All language subtitles for the.story.of.ireland.1e05.dvdrip.x264-EN

Ireland's modern story
begins in an age of empire,

but it will be convulsed by revolution.

The old order is overthrown.

The religious conflict that
has endured for 300 years

will lead to the division of Ireland
for the first time in history.

From the beginning of
the story of Ireland,

the island has been shaped
by events beyond its shores,

and this is never more true
than in the modern era.

In an age of world wars
when Europe is twice rent apart by hatred,

when tens of millions die
in the name of ideology and nationalism,

Ireland, too, will experience
dramatic upheaval.

It is an age in which the island's
people will confront not only

the legacy of history, but the very idea
of what it means to be Irish.

Ripped By mstoll

Early in the last century,

my forebears lived here in middle-class
respectability in the city of Cork.

It was a world dominated
by the British Empire,

and Cork was a thriving garrison city.

My great-grandfather was a sergeant
in the Royal Irish Constabulary.

But his service records
are not kept in Cork.

They're here
at the National Archives in Kew.

Here he is. 40739, Hassett, Patrick.

5ft 10, same height as myself,
from County Clare.

In his mind, there was nothing
unusual about him being sent,

as we can see here, to serve in Belfast,

because it was all one Ireland
at the time.

And he wouldn't have seen
any contradiction

between supporting the monarchy,

but also supporting
the idea of Home Rule for Ireland,

because, remember,
if Home Rule was granted,

the country was still going to stay
within the British Empire.

And that empire really framed the world

in which my great-grandfather
grew up and in which he lived.

Yet the image of a serene Ireland
was deceptive.

An Irish Catholic would never rise
to the top of the RIC.

In Her Majesty's Civil Service,

Catholics were noticeably absent
from the more senior posts.

The Act of Union
had given Catholics economic power,

but their political destiny
remained in the hands of London.

As the century turned, a view of an Irish
future utterly separate from Britain

was finding expression
in cultural revival.

One of the many artists attempting
to forge a new national consciousness

was the poet and playwright
William Butler Yeats.

In 1903, with Lady Augusta Gregory,
he founded the Abbey Theatre.

It would see the production
of their play Kathleen Ni Houlihan,

which represented Ireland
as a beautiful woman

for whom young men
would sacrifice their lives.

"They shall be alive for ever,"
Yeats wrote.

Later he would ask, "Did that play of mine
send out certain men the English shot?"

The cultural revival in sports,
literature and theatre

was profoundly influenced by the fear
that Ireland was becoming British.

There's a fear
that Ireland is losing its identity,

that if a new generation does not
embrace identity and national sentiment

and the national language and so on,

that something is going to be lost,
irretrievably lost.

What was being written
and talked about here in Dublin

chimed with nationalist sentiments
across the world.

In 1911, Sun Yat-sen had
declared his revolution in China.

The following year,
the African National Congress

was founded in South Africa.

And closer, in the Balkans,

Serbian plotters were preparing acts
that would change the world.

Here in Ireland, the long dominance
of those who'd advocated change

through peaceful means
was about to be challenged.

Across Europe, there are
premonitions of a cataclysm

that will make a new world.

In Ireland, a poet and teacher
declared bloodshed

a cleansing and sanctifying thing.

Inspired by Christ
and the warriors of Gaelic myth,

Patrick Pearse
had come to idealise martyrdom.

Pearse was the son of
an English father and an Irish mother.

At St Enda's, his school outside Dublin,
he declared it his mission

to counter what he called
the murder machine of British education.

Pearse told his pupils to be ready
to work hard for the fatherland

and, if necessary, to die for it.

Pearse joined
the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

committed to the overthrow
of imperial rule.

His alienation from
the bourgeois world of his childhood

would deepen when he watched
the combined forces

of state power
and a Catholic-led business elite

suppress the 1913 strike in Dublin.

But the conditions in which Patrick Pearse
and other radicals would rebel

were created by the British Government's
attempts at reform.

In 1912, the Liberal Cabinet
moved to introduce Home Rule,

but in keeping a promise
to Irish Catholics,

it provoked the anger
of Ulster Protestants.

Home Rule was seen as an attempt
to undo the Plantation of Ulster.

It was seen as an attempt

to bring the hewers of wood and
the drawers of water, to bring them top,

to effect a social revolution that
would have seen Protestant Ulster,

the Ulster that they had built, destroyed.

Protestant opposition
was led by a man

misrepresented as much by his allies
as his enemies.

Edward Carson was a Dublin lawyer

who to this day remains
the great icon of Ulster Loyalism.

