Aspects of the Irish question

Front matter

ASPECTS OF THE IRISH QUESTION

ASPECTS OF THE IRISH QUESTION

BY SYDNEY BROOKS

CHAPTER I A Review of the Past i CHAPTER n A General Survey 31

CHAPTER HI The Country and Its Problems ... 49

CHAPTER IV The New Elements ']6

CHAPTER V The Farmer and the Future .... 105

CHAPTER VI The Last Chance of the Irish Gentry . 136

CHAPTER VII

The Church and the " Religious " Issue 156

CHAPTER VIII Politics and the Home Rule Bill . . 205

Aspects of the Irish Question

CHAPTER I

A REVIEW OF THE PAST t

No attempt to interpret the Ireland of to-day can be helpful, can even be intelligible, without a constant throwing-back to the past. Other countries, Macedonia, for instance, and southern Italy and Sicily, have behind them a historical development as tortuous and mournful, as blood - soaked and convulsive ; but with no country have fate and nature and human perversity dealt more harshly than with Ireland, and in none is it so indispensable that an ever-present consciousness of what has been should be the starting-point of any effort to elucidate what is. The unhappy legacy of the past culminates in the tragedy of the Irish present. You find the mark of its ravages wherever you turn, in all departments of Irish life, in the social and economic sphere as much as in the political and religious, in the mind and instinctive outlook of the people not less than in their material conditions. The resultant cannot be understood without some knowledge of the processes that have shaped it.

A

The unique conformation which Ireland presents, intricate and astounding in any case, is a riddle in the geology of politics that cannot even be propounded aright, much less solved, without a sifting of the deposits of centuries.

Shut off from the Continent by a larger, richer, more populous and incomparably more powerful kingdom, Ireland has always differentiated from the normal type of European evolution. She was never conquered, she was never even invaded, by the Romans ; she escaped altogether the ordeal which was to prove the birth-throe of most Western civilizations. The Celts who had overrun the land and absorbed the aborigines long before the dawn of Irish history found in its isolation a refuge secure from the Roman legions. In Ireland the Celtic form of society, Celtic customs and characteristics, and the Celtic tongue developed with a freedom and in a seclusion unparalleled elsewhere. The Irish grew up the most self-contained and the least spoiled of Aryan peoples. The keystone of their organization was the tribal system, with its communal holding of land, its elective chiefs, its cement of a real or reputed kinship, its self-governing septs, and its overwhelming inclination towards a pastoral life. Politically the tribes had little effective unity. The rivers, marshes and woods would alone have sufficed to prevent the growth of anything resembhng the Roman idea of a State. Tribal wars and raids were frequent ; and though a sense of spiritual community based on common customs, a common language, common traditions and culture, and a single code of law undoubtedly prevailed, the groups had neither the framework nor the desire of a more visible and material union. Yet this loosely organised system, without centralised coherence or efficiency, but strong and rigid in its parts, with no accepted and dominating seat of authority, and constitutionally fatal to political, though by no means to social, progress, lasted on in Ireland for centuries after it had disappeared from the rest of Europe. Even as an institution it was not finally uprooted until the reign of Elizabeth, and as an economic, social and intellectual influence it persists to this day.

Tribalism penetrated the Irish mind with the conviction that the Irish soil belonged of right to the Irish people, and this conviction, after embroihng Anglo-Irish relations and baffling British domination for seven and a half centuries, has now all but extinguished landlordism and is creating a peasant proprietary by the free use of English credit. Here and there you may still encounter in Ireland forms of land-holding — . a ten-acre field, for instance, split up into scattered fragments among a dozen or more tenants — that are essentially tribal. Tribalism, again, fostered an intensive spirit of conservatism, and the Celtic Irish have an almost Malayan aversion to change. It subordinated home life to the Hfe of the sept, and the Irish are still a distinctively gregarious people. It encouraged pasture and discouraged labour, and Ireland to-day is predominantly a stock-raising country, and has yet to assimilate if not the gospel of work, at any rate the industrial virtues. It promoted internecine feuds, and the spirit of faction permeates native Irish life to this moment. It shielded, as nothing else could, the mind and temperament and customs of the people from external influences, and no one can visit Ireland to-day without being made conscious of a strain of almost unadulterated Asiaticism in some of the workings of the Irish mind, in certain traits of the people's character, in several of their instinctive ways of looking at things, and in many of their social usages. When Lord Dufferin described the BengaH as the Irishman of the East it was not on the Bengali alone that he threw a light.

