Piketty is Wrong About German War Debt

Colette Browne quotes economist Thomas Piketty in her column in today's Irish Independent as saying that Germany had sixty per cent of its war debt written off after the Second World War. This is not true.

It's not true for this reason: there wasn't a Germany after the Second World War to pay any debts. Germany was gone, and there were two states, East and West Germany, in its place.

Britain, France and the USA were in charge of West Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in charge of East Germany. The NATO powers quickly began to cut West Germany a break, as they had made a deal with the devil in the form of Josef Stalin to win the war in the first place, and now needed a strong Germany to protect Western Europe from the Soviets.

No such luck for the East Germans, which the Soviets already had in their mitts. Anne Applebaum has written an excellent book about rise of the Iron Curtain in the first ten years after the end of the war. From that we learn that the Soviets carried off everything in the occupied territories that wasn't nailed down, and would have continued to do so if Stalin hadn't kicked the bucket in 1953. East Germany remained a slave state, of course, but the Soviets went easy on populating the concentration camps left behind by the Nazis with people who didn't toe the state line.

Germany paid for her sins after the war, and now Germany is the main reason why there hasn't been a European war since – the longest period of European history without a war since Alaric and the Visgoths sacked Rome fifteen hundred years ago.

Beware, beware the celebrity economist. There's always a bottle of snake-oil that needs selling.

Inclusiveness, the British Army and the 1916 Centenary

Memorial to British in 1916 Centenary - Irish Examiner, April 1st, 2015.
Memorial Sought for British Troops Killed in 1916 - RTÉ News, April 8th, 2015.

The Irish National War Memorial Gardens commemorate Irishmen who died in the Great War in the armies of the Triple Entente, which was an alliance between the British Empire, the French Third Republic and the Imperial Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. (The memorial to all Irish soldiers does not commemorate any Irishmen who fought for the Central Powers, funnily enough). The memorial is located in Islandbridge, Dublin 8, but Merrion Square, just outside the Dáil, was one of the originally proposed locations.

A very telling speech was made during the 1926 debate about the location of the memorial, which seems to appropriate to current concerns about how to be “inclusive” in commemorating the Rising.

The speaker objected because he feared that locating the memorial in front of the parliament of an independent Ireland would give the impression, to those unfamiliar with Irish history, that the monuments were connected. That the deaths of Irishmen fighting for the Triple Entente led to Ireland taking her place among the nations of the Earth. He did not see this as being at all the case:

We had our talk of political dismemberment; we had our talk of partition; we had our conference on the less or more of partition; we had the shelving of the whole issue, and the hanging up of the [Home Rule] Bill until after the war, when that whole issue was to be reopened. The horse was to live, and it would get grass after the war.

The horse, not unwisely as I see it, decided it would have a bit for grass before the end of the war. Someone said, or wrote, that somehow, at sometime, and by somebody, revolutions must be begun. A revolution was begun in this country, in Easter 1916. That revolution was endorsed by the people in a general election of 1918 and three years afterwards the representatives of the Irish people negotiated a treaty with the British government. It is on that treaty, won in that way, that this state and its constitution are based, and I submit to deputies it is not wise to suggest that this state has any other origin than those. 

Let men think what they will of them. Let men criticise them, and hold their individual viewpoints. But those are the origins of the State.

It would be lacking in a sense of truth, a sense of historical perspective, a sense of symmetry, to suggest that the state had not these origins, but that it is based in some way of the sacrifice of those who followed the advice of parliamentary representatives of the day and recruited in great numbers to the British army to fight in the European war.

Fifty thousand Irishmen died in France. I hope that the memory of those men and their sacrifice and the motives of their sacrifice will always have respect and reverence in Ireland.

Who was the slavering, Brit-hating, báinín-wearing, backwoods-dwelling Republican jihadi who made that speech? It was the then Minister for Justice of the Free State Government, Kevin O’Higgins (the quotation is taken from Terence de Vere White's 1948 biography of O'Higgins, Anvil Press, 1966. p 173).