Carson had been a fierce cross-examiner
of his old college friend Oscar Wilde

during a libel trial in which the writer
denied his homosexuality.

But this man, appropriated
as an implacable Ulster Unionist,

began with a very different agenda.

Most Irish people would regard Carson

as the arch partitionist,
but that's not what Carson is about.

Carson is about sustaining the union
between Great Britain and all of Ireland,

not just the northeastern corner.

And he wants to make that union work
for the benefit of all Irish people.

But Carson understood that only in Ulster
was there a Protestant population

large enough
to mobilise against Home Rule.

On September 28th 1912,
here in Belfast City Hall,

Edward Carson signed a solemn covenant
pledging to defend Ulster from Home Rule.

Almost a quarter of a million men
followed his example.

But how were they going to back up
this declaration with deeds?

The Ulster Unionist leadership
now made a momentous decision.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, formed
in 1913, directly challenged the state.

It was encouraged in its threats
of rebellion by British Conservatives,

yet the Government took no action.

Nationalists reacted by founding
the Irish Volunteers to protect Home Rule.

They were joined by the Irish
Citizen Army, led by James Connolly,

a Glasgow-born socialist who'd come to
prominence in the 1913 strike in Dublin.

When this paramilitarisation
develops in the North, the reaction

in nationalist Ireland is excitement.

It's not fear.

It's not a sense
that a civil war may happen.

It's, this is what Irishmen should do.

Time and again, you hear it said
famously about Patrick Pearse that,

"to see arms in the hands of Irishmen
is an ennobling thing",

even if they're in the hands
of Ulster Unionist Irishmen.

It was, of course,
a grand delusion.

Both nationalists and the British
Government seemed to have forgotten

the bitter struggles with Loyalists
over Home Rule in the previous century.

It was as if they believed
Ulster Protestants

would eventually, peacefully,
come round to the idea.

But the Loyalists
were busy arming themselves

to fight whoever tried
to impose Home Rule.

On 24th and 25th April 1914,

25,000 rifles
and three million rounds of ammunition

were brought in through Larne and
other ports and distributed across Ulster.

These were German weapons being imported

at a time of mounting
international tension.

It would be hard to imagine a greater
challenge to the authority of the state.

And yet the Government did nothing.

But when nationalists imported guns
the following July, they were confronted.

This double standard helped to radicalise
many more moderate nationalists.

Tension steadily escalated

until Ireland's quarrel
was suddenly interrupted.

During the First World War,

you get a sea-change
in the nature of Irish political opinion.

People who had been thinking

that constitutional methods would work

changed their mind
and felt that they wouldn't.

People who felt that a more moderate goal
was legitimate

changed their minds
and wanted something more radical.

The war would claim the lives
of as many as 30,000 Irishmen.

More than 200,000 served.

To the moderate Irish
nationalist leader John Redmond,

the war was a chance to make the case
to Unionists for Home Rule.

Catholics would show their loyalty
to the empire.

But as the war dragged on
and casualties mounted,

fears grew that Britain
would introduce conscription in Ireland.

Redmond's call to arms looked increasingly
to have been a serious political mistake.

There was growing disillusionment
among nationalists,

but Ireland wasn't seething
with anti-British fervour.

It would take the events of Easter 1916
to create the cataclysm.

As Britain floundered
on the Western Front,

a small group of plotters
gathered in Dublin.

They were a minority, even within
the revolutionary Republican Brotherhood.

They included poets and hardened rebels,

Pearse, who dreamed of blood sacrifice,

and the champion of
a workers'republic, James Connolly.

They plotted the downfall of empire
in Ireland

here above the tobacco shop
of the veteran IRB man Tom Clarke.

The rebels decided to move
on Easter Sunday,

date of Christ's resurrection.

But the orders were countermanded
by moderates.

In the chaos of order and counter-order,

Pearse, Connolly and the other radicals
made a fateful decision.

They would strike
with a drastically reduced force

in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916.

A detachment of Connolly's Citizen Army
attacked Dublin Castle,

symbol and seat of British power,
but were repulsed.

The main body of rebels
led by Pearse and Connolly

rushed down Sackville Street
and took over the General Post Office.

They raised the Irish tricolour
above the building.

Pearse stepped outside
and read from a proclamation

signed by himself
and the six other leaders.

He declared an Irish republic.

"In the name of God and the dead
generations, Ireland through us

"summons her children to her flag
and strikes for her freedom."

A witness watching from a balcony opposite
described how boys quickly gathered up

any copies of the proclamation
they could find, because, as he put it,

they would be worth a fiver
when the beggars were hanged.

The British were caught unawares,
but by the end of the week,

they outnumbered the rebels by ten to one.