The strength which tribalism derived from the very looseness of its organisation and from the impossibility of overthrowing it at a single stroke was shown by the manner of its conversion to Christianity. It adopted the new religion, but was not absorbed by it. The people became Christians, but the Church to a far greater degree became Celtic, and for some centuries remained somewhat isolated from the Western communion. While unable to graft her law on the tribes, she raised Ireland to a brief but high pre-eminence in learning and the arts. Irish missionaries spread over the Continent ; the Irish monasteries attracted scholars from all over

Europe ; and the subtle and intricate traceries and spirals of Celtic design developed under the tutelage of the Church into a new and brilliant school of metal-work and illumination. But influences that might in time have knit Ireland with the broad movement of European progress were checked and dissipated by foreign invasion. The Danes swept over the island, an ecclesiastical exodus followed, and the country fell back again into its self-contained aloofness. The Celts were never a predominantly commercial or seafaring people, and the Danes from the few seaports in the south and east to which they were finally penned quickly gathered into their own hands whatever foreign trade there was.

It is true the Church was reorganised on a Latin basis, and thus came once more into tentative touch with the temporal power of Rome. But it has always been the fate of Ireland to lie more or less in a backwater and to give to the world more than she receives from it. For three and a half centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, tribalism, somewhat modified by the influence of the new settlers, continued to inform the faculties and temperament of her people and to intensify their separateness. The Reformation came not to touch her with a new vitality, but to confuse and embitter her social and political development^ with a sectarian contentiousness. Drawn into the wars of reHgion, Ireland experienced a momentary contact with countries other than England. But it was of too one-sided a character to stem the current of Anglicisation. The Catholic Powers used Ireland as a pawn and Irish soil as an occasional battle-ground ; they enrolled Irish officers and troops in their Continental armies ; men of Irish birth rose to power and honour in their councils. But they gave back nothing in return, and except for a glimpse now and then of a possibly Spanish type of countenance and of architecture in the West, one would not guess to-day that Ireland had ever come within the range of any European influence but England's. With hardly a break or deflection the English type of civilisation has steadily imposed itself from the sixteenth century till to-day. The American Revolution had its reflex action on Irish politics ; the French Revolution evoked a short-lived outburst of republicanism in the north ; some flicker of the spirit of '48 showed itself for a moment in Irish agitation ; but otherwise Ireland has remained completely cut off from all except English influences. It is only within the last sixty years that the great emigrations to America, Canada, and Australia have linked her, sorrowfully enough, with a wider destiny and larger interests. From the Continent, except through the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, she is still severed not so much in sympathies and in intellect as in commerce, politics and fact, by the interposing might of Great Britain.

This geographical isolation acting on a people naturally conservative, with little aptitude for

commerce, inclined to the least progressive form

of agriculture — tillage in Ireland, as Professor

from its birth with a bar sinister — and bound

long after other nations had outgrown it to

a system that both reflected and fostered their

intolerance of innovation, must in any case have

nourished the introspective instincts of the Celts,

have driven them in upon themselves, and have

stamped upon Irish life an exclusive and peculiar

intensity. The neighbourhood of England made

it not less certain that that isolation could not

permanently endure. That it should have been

broken, however, in a form that complicated every

element of national evolution and added a new

contentiousness of class, race and privilege to

the interplay of tribal strife was a catastrophe

the effects of which are felt to this day. The

Anglo-Norman invasion, soon after the middle \

of the twelfth century, introduced into Ireland

a body of conq^ierors and settlers who, while

sharing the religion of the natives, differed from

them in speech, in temperament, in racial

characteristics and in the fundamental cast of

their civilisation. Feudalism from that moment

confronted tribalism, an English interest the

Irish people, the Teuton the Celt.

