Yes James Craig said Northern Ireland was a "Protestant State", but why do we forget de Valera said that Ireland was "a Catholic nation"

John Draper wrote in History Ireland:

"Did the Unionist leader James Craig really describe Stormont as a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’, as quoted by Tony Canavan in ‘A papist painting for a Protestant parliament’ (HI 16.1, Jan./Feb. 2008)? This is at variance with the version given by Craig’s biographer, Patrick Buckland (James Craig, Gill and Macmillan, 1980). Citing Northern Ireland House of Commons records, Buckland says that Craig was making a comparison between the north and the south. Craig is recorded as saying that southerners had boasted and ‘. . . still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.’ Note that in this version there is no reference to the northern state and parliament being ‘for a Protestant people’. Critics may draw that inference, but that does not mean that the prime minister uttered those words. 

Fintan O'Toole - Ireland's parallel monarchy

Fintan O’Toole wrote in ‘Enough is Enough: How to Build A New Republic’ (page 28) about Ireland's 'parallel monarchy’ of the Church:

"Having shrugged off one culture of deference to titled nobles, the new state embraced another. The elected representatives of the people always kneeled before a bishop and kissed his ring. The fact that the bishop was addressed as ‘My Lord’ and lived in a house that was always called a ‘palace’ did not seem to cause any great discomfort to Irish people who would have been enraged by any sugges- tion that Ireland should honour an aristocracy. Indeed, Mary Kenny has argued persuasively that the Church occupied the place where the monarchy had been: ‘even the ardent Republicans would find a vehicle for the pomp and ceremony that every society either derives from tradition or reinvents – the Holy Roman Catholic Church would soon fill the vacuum left by the departed pageantry of His Majesty.’7 She points out that the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, which was the Irish state’s first great public ceremonial, ‘followed in almost every detail the format used for royal visits and royal events in Ireland… Not coincidentally, words and phrases previously applied to the monarchy were at- tached to the papacy: “allegiance”, “loyalty”, and “kingship” (of Christ).’ The ‘parallel monarchy’ of the Church preserved all the habits of awe, obedience and humility that might have been thrown off in a genuinely democratic revolution."

In an article in the Irish Times, 'Why do we allow a foreign state to appoint the patrons of our primary schools?' Fintan O’Toole wrote:

"Why do we allow a foreign state to appoint the patrons of our primary schools? If some weird vestige of colonial times decreed that the British monarch would appoint the ultimate legal controllers of almost 3,200 primary schools in our so-called republic, we would be literally up in arms. Why should we tolerate the weird vestige of an equally colonial mentality that allows a monarch in Rome to do just that?"

Remembering Ireland's "patriot dead" of 1916. Forgetting Ireland's unionists.

GPO in ruins after the Easter Rising in 1916

Edward Carson said that the ideals and ambitions of Ulster should be clearly understood by the people of England, Scotland and Wales.

I want to make something very clear - The ideals and ambitions of Northern Ireland unionists and Protestants should be clearly understood in Southern Ireland. For they are each and all, "fellow countrymen."*

Being a Protestant unionist does not preclude that person from being Irish. John Hewitt said it. Nick Laird said it. Sam McAughtry said it. Loyalist Gusty Spence said it. Edward Carson was Irish. He was British. He was an Irish Unionist. An Irish man who simply wanted to be Irish and remain part of the social, political and economic infrastructure of the British Empire. As he said:

"We’re both [Tom Kettle, Home Rule nationalist] Irishmen, and that is what matters."

Edward Carson, who opposed Home Rule was an Irish unionist and wanted Ireland united. In a

De Valera - Rejecting Irish Unity

In 1940 the nations of Europe were caught in a squalid world war. In the face of a fearsome German military and the axis forces, Churchill knew that in order to protect the convoys in the Atlantic the allied forces would need access to the Irish ports. Churchill had only one bargaining chip - Northern Ireland. And an offer was made. Fintan O'Toole said:

"I think that the offers of unity that were made at the beginning of the Second World War by the British were probably reasonably serious. You have to remember that if Churchill was prepared to deal with Stalin, he was certainly prepared to deal with de Valera. The war was the absolutely central aim that Churchill had and I think his loyalty to Northern Ireland protestants would not have been particularly strong in these circumstances." 

It seemed even some unionists were open to the idea. Professor Paul Bew said, "There's even evidence that some of the younger members of the Ulster Unionist Party cabinet took the view that if Irish neutrality was ended, the great priority was to defeat Hitler and that they would simply have to accept Irish unity in such a context."

Fintan O'Toole also said: "It's very striking that de Valera didn't take those offers very seriously or explore them at any level. Because what it told you was that ultimately de Valera was a southern Irish Catholic leader representing the southern Irish state."

Giving Northern Ireland to Ireland meant de Valera would have to take more than 800,000 northern Protestants into the electorate. In that context he would have found that his party - with its Catholic, gaelic and rural values - would see its political majority obliterated. Dr John Bowman, author of De Valera and The Ulster Question said:

"I think de Valera certainly wanted a united Ireland, but whether he was ready to pay the price for it, which would have been a much more pluralist, much less catholic, less Catholic state, whether he was prepared to pay that price for it is another question. And in a way he wasn't. So to that extent he can be faulted. But I'll tell you above all, he wanted the custody of the aspiration to unity. Because he knew there were much more dangerous forces potentially at work, northern republicans among them. He had to maintain the custody of the aspiration to Irish unity. One might say he rendered that into a permanently postponable aspiration."

Fintan O'Toole wrote in the Irish Times in October 2013: "Ireland is our dream - if it didn't have any Protestants in it."

Deporting unionists, Ctd

In an earlier post here I outlined how Sean Lemass proposed the removal of unionists from the island of Ireland. How very pleasant, plural, tolerant and non-discriminatory. Below is another suggestion to remove unionists from the island, this time from de Valera in 1964.

Patrick Kavanagh and Sean O'Faolain - Tackling de Valera's Mytholgised Irish-Ireland

Eamonn Wall wrote an article on Patrick Kavanagh entitled, 'It is midnight in Dublin and Europe is at war": Patrick Kavanagh's Poems of "The Emergency".' Available here, Eamonn made some fascinating analyses on the role of Kavanagh and the Bell Magazine in working to counter de Valera's rural, mythologised Ireland.  Eamonn explained the role of "The Emergency", de Valera's euphemism for Ireland's neutrality during the Second World War. He said of it:

"Sean O'Faolain saw "The Emergency" as "six years of silence" (Brown 211). Clearly, neutrality, if not politically or morally, at least practically and psychologically, presented Ireland's southern intellectuals with major difficulties. This policy appeared to institutionalize the withdrawal from the wider world that Irish-Irelanders had been advocating since the last decades of the previous century, an ideology given plain voice by Thomas Derrig, the Minister for Education in De Valera's government, in a speech at the 1937 Dublin Feis:

"That set of values which makes the Irish mind different looks out at us clearly from our old music - its idiom having in some subtle way the idiom of the Irish mind, its rhythms, its intervals, its speeds, its build have not been chosen arbitrarily, but are what they are because they are the musical expression, the musical equivalent of Irish thought and its modes... The Irish idiom expresses deep things that have not been expressed by Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Elgar or Sibelius - by any of the great composers."