Regardless of a separation of virtually 12,000 miles, Eire and New Zealand share a major variety of defining cultural traits. Most evident of those could be a typical language, authorized system, and parliamentary democracy, all the results of having been a part of the British Empire. There may be additionally a shared sporting legacy which lately noticed Eire rejoice its first-ever sequence win over the All Blacks. Like Eire, New Zealand has a largely rural economic system, well-known not least for its lamb and butter. Additionally it is a well-liked movie location, offering a surprising backdrop for the dramatization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
New Zealand has a inhabitants of simply over 5 million, about to similar because the Republic of Eire. Their largest buying and selling associate is Australia, a extra populous Commonwealth neighbour that additionally shares these defining traits talked about above. Below the Trans-Tasman Journey Association, residents of New Zealand and Australia are free to journey, reside and work in one another’s international locations whereas below the Nearer Financial Relations Settlement there’s free commerce in items and companies. In one more association paying homage to those who have tied Britain and Eire, for a lot of their historical past the currencies of the 2 nations have been linked at parity.
The Irish diaspora, significantly the exodus throughout the Famine period, resulted in roughly 20% of the inhabitants of New Zealand with the ability to declare Irish heritage. This compares with c. 26% of US residents, c. 13% of Canadians and c. 10% of Australians who say they’ve Irish roots. Though many of those would have fashioned Emma Lazarus’s ‘huddled lots’ and ‘wretched refuse’, some would go on to achieve the very best workplaces of their new land. Eire produced just one early British prime minister of word, Arthur Wellesley, whereas giving three to New Zealand. The primary of those, Daniel Pollen (1875–1876), was from Ringsend in Dublin, the second was John Ballance (1891–1893) from Glenavy, Co Down, and the final was William Massey (1912–1925) from Limavady, Co Londonderry.
Ballance was born in 1839, at Ballypitmave close to Glenavy, the oldest of 11 youngsters. His father, Samuel, was a Protestant tenant farmer with an curiosity in native conservative politics and, like his father earlier than him, an Orangeman. His mom, Mary McNiece, was a extra liberal leaning Quaker. Following a rudimentary schooling in Belfast, the younger Ballance labored in an area {hardware} agency earlier than touring to Birmingham in 1857 the place he attended night courses in politics, biography, and historical past. Nonetheless, his spouse’s poor well being obliged them to hunt hotter climes they usually migrated to New Zealand in 1866. The couple finally settling in Wanganui, the place Ballance turned a profitable newspaper writer. Whereas he remained happy with his Ulster heritage, a report by Ballance within the Wanganui Herald on sectarian rioting in Christchurch in late December 1879 is insightful.
One may need imagined that males popping out to a brand new nation to interact within the heroic work of colonisation would not less than go away behind them such outdated antagonisms as these between Orangemen and Roman Catholics, which belong wholly to previous world prejudices, and are totally absurd and unmeaning at present day and on the different finish of the world.
Having entered Parliament in 1875, Ballance would turn out to be the primary Prime Minister to move a ‘trendy’ political group, the Liberal Celebration, which was fashioned in 1891. Liberals offered the subsequent 4 Prime Ministers till displaced in 1912 by Massey of the Reform Celebration, fashioned in 1909. This however proved ample alternative to imbed a number of of Ballance’s key insurance policies following his premature dying in 1893 aged solely 54. These included the introduction of free and secular state schooling for all and feminine suffrage. In Britain and the US, girls didn’t safe the appropriate to vote till after the First World Warfare whereas common secular state schooling stays as distant as ever within the UK.
There was a level of irony in William Ferguson Massey being liable for ousting the Liberals. Massey first turned politically lively on behalf of rural conservatives, working towards the Liberal Celebration authorities of John Ballance. Though a fellow Ulsterman, Massey, a Grand Grasp of the Orange Order and Freemasons, was in some ways the antithesis of Ballance. He was additionally an advocate of the British Israelism Motion, an organisation that has been described as pseudoreligious, pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological. Between 1899 and 1902, the traditional passage tomb of Dumha na nGiall, or Mound of the Hostages, within the Tara-Skryne Valley, Co Meath, was ‘excavated’ by a gaggle of British Israelists seeking the Ark of the Covenant. They, in fact, discovered nothing however left a path of destruction worthy of Indiana Jones.
Ballance was the third New Zealand Premier to be described as a Freethinker, or Humanist. The primary, Alfred Domett (1862–1863), was an English born romantic poet and lawyer who clashed in equal measure with Christians and Māori. The second, Shetlander Robert Stout (1884–1887), a lawyer and educator who, from 1878, together with a small variety of different progressive politicians together with Ballance, supported Parliamentary payments for girls’s suffrage. Certainly, this profusion of secularist Prime Ministers earned New Zealand a popularity as a ‘paradise of unbelief’ and it stays one of many world’s most secular societies, having rejected the concept of an official church.
New Zealand’s picture as a trail-blazing ‘social laboratory’ was reinvigorated in 2017 when, in a shock consequence, Jacinda Ardern, the great-granddaughter of Irish migrants, was elected the nation’s fortieth Prime Minister. Ardern, who at age 37 turned the world’s youngest feminine head of presidency, describes herself as a social democrat and a progressive. She gave beginning to a daughter in June 2018, making her the world’s second elected head of state to provide beginning whereas in workplace, after Benazir Bhutto. A supporter of equal rights for LGBT folks, Ardern renounced her Mormon religion in her twenties to joins different overtly non-religious world leaders together with Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Sweden’s Olof Palme, Jose Mujica in Uruguay and Israel’s Golda Meir. Her empathetic response within the aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque shootings in March 2019, and swift introduction of stringent gun legal guidelines, earned her widespread recognition. The next yr, Ardern led New Zealand’s profitable response to the COVID-19 pandemic, profitable reward as one of many few Western nations to include the virus.
In April 1978, a blue plaque commemorating John Ballance was unveiled on the Ballance Home in a ceremony attended by surviving members of his household together with his niece, Eleanor Kathleen Wilson, and his grandnephew, Robin Wilson. In 1991, the restored home was formally opened as a customer centre with its nineteenth century parlour and Tea Barn. There may be additionally a nineteenth century Farm Equipment show and exhibitions specializing in Ulster-New Zealand connections. Ballance Home turned the bottom for the Ulster New Zealand Belief and Honorary Consulate in Northern Eire. New Zealand didn’t open its first Irish embassy in Dublin till 2018, in preparation for Brexit.
I’m an amazing grandnephew of John Ballance.
David Bell is a Postdoctoral Analysis Fellow in Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s College, Belfast. He’s additionally a member of the Alliance Celebration and Humanists UK however is writing in a wholly private capability.
