Age of Nations Story of Ireland

Ireland's modern story begins in an age of empire,

but it will be convulsed by revolution.

The old order is overthrown.

The religious conflict that has endured for 300 years

will lead to the division of Ireland for the first time in history.

From the beginning of the story of Ireland, the island has been shaped by events beyond its shores

and this is never more true than in the modern era.

In an age of world wars, when Europe is twice rent apart by hatred, when tens of millions die in the

name of ideology and nationalism, Ireland, too, will experience dramatic upheaval.

It is an age in which the island's people will confront not only the

legacy of history but the very idea of what it means to be Irish.

Early in the last century, my forebears lived here in middle-class respectability in the city of Cork.

It was a world dominated by the British Empire and Cork was a thriving garrison city.

My great-grandfather was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary.

But his service records are not kept in Cork.

They're here at the National Archives in Kew.

Here he is. 40739, Hassett, Patrick.

5ft 10, the same height as myself, from County Clare.

In his mind there was nothing unusual about him being sent, as we can see here,

to serve in Belfast, because it was all one Ireland at the time.

And he wouldn't have seen any contradiction between supporting

the monarchy, but also supporting the idea of Home Rule for Ireland,

because, remember, if Home Rule was granted, the country was still going to stay within the British Empire.

And that empire really framed the world in which my great-grandfather grew up and in which he lived.

Yet the image of a serene Ireland was deceptive.

An Irish Catholic would never rise to the top of the RIC.

In Her Majesty's Civil Service, Catholics were noticeably absent from the more senior posts.

The Act of Union had given Catholics economic

power but their political destiny remained in the hands of London.

As the century turned, a view of an Irish future utterly

separate from Britain was finding expression in cultural revival.

One of the many artists attempting to forge a new

national consciousness was the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats.

In 1903, with Lady Augusta Gregory, he founded the Abbey Theatre.

It would see the production of their play Cathleen ni Houlihan,

which represented Ireland as a beautiful woman for whom young men would sacrifice their lives.

"They shall be alive forever", Yeats wrote.

Later he would ask, "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?"

The cultural revival in sports, literature and theatre was

profoundly influenced by the fear that Ireland was becoming British.

There's a fear that Ireland is losing its identity,

that if a new generation does not embrace identity and national sentiment

and the national language and so on,

that something is going to be lost. Irretrievably lost.

What was being written and talked about here in Dublin

chimed with nationalist sentiments across the world.

In 1911, Sun Yat-sen had declared his revolution in China.

The following year, the African National Congress was founded in South Africa.

And closer, in the Balkans, Serbian plotters were preparing acts that would change the world.

Here in Ireland, the long dominance of those who'd advocated

change through peaceful means was about to be challenged.

Across Europe, there are premonitions of a cataclysm that will make a new world.

In Ireland, a poet and teacher declared bloodshed a cleansing and sanctifying thing.

Inspired by Christ and the warriors of Gaelic myth, Patrick Pearse had come to idealise martyrdom.

Pearse was the son of an English father and an Irish mother.

At St Enda's, his school outside Dublin, he declared it his mission

to counter what he called the murder machine of British education.

Pearse told his pupils to be ready to work hard for the fatherland and, if necessary, to die for it.

Pearse joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, committed to the overthrow of imperial rule.

His alienation from the bourgeois world of his childhood would deepen when he watched the combined forces

of state power and a Catholic-led business elite suppress the 1913 strike in Dublin.

But the conditions in which Patrick Pearse and other radicals would

rebel were created by the British Government's attempts at reform.

In 1912, the Liberal Cabinet moved to introduce Home Rule,

but in keeping a promise to Irish Catholics, it provoked the anger of Ulster Protestants.

Home Rule was seen as an attempt to undo the Plantation of Ulster.

It was seen as an attempt

to bring the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, to bring them top,

to effect a social revolution that would have seen Protestant Ulster,

the Ulster that they had built, destroyed.

Protestant opposition was led by a man misrepresented as much by his allies as by his enemies.

Edward Carson was a Dublin lawyer who to this day remains the great icon of Ulster loyalism.

Carson had been a fierce cross-examiner of his old college friend Oscar Wilde

during a libel trial in which the writer denied his homosexuality.

But this man, appropriated as an implacable Ulster unionist, began with a very different agenda.

