30-minute read
Dermot Feenan
LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law (non-practising) FRSA
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Introduction
On 6 January this year, David Aaronovitch, a columnist for The Times, wrote a comment ‘A nearby country of which we know nothing’. The comment is sub-headed ‘A hundred years after the Anglo-Irish Treaty, there’s a casual ignorance among the English about Ireland and its history.’ The comment identifies a lack of knowledge of Ireland among Times readers and an associated need to do better. There is merit in this argument. However, I will identify and discuss several problems with the approach taken by Aaronovitch and The Times’ heading and sub-heading which have implications for knowledge, ignorance and forgetting between, on the one hand, England and certain English, and, on the other, Ireland and the Irish.
These problems are, in preview, firstly, that the comment represents a type of English ethnocentric reporting about Ireland and the Irish which leaves crucial gaps in, or distorts, history for the benefit of an English audience.
Aaronovitch’s approach to knowledge, ignorance and forgetting is, in several important ways, seriously deficient. His approach omits any evaluation of how communities come to know and, relatedly, what, conceptually, constitutes knowledge (issues usefully addressed in the field of study known as social epistemology). This is not an abstract, intellectual criticism of Aaronovitch’s approach. It has profound social importance in terms of, for example, whether human experience is recognised, what history is recorded, and how to assess responsibility for such knowing (or its lack).
Aaronovitch’s approach also avoids evaluating how ignorance itself can be created and sustained (a field of study now given its own name: agnotology). In the present case, that ignorance reflects, principally, the exercise of imperial and racialised power – as will be shown in this essay.
I will critique the assumption underpinning Aaronovitch’s view about problems in knowing about Ireland; in particular that this is due to ignorance, amnesia or deficits in information.
The problem with the approach in the Times piece also has relevance for reflecting on truth, justice and commemoration in Ireland (with potential resonance elsewhere).
To those who might question the merit in focusing on a comment in one newspaper by one author, this essay makes clear that the approach adopted by Aaronovitch has resonance in the approach which has been taken, or may be taken, by others, especially English writers and media, in relation to Ireland – of which much has been written, including in relation to the conflict in the north of Ireland, as noted in The British Media and Ireland – Truth: the first casualty. The Times still carries heft nationally and internationally, though its pre-eminence as a ‘paper of record’ and its reader numbers have slipped considerably. Still, it is the fourth most widely circulated newspaper in Britain. It is important also to understand the political orientation of the media, and The Times has engaged in its own ideologically slanted reporting and commentary on Ireland, as noted by, for instance, Abassi and Soubiale (2006). Aaronovitch’s piece itself attracted substantial interest, as evident from the high number of readers’ comments and engagements on social media, including Twitter. Finally, my critique of this piece has broader relevance for understanding knowledge, ignorance and forgetting generally.
In the spirit of Aaronovitch’s call to do better, I set out in an appendix to this essay a number of resources which may enhance such better knowledge and understanding. I start by first setting out Aaronovitch’s approach and then set out the problems with that approach. These problems are, in sequence: limited sources; gaps in knowledge; ethnocentric bias; misdiagnosis and misapplication of the concept of amnesia, and; deficient understanding of the concept of ignorance.
Aaronovitch’s approach
Aaronovitch focuses in his comment on a series of events marking the one hundredth anniversary of Irish independence from Britain. He refers to the centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which had just passed. Signed on 6 December 1921, it ended the War of Independence between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British forces. Aaronovitch also refers to two other centenaries which were pending: of the ratification of the Treaty and of the handing over of Dublin Castle and state power by British authorities. He writes that ‘only one side seems to recall’ this series of events, by which he suggests Ireland alone.
Aaronovitch focuses on these centenaries with two objectives in mind, though he does not enumerate these as such. The first objective is to raise a concern about the lack of knowledge, including among Times readers, about Ireland (though, as I shall argue, his lack of precision about the intended audience introduces an element of incoherence). His justification for this objective is twofold. ‘There is no sovereign nation with whose people we the British are so entwined,’ he writes. There are, he adds, ‘so few Irish anniversaries that aren’t our anniversaries, too.’
Aaronovitch also presents his own understanding of Irish history in relation to Britain. I briefly mention the most significant aspects of that presentation now, before setting out his second objective. I will return later in this essay to this presentation of Irish history as it is symptomatic of a number of problems in Aaronovitch’s approach.
‘The migratory waves of the 1840s are famous,’ he writes. Referring to ‘postwar Britain’, he notes that Britain relied ‘as much on the Irish immigrant as any other source of needed labour’, and cites the Common Travel Area between Ireland and Britain, which operated de facto from 1923 (save for a period during WWII), and not 1952 – the date given by Aaronovitch – when it was specifically referred to in legislation for the first time. Aaronovitch goes on:
‘once the “Irish question” appeared to be answered, we in Britain chose not to think about the place at all, except as pubs, Guinness and dancing. We remembered it again, painfully, for the 30 years of the Troubles, and then placed the case once more in the “solved” file.’
