The Transformation of Identities

By the time the generational dust had cleared, Susanna West's great-grandchildren had engineered a rich variety of transformations of identity and allegiance. From Susanna's own origins in the families of the English plantation and old-Anglo-Normans, her descendants divided themselves more or less into three distinct new branches, one Scottish Presbyterian, another Ulster Unionist, and the third resident English. To such a family the umbrella identity of Britishness, must have made a lot of sense, particularly as the Empire reached its peak and finally entered the First World War under the naive impression that the conflict would be over in a few months and would be followed by the resumption of the natural order.

As it happened, the war lasted four years and the British Empire emerged on the other side battered, bruised, and in the first stages of what was to be an irrevocable decline.  Of course when Susanna West was born in 1761, Ireland was still nominally a separate entity, and the Union with Scotland only just over half a century old. So whilst the notion of Britishness may have been attractive to the governing classes and other vested interests, it took the vast expansionary success of the Empire to make the identity meaningful on a wider level.  

Throughout the nineteenth century however, whatever political, legal and military means the English employed, whatever carrots or sticks, the native Irish Catholics simply refused to be incorporated into the new paradigm. Eventually, when the Westminster government looked for ways to disengage themselves from their Irish imbroglio, they now had to contend with the outraged resistance of the very families that they themselves had originally settled on the island, hundreds of years before, and who felt they had every right to be both Irish and British. 

Commemoration in Dublin of the centenary of
The Easter Rising of April, 1916. From The Independent.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, taken aback by the Easter Rising of 1916, seen as nothing short of treasonous by one side, and the ultimate heroic but tragic failure by the other, a compromise had to be found. In 1922 the Free Irish State was declared, and the provinces of Northern Ireland, including County Down went their separate way as part of the now United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Although it might look as if  Irish problem is just a two-sided sectarian division, the history of the Hadzor and West families shows that the Irish issue was always far more complex than that. It was not only the Irish Catholics who resisted the Anglicisation of their culture and identity. There were the Presbyterians, the Ulster-Scots holding firm to their own dissenting tradition, prepared at a pinch to defer to the English monarch as a temporal head of state, but certainly not as the head of their church. And then there were liberal secularists like the United Irishmen who could foresee a united Ireland, self-governing, and without a single sectarian identity. The English just about succeeded in crushing the old Anglo-Norman families, as the Hadzors were to learn to their cost, and they certainly succeeded in creating a patriotic front of dedicated Unionists from the Irish community whose ancestral roots were in England and Scotland. But they were never really able to bring permanent peace and stability to the island. 

Furthermore, with the decline of empire, and the limited devolution of powers to the three other home nations, an agreed concept and definition of Britishness continues to be as elusive as ever, and remains beset by the thorny conundrum of English majoritarianism.

As the UK voters prepared to go to the polls in 2017, Sinn Fein announced that they would again implement their standard practice of not attending the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish Nationalists continued to weigh up the likely outcomes of a second independence referendum. What remained and remains to be seen is to what extent the younger generation's greater sense of the possibilities of a broader European identity will come to bear on the political map.