Most Irish people would regard Carson

as the arch partitionist, but that's not what Carson is about.

Carson is about sustaining the union between

Great Britain and all of Ireland, not just the northeastern corner.

And he wants to make that union work for the benefit of all Irish people.

But Carson understood that only in Ulster was there a

Protestant population large enough to mobilise against Home Rule.

On September 28th, 1912, here in Belfast City Hall, Edward Carson

signed a solemn covenant pledging to defend Ulster from Home Rule.

Almost 250,000 men followed his example.

But how were they going to back up this declaration with deeds?

The Ulster unionist leadership now made a momentous decision.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1913, directly challenged the state.

It was encouraged in its threats of rebellion by British Conservatives, yet the Government took no action.

Nationalists reacted by founding the Irish Volunteers to protect Home Rule.

They were joined by the Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly,

a Glasgow-born socialist who'd come to prominence in the 1913 strike in Dublin.

When this paramilitarisation develops in the north, the reaction

in nationalist Ireland is excitement.

It's not fear.

It's not a sense that a civil war may happen.

It's, this is what Irishmen should do.

Time and again you hear it said famously about Patrick Pearse that "to see arms in the hands of Irishmen

"is an ennobling thing", even if they're in the hands of Ulster unionist Irishmen.

It was of course a grand delusion.

Both nationalists and the British Government seemed to have forgotten

the bitter struggles with loyalists over Home Rule in the previous century.

It was as if they believed Ulster Protestants would eventually peacefully come round to the idea.

But the loyalists were busy arming themselves to fight whoever tried to impose Home Rule.

On the 24th and 25th April 1914, 25,000 rifles and three million

rounds of ammunition were brought in through Larne and other ports and distributed across Ulster.

These were German weapons being imported at a time of mounting international tension.

It would be hard to imagine a greater challenge to the authority of the state.

And yet the Government did nothing.

But when nationalists imported guns

the following July, they were confronted.

This double standard helped to radicalise many more moderate nationalists.

Tension steadily escalated, until Ireland's quarrel was suddenly interrupted.

During the First World War, you get a sea-change in the nature of Irish political opinion.

People who had been thinking that

constitutional methods would work

changed their mind and felt that they wouldn't.

People who felt that a more moderate goal was legitimate

changed their minds and wanted something more radical.

The war would claim the lives of as many as 30,000 Irishmen.

More than 200,000 served.

To the moderate Irish nationalist leader John Redmond,

the war was a chance to make the case to unionists for Home Rule.

Catholics would show their loyalty to the Empire.

But as the war dragged on and casualties mounted,

fears grew that Britain would introduce conscription in Ireland.

Redmond's call to arms looked increasingly to have been a serious political mistake.

There was growing disillusionment among nationalists,

but Ireland wasn't seething with anti-British fervour.

It would take the events of Easter 1916 to create the cataclysm.

As Britain floundered on the Western Front,

a small group of plotters gathered in Dublin.

They were a minority, even within the revolutionary Republican Brotherhood.

They included poets and hardened rebels,

Pearse, who dreamed of blood sacrifice and the champion of a workers' republic, James Connolly.

They plotted the downfall of empire in Ireland

here above the tobacco shop of the veteran IRB man Tom Clarke.

The rebels decided to move on Easter Sunday,

date of Christ's resurrection.

But the orders were countermanded by moderates.

In the chaos of order and counter-order,

Pearse, Connolly and the other radicals made a fateful decision.

They would strike with a drastically reduced force

in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916.

A detachment of Connolly's Citizen Army attacked Dublin Castle,

symbol and seat of British power, but were repulsed.

The main body of rebels,

led by Pearse and Connolly, rushed down Sackville Street

and took over the General Post Office.

They raised the Irish tricolour above the building.

Pearse stepped outside and read from a proclamation

signed by himself and the six other leaders.

He declared an Irish Republic.

"In the name of God and the dead generations, Ireland through us

"summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom."

A witness watching from a balcony opposite described how boys quickly gathered up

any copies of the proclamation they could find, because, as he put it,

they would be worth a fiver when the beggars were hanged.

The British were caught unawares, but by the end of the week,

they outnumbered the rebels by ten to one.

From the River Liffey, a gunboat fired.

Irish regiments also fought the rebels.

The Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who were drawn principally from the

working-class districts of the city, were being rushed up along the quays

here to join the battle near the GPO,

when a shot rang out from a sniper across the river.

Lieutenant Gerald Neilan, an Irish Catholic, fell dead.

Elsewhere in the city, his younger brother Anthony

was fighting on the rebel side.

The majority of the dead of Easter week were civilians,

killed in the rain of shells and bullets

that devastated the city centre in the British counter-attack.

Pearse and Connolly finally abandoned their headquarters

at the GPO, surrendering on April 29th.

As the rebels were led into captivity, they were jeered and jostled by the crowd.

Many of the most vociferous were women whose husbands were away fighting on the Western Front.

The rising had been crushed, and public opinion now seemed set against the rebels...

..until the British made a grave miscalculation.

The leaders were brought here to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin,

and hastily court-martialled, and sentenced to death.

Over a period of two weeks, 14 men were executed here,

13 at this end, including Patrick Pearse,

and up here, James Connolly,

who had to be carried to his execution on a stretcher.

The manner of their deaths and the number of executions would turn these men from being

the leaders of a militant minority into martyrs who could be acclaimed by all of nationalist Ireland.

The poet William Butler Yeats sensed the impact of the executions.

"I write it out in a verse

"MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse

"Now and in time to be

"Wherever green is worn Are changed, changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

Public anger deepened following mass arrests and the imposition of martial law.

Here in the military archives in Dublin is a trove of witness accounts from young men who were

radicalised by the events of Easter 1916, and who joined the Volunteers in its wake.

Matthew Davies from Roscommon - in 1916, he says, "I was unattached to any group.

"After the rebellion there was an outcry to execute the fanatics.

"I felt we would have to do something about it."

And of course he formed a volunteer unit in his area.

The Volunteers evolved into the Irish Republican Army, and among the

young men who flocked to join them was my grandfather, Paddy Hassett, the imperial policeman's son.

Why would Paddy Hassett

turn his back on that family tradition of service to the Empire?

The biggest factor was what had happened in Ireland.

The impact of the 1916 rising and the executions and the round-ups that took place after it.

I sense that that was what turned my grandfather, and many,

many other young men like him, against the British.

But if the great cause of the Irish revolution

had been a united republic, the consequence was very different.

I think after 1916, with the dead dedicated to a republic,

the fires of Easter week have

forged a new national identity, which is to be republican.

Ulster unionists find nothing in that whatsoever.

They found little if anything in Home Rule -

there's absolutely nothing for them in an Irish Republic.

It makes partition inevitable.

In the 1918 general election, Sinn Fein, led by veterans of the rising,

won a sweeping majority.

But instead of going to Westminster, the party set up an Irish Republic.

The Sinn Fein leader was Eamon de Valera,

and his finance minister, Michael Collins.

In an atmosphere made worse

by renewed British threats of conscription,

Collins would find himself directing a guerrilla war.

The IRA campaign which began in 1919

was met with fierce reprisals against civilians

by security forces like the Black and Tans.

A state-sanctioned policy of reprisal increased public support for the IRA.

And Irishmen killed fellow Irishmen.

Police shot IRA men and vice versa.

This is my father's hometown of Listowel in County Kerry.

On 20 January, 1921, an IRA squad was lying in wait at Church Street.

The man they were going to attack, District Inspector Tobias O'Sullivan of the Royal Irish Constabulary,

was coming up the street with his five-year-old son.

The IRA squad ran up to him and shot him dead in front of the child.

Now the version of the story that I was given growing up,

was that a British soldier - not an Irish policeman - had been killed.

Nor had there been any mention that he'd been holding his child's hand when he was murdered.

It was as if some parts of the story were simply too painful to tell.

O'Sullivan had taken part in a raid on a nearby village.

After two years of violence, both sides declared themselves ready to talk.

In October 1921, a Sinn Fein delegation

led by Michael Collins arrived in London to discuss a political settlement.

Michael Collins arrived as the 20th century's first celebrity rebel.

In terms of his public image, a kind of Che Guevara for his age.

But here, Collins would encounter a British negotiating team

led by Lloyd George, that was both experienced and tough.

Whatever else might be conceded, an Irish Republic was not on offer.

26 counties of southern Ireland would become the Irish Free State, with its own army

but swearing an Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown.

The Government had already allowed the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster

to form a new state within the United Kingdom.

