Dan Snow's History Hit - How the Irish Shaped Britain with Fergal Keane

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Fergal Keane joined me on the podcast to talk about the profound influence the Irish have had on Britain over many centuries.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a famous voice on this podcast. He's

one of the most remarkable broadcasters. He has won so many awards for his poetic and wonderfully delivered prose over the years. It is Fergal Keane, BBC veteran. As you'll hear, he's got a life that spans both sides of the Irish Sea. But currently he's living in the UK and that's where his new series is being broadcast. I should say actually we don't cover in this podcast his extraordinary work from apartheid South Africa or many of his other adventures if that's the right way to put it as a foreign correspondent instead we're talking about his new series that he's done with the BBC. It's called How the Irish Shaped Britain and 100 years on from the partition of Ireland in 1921, this felt like a very special time for this series and a great time for this conversation. We've got lots of

other Irish history podcasts, and we've got a couple of Irish history shows as well available on historyhit.tv. It's the only place where you can listen to the whole back catalogue of this podcast. And it's the only place where you can listen to them ad free, which lots of people quite like apparently. I think ads are quite amusing myself. But anyway, you can listen to the whole thing ad-free. We've still got our crazy January sale at the moment. A lot of people rushing to get the last few days of January. Is it still January? I don't know. Days, months, don't seem to matter very much anymore. But lots of people rushing to get ahead of that guillotine, that deadline. If you go to historyhit.tv and use the code JANUARY,

you get a month for free, so you can go and listen to whatever you like, watch whatever you like. It's like Netflix for history over there, you're going to love it. And then you get your next three months for 80% off. So just a few pence, a few cents, a few pfennigs, whatever they are, wherever you are, will get you historyhit.tv, which is the world's best history channel. But in the meantime, everybody,

it gives me enormous pleasure to have a broadcast that I've so long admired, very occasionally worked alongside and learned so much from, Fergal Keane. Fergal, this is such a great pleasure to have you on the podcast. My pleasure too, Dan. My pleasure. You're someone whose life and career has spanned the Irish Sea. This show, it feels personal to you.

It is. It's very personal. I mean, I'm talking to you from London, a city where I was born but where I didn't grow up. I'm talking to you from London, a city where I was born but where I didn't grow up. My parents were briefly sort of migrants in London in 1961. My father was appearing in a play at the Royal Court Theatre, The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Singh. And because of that, I just happened to be born in London. And because of that, I found myself entitled to British and Irish citizenship.

But I grew up in the south of Ireland. Occasional visits. I think I came to Britain once as a teenager with the Boy Scouts. And on another occasion when my father was again acting in a play. But that was the sort of sum total of my travels to Britain. And yet I grew up in a context in Ireland in which I couldn't be but aware of the enormous impact of the British Imperium on the history of Ireland. My grandparents on one side had been revolutionaries who joined the IRA and fought against the British in the Irish War of Independence. But on the other side, I had family members,

a great-grandfather who'd served in the Royal Irish Constabulary and had been part of the imperial project. And so, you know, my own family's lives were shaped by Britain, by the connection with Britain, but also everything about the language that I grew up speaking, English, came as a consequence of British plantation and British settlement. The history of the island, the troubles that erupted in 1969, of which I was very keenly aware of growing up as a teenager in the South. It occasionally spilled over into the South,

but the constant drumbeat of that violence was something that we heard and were told about in the South. All of that was as a consequence of our relationship with the island next door. And so it shaped me. Of course it did, hugely. Yeah, all of my Irish friends complain that whenever they talk to Brits, the Brits suddenly start banging on about their Irish antecedents,

sort of trying to prove their Irishness. So here we go. I have to conform to that. My dad is a kind of mirror image of you, if you like. He was born in Dublin, but left fairly young. His family were kind of Anglo-Irish. They were West Cork, but left at partition. They went up to down. I guess like you, I've always felt the kinship between Britain and Ireland more than antagonism,

just because of my particular personal privilege and situation. But in this series, you do seem to also be talking a lot about what these two places have in common. Of course we do. I mean, it's simply not, it's, you know, the geography is something that we cannot change nor is it something

I would ever wish to change. But I sort of grew up learning very much about what the British impact on us had been, as I've outlined in the previous answer. And to me, what fascinates me

is how did it work the other way around? How did we shape the big island next door? Or as one of my contributors rather mischievously puts it, the larger landmass. And of course, you know, when you start digging into it, and this was the difficulty of even trying to produce something in the space of, you know, three half-hour programmes, because you could be telling this story for years.

