Bernard Shaw on Politics by George Bernard Shaw

Author:George Bernard Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2016-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

3. From How to Settle the Irish Question. London: Constable, 1917. [The Matter with Ireland, pp. 153–73.]

[As part of the United Kingdom, Ireland was directly involved in the First World War against Germany. The Irish independence movement, however, which had been gathering momentum throughout the nineteenth century, was not put on hold. In April 1916 Irish nationalists rebelled, seized the General Post Office building in Dublin, and proclaimed an independent Irish Republic. The rebellion was quickly crushed by British forces, and its leaders were executed. Shaw supported more devolution of political authority to Ireland, but opposed full independence (“separation is out of the question”).]

…My qualification for dealing with the subject is that though I am an Irishman of the Protestant landlord variety, I have not lived in Ireland since I left in 1876, and that though I have since then been occupied almost continually with the problems of modern political science, I have studied them from the point of view of white civilization as a whole, having no constituency to conciliate and no social ambition to further; for it has been my fortune to secure by my artistic activities a public position infinitely preferable to any that political life or office has to offer. I can, without compromising that position, say things that no party politician dares say, and that even those politicians whose public spirit is above party can hardly say without too much offence to the factions they are striving to reconcile….

[Shaw then reviews the apparently irreconcilable position of the political factions struggling over the future of Ireland before proposing his solution, a “federation of the British Isles.”]

Even more important than the setting up of an Irish Parliament is the abolition of the now hopelessly obsolete institution at Westminster that calls itself an imperial Parliament, and is neither imperial nor national nor English nor Scottish nor Irish, neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. It was hopelessly beaten by its work in the old days of laisser-faire, when it was believed that the secret of government is not to govern. Today, when it has been discovered that the secret of government is to let nothing alone, it has been reduced to absurdity; and the country is being governed partly by the major-generals, and partly by bodies unknown to the Constitution.

There is only one Dublin Castle in Ireland [i.e., the seat of the British government]: there are a dozen in England. When is that wretched country going to insist on enjoying Irish liberty? Sir Horace Plunkett [1854–1932, Chair of the Irish Convention, 1917–18] has not to demand Home Rule for Ireland: he has to offer it to England, to Scotland, and even to Wales, if Wales cares for it. At present the four nations are supposed to be governed by an Anglo-Scottish-Irish-Welsh Parliament, in which the Irish, though representing only one-tenth of the population of the whole and less than a third of the area, has more than a sixth of the membership [105 of 670 seats, or 15.

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