But it wasn't Ulster that caused crisis for the Irish side.

In Dublin, de Valera accused Collins of having agreed to the Oath of Allegiance without his consent.

When the Dail convened in Dublin in December 1921, de Valera denounced the oath

as an abandonment of the Republic.

Collins argued that the treaty gave Ireland the freedom to achieve freedom.

The one-time comrades became bitter enemies.

When the vote on the treaty came, it was perilously close - 64 votes for, 57 against.

De Valera led his supporters out of the Dail. As he went, Michael Collins shouted, "Deserters, all!"

The slide to civil war had begun.

A majority of the people supported the treaty,

but couldn't stop a war characterised by extreme ruthlessness.

Both sides committed atrocities.

At Ballyseedy Cross in County Kerry, nine Republican prisoners

were tied to a log and blown to pieces by a landmine.

Retaliation for the killing of Free State soldiers.

The Government army gradually captured the Republican strongholds.

But on 22 August, 1922, Michael Collins was assassinated in County Cork.

The Free State would triumph, but his loss was devastating.

In death, Collins would become a romantic icon, the great lost leader.

Yet in some of his last writings he espoused a patriotic pragmatism.

"True devotion", Collins wrote, "lay not in melodramatic defiance

"or self sacrifice, but in steady, earnest effort."

By the time the Civil War ended in 1923, Ireland was a very different country to the united

and equal nation imagined by the revolutionaries of 1916.

The revolution had driven the British out.

But it had also consolidated the prevailing social reality.

This was a Catholic, largely rural and, above all, conservative society.

It was a society not dissimilar to that imagined by Ireland's first political titans.

The settled country imagined by Daniel O'Connell, hero of Catholic Emancipation, in the 19th Century.

An Ireland of landowners, such as Charles Stewart Parnell envisioned,

and which his Land League had done so much to create.

A society whose fundamental desire now was for stability.

In the Protestant-ruled six counties of Ulster, electoral boundaries

had been drawn to ensure majorities for Unionists in most areas.

There had been fierce retribution against Catholics, following IRA violence.

More than 8,000 were driven from their jobs, hundreds were killed.

The Prime Minister, James Craig, was a patrician landowner and proud Orangeman.

Catholic Northern Ireland, Catholic Ulster, does not really feature in his political agenda.

Craig, I think, associates Catholicism with a challenge

to the state that he finds himself ruler of.

He associates Catholicism with subversion.

But Unionism comes together from a variety of very different institutions and forces.

It's absolutely not a monolithic group,

and it contains a spectrum of those who are ferocious in their anti-Catholicism,

across towards a more liberal take on the Union and Unionism.

Across the river is Donegal in the south.

This is Clady in County Tyrone, one of the six counties of the new Northern Ireland state.

The Prime Minister, James Craig, had built here a Protestant state for a Protestant people.

Many years later, a Unionist leader trying to forge peace with Nationalists

would ruefully acknowledge that this had been a cold house for Catholics.

A place of discrimination and exclusion.

Catholics materially were better off in Northern Ireland than they were in the Irish Free State.

But politics matters more than economics.

Catholics were not welcome, and that was clear.

They had to listen to a tirade of abuse coming up to 12 July every year.

They had to listen to Unionist politicians boasting that

they'd never employed a Catholic, never would employ a Catholic, wouldn't have one around the place.

That sort of chilly feeling of not being wanted produces serious disaffection.

But in the South, the new government of Cumann na Gael, led by Michael Collins' heirs,

had neither the military means, economic power or desire to wage a war of territorial redemption.

The south opted for stability.

Even with the arrival in power in 1932 of Eamon de Valera,

now leading the Fianna Fail party, rhetoric would be a comforting substitute for action.

Ireland united, Ireland free, these are the ideals

to which enthusiastic young Ireland is now devoting its energy.

Whatever the rhetoric, whatever the propaganda campaigns,

de Valera realised that unification was not going to happen, and he may even have seen advantages in that.

I think the majority of southerners were quite happy

that Northern Ireland was gone, that the wretched Unionists were corralled in their area,

and were not coming down and not interfering with their setup in the South.

The founding father of Irish Nationalism, Wolfe Tone,

imagined a nation that united Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

But Ireland was now an island of two states in which religion would be a primary badge of identity.

Here at the Phoenix Park in 1932, vast crowds gathered

for a religious festival that would symbolise the character of the new Irish state.

