Weekend Essay – the decline of the Anglo-Irish and the rise of the British-Irish

Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat, met the novelist Elizabeth Bowen in London in February 1941. He commented that he had “expected someone more Irish”. Given that Bowen’s family home was in Ireland and most of her novels are set there, Ritchie’s reaction is unsurprising. However, the stylish woman whom he met lived at the time in a rented house near Regent’s Park. She did so notwithstanding it was wartime and she a citizen of neutral Ireland with every right to live there, out of harm’s way. Bowen spoke with an upper class English accent that was crystal sharp and patrician. She was in so many ways neither English nor wholly Irish; she was one of the last of the Anglo-Irish.

In the eighteenth century and for a very long time thereafter, there was a distinctive class of people in Ireland known collectively as the Anglo-Irish. They lived in “Big Houses” and owned land – “plantation land” – they had been given by English Kings and by Lord Protector Cromwell, a century or more earlier. Unlike the vast majority of people in Ireland who were Catholics, they were Protestants. They constituted a political and religious ascendency and relished their privileges. Over time, however, they came to seek devolution from England and, for a short while they secured it.

Coaxed and bribed into Union with Britain in 1801, the Ascendency Irish continued to lord it over their tenants, many of whom were to die in the 1845 famine or seek relief outside of their country of birth. However, the Anglo-Irish were never willingly subservient to England and many of them became leaders of the movement for Home Rule in the late nineteenth century and, eventually, the agitation for an independent Irish State.

When the break with England and Britain came after 1922, the Anglo-Irish were still there in all their distinctiveness, even if some of their “Big Houses” had been burnt down during the Civil War. There had indeed been a terrible rupture, political and cultural and a revolution that was unfinished. The nationalist current was of course dominant, whilst the Anglo-Irish pretended not to notice; but gradually and often quite subtly they became more confessedly Irish and their English colouring began to fade. They still owned much of the land, and despite the late nineteenth century Celtic revival the English language still dominated. Ireland’s literary lions initially came from among the Anglo-Irish – from W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw and eventually Samuel Beckett. That trend and dominance would change over time and the two Irish cultural streams overlap and steadily merge. The Anglo-Irish inheritance survived but in a new and transmuted form.

Ireland’s cultural distinctiveness would eventually and successfully reflect the many strands (including in the North) in its make-up, not least the Anglo-Irish one. The inheritance from the Ascendency period was most obvious physically in all these ‘Big Houses’ spread across the country and in the elegant Georgian squares and buildings of Dublin. Allowing for some egregiously destructive bumps along the road, the wonderful architectural heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has, in the words of the Irish historian, Roy Foster, “been accepted as the national treasure it is rather than merely the evidence of colonial domination”. Of course, increasing prosperity from the 1960s onwards and especially via entry into the European Union, helped bring about a coalescence of the various post-Civil War traditions, some still with sharp political edges relating to the political characteristics of the island of Ireland. But the slow and quiet integration of the Anglo-Irish element has been notably successful. The “Irish” has come to dominate the “Anglo” reflected in that phrase.

Elizabeth Bowen, whose novels chronicled the shifting world of the Anglo-Irish and whose home, Bowen’s Court, near Cork was itself one of the “Big Houses”, would probably have been pleasantly surprised by these changes. Though a speculative builder purchased and then demolished Bowen’s Court in 1959, her house had been the focus of a social mix of Anglo-Irish and English friends. Some of those acquaintances opted, especially following the Second World War, to make a home in Ireland; and even Evelyn Waugh dallied with doing so. Bowen might not have been surprised to learn that after Britain’s Brexit decision the traffic across the Irish Sea has taken on new life. John Le Carré seriously explored the possibility of emigrating there not long before his recent death.

What is most striking, however, are the anonymous people who in large numbers have sought Irish passports since the 2016 referendum. They tell their own story. In 2018 there were 94,000 such applications by British citizens and in 2019 there were reportedly over 50,000 Irish passports issued to British applicants.

After the long evolution of the Anglo-Irish class, it might be thought ironic indeed that the “Anglo” element in the Irish make-up should be given new form and take on new life because of disenchantment with the Britain which decided to leave the European Union. The new passport holders are likely not all intending to go and live in Ireland, but self-evidently they want the freedom to travel within Europe that such a passport can provide and doubtless some will want the option of being able to go and live there in the future. The entitlement of most applicants for an Irish passport will have drawn on the citizenship of Catholic grandparents, but they will not be renovating the Anglo-Irish class. Instead, they will be generating a new kind of passport-carrying “British-Irish”, some with new-found homes across the Irish Sea.

Elizabeth Bowen was indeed among the last of her kind of Anglo-Irish. She died in England in 1973 – the year Britain and Ireland joined the then European Community. She would surely have smiled wryly at the prospect of Ireland receiving a new infusion of British citizens disenchanted with their country’s departure from the European Union and intent on renovating their links with the land of their parents and grandparents.