So profound has been the impact. And whether that's back to the period of the pre-Roman Empire when Irish raiders were coming up and down the coast of Britain, whether Irish tribes crossing into Scotland, forming kingdoms there, then during the Roman period, this fascinating nugget, which was revealed to me while making the series,

that you had the Romans bringing in Irish settlers, planters, giving them their own sort of mini kingdoms as a buffer against the invasions and the depredations of Irish pirate tribes. All of that, you know, which then spreads out into a continuing presence that endures until this day, in which you see in the fields of construction, you know, the sort of physical building of Britain, but also hugely in terms of culture, and of course, the building of the British Empire.

And that's one of those things which, in Ireland, we've paid far too little attention to because it didn't slot into the kind of comfortable nationalist narrative of hundreds of years of struggle against the British when in fact the British Empire provided many Irishmen and I'm not just talking about people who served in the armed forces you know for hundreds of years i'm talking about you know young irish catholics who wanted to get ahead in the world who'd received a decent education who because of the sectarian realities at home in ireland knew that there was a glass ceiling for any catholic but who could look at the empire and realize that the sky was the limit and they

went on to become colonial governors commanders commanders of the British armies, imperial civil servants at every rank. That's a whole fascinating area of study and I'm confident in saying that the British Empire as it went on to you know to cover such a large part of the landmass could not have happened without the active participation of the Irish. I like the fact that this series isn't chronological. I was sort of slightly dreading just to launch straight into the first episode and launch straight back to St. Patrick, the Romans and all that kind of stuff. But actually, you start with a discussion of the cultural and social human relations between our two islands. We don't get Tastus and Agricola straight away. I mean, violence, you know, this archipelago, like anywhere else

in the world, has been ripped apart by violence on so many occasions. But you obviously think it's important now to talk about cultural exchange as much as that history of conflict. I mean, it is. And, you know, as somebody passionate about history, of course, and my own early passion with history came from, you know, military history. passion with history came from military history the books that I read as a child were and I was a very strange child Dan when you consider this there were biographies of Bismarck, Napoleon

Bonaparte, Gustavus Adolphus and the stories of battles but growing older I saw that history, the imprint that we leave upon one another has every bit as much to do with culture. And if you like soft power,

and if you want the greatest living example for me of soft power in history, it is the Irish impact on Britain. And you go back to the Roman times and early Christianity and Irish monks settling and founding monasteries in Scotland, helping to keep Christianity alive in what, of course, we wrongly call the Dark Ages. They weren't Dark Ages. But in a period when Christianity itself was under siege and threatened across much of Europe,

the influence of the Irish was profound. You look at the island of Lindisfarne, for example. One of the historians that I interviewed for the series talks about the Irish hand being the English hand, and this is just in terms of handwriting, right down until 1066, because of the influence of Irish clerics. And so we go from that into a period

when Irish writers, and some of them are Anglo-Irish, some of them are Irish writers, and some of them are Anglo-Irish, some of them are Irish Catholics, become pre-eminent in the development of English theatre. And I'm thinking about people like Richard Brinsley Sheridan, for example, William Congreve, someone like Thomas Moore. Now here's a fascinating character who goes to university at Trinity College in Dublin, Protestant University, but he's the son of a Catholic grocer. And Moore is very sympathetic with Irish rebels during the rebellion of 1798 and then Robert Emmett's rebellion at the turn of the 19th century. He writes this beautiful ballad, The Minstrel Boy, to the wars as and the Ranks of Death You'll Find Him.

This is very sympathetic, as I say, to the Irish rebels, but becomes one of the great songs of the British Armed Forces, played every year at the Cenotaph in November. Moore himself goes from being this character who is questioned during the period of the 1798 rebellion, falls under suspicion because of his sympathies for the rebels, becomes a toast of London literary society, a best friend of Lord Byron,

indeed executor of Byron's will, becomes briefly, at one period, a colonial civil servant in Bermuda. And Moore is a sort of symbol, if you like, he's sort of iconic, of that Irishman who arrives, the Catholic Irishman particularly, who arrives into London society in the 18th and 19th centuries and makes his way very effectively, very seductively, one might say.