Whatever rhetorical gestures might be made to the Protestants of Ulster, this was a Catholic nation.

The clergy, for somebody like de Valera, were very important.

They were his advisors.

The leaders also had brothers who were priests or nuns.

That clerical establishment was very much integrated in a way that, if you were a political leader,

if you were a Catholic, you would not be very distant

from some relative or brother who was in orders or a nun.

De Valera's landmark constitution of 1937 avoided making Catholicism the state religion,

offering instead a vaguer special position.

Since the 19th Century, church power had been deeply embedded.

Ireland was a nation of mass devotion,

and the overwhelming majority of children were educated in church-run schools.

But this central role came at a price.

Church control of education was close to absolute.

But its power also extended deep into the criminal justice system.

This is the old Letterfrack Industrial School in County Galway.

It was one of a network of such institutions

up and down the country, where the state consigned children.

Many of these institutions were set up under British rule.

The new rulers of Ireland would prove as inadequate as the old in protecting the young.

Physical and sexual abuse on a large scale was part of the secret history of the new state.

You were constantly waiting to be set upon.

St Joseph's Industrial School, Letterfrack,

was an extremely violent place in an extremely violent Irish society.

Mannix Flynn, who came from a poor Dublin background, was sent to Letterfrack in the early 1960s.

An individual I saw one night being dragged out of the bed,

his head beaten against a wall.

What blood came out of the person, the Brother then

dragged this young boy up and down the dormitory,

wiping him in his own blood to clean it off the floor.

But depending on what kind of venom the individual who was perpetrating the violence on you,

whatever Brother or whatever civilian it was that was attached to the school, it could last for weeks.

They were children from working-class backgrounds, from mixed families.

Some of them were the children of mothers who had children out of wedlock.

Some of them were from other institutions, having been in orphanages and orphaned.

They were the dirty poor.

They didn't fit into the emerging Irish Catholic middle classes.

This society, since the foundation of the state, has continued

the containment of a class of people,

a segregation of a class of people that it sees as God's mistake.

Church influence spread far beyond the care of the young.

From the bishops' palaces came regular diktats on cultural morality.

Eamon de Valera's friend, the Archbishop of Dublin,

John Charles McQuaid, kept a close eye on the Republic's creative spirits.

His files are a trove of insight into the thinking of the Archbishop on a whole range of issues.

This is the box relating to censorship.

And in it, there's a letter from a parish priest who wants to put on

a showing for his parishioners of the Oscar-winning movie, Gigi.

The plan has to be abandoned. Why?

Well, according to this file, the film contains a reference to a prostitute.

Banned were some of the greatest names in the Irish literary canon.

James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Frank O'Connor and scores of others.

And yet in this atmosphere of constraint, Irish literature flourished.

Literature acquired a kind of weird glamour by virtue

of being persecuted,

probably in the way it did in Soviet Russia.

If you say these people are important enough to suppress, you are saying they are very damned important.

Remarkable talents like Flann O'Brien produced

defiantly Irish masterpieces in a European surrealist tradition.

It's as if the radicalism got annulled in political politics

and re-routed almost entirely into literature.

The more repression there was at an official daylight level,

the more creatively deranged the texts produced.

It's as if the Irish were straights by day and swingers by night.

De Valera followed church advice on morality, but it was not his obsession.

From the time he came to power in 1932,

through his 16 years in office, his central preoccupation was Irish sovereignty.

When World War II broke out, de Valera resisted Churchill's urgings to join the fight.

Ireland remained neutral.

There was a considerable degree of public support for that stance,

and there was a considerable degree of pride in the idea that we could go our own way.

Partly because this is a country

that is still relatively raw from the Civil War.

And if de Valera had decided to go in and fight

on the part of the Allies, it could well have divided the body politic.

But it was an ambiguous neutrality.

When the German air force attacked Belfast, de Valera sent firemen to help fight the blaze.

Germans bailing out over the South were interned,

while their Allied counterparts were allowed to return to Ulster.

When the IRA declared war against Britain, de Valera imprisoned and even executed its members.

Yet, on Hitler's death, de Valera offered his condolences to Germany.

While Europe burned, de Valera set out his vision

for an Ireland that would be distinctive in its culture and values.

'The Ireland that we dreamed of

'would be the home of the people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living.

