De Valera's Irelands (28 page)

After the Second World War, Armistice Day was replaced by Rem­em­brance Day and held on the Sunday closest to 11 November. Names of those who had served or died in the war were added to existing me­mori­als. Parades and services continued as they had done on Armistice Day, and they remained largely the concern of the Protestant and unionist com­munity. While the government had no formal involvement in these events it was quite common for the prime minister or a cabinet minister to take the salute of ex-servicemen on these occasions. There is little evi­dence of involvement of Catholic clergy in public ceremonies at ceno­taphs or at council services. At the same time we should note that in some places, such as Dungannon, Newry and Sion Mills, parades of Ca­tholic and Prot­estant ex-servicemen continued to take place as they had done in the 1930s.
29

The degree of polarisation between the two communities over this commemoration is revealed starkly in a comparison of coverage of these events in Belfast nationalist and unionist papers in the mid-1950s. In 1955 and 1956 the unionist papers, the
Belfast Newsletter
and the
North­ern Whig
gave extensive coverage to Remembrance Day in various places in Northern Ireland as well as in London, while the nationalist paper, the
Irish News
, ignored the occasion and carried not a single report on any event connected with the commemoration.
30

By the early 1900s, St Patrick's Day on 17 March was widely celebrated throughout Ireland, north and south. In 1903 an act of the West­minster parliament made St Patrick's Day a bank holiday, a measure supported by unionist and nationalist MPs. After 1921, St Patrick's Day was still ob­served in Northern Ireland but on a lower key than in the south where it took on special importance. During the 1920s and 1930s in Northern Ireland the shamrock continued to be worn widely and the day remained a bank holiday when banks, government and municipal offices and schools were closed, although most shops and factories seem to have been un­affected.
31
In Catholic churches St Patrick's Day was an important feast day which was well-attended. The Ancient Order of Hibernians continued to organise demonstrations on this date and nationalist politicians often used the occasion to make speeches. From 1925, the BBC in North­ern Ire­land commenced an annual series of special St Patrick's day broad­­­casts.
32

The Patrician Year of 1932, which marked the anniversary of St Pat­rick's arrival in Ireland was marked by all the churches. At Saul, the site of St Patrick's first church, the Church of Ireland built a new church while the Catholic Church erected a statue of St Patrick on a nearby hill top. Each of the main denominations took advantage of the occasion to re­affirm its belief that St Patrick belonged exclusively to its tradition.
33
Sporting activ­ities on St Patrick's Day, including the Ulster schools rugby cup, and spe­cial theatrical events, dances and dinners, were well attended in the 1920s and 1930s. On 18 March 1939 the
Belfast Newsletter
reported that ‘in Bel­fast and all over the province Ulster folk said good­bye to St Patrick's Day with dances and other entertainments'. Special ceremonies of the troop­ing of the colour and presentation of the sham­rock to Irish regiments re­mained a tradition (begun by Queen Victoria at the end of her reign). There was, however, no official involvement in or recognition of St Pat­rick's Day, apart from a number of dinners or dances on the day, organ­ised by the Duke of Abercorn, as governor of Northern Ireland.
34
On the unionist and government side there was no attempt to hold parades or make speeches on 17 March. The speeches of southern politicians on the day denouncing partition or declaring Ireland's attach­ment to Rome were reported regularly in the northern press and some­times criticised in edi­torials but there was no attempt by the government in this period to re­spond.