Thus early in the history of Anglo-Irish relations the three cleavages of land, race, and a favoured faction backed by a foreign Power and seeking to impose its rule over the native population, began to show themselves. Thus early, too, appeared the lack of definiteness which has marked from that day to this England's Irish policy. No attempt was made to effect a thorough conquest of Ireland. The Anglo- Norman settlement was never probably effective over more than a third of the Irish soil, the Normans estabhshing themselves in the rural parts north and south of Dublin and the Enghsh in the seacoast towns. England's interest in her colony was weak and fitful. She would neither rule it nor rule through it. Between the settlers and the tribes ensued three centuries of such border warfare as the English in America were afterwards to wage with the Red Indians. The conquest of the Celts by the settlers, the expulsion of the settlers by the Celts, were alike impossible. Inherent disunion made the attacks of the tribes spasmodic ; lack of sufficient force and the barrier of river, bog and forest kept the Pale restricted to defence. Without the cement of kingship, drawn upon for the purposes of the Scottish and French wars, weakened by absenteeism and a foreign education, and harassed incessantly by the tribes, it began to dwindle and disintegrate. Edward Bruce's invasion nearly drove it to the sea. The Norman landowners in the rural districts of the settlement became gradually Celticised, while the English traders in the towns maintained their nationahty intact. Feudahsm and tribaHsm formed a patchwork fringe to a country two-thirds of which remained purely Celtic. The beginning of the sixteenth century found Ireland turned into a political dependency of England, but a dependency in which English authority covered hardly a fourth of the island. It found, too, tribalism modified but still predominant, feudalism vital but losing rather than gaining ground, and both systems already survivals of an order of things that in England and on the Continent had been left behind. But for the decisive interposition of a great historical event the Anglo-Norman settlement of Ireland would probably have been sapped or stormed.

That event was, of course, the Reformation. The English and Anglo-Norman colonists in town and country, and the native Celts, all professed the Catholic religion, but they maintained to some extent separate churches and a separate clergy, and neither quite regarded the other as within the fold of Christianity. Both races, however, were at one in rejecting the new faith. " To the Catholic lords of the Pale the Elizabethan religion was alien ; to the native Celts it was not only alien, but utterly abhorred. It presented itself, not as the religion of Ireland, but as the religion of the conqueror." The warm and imaginative Celtic temperament, which has never yet found a resting-place between Rome and Geneva, revolted from the measured formalism of the Anglican creed. A people pre-eminently devoted to ceremonial rites and emblems, to sacerdotalism and to the monastic life, had no single instinct of sympathy for a movement which chose these features of their faith for its special attack. Politically, intellectually, and socially it appealed as little to their minds and to their conceptions of life and society as its spiritual essence and formulas appealed to their emotions.

The ground in Ireland had never been prepared for such a revolution, nor was there the smallest impulse to welcome it when it came. The suppression of the Irish monasteries, the defacement and destruction of the hallowed shrines, statues and relics, were followed by the masses with boundless resentment. Himself a Celtj Henry VIII. had initiated in Ireland a policy of secular conciliation. He approached the tribal chieftains in a shrewd and friendly spirit, hoping to form among them a native nobility, to invest them with a grant direct from the Crown of their tribe-lands, to receive in return an acknowledgment of his supremacy in Church and State, and so to establish throughout the country centres of authority from which English laws, customs and civilisation might gradually radiate. But he fell into the fundamental error of ignoring the differences between feudal and tribal tenure. He treated the chiefs as the absolute owners of the land, in their share of which the tribal system allowed them no more than a life interest. The personal pledges and undertakings of a chief could bind neither the heads of the septs nor the free tribesmen who

A Review of the Past n

elected his successor ; and the chiefs who made submission to the Crown and agreed to become the King's tenants were without the power, when once beyond the narrow range of his effective rulership, to force the compact on their tribal kinsmen. Yet if it were violated, the Crown, by English and feudal law, claimed and exercised the right to confiscate the whole of the tribe-lands.

Thus the policy of consolidating British power by negotiations instead of force split on the eternal rocks of religion and land. Yet it was essential for England's security that her authority — inseparable, under the conditions of the time, from her faith and civiHsation — should be imposed upon Ireland. As the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism broadened out into a vast European struggle, Ireland, which hitherto had been merely England's disgrace, now became England's danger. A Catholic Ireland, acknowledging Papal, but not English, sovereignty, wab a formidable weapon in the hands of the anti-Protestant coalition and an insufferable menace to the concentration of England's power. The conquest of Ireland, the conversion and Anglicisation of Ireland, had become political necessities. Only the effective supremacy of England over all parts of the country could forestall or at least diminish the peril that Ireland might furnish the spearhead of the shaft aimed by the Catholic Powers at England's heart. It fell to Ehzabeth, who '