From the River Liffey, a gunboat fired.

Irish regiments also fought the rebels.

The Royal Dublin Fusiliers,
who were drawn principally

from the working-class districts
of the city,

were being rushed up along the quays here
to join the battle near the GPO,

when a shot rang out
from a sniper across the river.

Lieutenant Gerald Neilan,
an Irish Catholic, fell dead.

Elsewhere in the city,
his younger brother Anthony

was fighting on the rebel side.

The majority of the dead of Easter week
were civilians

killed in the rain of shells and bullets

that devastated the city centre
in the British counterattack.

Pearse and Connolly finally
abandoned their headquarters at the GPO,

surrendering on April 29th.

As the rebels were led into captivity,
they were jeered and jostled by the crowd.

Many of the most vociferous
were women whose husbands

were away fighting on the Western Front.

The rising had been crushed,

and public opinion now seemed
set against the rebels.

Until the British
made a grave miscalculation.

The leaders were brought here
to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin

and hastily court-martialled
and sentenced to death.

Over a period of two weeks,
14 men were executed here,

13 at this end, including Patrick Pearse,

and up here, James Connolly,

who had to be carried to his execution
on a stretcher.

The manner of their deaths
and the number of executions

would turn these men from being
the leaders of a militant minority

into martyrs who could be acclaimed
by all of nationalist Ireland.

The poet William Butler Yeats
sensed the impact of the executions.

"I write it out in a verse

"MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse

"Now and in time to be

"Wherever green is worn
Are changed, changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

Public anger deepened
following mass arrests

and the imposition of martial law.

Here in the military archives in Dublin
is a trove of witness accounts

from young men who were radicalised
by the events of Easter 1916

and who joined the Volunteers in its wake.

Matthew Davies from Roscommon - "In 1916,"
he says, "I was unattached to any group.

"After the rebellion there was an outcry
to execute the fanatics.

"I felt we would have to do
something about it."

And of course, he formed
a Volunteer unit in his area.

The Volunteers evolved into
the Irish Republican Army,

and among the young men who flocked
to join them was my grandfather,

Paddy Hassett,
the imperial policeman's son.

Why would Paddy Hassett

turn his back on that family tradition
of service to the empire?

The biggest factor
was what had happened in Ireland.

The impact of the 1916 rising
and the executions

and the round-ups
that took place after it.

I sense that that was what
turned my grandfather

and many, many other young men like him,
against the British.

But if the great cause
of the Irish revolution

had been a united republic,
the consequence was very different.

I think after 1916,
with the dead dedicated to a republic,

the fires of Easter week
have forged a new national identity,

which is to be Republican.

Ulster Unionists
find nothing in that whatsoever.

They found little, if anything,
in Home Rule -

there's absolutely nothing for them
in an Irish republic.

It makes partition inevitable.

In the 1918 general election, Sinn F�in,
led by veterans of the rising,

won a sweeping majority.

But instead of going to Westminster,
the party set up an Irish republic.

The Sinn F�in leader was Eamon de Valera,

and his finance minister, Michael Collins.

In an atmosphere made worse by
renewed British threats of conscription,

Collins would find himself
directing a guerrilla war.

The IRA campaign which began in 1919

was met with fierce reprisals
against civilians

by security forces
like the Black and Tans.

A state-sanctioned policy of reprisal
increased public support for the IRA.

And Irishmen killed fellow Irishmen.

Police shot IRA men and vice versa.

This is my father's hometown
of Listowel in County Kerry.

On 20th January 1921, an IRA squad
was lying in wait at Church Street.

The man they were going to attack,

District Inspector Tobias O'Sullivan
of the Royal Irish Constabulary,

was coming up the street
with his five-year-old son.

The IRA squad ran up to him
and shot him dead in front of the child.

Now, the version of the story
that I was given growing up

was that a British soldier,
not an Irish policeman, had been killed.

Nor was there any mention
that he'd been holding his child's hand

when he was murdered.

It was as if some parts of the story
were simply too painful to tell.

O'Sullivan had taken part in a raid
on a nearby village.

After two years of violence, both sides
declared themselves ready to talk.

In October 1921, a Sinn F�in delegation
led by Michael Collins

arrived in London
to discuss a political settlement.

Michael Collins arrived as
the 20th century's first celebrity rebel.

In terms of his public image,
a kind of Che Guevara for his age.

But here, Collins would encounter
a British negotiating team

led by Lloyd George
that was both experienced and tough.

Whatever else might be conceded,
an Irish republic was not on offer.

26 counties of Southern Ireland
would become the Irish Free State,

with its own army but swearing an
Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown.

