Were the Troubles Inevitable?

Tom Holland (0:08)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another bonus episode of The Rest Is History. I am here with Dominic. And Dominic, this week, we've had your magnificent series on The Troubles, the second week of The Troubles. Nothing that anyone in a British government wants to hear said, certainly.

And then next week, we have, an even bloodier civil war in the form of the Great Contest, the Titanic Contest between Marius and Sulla, two of the apex predators of the late Roman Republic, blazing a trail for Pompey the Great, Caesar and Augustus. And we're going to have a special bonus next week with Brett Devereux looking at how the civil wars impacted the growth of Roman military culture. So very exciting. But Dominic, for now, let's head back to, what is it? The dreary steeples of Tyrone and Femana.

Dominic Sandbrook (1:06)

Oh, wow, you're really selling it.

Let's go to the slate grey skies of Belfast. People dressed in nasty parkers, the rain pouring down, the crump of a bomb in the distance. Everyone, yeah, let's get back into that.

Tom Holland (1:22)

Let's go back to the troubles in late 60s and early 70s. We've had lots of questions. And it is Jules Goelner, who asks, I suppose, the most important question of all, were the troubles avoidable?

Dominic Sandbrook (1:37)

Wow, that's a big question. I think there are, I'm gonna give a really, really boring answer, which is yes and no. I'll start with no, they're not avoidable. The troubles start straight away. So the troubles, as it were, the conflict, it's inherent in the nature of Northern Ireland. And that's because the creation of Northern Ireland is itself the product of conflict.

Lots of historians have different views about this, lots of listeners will as well. But my own personal view, and I actually talked about this with Paul Rouse when we were doing the thing at Hampton Court, and I think he agrees with me, or at least I agree with him.

My view is that when you get to 1900, the idea that there will be an independent entity on the island of Ireland that will encompass everybody on that island is a fantasy. There are a million people, or however many it is, who do not want to be part of a separate island.

Tom Holland (2:37)

Dominic, can I just ask, what is the population of Ireland at that time?

Dominic Sandbrook (2:40)

So I think it was something like four and a half million.

Tom Holland (2:43)

Okay, so about a quarter.

Dominic Sandbrook (2:44)

Yeah, I can't remember. I mean, we actually had the figures in the first episode of the Troubles series, but we recorded it so long ago that I've forgotten exactly what it was. But there is a significant minority who do not want to be part of a home rule Ireland. And they are so determined not to be part of a separate island that at the beginning of the 1910s, they arm themselves and they sign a covenant, that they will not go along with it. Now, some Irish nationalists might say, well, the British should have coerced them.

The British should have forced them to be part of a united island. Because you're not going to move a million people, or however many it is, to Great Britain.

The British army was never going to force them. And indeed, the British army and the Curramutiny and whatnot made it very clear that they were not going to go along with any policy of coercion of the Ulster Unionists. So the setting up of something like Northern Ireland is always going to happen, I would argue. So partition is always going to happen. But the very nature of it means that there's always going to be a Catholic minority who regard the Stormont state as illegitimate and are basically not signed up to the project. And that means that conflict is basically baked in, especially as the Unionists themselves regard the Catholics as a fifth column, as an enemy within.

Tom Holland (4:05)

Can I just ask, looking at the 1910s and the fighting then, was there any prospect of a kind of Turkish-Greek population exchange of the kind that happened in the Middle East in this period?

Dominic Sandbrook (4:20)

I don't think so.

Tom Holland (4:21)

Catholics get expelled and Protestants get expelled and you have kind of separate...

Dominic Sandbrook (4:26)

I don't think so. I mean, that's your solution, right? That's your solution. Now, had there been a land-bridged Britain, that might have been, as horrific as it sounds, that might have been a kind of workable solution. Because that's how a lot of the ethnic conflicts of the 1920s or the early 20th century end up being resolved, isn't it?