Southern Irish Protestants: an example of
de-ethnicisation ?
Joseph Ruane
Department of Sociology
University College Cork
Western Road
Cork
IRELAND
Tel: 353 (0)21 4902619
Email: [email protected]
David Butler
Department of Geography
University College Cork
Western Road
Cork
IRELAND
Tel.: + 353 (0)21 490 4129
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there
are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of
Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed
themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively,
from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past)
British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and
overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this
is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic-Protestant
relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from
research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.
Introduction
The study of minorities forms a very large part of research on ethnicity and nationalism.
Minorities created by the secession of territories from larger states (including empires) or
by the break-up of larger states are of particular interest. They take a variety of forms. They
may be members of the previously ruling nationality who have remained in the territory
after secession; they may be segments of ethnic diasporas that played a middle role in the
administration of the state; they may be segments of adjoining national groupings that for
one reason or another are located within the boundaries of the new state; they may be tiny
encapsulated minorities who do not belong to any wider group. But what if the ethnic status
of the group is unclear or contested? The temptation is to leave the matter of precise
definition aside and proceed to the task of tracking their experience as a minority.1 But the
uncertainty and complexity of their status may itself shape that experience. These issues
arise in the context of the Protestant minority in independent Ireland.
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
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Post-partition Ireland produced two minorities whose size and subsequent histories contrast
sharply with each other. The Catholic minority in Northern Ireland was large, refused to
accept the legitimacy of the new Northern state or the finality of partition and met with
harsh treatment at the hands of the Protestant unionist majority. The effect was chronic
instability and eventual political breakdown. The other minority – the Protestants of
Southern Ireland – differs from it on virtually every point. It was small to begin with and
decreased in size over time, it accepted the legitimacy of the state and affirmed an Irish
identity, while dissenting at important points from the version of Irish identity held by the
majority. It has not been a source of instability, confessional clashes have been rare and the
years of violent intercommunal conflict in the North produced few echoes in the South.
The most common explanation for the tranquil nature of relations in the Irish state is a selfflattering one: Southerners are less bigoted than their Northern counterparts and handled
matters in a spirit of give and take, making Southern Protestants on many counts a privileged
minority. Not everyone goes along with so positive a picture. The issue most frequently
raised is Protestant demographic decline (if Protestants were a privileged minority, why did
their numbers decline?) but attention has also centred on their abandonment of their
previous allegiance to Britain. That this has happened is not in doubt. The question is how it
is to be interpreted. Akenson (1975) has contrasted the willingness of successive
governments in the new Irish state to recognise the religious identity of Protestants with
their stubborn resistance to making any concession towards their cultural identity as British.
If Protestants are more self-confident now than in the past, he argued, it is a confidence
born of having become ‘Irish nationals’ (Akenson 1975:134). A similar theme occurs in
Coakley (1998) who argues that the structural and institutional weakness of Southern
Protestants left them unable to resist the assimilative pressures of the majority community.
The effect has been their transformation from a British ethnic minority to an Irish religious
one.
The fact that today Northern Irish Protestants affirm a British national identity and Northern
Irish Catholics an Irish one gives this view of Southern Protestants a superficial plausibility.
But there are problems. For example, White (1975) insists that Southern Protestants always
had a deep sense of being Irish even when they were politically unionist; a similar emphasis
on an Irish identity and a British allegiance is evident in McDowell’s (1997) discussion of
Southern Irish unionists, and in Brown’s (2004) description of the experience of Protestants
in the new state. Is a British allegiance the same thing as a British national or ethnic identity,
and is its abandonment the same as abandoning a national or ethnic identity? It is far from
obvious. In a comprehensive study of Southern Protestants Bowen (1983) stressed the
British identity of one segment of Southern Protestants – those whom he calls and who see
themselves as ‘West Britons’ – but for other Protestants he pointed to a distinctiveness
based on a complex interplay of ethnicity, religion and class. It is also worth noting Coakley’s
observation that at the turn of the twentieth century Southern Protestants ‘did not opt
unambiguously’ for either of the alternative versions of heritage, history and politics of the
time, and were unwilling ‘to see themselves as a distinct national group from Catholics’
(Coakley 1998: 104).
This suggests that something different was involved in the Southern Protestant adaptation to
Irish independence than is conveyed by the notion of a shift from a British ethnic or national
identity to an Irish one. But if it was not that, what was it? The issue is important in its own
right but it has wider relevance. One is for the situation in Northern Ireland where the
assumption that this is an ethnic or ethno-national conflict is now standard. The two parts of
Ireland are very different and have been so since the seventeenth century. But the elements
and many of the conditions of identity formation have been the same (Ruane and Todd
1996). Careful consideration of the Southern Irish case may open up fresh perspectives on
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
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the Northern Irish one. It is relevant also to other cases where complexly layered historical
processes have produced minorities who do not fit neatly into the standard categories of
ethnicity, in particular where identities are multiple – religious, ethnic, social, national,
imperial.