Nobody was as ruthless as O’Higgins in implementing the Treaty during the Civil War and after. But for all that, O’Higgins saw a clear line of demarcation between those Irishmen who fought under the Tricolor and those Irishmen who fought under other flags.

If O’Higgins’ shade were to return one year from now, and walk down what he knew as Sackville Street, what would he make of the Centenary? Reader, couldn’t you excuse him for wondering why he and his comrades ever bothered?

Did Ireland Win the First World War?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

There are so many events commemorating World War I this month that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ireland won the thing.

Last week saw a Nationwide special on the four Irish regiments that participated in the war, and this week sees a TV series broadcast over two nights called “My Great War”. There’s also a panel discussion to be chaired by John Bowman after the second episode of “My Great War” where we discuss the war and what we can learn from it. We will discuss it sensibly, as a nation. Just like we always do.

Because Irish culture has never been so influenced by that of the United Kingdom since we theoretically severed our links with the mainland, it’s important to notice that two strands are being woven into the World War One narrative in the media that swirls around us, all day, every day.

The first strand is the narrative of the war itself; that it happened, how it happened, how and where it was fought, and all that. Most of this is coming from the UK, and is very interesting for those interested in that period of history.

The second strand, however, is very particular to Ireland. That narrative is being spun like a top and it’s important to be aware that spinning is going on.

This second narrative posits that World War One was a ‘just’ war, fought for honorable reasons, and that the soldiers who served in Irish regiments were unfairly discriminated against when they came home and also in subsequent history. Those that did come home, of course. Many did not.

And that narrative is fine. It’s a perfectly legitimate point of view. Former Taoiseach John Bruton made a related argument in a hugely under-reported speech at an event in the Irish Embassy in London last month to mark the hundredth anniversary of the passing of the 1914 Home Rule Act.

Bruton made the point that the Easter Rising had legitimised violence in Irish politics, and the nation would have been better off if the Rising never happened, had stuck with John Redmond and had Home Rule delivered after the war in 1919.

There are a lot of people who currently think Bruton may have had a point. There are those who were never happy about independence. There are those who were badly treated by the independent Ireland are very understandably bitter of over it.

And there are other people who are beginning to look back on the ninety years of Irish independence, and don’t see that much to show for it. We had the boom and the crash and now, worst of all, it looks like we’ve learned nothing, zero, the null set, from it all.

The Dublin property market is overheating again, the Banking Inquiry is looking like a sequel to the Mrs Brown movie and the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have to find a way to mix oil, water, fire and ice to pass a budget in October. So asking if it was all worthwhile is a legitimate question.

But Irish public life is ill-suited to legitimate questions. Politicians and public figures call for calm and reasoned debates on abortion or the nature of marriage or Ireland’s role in World War I but they certainly don’t get them.

We don’t do town hall debates. We don’t do going on the record. We don’t follow Martin Luther and say “here I stand; I can do no other.” What we do instead are shouting matches that properly belong outside chip shops at two in the morning.

And while men are threatening to remove their jackets and engage in boxing, the actual business of public life and government is going on just the same, in much more sedate, though hardly more civilised, surroundings. Nods are nodded and winks are winked until eventually, through highways and byways, deals get cut and things get done while the politicians are still roaring to be held back, before they do damage.

It would be something if people took their stand and said yes, it was a great thing that Ireland played a role in the Great War. Or if they took an opposite view, a view that was quite common until the hundredth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination loomed into view, and people saw a chance to rewrite some history books.

Because the opposite and long-standing view of the Great War is that, of all the many wars fought for no reason, World War One was the most pointless. It was a war fought by political entities that were wiped out by it – the House of Hapsburg in Austria-Hungary, the House of Hohenzollern in Germany, the House of Romanov in Russia and the Ottoman Empire that was based in Turkey.

