Congressman Neal has done us a favour: Planters & Gaels (Pt I)
As a visiting dignitary, it was only fitting that Congressman Richard Neal was given the honour of throwing the opening pitch in a Northern Irish culture war this week.
The Democratic representative for Massachusetts referred to “Planter and Gael” in a speech to the Dáil, heralding a familiar ding-dong. Unionists, rightly, pointed out that the description was a bit insulting given their ancestors have been in Ireland longer than Massachusetts has been Massachusetts. Nationalists, accurately, replied that the Planter and Gael binary has been appealed to by the likes of Peter Robinson and the poet John Hewitt.
But even outside of the culture war ballpark, Neal’s intervention rankled. It betrays a trite Cowboy-and-Indian view of our little predicament. Irish politics and history, viewed hazily across the Atlantic from a Boston Irish bar, seems to boil down to ancestral enmity. And enmity is always more fun if you can join in.
The row, for once though, may turn out to be edifying. It has nudged us into talking about the ways in which our story isn’t just a generational game of Cowboys and Indians or an overgrown Hatfield-McCoy feud .
In an ideal world it would provide the opportunity Irish culture needed to begin dismantling the very notions of Planter and Gael.
This is a two-parter. This part takes a look at why the Planter/Gael dichotomy is unhelpful nonsense. The next part is on how it moulds and distorts the way we imagine ourselves and what we can do about it.
First, some numbers.
The Ulster Plantation was more than 400 years ago. Let’s say 25 years a generation. So, to have an idea of who our ancestors were when James I was telling Northern English and Scottish prods to pack their toothbrushes for Ireland, we would need to trace our direct lineage to perhaps 64,000 great-great(x9)-grandparents. So exactly how certain are we of our Planter or Gael credentials?
The water quickly gets murky. My maternal grandmother was born into a Protestant family in Leitrim with a surname that is distinctly Irish in its origins and ordinarily Catholic. Planter or Gael? Or WB Yeats, who was (of course) quoted by Congressman Neal in the same speech as his Planter comment. An archetypal nationalist, yes, but ethnically? More of a planter. Guinness? Synonymous with Ireland the world over, but of course from a Protestant family. Then again, the Guinness name is thought to derive either from a Protestant fragment of the Magennis clan or from a townland called Guiness near Ballynahinch, held by the McCartan clan. So according to the patriarchal line, the Guinnesses are Gaels, albeit unionist, Protestant ones.
As Mick Fealty mischievously pointed out, in a game of Planter and Gael we would ordinarily assign surnames like Adams and Hume to the planters. A dip into the republican pantheon is instructive. Patrick Pearse’s father was English. Sean Mac Stiofain, founder of the Provisional IRA, was born in London under the name John Stephenson. His colleague Cathal Goulding had a surname with English origins. Arthur Griffith’s surname is, presumably, Welsh in origin. (And I’m deliberately staying clear of 1798 and All That — I’ll touch on it in part II — but suffice to say that the United Irishmen rather complicate the Planter-Gael story).
Some of this blurring of ancestral lines was quite far downstream, as in Pearse’s case. Some was a result of a romanticised reinvention, as in Mac Stiofain’s case. But in other cases it seems likely that the smudging of lineages, like in the Guinness case, was probably in the 17th century.
The historian ATQ Stewart, in The Narrow Ground, offers some hints as to how this came about. The people in charge of the plantation of Ulster were never able to deliver the job they had been given, that of clearing the natives off the land. Many remained as tenants, while the top of the previous social hierarchy was shunted elsewhere.
“It is therefore necessary to keep in mind a distinction between the dispossessed landowners as such, with their deep sense of grievance, and the entire pre-plantation population”, Stewart wrote.
“The sharp line of division was one of religion, not of race. The evidence of family names would suggest that since 1609 many Gaels have become Protestants and ‘British’ by the same process of assimilation which more frequently has operated in the reverse direction.”
The Planter/Gael dichotomy has prevailed because it suited the political purposes of both unionism and nationalism, particularly during the 19th century when ethnic nationalism was exploding across Europe. It was a mutually convenient short-hand, used by populist Irish nationalism to militate against the perceived oppressor and by unionism to underscore its refusal to be bundled out of the United Kingdom along with a Catholic majority.
There is a danger in resurrecting and reifying the mutually convenient myth of Planter and Gael. Identity politics, on the left as well as the right, privileges those who can claim to speak from a position of authenticity. For post-1998 generations, relatively undaunted by the horrors of the Troubles, Planter and Gael could offer the purity and clarity that attracted Congressman Neal.
