South such as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In a 1925 debate on outlawing divorce, for example, Yeats made a compelling speech urging the Irish Parliament to refrain from passing laws that the Protestant North would not find acceptable as it would only drive the communities farther apart and make re-unification impossible. Yeats and others were ignored in this and other sectarian issues and Ireland has lived with the consequences ever since.
The North, of course, went further than simply protecting Protestant interests and essentially disenfranchized Catholics in the six counties leading eventually to the sectarian “troubles” of the 1960s and 70s.
Lessons for the Middle East
In my class on Strategy and Geopolitics last term, we had the good fortune to have students from Lebanon, Kuwait, and Israel and the one thing they all agreed upon was that the different conflicts in the region were primarily political and that religious issues were mostly used to further political ends.
Fear of religious persecution can be a powerful motivation to win votes and political support and religious fervor can be used to justify murder, war, and the de-humanization of whole groups of people.
In class, we made reference to the fact that religious wars were common in Europe up until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and that the Catholic – Protestant conflict was allowed (or perhaps encouraged) in Ulster up until recent times.
It has taken the Irish 100 years to go from the Rising to the presently tolerant and prosperous country I visited last week and I can only hope that it will not take so long to find lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors on the one hand and between Shia and Sunni on the other.
Religion can have a central place in people’s lives but politics should be left to politicians and they should not weaponize people’s beliefs.