The only House that survived was that of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who were clever enough to change their name to the rather more British-sounding Windsor on the 17th of July, 1917. We look forward to the commemoration of that anniversary in three years’ time.

The rulers of the three “Great Powers” – Germany, Britain and Russia – were all first cousins. Pictured side-by-side, it’s nearly impossible to tell George V of England from Nicholas II of Russia. The three Emperors used to give each other commissions in each other’s army, because all three of them loved dressing up and playing soldiers.

But small ripples can transform into great waves, destroying all before them. These three Emperor-cousins’ love of playing soldiers lead to real soldiers being mobilized one hundred years ago this week, real soldiers who were slaughtered in their thousands and thousands for the next four years.

John Bowman’s TV debate will probably focus on the Irish in the British Army, but that’s too narrow a scope to tell this story. It would be nice if the full story of how the First World War started were told as part of the debate – not least as events in the same corner of the world seem to be getting edgy once again, one hundred years after the start of the war to end wars.

Did the Pope Sponsor King Billy?

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

Father Hoban’s column the week before last had to do with sainthood, and how tricky it is for popes to claim a halo. Interestingly, a quick look at the list of the Blessed, those who are next in line for sainthood shows a pope who may or may not have had a role in the history of this country and – if the rumours are true – not at all for the better.

There are a number of parallels to be drawn between Blessed Pope Innocent XI, who reigned from 1676 to 1689, and the current Pope Francis. Reform of the Roman Curia was said to be a major reason behind Francis’s election this year, and Innocent was a zealous reformer himself. Both men’s natures were frugal – they didn’t care for ceremony and enjoyed living humble lives.

Jorge Bergoglio father was an accountant. Benedetto Odescalchi’s family were gentry, but very minor gentry. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by founding a bank, and lending money to those whom they thought were good for paying it back. This fact will be significant in Innocent’s later career.

We Irish are inclined to moan about the EU but the reality is that the history of Europe before the founding of the Common Market was continual and unceasing war between the different states and noble families. When Innocent ruled the Papal States, he helped King John III of Poland lift the siege of Vienna in 1683 and rout the Turks who were threatening from the east. You’d think that would have made Innocent a hero in Christendom. It didn’t.

The most important man in 17th Century Europe after Pope Innocent was King Louis XIV of France, the so-called Sun King. Louis wanted to be boss himself and did his best to undermine papal authority by getting councils of bishops to say, in not so many words, that maybe England’s Henry VIII had a point, and the pope shouldn’t be telling divinely appointed kings what they’d do or to whom they’d bend the knee.

You can imagine how little Innocent cared for these onions. And another King who had the gift of giving Innocent a pain in his neck was James II of England. James had converted to Catholicism while in exile in France, and got to be good buddies with Louis XIV while he was there.

Innocent thought that James could have been a little more subtle in the way he went about restoring Catholicism to England, and he was also a bit worried that this restored English Catholicism would a French-flavoured Catholicism, instead of Rome’s own hard drop.

As every schoolchild knows, it wasn’t only the pope who thought James II needed to draw in his horns. A Protestant delegation travelled to William III of Orange, married to James’s daughter Mary, and told him that now was the time for a Glorious Revolution.

William arrived in Devon in November 1688, James’s reign imploded and the only fighting that was done was here, in Ireland, where lives mattered less.

All that is on the record. What is less widely known is that the Glorious Revolution arrived at just the right time for William of Orange, because at the time he got the call the man who would become King Billy was up to the feather in his tri-corn hat with debt. He hadn’t a shilling, and what was worse, he owed money.

Internal Dutch politics meant that the House of Orange wasn’t popular at all in the middle of the seventeenth century and therefore the House of Orange had to get itself some bridging finance to keep things ticking along. And bridging finance they got, from an Italian banking family based outside Milan.