would willingly have shrunk from it, to achieve the task. Her excommunication and deposition by papal bull forced it on her. Three great Irish rebellions, waged and suppressed with mutual and unsurpassable cruelties, filled her reign. When it closed Celtic Ireland had ceased to be ; the country lay crushed, desolate and starving at England's feet. Vast forfeitures and confiscations followed, and Enghsh colonies began to be systematically planted. Protestantism was enthroned as the state religion, and conformity to it was prescribed rather than enforced. The central aim of the Elizabethan policy was political domination, and there were at first no penal laws and little persecution. Protestant administrators and officials, imported from England, superseded the English of the Pale, most of whom, while not becoming rebels, had remained Catholic. But it was in the spheres of law and land and government rather than in that of religion that the fruits of the EHzabethan conquest most plainly appeared. " Ireland, conquered, now became shire land, at least in contemplation of law. The law of England, in the eyes of its professors the consummation of human wisdom, ousted the Brehon law. The feudal system of land tenure supplanted the tribal system. Freehold and leasehold primogeniture and entail, took the place of tribal ownership and tenantry. Justice was henceforth to be administered in English courts, and judges were to go circuit as in England . . . The whole machinery of government, as well as^^ law and the judiciary, was at the same time assimilated, formally at least, to the English model."

Throughout the seventeenth century the process of Anglicisation went bloodily on. Huge grants of land were made under James I. to English and Scotch settlers in Ulster and elsewhere. By seizure and escheat, by indefensible acts of legal chicanery and bad faith, the Catholic landowners, whether Celtic or Anglo-Norman, were steadily dispossessed. Protestantism, veering towards Puritanism, increased the stringency of its enactments. All the animosities of race and religion were precipitated into a fight for the land. Twice the natives rose and massacred and achieved a brief ascendancy, only to see it twice torn from them. Rebellion was answered by wars of extermination, defeat by wholesale confiscations. Neither Rome nor France availed to arrest the final triumph of English power. Devastation and evictions, slaughterings, banishment, forfeiture: and emigration, Cromwell and William III., numberless grants of land to individual adventurers and a systematic policy of colonisation by Scotch and English settlers, made an end of the Catholic proprietors. Under a common proscription and defeat the descendants , of the old Celtic chieftains and tribesmen and the descendants of the old Anglo-Norman nobility sunk their feuds, and though still speaking different languages, came to acknowledge in their misfortunes, their Catholicism and their detestation of Puritanism, a real bond of unity. Religion overrode race and nationality in the daily speech. Men spoke of Catholics when they meant the Irish, of Presbyterians when they referred to the Scotch settlers in the north, and of members of the State Church when they wished to designate the new English colonists. Five centuries of Anglo- Irish history had destroyed the native civilisation, had dispossessed the people of their holdings, had marshalled on either side of the agrarian struggle the bitterest antagonisms of racial and religious strife, and had vested in a small minority of alien speech, temperament and creed practically all political power, and all the privileges of a legal, social and territorial ascendancy.

For nearly a century this privileged oligarchy, created by conquest, established by confiscations, upheld by the power of England, maintained, though divided within itself, an unbroken supremacy. It was a domination of Protestants, but the Protestants were not united. Half of them were Presbyterians, excluded by law from public offices, forced to pay tithes to a Church that they abhorred only less than they abhorred Catholicism, and separated from their co-religionists by the economic rivalries of manufacturers with landowners. Virtually all authority was in the hands of the Episcopalians. They trod the Catholic population under heel, reducing it by the ingenious iniquity of the Penal Code to a status of outlawry. They ruled the Presbyterians with a rigid and masterful pertinacity ; and while dependent for their security and privileges, and indeed for their very existence, upon English arms, they had to defend their interests against a Parliament that would grant them neither union nor independence, and that jealously repressed every promise of Irish competition with the commerce and industries of the mother country. Against this converging onset of difficulties they stood their ground for the better part of the eighteenth century with a phenomenal tenacity. Under their rule Ireland had unwonted, if artificial, peace. The country was opened up by roads and canals ; civilisation, the arts and humanities spread ; Dublin became the second city of the Empire ; and the colonists developed a new type of character that still charms by its happy union of '^ Celtic " vivacity, sensitiveness and grace with ^' Saxon " hardihood and practicality.