This paper draws on ongoing research into the Southern Protestant minority and the picture
that emerges is more complex than either the ‘de-nationalisation’ or ‘de-ethnicisation’ theses
suggest. Two factors contribute to this complexity. The first is the ambiguous and slippery
nature of ‘British’ as a concept, including in Britain itself. It has a host of national, state and
public institutional references and associated symbols as well as the patina of centuries. It
once described an empire, then a commonwealth and still describes a state. It can describe a
set of values and even a way of life. It is a political allegiance and can generate a sense of
wider social belonging, though this is the case for some more than others. But there is no
agreement as to whether or in what sense there is a British nation (compare Colley 1992;
Robbins 1998; Kumar 2000; Taylor 2001).
The second is the contested nature of Irish culture and identity. To say, as White (1975)
does, that Southern Protestants always had a deep sense of being Irish is not to say that they
understood it in the same way as their Catholic neighbours. In every country constructions
of national identity are extremely variable. But something more fundamental is involved
here. To address it we have to examine why in the past Irish Catholics and Protestants
developed such opposed ways of being Irish and what remains of this today. We first deal
with the issue in general terms; we then look at what it has meant empirically for one
particular group of Protestants, those of West Cork in the south-west of Ireland.
Protestants, the Irish situation and the British context
Conor Cruise O’Brien (1965:98-9) once said of Irishness that it was ‘not primarily a question
of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and
usually of being mauled by it.’ The wry reference to being ‘mauled’ should not distract from
the crucial point: that Ireland existed as a situation, one that profoundly affected those who
were caught up in it. It does not mean that all were affected in the same way or became
alike as a result. On the contrary, the most distinctive and enduring quality of the Irish
situation was its capacity to produce people who would share many cultural features and at
some level the same identity, and still remain profoundly ‘other’. In the case of Irish
Protestants it meant something else as well: it was a situation which over time made them
distinctly different from their communities of origin in Scotland and in England. To
understand what happened, we have to come to grips with the Irish situation and how it
affected those caught up in it.
Conflict – specifically communal conflict - lay at its heart. At a theoretical level we analyse
this in terms of the intersection and interaction between three elements: difference (where
the dimensions of difference may be singular or multiple, without any one of these being
necessarily foundational), power/inequality (which may take the form of diffuse and shifting
power relations or highly structured modes of domination) and community (which may
range from the minimal form of a social category with little capacity for collective action to a
highly solidaristic and mobilised community engaging routinely in collective action) (Ruane
and Todd 1996:16-48; 2004). The categories of difference, power and community can be
used to analyse situations where identities are fluid and changing and communal solidarities
limited, but they are equally relevant to ones where identities are deeply structured and
persistent with communal solidarity strong and at times intense. This was the Irish case.
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
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What distinguishes a situation of openness, fluidity and minimal cohesiveness from one of
boundedness, structure and cohesion is the tightness of the interrelatedness between the
three elements. What produces that tightening is a critical juncture that brings difference,
power and community together in some form of mutually constituting systemic
interdependence. At this point difference becomes inscribed in power relations, power
struggle produces communal cohesion which leads to the further elaboration of difference.
With this – and the situations, interests and identities that it generates - comes a tendency
to the reproduction of the conditions of conflict. Where this happens the likelihood is a path
dependent pattern (Pierson, 2004) with forms of structural and cultural ‘lock-in’. Structural
lock-in is where the systemic effect reproduces interests in a zero-sum way; cultural lock-in
is where the systemic effect reproduces identities in a zero-sum way. In situations of
persistent communal conflict the tendency is for both kinds to be present and to reinforce
each other, but one may persist while the other is undone (Ruane 2006: 510-11).
This model gives us a distinctive view of Irish development and the origins of its divisions.
Ireland was a lordship of the English crown from late medieval times; the early modern
period saw its full integration into the English/British state at a time of political centralisation,
religious reformation and colonial expansion (Canny 2001). Resistance to English centralising
pressures and the reformation encouraged the adoption of ever more radical policies.
Native displacement and plantation by Protestant settlers from Britain was first used as a
limited measure of centralisation and cultural and religious reform in the 1560s; it was
eventually used to replace virtually the entire native Catholic ruling class with English and
Scottish Protestant settlers. The settlers, however, remained a minority of the population
overall. The situation took on a compelling logic. What the British government wanted
about all was a stable and secure Ireland. This meant a ruling class at once effective and loyal
to the crown. The section of the population with the greatest inclination towards and
interest in loyalty were the settlers: as Protestants they had religious grounds for loyalty; as
a minority they could only survive with crown support. But to be effective they had to be
given a monopoly of power (Barnard 2004).