The Government had already allowed the six
Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster

to form a new state
within the United Kingdom.

But it wasn't Ulster
that caused crisis for the Irish side.

In Dublin, de Valera accused Collins

of having agreed to the
Oath of Allegiance without his consent.

When the D�il convened
in Dublin in December 1921,

de Valera denounced the Oath of Allegiance
as an abandonment of the republic.

Collins argued that the treaty gave
Ireland the freedom to achieve freedom.

The one-time comrades
became bitter enemies.

When the vote on the treaty came,
it was perilously close -

64 votes for, 57 against.

De Valera led his supporters
out of the D�il.

As they went,
Michael Collins shouted, "Deserters, all!"

The slide to civil war had begun.

A majority of the people supported
the treaty, but couldn't stop a war

characterised by extreme ruthlessness.

Both sides committed atrocities.

At Ballyseedy Cross in County Kerry,
nine Republican prisoners

were tied to a log
and blown to pieces by a land mine,

retaliation for the killing
of Free State soldiers.

The government army gradually
captured the Republican strongholds.

But on 22nd August 1922, Michael Collins
was assassinated in County Cork.

The Free State would triumph,
but his loss was devastating.

In death, Collins would become
a romantic icon, the great lost leader.

Yet in some of his last writings,
he espoused a patriotic pragmatism.

"True devotion,"Collins wrote,
"lay not in melodramatic defiance

"or self-sacrifice,
but in steady, earnest effort."

By the time the civil war ended in 1923,

Ireland was a very different country
to the united

and equal nation imagined
by the revolutionaries of 1916.

The revolution had driven the British out.

But it had also consolidated
the prevailing social reality.

This was a Catholic, largely rural
and, above all, conservative society.

It was a society not dissimilar
to that imagined

by Ireland's first political titans.

The settled country
imagined by Daniel O'Connell,

hero of Catholic emancipation
in the 19th century.

An Ireland of landowners, such as
Charles Stewart Parnell envisioned,

and which his Land League
had done so much to create.

A society whose fundamental desire now
was for stability.

In the Protestant-ruled

six counties of Ulster,
electoral boundaries

had been drawn to ensure majorities
for Unionists in most areas.

There had been fierce retribution
against Catholics following IRA violence.

More than 8,000 were driven
from their jobs, hundreds were killed.

The Prime Minister James Craig

was a patrician landowner
and proud Orangeman.

Catholic Northern Ireland,
Catholic Ulster,

does not really feature
in his political agenda.

Craig, I think, associates
Catholicism with a challenge

to the state that he finds himself
ruler of.

He associates Catholicism with subversion.

But Unionism comes together from a variety
of very different institutions and forces.

It's absolutely not a monolithic group,

and it contains a spectrum of those who
are ferocious in their anti-Catholicism,

across towards a more liberal take
on the Union and Unionism.

Across the river is Donegal in the South.

This is Clady in County Tyrone,

one of the six counties
of the new Northern Ireland state.

The Prime Minister James Craig

had built here a Protestant state
for a Protestant people.

Many years later, a Unionist leader
trying to forge peace with nationalists

would ruefully acknowledge that this
had been a cold house for Catholics,

a place of discrimination and exclusion.

Catholics materially
were better off in Northern Ireland

than they were in the Irish Free State.

But politics matters more than economics.

Catholics were not welcome,
and that was clear.

They had to listen to a tirade of abuse
coming up to 12th July every year.

They had to listen to
Unionist politicians boasting

that they'd never employed a Catholic,
never would employ a Catholic,

wouldn't have one around the place.

That sort of chilly feeling of not being
wanted produces serious disaffection.

But in the South, the new government
of Cumann na nGaedheal,

led by Michael Collins' heirs,
had neither the military means,

economic power or desire
to wage a war of territorial redemption.

The South opted for stability.

Even with the arrival in power in 1932
of Eamon de Valera,

now leading the Fianna F�il party,

rhetoric would be
a comforting substitute for action.

Ireland united, Ireland free,
these are the ideals

to which enthusiastic young Ireland
is now devoting its energy.

Whatever the rhetoric,
whatever the propaganda campaigns,

de Valera realised that unification
was not going to happen,

and he may even have seen
advantages in that.

I think the majority of Southerners
were quite happy

that Northern Ireland was gone,

that the wretched Unionists
were corralled in their area,

and were not coming down and not
interfering with their setup in the South.

The founding father of Irish nationalism,
Wolfe Tone,

imagined a nation that united
Catholic, Protestant and dissenter.

But Ireland was now
an island of two states

in which religion
would be a primary badge of identity.