Aaronovitch’s second, related, objective in his comment is to make a plea ‘that in the future we all need to do better’. He notes ‘the insouciance with which most English politicians and their partisans regard Ireland’ in the context of promises they made and broke regarding the Irish and British border in the previous four years. This period includes the Brexit withdrawal agreement between the EU and UK, which incorporates the Protocol on Ireland/ Northern Ireland (the ‘Northern Ireland Protocol’).
The Protocol squared the need for regulatory checks on goods passing between Ireland (still a member of the EU) and the UK, and vice versa, while also avoiding a ‘hard border’ on the island of Ireland which could destabilise peace on the island. This compromise was achieved largely by shifting proposed checks at the land border to checks on goods passing from Britain to Northern Ireland.
On the face of it, Aaronovitch’s objectives are creditable. I have no wish to take away from the thrust of his message. I have studied Irish and English history. I am a northern Irish person who lived through almost all of the recent period of violent political conflict in the north of Ireland, which some people euphemistically still call ‘The Troubles’. I knew many people who were killed, physically injured, psychologically traumatised, or otherwise harmed by that conflict. Like many others, I also bear scars from the conflict. In 1998, I voted for the Belfast Agreement which brought that conflict largely to an end. The Agreement included a commitment to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships between these islands. I have dual citizenship: of Ireland and of the UK. Much of my comparative research has involved fieldwork in Ireland and the UK, with results shared with audiences in both countries (and elsewhere). I have lived for almost a decade in England. This has included periods in which I have taught students in universities in England. My partner is English. I am, in part because of this experience, committed to improved knowledge and understanding between the UK and Ireland, and especially between the English and Irish. So, it had been heartening to see considerable progress in mutual understanding between the UK and Ireland in the immediate aftermath of the Belfast Agreement. That progress has, however, been damaged in the course of discussion about Brexit by some pronouncements and positions regarding Ireland by the British government and by certain politicians, which has also contributed to a regressive shift within certain sections of the population, chiefly in England, towards anti-Irish racism.
Limited sources
Aaronovitch starts his comment and devotes over a third of that comment to an odd story about the abduction by the IRA of The Times’ Ireland correspondent during the War of Independence and ensuing treaty negotiations because of offence caused by his reporting. It reveals little about Irish history. It is, instead, an unnecessary, institutionally self-referential, context for Aaronovitch’s principal objectives.
Aaronovitch fails to refer to any empirical research in support of his statement about knowledge of Ireland. Yet, there are many surveys of British (including English) knowledge of Ireland. In 2020, YouGov conducted a survey of people in Britain regarding their study of history, including Irish history, at school. It found that just 6% of the public say they have studied Irish Home Rule and the Troubles whilst at school, with a far larger amount covering topics such as the Tudors (56%) and World War Two (51%). Given that some of those surveyed may have schooled in Northern Ireland, where Home Rule was on some of the curriculum, this percentage probably overrepresents the proportion of people born and schooled in Britain who have studied Home Rule and the Troubles.
A YouGov survey in 2019, conducted during the protracted negotiations between the UK and the EU on the withdrawal agreement, found that 1 in 5 of British people knew nothing about the issues regarding the Irish border. A further 42% knew ‘not very much’. Another YouGov survey in 2020 found that almost a third (31%) of British people knew nothing at all about or were unaware of the Belfast Agreement – one of the most significant constitutional developments in these islands in recent history.
These surveys provide reliable representative data on knowledge of Irish issues. Aaronovitch provides, by contrast, ersatz information and occasional anecdote.
Aaronovitch’s cites only one author in the entire comment, Megan Nolan, an Irish writer based in London, who was, at the time of writing her piece, in her late twenties, and based her views about the English upon limited personal experiences rather than any representative survey or other systematic approach. Aaronovitch did not quote anyone who could reasonably be expected to have the expertise to comment on the issue under discussion, such as Professor Ian McBride, Foster Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, whose work has included analysis of commemoration, or Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin, who has written extensively on English colonization of Ireland, including in Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century. In fact, Aaronovitch doesn’t cite any historians. Nor does he cite any books or articles on the ways ignorance is secured and maintained, certainly by England (and I use this term both in its strict historical sense to denote the Kingdom of England and a persisting imagined community).
Gaps in knowledge
A serious gap in Aaronovitch’s comment is evident in his statement that ‘once the “Irish question” appeared to be answered, we in Britain chose not to think about the place at all, except as pubs, Guinness and dancing’ until ‘the Troubles’.
The ‘Irish question’ was the name given to the political issue that occupied the Westminster Parliament from the early part of the 19th century until the 1920s; namely, how to address Irish nationalism and the demand for Irish independence. The so-called ‘Troubles’ is often dated to the arrival of the British Army in mid-August 1969 until the signing of the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement of April 1998. Many of us northern Irish who lived through the conflict refuse to so casually euphemise that warfare, an assertion of knowing that consciously rejects the obscuring of reality inherent in Aaronovitch’s use of the term ‘the Troubles’.
Between the 1920s and 1969, Ireland was certainly not forgotten by Britain. While Ireland stayed neutral during the WWII, it permitted the Royal Air Force to fly over Irish airspace through the Donegal corridor. It is estimated that 70,000 Irish served in the British armed services during the war.
