Ireland: Small Nation, Big History

Lying on the northwestern edge of Europe, Ireland's geography places it both within the European sphere and on the threshold of the wider Atlantic world. It seems to me that Irish history, as well as its present, has always been heavily defined by a certain duality and the contradictions within the fundamental Irish predicament. It might possibly anger some people watching this video that I mention the English within the first few sentences. But Ireland is one of those nations that really can't be properly examined without taking into account its fundamental external other, the enemy that the Irish identity was inevitably defined against, and that is the English, or more broadly, the British. I will use the terms British and English sort of interchangeably throughout this video, since I am too lazy to always consider the context of each individual situation to see which term is more appropriate. When I think about it in terms of western countries with independent statehood, excluding cases such as Catalonia or Scotland, Ireland is probably the nation most defined by its external other throughout its history. And even today, Ireland remains a peculiar case of a non-Anglo-anthropological base heavily moulded by omnipresent Anglo influences, increasingly those coming from the American West rather than from Britain. The Irish predicament can be neatly illustrated in the case of Irish geography. Ireland is part of the British Isles, reflecting the inherent inseparability of Ireland from whatever is taking place in Britain. Nevertheless, it is also geographically a separate island, and even though various forms and extents of English rule over the island, or its substantial parts, spanned more or less 800 years, the Irish strong sense of separateness never gave in. One way of perceiving the history of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards is as a continual cohabitation, intermingling and also conflict between the earlier Gaelic inhabitants and the Germanic Anglo-Saxon newcomers. The Gaelic peoples retreated to and survived on the margins of the British Isles, in Wales, Scotland and of course most notably in Ireland, even though all of the Gaelic peoples eventually switched to the English language. Demographically, Ireland is truly a unique country. It is essentially the only country in the world whose population today remains significantly lower than it was around the mid-19th century, when it surpassed 8 million before the Great Irish Famine. For another whole century after the famine, which caused the death of approximately 1 million Irish people and the emigration of many more, the population of Ireland declined and stagnated due to persistent emigration to wealthier nations. Even today, after more than a century of natural population growth and the shift from emigration to immigration, the whole island still has just over 7 million inhabitants. While that might sound rather catastrophic, the reality is that Ireland today is undeniably one of the demographically healthiest nations in the Western world. The number of ethnically Irish people still grows and the median age is around 38 years, the lowest in the West alongside the settler societies of Australia and New Zealand. The Irish fertility rate, even though it has also declined in the past couple of years in line with the global post-COVID trend, remained close to replacement level for most of the past few decades. In most aging-related metrics, such as the share of the elderly within the population or the old age dependency ratio, Ireland is the healthiest country in the European Union. In many aspects, Ireland historically seemed culturally and anthropologically closer to the nations of continental Europe than to the English-speaking world. It staunchly clung to its Catholic faith as a marker of distinction from the Protestant Englishmen, colonizing their homeland, and the communal and folkish characteristics of Irish Catholicism, with its strong popularity of pilgrimages and local saint cults, are typical of Catholic Southern European cultures, such as that of Spain. The role of kinship structures in ordinary life and marriage patterns were closer to Southern or Eastern Europe, according to many scholars, such as John Hynel, whose famous Hynel line anthropologically excluded Ireland from Western Europe. Yet, when it comes to recent demographic patterns, Ireland is much closer to Protestant Northwestern Europe and the Anglosphere countries. In this regard, Ireland represents a notable exception within Catholic Europe. In the second half of the 20th century, until roughly the mid-1980s, the late to secularized Catholic countries and regions within Europe, namely Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Southern Italy, or Poland, had significantly higher fertility than the majority Protestant countries of Northern Europe, such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, or Britain. The same gap existed between Catholics and Protestants in the United States. The height of this divergence was the 1970s, when the fertility difference was up to one child per woman in favor of the Catholic countries. However, once the process of final secularization fully hit the Catholic regions, the tables turned. The fertility of the late to secularized Catholic regions went ultra low, while the fertility of majority Protestant countries remained relatively close to replacement level. Today, the demographic plight of the late to secularized Catholic countries