'Of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.

'A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads,

'with the romping of sturdy children, and the laughter of happy maidens.'

Yet to cast this giant of the Irish 20th century as an inward-looking Nationalist would be wrong.

He had chaired the League of Nations.

The avoidance of wars and of the burden of preparatory armament

is of such concern to humanity, that no state should be permitted to jeopardise the common interest

by selfish action contrary to the covenant.

When the League was succeeded by the United Nations, de Valera made striking gestures of independence.

From Dublin came his instruction to support Red China's application to join the UN,

to the horror of America.

He established the commitment which saw Irish troops serve in their thousands on peacekeeping missions.

There is a real paradox here.

De Valera was well aware of Ireland's international role.

Yet his vision for the Irish demanded that they remain uncontaminated by foreign ideas.

It was a vision at odds with modernity.

Economic conflict with Britain had damaged Ireland at the outset of his rule.

Stagnation deepened with the years.

Around half a million people would leave Ireland, most seeking a better life in Britain,

the country de Valera had spent his life fighting against for Irish sovereignty.

If you had to characterise the Ireland of de Valera, how would you describe it?

Very inward looking.

Very complacent.

And most of all, very poor.

The last week in secondary school, the headmaster came in and asked us -

those of us in the class - there were about 30 of us -

how many of us saw our future in Ireland.

And the answer was 2 out of the 30.

I was one of those two, by the way.

By the time de Valera retired at the age of 77, Ireland wanted change.

The leader who took over in 1959 was another veteran of revolution,

but he displayed a steely pragmatism,

utterly different from de Valera's mystical vision of Irishness.

Sean Lemass encouraged foreign investment, removed trade barriers,

urged efficiency and modernisation in industry.

We started off like all the other newly free countries,

with the assumption that freedom alone was enough

and that in freedom, economic difficulties would right themselves.

We found out, the hard way, this wasn't so.

Ireland had begun to catch up with the great post-war modernisation.

The young were beneficiaries of free secondary education,

and a society again open to outside cultural influence.

Television challenged the voice of both priest and politician.

Women joined the workforce in growing numbers and challenged discriminatory laws.

And across the border, the changing world of the Sixties seemed to inspire a new kind of Unionism.

A leader emerged who offered a friendlier face to the Catholic minority and to the South.

In January 1965, O'Neill and Lemass made history by meeting together at Stormont.

The beginnings of North-South detente.

How important is that moment?

I think it's symbolically of huge significance.

This is the first official meeting of the two heads of state since the 1920s.

We discussed this during our meeting, which of us would get into the most trouble.

I said I would, and he said he would.

He did get into a certain amount of trouble during the first six weeks.

But nothing to the trouble that I got into.

Captain O'Neill recently said that the South of Ireland

was a very beautiful young lady.

And that he was very glad to talk to her over the hay.

We don't look upon the South of Ireland

as a beautiful young lady!

The liberal aspirations are very much overdue,

but part of the difficulty with the O'Neill project is O'Neill himself.

But O'Neill is an extraordinarily attritional figure who does not connect with Nationalism or Unionism

and, in the end, is simply not able to deliver the votes.

By 1968, O'Neill had been outflanked by the older forces of fear.

Detente with the South was over.

But in this year of rebellion, a movement rises in Northern Ireland

to demand equal rights for Catholics.

For the Ulster Protestants, the civil rights movement was the old Catholic conspiracy,

not a movement for change inspired by the unrest of that momentous year.

The following year, sectarian rioting erupted.

The IRA, long in decline, re-emerged to present itself as the people's protector against a hostile state.

Republican and loyalist paramilitaries,

policemen and soldiers, fought over the old ground.

Positively nothing fired at them whatsoever.

There weren't even stones thrown at them, and they opened fire.

People ran in all directions. They call themselves an army.

It was completely outrageous.

The bus station was crowded when a bomb went off without warning.

In the space of 16 minutes alone,

13 blasts sent people screaming from one place of safety to another.

An army helicopter was flown in to remove the casualties

and this was then caught in a separate explosion.

There can be no question of political status.

Crime is crime is crime.

The Provisional IRA have said they planted the bomb

at the Brighton hotel

where Mrs Thatcher and her ministers are staying.

Politics is the alternative to war.

Politics is about dialogue. I'll talk to anyone.