But the abnormality of their position could only be maintained by repression and persecution on the one side and an intricate balancing of hostilities on the other. The Catholics were crushed into subjection. They were shut out from all public appointments, from Parliament, from the franchise, from the jury-box, from the police force, from the legal and learned professions. Education either at home or abroad or in a university was forbidden them. They could not keep arms or own a horse worth more than five pounds. A determined effort was made to stamp out their religion. Archbishops and bishops, monks and friars were banished. Marriage between a Protestant i6 A Review of the Past

and a Catholic was prohibited. CathoUcs were not allowed to buy land or hold mortgages on it or lease it except for a short time and with limited profits or to bequeath it by will. The equal testamentary division of such estates^as still remained to Catholics was made compulsory. These and similar provisions of the Penal Code attained some at least of their ends. They finally crushed the Catholic gentry of the upper and middle classes. Great numbers of them emigrated and rose to honour in the service of foreign Powers. Nearly all ceased to own land. But persecution failed as usual to make converts. The people clung with unconquerable firmness to their ancient faith, and the unique authority which the priesthood wields in the Ireland of to-day dates unquestionably from the enforcement of the Penal laws.

The masses throughout the eighteenth century remained meanwhile in a deplorable condition, cowed but unreconciled. A liberal commercial policy might have helped them, but English statesmanship was bound to the theory that a colony was an estate whose usefulness began and ended with serving the industrial and agricultural interests of the mother country. The colonial system that induced the American Revolution was applied to Ireland with a thoroughness from which distance saved the New England settlements. Whatever industry Ireland turned to, from wool to cotton, from glass to brewing, from gloves to linen, was deHberately ruined or crippled by English legislation. The masses were flung back upon the land and the land impaled them. A fearful competition grew up among a starving and congested peasantry for the privilege of leasing from their Protestant masters, at rents that could only be paid by a progressive lowering of every social standard, a few acres of the soil that once was their own by tribal right. From their landlords they were separated by speech and creed and the memories of ferocious wars. No tie of immemorial usage sanctified or humanised the new relations of proprietor and tenant. Evictions, which were unknown under the tribal and feudal systems, became the common incidents of a tenure based on a one-sided contract. Many of the landlords were absentees, and their place was taken by extortionate, rack-renting middlemen. The great change from tillage to pasture that marked the early years of the century brought in the grazing speculator with his writs of ejectment. The potato became the chief, almost the sole, dietary of the peasant serfs, and the frequent failures of the crop, under their primeval methods of cultivation, entailed famine and pestilence. The tithe proctor levied his toll on their wretched earnings in support of a Church which they detested as the apostate emblem of ascendancy. Of education they had none except what the priest brought them at peril of his life.

Deprived of their secular leaders by the decimation of the Catholic gentry they turned to the i8 A Review of the Past

ministers of their religion with more than the fervour of devotion they had formerly offered their tribal chiefs. The consolations of religion derived a new potency from their miseries on earth. Under a systematised stigma of subjection their instinct of indolence, inherited from tribal days, came to be penetrated with the lethargy of fatalism. Their character took on the virtues and failings that are the common product of oppression. The spirit of neighbourly helpfulness, always a Celtic trait, developed progressively with their afflictions. But they acquired, too, a less pleasing but not less natural command of all the artifices which are the invariable defence of a weak and quick-witted race in its struggle against government by force. Dissimulation and deceit, a profound capacity for concealing their real opinions, an extreme facihty in feigning agreement, became rooted in their minds as virtues. Self-reliance, a quality which the form of Celtic society, with its radical suppression of the individual, had never favoured, was completely crushed by an accumulation of adversities. The habit of secret conspiracy and organisation, of forming retaliatory leagues and brotherhoods of vengeance — a habit which has also its clear associations with the tribal past — grew as the possibility of legal remedies became more remote. Outlaws in fact, they became outlaws in spirit and in deed. Chained to ignorance, they nourished their warm and fanciful minds on the legends and superstitions of their fathers. Though sunk in an appalling poverty, which was aggravated by rapid reproduction, they preserved something of their happy racial carelessness and their old delight in games, the dance and minstrelsy ; and strangely passive as they remained throughout the greater part of the century, two fierce agrarian wars and the multiplication of secret societies were omens of what was to come.

