Countering the republican refrain "you took our land"

The common refrain from republicans is, "you took our land".

Yet Belfast as a town and later city was only founded in the early 1600s.

It was built in a basin, situated at the foot of a rim of hills and at the the mouth of a river. It became a trading hub and the merchant community and the population grew rapidly from the 1650s onwards.

A mid-century figure of around 1,000 quickly rose to 2,000 by 1660. Hitting 3,200 by 1670, then reaching 5,000 in 1706.

The population grew to about 8,500 by 1760, grew to 13,500 in 1782, then got to 19,500 in 1791.

By 1912, the population of Belfast was nearly 400,000 compared with 174,000 in 1871. Edward Carson said in 1911:

"The men who made Belfast, which was a town of 12,000 when the Act of Union [1801] was passed, and now has something like 400,000 people, do you think they will accept notice to quit?"

The Scots Irish

Ireland's Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said on St Patrick's Day 2018:

"Ulster-Scots Protestants are as much a part of the history of the Irish in America as the Irish Catholics are. In the same way, they are an integral, respected and valued part of the history - and the future - of the island of Ireland."

John Hume wrote in 1989:

The creation of Northern Ireland and the Free State gave Home Rule to all of Ireland

'All right—who else can steer?' O’Neill and Chichester-Clark drowning in a cartoon by ‘Mac’, Daily Sketch, 1 January 1971. (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)

The Ulster Proclamation of Provisional Government of 1913 signalled the intent of unionists to form their own administration in the nine northern counties of Ireland if Westminster handed powers to a nationalist parliament in Dublin.

It was issued the year after almost half a million people in Ulster signed either the Solemn League and Covenant or Declaration in opposition to Home Rule and as tens of thousands joined the original Ulster Volunteer Force in preparation to resist the move by force. The crisis was overtaken by the outbreak of World War One and a nine-county government was never formed.

Edward Carson - If Home Rule for Ireland, why not for the north-east of Ireland?

In opposition to the third Home Rule bill Edward Carson said:

"What argument is there that you can raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east province?"

Lloyd George said:

"I was drenched with suspicion of Irishmen by Englishmen and of Englishmen by Irishmen and, worst of all, of Irishmen by Irishmen. It was a quagmire of distrust which clogged the footsteps and made progress impossible. That is the real enemy of Ireland."

After 1916 relations between Carson and Redmond improved

Delivering the John Redmond Lecture in April 2012 in Waterford the Minister of State for Northern Ireland the Rt Hon Hugo Swire MP reminded us that if you walk out of the Members’ Dining Room in the House of Commons and turn right you will pass a bust of John Redmond, continue towards the Members’ Library and you will face a bust of Sir Edward Carson.

Sir James Craig was Irish

Sir James Craig, Viscount Craigavon, by society painter Sir John Lavery

William O'Brien wrote a description of Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and utterly loyal adjutant to Sir Edward Carson, in ‘The Irish Revolution and how it came about’ (1923):

"Sir James Craig… The Ulster leader was never an incorrigible enemy of a modus vivendi with his Southern countrymen. Like so many of the higher Orange type, if he was an irresponsible being for half a dozen mad “ anniversary ” days, he was for all the rest of the year a kindly neighbour, a fast friend, more honest of heart than complex in the convolutions of his brain matter, but in all things, flattering or otherwise, as irredeemably Irish as the granite ribs of Cave Hill."

TIME Magazine featured Sir James Craig on the May 26 1924 cover of the magazine. Inside it produced a short feature on the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland:

Partition in Ireland is strengthened by violence

Cartoon by Ian Knox

George Bernard Shaw portended that partition in the north would lead to "an autonomous political lunatic asylum." J.B. Armour, liberal presbyterian and Home Ruler, said:

"For years they have been yelling against Home Rule, and now they have got a form of Home Rule which the Devil himself could not have devised."

Why do people call Northern Ireland Ulster?

Edward Carson and James Craig, the founding fathers of Northern Ireland, who were party to the dismembering not only of Ireland but Ulster also

Nick Laird wrote:

"Under nationality I write Irish/British, though I’d be happier with Ulsterman, since Ulster itself (incorporating Northern Ireland and the Irish counties of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal) is a province administrated by both Dublin and London."

Ulster is a misnomer, as Mr. Clynes said in 1920, "Ulster is an expression which has misled a great many people." Letter writer, J.H. Nunn, wrote to the Irish times in 1916:

In revolutionary Ireland Protestants were overwhelmingly unionist and anti-Home Rule

It is quite often said that many protestants filled the republican ranks in revolutionary Ireland. This is true to a degree. There are examples of protestant republicans, however these oft-recounted individuals were outliers. The overwhelming majority of protestants were unionist and anti-Home Rule. Ronald McNeill wrote in 1922, 'Ulster's Stand For the Union':

"An additional cause of offence, moreover, was that he was at that time trying to persuade credulous people in England that there was in Ulster a party of Liberals and Protestant Home Rulers, of which he [Lord Pirrie] posed as leader, although everyone on the spot knew that the “party” would not fill a tramcar."

Edward Carson, father of the IRA?

In the final lines of the September 1913 poem, Yeats wrote, "Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave." The rebel leaders shared these fears and, inspired by the rebellion of Edward Carson, they later emulated Carson's example.