Settler rule came with a price, however: the chronic alienation of the Catholic majority and
the difficulty of ever securing their loyalty. It was in this that structural lock-in consisted:
once crown and minority had opted for a system of settler rule, neither could easily or
safely disengage from it. There was also cultural lock-in. Cultural opposition had its own
systemic logic, based on multiple differences, each difference conceived as oppositional and
each reinforcing the others. Protestants were not simply religiously other, they were also
ethnically other (English and Scottish as opposed to Gaelic-Irish and Old English), of settler
as opposed to native stock and (in their own minds at least) culturally civilised and
progressive in contrast to the barbarous and backward Catholics/natives/Gaelic Irish. Once
trapped in the logic of this web of interlocking differences it was extremely difficult to break
out of it. The result was a specific intersection between difference, power and community
that made conflict at once inescapable and self-reproducing (Ruane and Todd 1996).
How this would unfold would depend on the balance of power. The long term trend was for
power to shift from Protestant to Catholic and for each major shift to lead to a challenge to
Protestant control. In the logic of the system each challenge was initially met by a united
Protestant and British resistance. But there were limits to this alliance arising from the
differing geo-political interests of the British government and the Protestant minority. What
mattered most to Protestants was that they maintain their dominant position in Ireland.
What mattered most to the British government was that Ireland be stable and a secure part
of the empire: who ruled it and how it was ruled was a secondary matter. This meant that
the British government could contemplate compromising with Catholics in a way that
Protestants could not. Catholic challenges eventually resulted in British-inspired
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compromises that Catholics invariably found ‘too little too late’ and which filled Protestants
with anxiety about their future (Bartlett 1992; Boyce 1992).
At this point we need to look more closely at the changing relationship of Irish Protestants
to their two key reference points - Britain and Ireland. For the first generation of settlers
the native Irish were religiously and ethnically other; they were nationally other in the sense
of belonging to Ireland rather than Britain; and they were the people whom, with the
support of the crown, they had defeated in battle and whose land they had appropriated. At
one level none of this would change: the religious difference was fundamental; the difference
in ethnic origins lived on through the religious differences (and even family names); and no
one – not least the Catholic Irish – forgot how Protestants had come by their lands. But
there was movement along and between these dimensions of difference. The first change
was the increasing importance of the confessional labels at the expense of the ethnic ones
(Barnard 1998:207). A second was the embracing by Protestants of an Irish identity not
simply as a term of self-reference, but in the more important sense of writing themselves
into the narrative of Irish history. This took some time – it was delayed by the Catholic and
pejorative associations of the term ‘Irish’ (Barnard 1998: 207-8) - but it was well underway
by the middle of the eighteenth century (Connolly, 1992:119-21). A third change was the
development of a concept of an Irish nation (Leerssen 1996:12-13) that included both
Catholic and Protestant (Connolly 1992:122).2
It was in this sense, and not by virtue of residence alone, that the descendants of the English
and Scottish settlers became and thought of themselves as Irish. It does not mean that there
was a merging of the communities, or even a tendency for this to happen. Catholics had
their own, very different, historical narrative and version of Irish identity (Cunningham 2004)
and Protestants remained religious and ethnic others who with crown support had
dispossessed and displaced them. Protestant attitudes to Catholics mixed hostile religious
and ethnic stereotypes. Both groups differed in the degree of their openness to Britain.
Catholic attitudes were laced with ambivalence. Protestants were more open. They
recognised their historic links to the peoples of Britain and their shared religious interests
and political loyalties, and they identified strongly with the empire. But there was also
ambivalence. They appreciated British support but resented their dependence; they were
acutely sensitive to British condescension and lack of appreciation for their contribution to
British interests; their loyalty was at once sincere and conditional, and they lived in fear that
one day they would be sacrificed to wider imperial interests (Miller 1978).
By this stage a complex cultural and political situation had developed. There was significant
cultural commonality across the different ethno-religious groups – those of Scottish
Presbyterian, English Episcopalian, Catholic Old English and Gaelic Irish descent – that was
particularly evident at the regional level. Both Protestants and Catholics now defined
themselves in an Irish context. However, they did so in contradictory ways and the
relationship between them was one of – at best – rivalry and mistrust. The political situation
was becoming increasingly fraught. To Catholic ancestral grievances were added in the
nineteenth century economic crisis and uneven development and increasing cultural
anglicisation. The combination of superior numbers and democracy allowed them to mount
a challenge to the British-Protestant alliance and to extract increasing concessions from the
British government. Concessions were not sufficient to satisfy an increasingly militant
nationalism and nationalists – overwhelmingly Catholic – now began to demand Irish selfrule. Self-rule would have turned Protestants into a political minority, put their economic
interests at risk and subjected them to the imperatives of a version of Irish history and
identity very different from their own.
Their political response was unequivocal: support for the union. Their cultural response was
more mixed. One view is that they responded by embracing a British national identity
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(Pringle 1985; Loughlin 1995). It is more accurate to say with Coakley (1998: 104) that they
withheld judgement, yielding nothing on their claim on an Irish identity while continuing to
insist on their British allegiance and attachment to the union and empire. It is possible that
there was a difference in response between the north-east and the rest of the country.