Here at the Phoenix Park in 1932,
vast crowds gathered

for a religious festival
that would symbolise

the character of the new Irish state.

Whatever rhetorical gestures might
be made to the Protestants of Ulster,

this was a Catholic nation.

The clergy, for somebody like
de Valera, were very important.

They were his advisors.

The leaders also had brothers
who were priests or nuns.

That clerical establishment
was very much integrated in a way

that, if you were a political leader,

the likelihood is that, if you were
a Catholic, you would not be very distant

from some relative or brother
who was in orders or a nun.

De Valera's landmark constitution
of 1937

avoided making Catholicism
the state religion,

offering instead
a vaguer special position.

Since the 19th century, Church power
had been deeply embedded.

Ireland was a nation of mass devotion,

and the overwhelming majority of children
were educated in Church-run schools.

But this central role came at a price.

Church control of education
was close to absolute,

but its power also extended deep
into the criminal justice system.

This is the old Letterfrack
Industrial School in County Galway.

It was one of a network
of such institutions

up and down the country
where the state consigned children.

Many of these institutions
were set up under British rule.

The new rulers of Ireland
would prove as inadequate as the old

in protecting the young.

Physical and sexual abuse on a large scale

was part of the secret history
of the new state.

You were constantly
waiting to be set upon.

St Joseph's Industrial School,
Letterfrack,

was an extremely violent place
in an extremely violent Irish society.

Mannix Flynn, who came from
a poor Dublin background,

was sent to Letterfrack
in the early 1960s.

An individual I saw one night being
dragged out of the bed, his head beaten

against a wall.

What blood came out of the person,
the brother then

dragged this young boy
up and down the dormitory,

wiping him in his own blood
to clean it off the floor.

Depending on what kind of venom

the individual who was perpetrating
the violence on you,

whatever brother
or whatever civilian it was

that was attached to the school,
it could last for weeks.

They were children from working-class
backgrounds, from mixed families.

Some of them were the children of mothers
who had children out of wedlock.

Some of them
were from other institutions,

having been in orphanages and orphaned.

They were the dirty poor

that didn't fit into the emerging
Irish Catholic middle classes.

This society, since the foundation
of the state, has continued

the containment of a class of people,

a segregation of a class of people
that it sees as God's mistake.

Church influence spread far beyond
the care of the young.

From the bishops' palaces
came regular diktats on cultural morality.

Eamon de Valera's friend,
the Archbishop of Dublin,

John Charles McQuaid, kept a close eye
on the republic's creative spirits.

His files are a trove of insight
into the thinking of the archbishop

on a whole range of issues.

This is the box relating to censorship.

And in it, there's a letter from
a parish priest who wants to put on

a showing for his parishioners
of the Oscar-winning movie Gigi.

But the plan has to be abandoned. Why?

Well, according to this file, the film
contains a reference to a prostitute.

Banned were some of the greatest names
in the Irish literary canon.

James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw,
Frank O'Connor and scores of others.

And yet in this atmosphere of constraint,
Irish literature flourished.

Literature acquired a kind of weird
glamour by virtue of being persecuted,

probably in the way it did
in Soviet Russia.

If you say these people
are important enough to suppress,

you are saying
they are very damned important.

Remarkable talents like Flann O'Brien

produced defiantly Irish masterpieces
in a European surrealist tradition.

It's as if the radicalism
got annulled in political politics

and rerouted almost entirely
into literature.

The more repression there was
at an official daylight level,

the more creatively deranged
the texts produced.

It's as if the Irish were straights by day
and swingers by night.

De Valera followed Church advice
on morality, but it was not his obsession.

From the time he came to power in 1932,

through his 16 years in office,

his central preoccupation
was Irish sovereignty.

When World War II broke out,

de Valera resisted Churchill's urgings
to join the fight.

Ireland remained neutral.

There was
a considerable degree of public support

for that stance, and there was
a considerable degree of pride

in the idea
that we could go our own way.

Partly because this is a country

that is still relatively raw
from the civil war.

And if de Valera
had decided to go in and fight

on the part of the Allies, it could well
have divided the body politic.

But it was an ambiguous neutrality.

When the German air force
attacked Belfast,

de Valera sent firemen
to help fight the blaze.

Germans bailing out over the South
were interned,

while their Allied counterparts
were allowed to return to Ulster.

When the IRA declared war
against Britain,

de Valera imprisoned
and even executed its members.

Yet, on Hitler's death, de Valera
offered his condolences to Germany.

While Europe burned, de Valera
set out his vision for an Ireland

that would be distinctive
in its culture and values.

