Protestant and Irish: The minority’s search for place in independent Ireland

by Ian d'Alton (Editor), Ida Milne (Editor)

Even before the end of the union with Britain, southern Irish unionists were being represented as stateless, rootless. Popular opinion has often erroneously conflated 26 county Protestantism with 26 county Unionism, but the two are not synonymous. This book of essays aims to show both that, and how Irish Protestants went about finding a place in in the new Ireland. From various perspectives of Protestant participants in the new Ireland – such as academics and students, working class Protestants, revolutionaries, rural women, a landlord, clerics, – it examines how they accommodated themselves to the changed dispensation. In our view, our volume will stand complementary to the works cited (and others, such Kurt Bowen’s sociological work, Protestants in a Catholic Ireland’s privileged minority (McGill, 1983) and M. Macourt, Counting the people of God? The Census of Population and the Church of Ireland (Dublin, 2008) on Church of Ireland historical demography). We hope that this volume will enable readers to draw broader and deeper conclusions about the nature of Protestant attitudes and adjustment to the new regime after 1922 than has hitherto been the case.

396 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2019

Reviews

[Jason Blean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely and much-needed analysis and reflection on the working out of Irishness for southern Protestants in the newly-independent Ireland of the 1920s and beyond. The research supporting the essays is rigorous and substantial, the questions pertinent and, in terms of a sense of history and identity of Irish Protestants (in particular those who found themselves a minority in a new Catholic state in 1921), profound, and the issues discussed relevant to where Ireland goes from here. The issues are, of course, controversial and senstive but this book effectively notes the reasons for southern Protestants' reticence to discuss them in the past and now. Yet, in the "decade of anniversaries" and on the centenary of the forming of the Irish Free State, which lead to the Republic of 1949, it is timely to take a thorough look at them again. The book exposes stereotypes and avoids the temptation of painting a homogenous picture of a single ethnic group with the same views on their participation in the Irish State. This is brought out in the State prayers controvery in the Church of Ireland and the expression of British identity and the relationship with British royalty in the years following partition. The lessons for those who might seek Irish unification are clear: it is possible to have a "fluidity of allegiance" as generations change and though there are some comparisons to be made with French Protestants, the recognition of the deep-rooted and difficult issues of identity, historical injustice, threat and counter-threat is a first step in helping people in (or interested in) contemporary Ireland to try to resolve them.