After the war, banks and government offices continued to close on St Patrick's Day, while the wearing of the shamrock remained popular and the tradition of presenting it to the Irish regiments abroad con­tinu­ed. Catholic churches still observed it as a special feast day and the An­cient Order of Hibernians organised parades and demonstrations as be­fore. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Northern Ireland prime minister, Lord Brookeborough, used the occasion of St Patrick's Day to issue pub­lic addresses to Ulster people abroad, while members of his cabinet spoke at dinners organised by Ulster associations in Great Britain.
35
By the mid 1950s, however, these attempts to match the political use made of St Pat­rick's Day by the southern government had mostly ceased. In the late 1950s a government information officer urged the cabinet that it might be wise to ‘quietly forget' St Patrick's Day and abolish it as a bank holi­day.
36
The suggestion was rejected, but it is clear from newspaper reports in the 1950s that for many people St Patrick's Day was ‘business as usual'. Many schools dropped it as a holiday and shops and businesses remain­ed open.
37
Correspondents in the unionist press denounced the political overtones of the day in the south and elsewhere. One letter on 17 March 1961 stated that ‘the day is now chief­ly memorable to the aver­age Ulster­man as the day on which repeated threats against his stand for constitu­tional liberty are pronounced in the Republic and on which Ulster's position is vilified throughout the Eng­lish-speaking world.'
38

Nonetheless, it should be noted that there were some in unionist and Protestant church circles who believed that more attention should be given to the event. From the mid-1950s the editorial in the
Belfast Tele­graph
often urged that the day should be a full public holiday, a re­quest backed by the Church of Ireland diocesan synod of Down and Dromore.
39
In 1961 a resolution of the Young Unionists' Conference de­plored the apathy in Northern Ireland towards St Patrick's Day.
40
In the 1950s the Church of Ireland inaugurated an annual St Patrick's Day pil­grimage and special service at Downpatrick and Saul, which was well attended. Such events were still strongly limited by denominational barriers al­though small elements of change were occurring. In 1956 the nationalist members of Downpatrick council refused an invitation to participate in a joint wreath-laying ceremony at St Patrick's grave on the grounds that the Catholic Church ‘had arranged adequate celebrations for the Feast and they could not add anything to them'. Eight years later, however, when the Archbishop of Canterbury was the special guest at the St Patrick's Day service at the Church of Ireland cathedral in Down­patrick, nationa­list councillors turned up to greet the archbishop at the entrance to the cathedral, although they felt unable to enter the building.
41

Commemoration at Eastertime of the 1916 Rising was low-key and without much public notice in Northern Ireland until 1928 when well-publicised ceremonies were held at republican plots in Milltown ceme­tery in Belfast and in the city cemetery in Derry. In the following year and throughout the 1930s, the government, using the Special Powers Act, pro­hibited these commemorations. In support of the ban the Minister of Home Affairs, R. D. Bates, stated that those involved were ‘celebrating one of the most treacherous and bloody rebellions that ever took place in the history of the world' and claimed that there was IRA involvement in the commemorations.
42
The nationalist leader, Joe Devlin, challenged this view in parliament in 1932 and argued that the ban on the commemora­tions was a denial of people's right to free speech and referred to one such event in Newry as simply ‘an annual commemor­ation for all those who died for Ireland'.
43

Every Easter during the 1930s, commemorative meetings were an­nounced and then declared illegal by the government, but there were often attempts to get round the ban.
44
In 1935, for example, about five hundred people gathered on Easter Monday some fifty yards beyond the cemetery gates at Milltown graveyard where they recited a decade of the rosary, while in Derry, republicans held their commemorations a week before Easter to get round the ban at Eastertime.
45
On a number of occasions in Derry and Armagh wreath-laying ceremonies were per­formed on Saturday night, hours before the ban came into operation on Easter Sunday.
46
Tension arose frequently over the flying of the tricolour and the wearing of the Easter lily. The most serious confrontation be­tween the police and republican organisers came in 1942, when active IRA units became involved in the commemorations, leading to shooting in both Dungannon and Belfast, and the murder of a Catholic police con­stable in Belfast.
47

