Ian Paisley was a proud Irishman

Ian paisley wrote:

"Edward Carson was a life-long Irishman, as well as being a life-long unionist,and that made all the difference… On this 28th day of September [2012], 100 years after his pen touched parchment, we salute the man who taught us all how to be true Irishmen and women."

Edward Carson was a life long Irish man

Cartoon by Ian Knox

Edward Carson rose in the Lords on December 3 1929 and made a number of points about the Irish Free State and the Privy Council, the legal forum the nascent Irish state sought to do away with. Interestingly he called the Anglo-Irish Treaty the “Treaty of surrender and betrayal”. On the matter of his identity, he said:

Saint Patrick's Day - We need to end the identification of Irishness with monolithic Catholicism.

There is not such thing as a proper Irish person. There is no doctrinally orthodox and prelapsarian pure way to be an Irish person. It may exist as a demented ideal is some puritans, but these notions are racist, xenophobic and the most obvious bar to peace in Ireland. This is the Celtic nationalism that worked to make Irishness irrevocably incompatible with Englishness. It is a dangerously and wrecklessly conservative, idiosyncratic and reactionary view of identity. On par with the purist ideology of the BNP and EDL.

 

Éamon de Valera typified the little-Irelander mentality perfectly. Gearoid O Crualaoich explained that de Valera had 'a static conception of a "truly Irish" way of life.' De Valera and others cherished and pursued the "fior Gael" ("true Irish"). This was explicitly shown in his famous but loopy 1943 speech 'The Ireland That We Dreamed Of'.

 

It was the ireland of "cosy homesteads", the rural countryside, neo Gaelic, Catholic Arcadia. As J. T. Morahan said in 1931*:

"[English] culture is not the culture of the Gael; rather it is poison gas to the kindly Celtic people."

Taoiseach Éamon de Valera said in 1951:

"I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong."

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in 2013:

 "I am proud to stand here as a public representative, as a taoiseach who happens to be a Catholic, but not a Catholic taoiseach."