Irish Protestant Identities

A Review Article by Oliver P. Rafferty, SJ

Issue 390, vol.98, Summer 2009

Identity is, in some respects, a notoriously difficult and complex phenomenon, especially in the Irish context. As Anthony Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney point out in their 1995 volume Negotiating identity, a community self-identification can at times amount to little more than ‘virtual’ identity, which of its nature is idiosyncratic, and not necessarily confirmed by a wider-context. In other words, it ‘lacks reality’.[1] Some form of agreement in a more elastic social milieu is necessary for the ‘objectivity’ of identity. Too often, perhaps, in discussions of Irish Protestant identity this aspect of the problem is glossed over. Many of the essays in this volume simply take at face value and for granted the self-identity of Irish Protestants: ‘the identity of Irish Protestants is what they say it is’. Whilst one has to respect the labels that people give to themselves, such self-identity must also be seen in terms of the history, myth and the social construction of the Protestant experience in Ireland.

It must surely be legitimate to ask: does the social construction and ‘myth making’ of the Protestant Irish accord with the actual experience of the people themselves, but also with that of other social groups with which they come into contact? Undoubtedly Irish Protestants, in many respects, found the Irish Free State a discommodious place in which to live. But is it true to say, as the editors of this volume assert, that they were ‘as a community marginalized by the triumph of Irish nationalism’? (p.2). This would be accurate only if one accepts the construction that nationalism equals Catholicism, or that there were no Protestant nationalists. Indeed, it is one of the major weaknesses of this volume that the history of Protestant engagement with modern Irish nationalism is entirely written out of the story. There are no essays, or even allusions to 1798, Tone, Emmett, Butt, Parnell, Childers, nor indeed to the more ambiguously Protestant nationalists Synge and Yeats, nor, for that matter, to Presbyterian radicalism in its various guises.

Even in the Irish Free State, Protestants continued to exercise considerable influence in professions such as banking and insurance, medicine and law, and even in politics, sometimes at a high level, not to mention their involvement in Trinity College Dublin, which remained a bastion of Protestant and British influence well into the 1970s. The fact, of course, that the Free State remained part of the British Commonwealth until 1949 did much to bolster the self-confidence of those who sought identification with imperial Britain rather than independent Ireland. Daithi O’Corráin, treats us, again, to an account of the convulsions that shook the Church of Ireland when the Republic was declared, and the self-questioning and squabbles which ensured when the prayers for the king and royal family had to be dropped from the liturgy in the new Irish Republic. [2]

This is emblematic, perhaps, of a more serious issue of the essential insecurity of Irish Protestant identity, as that has emerged historically in Ireland since the Reformation. Arguably, the problem is much older, because similar issues, devoid of their sectarian, but not necessarily of their racist, overtones, bedevilled Anglo-Norman and Old English engagement with Irish political and social realities.

Such insecurities are often found in colonial and post-colonial contexts, giving rise to the ambivalence in colonial identity and discourse.[3] Many historians deny that Ireland, in fact, operated as a colony, and, indeed, its history does not bear all the marks of colonial identification, but, with regard to identity, it does fit the colonial norm. Quite often, in the history of colonialism, one finds that the colonists are treated with a certain distain bordering on contempt by the metropolitan centre. Their values and mindset can seem quite alien to the more sophisticated tastes of the central authorities and culture.[4] The colonists feel hard done by. They are misunderstood, and at times even abandoned, by the imperial centre and yet have to survive and thrive in a social environment often hostile to their presence or even their very existence.[5] And yet when the ‘Mother country’ is under threat, they are expected to ‘do their duty’ with regard to its defence. At one point in the history of Irish Protestantism, a number of these facts gave raise to what Mervyn Busteed has termed, following Tom Bartlett,[6] ‘colonial nationalism’, (p.33). Of course by the nineteenth century the terms of the debate had changed, and, given both the Union and the rise of nationalism, loyalty became a badge of identity and belonging.

One aspect of this conundrum was articulated by a former member of the UVF who, when asked by Lyndsey Harris what are Loyalists loyal to, replied:

Loyalists, I think, in the sense of the true word of Loyalism are loyal to the Crown: The British Empire; we are the British presence in Ireland and that is where there loyalty is. (p.314). [7]

This too is part of a longer history of a failure really to feel at home in Ireland. In the 1690s, Irish Protestants could identity themselves as ‘the English of this Kingdom’, even if by the 1720s they had changed their minds and became ‘Irish gentlemen’.[8] This then is an aspect of the ambiguity of Protestant identity, perhaps not sufficiently explored in these essays, of belonging and not belonging within an Irish context. At the same time, as Thomas Hennessey’s otherwise highly coloured essay pleads, there has to be a good deal of flexibility in estimating the contours of identity, but for Hennessey this is in terms of what he calls a ‘variety of Britishness’ (p.259). Once again post-colonial discourse is keen to emphasise the hybrid nature of colonial identity. [9]

However so far as Ireland is concerned, many Protestants simply do not want to use the designation ‘Irish’ for any part of their operational or rhetorical identity. No doubt various aspects of Irish Protestant historical experience has lead to such a position. In this respect Hennessy is concerned to stress the centrality of the First World War as paradigmatic for the disentangling of Irish from British identities. He quotes James Craig that Ireland’s failure to engage whole-heartedly in that conflict meant that ‘it will be no pleasure to call myself an Irishman’. The irony of Craig’s position was that, as the Irish Catholic Directory at the time pointed out, in 1916 Craig was ‘too ill to go to the Front and has relinquished his commission on that account’.[10] This supposed failure of Catholic Ireland to identify with imperial interests became another major barrier in the issue of inclusion or exclusion with regard to identity formation in twentieth-century Ireland. Hennessey quotes at length (pp.260-61) Brookeborough’s diatribe against the Free State’s neutrality in World War II. But, as is notoriously well known, more people volunteered for service in the British forces in that war from Southern than from Northern Ireland: 43,000 as opposed to 38,000.[11] However Brookeborough’s constructions were a necessary part of Protestant Unionist mentality, combined with the atavistic notions of victimhood in its historical experience, so as to explain why Irish Protestants could never really count as Irish.

This particular approach is well summarised by Hastings Doonan in his piece on two Protestant victim support groups in South Armagh, ‘Identity and victimhood among Northern Ireland border Protestants’ (pp.235-46). In terms of how Protestants read the narrative of their own history and identity Doonan concludes that:

The narrative possibilities available to Protestants can sometimes seem heavily constrained by a rigidly formalistic and minimally changing set of rituals and symbols drawn from a limited stock of historic milestones to which every new event must be accommodated, and which provides an interpretative framework in perpetuity for all that follows. (p.245).

Perhaps the most important such milestone in Irish Protestant identity and experience was the 1641 massacre of Protestants by their Catholic neighbours in Ulster. Not only the event itself but, as John Gibney points out, the often highly polemicised memory of the massacres exaggerated the extent and depth of the outrages, (p.14) to create an interpretative template for what Catholics might do if they were ever again given the opportunity to exercise the upper hand politically. By extending slightly Girardian categories, we could say that such blood sacrifice by martyred forebears, amounting to a sacrificial rite, who in turn become sacred for us, is what actually constitutes social solidarity.[12] Irish Protestant identity is both shaped and confirmed by such bloodletting. The idea of Catholic barbarity and treachery towards their Protestant neighbours was to haunt the Protestant imagination from the mid-seventeenth-century down to our own day. As late as 1991, the Orange Order could claim that the atrocities of 1641 were comparable to the Holocaust (pp.23-4).

In a sense even more than 1690, 1641 has become the foundation myth for Irish Protestant identity. Irish Catholics are cast in the role of idolatrous and murderous dis-loyalists, ever-ready to butcher Protestants, the natural ‘loyalists’ of the country, who must resist the endemic disloyalty of the Catholic population (p.9). That disloyalty is underlined for Protestants by Catholic flirtations with foreign influence especially, in the shape of Rome, Spain and France. As Ruth Dudley Edwards has pointed out, in her sympathetic and mostly uncritical examination of one aspect of Irish Protestant experience, ‘The Protestant British living in Ireland have for centuries been terrified of foreign … enemies: the only foreign leaders to have brought them succour were the little Dutchman and, later on, the unattractive Hanoverians’.[13] Thus the siege mentality was born and gave rise to a sense that even those who should best understand the Protestant Irish experience, the Protestant British, were not always completely dependable when it came to guaranteeing the community’s rights and privileges. Hence the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland came as a particularly bitter blow from the metropolitan centre to the beleaguered loyal upholders of Protestant and British values. Tom Paulin’s harsh, but accurate, caricature of Edward Carson’s maiden speech in the House of Lords bespeaks volumes of how at one level Irish Protestants see themselves. Paulin comments that Carson remarks were ‘a spectacular example of the contradictory, self-pitying, childish and festering sense of grievance, which is at the centre of loyalist mentality’.[14]

It is important to guard against the tendency to think of a single univocal Protestant identity in Ireland and the editors of this volume were careful to represent the wide and richly textured spectrum of Protestant identities: from the genteel seventeenth-century ascendancy to the hard-line loyalist of the late twentieth century. One does detect very distinct leitmotifs in identity formation across the centuries and classes in Protestant experience in Ireland. It was perhaps the relative detachment, owing to position and wealth, that enabled those such as the Fermanagh landlord Sir James Caldwell (1720-84), whom the Empress Maria Theresa made a ‘Count of Milan of the Holy Roman Empire’, to take an indulgent view of the religion of Catholics, whilst opposing their political pretensions. Further down the social scale, Protestants regarded Catholics both as a religious and a political threat. The 1859 Revival in Ulster marked not only a religious outpouring in the working class protestant community, but it undoubtedly also contributed to the upsurge in sectarian violence in Belfast. It was also, as Mark Doyle indicates, an opportunity, like Orange processions before and since, for Protestants to assert ownership of public space. Of course this formed part of a pattern of Protestant identity in general. One might be permitted to observe that one of the reasons that Protestants failed to achieve social and cultural security in Ireland was precisely the failure to take ‘ownership’ of the country, except in a strictly material sense. The confrontation with Catholic and Gaelic tradition was, for the majority of Protestants, seen simply in terms of competition for property. The other transcendent cultural and spiritual aspects of Ireland were simply repudiated and an alternative socialisation, based largely on Anglicanism and English cultural mores, was embraced as a means of emphasising difference from the natives.

Of course, Presbyterians also experienced something of the exclusion and repression of all dissenters at the hands of the establishment. However, the overriding opposition to Catholicism linked the two communities in a bond of mutual intolerance to the perceived common adversary, culminating as it did with Henry Cooke and his proclamation of the ‘banns of marriage’ between Presbyterian and Anglican interest.[15] The role Presbyterians played as frontiersmen in confrontation with Catholics in Ulster was by no mean new in the nineteenth century. Nor was the frontier role simply confined to Ireland. In a fascinating essay, ‘Ulster Presbyterian immigration to America’, James E. Doan shows that one role they were called upon to play in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts was similar to that which they played in Ulster namely ‘defenders of the English Establishment against the rebellious natives’. (p.194). Indeed, this containment of the natives, whom they regarded like Irish Catholics as ‘heathens’, was one reason, despite colonial opposition, why even as late as the 1750s the London government encouraged migration of the Ulstermen. (p.197).

The study of evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland has become something of a growth industry in recent years.[16] Patrick Mitchel adds to this by giving us his case study of evangelicals in independent Ireland. Is it true to say that there are evangelicals, in any real sense, in the Roman Catholic Church? (p.156). Certainly the criteria he outlines, as a mark of the evangelical, among which is the supreme authority of scripture as a source for knowledge of God, sits uneasily with nuanced Catholic theological understanding. I presume he means to draw a distinction between evangelicals on the one hand, and ‘charismatics’ or ‘fundamentalists’ on the other. Although there are representatives of both groups within Catholicism, they hardly constitute evangelicals as such. One interesting and salient point that he does make is in the area of the vexed question of the decline in the Protestant community in independent Ireland. Mitchel maintains that this was principally felt among the urban working classes. (p.160). If so, this was part of a larger phenomenon in Europe as a whole, where many in the working classes steadily abandoned formalized religion after World War I.

A number of the pieces in this collection touch on this question of Protestant decline in the Free State/Irish Republic. Its importance as a touchstone for Northern Protestant phobias cannot be underestimated. The Opsahl Commission found that whilst Protestants virtually knew by heart the stipulations of the Ne Temere decree (1908), most Catholics had never heard of it.[17] The Church’s insistence that the children of mixed marriages should be brought up as Catholics no doubt contributed to the decline of the Protestant population in independent Ireland. But so did the failure of single Protestants to marry, as late as 1961 over 60 per cent of Protestant males and 40 per cent of Protestant females were unmarried. This was despite the fact that there was an obsessive concern in the Protestant community about procreating (O’ Byrne, quoting the novelist Annabel Goff p.43) and marrying within the community. Indeed much of the socialization of Protestants was constructed around this (Catherine O’ Connor pp.122 ff.). A number of the contributors fail to represent accurately the numbers of Protestant in the Free State in 1926 or the extent of the decline. O’Byrne (p.42) thinks the number dropped from 146,000 to 10,000 (census figures reveal 164,215 to 95,366), Mitchel declares that Protestants decreased from a ‘25 percent minority … [to] a 5 percent minority’ (p.160). It is left to O Corrain to point out that the Protestant populations had already been declining in absolute terms since 1861 (p.87). Statistically, the decline can be read as a continuation of a vigorous trend. On the other hand, O’Byrne does point out that the idea of the Protestant community in Southern Ireland being ‘wiped out’ as a result of World War One, is at most ‘a psychologically understandable’ re-writing of their decline’ (p.44). Terence Dooley had already shown that of the 100 families he had surveyed, who had given officers to the war effort, the casualty rate was about twenty-five per cent.[18]

Of all the ingredients of Protestant identity in Ireland, perhaps the least attractive to either the outside observer or the Catholic nationalist, is the Loyalist aspect. A number of essays in the book are devoted to this important subject. Several former paramilitaries, when surveyed, declared that their reason for engaging in violence was to defend their Protestant faith and Protestant community. (p.316). While the community defence aspect is intelligible, the distinct sectarian motif is difficult to reconcile with Lyndsey Harris’ conviction that one has to grasp the thinking behind Loyalist actions in order to avoid focusing on the purely sectarian nature of violence emanating from the Loyalist community. Equally, it is difficulty to see what genuine rationale there was behind the activity of the Shankill Butchers, except sectarian psychopathology. Furthermore, when given the opportunity to play more constructive roles, as in the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement, many Loyalists, especially of the UDA variety, preferred drug dealing, extortion and the sex industry (Brian Graham, p.337). Even for a loyalist leader such as Johnny Adair, as Stephen Hopkins concedes, ‘a genuine non-violent political career was not something that appealed to [him] in the new dispensation’ (p.328).

Hopkins, and others, also make much of the fact that ‘with only few exceptions the Loyalists have seemed inarticulate and slow to react to [the] transparent republican strategy to control the narrative “telling” of the conflict’. (p.320). Absenting from the question-begging nature of the point, one possible interpretation of the inability of loyalists to articulate their political position is its essential incoherence. Taking up arms against the British state, and of course the Catholic community, in order to preserve one’s ‘British way of life’ must seem somewhat peculiar even to the most sympathetic interlocutor. Even the generous space allowed by Studies does not permit the facility of a treatment of the historical inconsistencies in the Unionist and Loyalist political posturing on their position in Ireland. But it is too much of a stereotype to contrast, as the sections on Loyalism in this work tend to do, the inarticulate, stoical, reserved but decent Unionist with devious, rebellious and loquacious Gael. The irony is that, quite often, when Loyalists have been given the opportunity in non-threatening situations to articulate and explain themselves, the results have been atrocious. One can see this for example as early as 1921, when the French journalist Simone Tery tried to get the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Sir William Coates, to explain the Unionist position, his response was ‘I have nothing to say to you’.[19] More recent and unfavourable impressions can be gleaned from the work of Peter Taylor. [20]

It would be quite wrong to end this review on a negative note. The essays in this work, taken as a whole, do much to enlighten the character and components of Irish Protestant identity. They are of a high order and are grounded in rigorous attention to sources. They repay careful reading and make available in a single volume material that is scattered over a wide range. This book will become an indispensable reference point for any student of Protestant identity in Ireland.