In 1949, the UK was compelled to pass The Ireland Act 1949 to deal with the fact that Ireland passed the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. The 1948 Act provided for the abolition of remaining functions of the British monarchy in relation to Ireland. The 1949 Act declared, amongst other things, that Ireland was no longer ‘part of His Majesty’s dominions’ (that is a member of the Commonwealth).
During the period between the 1920s and the start of the conflict in 1969, Irish people who encountered anti-Irish racism in Britain were certainly not relieved of any purported forgetting by some of those who identified as British and/or English. The notorious ‘No blacks, no Irish’ signs which barred Irish people from accommodation existed in England long before the British administration sent its troops back onto the island of Ireland in 1969. Ireland and the Irish remained fixed in significant ways in an imaginary constructed largely within a British imperial mentality, the vestiges of which not only persist today but have been renewed by some on the political right.
Aaronovitch’s statement ‘[t]he migratory waves of the 1840s are famous’ is not accompanied by any explanation for the major exodus from Ireland: An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger/ Famine, or, as it is sometimes called obliquely, ‘The Irish Potato Famine’. The ‘migratory waves’ amounted, in fact, to the greatest mass exoduses from a single island in history. Those exoduses were not limited to the 1840s since the effects of the famine devastated communities, employment and opportunities for decades thereafter. Nor does the reference to migratory waves acknowledge the deaths of one million people caused by famine. Aaronvitch’s statement also ignores the fact that the famine and its effects, which were not part of the ‘Irish Question’, commanded considerable attention in England. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws—which included tariffs that kept the price of bread high—in response. This caused a split in his Conservative Party that ultimately led to Peel’s resignation and a new Whig government. The adverse economic effects on many Irish tenants caused by the famine and harsh property laws led to an estimated half a million people being evicted from their homes by largely English landlords, with wealthy speculators in Britain buying up estates which landlords could no longer maintain. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary and an absentee landlord of a huge hereditary estate in Ireland, evicted 2,000 tenants who could no longer afford their rent because of the famine. He then paid for their relocation to North America. One Canadian official compared conditions on the vessels Palmerston chartered to those of the slave trade.
Aaronovitch is entirely silent on English colonization of Ireland and associated anti-Irish racism. That colonialism and racism shaped, and to some extent still shapes, what is deemed worth knowing and who is regarded as knowledgeable and credible. The centuries-long relation between colonization and racism means that the Irish were subject to a distinctive type of colonial-racial subordination, not experienced by those other groups, such as the Russians, who were racialised but not subject to that imperialism.
Those colonial-forged racializing views were rekindled by a particular type of English ultra-nationalism during and after the Brexit campaign, as I argued in the article ‘Brexit and the Rekindling of Anti-Irish Racism’. That article was based on a systemic survey of recent comments in the media, including social media, about the Irish, which were analysed in the context of historical examination of English anti-Irish views. It is significant that Aaronovitch does not cite that work or the work of many others cited in that article who have documented this historical anti-Irish racism, including Professor L. Perry Curtis, Professor Michael de Nie, and Professor Mary Hickman. Instead, he selectively quotes only the writer Megan Nolan from an article in The New York Times:
‘what kills you is the ignorance; what grinds you down is how much they don’t know about the past and, if they do know, how little they care. It’s a strange and maddening thing to discover about the people who shaped your country’s fate and who are poised to do so again.’
Setting aside some of Nolan’s troubling generalisations elsewhere in the article, what Aaronovitch does not include is what Nolan wrote immediately before that sentence: ‘What I didn’t expect was the toxic mix of dismissal and casual disdain.’ It is precisely such animus that can underpin some of the ignorance. The ignorance arises from neither mere want of knowledge nor want of care. It derives from this dismissal and disdain. Nolan, the Irish woman in England, experienced it. Aaronovitch, the Englishman in England writing about England’s ignorance of Ireland, did not refer to it.
A particularly potent recent manifestation elsewhere of anti-Irish bias is illustrated in the recent decision of Stephen Eyre QC, Chancellor of Coventry Diocese, Church of England, to refuse an Irish-only inscription on the gravestone of Mrs Margaret Keane in the churchyard of St Giles, Exhall, which was successfully appealed to the Court of Arches, Canterbury, May 2021.
The reasoning of the Chancellor will be all too familiar to those of us who have studied bias in the decisions of other English judges regarding Irish people, including of Mr Justice Donaldson in the cases of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, Lord Denning in the Birmingham Six case, and Lord Widgery in the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, to which I shall return later.
Ethnocentric bias
Aaronovitch writes, as many English writers born and raised in England do, from an ethnocentric Englishness: assuming a national identity among his audience. This occurs in numerous ways. After referring to the series of Anglo-Irish Treaty centenaries, Aaronovitch then writes: ‘My suspicion (and forgive me if I’m wrong) is that right now you’re the only person in your family who knows any of this.’ The assumption that there are no Irish readers of The Times who will likely be familiar with these centenaries is not excused by the request for forgiveness for inaccuracy. Aaronovitch’s delayed acknowledgement – ‘Unless you’re Irish, of course’ – is then counterposed to ‘we the British’. The use of ‘we’ reinforces the idea that the audience is British, not Irish. Aaronovitch attempts to resolve the resulting incoherence – for he has previously acknowledged that readers may also be Irish – by stating that ‘many Britons were or are Irish.’ This is insufficient to eliminate the incoherence because Aaronovitch goes on to write: ‘once the “Irish question” appeared to be answered, we in Britain chose not to think about the place at all.’ This ignores the fact that the Irish have continued to live in Britain since the apparent answering of the so-called ‘Irish question’. The comment also ignores the way that some people who are both Irish and British (Anglo-Irish, Irish who served the British Empire, British who took up permanent residence in Ireland, and dual citizens of Ireland and the UK) have also been complicit in sustaining ignorance.
