Philip Stephens’s memories of childhood summer holidays in Ireland are held deep, a mix of the sights, sounds and smells of the Holyhead night-boat, crowded trains to Claremorris in Co Mayo, rush-filled fields and soda bread.
Each July, six weeks “exploring the mountains, bog lands and the wild Atlantic coast” lay ahead, he writes in his latest book on relations between Ireland and Britain, These Divided Isles.
“For two young boys growing up on a London housing estate, Kiltimagh, a small town of a little more than a thousand people, was a wondrous place. The surrounding countryside offered hills to range across, rivers to swim in, peat bogs to get lost in.
“The fog and rain were part of the fun. Meals in my grandparents’ house – potatoes, gammon, soda bread – were baked in a huge grate warmed by an ever-burning turf fire,” remembers the now 72-year-old Financial Times writer.
RM Block
The childhood stories told in These Divided Isles are no chapters from a nostalgic John Hinde history, however, but rather ones that help to explain his interest in, and understanding of, the Anglo-Irish relationship.
“I am privileged to be Irish as well as British,” says Stephens, who finally applied for and got his Irish passport in the 1990s, along with his children, after his mother had died.
“I felt my Irishness more after she died. It just hadn’t occurred to me to get one before. I suppose I wanted to honour her memory by making a bit of a statement that I am Irish, as well as British.”
Raised in a then new housing estate in Kingston-upon-Thames, now a London suburb, by his Irish mother and Welsh father, Stephens never suffered from anti-Irish discrimination, noticing negativity but once.
“I must have been seven or eight, so that would put it in the early-1960s, in one of the seaside towns that we used to go to – Folkestone, Hastings or Littlehampton, I don’t remember which – when I saw a sign on a bed and breakfast.
“It said, “No Blacks, no Irish”. I don’t remember it saying anything about dogs, to be honest. What I remember is ‘No Blacks, no Irish’. I remember saying to my mother, “What’s that about? Are we Irish?
“I remember her saying, ‘Oh, they’re all silly. They’re just silly people’. And she took me away by the hand. She was obviously embarrassed by it,” Stephens says, speaking in his Wandsworth home in south London.
The Troubles largely passed him by. With an English accent and an English-sounding surname, he escaped the anti-Irish discrimination prevalent in the wake of IRA bombings in England in the early-1970s.
With a strong Irish identity, Stephens had no doubt where he stood on IRA violence: “My mother would often remind me, nothing then or subsequently justified the merciless violence inflicted on the people of Northern Ireland.”
Stephens had wanted to become a historian, but, instead, spent decades with the Financial Times as a senior correspondent, before reverting to his first love over the last few years by beginning a three-volume history on Britain’s place in the world.
The first volume, Britain Alone, traced Britain’s path since the Suez crisis in 1956; These Divided Isles tracks its history with its nearest neighbour, Ireland; while the third, yet unwritten, volume will cover its relationship with the United States.
During the post-2008 crash, people in Britain were really impressed by the [Irish] resilience and the willingness to take pain and to emerge from it
Making Ireland the second volume appeared obvious to Stephens, who strongly opposed Brexit and still rails at the repeated failure of Brexiteers to understand the significance of the Irish Border.
His feelings about the relationship between the two countries are tinged with a degree of sadness, though, especially given the heights reached, ironically, in the years immediately before the Brexit referendum.
Queen Elizabeth’s 2011 visit to Ireland “spoke to a deep change in mindset”, with her words in Dublin Castle offering a recognition that “Britain no longer saw the Republic as a backward former colony”.
Yet, that soon passed in the eyes of Brexiteers, especially Boris Johnson, the one who most benefited personally from it, and a man forever guilty in Stephens’s eyes of “ignorance and duplicity”.
For them, “Ireland was an irritation and something that could be sorted. It certainly wasn’t something that was going to be allowed to get in the way of this great project to ‘restore’ British sovereignty.
“There was a mixture of indifference, a certain contempt, too. There’s always been a section of the Tory party, the English nationalists’ section, which has been pro-unionist, as well as anti-European,” Stephens declares.
Though his mother’s experience of emigration to Britain was good, Stephens highlights the attitudes displayed often towards the Irish who had travelled across the Irish Sea from Éamon de Valera’s Ireland in search of work.
In the eyes of London, they were cheap, willing labour, prepared to endure hardship. If little noticed by British officials, however, they were ignored entirely by the land of their birth, even when Dublin was warned about the “shocking” conditions many faced.