Apart from the legacy of a more dense settlement and proximity to Scotland, the concept of
British nationhood then emerging had greater potential appeal in the north-east than
elsewhere. Colley (1992) argues for the period 1707-1837 that it was based on war,
Protestantism, trade and empire; the industrial revolution and the new urban-based mass
culture would add further ingredients (Howe 2005). Protestants in the north-east could
more easily identify with this combination of elements than Protestants elsewhere on the
island. But the difference can be overstressed: for Protestants throughout the island the locus
classicus of British national identity was Great Britain, not the British Isles as a whole, and
Ireland’s relationship to it was at best ambiguous. 3
It is a truism that in the early twentieth century Irish Protestants had both Irish and British
components to their identity. The challenge is to clarify what these components were and
what they meant. The implication of our discussion is as follows. The Irish component was a
primary identification with Ireland as the country in which Protestants and their forbears had
lived for three centuries, into whose history and historical record they had written
themselves, and whose culture they had shaped and been shaped by. It was a national
identification, albeit one that was contested by that of its ethno-religious Catholic rival. The
British component was at once more diffuse and more specific. It consisted of feelings of
historic kinship and affinity with the diverse peoples of Great Britain and the empire with
whom Protestants shared a common language and traditions, an allegiance to the crown and
a wish (for a multiplicity of reasons) to remain part of the union and empire. It was an
important and coherent part of Protestant identity, but unlike the Irish component, it was
neither an ethnic nor a national identity.4
How Protestants balanced the British and Irish components of their identities varied from
one individual to another. For some, the crown was a focus of intense feeling, the empire
was a palpably real place and Ireland was a place to move out from; when Irish independence
meant a choice had to be made between remaining in a de-Britishising Ireland and leaving,
they preferred to leave. For others, it was the Irish context that mattered above all else, and
faced with the same choice they chose to let go of crown and empire. But for all it was a
choice they would have preferred not to have to make.
Independence and its consequences
What happened to those Southern Protestants who chose to remain in independent Ireland?
We have seen the arguments of Akenson (1975) and Coakley (1998) that they now had to
contend with a state and a society hostile to their Britishness and either chose or were
forced to undergo a process of de-nationalisation and de-ethnicisation. It is certainly the case
that there was public hostility to expressions of Britishness - the display of British symbols,
acts of commemoration, expressions of British allegiance - and that the new government
removed some of the more prominent legacies of the British period. It is true too that the
Irish government would have been unsympathetic to claims made on the basic of British
minority rights. Finally, it is the case that the vast majority of Southern Protestants quickly
abandoned unionism and - more gradually - their attachment to Britain and the empire.
The question is whether the abandonment of unionism and the attachment to Britain and
empire should be seen as a process of de-nationalisation or of de-ethnicisation. This would
be the case only if Britishness for Protestants was an ethnicity or a form of nationhood. We
have argued that it was neither: it was an identification with and wish to belong to a wider
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cultural and political context and an allegiance to its political centre, the crown. This is not
to understate its importance or the emotional cost of disengaging from it: the links with
Britain were a valued and familiar part of their lives, and their attenuation was not made
easier by the narrowness of the world to which they had now to adjust. But it was not the
same as losing a primary national identity. It was possible to keep faith mentally and
spiritually with the British world they had lost by displaying its symbols, acting out its rituals
and participating in its commemorative acts. Churches, schools and other institutions were
important loci for this. But what had been most valuable about it was really belonging to it;
participation at one remove was a poor substitute.
Even though ‘British’ was not a primary identity, it could have been used as a public marker
for Southern Protestants after independence. Except for ‘West Britons’ it did not become
that. As a religious minority Protestants already had a perfectly serviceable basis for claiming
minority rights in the two areas that counted most: health and education. A claim to British
minority rights might have served some purpose in resisting the imposition of the language
revival policy on Protestant schools, but it is unlikely. As Akenson (1975:128-130) points
out, Protestant objections on that score met a brick wall. But there was a further reason.
The transition to independence was traumatic and in some respects the auguries for the
future were not good. But in other ways independence promised a new beginning.
Expressed in the language of path dependence, independence broke the structural lock-in of
the past and Catholics and Protestants were now in a position to re-build their identities and
relationships on a less than conflictual basis. Those Protestants who chose to remain in
Southern Ireland had every interest in that process; a claim to a now redundant Britishness
would not have helped.
The view of Southern Protestants as a minority forced or choosing to yield its British ethnic
or national birthright and re-define itself as an Irish religious minority is, therefore, wide of
the mark. It is to misunderstand their relationship to Britain and to ignore the depth of their
identification with Ireland rooted in a centuries-long embeddedness in its land and history.
There is another point to be stressed, however. The fact that Protestants had an Irish
identity did not open the way to a completely trouble-free relationship with the Catholic
majority for the simple reason that the two versions of Irish identity were not the same.