By 1948, the government had decided not to impose a general ban on Easter commemorations of 1916. From this time on commemorative events were held in a number of centres by a range of organisations. In 1950, for example, the main event at Milltown cemetery in Belfast was organised by the National Graves Association.
48
This was followed by a separate service organised under the auspices of the Republican Socialist party, addressed by Harry Diamond MP, who referred to ‘the shadow of a foreign occupation of a portion of their country'. Finally, there was an­other ceremony held by the ‘Old Pre-Truce IRA'. In Newry a comm­emo­rative service was followed by a large parade, led by members of Newry Urban Council, and including members of the Catholic Boy Scouts, the Foresters and the Hibernians. There were also Easter commemorative events in County Armagh and County Tyrone and Derry city. Similar events occurred during the 1950s with few problems, although some­times there was conflict between organisers and police over the flying of the tricolour, as for example in Lurgan in 1952 and 1953 when the Royal Ulster Constabulary confiscated flags and made arrests. In Newry in 1957, arrests were also made over the flying of the tricolour at the Easter commemorations, and in the following year a parade to commemorate 1916 was prohibited in the town, although the ban was ignored.
49

In the new Irish Free State, St Patrick's Day quickly took on special significance. By 1922 it had been made a general holiday and from 1925, thanks to the Free State Licensing Act, all public houses were closed on that day. In Dublin, an annual army parade now replaced the process­ions organised by the Lord Lieutenant and Lord Mayor. Throughout the country there were parades, often involving army marches to church for mass. Dances, sporting activities, theatrical events and excursions were run on the day. The Irish language was specially promoted on the day, frequently with events organised by the Gaelic League. In 1926 the south­ern premier W. T. Cosgrave made the first official radio broadcast on St Patrick's Day. He called for mutual understanding and harmony and declared that:

The destinies of the country, north and south, are now in the hands of Irish­men, and the responsibility for success or failure will rest with ourselves. If we are to succeed there must be a brotherly toleration of each other's ideas as to how our ambition may be realised, and a brotherly co-operation in every effort towards its realisation.
50

In his St Patrick's Day's speech in 1930, Cosgrave declared that ‘as we have been Irish and Roman, so it will remain', but he took care to preface his statement with the remarks that he was speaking for the majority of people in the state.
51
In 1931 in a St Patrick's Day broadcast to the Irish in America, and reported in the Irish press, Cosgrave again sought to make a reconciliatory gesture ‘whatever be your creed in religion or politics, you are of the same blood – the healing process must go on'.
52

With the accession to power of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil in 1932, St Patrick's Day took on added significance. Links between Church and State were publicly stressed with the annual procession on St Pat­rick's Day of de Valera and his Executive Council, complete with a cavalry troop, to the Dublin pro-Cathedral for mass.
53
The Patrician Year of 1932, which included the Eucharistic Congress, gave an opportunity for large demonstrations, with considerable official involvement, emphasising con­nections between Ireland and Rome.
54
This religious aspect was taken up again by de Valera in his St Patrick's Day broadcast of 1935 in which he reminded people that Ireland had been a Christian and Catholic nation since St Patrick's time: ‘She remains a Catholic nation,' he declared.
55
De Valera now used the St Patrick's Day broad­casts, which were transmit­ted to the USA and Australia, to launch vigor­ous attacks on the British government and partition. These speeches reached a peak in 1939, when, in Rome for St Patrick's Day, de Valera declared how he had made a pledge beside the grave of Hugh O'Neill that he would never rest until ‘that land which the Almighty so clearly designed as one, shall belong undivided to the Irish people'. He urged his listeners to do likewise.
56
At the same time, however, the links between Catholicism and Irish identity as expressed on St Patrick's Day were not absolute. For example, the Prot­estant President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, attended a St Patrick's Day service in the Church of Ireland cathedral of St Patrick's in Dublin in 1939.
57

During the war, celebrations on St Patrick's Day were low-key al­though de Valera continued to make his annual broadcast. In 1943 he spoke of the restoration of the national territory and the national lan­guage as the greatest of the state's uncompleted tasks. He also talked of his dream of a land ‘whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of ath­letic youths and the laughter of comely maidens'.
58
After the war St Pat­rick's Day became a major national holiday once again. In 1950 the mili­tary parade in Dublin was replaced by a trade and industries parade. In their St Patrick's Day speeches in the 1950s, heads of government, Eamon de Valera and John A. Costello, continued to use the event to make strong denunciations of partition. In his St Patrick's Day broadcast in 1950, Cos­tello declared that ‘our country is divided by foreign inter­ference'.
59