The ethnocentric assumption in Aaronovitch’s reference to the ‘Irish question’ and Ireland is reinforced when he writes: ‘We remembered it again, painfully, for the 30 years of the Troubles, and then placed the case once more in the “solved” file.’ The use of ‘we’ again assumes a readership that is distinct from the Irish (and some British – who do not hold Irish citizenship or identify as Irish and British) who had not forgotten about Ireland when the conflict returned in 1969. Again, Aaronovitch seeks to resolve this incoherence by qualifying the word ‘we’. He sets out an exception: ‘those who had reported from there, those who negotiated the Anglo-Irish and Good Friday Agreements, and those whose relatives died or were maimed in the conflict.’ Yet, there are Irish in Britain whose relatives will not have died or been maimed in the conflict, and they did not forget about Ireland. There will also be British armed services personnel who were directly affected by the conflict (on tour in Northern Ireland or on duty elsewhere) and others living in places in Britain which were targeted by the IRA’s bombing campaign who remembered and still remember that conflict.
Those of us who are both Irish and British, not simply ‘Britons’ who are Irish, occupy a separate, distinctive standpoint, both insider and outsider (though in practice not necessarily always at our choosing) and likely will read his assumptions, as I did, with a familiar sense of weariness about much English writing on Ireland. There was much in the reporting by the media in England of the conflict in the north of Ireland which contributed to the hostile environment experienced by many Irish people living in Britain.
In referring to ‘postwar Britain’, Aaronovitch assumes the reader will understand that to mean WWII, but in the context of discussing the commemorations of the War of Independence in Ireland it is likely to have entirely different meaning to many Irish or at least create a reasonable doubt about which war is being referred to.
This English ethnocentricity is intimately tied to English imperial ways of thinking about others which has defined the nucleus of Britishness. To borrow from Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ potent analysis in his book Epistemologies of the South of the relationship between the Global North and Global South, such a view ‘excels in knowing about, explaining, and guiding rather than knowing with, understanding, facilitating, sharing, and walking alongside.’ In such an approach, the ignorance of certain English about Ireland can be explained as a deficit that can be remedied by knowing more, topping up knowledge, rather than also a symptom of that very imperial ‘knowing’.
There is something ironical about Aaronovitch’s detached observation about not knowing about Ireland. He does not admit to his own ignorance. Yet his comment reveals significant gaps of ignorance about Ireland and the Irish. The very lack of knowledge that Aaronovitch bemoans also comes from precisely the worldview that English people of a certain background can tell others what they know and don’t know.
Misdiagnosis and misapplication of the concept of amnesia
Aaronovitch refers to the English writer and columnist for The Times Sathnam Sanghera as having ‘chronicled the national amnesia surrounding the empire’.
Amnesia is a form of memory loss caused by injury, disease or intoxication. While the concept may sometimes be applied more generally to a type of forgetting that does not have its origins in such psychiatric or neurological terms, it should be used accurately. Aaronovitch’s approval of its usage by Sanghera falls short of that. Let me explain why it is important – especially in the context of a comment on knowing, forgetting and ignorance in a postcolonial context – to be accurate in the use of this concept.
Sanghera uses the phrase ‘national amnesia’ in a chapter titled ‘Selective amnesia’ in one of his books: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. The examples that Sanghera sets out in aid of this idea of amnesia are not mere instances of forgetting. Sanghera starts that chapter by citing several examples of the ‘Empire nostalgia’ package tours of India, one of Britain’s former colonies. One sells ‘colonial-style safaris’ (p. 192). Sanghera notes that there is no mention of the ‘violent racial suppression of the era’ (p. 192). This is not selective amnesia. It is suppression of information about Empire by the British for the purpose of making money still in Britain’s former colonies. This is symptomatic of how profit-seeking British companies operated during Empire: they promoted that which would attract British interest and investment while suppressing information about imperial violence.
Sanghera continues: ‘who can be surprised given the number of high-profile names who have emerged in recent years to celebrate empire’ (p. 193) He lists five names, almost all politically rightwing, and notes the prominence given to their views. This, too, is not selective amnesia. It is an active process of promoting a partial history.
Sanghera gives further examples of what he calls ‘selective amnesia’ in British accounts of history (p. 196). Yet, these, too, involve active, and racist, distortions: from the racist comedian Bernard Manning’s statement on national television in 1998 that ‘there were no Pakis at Dunkirk’ to actor Lawrence Fox’s more recent complaint about the inclusion of a British Sikh soldier in the First World War movie 1917 (p. 198).