Indeed this made reconciling the two identities all the more difficult: the Protestant sense of
Irishness derived from their embeddedness in the land and history of Ireland; but for
Catholics this raised the question of the manner of that embedding and at whose expense it
had been.
Returning to the language of path dependence, the undoing of the conditions of structural
lock-in in Irish Protestant-Catholic relationships, did not automatically undo the conditions
of cultural lock-in. In fact for decades Catholics and Protestants continued to view each
other from old positions and through familiar stereotypes. Major change began only in the
1960s and there has been much change since. But even today it should not be assumed that
the past is entirely gone. In the next section we look at samples from interviews conducted
with Protestants in West Cork that capture some of the points of tension.
Protestants and Catholics in West Cork
We have been describing Irish (and later Southern Irish) Protestants in very general terms
with limited reference to denominational, regional and class differences. For this level of
analysis and within the constraints of space, such generalisations are permissible: there has
been a logic to the Catholic-Protestant divide at the level of the island that has operated
regardless of internal Catholic and - still more – Protestant differences. At the same time
there have always been locality-, denomination- and class-based specificities. Our field
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research is among the Protestants of West Cork, one of the significant rural clusters of
Protestants in Southern Ireland whose roots go back to the Munster plantation of the
sixteenth century. They belong to Bowen’s category of ‘farmers and rural townsmen’
(Bowen 1983:166-75), quite different from his urban middle and lower classes and, even
more so, the ‘West Britons’. West Cork Protestants have a strong sense of local place and
live far from the troubled counties of the Ulster borderlands. But 1919-23 West Cork had
its own experience of ‘troubles’: it was one of the areas of violent confrontation between
the IRA and the British, and later the Irish, army, and Protestants suffered savage reprisals
(Hart 1997; 1998). The latter events remain controversial and neither community likes to
revisit them.5
The Protestants of West Cork are a small percentage of their local area (8.2 per cent in
2002) but significantly higher than the figure for the country as a whole (3.7 per cent in
2002).6 Denominationally they are overwhelmingly Church of Ireland followed by Methodists
who are largely nineteenth century converts from the Church of Ireland. Today both
denominations downplay their differences. There are recent Presbyterian arrivals, but the
older Presbyterian families, always small in number, have died out as a result of
intermarriage, non-marriage or emigration. The data presented below are drawn from 125
in-depth interviews, principally with members of the Church of Ireland and Methodists but
some with other dissenting groups and with Catholics, that explored issues of identity and
community in an open-ended way.7 The quotations that follow are chosen for the clarity
with which they articulate the positions on these issues.8
Writing in 1975 Jack White (1975:21) quoted a West Cork Protestant on the sympathies of
West Cork Protestants during the war of independence: ‘We were very British at the time,
most of the Protestant people were very British’. ‘British’ in this context was political
Britishness: loyalty to the crown, as well as an attachment to its symbols, opposition to the
rising forces of nationalism and republicanism, respect and support for the forces of law.
Britishness in the positive sense of loyalty to the crown and attachment to its symbols has
been gone for a considerable time though its decline was slow and uneven.
Selective emigration played a role, as one respondent (age: 40s) made clear:
‘The other thing that I think happened was that those who were very pro-British by
and large left the country either during the Troubles, or in the twenty years that
followed – not all of them, but quite a lot did. So I think emigration was quite
selective; whereas a lot of Republicans left the country after the Civil War, equally an
awful lot of Unionists … left the country too. If they couldn’t stomach the changes,
they went, and by in large, those who stayed were those who were quite prepared to
give the country a chance and … throw in their lot with the new state.’
A small number who were pro-British and did not leave tried to maintain the tradition of
loyalty as best they could in a hostile environment. They succeeded for a generation. Then it
faded:
‘There were a few obviously who decided to retire to their little spots and who
continued to fly the mast after dark, or whatever! – but they died out, I think, with the
generation that they were. Now some of their offspring would have gone off to join
British forces and that in the Second World War; there was a lot of … but then again
there was a lot of volunteering among Catholics as well, and the number who were
involved in the Second World War was quite big.’
Now it is virtually gone:
‘There might be a very small grouping around Skibbereen, and a very small grouping
around the Kilbrittan cum Harbour View area around Bandon … who would sort of
relate to ‘West Brit’ tendencies … But no, this ‘West Brit’ thing; you would still in the
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sixties have found, in quite a number of homes I think, a photograph of Queen
Elizabeth, or a Coronation photograph in the sitting room. You don’t see that
anymore, ever.’
Indeed so distant now is that period that another respondent (age: 60s) questioned whether
it was ever a significant tendency at all:
‘I wouldn’t think there was much of a period of adjustment. I would think they looked
at themselves as being very Irish. We have a lot of people around here that would
have spoken Irish and Irish is what they were. I don’t think they felt any sort of
attachment to England at all. I remember one of my grandmothers would have had a
photograph of the Queen but I don’t think that would ever have been true down
around here at all’.