“De Valera joined those complaining about the dire conditions faced by Irish workers in Britain. It apparently did not occur to him to ask why they were prepared to endure the hardships,” says Stephens.
Nevertheless, they were put into a different category by British officials to immigrants from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth who had come, or been recruited, to fill job post-second World War job vacancies.
In a report to the British cabinet in 1955, officials drew sharp distinctions between the economic and social dislocation that could be caused by “coloured” immigrants, compared with the minimal impact of the Irish.
Despite history, the Irish were not “a different race from the ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain”, the report went on, seeing Irish workers as cheap labour that could be integrated without significant disruption or local complaint.
The idea that neutrality is a pillar of Irish independence no longer holds, if it ever did
Irish emigrants showed little appetite to return home, Stephens records. In January 1958 the Irish ambassador in London, Con Cremin, challenged “many of the familiar assumptions of unskilled, low-paid and exploited workers”.
The majority were so, he said, but there was another story, too, one where Irish office workers, teachers, nurses and doctors were beginning to move up the economic and social ladder.
“The Irish, he said, were not thought, as with the Germans or the French, to be ‘foreign’. Rather, they were part of the family – ‘no more alien to the English than the Welsh or Scots’. Their Catholic faith was rarely held against them,” writes Stephens.
In the 1990s, “the overwhelming feeling” among the majority of British people after the Belfast Agreement was that the people of both countries could “now get on with being friends”, freed of the baggage of history.
“It took the British a while to realise that Ireland wasn’t the theocratic state it had been. Brexit, unfortunately, disturbed all that, creating a point of friction on an issue that a lot of people cared a lot about, not just in the political class,” he went on.
Contrary to the general belief, he now believes that the partition of the island ordered by the Government of Ireland Act in 1921 took place not because London “wanted to hang on to a bit of its empire”, but the very opposite.
“It wanted to get out, but it wanted to get out in a way that didn’t damage its standing in the rest of the empire. The ideal for Lloyd George would have been a united Ireland, but one remaining within the Commonwealth family.”
A century later, the attitudes displayed in Britain during the Brexit referendum highlighted attitudes that will need to be understood in Ireland if the campaign for a United Ireland develops momentum in the years ahead.
“Brexit illuminated the dichotomy in the British view of Northern Ireland. One is, it wants to get rid of it. But, two, it is not going to let the Irish take it. It’s a bit like the attitude to the Falklands,” he says.
Support for a United Ireland in Northern Ireland grew significantly on the back of the conduct of Johnson, with most people believing that success for the Reform Party in the 2029 Westminster elections will further fuel support.
Stephens accepts some of the predictions about such an outcome, but not all. Undoubtedly, Reform in power would be more hostile to the European Union, constantly threatening the Belfast Agreement and Brussels/London post-Brexit deals.
However, he is less convinced that such an administration would call, as the Belfast Agreement lays down, a unity referendum if and when the Northern Ireland secretary of the day judges that such a referendum would pass.
“Reform would be more accommodating of unionists’ hostile to unity and more defensive of the union. But that’s an almost emotional impulse rather than sound strategic judgment,” he says.
Scotland will become independent before Northern Ireland votes to join with the Republic, he believes: “The more often I go to Scotland, the more I realise that it really feels like a different country now. It is growing apart.”
In the wake of the Brexit differences, Stephens believes that some of the damage to Anglo-Irish relations of the last decade can be undone.
“There is less indifference, there is a lot less condescension. There is a respect, if a grudging respect sometimes, that Ireland has emerged as a strong economic force,” says Stephens.
“During the post-2008 crash, people in Britain were really impressed by the resilience and the willingness to take pain, as it were, and to emerge from it. People in Britain were really struck by that.”
However, new points of division on the horizon loom, including Irish attitudes on neutrality, but most especially the fact that Ireland spends less than 1 per cent of its GDP on defence.
This provokes irritation, he argues. Recalling a recent conversation with a senior British official, Stephens said the official complained with irritation that Ireland enjoys “a security umbrella” from Washington “and, to a degree, London”, without charge.
Historically, Ireland’s neutrality was rooted in an understandable desire not to be linked militarily to Britain, but this is now less understandable to friendly states “in a world of Putin and Russia”.
He was not, he said, arguing that Ireland should join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, even though former neutral states Finland and Sweden did sign up after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“The idea that neutrality is a pillar of Irish independence no longer holds, if it ever did,” he says, and no one is arguing that Ireland should be sending troops around the world, “but you cannot be a bystander any more, those days are over”.
These Divided Isles by Philip Stephens is published by Faber