is almost uniformly among the worst in the Western world, except for Ireland. It seems that Irish Catholicism was able to survive the wave of secularization without fundamentally destroying all of the social practices connected to it. Secularization has certainly happened in Ireland. Church attendance among Irish Catholics has fallen from 90% in 1970 to around 30% in recent decades, while the number of those choosing to become priests or enter monasteries has rapidly decreased over the same period, and while the fertility rate has decreased precipitously since that time, from truly outstanding figures for Western Europe of between three and four children per woman from the 1950s up to the 1980s, it did not plunge into the lows observable in religiously comparable countries. As with the demographic peculiarities of many countries, there is no definitive answer as to why is that the case, just a confluence of economic, cultural and historical factors. Some people point out a pattern among ethnic groups that have undergone some form of massively traumatizing event with millions of casualties, threatening the survival of the ethnic group. They tend to have higher fertility, such as the Jews of Israel after the Holocaust, Kazakhs after the famine of the 1930s, and the Irish after the Great Irish Famine. Ireland is one of the countries with relatively high childlessness. Around 20% of women who have already completed their fertility cycle remain permanently childless, but it also has a higher proportion of higher order births among those women who do have children. In other words, if an Irish couple decides to have children, they are more likely to have an above average number of them, which partially compensates for the women who decide to remain childless. In 2020, a quarter of births in Ireland were third or higher order births, which is quite a lot. Contrary to what people often believe, childlessness was very common in Western Europe in the past, and childbearing was by no means universal. In the first half of the 20th century, the level of female childlessness in most Western countries, including Ireland, was higher than it is today. In Ireland, it was 25% a century ago, versus less than 20% now. So, you can have relatively high childlessness and still but those women who do marry and have children must simply have more. It actually seems that countries with a history of higher childlessness in the past are better able to maintain higher fertility in the modern period than those with a history of almost universal childbearing. A possible explanation might be that a higher level of childlessness in the past was a marker of a higher position of women within society. Women were granted enough autonomy to be able to marry later in life, or possibly not at all. As Emmanuel Todd argues, societies with a relatively higher position of women in previous centuries are usually able to maintain higher fertility in the modern period, since female emancipation in the second half of the 20th century does not cause the same level of disruption as it does in countries with a more patriarchal tradition. If you enjoyed this video, you can subscribe to my sub-stake, where I publish essays on a weekly basis for merely $5 a month, or, even more favorably, for $30 a year. The link is in the description. Thank you. Emmanuel Todd initially classified Ireland's family type as that of the authoritarian or stem family, which is more prevalent on the continent, while the European north-western fringe, to which Ireland geographically belongs, was characterized more by nuclear family systems, such as that of the English. The authoritarian family type was characterized by strong parental authority over children, and the unequal inheritance of land between siblings due to the practice of primogeniture. The oldest son inherited everything, and the younger sons got nothing. This supposedly instilled in these peoples an intuitive acceptance of the inequality of human beings, based on the archetypal inequality among siblings. Todd notes that peoples with the authoritarian family type are characterized by a strong sense of separateness, and a certain obsession with their own historical distinctness, caused by the projection of the seemingly never-ending line of male descent stretching from past to future onto the whole national group. They are usually very difficult to assimilate by foreign powers, but they are also much less skilled at, or willing to, assimilate other groups, when then themselves are the conquerors. That is why this family type is usually prevalent among relatively smaller and often irredentist nations, such as the Catalans, Basques, Wallons, Flemish, Irish, Scottish, Czechs, Swedes, Austrians, or Jews. Among larger nations, it can be found among Koreans, but most notably among the Japanese and Germans, nations that, while powerful and imperial, were never very successful at assimilating subjugated peoples. A sense of ethnic superiority does not incentivize assimilation, but rather the creation of a caste-like system. One of the characteristics of nations with this family system is the remarkable electoral-political stability. Even though these countries have wholly or partially proportional electoral systems, West Germany, Japan, or Sweden often saw the staggering domination of one or two political parties, often scoring around 50% of the popular vote. Interestingly, that is precisely what we can see in the electoral results of the Fianna Fáil party, between the 1920s and 