The Pale

The word pale derives ultimately from the Latin word pālus, meaning stake, specifically a stake used to support a fence. From this came the figurative meaning of boundary and eventually the phrase beyond the pale, as something outside the boundary. 

Also derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid. The term was used not only for the Pale in Ireland but also for various other English colonial settlements, notably English Calais. 

Harristown

The Pale was a term used in the context of the invasion and colonisation of Ireland by the English Normans and associated with a strip of land, centred on Dublin, that stretched from Dundalk in Louth to Bray in Wicklow and became the base of English rule in Ireland. 

The Norman invasion of Ireland, beginning in 1169, brought much of Ireland briefly under the theoretical control of the Plantagenet Kings of England. From the 13th century onwards the Hiberno-Norman occupation in the rest of Ireland at first faltered, then waned. Across most of Ireland, the Normans increasingly assimilated into Irish culture after 1300. They made alliances with neighbouring autonomous Gaelic lords. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Norman lords, like their Gaelic neighbours in the provinces, acted as effectively independent rulers in their own areas.

By 1300 the territory the Lordship controlled by the English king had been consolidated to an area of lowland around Dublin easier to defend, and as parts of a perimeter in counties Meath and Kildare were fenced or ditched, it became known as the Pale, referring to what was a defensive boundary. This boundary originally divided colonists from native Irish.

In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was enacted. The statute decreed that intermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers from using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs, as such practices were already common. The adoption of Gaelic Brehon property law, in particular, undermined the feudal nature of the Lordship. The Act was never implemented successfully, even in the Pale itself. This inability to enforce the statute indicated that Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms.

By the Tudor period, the Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory initially lost to the colonists: “even in the Pale, all the common folk … for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language”. At a higher social level, there was extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords, beginning not long after the invasion.

By the late 15th century, the Pale became the only part of Ireland that remained subject to the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown. The tax base shrank to a fraction of what it had been in 1300. 

The idea of the Pale was inseparable from the notion of a separate Anglo-Irish polity and culture. After the 17th century and especially after the Anglican Reformation and the Plantation of Ulster, the "Old English" settlers were gradually assimilated into the Irish population. This was in large part due to their relative reluctance to give up Roman Catholicism (those who worshiped in the Church of Ireland were rewarded with a higher status). They kept their version of the English language, though by that time they also spoke Irish.

Sectarian Animosity
Ireland during the period 1536–1691 saw the first full conquest of the island by England and its colonization with Protestant settlers from Britain. 

This established two central themes in future Irish history: subordination of the country to London-based governments and sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants. 

The period saw Irish society transform from a locally driven, intertribal, clan-based Gaelic structure to a centralised, monarchical, state-governed society, similar to those found elsewhere in Europe. 

The period is bounded by the dates 1536, when King Henry VIII deposed the FitzGerald dynasty as Lords Deputies of Ireland (the new Kingdom of Ireland was declared by Henry VIII in 1541), and 1691, when the Irish Catholic Jacobites surrendered at Limerick, thus confirming British Protestant dominance in Ireland. 

Beyond the Pale

The English had little success in converting either the native elite or the Irish people to the Protestant religion. It is an enduring question, why the Protestant reformation failed to take hold amongst the Irish (amongst many) lies in the fact that brutal methods were used by crown authority to pacify the country and exploit its resources, which heightened resentment of English rule. An additional reason was a determined proselytising campaign carried out in Ireland by counter-reformation Catholic clergy, many of whom had been educated in seminaries on the continent. Irish Colleges had been established in many countries in Catholic Europe for the training of Irish Catholic priests and the education of the Irish Catholic gentry. Finally, the printing press, which had played a major role in disseminating Protestant ideas in Europe, came to Ireland very late.

In a serious, but also light hearted vein, the story of the English, and later, the British incursions on the island of Ireland is presented in The True(ish) History of Ireland.

Here is an exerpt:

An English Solution to an Irish Problem
And so began eight centuries of fun, games, and oppression. From the twelfth century on, the English did everything in their power to make the Irish more ‘English’, including teaching them tiddlywinks, making them eat Yorkshire pudding and, when all else failed, taking their lives. The Irish are a famously stubborn lot, however, and very little worked. Often, the Irish would just turn around to their conquerors and say: ‘Yip, that’s grand, we’re all English now, so you fellas can head off home and we’ll look after things here for you.’

The English usually replied: ‘How jolly decent of you! Back home, they told us you were savages, but you chaps are actually quite good sports!’

And the Irish would reply: ‘Not a bother, me lord sir! See youse later.’

Then, as soon as the English were gone, they would just carry on being all Irish, having fun and staying up late telling stories about how they managed to dupe the English.

However, the English soon realized that their policy of absenteeism was becoming a joke. They knew that the best way to defeat the cunning Irish was to suppress the entire country, which would have cost a fortune … or they could just build a big wall around the greater Dublin area and put signs on it saying, ‘Beyond this wall is Britain. No Irish, no savages, no dogs!’ They decided on the less painful latter option and called the walled area The Pale. These days The Pale is protected by the fast and dangerous M50 ring road instead of a big wall, though most people who live outside it have little or no desire to enter.

Both colonists and colonised? 

Can England’s troubled relationship with Ireland usefully be compared to European colonialism? 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft weighs up the revisionist and nationalist debates in an article in the New Staesman reviewing Ireland and Empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture by Stephen Howe.

When an Italian talks about visiting her casa colonica in the countryside, she means no more than a farmhouse. This echoes the harmless original etymology - in Latin, a colonus was a cultivator or tiller - of what has become one of the fighting words of our age. Some of the past century's most bitter physical and verbal battles have been fought over colonialism. There were movements for colonial freedom, on behalf of what the left used to call "the colonial peoples". Then there was neocolonialism and, as an academic residue, "colonial discourse analysis". As Stephen Howe writes, a once simple word has been put to ever wider and more problematic uses.

Nowhere has the concept of colonialism been more problematic than in Ireland. England began some form of conquest in the 12th century, subjugated and ruled all of Ireland from the 16th to the 18th century, attempted to incorporate it politically in the 19th century, and still holds sovereignty over a corner of it as the 21st century begins. There were also repeated colonial settlements - in the literal sense, plantations of farmers to till the land - under the aegis of the English crown. From those unarguable facts, republicans claim that, in Kevin Toolis’s words, “Ireland was the first English colony and it will be the last”.

But what does this mean? And is it true? Can the troubled history of Ireland’s connection with England usefully be seen in the same light as European dominion over the rest of the world? Howe’s fascinating book examines the “colonial paradigm” to see how it has been discussed in Irish historical and political writing.

He gives an entertaining account of the debates between revisionists - another fighting word - and nationalists, both academic and political. The revisionists have been scrutinising what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister 100 years ago, once called “the beautiful national legends” that nourish a country. Nationalist reaction to their work has been most revealing. “What revisionism has done”, Gerry Adams says dismissively, “is tell people they can’t be satisfied with what they come from. That’s putting things you thought of as constant under attack.” Not a bad definition of critical scholarship, come to think of it.

More tellingly still, Mary McAleese, now the president of the Irish Republic, describes Conor Cruise O’Brien as an “arrogant man . . . in the process of revising everything that I had known to be a given and a truth”. As Howe writes, this is not the statement of an open mind, “but the lament of a religious believer whose faith is questioned”. Like those revisionist historians in Israel who have been looking at some different national legends, the work of these writers can sometimes be faulted. But in either case, they are free spirits who are not satisfied with patriotic myth, which can take the form of the “old history” taught to generations of Irish schoolchildren, or the newer fashion for seeing Ireland in third-world terms.

Although the colonial paradigm may seem tempting, one problem is that, if you go back far enough, we are all colonised and colonists. This applies notably to the British Isles. To be sure, 500 years ago there were no Scots Protestants in Ulster, just as 1,000 years ago there were no Normans in Leinster (or England); 2,000 years ago there were no Anglo-Saxons in Britain; and 3,000 years ago there were no Celts in Ireland. Does that make Celtic Ireland a colony? If, as Howe writes, “Ireland’s story was indeed a colonial one, it was as part of a picture in which, literally, all European history is colonial history”.

Howe is particularly illuminating on the way in which recent Irish rhetoric of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism has projected modern concepts on to the past. It would be nice for republicans if there really were a long history of Irish anti-imperialist discourse. The trouble is that, before the 1960s, nationalists simply "did not use the colonialism-anticolonialism model". It gets worse. As Howe drily writes, colonial discourse has supposedly dealt with the "disturbance in the visual field" - the stubborn fact that the Irish are observably white - "by insisting that somehow they were really black". But that was not how earlier nationalists saw it. Admittedly, John Mitchel was an extreme case. For him, the worst aspect of the Irish Famine was that it had happened to "White men! Yes, the highest and purest blood and breed of men." He combined his nationalism with warm support for slavery in the American south, hoping to see an independent Ireland with its own slave plantations.

But then, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, was likewise disgusted by any idea that an Irish nationalist should “hold the negro his peer”. A hundred years ago, Irish nationalists were indeed united in one “anti-imperial” cause, but an awkward one in retrospect. They cheered - and, in a few cases, such as Major John MacBride, fought for - the Boers in their war with England. That is, they supported the nation that created apartheid. Michael Davitt was another passionate pro-Boer, who thought that the South African blacks were “savages”.

The people who did perceive Ireland in terms of imperial interests were English unionists, Tory or Liberal: for them, Home Rule was a threat to the British empire. But even this scarcely fits the colonial paradigm. English unionists wanted to keep Ireland as part of their own country and parliament, with representative constitutional government. Did they want the same for India or Africa? Even the Troubles of 1919-21 take on a different light in “Comparative Perspectives”, as one of Howe’s chapters is called. At exactly the same time, the British empire was dealing with a rising in Iraq. This was suppressed by the newborn Royal Air Force, whose bomber aircraft wantonly butchered villagers into submission. As Howe maintains, for all the brutality of the Black and Tans, it would have been unimaginable for the RAF to bomb republican villages in West Cork or Kerry.

Howe's book may not be written for the general reader, but anyone interested in Ireland, North or South, should read it. He takes no overt political position (although he teaches at Ruskin College, Oxford, and his footnotes reveal that he has written leaders and book reviews for the NS). His tone is reasonable in contrast to many of the books he discusses - the tendentiousness and ignorance of which occasionally provoke his asperity. In recent years, most of the nonsense has stemmed from the extreme nationalist side, or from that area where republicanism overlaps with the modish left. Howe's demolition jobs are all the more impressive because they come from a scholar who isn't a Telegraph unionist.

Thus Anthony Coughlan's claim that Marx and Engels formulated their theory of imperialism from their observation of Ireland is "entirely false", because they had no such theory. Engels rarely mentioned the Irish, and he had a regrettably low opinion of them, holding that independence would not alleviate Ireland's distress, but instead "lay bare the fact that the cause of Irish misery, which now seems to come from abroad, is really to be found at home" (an insight that was empirically verified after independence, when the bulk of productive economic assets in the Free State were indigenously owned). As to Paul Foot's effusion Ireland: why Britain must get out, Howe writes (correctly, I'm afraid) that "Foot's historical account condenses almost every conceivable myth about Ireland's past as well as perpetrating very basic factual errors. Quite obviously he - like many external 'friends of Irish freedom' - has not even second-hand awareness of any modern writing about the country's history."

One writer who does win Howe's approval is Fred Halliday, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, a long-time member of the editorial board of the New Left Review and, as it happens, Irish by birth. Howe mentions Halliday's joke that, if Irish republicans want an historical hero, they should choose the first man to have ruled a United Ireland, King Henry VIII. This would win few smiles from republicans, who are not distinguished by their humour, nor by their grasp of history, Irish or otherwise. The weakness of their agitprop is shown by the way that, while invoking faraway struggles, difficulties are avoided by insisting on what Howe calls "an implicit or explicit belief in Irish exceptionalism".