In a later episode, I talk to an Irish comedian, a modern Irishman called Dara O'Brien, and I ask him, what is it, this gift that the Irish have of being able to not only find acceptance, but enormous success in the British mainstream and theatre and entertainment? And he says it's something to do with charm. Louis MacNeice, that great Ulster Protestant poet,

put it a different way. He said, the Irish have a hold over the sentimental English. I think there's something in that. I think one of the great misnomers of old time, you know, misapprehensions is this idea that the English are the people with the stiff upper lip. Not at all. Profoundly

sentimental people. And that gave the Irish a gift in presenting to them an idea of a world that never was, which is the sort of sentimental Celtic world. Hugely popular, of course, in the late Victorian period,

when the sort of myths of nations and nation-states were being constructed. You're listening to History, I'm talking to Fergal Kegal keen more from the wonderful man after this land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. First of all, let me just say you were not a strange child. You're among friends here. We all had accounts of Gustavus Adolphus at Breitenfeld and Lutzen on our shelves. So don't worry.

Don't worry, you're among friends. But let's ask the big question. Why did the Anglo-Irish project, the kind of the British Isles project, fail? The Reformation? Oh, yeah, exactly. Hold your horses. Things like the Reformation. It's this detonation, you know, this extraordinary moment. You could argue, and I think one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened had Henry VIII not broken with Rome and had the English Reformation not proceeded, we could say even if Henry had broken with Rome,

but had it not proceeded to the much more radical Protestantism which would later emerge and had Britain, had England, let us say, not felt the existential threat that it did from Catholic Europe. Because that's what changes everything. That is when the Irish suddenly become the potential backdoor to the overthrow of the Reformation and the overthrow of Protestant England. And whenever a state feels itself threatened, and it is fascinating to look at the literature.

One of the projects that I'm researching at look at the literature one of the one of the projects that i'm researching at the moment is a book about the plantation of monster in my home province um in ireland and reading the doc you know the documentary evidence of walsingham spies the terror that existed at very senior levels in england which filtered its way down to the population, of invasion and overthrow by the Spanish in that period, but then you go forward to the impact of Napoleonic France sending an invasion fleet as well off the coast of Ireland. This is why it really mattered. Religion wasn't some sort of point of theological disagreement.

This was a period when, if you were overthrown, and particularly in the case of Elizabethan England, if you were overthrown by Philip Spain, you know, unmentionable bloodletting and complete reshaping of your society was going to follow. So there was more than an academic interest in what the Irish were getting up to with their religion and who they were allying with. That's what I find so fascinating. The Reformation is so important, but was there even possibly a path after that, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries, where there could have been a kind of united legitimate state that spanned the Irish Sea? I think it might have been possible for there to exist some kind of continuing kingship based in London, but which encompassed the islands had the Reformation not happened.

But I think you also have to factor in the kind of extraordinary energy which was unleashed during the Elizabethan period and indeed went on into the Jacobean period. And that energy was intellectual, it was scientific, but of course it was fundamentally about building empire. Now the question for me is, would the plantation of Ireland have taken place, would the seizing of Irish lands have taken place? Had the existing aristocracy, both Gaelic and Old English, in other words, the descendants of the people who had come in with the Normans in the middle of the 12th century,

had those people remained loyal to the crown and remained loyal to London? Would there have been the the kind of planting energy pushed outwards um by the elizabethan and then the jacobean state i'm not sure that there would and so there is the possibility that you might have had growing up a polity in ireland which was loyal to london but always because of the very fact of a separate Gaelic culture that continued and also the fact of the Irish Sea that was always at one remove. And that might have meant, of course, in the long term,

aspirations towards a nation state, nationalism rising eventually. But we don't know that. How do you talk about the rise of nationalism in the 19th century? Was nationalism from its very beginnings at root a threat to the British imperial project? Irish nationalism, it's very difficult to kind of pin it down as being one thing because of course it's shape-shifted over the centuries. Let's be more specific and let's talk about violent Irish nationalism. In the sort of 18th and specifically the 19th centuries it is something that surges briefly

you have the great rebellion of 1798 which leads in turn to the act of union at the turn of the century and then a long period of relative calm until you get the famine and out of that comes the impetus and comes much of the bitterness which will drive the militant the violent nationalist project right into the 20th century and so you have the rise of the Fenians but again that's crushed pretty quickly as a kind of military exercise but endures to inspire people who will take part in the rebellion in 1916.