2007. Now, the classification of Irish peasants within this family system is often disputed. Many claim that the Irish family structure was much more communitarian, with equal inheritance among siblings, or even older forms of complicated redistribution of inheritance among the broader kinship group. Others argue that the authoritarian family type emerged in Ireland only after 1850, partially as a reaction to the practice of subdividing farmland into smaller and smaller plots, being one of the factors that contributed to the great Irish famine. That would invalidate Todt's claims only partially. The basic tenet of his theory is that it is primarily the family system that was widespread among the population at the time of the transition to modernity, and the entrance of the masses into political life that matters. The synchronous processes of mass literacy and urbanization turned masses of peasants, who had lived materially brutal but also relatively stable and predictable lives, dictated primarily by tradition, religion, and the agricultural cycle, into modern citizens navigating a much more dynamic but also confusing and psychologically destabilizing world of urban modernity. It is precisely in these periods of transition to modernity, after which the nuclear family system becomes standard almost everywhere, that people turn to politics to replicate the ideals experienced in their youth within the family circle. This transition to modernity happened in Ireland primarily after 1850. The urbanization rate in Ireland in 1850 was still around 15 percent, and the majority of the population, especially among Catholics, achieved full literacy only in the second half of the 19th century. Emmanuel Todt himself, in his later works following his initial famous book Explanation of Ideology, continued to dig deeper into various anthropological and historical sources, further detailing and complicating the outline of family systems. In his newer books, the question of the Irish family system was further complicated. Whoever is correct in this anthropological dispute, the fact remains that the Irish clearly clung to their distinct national identity, and this identity was reinforced in its robustness by centuries of subjugation and colonization. When reading about the history of Ireland, I couldn't help but see many parallels with the history of some nations in Eastern Europe. Ireland was one of those European cultures, and I'm using the word culture not in the more narrow artistic sense, in which the Irish were actually very successful, but in the broader civilizational manner, that was not particularly competitive in comparison with the leading European cultures, represented in the case of Irish history by the English, at least in the realm of economic, political and military development. Irish history was always shaped by foreign intrusions, the Vikings, the Normans and the English. The primary Irish city of Dublin, as well as many other important cities in Ireland, first gained prominence as a Viking outpost, and then as a Norman administrative center. So the genesis story of many Irish cities is somewhat similar to the genesis of cities like which were also probably established as Viking outposts. For a long time, cities in Ireland were outposts of English-speaking Protestant civilization within the rural, agrarian, Gaelic-Irish countryside, in many ways resembling the pattern common in Eastern Europe, where cities were often inhabited by different ethnic groups than the countryside surrounding them. The most common pattern included cities inhabited by German and often German-speaking Jews, while the countryside was mainly Slavic. The urban minorities were usually in a position of superiority toward the majority ethnic groups in terms of wealth, education and often also legally. While this understandably created a lot of resentment among the native ethnicities, and this resentment was often fully justified due to the reprehensible deeds committed by outside powers towards the subjugated natives, it is also clearly a fact that the natives, in the long run, hugely profited from the transfer of culture or capital from the more developed cultures, such as the English and the Germans, to the less developed ones, such as the Irish or the Slavs. In 1860, the literacy rate among Irish Catholics was about 35%, similar to other peripheral Catholic populations, such as those of while rate among Protestants exceeded 60%. In 1911, Dublin had one of the most underfed, worst housed and badly paid populations in Europe. 21,000 families lived in single-room tenements. The infant mortality rate was 27.6 per 1,000 and was higher than in any other city in Europe, with Moscow second to Dublin. So, while geographically the Irish are without a doubt Western European ethnic group, sociologically they for a long time resembled the peripheral nations of Europe that could be found in the south and the east of the continent. When one reads the history of Ireland in the 19th century, the chain of unsuccessful rebellions must remind them of a similar endeavours by the Polish against the Russian rule. Two staunchly Catholic nations, heavily infused with the Romantic nationalism of the time, launching numerous uprisings that were mostly doomed to fail, but had a massive mythological nation-building effect, while also eating a whole lot of potatoes. Today, however, Ireland is firmly a part of the developed wealthy world and, while its standard of living is not as high as its GDP figures would suggest, since