Disengaging from Britishness did not mean, however, a smooth transition to a shared sense
of Irishness. Here quite striking tensions and ambivalences emerge. One respondent, now in
his 70s, recounted how his father-in-law, a Methodist minister stood up in the church in the
1920s and challenged the people: “If you are Irish, you stay in Ireland, and you submit to the
government that would be coming. If not, get out of it”. When asked if ‘got a reaction’, he
responded: ‘He did, but my father-in-law was a great Irishman, and he was a Methodist, but
very national. He said “Ireland is for the Irish, and we must put our back into it and make
something worth being proud of.”
That it seemed appropriate to the minister to present so stark an alternative - either submit
to the new government or get out - gives some idea of the political climate of the time. Two
further points are worth commenting on: firstly, in the phrase ‘he was a Methodist, but very
national’ the meaning of the word ‘national’ appears to be essentially political; secondly, the
statement ‘If you are Irish, you stay in Ireland and you submit to the government’ contains
no implication that the group he is addressing considers itself as anything other than Irish.
Other respondents revealed tensions not simply about engaging with the new order of
things, but about Irishness. According to another Protestant respondent (age: 50s):
‘There wasn't an affinity with being Irish. Very definitely they would have put up with
the fact that they were born on this land but they wouldn't have been … that wouldn't
have been something that would have been high in their priority to say that they were
Irish…. [Or to prove it, or anything?] Or to prove it, no. It was just the way things
were. I think that was possibly a throw-back from the Civil War. … (T)hey would
have been keeping a very low profile on things. The rectors would have been involved
at local … they would have been invited in local things but not anything like the
involvement of the parishes today, interacting with the Roman Catholic parishes - in
West Cork or anywhere else. It would have been very much 'keep to yourselves' and
they would also have …they would have voted but … Local Government wasn't such
a big thing, probably, they would … yes, they would have voted for their local TDs and
it wouldn't have been the end of the world had they not voted. They didn't see it as
terribly important.’
The next quote is from an Englishwoman (age: 60s) long resident in the area:
‘I don’t know what percentage but maybe 80 per cent [in my parish] would be English
names. Sometimes there was a sort of unwillingness to be a 100 per cent Irish...very
hard to pin down…. … it would be to do with history I suppose. Things
like...Remembrance Day with the poppies and having a state service, that had gone by
the time I arrived here. People would wear the red poppies and have them for sale for
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the church, which I was uncomfortable about … I found it a very British sort of thing
... The royal family was spoken of fondly...what are you talking about you have been
Irish for 300 years. Maybe because being English myself maybe I was trying to be more
Irish than the Irish and I didn’t want to play the English card at all and I was very
suspicious of anything English. It was something that always just puzzled me and I felt
that people wouldn’t talk to me about it. I can’t know think of incidences but I think
there were incidences where they didn’t want to identify as a 100 per cent Irish...Irish
yes but with reservations or something’.
These comments could be seen as evidence of a lack of an Irish identity, but the political
context is crucial: the Catholic-nationalist claim to ownership of the label ‘Irish’ and
unwillingness to accord it fully to Protestants. As one elderly Protestant (age: 90s) pointed
out:
‘But apart from that, there was an undercurrent the whole time … that we [Roman
Catholics] were the people, and these Protestants were blow-ins … that these
Protestants were English, and that if you were English, you were Protestant, and you
couldn’t be a true Irishman!’.
A Catholic (age: 60s) concurred:
‘Even local Church of Ireland people, local Methodist people whose families have been
here since the 1600s you could say … would be looked at as being outsiders. Yet
they would be fully Irish. Now a lot of it is their own fault. …. the fact that all the
school plays rugby and hockey … whereas we would associate games like hurling and
football with Roman Catholics’.
In the first quote Protestant = ‘blow-in’ = English and as Protestant ‘you couldn’t be a true
Irishman’ (italics added). In the second we are told that people whose families have been in
the area since the 1600s are looked at as ‘outsiders’. But though the respondent himself
considers them ‘fully Irish’ it is ‘their own fault’ that not everyone else does because their
schools play rugby and hockey rather than games associated with Roman Catholics.
The emphasis in these quotes is on undercurrents and how people are perceived rather than
what is said. But at times these perceptions are verbalised, and when it happens the effect
can be deeply wounding. A respondent (age: 70s) recounted two incidents:
‘[T]here was a man sitting next to me …he didn’t know me. And he turned to me and
said to me ‘I suppose your family came over and took over land from the Irish.’ …. So
when I was walking out I said to him ‘my family took not one piece of land from the
Irish, thank you very much, they came over and worked hard!’ Or something like that.
Really I was gobsmacked. Where was he coming from! But some bitter presumption.
But you see that sort of thing, that sort of thing is under the skin still….
It is ridiculous. I think people are made to feel like that because I remember a young
farmer … and they were an old family, they were an old gentry family. And he was
going around saying ‘I’m Irish! I’m Irish!’ and I mean people must have been getting at
him saying he wasn’t Irish but of course he had land. You see it’s land [causes it].