Once William sat on the English throne, he was able to pay off his debts and still have the price of his Friday night porter. And who were those Italian bankers who got their money back? Why, they were the Odescalchis – those same Odescalchis whose brother sat on the Throne of Peter, invested with the power to loose and to bind.

Pope Innocent XI was beatified by the Venerable Pope Pius XII in 1956. Innocent’s actions at the Battle of Vienna had a poignant echo in 1956, when the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and the west seemed in as much danger from an Eastern invader as it did in 1683. But that’s as far as it’s got for Innocent, who waits on for his elevation.

Italians enjoy conspiracy theories like no other nation. The idea that Pope Innocent XI winked at the fall of Catholic England because, Protestant or not, William of Orange would be able to pay his debts to the Odescalchi family if he were King of England is exactly the sort of intrigue that delights them.

Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti, the journalists who discovered details of payments between William of Orange and the Odescalchi family in the Vatican archives, claim that the novel they wrote based on their findings caused them to be run out of town by the Vatican, and they now live in Vienna. This is all grist to the rumour mill.

Is the story true? Well, who knows? Money has a well-earned reputation as the root of all evil but could Innocent XI be so fond of it that he would support someone whom he considered a heretic? Or was it the case that at least William never pretended to be something he wasn’t, unlike the treacherous Sun King of France?

Father Hoban wondered in these pages how it was that only five popes have been elevated to sainthood in the past 900 years. If all their cases are as complex as that of Innocent XI, it’s a wonder that even five of them have made it over the line. It’s hard to be a saint in the city.

The Pietà of Irish Catholicism

There was a curious reaction on Twitter to yesterday’s Magdalene Laundry report. Some people thought it was a cover-up, which is fair enough, but it seemed that some others were disappointed that the history of the country was insufficiently horrible. Which seems a strange way of looking at it.

There are a number of issues in contemporary Irish life which all boil down to the same thing - the breakup of the sixteen hundred year love affair between the Irish nation and the Roman Catholic Church. There are people who are passionate advocates on either side of the gay marriage, abortion or schooling debates but it seems reasonable to guess that most people will divide up according to how they feel about the faith of their fathers.

George MacAuley Trevelyan published a shortened version of his epic History of England in the late 1930s, when National Socialism was on the rise in Europe and he wasn’t even sure that his civilisation would even survive. There’s a real sadness when he writes about Ireland; it was a genuine puzzle to him why the Irish couldn’t get with the program and integrate into the United Kingdom, just as the Welsh and Scots had done.

The reason why, of course, is religion. There may have been an outbreak of ecumenism during the time of the United Irishmen, but the identification of Ireland with Catholicism has been a constant theme of Irish history since Henry VIII got the glad eye from Anne Boleyn.

The Church’s own history towards the eight hundred years of oppression is an interesting one, with a certain amount of running with hares and hounds. The Norman Invasion was sanctioned by Pope Adrian IV. It was only when the English started claiming church lands and putting prices on priests’ heads in the sixteenth century that the church changed its mind on that policy.

By the time of Catholic Emancipation, the Church was quite happy with the status quo, until they saw the British Education Act as act of Protestant proselytism, and didn’t care for it. And then came the Rising and the Civil War and partition, and the emergence of a Catholic state for a Catholic people in the south and a Protestant state for a Protestant people and everyone was happy. Except any poor mug who should have been in one but ended up born into the other. He or she had no great time of it.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, David Trimble admitted that Northern Ireland was a “cold house” for Catholics. It was none too toasty for Protestants in the south either, as the triumphalism that is one of the baser strains of the Irish character abounded. Anyone who doubts it should read Pat Walsh’s excellent and humiliating Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian, the sad story of Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, and realise just how shabbily the Irish nation treated freedom when we got it.