they are distorted by multinational corporations' tax practices, it has probably surpassed the living standards in the UK, which is a big accomplishment for the Irish. It can nevertheless be argued that this would not have been possible without the aforementioned cultural transfers that the Irish, willingly or unwillingly, received from the British. Among such culturally advantageous characteristics are, first and foremost, the English language, the system of common law, parts of the political, educational and administrative systems, and the sheer number of human-relational connections between the Irish and the Anglo-Saxon world. The contemporary Irish economy is structurally similar to Anglophone economies, such as that of the UK and the United States, with a very high emphasis on service and finance, a low share of employment in industry, and a very high proportion of the population with university education. The dramatic economic success of Ireland in the past half-century is clearly also a product of the Irish successfully adapting to patterns observable among the British. But it would be highly reductive to only mention the British, since the relationship of the Irish with their western neighbor across the Atlantic has been as important as that with the British in the modern era. Even before the main flow of Irish-Catholic immigration to America started, there was the emigration of the group that came to be known as Scotch-Irish, people of Scottish Presbyterian ancestry who colonized the northern Irish region of Ulster. I will talk about this more further down the line. In the 17th century, and then hundreds of thousands of them moved to America in the 18th century, where they formed one of the most influential American subgroups. The Catholic emigration from Ireland to America in the 19th and the 20th centuries was massive. Roughly 4.5 million Irish people emigrated to the United States between 1820 and 1930. Today, roughly 10 times as many people claiming Irish ancestry live in the United States than in Ireland. The financial remittances sent to Ireland by the Diaspora were economically crucial in the precarious times of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Diaspora also financed various Irish independence movements. The Fenian Brotherhood, the violent Irish Republican organization fighting for Irish independence, was founded, headquartered, and largely financed from New York. The Irish Diaspora has always exercised influence over American foreign policy through its voting power, and American presidents like Kennedy, Clinton, and Biden have all emphasized their Irish ancestry. Clinton was a crucial player during the resolution of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the 1990s, and large US-based corporations investing in Ireland and making it their EU headquarters is one of the flagships of the contemporary Irish economic model. Ireland is a nation that underwent one of the most spectacular PR transformations in the world. Up to the 20th century, the Irish were not a group with a particularly good reputation, especially among the Anglo-Saxons. Both the British and Protestant majority in America often saw them as disordered, lazy drunkards, agents of the Pope, and they were also often portrayed as having ape-like features in line with the then prevalent racialist sentiments, which portrayed Anglo-Saxons, or broadly speaking the Germanic-Protestant Northern Europeans, as the apex of the racial hierarchy. It is not true that the Irish, together with Slavs, Jews, or Italians in America, were not considered racially white, an argument often used to support the claim that race is just a social construct that can very rapidly change, influenced by prevailing social mores. The Irish, Poles, or Italians were never legally segregated in the way that Black or Asian populations were, but it is true that they were clearly looked down on with ethnic contempt. This was true both in America and in Britain, where many impoverished Irish immigrants also migrated. Today, such sentiments would seem completely unjustified and borderline ridiculous, which, to me, is a good example of why one should always maintain a healthy reserve and an agnostic approach towards claims of inherent superiority or inferiority of certain groups. Many groups were seen as inherently inferior in the past, and it often seemed a completely logical conclusion based on the observed reality to the people of the time, until it just wasn't anymore. And while it might seem to us today that there is significant scientific evidence for certain groups inherently lacking or, on the contrary, being endowed with certain characteristics, it is also important to keep in mind that our scientific understanding of the world is not definitive. A century from now, the world and our understanding of it might look very different than it does today, as it undoubtedly did a century ago. That, of course, does not mean that one should a priori reject or ideologically suppress such knowledge, but rather just keep in mind that it could be wrong or incomplete, as it has been many times in the past, before adopting very radical or rigid worldviews based on it. The history of Ireland is one where migration, both immigration and emigration, played an essential role. I already outlined the massive importance of Irish emigration into the Anglo-American world, but long before that, the ethnodemographic landscape of Ireland itself was transformed by an immigration stream that continues to shape it to