That doesn't mean that I approve of what they stand for.

The war occasionally spilled over into the South.

But partition had entrenched a separation of the mind.

The six counties of Ulster truly seemed a world away.

In the Republic, a younger generation pursued its own narrative of change.

Pushing at the boundaries of Church and of State.

This changing sense of Irishness was the beginning of an extraordinary journey.

The Republic of Ireland now looked increasingly beyond its shores,

as part of a European Community.

Through the decades of change from the '60s to the '90s, Ireland moved from stagnation to growth.

By the late '90s it was among the richest countries in Europe.

The country I had left in the recession of the 1980s was now the Celtic Tiger.

Low corporate tax and a highly educated workforce helped to produce record growth.

Coming back on holidays during the years of boom, it was hard

to suppress a sense of shock at the sheer scale of the development.

Pride, too, in a country that seemed to have shaken off

the more inward-looking elements of its historic legacy.

But - and I claim no great prescience here - I also had a lingering unease.

Where was the money coming from?

And who exactly was it benefiting?

Inequality between rich and poor was still among the worst in Western Europe.

And the idea of a new Republic was undermined by the old deference to power.

Whatever else might be said about the founding fathers of this state,

the revolutionary generation, they were austere men, devoted to public service.

But there emerged from this building a new kind of politician.

One who understood that political power could be the pathway to great personal wealth.

The man who came to symbolise the Irish politics of cronyism

was Charles Haughey, leader of the party de Valera had founded.

Talented, modernising, yet he lived like an Ascendancy Lord, bankrolled by businessmen.

Haughey entered a very different Ireland in the 1960s, demographically and economically,

there were more urban people living in Ireland

for the first time than rural people in history.

That brought on all sorts of pressures.

More people wanted access to services, more people looking for planning permission,

where a lot of the corruption was.

New politicians stepped in.

They were self-made men.

While Ireland embraced Europe and the technology of modernity,

the political system was rooted in 19th-century localism.

Ireland's new political titan sailed his own yacht to the small island he owned.

In Ireland, the parish and not the nation remained the centre of the democratic universe.

Land, such a fundamental obsession of the Irish psyche for centuries,

was at the centre of the new clamour for wealth.

Beginning in the 1960s, bribes had been paid to rezone green fields for building development.

The lost fields of de Valera's Gaelic idyll were the new currency of wealth and power.

Even as the country boomed, judicial tribunals revealed the scale of corruption in Irish public life.

The Moriarty Tribunal, which sat in this very yard,

estimated that between 1979 and 1996, the substantive phase

when Charles Haughey was Taoiseach during that time,

he received over nine million in donations.

There seems to be a very clear relationship between Haughey receiving

substantive amounts of donations when he was in power and when he wasn't in power,

he didn't seem to receive that much money at all.

As Ireland turned towards a new millennium, the gleaming buildings rose.

But old certainties unravelled.

Scandals rocked the authority of the Church as the full scale of clerical child abuse was revealed.

The tribunals continued to hear allegations of corruption in public life.

Yet prosperity and the old habits of deference ensured public quiescence.

It's often remarked that the Irish people are very sophisticated, politically.

That the Irish are very defiant.

That the Irish are rebels.

When you contrast that with the lack of protest, the lack of civic engagement, the lack of demand for

accountability, for the abuse of power, you have to ask yourself,

are a lot of those assertions about the Irish character and Irish rebelliousness actually mythical?

But in 2008 a financial catastrophe unleashed public anger.

Ireland's economy was already in decline when America's property bubble exploded.

In Ireland, prices collapsed.

Thousands were forced to emigrate.

The ghost estates became a symbol of a nation in decline.

Here, opposite Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of 1916 were executed,

there's a monument which stands next to the empty office buildings of the Celtic Tiger.

It reminds the Irish people of the proclamation of a nation that would cherish all its children.

As Ireland enters the second decade of the 21st century, there seemed

the possibility that the old way of doing things might be overthrown.

This wasn't a transformation that could happen overnight or in the space of one election.

But there were deeper stirrings of dissent

that suggested that an entire political culture could be changed.

And there was already a recent powerful example of that

here on the island, in a place we might least have expected.

And if what has been agreed is implemented in full good faith,

all the people of Northern Ireland will gain.

There are no victors, nor any losers.

