Henry Cooke and Catholic Emancipation (1825)

Henry Cooke

It is ever the case that Unionism and its avatars are presented as bigoted and regressive, while nationalism and its icons are liberal agents of change. Never has this clash of ideas been better encapsulated than with the Henry Cooke-Daniel O'Connell standoff. Yet O'Connell wasn't necessarily the paragon of enlightenment and liberation that he is automatically projected as. As Mick Hall and others have noted:

"Yet Daniel O’Connell, within five years of achieving Catholic Emancipation, stated that Protestants were “foreigners to us since they are of a different religion”."

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."

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:

Unionism's anglophobia

[UPDATE - I published a version of this on Slugger O'Toole here]

Hardline Irish-America often declaims, 'England out of Ireland!' There is huge irony in this.
Scott MacMillan, in Slate Magazine, wrote:

"It is a telling irony: Working-class loyalists directed their rage not against their traditional enemies, Catholics who favor unification with the Republic of Ireland, but against the symbols of the United Kingdom to which they are supposedly loyal."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Justine McGrath

Justine McGrath was born in Zambia in Central Africa. Her parents were both born and brought up in Belfast. She can call upon a famous father, the late Jack Kyle OBE, Irish rugby legend and International Rugby Hall of Famer. Justine attended boarding school at Victoria College Belfast and Methodist College Belfast. Following school Justine enrolled at Stirling University and completed a degree in French and Spanish. She is now lives in Dublin and is self-employed, doing the following: career coaching, writing, freelance French and Spanish teaching and book reviewing.

Being Loyalist and Irish

Gusty Spence said:

"It’s sad today whenever you see a kind of an anti-Irishness. I suppose maybe it’s understandable because of the Provisionals campaign. Whatever little bit of Irishness people felt or some people felt - I feel greatly Irish - it was kind of driven out of them by these people who purported to be absolute Irish, and dogmatic, by bombing and shooting them."

Being a Protestant atheist

Martin Luther, theologian (1483–1546)

I'm a Protestant atheist, a cultural Calvinist. The Reformation brought to the world the Protestant faith and the Protestant culture of individual autonomy, enterprise, trade and self-direction. Being a Protestant and an atheist is not an oxymoron. 

Christopher Hitchens said, "I'm a Protestant atheist." Gore Vidal said:

"I am an atheist but I am powerfully influenced by the protestantism with which I was brought up. We must bear witness to what we do and to what the nation does."

IRA violence wiped out Protestant self-identification as Irish

Source here.

IRA violence turned Irish against English and English against Irish, protestant against Catholic, and
robbing protestants of Irishness. As Christopher Hitchens said:

"It was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left “the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation."

The Provisional IRA may have persuaded Britain to the negotiating table, however their relentless campaign of homicide powerfully dissuaded Irish unification and effectively rendered extinct protestants who self-identified as Irish. That fact alone speaks for how the armed separatism was not only immoral and wrong, but also spectacularly counterproductive. What justification is there for the PIRA armed campaign of destruction of persons and property if the result was to dissuade and create a vehement rejection of being Irish among the very people who they wanted to be Irish in an Irish Republic?

Brian Kennaway said:

"[IRA violence] knocked the Irish heart out of Ulster Protestants."

Nick Laird on the Protestant-Irish identity

Nick Laird, poet from Northern Ireland, said:

"The complexities of being a Protestant, in that you’re Irish when you’re in Britain, but you’re not Irish when you’re in Ireland. You’re a bad fit everywhere."

Orange and Green, we're all Paddies

The Simpsons portrays Saint Patrick's day and the division in Ireland between Orange and Green 

Many Protestants born in Ireland strenuously and stridently object to being Irish.

To the outsider there's not a shade of difference between the Orangemen and the Green Gael, the planter and the native. The English, American and Europeans and the world see us all as Irish equally.

A Northern Protestant speaks to a 1916 commemoration

Belfast born Pat Storey at the 1916 commemoration event, 

The Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare Most Rev Pat Storey was invited to speak at state event to mark the 1916 Rising, described by the Irish Times as a "Catholic, republican commemoration". On May 5 2015 the northern Protestant, born and raised in Belfast, addressed the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Irish President Michael D Higgins, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and other dignitaries. Pat Storey said:

"It is not a part of my story. But I want, and I need, to try to understand it. I need to walk in your shoes generously. [It meant] relating to the commemorations of your community when I would rather remember wrongs done to mine."

The Protestantisation of Southern Ireland

COI Dean Victor Griffin who opposed the Protestant ascendency in the North and the Catholic ascendancy in the South, was the first public representative of new-look Protestantism in Ireland said Roy Foster

Ian D'Alton wrote that the Irish Free State "was rescued by Catholics becoming Protestants." This was a formulation most prominently articulated by the recently deceased Eddie Holt - The Protestantisation of the South's middle class. Coincidentally I wrote in 2015 that 'The Calvinist Ulsterman is more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised.' The religious proclivities of the North and the South have inverted.

Conor Cruise O'Brien - The church and school helps to encourage, exalt and extend tribal-sectarian self-righteousness

Cartoon of Conor Cruise O'Brien

[UPDATE - John Hume wrote in The Irish Times, May 18 1964, "Bigotry and a fixation about religious divisions are the first thing that strike any visitor to the North."]

Our parents are patrons of prejudice, bequeathers of bigotry. Churches and chapels inculcate hate. 

He was that Irish essayist and polemicist so "sorely deficient in Anglophobia". Conor Cruise O'Brien (who was satirised in the 'Gentle Black and Tans'), drew across the grain on so many issues. He was the arch-"revisionist", a charge he countered here. A controversialist and a man of irrepressible energies, we sorely lack his type today.

Ethical Irishness and ethically remembering Ireland's history

A young Michael D. Higgins

Irishness is about ethics, not ethnics. Michael D. Higgins said that his would be a "Presidency of ideas - recognising and open to new paradigms of thought and action". Through speeches the President has explored the importance and challenge of ethics in Irish life and Ireland’s relationships abroad. There are four select Special Initiatives which mark his stewardship of the Áras an Uachtaráin, one of which is the Ethics Initiative.

The vanity and narcissism of the small difference in Ireland

Thomas Nast, ‘St. Patrick's Day, 1867--'The day we celebrate.'’ Harper's Weekly, April 6, 1867.

[UPDATE - Interesting and relevant comments from David Trimble and Daniel Hannan here and here.]

Tomorrow the world will celebrate Saint Patrick's day. Tomorrow the Irish in the troubled Northern region will continue to celebrate and cherish the minutiae that divides them. John Hewitt, Ulster protestant and Irishman, wrote:

‘St Patrick’s Eve,The country came to wake him, men and boysSmoking round the hearth’

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: