Breaking The Connection With Britain - A Changed Military Reality
Many readers will be familiar with the Martello Towers that are still to be found along sections of Ireland’s coastline. The towers beside the Forty Foot bathing area in Dublin, at Millmount in Drogheda and surrounding Cork Harbour are among the most well-known.
Less readers will know that the towers we see today are part of an original network of about fifty such Irish buildings. The were constructed by Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century to counter the ‘threat’ of troops from revolutionary France landing in Ireland.
The possibility of such a landing was far from a theoretical threat. In 1796, an estimated 15,000 soldiers of the newly established French Republic set sail for Ireland to assist the Society of United Irishmen in their efforts to establish an Irish republic. On that occasion ferocious storms prevented the troops from coming ashore at their planned landing point in Bantry Bay in Cork.
Two years later, in August 1798, a thousand-strong French force successfully landed in Mayo under the command of General Humbert. A third planned landing of 3,000 troops in October of that year was intercepted by the British navy before it could come ashore in Donegal. Wolfe Tone himself was one of those captured in that final fleet.
The British ruling class had good reason to fear an alliance between French and Irish republicans
The possibility of revolutionary France gaining a foothold in Ireland re-ignited old fears for Britain. Two hundred years earlier, Spain had sent several armada’s to Ireland with the intention of aiding a rebellion against British rule. In 1601 they eventually succeeded in landing an estimated 4,000 Spanish troops in Kinsale.
The attempted and actual landings of French and Spanish troops in Ireland should not be seen as isolated historic events that have no bearing on the Ireland of today. Far from it, they were seminal events in the formation of four centuries of British policy in relation to Ireland.
Gaining a full understanding of that policy is particularly important as Brexit, demographics, the demise of the orange state and other factors are now coming together to increase momentum towards Irish reunification.
Irish people tend, understandably, to view Britain’s colonisation from an Irish perspective; to see it as a war of conquest and domination which was motivated by material greed, sectarianism and empire-building.
It was all of these things, but there was another factor that drove British policy - the desire to clear its own ‘sphere of influence’ of potential military threats. And there was no closer or greater threat within that sphere than Ireland.
As long as Ireland existed as an independent nation it represented a potential military threat to Britain, either in its own right, or as a ‘back door’ to be used by one of Britain’s European rivals. The domination of Ireland was, therefore, seen as a necessary defensive measure and a prerequisite for the development of a global British Empire.
The worst case scenario for Britain would have seen Ireland being used as a point of departure for an invasion of Britain itself by one of its European rivals. With just 19kms of sea separating the two islands at the closest point, the threat was obvious.
19kms of sea separate Ireland and Britain. The domination of Ireland was historically seen as a military necessity by the British ruling class.
However unlikely this scenario might have been, it still had to be guarded against. Throughout history Britain’s rivals and enemies have clearly understood these dynamics. By supporting Irish rebellions with troops and weapons they hoped, at a minimum, to divert British monies, troops and munitions from other theatres of war.
The cost to the European powers of supporting an Irish rebellion were relatively low, while the potential benefits of helping to secure a free Ireland were immeasurable.
Even a failed Irish rebellion would force Britain to redeploy resources to secure her first colony. This reality was successfully exploited by Spain during the Anglo-Spanish war, by France during the Napoleonic Wars and by Germany during World War One.
On each occasion foreign support for an Irish rebellion created panic in London and caused the diversion of valuable resources to Ireland to suppress real and possible threats.
When it came to the partitioning of Ireland there is no doubt that British strategy was still informed by the centuries old-doctrine of neutralising Ireland as a possible military threat.
By retaining the Six Counties, the British state retained a strong military foothold in Ireland, allowing it to rapidly retake the Twenty-Six Counties if required to do so. It also left Britain in control of the shortest sea-crossings between the two islands.
Ironically, partition occurred in the same period that new military technology was beginning to undermine the very basis of the doctrine that required Britain to retain physical control of some, or all, of Ireland.
Until World War One it wasn’t possible for an enemy to cause substantial and sustained destruction in Britain without physically invading the country. This changed when the first bombs fell on London from Zeppelin airships.
For centuries the British navy had successfully protected the British civilian population from attack. This immunity ended with the aerial bombing of London by a Zepplin airship in 1915
In the century since partition, military technology has fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. It is no longer necessary to physically invade a country to inflict catastrophic damage upon it.
Missiles, manned aircraft, unmanned drones, aircraft carriers, submarines, cyber-warfare and other technologies allow modern armies to inflict immense destruction on targets thousands of kilometers from their home countries.
In this changed military landscape, an enemy could strike targets in any part of Britain within minutes of entering British airspace using weapons launched from huge swathes of Europe or seaborne platforms in the North Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Irish Sea or English Channel.
The fear that Ireland could be used as a ‘back door’ for a full blown invasion of Britain has also been made redundant by technological developments. Should any British government ever face the existential threat of a seaborne invasion from Ireland, or anywhere else, they would almost certainly prevent it from happening through the deployment of their last line of defence - a substantial nuclear arsenal.
A single British vanguard class submarine is capable of launching 192 individually targeted nuclear warheads to a maximum range of 12,000km
It is clear, therefore, that Ireland no longer holds the same level of strategic military importance for Britain that it once did. Because this reduction in strategic importance occurred gradually over many decades, it has gone unnoticed by many.
But that does not take away from the fact that one of the major principles that underpinned British interference in Ireland for centuries has been significantly eroded. From a defence perspective it is no longer necessary for Britain to maintain a physical occupation of any part of Ireland.
This shift in the military equation has occurred in parallel to a glacial shift in demographics within the Six Counties and the almost complete deconstruction of the Orange state and economic unionism.
Taken together these factors have brought the possibility of a united, independent Ireland closer than at any point in the last eight and a half centuries.
The most pressing task facing those who want to accelerate the process towards Irish reunification is the development of a strategy that will deliver reunification in the shortest possible timeframe.
That strategy must be based on an accurate understanding of the factors that motivate the British state to maintain its illegal claim of jurisdiction over six Irish counties. Once those factors are correctly understood a strategy can be developed to overcome them.
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