Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Ireland usually backs the wrong side in English disputes

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Get ready for 'economic hell' under new UK prime minister Rishi Sunak Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire.
Get ready for 'economic hell' under new UK prime minister Rishi Sunak Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire. Get ready for 'economic hell' under new UK prime minister Rishi Sunak Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire.

It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in Ireland) that the English have never quite understood us.

Our culture, our attitude and our politics (or the lack of them) have often been a cue for English humour and ridicule.

So how well do we understand the English? The answer is that nationalists have no better appreciation of them than they have of us. While you might think this is unimportant, recent comments from Sinn Féin and the SDLP show that their ignorance of England and its politics has been concealing an even greater misunderstanding of economics.

This has led both parties (probably unknown to themselves) to support British government cutbacks, in what is the latest episode in Ireland’s remarkable tradition of backing the wrong side in internal English disputes. The losers in all cases have been the Irish people.

It is a long story which began when Tyrone’s Hugh O’Neill surrendered to Elizabeth I in 1603, unaware that she had died a week earlier. It marked the end of much of Ireland’s Gaelic tradition and heralded the Ulster Plantation. Today a different O’Neill from Tyrone greets English royalty, which might suggest that not much has changed in Tyrone in 400 years.

Elizabeth was succeeded by James, whose son Charles I had his head chopped off by Cromwell. During the English civil war, the remaining Irish chieftains supported the king (who claimed he was appointed by God) rather than the republican Cromwell.

That tradition continues to this day when Sinn Féin refuses to sit in Britain’s democratically elected parliament, but hobnobs instead with unelected monarchs. Maybe not much has changed in Ireland in 400 years.

Despite their supposed rebellious tradition, nationalists voted for British rule in the north in 1998. Since then they have complained about the policies of successive Tory leaders, even though they voted to be ruled by them. (Who did they expect would govern them? The Archbishop of Canterbury?)

Complaints about Liz Truss were particularly loud. Ridiculing her may have been a belated response to 19th century anti-Irish cartoons in Punch magazine. However, while she was a politician of limited ability, her budget rocked the British establishment and should have won at least some support in Ireland.

Truss was wrong in believing that reducing corporation tax would benefit everyone. (That was the economic policy of SF and the SDLP for years before the assembly’s collapse in 2017.) However, she was right in tackling the cost of living crisis by borrowing to fund a two-year energy price guarantee, which promised home heat for millions of ordinary people.

She challenged the idea that, in a time of economic crisis, Britain had to “balance the books” (meaning cutting public services, as Rishi Sunak will now do). It was that policy rather than her tax cuts which led to a clash with the unelected technocrats in the Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility.

Truss lost out to monied interests while Irish nationalists cheered. Like the bankers, Sinn Féin criticised her “economic chaos”. (Is England’s difficulty no longer Ireland’s opportunity?)

But, you say, the markets did not like it. So who or what are ‘the markets”? At its simplest, it is a system which allows the wealthy to make money without working, by buying and selling shares. Sinn Féin and the SDLP sided with the markets.

Groups of investors managed by professionals are called hedge funds. Sunak is a former hedge fund manager. So expect his policies to reflect what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called private affluence and public squalor.

Sinn Féin and SDLP support for Truss’s policies might have had little impact, but they could at least have analysed them rather than condemn them out of ignorance. The Irish suffered in 1649 because of their leaders’ ignorance of Cromwell’s objectives.

When he arrived here, Cromwell offered us a choice: to hell or Connacht. For Sunak, Connacht is no longer an option. So get ready for economic hell.