Sanghera himself mischaracterises this symptom as one of amnesia, and, moreover, inadequately addresses Britain’s relationship with Ireland – which he limits to several references to the famine despite his book being about British imperialism generally.
The suppression of history cannot accurately be described as ‘amnesia’. Sanghera and Aaronovitch are not the only English writers to use this flawed concept in this way. George Monbiot, writer and activist, used the concept recently after reciting a long list of atrocities committed by the British Empire. He then wrote: ‘this list (and there are *many* more) would earn you a blank stare if you mentioned them to almost anyone in this country. It’s a Great National Amnesia. Is there any other nation as good at forgetting?’
Monbiot, like Aaronovitch, also couches this description in terms of ‘forgetting’ rather than through techniques to secure and maintain ignorance.
Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, instead calls for an ‘ethical remembering, adding’: ‘A feigned amnesia around the uncomfortable aspects of our shared history will not help us to forge a better future together’ (emphasis added).
Moreover, Professor Guy Beiner, in his book Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster, rejects the idea that amnesia and social memory form a simple dichotomy. Beiner shows, instead, that the relation between remembrance and forgetting is complex, dynamic and usually deeply politicized.
It is to the political that I now turn, with particular reference to the concept of ‘ignorance’ in The Times comment.
Deficient understanding of the concept of ignorance
The Times piece uses the concept of ‘casual ignorance’ and Aaronovitch quotes approvingly from Megan Nolan who writes about ignorance. The lack of knowing or the forgetting about Ireland is, therefore, understood in part in this piece with reference to ignorance. This presents the problem as if it were akin to an accounting ledger: with knowledge in one column, and ignorance in the other. Ignorance is seen only as the opposite of knowledge. Balancing the ledger in this account means simply topping up ignorance to rectify the difference. Ignorance is seen as a mere deficit of information. In the abstract, there is nothing problematic in such a simple dichotomy. However, these are concepts that are used to describe contemporary social life and history, pregnant with power, and associated material and strategic interests. Do the ideas about ignorance in The Times, in fact adequately explain whether something is known or not and the nature of that knowing by England and certain English about Ireland? In short, no.
I noted in the Introduction that ignorance itself can be created and sustained. In the present case, that ignorance reflects the exercise of imperial and racialised power.
The failure by The Times to acknowledge how knowledge/ignorance is actively shaped by English colonialism, especially in the wake of the extensive work of postcolonial scholars and how that has been renewed in recent calls to decolonize the curriculum, is inexcusable. It echoes what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called ‘sanctioned ignorance’, as introduced in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999): a silencing achieved by dismissing a particular context as being relevant. It operates through a systemic way of thinking about the world which precludes certain types of analysis or considerations entering discourse.
The Times piece ignores the growing body of research on how precisely ignorance is secured, managed and sustained. As I argued in an article ‘Understanding Disadvantage Partly through an Epistemology of Ignorance’, ignorance can be actively constituted or reproduced as an aspect of male power over and against women. I illustrated that argument with reference to empirical research on the process of applications for Silk and judicial office in Northern Ireland.
The recognition of the need to critically study ignorance had been made elsewhere. That field of study has been given its own name: agnotology – from the Greek root ‘agnosis’, meaning ignorance or not knowing, and ontology, the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as being and reality. The field of agnotology has since grown, with texts such as the Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008) and Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (2018).
There are numerous ways that the ignorance about Ireland by England and certain English should be understood. These ways include, and are not limited to, the following techniques. In the interests of brevity, I have illustrated only some of these here. Further particulars in support of all these techniques are available elsewhere.
The techniques include avoidance, distraction, erasure, and evasion. As Professor Stan Cohen argued, the maintenance of ignorance, especially regarding the realities of atrocity and suffering, can also be instrumentally perpetuated through states of denial.
Other techniques that enable ignorance include withholding, concealment, or suppression of information, lying, wilful failure to keep records, and removal of evidence. All of the foregoing techniques to secure ignorance were identified by Sir John Stevens in his inquiries in the late 1980s and 1990s into collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.
Stevens noted in his first inquiry that he asked to examine particular documents but received written statements from the state that they did not exist. As Professor Joseph Rouse observed in his 1987 book Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, one of the techniques to secure ignorance is ‘to impede or distort the acquisition of knowledge.’ Stevens also noted in his third inquiry that he had been obstructed by state authorities in his investigations.
In addition, Stevens also recorded what might be regarded as one of the most serious techniques to secure ignorance: destruction of evidence. In January 1990, Stevens’ team identified a key suspect and planned to arrest him and others. Information about the plan was leaked to loyalist paramilitaries and the press. This resulted in the operation being aborted. The suspect was advised by his British Army handlers to leave home the night before. A new date was set for the operation on account of the leak. The night before the new operation the team’s secure investigation room was destroyed by fire. Fire alarms, telephones and heat-sensitive intruder alarms did not work. Stevens later stated that the incident had never been adequately investigated and that it was a deliberate act of arson.
It is in part because withholding of information can undermine accountability and legal fairness, that laws and policies such as freedom of information legislation, disclosure rules in litigation, the duty of candour, and access to health records have been introduced. They are resources against the risk of enforced ignorance.