The agreement proposes changes

in the Irish constitution and in British constitutional law

to enshrine the principle that it is the people of

Northern Ireland who will decide, democratically, their own future.

I think the change came when war weariness overtook war readiness.

And I think that happens some time in the 1980s and certainly by the early 1990s.

There was the feeling that this cannot go on. We're into the second generation now.

People were committing atrocities who had not been born when the Troubles began.

EXPLOSION

The peace has so far endured

the challenge of unreconciled Republican dissidents.

But the pain of 30 years of killing haunts quiet living rooms across Ulster.

We want better lives for our children and our grandchildren and their children, too.

That's a lovely photograph of the two of you, in a harbour somewhere.

-In Ardglass.

-Right. Down at the coast.

-Yeah.

Bridget Mooney's husband, Raymond, was murdered in the grounds of a church in September 1986

in retaliation for the IRA murder of a leading Loyalist.

That's where we had our wedding reception.

-So, this is the two of you on the day of your wedding?

-It is indeed.

Where were you married?

-In Ardoyne.

-So were you married in the same church that Raymond would later be murdered in?

-Yeah.

And all of my grandchildren who have been born so far, all of them christened in Ardoyne.

So much of this conflict - and I'm not just talking about what has happened in at the last 30 years,

but for hundreds of years - has been driven by fear and by hatred.

I just wonder, do you feel hatred, now, towards the people that killed your husband?

No. For the simple reason, hatred and bitterness are feelings.

And I refuse to let people who took my husband's life

have any place in my body.

In my heart, in my head.

An no, I hate nobody.

Have you ever wanted to, and have you ever thought about, leaving Northern Ireland?

Never. Not while my husband's body's in the city cemetery. Never.

And I've never even thought about it, no.

And I'll never leave Northern Ireland now.

The poet John Hewitt, writing at the height of the Troubles,

urged that "we should bear in mind these dead, I can find no plainer words."

He was reflecting on a conflict in which men killed and died for the sake of contested identities.

This was not, Hewitt implied, patriotism.

"Patriotism has to do with keeping the country in good heart,

"the Community ordered with justice and mercy."

Hewitt's lines might stand as one of the enduring lessons of the Irish story.

The decommissioning of the arms of the IRA is now an accomplished fact.

The IRA abandoned war and Unionists agreed to share power with Catholics.

After 30 years of war in which over 3,500 people died, the IRA accepted

the partitioned Ireland agreed by Michael Collins and the British.

Unity was an aspiration to be achieved by peaceful means.

In the South, the romantic nationalism of earlier generations had largely vanished.

When the Republic voted to abandon its territorial claim on the six counties,

it seemed an act of practical patriotism.

It's an acceptance of political reality and an acceptance

of engagement with the outside world, including Northern Ireland.

We no longer have to, as it were, wave the flag.

There is a feeling of Irishness that is real, much deeper,

in my view, than what existed in the '30s and '40s.

The Republic is now having to accommodate a broader sense of Irishness.

There is racism, but far-right politics have not taken root here.

How many children have parents who are from outside of Ireland?

-How about yourself? Where are your parents from?

-Russia.

-And you over here?

-Lithuania.

-Lithuania, Poland as well.

10% of the population of the South is now foreign-born.

These are the children of those who came here in the boom to find work.

THEY CHANT IN IRISH

Economic globalisation changed the idea of Irish identity.

The old concept of an Irish identity, the one that I grew up with,

which was that being Irish was Gaelic and Catholic, that's gone, really, hasn't it?

There are still plenty of Gaels around, plenty of Catholics around,

but what's nice about the time we are entering now is that

you don't have to be both of those things to be Irish.

And that Irish identity now can draw from many, many wells.

And we're going to build, between us, the Ireland of tomorrow.

And who can say what Irish identity will morph into?

The first inhabitants of this island came from Europe.

They were open to change and absorbed waves of invasion.

They embraced a spiritual revolution and carried it to distant lands.

The old hatreds have not vanished but the Irish have moved to peaceful co-existence.

There has been famine, revolution and civil war.

But, in an age of uncertainty, we can surely draw strength from the memory of what has been overcome.

The story of Ireland has always been a narrative of change, unpredictable and dynamic.

The past is no longer a melancholy burden or a reason to hate.

We're never entirely free of the claims of history, but neither are we its prisoners.

Ireland today is an island of possibility, an open island.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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