this day, and represents the most lasting legacy of British colonization, the population colonization of Northern Ireland by the Protestant population from Britain. Ulster was the most Gaelic and least Anglicized province in Ireland, before 1600. Between 1593 and 1603, there was the Nine Years' War, a Spanish-supported uprising of Gaelic-Irish lords. The strategic importance of Ireland for Britain was always, first and foremost, dictated by the fear of Britain's Catholic rivals using Ireland as a stepping stone for encroachment on Britain. After the uprising was suppressed, the British Crown seized a major area of Northern Ireland and decided to systematically colonize it with British settlers. This was ultimately a different endeavor from the pattern of urban populations of initially foreign origin that I was describing before. Here was an attempt, and a successful one at that, to implant whole new self-sufficient rural communities, not just Protestant or Anglo-Irish landlords for whom Irish peasants toiled, as in the rest of Ireland, but Protestant Anglo-Scottish rural settlers. Ulster became the region of Ireland with the highest Protestant population and, for a long time, also the most economically dynamic one, reflecting the economic takeoff of the Protestant world that happened earlier than in the rest of the continent. And it prepared ground for one of the most well-known, long-lasting and peculiar ethno-religious conflicts in modern Europe, known as the Troubles, that between the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The region of Ireland that did not become part of the Irish Free State after 1922, but remained within the United Kingdom. The basic outline of the conflict is relatively simple. Catholic nationalists were seeking Irish unification, while Protestant unionists wanted to remain in the United Kingdom. Otherwise, they would be a small minority within Catholic Ireland. While the most commonly used names for these two sides of the conflict, Catholics and Protestants, suggest a religious conflict, it is first and foremost an ethno-nationalist one, where the two opposing groups adopted religious affiliation as markers of ethno-nationalist identity. This is similar to the Balkan conflicts between Serbs, Bosniak and Croats, where religious affiliation serves as the primary marker of ethnic distinction, rather than holding deep metaphysical significance. Purely religious considerations play very little role in the modern form of Northern Ireland conflict. For a long time, the more pronounced division in Ireland may not have been between Catholics and Protestants, but within the Protestant group, between the predominantly Scottish Presbyterians and the predominantly English Anglicans. Catholics were seen as so politically marginalized that they weren't even considered a threat. The rise of Irish nationalism throughout the 19th century, however, unified the perceived interests of Presbyterians and Anglicans and created a common Protestant identity. It is interesting that, while the initial demographic mix of the colonizers was a roughly 60-40 split between Scots and Englishmen, the English identity has been very rarely mentioned among modern Ulster Unionists, while the Scottish one has been much more pronounced. It might serve as yet another example of the influence of the family system. The Scots belonged, according to Todd, also to an authoritarian family system, and the obsession with their ethnic distinctness would fit into this pattern. The conflict in Northern Ireland has been one where demographics were always of utmost importance. The territorial extent of Northern Ireland was gerrymandered in such a way as to ensure a Protestant majority. In accordance with pan-European trends of the time, the Catholic fertility rate in Northern Ireland was significantly higher than Protestant fertility throughout most of the 20th century. But Catholic fertility in Ireland was high even by Catholic European standards, and higher than in the Republic of Ireland, between 4 and 5 children per woman in the early 1960s, truly remarkable for a Western European region at that time. In 1920, the fertility gap between Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants stood at 5.4 children per woman for Catholics versus 3.1 for Protestants. By 1980, these numbers had declined to 3 and 2.5 respectively. The youthfulness of these two populations certainly added fuel to the violent conflicts of the Troubles, and the uniquely high fertility of Northern Irish Catholics points to it being a case of so-called competitive breeding, where the minority population tries to increase its share through demographic means. Something similar could be observed among Palestinians and Israelis. Protestant Unionists were very much afraid of the high Catholic fertility and the possible loss of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, a fear that has, in fact, come to fruition since then. But instead of continued violence and the reintegration of Northern Ireland into the Republic, something the Republic of Ireland would probably decline as well, the issue has largely fizzled out since the 1990s. The conflict in Northern Ireland seems to be one where demographics were not destiny after all. The fastest growing group in recent decades has been those identifying as irreligious, and the younger generation of both communities just don't care nearly as much as their forebears did. It's an important reminder that people's identities and the political positions connected