Even starker evidence of what was still ‘under the skin’ in the mid 1980s, and its relationship
to land, was inadvertently exposed in a local bar/grocery in a country village. The
respondent’s (aged 50s) brother and sister were in the grocery section, awaiting service,
when they overheard a conversation in the ‘snug’ on the other side of the partition
concerning their townland, where there was a farm for sale:
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
10
‘At one stage all of our townland … every farm would have been owned by a
Protestant, whereas my brother would have been the last one left [at this stage] …
but the discussion going on inside in the pub was kind of “Sure it’s all ours again, we’ve
only one more and it will be all ours … [this was] 20 years ago probably [1984], so
anyway my brother lost his rag over all this and took on the shopkeeper … They
never went into the shopkeeper [again] … It was the shopkeeper inside philosophising
with somebody … If you scratch under the surface you find out … obviously a few
pints now and they chatting, never thinking that anybody would overhear them. But of
course Robert [pseudonym] took them on over it and nobody ever went into the
shop afterwards because of the fact that … actually that would have been the feeling
you see … to this day … My brother took that very badly for years. He was very hurt
over it … What had we done, we had nothing done … But there is still an element that
we are British down west … It is still an element of it. There is yes, that we are not
quite Irish.’
Just as some Catholics harbour doubts about the ‘Irishness’ of Protestants, they can also find
it difficult to come to grips with Protestant nationalist sentiments, as the experience of a
nationalist-minded Church of Ireland rector (age: 40s) shows:
‘There are long memories in West Cork. And while the Church of Ireland became
entirely – as I said to you – became entirely reconciled to the new political regime and
quite patriotic about it, and very involved in it, there was a sense that many, if not all
of them, had been on the wrong side in the War of Independence. And you know
how, all over West Cork there are crosses on the side of the road, usually in the old
Irish script, about how people had been killed by Crown Forces. And … all sorts of
strange commemorations would go on at these things. And I wouldn’t have normally
have been told about that, even if they were sort of – almost in my churchyard. It was
almost as if it was assumed that I wouldn’t want to be part of that … which I found a
little irritating.’
It is as if Protestants have been guilty of an ‘original sin’ (taking Catholic land, supporting the
union, resisting or not supporting the fight for independence) from which there is still no
final redemption. Meanwhile (as Protestants often observe) Catholics can stray from the fold
with impunity. The same rector described what happened when he was invited to a
commemoration of the 200th anniversary of local events that occurred in 1797 at the time of
the United Irish rebellion. It was planned months in advance and the day of the
commemoration happened to coincide with the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. The
rector made sure he was present:
‘… the one thing I was not going to do was not be there. I didn’t want people thinking
the Protestant rector’s at home watching the British Royal family on the television. So
I dutifully went to this thing, at the selfsame hour – and there was nobody there. They
were all watching Diana’s funeral. There were a sort of miserable half-dozen [there] –
there was nobody on the roads. And I went and did my Republican patriotic duty, and
when I was coming back past St Peter’s [Church of Ireland church] there was this
enormous scaffolding on the tower, they were re-pointing the tower, and there were
stonemasons there, up on the steeple, and they would all have been Roman Catholics
to a man, I knew, and they had a radio up there, listening to Diana’s funeral, up the
scaffolding at full tilt! After I had sort of been killing myself showing that this isn’t the
sort of things that Protestants do!’
Has the situation got much better in the more recent period? If the report of another
Church of Ireland respondent (age: 50s) is accurate, there has been improvement, although
within limits:
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
11
‘But certainly there would be … now it would be a much easier situation I think to be
involved in local community than what it used to be. I think there are maybe still
some barriers which, listening to my nephews, they still find difficulty with because of
the fact that they are Church of Ireland and maybe it's a lack of trust or something, on
the other side of the fence, I don't know. Or is it just not knowing really what we
stand for because I think the Roman Catholic community have always held the opinion
that everybody on this island was Roman Catholic and there was nothing else or could
be anything else.’ [That Irish equals Roman Catholic?]. Yes’
Another (age: 40s) reports much greater integration in his area:
‘They [Protestants] are never made to feel and never are second class in any sense, or
on the fringe or deliberately staying on the fringe of that community. They are very
involved, very involved in the culture of the community life, music, as I say there’s a
parishioner who is running the céilí classes, parishioners who are playing for Irish
nights in pubs, parishioners who are providing music, and doing various different
things. … I’ve never heard that expressed [that Protestants are not fully Irish] - it has
never been articulated to me as an issue.’
A final quote from an individual (age: 40s) whose family lost members in the violence of the
independence period brings out with particular clarity how Protestants saw their
relationship to Ireland and to Britain: Britain was a country to ‘stay with’ or ‘keep allegiance’
to, Ireland – despite what had happened - was the country one was part of:
‘But some of my relations on my mother’s side. They were shot … But [growing up] I
never heard them, I never heard them say anything, say anything like we should have
stayed with Britain or kept allegiance, I mean they were part of the country of Ireland
and that.’