But the Catholic peasantry were not alone in their grievances. The Presbyterians in the north chafed bitterly under the ascendency of the Established Church, the exactions of the tithecollector, and the religious tests that excluded them from office and from the army, disputed the validity of their marriages, and interfered with their worship and education. As manufacturers they were all but ruined by the commercial restrictions and the navigation laws. As farmers they not only had to meet the competition of the Celtic peasants, who habitually starved themselves to pay higher rents, but equally with their rivals they suffered from evictions, the extension of pasture, and the pressure of an unscrupulous landlordism. Discontent broke out in agrarian uprisings and outrages, and finally took the form of steady emigration to the American colonies, where the Presbyterian refugees from Ulster were to prove the backbone of the Revolution. And both Presbyterians and Episcopalians protested against the price which England forced them to pay for the protection and privileges they enjoyed. They had few or none of the rights of EngHshmen. Their ParHament, overrun by placemen from England, was absolutely under the control of the English Privy Council. It met only once in two years, and in George II.'s reign it lasted for thirty-three years without renewal. " There was no Habeas Corpus. There were large sinecures, instruments of corruption in the hands of the Government. The pension list, swollen beyond bounds, was a privy fund for king's mistresses and for jobs too dirty for the EngHsh list." All the high offices of state, judicial, administrative and ecclesiastical, were filled by Englishmen, Ireland, in short, was treated as the American colonies were treated, but with far greater strictness, propinquity making the task of supervision easier and more thorough ; and it was the American colonies that wrought her partial deliverance. A patriot party rose in the Irish Parliament, proclaiming Irish wrongs. The American Revolution denuded the country of troops. Forty thousand volunteers were enrolled ostensibly for the protection of Ireland against a French invasion. But the Presbyterians, who formed the majority of the rank and file of the force, joined with the Episcopalians in using it as an instrument for the redress of Irish grievances. Harassed and all but prostrated, England had no option but to yield. The tests were abolished ; the commercial restrictions were swept away ; the legislative and judicial independence of Ireland was completely and formally acknowledged.

There ensued for a little while one of the brightest periods in Irish history. The Parliament, though wholly Protestant, representing not more than a fourth of the population, and largely controlled by the British Government through its ownership of pensions, places and nomination boroughs, accomplished much for Ireland. It repealed the worst enactments of the Penal Code, which had, however, long before this fallen very largely into desuetude ; it passed a Habeas Corpus Act ; it fostered tillage, remodelled the Pension List, and gave a great impetus to industries and material development. But it did nothing for the peasantry, and while it extended the franchise to Catholic holders of forty shiUing freeholds, it failed to secure their admission to Parhament. Beneath the surface Ireland was as disunited, and the Irish Parliament as much a stronghold of Protestant ascendency, as ever. The Catholic upper and middle classes boldly pressed their claims for representation in Parliament. The Presbyterians, clamorous for the aboHtion of tithes and Parliamentary reform, were also deeply infected with the democratic spirit of the French Revolution. Communicated to the peasantry, the new ideas of liberty assumed the inevitable form of an agrarian revolt. The Presbyterians, who aimed at first at an Irish Republic to be established by French aid, were driven over by the uprising of the peasants to the side of Protestantism and repression ; and the country was plunged once more into a murderous conflict of class and creed. In 1783 the Irish Protestants had turned the embarrassments of England to their own profit. In 1798 England repaid them in their own coin. The experiment of an independent Irish Parliament, partly, no doubt, because it was never fully tried, had led to a civil war of atrocious virulence. Legislative union was now resolved upon. The Catholic priesthood and gentry, buoyed up with the hope that it would be followed by their political emancipation, state provision for the clergy and a settlement of the tithe question, favoured it. The Catholic masses remained passive. The Episcopalians accepted it as inevitable. The Presbyterians made no sign, and only the citizens of Dublin and the Orangemen in the north can be said to have strongly opposed it. The Irish House of Commons fought, indeed, for its life and its privileges with the tenacity both of patriots and of hucksters, but its resistance was overborne by a lavish creation of peerages and liberal compensation to the patrons of pocket-boroughs. Pitt " bought the fee-simple of Irish corruption," and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland became again a fact.