to them can significantly change over time, and that demographics, while very important, are not determinative. And then there is the question of modern immigration to Ireland. After being a country of massive emigration flows for centuries, Ireland has turned into a country of immigrants, roughly since the economic boom of the 1990s. Today, the percentage of the population identifying as white Irish is around 75%. Ireland was one of the few countries in the European Union that did not enact any limits on immigration from new EU member states after their accession in 2004, which resulted in a very large wave of Eastern European immigration to Ireland after 2004, similar to the UK. Poles remained the second most numerous foreign group in Ireland, just after people from the UK. After the global financial crisis of 2008, which hit Ireland particularly hard, there were a couple of years of negative net migration, but since the mid-2010s, and especially after the COVID pandemic, immigration has accelerated, and reached quite high proportions. The most common non-European groups in Ireland are Indians, Brazilians, Nigerians, and Filipinos. Nevertheless, immigrants of European heritage still make up the largest part of the immigrant population, and there has also been a significant influx of Ukrainian refugees in the past couple of years. Approximately from 2022 onwards, there have been numerous anti-immigration riots and protests in Dublin, as well as many other Irish cities. They usually revolve around a pattern similar to the UK immigration protests of recent years. Specifically, the housing of immigrants in hotels and facilities in neighborhoods and communities that were not particularly happy about it. And, as in the UK, the spark that ignites some form of riot is usually a crime committed by a migrant accommodated in one of those facilities, as was the case with the recent Ireland once again seems to be behaving in patterns rather similar to the British. Now, the Irish situation is a very peculiar one in regards to a reaction of the Irish to mass immigration. On one hand, one might expect that Irish anti-immigration backlash would be very harsh. There is a tradition of a small nation under siege, with a significant, however historically justified, victimhood mentality. Something once again observable among many nations in Eastern Europe. There is a tradition of ethnonationalism and the authoritarian family system to support it. There is also the tradition of, let's say, popular uprisings and asymmetrical violence against state power, that could often simply be called terrorism. But, even with all these factors, Ireland's position within the contemporary West is peculiar, since, at least so far, there hasn't been any relevant populist anti-immigration party or political figure, such as Donald Trump, reform in the UK, AFD in Germany, national rally in France, and so on. The electoral results of nativist political parties in Ireland are miniscule, and the traditional establishment parties firmly hold power, even though frustration clearly bubbles under the surface. In this regard, Irish politics might resemble that of Canada, even though the historical trajectory of Canadian and Irish nationalism couldn't have been more different. I would say that one of the reasons for this is that Irish nationalism is, well, sort of leftist. Let me elaborate. Modern Irish romantic nationalism, as it developed in the 19th century, is deeply intertwined with an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist vision of the world, something that has always been very much connected to the western left. 19th century leaders drew parallels between Ireland's subjugation and British imperial wars abroad. For example, struggles in India, Egypt, the Sudan, and the Boer War. Revolutionary nationalists like the Fenians, and later figures such as James Connolly, fused Irish independence with socialist influences. Scholars note that Irish nationalists followed and sympathized with other anti-colonial revolutions in India, Africa, or Latin America, embedding internationalism in the republican tradition. I would say that the national identity of Ireland was, to a large extent, formed in opposition to 19th century Britain, imperial and capitalist. During the Second World War, Ireland was strictly neutral, but some of the militant Irish nationalists maintained contacts with the Third Reich, not because of sympathies for Nazism, but due to the anti-British stance of the Nazis. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Sinn Féin, the party that used to be seen as the political arm of the IRA, has been a socialist and sometimes even borderline Marxist party throughout the 20th century, and has maintained fraternal relations with the African National Congress, the main anti-apartheid political force in South Africa. Ireland is also among the most pro-Palestinian states in Europe. It is a peculiar ideological mix that makes the political emergence of anti-immigration nativism harder, since one would need to overcome the contradiction of Irish national identity being, apart from its desire for autonomy and sovereignty, also based on the deep solidarity with precisely many of the third world populations that now comprise a large portion of immigration inflows. In the end, Ireland stands as a paradoxical testament to how a national identity shaped in opposition, forged through loss, migration, defiance and borrowed forms, can still emerge as confident, coherent and distinctly its own.