In addition to lying, there are a range of closely associated techniques that impede knowing such as denial, misrepresentation, and misinformation. These may be techniques of propaganda, psychological operations or other ideologically driven strategies. There are, beyond this, a further range of techniques, such as neglect and indifference, which create or sustain ignorance. In the context of knowledge in Britain about Ireland, it is worth noting that The British Association of Irish Studies was established only as recently as 1985 in recognition of the neglect of the area by the higher educational system in Britain.
Commitments to unquestioned tradition can also lead to ignorance, as Robert N. Proctor, Professor of the History of Science, Stanford University, points out in his Preface to the collection Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, co-edited with Professor Londa Schiebinger. Other cultural commitments such as the insistence on ‘balance’ (even in the face of overwhelming evidence on one side) can operate likewise. Indeed, Proctor has argued that what he calls this ‘balance routine’ has ‘allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that “experts disagree” – creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.’ More recent political tactics, particularly on the right, of truth degradation, such as denigration of experts, malicious accusations of ‘fake news’, and the blurring of boundaries between fact and invention, can also serve the creation and maintenance of ignorance. A subset of such tactics which has long been evident in the north of Ireland has been the undermining by the state and supporters of state policies of the need for truth and justice by those who seek accountability for the deaths of their relatives. This has been increasingly evident in the stance taken by the current Conservative government to stop any prosecutions of soldiers for offences committed during the conflict.
Finally, for present purposes, there are a range of techniques that impinge on freedom of expression and inquiry such as silencing or chilling which inhibit access to information. An example of such silencing occurs in some attempts to criticise certain policies of the state of Israel, as noted by David Landy and others in the edited collection Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel. Sometimes these techniques contribute to other compounding effects, such as widespread social indifference, which militate against the sharing of information. An example is where a person or group needs to speak a truth – say of atrocity, as in the case of some Holocaust survivors – but do not feel that they can tell of their experience due to a fear they will not be heard or have their feelings recognised and any trauma addressed.
Aaronovitch shows no understanding of how these techniques operate to affect knowledge of Ireland, relying instead on a comforting view of forgetting, amnesia and casual ignorance – an insufficient, chauvinistic stance. Lest my summary be dismissed as itself insufficient, in the next section of this essay I set out other corroborating examples. Those who need no further evidence might skip this section and resume reading in the subsequent section.
Further examples: creating and maintaining ignorance
The three examples in this section that show how ignorance is created and maintained involve legal processes which are designed to get to the truth. They all show how the British state has addressed northern Irish people. They are, therefore, particularly potent examples. The examples are, in sequence: the cases of the Guildford Four and Maguire Six; the case of the Birmingham Six, and; the Bloody Sunday inquiries.
The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven
On 5 October 1974, the Provisional IRA planted two bombs in pubs in Guildford, Surrey, which were known to be frequented by soldiers based at a nearby barracks. The bombs killed five people and injured sixty-five people. Four people, the ‘Guildford Four’ (including three northern Irish men, Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon and Patrick Armstrong), were wrongly convicted of the bombings. Seven others, the ‘Maguire Seven’ (including Annie Maguire, Patrick Maguire, Sean Smyth, and Patrick ‘Giuseppe’ Conlon – all northern Irish), were wrongly convicted of handling explosives found during the investigation into the bombings.
In the Guildford Four case, typed notes from Patrick Armstrong’s police interviews had been extensively edited. Deletions and additions had been made and the notes had been rearranged. Manuscript notes relating to an interview with Paul Hill showed that Hill’s fifth statement was taken in breach of Judges’ Rules and may have been inadmissible as evidence. This information was not made available to the Director of Public Prosecutions or the prosecution. Indeed, the officers involved had denied under oath that such an interview had happened. Moreover, detention records were inconsistent with the times and durations of the claimed interviews, as reported by the police.
In October 1975, each of the Guildford Four were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Their convictions were quashed in 1989. They had served fourteen years in prison. The Maguire Seven were convicted in 1976, with Anne and Patrick Maguire each sentenced to 14 years. Sean Smyth and Giuseppe Conlon were each sentenced to 12 years. On 12 July 1990, the Home Secretary published the Interim Report on the Maguire Case: The Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the convictions arising out of the bomb attacks in Guildford and Woolwich in 1974, which criticized the trial judge, Mr Justice Donaldson, and unearthed improprieties in the handling of scientific evidence, declared the convictions unsound, and recommended referral back to the Court of Appeal. The report ‘strongly criticise[d] the decision by the prosecution at the Guildford Four’s trial not to disclose to the defence a statement supporting Mr Conlon’s alibi.’ The convictions of the Maguire Seven were quashed in 1991. They had by then served almost all of their sentences, except Giuseppe Conlon who died in prison in 1980.
Birmingham Six
In the Birmingham Six case six innocent men were framed by the West Midlands Police for bombings at two central Birmingham pubs in 1974. They were subject to physical and psychological abuse in custody. Fourteen prison officers were charged with assault, but all were acquitted at trial.
The Birmingham Six were each charged with and convicted of murder. On 15 August 1975, they were each sentenced to 21 life sentences. In 1976, their first application for leave to appeal was dismissed by the then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Widgery, who had, in his inquiry report into Bloody Sunday (1972), exonerated British soldiers who shot and killed 13 civilians. These inquiry findings were overturned by a subsequent inquiry headed by Lord Saville, which found in 2010 that the killings were unjustified and unjustifiable.
