The stereotype of the Irish Protestant

The banker from the film Calvary who personifies vulgar excess and the lingering ascendency in Ireland

For the the outsider, every one from Ireland is Irish, Green and Orange and every shade in between. (Except perhaps in the United States, as noted here and here.) The natives suffer from and indulge in the vanity and narcissism of small differences. Irish people all have a notion of "the other". The person who is "the other" is the confessional and constitutional counterpart, the person in the house next door or in the adjoining community. I wrote here about the bias and prejudgement that the protestants of Ireland experience.

Two ways to view the republican movement...

And in contrast a News Letter editorial wrote:

"The Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said yesterday that the UK and Irish governments must “intervene” if the Northern Ireland talks to restore Stormont fail. 

“The current stalemate cannot continue, the current position is simply not sustainable,” she said. 

Ireland's "up the 'RA" problem

Recently Declan Rice caused huge controversy after it emerged that in 2015 he wrote "up the ‘RA" on Instagram. Only a few days earlier Michael Conlon entered the ring in New York to chants of "ooh ah up the RA".

Ray Davey on the Civil Rights campaign in Northern Ireland

Ray Davey wrote in his book ‘Take Away This Hate’ (pp. 90-92):

"It was, as far as I could see, a time of creativity and optimism among the students that I knew best. The result was that when in the Autumn term of 1968 the whole situation suddenly changed and the academic calm was rudely shattered by protest marches and confrontation, the vast majority of students were deeply shocked and completely taken by surprise. 

Ireland was never united

It was written in 1913:

"The Celtic Church no doubt had its golden age. It produced saints and men of learning. It sent out its missionaries to the heathen beyond the seas. So famous were its schools that students came to them from distant lands. But centuries before the Normans appeared in Ireland the salt had lost its savour. The Celtic Church had sunk into being a mere appendage of the wild tribes it had once tried to tame. The chiefs of one tribe would sack the colleges and shrines of another tribe as freely as they would sack any of their other possessions. For instance, the annals tell us that in the year 1100 the men of the south made a raid into Connaught and burned many churches; in 1113 Munster tribe burned many churches in Meath, one of them being full of people; in 1128 the septs of Leitrim and Cavan plundered and slew the retinue of the Bishop of Armagh; in the same year the men of Tyrone raided Down and a great number of people suffered martyrdom; four years later Kildare was invaded by raiders from Wexford, the church was burnt and many men slain; and so on with dreary monotony. Bishops and abbots fought in the incessant tribal wars as keenly as laymen. Worse still, it was not infrequent for one band of clergy to make war on another. In the ninth century, Phelim, who claimed to be both Bishop and King of Leinster, ravaged Ulster and murdered its monks and clergy. In the eleventh century the annals give an account of a fierce battle between the Bishop of Armagh and the Bishop of Clonard. Nor did time work any improvement; we read of bloody conflicts between abbots and bishops as late as the middle of the fifteenth century. What influence for good could such a church have had upon the mass of the people?"

"Look to Belfast and be a repealer if you can..."

Illustration depicting Cooke’s Challenge to O’Connell within the context of the Union.

Henry Cooke issued this challenged to Daniel O’Connell when the latter came to Belfast in January 1841:

"Look at Belfast, a glorious sight, the masted groves in the harbour, the mighty warehouse, the giant manufactories, the rapidly growing streets, all owed to the Union. Look to Belfast and be a repealer if you can."

"This everlasting teaching of hatred of England..."

Edna Longley observed:

"Irish Catholics and Ulster protestants not only tend to remember different things, but remember them in different ways."

Fiona Kennedy wrote in the Irish Times:

"When I was a child I learned from my grandmother that the Protestant heathens who lived next door had plundered and tortured us, ruined our language and culture and divided our country."

American independence was England's second civil war

Poor old England endeavoring to reclaim his wicked american children. And therefore is England maimed & forc'd to go with a staff

Christopher Hitchens wrote:

"I would like to claim the American Revolution as part of an English revolution all the same, it was basically a revolution of highly educated English people against a German monarchy and its German surrogate forces in America. The sad thing to me is that the German monarchy still remains in England."