Edward Carson - "I am preaching order"

The Irish Unionists blocked the first two Home Rule bills using constitutionalism. Unable to frustrate the third bill by constitutional means, the Irish and Ulster unionists, with Tory backing, devolved to unconstitutionalism - the threat of arms. John Redmond, the Parnellite and resolute Irish constitutionalist, had broken the Lords veto and put Home Rule onto the statute book. Facing a Dublin parliament, an "assembly of cattle drivers in dublin" (Ronald McNeill), Carson formed a provisional government and threatened rebellion.

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:

Unionists and nationalists write to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson

Oil on canvas By Sidney Edward Dickinson

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson coined the expression "self-determination", a catch-penny cry in Ireland. Dated August 1 1918, Edward Carson and other unionists sent a letter to the U.S. President which responded to the Nationalist Manifesto sent to Wilson in June 1918 and openly circulated. Mr Carson and his co-signatories wrote:

Edward Carson and John Redmond respond to the Easter Rising (May 3 1916)

Cartoon of Carson and Redmond by Percy Fearon, 'Poy'. 

On May 3 1916 the House of Commons convening for a motion titled ‘Disturbances in Ireland, Resignation of Mr. Birrell’. John Redmond and Edward Carson both spoke in reaction to the Easter Rising that broke out on April 24 1916. The Ulster poet John Hewitt said: "I accepted Sir Edward Carson and his twin, John Redmond, as men from the same country as myself, who had diverging ideas about the governing of it." John Redmond said:

G.K. Chesterton on Belfast

G.K. Chesterton by David Low.

[UPDATE - Read here and here for G.K. Chesterton on Unionism and Home Rule respectively]

The Protestant turned Catholic G.K. Chesterton wrote 'Irish Impressions', published in 1919 he shared his thoughts with great contemporary relevance on his time in Ireland. He devoted a chapter to the Ireland's leading industrial centre, 'Belfast and the Religious Question,' in which he wrote scathingly of the superiority of the northern Protestant creed. He began with thoughts on Ireland and poetry:

"Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift over so many Irish poems and impressions, I felt very little in Ireland. There is a real meaning in this suggestion of a mystic sleep; but it does not mean what most of us imagine, and is not to be found where we expect it.

James Joyce on Home Rule

James Joyce by Ronald Searle

In an earlier post I looked at a 25 year old Joyce who wrote about 'The Last Fenian' John O'Leary. In the same year, 1907, he wrote, ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’. "From a hasty study of the history of Home Rule," Joyce made two deductions, one:

"The first is this: the most powerful weapons that England can use against Ireland are no longer those of Conservatism, but those of Liberalism and Vaticanism. Conservatism, though it may be tyrannical, is a frankly and openly inimical doctrine. Its position is logical; it does not want a rival island to arise near Great Britain, or Irish factories to create competition for those in England, or tobacco and wine again to be exported from Ireland, or the great ports along the Irish coast to become enemy naval bases under a native government or a foreign protectorate. Its position is logical, as is that of the Irish separatists which contradicts it point by point. It takes little intelligence to understand that Gladstone has done Ireland greater damage than Disraeli did, and that the most fervid enemy of the Irish Catholics is the head of English Vaticanism, the Duke of Norfolk."

Bernard Crickly on the Irish question and liberal prudery and squeamishness

Bernard Crick, biographer of Orwell and political advisor in the Northern Ireland Constitutional convention 1974.

Bernard Crick wrote 'In Defence of Politics', published in 1962, and in the chapter 'A Defence of Politics Against Nationalism', he wrote about Ireland:

"British imperialism only once seriously endangered the established domestic political institutions in the way that German imperialism strangled and frustrated the growth of German liberalism."

George Bernard Shaw on his Irishness, Edward Carson and Home Rule

George Bernard Shaw by Alick P.F. Ritchie

George Bernard Shaw is the venerated and revered Irish man of letters, and a protestant Irishman to the very narrow" of his bones at that. Like all Irish he proclaimed his Irishness but unlike the Irish, he also proclaimed his unIrish roots:

"I am a traditional Irishman, my family came from Yorkshire."

In sharing this Wildean aphorism, Shaw touches on a truth that many on the island can relate to, even if it's uncomfortable in doing so. Shaw also proclaimed his unionism as a protestant Irishman. In a letter to The Irish Statesman, January 10 1920, George Bernard Shaw said:

Northern Ireland's Abject Ignorance of History

In the overview of Owen Dudley Edwards book, 'The Sins of Our Fathers,' the book was presented like this:

"Many people are fond of saying that the Irish, particularly in Northern Ireland, live too much in the past and are over-influenced by it. In this corrosive analysis on the origins and character of the present crisis in Northern Ireland, Owen Dudley Edwards suggests that part of the trouble stems from too much indifference to the past and too little effort to understand it." 

In the book Owen Dudley Edward's presented his response to the question, if there was much unionist sentiment outside ulster before 1920 and the passing of the Government of Ireland Act 1920? ODE wrote:

"Certainly. The overwhelming strength of upper-class Protestantism, together with socially-aspirant Catholicism were stout supporters of the Union. Trinity College in Dublin was its intellectual bastion - much more so tan the non-sectarian QUB. It had a powerful Dublin newspaper in the Irish Times as well as other journals elsewhere. But Dublin unionism provided much of the thrust of the entire movement until the Ulster crisis of 1912-1914. Even Edward Carson, their leader, was a Dubliner."