The Ireland that we dreamed of

would be the home of a people

who valued material wealth
only as a basis for right living.

Of a people who,
satisfied with frugal comfort,

devoted their leisure
to the things of the spirit.

A land whose countryside
would be bright with cosy homesteads,

with the romping of sturdy children,
and the laughter of happy maidens.

Yet to cast this giant
of the Irish 20th century

as an inward-looking nationalist
would be wrong.

He had chaired the League of Nations.

The avoidance of wars and of
the burden of preparatory armament

is of such concern to humanity

that no state should be permitted
to jeopardise the common interest

by selfish action
contrary to the covenant.

When the League was succeeded
by the United Nations,

de Valera made striking gestures
of independence.

From Dublin came his instructions

to support Red China's
application to join the UN,

to the horror of America.

He established the commitment
which saw Irish troops

serve in their thousands
on peacekeeping missions.

There is a real paradox here.
De Valera was well aware

of Ireland's international role,
yet his vision for the Irish

demanded that they remain
uncontaminated by foreign ideas.

It was a vision at odds with modernity.

Economic conflict with Britain had
damaged Ireland at the outset of his rule.

Stagnation deepened with the years.

Around half a million people
would leave Ireland,

most seeking a better life in Britain,

the country de Valera had spent his life
fighting against for Irish sovereignty.

If you had to characterise
the Ireland of de Valera,

how would you describe it?

Very inward-looking. Very complacent.

And most of all, very poor.

The last week in secondary school,

the headmaster came in and asked us,

those of us who were in the class -
there were about 30 of us in the class -

how many of us saw our future in Ireland,

and the answer was two out of the 30.

I was one of those two, by the way.

By the time de Valera retired at
the age of 77, Ireland wanted change.

The leader who took over in 1959
was another veteran of revolution,

but he displayed a steely pragmatism

utterly different from de Valera's
mystical vision of Irishness.

Sean Lemass encouraged foreign
investment, removed trade barriers,

urged efficiency
and modernisation in industry.

We started off like all the other
newly free countries,

with the assumption that
freedom alone was enough

and that in freedom, economic difficulties
would right themselves.

We found out the hard way
that this wasn't so.

Ireland had begun to catch up
with the great post-war modernisation.

The young were beneficiaries
of free secondary education

and a society again open
to outside cultural influence.

Television challenged the voice
of both priest and politician.

Women joined the workforce
in growing numbers

and challenged discriminatory laws.

And across the border,
the changing world of the '60s

seemed to inspire
a new kind of Unionism.

A leader emerged
who offered a friendlier face

to the Catholic minority
and to the South.

In January 1965,
O'Neill and Lemass made history

by meeting together at Stormont -

the beginnings of North-South d�tente.

How important is that moment?

I think it's symbolically
of huge significance. This is the first

official meeting of the two
heads of state since the 1920s.

We discussed this
during our meeting,

which of us would get into
the most trouble.

I said I would, and he said he would.

He did get into a certain amount
of trouble during the first six weeks,

but nothing to the trouble
that I got into.

Captain O'Neill
recently said that the South of Ireland

was a very beautiful young lady

and that he was very glad
to talk to her over the hedge.

We don't look upon
the South of Ireland

as a beautiful young lady...

The liberal aspirations
are very much overdue,

but part of the difficulty with
the O'Neill project is O'Neill himself.

But O'Neill is an extraordinarily
patrician figure

who does not connect
with nationalism or Unionism

and, in the end, is simply
not able to deliver the votes.

By 1968, O'Neill had been outflanked
by the older forces of fear.

D�tente with the South was over.

But in this year of rebellion,
a movement rises in Northern Ireland

to demand equal rights for Catholics.

For the Ulster Protestants,
the civil rights movement

was the old Catholic conspiracy,

not a movement for change inspired
by the unrest of that momentous year.

The following year,
sectarian rioting erupted.

The IRA, long in decline, re-emerged

to present itself as the people's
protector against a hostile state.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries,

policemen and soldiers,
fought over the old ground.

Nothing fired at them whatsoever.

There weren't even stones thrown
at them, and they opened fire.

People ran in all directions.
They call themselves an army.

It was completely outrageous.

The bus station was crowded
when a bomb went off without warning.

Within the space of
16 minutes alone, 13 blasts sent people

screaming from one place of safety
to another...

An army helicopter
was flown in to remove the casualties,

and this was then caught
in a separate explosion.

There can be
no question of political status.

Crime is crime is crime.

The Provisional IRA
have said they planted the bomb

at the Brighton hotel where Mrs Thatcher
and her ministers are staying.

Politics is the alternative to war.