And, having sown the wind, the Church is now reaping the whirlwind. The revelations of abuse have been too much to bear for a people who once thought nothing of gathering at Mass rocks in the wind and rain. And, like all spurned lovers, the people’s need for vengeance is now bloody and insatiable.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all is that the small band who do defend the church defend what they consider the Vatican II church, the church of the sandal-wearing priest with his guitar and his beard and his “please, just call me Eddie” shtick. They think it connects with people, when all it connects with is Craggy Island. Feck.

One of the features of the Catholic Church is that it is meant to be the same all over the world, but it’s not – every country puts its own particular stamp on things. In Ireland, for instance, there are none of the ornate churches that you see in Europe. It was a much more monastic church, with emphasis on penitence and suffering – Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg have always done business. It’s hard to see how this particular flavour of Catholicism sits with Father Eddie singing Bind Us Together, Lord.

But then, perhaps to be Irish is to live with contradiction. It is unusual, with the country still mired in recession and questions about its sovereignty being both very real and very unanswered, that the death agony of the Church is so important to us and permeates so much of public debate. I guess it’s always hard to say goodbye.

Lady Jane Grey Identified at Last

Those people for whom the long history of the English monarchy exerts a fascination – and your correspondent is one such – will be all a-twitter today from reading in this morning’s Daily Telegraph that historian David Starkey is claiming to have finally identified a contemporary portrait of Lady Jane Grey, who reigned as de jure Queen of England and Ireland for nine days in the summer of 1553. Lady Jane is one of the great martyrs of the English Reformation, but no contemporary portrait of her was known until Dr Starkey’s discovery at the Yale Center for British Art. And even now Dr Starkey is hedging his bets, not willing to go higher than a 90% claim that the woman in the miniature is the misfortunate monarch.

Lady Jane’s tragic fate was another of the side effects of her great uncle, King Henry VIII’s, determined ambition to hose half of England, leading to quite a complication succession once the old goat finally kicked the bucket. Brendan Behan quotes an apposite - if nasty - quatrain in Borstal Boy:

Ná thrácht ar an mhinistéir Ghallda,
Nár ar a chreideimh gan bheann gan bhrí,
Mar níl mar bhun-chloch dá theampuill
Ach magairle Annraoi, Rí.

Henry VIII was succeeded by Edward VI, who died of tuberculosis at the age of fifteen after a six year reign. And this is where it got interesting, and how the misfortunate Lady Jane ended up losing her head.

Lady Jane Grey was not Lady Jane Grey when Edward VI died; she was Lady Jane Dudley, having married – or, more correctly, having been married to - Guildford Dudley in May of 1553. Dudley’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, was a Protestant and regent to Edward VI, and it was very much in Northumberland’s interest to shore up the succession before Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII and therefore the first in line for succession, could ascend to the throne. Northumberland had made a nice big ball of money for himself during the Reformation as part of the taking over of the Catholic monasteries and he was damned if Mary, a Catholic, was going to make him give all the loot back to the papists. So he made a power play where Lady Jane Grey was named Heir Presumptive to Edward VI in Edward’s will. Edward died on July 6th, 1553, and four days later Northumberland proclaimed Lady Jane Queen Jane.

Her reign lasted nine days. The succession was not deemed to be something you can bequeath in a will, and Mary Tudor was eventually crowned Queen by right of primogeniture in October of 1553. Lady Jane was taken from the throne to the Tower of London. She pleaded guilty to a charge of high treason in November of 1553 and four months later was beheaded.

Three hundred years after Lady Jane’s execution Paul Delaroche painted his remarkable portrait of the Nine Days’ Queen’s final minutes, currently gracing the top of An Spailpín Fánach. Like all great artists, Delaroche didn’t let the facts get in the way of his vision – instead of the darked room populated with swooning maidens, Lady Jane’s was an open-air public execution. If it happened tomorrow, Lady Jane would probably have suffered the final indignity of having Davina McCall stick a microphone under her nose before the axe fell to ask her who was more regal, herself or Shilpa Shetty. The English Reformation was a bloody and murderous time, but at least Lady Jane was spared that barbarism.




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