Abstract
In June 1918, the ultra-Catholic nationalist newspaper editor D. P. Moran asserted that Protestant nationalists were a tiny and unrepresentative minority of the minority. As Stephen Gwynn wrote ‘99% of Catholics and 98% of Protestants could be relied on to vote for their natural hereditary side’ (p. 11). Conor Morrissey validates Moran and Gwynn in that regard – this study is based on data assembled for 500 Protestant nationalists and some 220 Protestants who joined the National Army. That total represents a vanishingly small proportion of the island's Protestant population. It is therefore not surprising that the personal and the individual loom large in this intriguing book, with chapters on radicals, dissidents, converts, militants, rebels, outsiders (with a question mark), revolutionaries and Free Staters. Many were women – we learn much about what motivated those such as Cesca Chenevix Trench, Elizabeth Bloxham, Alice Milligan, Hon. Albinia Brodrick (sister to southern Irish unionist leader Lord Midleton) and Charlotte Despard (sister to the lord lieutenant, Sir John French).
A book about such a small cohort needs to justify itself with questions of influence and position rather than power. Morrissey achieves that. Supplying an erudite and vivid transnational discussion in his ‘Introduction’ he examines Protestant nationalists through three themes – what motivated them; their involvement in, and impact (if any) on the course that Irish nationalism took; and the ‘fraught relationship’ between their religious identities and that nationalism (p. 2). A vital distinction is a difference between Home Rulers who happened to be Protestants (like Butt and Parnell), and Protestant Home Rulers – those who felt it necessary to emphasise their contrapuntal denominational credentials precisely because, by 1886, when the Protestant Home Rule Association was founded, ‘Home Rule’ had been captured by Catholicism. Thus perhaps the ‘research question’ is, if Protestant = unionist (or, indeed Catholic = nationalist) is the ‘natural’ state, what can ‘Protestant≠unionist’ tell us about either Protestants or nationalists – or indeed both?
Protestant nationalists trod a lonely path. They were reviled as political Lundys by the vast majority of their co-religionists and seen (not altogether without good cause – think of converts such as Casement, Lord Ashbourne and Aodh de Blacam) as somewhat prone to the predilections of Popery. Similarly, their Catholic political fellow-travellers did not always accept them as 24-carat nationalists. Morrissey suggests that, as exemplified at the 1917 Sinn Fein convention, ‘The new nationalism appeared to lack the inter-religious sprit of the old one’ (p. 150). Protestants were, in many respects, stuck between two hard and unsympathetic places, citizens of nowhere, exemplars of an uneasiness of being.
The influence of the Protestant Home Rule Association, founded in Ulster, lingered on in liberal unionism there, as well as in the Irish Convention, Horace Plunkett's Irish Dominion League and Lord Midleton's Anti-Partition League in southern parts much later on. But these were the ‘moderates’, in the main imperial and British-oriented. Within the Lilliputian world of dissident Protestants, Morrissey points up an important distinction between them and those Protestant advanced nationalists of Yeats’ ‘vivid faces’ and Patrick Maume's long gestation of cultural Irishness, like Douglas Hyde. Morrissey claims that between 1900 and 1923 these advanced nationalist Protestants played an influential role, forming ‘a vibrant counter-culture within Irish life’ (p. 11).
In most respects, Irish Protestant nationalists conformed to the paths that Catholic nationalists took towards separatism and Irish cultural identity. Thus, for instance, Morrissey details how the Irish language movement and Gaelic cultural revival radicalised Protestants in the same way as Catholics. In some areas, Protestantism was far ahead of Catholicism. The Irish Guild of the Church was originally formed to promote services in Irish when the Catholic Church, not vernacular in either English or Irish, could not. The Guild was radicalized by the conscription crisis and, in 1918, became yet another support network for ‘about ninety mainly Dublin-based Episcopalians, who supported independence’ (p. 162). In such small marginalized groups, networking becomes a significant determinant in how individual members can combat isolation and irrelevance.
Ulster was a tough nut to crack. Sectarianism was endemic and deep-rooted. At the 1918 general election, George Irvine was selected as Sinn Fein candidate for North Fermanagh. But the Ancient Order of Hibernians refused to accept his candidature because of his Protestantism, and the seat was lost to the unionists. Protestant nationalists were observed with distrust by all sides. As William Forbes Patterson, labour-oriented Presbyterian schoolmaster, wrote ‘…the pilgrim Protestant finds himself in a perfectly awful atmosphere of suspicion’ (p. 169).
If taking up arms is the ultimate measure of dedication to the Cause, Morrissey's chapter on ‘Revolutionaries, 1919–23’ shows just how few Protestants possessed that dedication. Of some 5,000 guerillas who fought in the period, he has identified only thirty-seven Protestants. That really is not representative of anything but individual inclination. These were exotics, and often not in a good way. According to Fr Louis O’Kane, the Ulster IRA fighter Rory Graham was ‘a sort of white-blackbird’; George Irvine, who had become vice-commandant of 1st Battalion Dublin Brigade of the IRA was to his co-religionists ‘an iconoclast, who sought rupture with the past’ (pp. 184, 185).
Finding a valued place for Protestant nationalism within the dominant political narrative of early twentieth-century Ireland was virtually impossible. Promoting the notion, as Irvine later did, that Protestants were the inspiration for Irish republicanism while Catholics were traditionally loyal to the Crown, was as ingenious as it was insulting to all sides. In this balanced and timely book, Morrissey's first conclusion is, unsurprisingly, that religious denomination is central in early twentieth-century Ireland, and that political culture had to bend to that reality. His second is that ‘individual historical actors…can often be best understood in relation to the formal and informal networks they inhabited’ (p. 223). This is particularly significant when there were so few of these ‘individual historical actors’. Finally, he emphasizes the significance of this nationalist counterculture in a largely monolithic society. If it contributed anything, Protestant nationalism perhaps provided a narrow bridge across which each tribe could travel into the other's territory – if they wanted to.