Oliver P. Rafferty SJ lectures in Theology at Heythrop College, London

Notes

[1]     Anthony B. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenny, Negotiating identity. Rhetoric, metaphor and socialdrama in Northern Ireland (Washington and London, 1995), p.29.

[2]     See Daithi O Corrain, Rendering to God and Caesar: the Irish churches and the two states in Ireland, 1949-73 (Manchester, 2006).

[3]     See Homi Bhabha ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of empire: colonialism in a bourgeois world (Berkeley, 1997) pp.152-60.

[4]     A spectacular example of this took place in 1912. As Derek Lundy has made clear, ‘In drafting and signing the seditious and menacing Covenant and in forging their private army, the Ulster Protestants confirmed for the average Englishman how completely different they were. It was unimaginable that any group or any region in England would do the same thing’. Lundy, Men that God made mad: A journey through truth, myth, and terror in Northern Ireland (London, 2006), p.280.

[5]     As Deirdre O’Byrne points out in her piece ‘Last of the line: the disappearing Anglo-Irish in twentieth-century fictions and autobiographies’, pp.40-52, quite often the orphan is a trope in Irish ascendancy fiction. The idea of a walled garden is another central motif and hence the exotic fruit serves as a symbol of the transplanted Anglo-Irish. As O’Byrne comments ‘They are an incongruous feature of the Irish landscape, not quite fitting in … and regarded as with curiosity by the Gaelic-Irish’. Ibid. p.41.

[6]     Tom Bartlett, ‘ “A people made for copies rather than originals”: the Anglo-Irish, 1760-1800’, in International History Review 31.1: pp.11-25.

[7]     My emphasis

[8]     R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London, 1988), p.178.

[9]     See for example Amar Acheraion, Rethinking Postcolonialism: colonial discourse in modern literatures and the legacy of classical writers (London and New York, 2008), p. 2.

[10]    Irish Catholic Directory (Dublin, 1917) p.508. His ill health did not prevent him from becoming the first prime minister of Northern Ireland and he lived until 1940.

[11]    Kevin Kenny, ‘The Irish in the Empire’, in Kenny (ed.) Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004) p.109. Furthermore Catholic Ireland’s loyalty to specifically British interests could have no more eloquent testimony than the fact that between November 1918 and September 1921 some 20,000 Irish Catholics join the British Army. In other words more Irish Catholics served the Crown forces than fought against Britain in the War of Independence. See Peter Kersten, ‘Irish soldiers in the British Army 1792-1922: suborned or subordinated?’, in Journal of Social History 17: 1 (1983) p.51.

[12]    Rene Girard, Violence and the sacred (E. T. Baltimore and London, 1977).

[13]    Ruth Dudley Edwards, The faithful tribe: an intimate portrait of the Loyal Institutions (London, 1999), p.203.

[14]    Quoted in Susan McKay, Northern Protestants: an unsettled people, 2^nd edition, (Belfast, 2005) p.296.

[15]    Andrew Boyd, Montgomery and the Black man: religion and politics in nineteenth-century Ulster (Dublin, 2006), pp.50-53.

[16]    See for example, David W. Beddington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a history from the 1730sto the 1980s (London, 1989), and Crawford Gribben and Andrew R. Holmes, (eds) Protestant Millennialism, Evangelicalism and Irish society 1790-2005 (Basingstoke, 2006).

[17]    Andy Pollok (ed.), A Citizen’s Inquiry: The Opsahl Report on Northern Ireland (Dublin, 1993).

[18]    Terence Dooley, The decline of the big house in Ireland: a study of Irish landed families 1860-1960 (Dublin, 2001), p.125.

[19]    Ian McKeane, ‘“What satire would be more eloquent than reality”? Reporting the northern unionists in the French press, 1919-22’, pp.221-232, here p.229.

[20]    Peter Taylor, Loyalists 2nd ed. (London, 2000).