And so that's one sort of part of Irish nationalism. But don't forget that the majority of people who would have called themselves Irish nationalists, certainly in the 19th century, were those who supported the pretty much largely constitutional politics of people like Charles Stuart Parnell, of the landleaguers. But it was a politics which was very much based at Westminster, which was pushing for not the complete separation of Britain and Ireland, but for home rule, Irish home rule, which would have continued within the British Empire. In other words, a kind of super devolution. And when we talk about, as well, Irish nationalism,

a huge part of it is what gives these islands the wonderful writing and literature of somebody like W.B. Yeats, whose family comes to Ireland originally back in history as part of the English plantation, but who grows up, and like many of his cohorts, people like Oscar Wilde, people like James Millington Singh, George Bernard Shaw, who grow up to be people, exponents of a very definite Irish culture,

which has an enormous impact on these islands. And that Irish national culture, which Yeats was at the fore of developing, had elements of sort of anti-Englishness about it, but it was much broader. It was about a great deal more than that. And so it was certainly not the kind of literature, although Yeats did worry at one point, he writes,

did that play of mine, Send Out Certain Men, The English Shot, referring to his great nationalist play, Kathleen de Houlihan. But he was not a, shall we say, a rabble-rouser for violence. He was far too intelligent, much too subtle a creative force for that. So Britain has just Brexited. Scotland looks like it may choose to go its own way as well. Although we rightly talk about the politics and the constitutional arrangements of the Isles

and the violence that has benighted these islands until very, very recently, do you think we still do talk a bit too much about the politics, the constitutional arrangements? I mean, does it matter? Do you think it, I mean, dare I say, does it matter as much as our scientific, our cultural history? I think it's a very interesting question, but it's a question you would only ask me in 2021 it's not a question you would have asked me 10 years ago and certainly not 10 years before that it's a luxury to be able to ask that question had you been asking me that at the height of the troubles well you wouldn't even have thought to ask me because at that point you had the ira waging a campaign and we talk about how the Irish shaped Britain look at your prevention of terrorism act 1974 that was a shaping of British law by virtue of the fact that there was an armed campaign insurrectionary campaign going on on the

mainland of Britain British cities like Birmingham being bombed Guildford, that in turn leading to not just the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but injustices like the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four. We can enjoy the culture, we can reflect on the culture, we can see it develop richly, I think, when there is an absence of violence. It is when you get, and I'm not sure we're at all out of the woods, I think that's one of the great problems at the moment. I don't think we're out of the woods at all in terms of seeing the end of insurrectionary violence,

or let us say the possibility of insurrectionary violence as a consequence of the still fractured constitutional relationship in these islands. Do you get a nagging feeling when you're in some of those places that there is a bit too much history? I'm not sure that that's the problem. It's a really relevant question now, in this particular period, the decade of centenaries, as they call them, when we're remembering the 1916 rebellion,

then the Irish, what you call the Anglo-Irish War, what Irish people call the War of Independence, then the Irish Civil War and the partition of Ulster, the creation of Northern Ireland. And I'm not sure it's a question of there being too much history, but it's about the kind of history that we're looking at. And what strikes me looking at the current period is that we're spending a lot of our time looking at the history of violence,

the history of political violence. Now, that's a fascinating field of study. But if anything, in my series, what I try to show is that it's far from the only story. And I would like us to see more, putting more emphasis around kind of cultural anniversaries and studying the kind of complexity, the cultural complexity of our relationship

and not just the story of massacres, bombings and brutality. Because that's where history tends to get weaponised. And I'm not saying, you know, nobody in an official capacity at the moment in terms of either governments or indeed the advisory panels who work to set out an agenda for the period of centenaries, are doing this. They're not into weaponising, but political parties do.

And there is always a battle about who controls the narrative of the past. And that's not unique to Ireland. But we're seeing that right now. One of the great things that's not unique to Ireland but we're seeing that right now. One of the great things that happened when I was growing up in Ireland is that we moved from a nationalist telling of history into a period where it became about more than the 700 years of oppression. It became about more than just massacre, important as all those things are to remember,

but it became about the question as well of how we shaped each other and of what good the British Imperium did in Ireland, as well as the undoubted catalogue of infamy that came with so many of the conquerors and so many of the planters. And it's that, it's more nuanced, it's more reflective history we need

rather than turning away from memorialisation. That's, Fogelkeen, a beautiful place to end it. Thank you very much. Wonderful stuff. How can people get hold of your series? So you can find it on BBC Sounds and anytime you want. And if you're minded to, you can switch on Radio 4

at eight o'clock on Monday nights and then again at 11 o'clock in the morning on Wednesdays and listen in and see what we all have in common. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Great, Dan. hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask totally understand if you

want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purgege yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.