Further quotations from the interviews would add detail and nuance without changing its
essential message. For Protestants the British dimension was a context and an allegiance not
an ethnic or a national identity. There was no post-independence shift to an Irish identity: it
was there all along. But it was not the Catholic version of Irishness: it was, and remains, one
rooted in the specificities of the Protestant experience. It is Catholics, not Protestants, who
harbour doubts about the Irishness of Protestants and these doubts have been a source of
unease and at times distress. But there is no evidence that for this or any other reason
Protestants are moving away from their version of Irish identity. For that reason
assumptions about assimilation should be treated with caution.
Conclusions
The vast majority of Southern Protestants abandoned their British allegiance in the decades
after independence. The question we have addressed in this paper is what this means. We
have taken issue with the de-nationalisation and/or de-ethnicisation thesis of Akenson (1975)
and Coakley (1998). Pre-independence Irish Protestants had a strong sense of allegiance to
the British crown and wished to remain part of the union and empire. But they combined
this with an Irish identity that had deep roots in the Irish Protestant experience. To see that
identity as British in a national or ethnic sense is to misunderstand the historic dynamic of
Irish Protestant identity-formation. It also makes it difficult to understand residual CatholicProtestant tensions.
The analysis has implications for the study of the conflict in Northern Ireland. As noted
above the elements and many of the conditions of identity formation have been the same
North and South, but there have also been important differences. It is possible that the
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
12
much denser settlement of Protestants in the north-east and the significance of the Scottish
Presbyterian dimension led to a continuity of British identity there that was not the case
elsewhere (Ohlmeyer 1999:451), or that the Belfast urban-industrial revolution led to a
process of ethnogenesis that did not take place elsewhere on the island (Gibbon 1975).
There is also the further effect of the building of Northern Ireland as a state separate from
the rest of the island, the Second World War, the British welfare state, the polarising effects
of the violence after 1969 which – at least in opinion poll data - saw a steep rise in the
number of Protestants opting for a British rather than an Irish identity. But these arguments
and claims have to be viewed in the light of the intense politicisation of past decades. Rather
than taking them at face value, we should explore the ethnographic reality behind the labels
and be alert to other meanings. This is all the more important as the meaning of ‘British’
comes under increasing scrutiny in Great Britain, and the Good Friday Agreement opens up
new possibilities for identity reconstitution on both sides of the Irish border.
There is a wider implication. Research in ethnicity and nationalism takes as its subject matter
culturally distinct historical communities. Sometimes – as in the categories listed in the
opening paragraph of this paper – what these communities are culturally is clear. But as the
Irish case indicates this is not always so. The factors that shaped Ireland historically are
unusual in their combination but they are not unique. Early modern Ireland experienced at
once the tensions and conflicts of state building and religious reformation and the sharper
confrontations of colonisation and empire building. Modern Ireland and its divisions are the
product of peripheral nationalist revolt and uneven decolonisation. There are other parts of
Europe and farther afield where state and empire interlocked and which have witnessed
imperial collapse and new state formation. Here too there are likely to be many groups
whose cultural and ethnic status is not immediately clear and whose specificity must be
grasped if their internal dynamics and relations with other groups are to be adequately
understood.
1
Much of the ethnic conflict literature rests on an umbrella use of the term ‘ethnic’ that elides ethnic,
tribal, religious and caste differences as in, for example, Horowitz (1985). For a discussion, see
Chandra (2006)
2
Barnard (1998) locates the second phase in the mid-eighteenth century; Ohlmeyer (1999: 451) has it
already in evidence in the seventeenth.
3
It is striking that the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant against Home Rule of 1912 refers to
‘material well-being’, ‘civil and religious freedom’, ‘loyal subjects’, ‘the unity of the Empire’, ‘equal
citizenship in the United Kingdom’. It makes no reference to nationhood or nationality.
4
Catholics whose national identity was firmly within the Catholic-nationalist tradition could combine
this with a similar British component (Canny 2004).
5
Hart (1998) continues to arouse local controversy.
6
For the purposes of the research project West Cork was composed of the following census rural areas:
Bandon, Bantry, Castletownbere, Clonakilty, Dunmanway, Schull and Skibbereen,.
7
The empirical research was guided by the theoretical perspective outlined above ( ). Interview
questions (in the form of an aide-mémoire) dealt with issues under the general heading of difference,
power and community.
8
For reasons that will be explored elsewhere, the most articulate on these issues were the over-forties.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge funding from the HEA North-South Programme for Collaborative
Research, Strand 1 for ‘Catholic-Protestant relationships in Ireland, North and South: A study
of three “frontier communities”’, and from the IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research
Public Geography Research Papers, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland, 2007
13
Projects Grants in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Irish Protestants in the European
Context’. They thank Jennifer Todd and anonymous referees for comments on a previous
draft.
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