Politics is about dialogue.
I'll talk to anyone.

That doesn't mean that I approve
of what they stand for.

The war occasionally
spilled over into the South.

But partition had entrenched
a separation of the mind.

The six counties of Ulster
truly seemed a world away.

In the republic, a younger generation
pursued its own narrative of change,

pushing at the boundaries
of Church and of State.

This changing sense of Irishness was
the beginning of an extraordinary journey.

The Republic of Ireland now looked
increasingly beyond its shores,

as part of a European community.

Through the decades of change
from the '60s to the '90s,

Ireland moved
from stagnation to growth.

By the late '90s, it was among
the richest countries in Europe.

The country I'd left in the recession of
the 1980s was now the Celtic Tiger.

Low corporate tax
and a highly educated workforce

helped to produce record growth.

Coming back on holidays
during the years of boom,

it was hard to suppress a sense of shock
at the sheer scale of the development.

Pride, too, in a country
that seemed to have shaken off

the more inward-looking elements
of its historic legacy.

But - and I claim no great prescience
here - I also had a lingering unease.

Where was the money coming from?

And who exactly was it benefiting?

Inequality between rich and poor was
still among the worst in Western Europe.

And the idea of a new republic was
undermined by the old deference to power.

Whatever else might be said about
the founding fathers of this state,

the revolutionary generation,

they were austere men,
devoted to public service.

But there emerged in this building
a new kind of politician,

one who understood that political power

could be the pathway
to great personal wealth.

The man who came to symbolise
the Irish politics of cronyism

was Charles Haughey, leader
of the party de Valera had founded.

Talented and modernising,
yet he lived like an Ascendancy lord,

bankrolled by businessmen.

Haughey entered
a very different Ireland in the 1960s,

demographically and economically.

There were more urban people
living in Ireland

for the first time,
than rural people, in its history.

That brought on all sorts of pressures.

More people wanted access to services,

more people were looking for
planning permission,

where a lot of the corruption
in Ireland was.

New politicians stepped in.
They were self-made men.

While Ireland embraced Europe
and the technology of modernity,

the political system was rooted
in 19th-century localism.

Ireland's new political titan
sailed his own yacht

to the small island he owned.

In Ireland, the parish
and not the nation

remained the centre
of the democratic universe.

Land, such a fundamental obsession
of the Irish psyche for centuries,

was at the centre
of the new clamber for wealth.

Beginning in the 1960s,
bribes had been paid

to rezone green fields
for building development.

The lost fields of
de Valera's Gaelic idyll

were the new currency
of wealth and power.

Even as the country boomed,

judicial tribunals revealed the scale
of corruption in Irish public life.

The Moriarty Tribunal,
which sat in this very yard,

estimated that between 1979 and 1996,
for a substantive phase

when Charles Haughey
was Taoiseach during that time,

he received over nine million
in donations.

There seems to be a very clear
relationship between Haughey receiving

substantive amounts of donations
when he was in power,

and when he wasn't in power,

he didn't seem to receive
that much money at all.

As Ireland turned towards a new
millennium, the gleaming buildings rose.

But old certainties unravelled.

Scandals rocked the authority
of the Church as the full scale

of clerical child abuse was revealed.

The tribunals continued to hear
allegations of corruption in public life.

Yet prosperity and the old habits of
deference insured public quiescence.

It's often been remarked

that the Irish people
are very sophisticated politically,

that the Irish are very defiant,

that the Irish are rebels.

Now, when you contrast that
with the lack of protest,

with the lack of civic engagement, with
the lack of a demand for accountability,

for the abuse of power,
you have to ask yourself,

are a lot of those assertions
about the Irish character

and Irish rebelliousness
actually mythical?

But in 2008, a financial catastrophe
unleashed public anger.

Ireland's economy was already in decline

when America's property bubble exploded.

In Ireland, prices collapsed.

Thousands were forced to emigrate.

The ghost estates became the symbol
of a nation in decline.

Here, opposite Kilmainham Gaol,
where the leaders of 1916 were executed,

there's a monument which stands
next to the empty office buildings

of the Celtic Tiger.

It reminds the Irish people
of the proclamation of a nation

that would cherish all its children.

As Ireland enters the second decade
of the 21 st century,

there seemed the possibility that the old
way of doing things might be overthrown.

This wasn't a transformation
that could happen overnight

or in the space of one election.

But there were deeper stirrings of dissent

that suggested that an entire
political culture could be changed.

And there was already
a recent powerful example of that

here on the island, in a place
we might least have expected.

If what has been agreed
is implemented in full good faith,

all of the people of Northern Ireland
will gain.