Neither in Welsh nor in Irish did a word exist for ‘republic’

‘David Lloyd George blessing James Craig’, by Shemus

Kenneth O Morgan in the No 10 guest historian series, 'Prime Ministers and No. 10', wrote:

"He held a series of talks with the Sinn Fein leader, Eamon De Valera, at Downing Street in July 1921, at which key issues in Ireland’s proposed new relationship with the UK, were discussed. Lloyd George, who made a point of speaking in Welsh to his Secretary, Thomas Jones, in the presence of De Valera, successfully argued that neither in Welsh nor in Irish did a word exist for ‘republic’."

Britain and Ireland, archipelagic peoples

The one characteristic that has marked Ireland and Britain from time immemorial is proximity and propinquity. During the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, the British Isles were one island (see here), yet for many, to this day they remain one. 

Ed Moloney - The IRA set out in Spring and early Summer of 1971 to exploit circumstances and to force the British into a premature and ill-prepared internment swoop

Operation Demetrius involved the location, arrest and internment of 342 people in three days. These arrests sparked protests and riots in several Catholic areas across Northern Ireland. The worst of the rioting broke out in Ballymurphy in west Belfast. Only hours into Operation Demetrius British paratroopers went into Ballymurphy to arrest suspected IRA volunteers. On their entry into the estate the soldiers opened fire, claiming later that they had come under attack from IRA snipers. Six civilians were shot and killed that day.

Fintan O'Toole wrote:

"This belief encouraged the IRA republicans to adopt in the 1970s a classic terrorist position that violence would produce a reaction which would display the state in its true, fascistic colors. Instead of trying to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Catholics, the IRA was intent on destroying rational reform and provoking repression... A defense of the IRA’s bombing campaign written in 1976 and published in its own newspaper was entirely explicit about this."

Ed Moloney wrote in 2015:

George Bernard Shaw wrote - Am I not a protestant to the very narrow of my bones?

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Am I not a protestant to the very narrow of my bones?" And he also said: "My own family and antecedents are ultra-Protestant; and I am a bit to the left of Protestantism myself."

George Bernard Shaw wrote elsewhere:

"Ulster children still repeat the derisive doggerel, "Sleether slaughter, holy wather”; and the adults are determined as ever that ‘the Protestant boys shall carry the drum’. As a Protestant myself (and a little to spare), I am highly susceptible to the spirit these war cries express."

Sinn Fein abstained from the vote on the Good Friday Agreement

David Trimble said to Alex Kane:

"Sinn Fein were heavily opposed to a Northern Ireland Assembly. In December 1997 it was proving almost impossible to get them to even agree to put an Assembly on the agenda. The SDLP wanted it on the agenda but they weren’t prepared to face down Sinn Fein at that stage."

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:

Religious apartheid in 1940s southern Ireland

As has been a recent theme on this blog, I've been a little alarmed at the growing narrative that only protestants and unionists are bigoted, something Sinn Fein and republicans appear to be promoting.

As Jenny McCartney wrote in 2004 following the complete exit of protestants from a catholic estate in Belfast:

"Mr Eoin O'Broin - steeped so long in Sinn Fein’s myth that Northern Ireland’s Catholics must always be oppressed and Protestants the oppressors - simply cannot bear to admit the truth about the intense anti-Protestant bigotry in many working-class Catholic areas... It is pure dishonesty, however, for anyone to pretend that the sectarianism flows in only one direction."

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. 

Having to speak to republicans like they're a child

James Stephens said:

"It is too generally conceived among Nationalists that the attitude of Ulster towards Ireland is rooted in ignorance and bigotry."

John Hume said that being pro-Union does not make you a bigot. He wrote in his famous 1964 letters for the Irish Times:

"Another positive step towards easing community tensions and towards removing what bigotry exists among Catholics would be to recognize that the Protestant tradition in the North is as strong and as legitimate as our own. Such recognition is our first step towards better relations. We must be prepared to accept this and to realize that the fact that a man wishes Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom does not necessarily make him a bigot or a discriminator. Which leads me to the constitutional question."

Sinn Fein is "the Irish for John Bull"

Cartoon by Morten Morland (2003), via the British Cartoon Archive

Presently in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein has worked to make itself synonymous with progress and positive. They have done this to the detriment of Unionism and the wider protestant culture, both of which are perceived as cold and narrow minded.

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.

The vanity of Irish exceptionalism...

I voted agained Brexit, but I believe in democracy. The Brexit vote and the disentagling process can be critiqued, but many commentators and papers have taken a sneering and condescending approach to those who favour separation from Brexit.