In 1980, the Court of Appeal, presided over by Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, rejected the men’s civil claim against the police for injuries sustained by them while in custody. Lord Denning stated:
‘Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial … If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. … That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, “It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.”’
In 1988, the convictions were referred back to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales following publication of the work of journalist Chris Mullin which cast doubt on the convictions. The appeal court, presided over by Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, ruled that the convictions were safe and satisfactory. In 1991, further evidence of police fabrication and suppression of evidence led to a second appeal. The Crown did not resist the appeal. On 14 March 1991, the six men walked free. In 2001, they were variously awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.
These cases reveal not simply a resistance to knowing the truth by core institutions of the state – the police, the prosecuting authority, and the courts – but a pattern of creating and sustaining ignorance through the withholding and fabrication of evidence and subsequent reliance on flawed evidence influenced which has been influenced by anti-Irish prejudice.
That prejudice can manifest not simply, as is too often regrettably believed to be the case, in narrow – even if impactful – forms of discrimination such as slurs, racial insults, and denial of service, but in broader and deeper patterns of anti-Irish racism: of epistemic injustice, refusal to accord recognition and respect for the testimonial validity, the credibility, of Irish people. This can manifest in covert and oblique racism by impermissibly affording lesser weight to an Irish person’s account over a non-Irish person’s account. It can extend to stereotypical views that treat Irish people as liars. In 1873, Edward Hamilton, an Englishman, told his family that he was going to Ireland. His uncle wrote back to warn him about bringing home an Irish wife: ‘The whole nation lies and that is not a good quality in a wife.’ Such a view may seem anachronistic, of a bygone, Victorian era, but the trope re-emerges over a hundred years later in English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1999: ‘You can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars.’
Bloody Sunday Inquiries
Lord Widgery did not in his infamous inquiry into Bloody Sunday, and in his own words, ‘think it necessary to take evidence from those of the wounded who were still in hospital.’ Referring to testimony provided to the inquiry, he added: ‘I was much impressed by the care with which many of them, particularly the newspaper reporters, television men and photographers, gave evidence.’ He did not mention residents of Derry. In a telling privileging of Army testimony, he stated: ‘If the soldiers are wrong they were parties in a lying conspiracy which must have come to light in the rigorous cross-examination to which they were subjected.’ This language prefigures that of Lord Denning in the Birmingham Six case. Lord Widgery’s privileging of soldiers’ testimony and conduct extended to the unacceptable generalisation for the purpose of an inquiry that ‘[s]oldiers will react to the situations in which they find themselves in different ways according to their temperament and to the prevailing circumstances.’ He concluded that, among the soldiers, ‘[t]here was nogeneral breakdown in discipline’, adding: ‘The individual soldier ought not to have to bear the burden of deciding whether to open fire in confusion such as prevailed on 30 January. In the conditions prevailing in Northern Ireland, however, this is often inescapable.’ Lord Widgery ultimately blamed those civilians for creating ‘a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable.’
The Saville Inquiry, by contrast, concluded that ‘there was a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline among the soldiers.’ The Inquiry concluded that the soldiers lost control and none of those killed posed a threat of causing death or serious injury. These are not simply judgments that legitimately differ because the judges in each inquiry had before them only different evidence. They differ in significant part because the evidence of British soldiers was preferred by Lord Widgery, himself a former brigadier in the British Army, over that of Irish civilians, coloured by the vague yet significant exculpatory statement for the state about ‘the conditions prevailing in Northern Ireland’.
Several months before 1 Para shot dead innocent civilians on Bloody Sunday, they also killed at least nine people in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast. Relatives of those killed in Ballymurphy campaigned for almost 50 years for justice. The British Army claimed to have shot Provisional IRA combatants, an account advanced by a soldier who would go on to become head of the British Army. In May 2021, a judge in Northern Ireland said that “all of the deceased were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing on the day in question”. There had been, the coroner added, a use of ‘disproportionate’ force by the soldiers. The lack of investigation in one case had been an ‘abject’ failure by the state. The coroner concluded that in the wake of the shooting of John Kerr there was ‘no adequate investigation by the relevant authorities.’ She added: ‘This is a significant State failing and an abdication of responsibility.’
In each of these cases the British state, including institutions within the state which are dominated largely by those from the English upper classes within the army, judiciary and journalism, prevented or were indifferent to the truth about these incidents, thus maintaining a chauvinistic ignorance that profoundly harmed Irish lives and relations between England and Ireland.
Aaronovitch shows no awareness that the lack of knowledge about Ireland he bemoans includes these egregious examples of sanctioned ignorance.
Aaronovitch has form
Aaronovitch is no stranger to ignorance about Ireland.
He wrote in 2008 regarding Gerry Adams, former leader of Sinn Féin, and his republican colleague Martin McGuinness, former Deputy First Minister of Norther Ireland, both of whom were instrumental in negotiating the Belfast Agreement: ‘Adams and Martin McGuinness – brave though they have been – achieved for themselves no more and no less than a peaceful civil rights movement would have achieved ten years earlier and with 3,000 fewer deaths.’ Aaronovitch is unclear about the date when that ten-year period operated, an indifference to the precise circumstances of conflict that is telling. But no event within ten years after the start of the conflict in 1969 or immediately before the Belfast Agreement of 1998 would have saved 3,000 deaths. This error, too, by Aaronovitch shows an indifference to the material circumstances of those deaths.
Does Aaronovitch know of Samuel Devenny, a 42-year-old Catholic civilian, who died three months after he, his children and others were batoned and kicked in his home in Derry by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)? An investigation into the assault was carried out in 1970 by the Metropolitan Police but the full report into the incident has never been made public, despite repeated requests by the family. An investigation by the Police Ombudsman in 2001 released some details of the report, including that Mr Devenny was beaten about the head and kicked and batoned in front of his younger children, the youngest of whom was three. Mr Devenny was left lying on the floor with blood pouring from a number of headwounds and with his dentures and spectacles broken. He was treated in hospital and was readmitted within days with a coronary attack. He died within three months from another heart attack. The Police Ombudsman also revealed that the RUC men attacked 16-year-old Catherine Devenny, who was lying on a sofa recovering from surgery. She was batoned, pulled off the sofa and kicked, before losing consciousness. Another daughter, Ann (18), lay across her father to protect him, but was kicked and thrown across the room. Mr Devenny’s son, Harry, and two other men were also attacked, one being left unconscious in the hallway.
Does Aaronovitch know about one of the first fatalities of the conflict in Belfast? On 15 August 1969, just around the time I was preparing to start my primary school education in the North, nine-year-old Patrick Rooney was killed by a bullet from a gunner on a RUC armoured vehicle. Patrick was lying in his bed in his family’s flat in Divis Tower in west Belfast. On the 30 July 2020, the Public Prosecution Service of Northern Ireland stated that no prosecution would be brought against the former RUC officer alleged to have short the bullet as there was ‘no reasonable prospect of conviction’.
These, and many other, deaths could not have been stopped, as Aaronovitch claims, by any ‘peaceful civil rights movement’.
Aaronovitch’s carelessness about dates and deaths is less than his indifference to the causes and context of the conflict and a fantasy about a peaceful civil rights movement. He shows no knowledge or understanding of the repeated violence inflicted by loyalist civilians and members of the state on peaceful civil rights protestors, of brutal sectarian attacks by loyalists and members of the RUC and ‘B’ Specials which destroyed homes in West Belfast in August 1969 and which led to one of the greatest migrations of internally displaced people on these islands outside wartime in modern times.
‘We all need to do better’
There are other important reasons England and certain English should know more about Ireland. We have a shared language, English (even though Ireland, like some other countries, has two official languages). As part of the Anglophone world, Ireland has produced globally important work, from groundbreaking playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, through writers such as James Joyce, Edna O’Brien and John Banville, through to singer-songwriters such as Sinéad O’Connor and U2. That work may also at times be partly dependent on and feed back into resources available in Britain: broadcasting platforms, publishers, entertainment venues, libraries etc. The tendency to focus on singular identities and solo achievements can obscure the many ways in which Irish and English (and others) work collectively towards common goals.
Globally, Ireland holds considerable influence in international relations. It has been an elected member of the United Nations Security Council on a two-year term since 1 January 2021. The country is generally regarded internationally as ‘punching above its weight’ in world affairs, due in significant part to its policy of military neutrality and its record in diplomacy. The state’s long-standing commitment to its diaspora maintains strong bonds between emigrants and people of Irish heritage abroad, many of whom exercise considerable soft power – as illustrated by the Irish-American influence in the United States over issues affecting Ireland.
Ireland is also an important trading partner for Britain, even though exports from Britain to Ireland have slumped significantly due to Brexit. Joint initiatives such as the UK and Ireland bid for the Euros 2028 are evidence, however, of the opportunities to be gained from constructive relations.
Much focus is currently placed upon reconciliation between Ireland and England, including with reference to the Belfast Agreement. Reconciliation cannot occur, however, without, at least, truth. That requires challenging any attempts to avoid, suppress, obscure or minimise history.
While I appreciate David Aaronovitch’s statement ‘we all need to do better than this’, he, like many other English writers on Ireland tend to rely on superficial, ethnocentric comment above rigorous research. Those writers would do better to acknowledge existing data, engage with critical analyses of how ignorance is maintained, and jettison flawed, chauvinistic concepts and categories in their attempts to comment on what are issues of profound social, political and constitutional importance.
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Appendix: Resources
There have been powerful insights into Ireland by English journalists and broadcasters, such as Robert Kee, who wrote and presented the landmark joint BBC and RTÉ 13-part series in 1980 Ireland: A Television History, which won a BAFTA for Best Documentary Series, and the reporting of the late Robert Fisk, who was The Times correspondent in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.
There are ongoing discussions among the Irish about many of the issues touched on in this essay. Notable contributions are being made by:
President of Ireland/ Uachtarán na hÉireann, Michael D. Higgins. Twitter: @PresidentIRL.
Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin. Twitter: @janeohlmeyer.
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©Dermot Feenan 2022