There are no victors, nor any losers.

The agreement proposes changes

in the Irish constitution
and in British constitutional law

to enshrine the principle
that it is the people of Northern Ireland

who will decide, democratically,
their own future.

I think the change came when war-weariness
overtook war-readiness,

and I think that happens
sometime in the 1980s,

and certainly by the early 1990s

there was the feeling
that this cannot go on.

We're into the second generation now.

People were committing atrocities

who had not been born
when the Troubles began.

The peace has so far endured

the challenge of unreconciled
Republican dissidents.

But the pain of 30 years of killing
haunts quiet living rooms across Ulster.

We want better lives
for our children and our grandchildren

and their children too.

That's a lovely photograph of
the two of you, in a harbour somewhere.

- In Ardglass.
- Right.

- Down at the coast.
- Yeah.

Bridget Mooney's husband, Raymond,

was murdered in the grounds
of a church in September 1986

in retaliation for the IRA murder
of a leading Loyalist.

That's where we had
our wedding reception.

So, this is the two of you
on the day of your wedding?

- It is indeed.
- Where were you married?

In Ardoyne.

So were you married in the same church

- Raymond would later be murdered in?
- Yeah.

And all of my grandchildren
who have been born so far,

all of them christened in Ardoyne.

So much of this conflict -
and I'm not just talking about

what's happened in the last 30 years,
but for hundreds of years -

has been driven by fear and by hatred.

I just wonder, do you feel hatred,

now, towards the people
who killed your husband?

No.

For the simple reason, if...

Hatred and bitterness are feelings

and I refuse to let people
who took my husband's life

have any place in my body,

in my heart, in my head.

And no, I hate nobody.

Have you ever wanted to,
and have you ever thought about,

leaving Northern Ireland?

Never. Not while my husband's body's
in the city cemetery. Never.

And I've never even
thought about it, no. No.

And I'll never leave
Northern Ireland now.

The poet John Hewitt,
writing at the height of the Troubles,

urged that we should, "Bear in mind
I can find no plainer words."

He was reflecting on a conflict
in which men killed and died

for the sake of contested identities.

This was not, Hewitt implied, patriotism.

"Patriotism has to do with
keeping the country in good heart,

"the community ordered
with justice and mercy."

Hewitt's lines might stand as one of
the enduring lessons of the Irish story.

The decommissioning
of the arms of the IRA

is now an accomplished fact.

The IRA abandoned war, and Unionists
agreed to share power with Catholics.

After 30 years of war,
in which more than 3,500 people died,

the IRA accepted the partitioned Ireland
agreed by Michael Collins and the British.

Unity was an aspiration
to be achieved by peaceful means.

In the South, the romantic nationalism of
earlier generations had largely vanished.

When the republic voted to abandon
its territorial claim on the six counties,

it seemed an act of practical patriotism.

It's an acceptance

of political reality and an acceptance
of engagement with the outside world,

including Northern Ireland.

We no longer have to,
as it were, wave the flag.

There's a feeling of Irishness
that is real, and much deeper,

in my view, than what existed
in the '30s and '40s.

The republic is now having to accommodate
a broader sense of Irishness.

There is racism, but far-right politics
have not taken root here.

How many children have parents
who are from outside of Ireland?

How about yourself?
Where are your parents from?

- Russian.
- And you over here?

- Poland.
- Lithuania.

Lithuania, and Poland as well.

10% of the population of the South
is now foreign-born.

These are the children of those who
came here in the boom to find work.

Economic globalisation
changed the idea of Irish identity.

The old concept of an Irish identity,
the one that I grew up with,

which was that being Irish
was Gaelic and Catholic,

that's gone, really, hasn't it?

There are still plenty of Gaels around,
plenty of Catholics around,

but what's nice about the time
we're entering now is the sense that

you don't have to be
both of those things to be Irish

and that Irish identity now can draw
from many, many, many wells,

and we're going to build, between us,
the Ireland of tomorrow.

And who can say what
Irish identity will morph into?

The first inhabitants of this island
came from Europe.

They were open to change
and absorbed waves of invasion.

They embraced a spiritual revolution
and carried it to distant lands.

The old hatreds have not vanished,

but the Irish have moved
to peaceful co-existence.

There has been famine,
revolution and civil war.

But in an age of uncertainty,

we can surely draw strength from
the memory of what has been overcome.

The story of Ireland
has always been a narrative of change,

unpredictable and dynamic.

The past is no longer
a melancholy burden or a reason to hate.

We're never entirely free
of the claims of history,

but neither are we its prisoners.

Ireland today is an island
of possibility, an open island.

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