“a vestigial population”?: perspectives on southern irish protestants in the twentieth century

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ire-Ireland, Volume 44:3&4, Earrach/Samhradh / Fall/Winter 2009,pp. 9-42 (Article)

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Ian dAlton

I

The gods were not smiling on the Irish Week of Prayer for ChristianUnity in January . The Jesuit organizer of an ecumenical meet-ing in Dublins Mansion House had unwisely promised that, for thefirst time since the Reformation, the two archbishops of Dublin,John Charles McQuaid for the Catholics and George Otto Simmsfor the Church of Ireland, would publicly say the Lords Prayertogether. McQuaid was incandescent with fury at being railroadedinto this event and took it out on the traumatized cleric. As a result,the meeting itself was chaotically disorganized. A free-for-all at thestart resulted in McQuaids securing a seat at the top table, whileSimms ended up in the audience, notwithstanding that there wasan empty chair on the platform. That empty chair, together with apatronizing tribute by the main speaker to the Irish authorities forbeing so tolerant toward their minority, was seen by many as sym-bolizing the still seemingly marginal position of Irish Protestants inthe southern state. So discomforting was it that one contemporary

9

*The genesis of this essay was in a paper given to history students at the Universityof Cambridge on January . I wish to thank Dr. Eugenio Biagini for the kindinvitation to address his special-subject group. I am also grateful to Professor TomDunne, Barry OLeary, the Rev. Peter Hanna, and Felix Larkin for their helpfullycritical analyses of earlier drafts of this paper. I am indebted as well to the Rev. Dr.Robert Tobin, Dr. Susan Hood, and Professor Maurice Harmon for various kindsof generous assistance.

A Vestigial Population?

Perspectives on Southern

Irish Protestants in the

Twentieth Century*

commentator suggested that ecumenism was in danger of becomingIrelands number one blood sport. And exactly a year later, theincorrigible McQuaid was still calling for prayers for the return ofProtestants to the One True Church.1

Until the s at least, southern Irish Protestants often spentthe time dancing around their own handbags. Yet within not muchmore than a decade, all had changed, changed utterly. Initially, thecatalyst came from outside Irelandthe upheavals instituted by theSecond Vatican Council () and the disintegration of theauthority of the Catholic church over sexual mores initiated by theencyclical HumanaeVitae ()and then internally, following ashort-lived boost from the papal visit in , with the painful emer-gence of corrosive scandals involving priests, brothers, and nuns inthe s. A loss of nerve, long thought to be a Protestant charac-teristic, was suddenly mirrored on the Catholic side.

At the same time, Protestantism was bedding down as a confidentminority.2 The change of pace was startling. Extrapolating the pop-ulation graph, as late as the s observers could assert quite plau-sibly that southern Protestants appeared to be dwindling . . .towards a painless extinction, accepting the need to live quietly andpassively in their dying culture.3 But by far from the fears ofearnest ecumenists wondering if there would be enough to goaroundProtestants appeared to be thriving, as evidenced byhealthy census figures.4 Their social standing has become quite fash-

ire-Ireland 44: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 09 Perspectives on Southern Irish Protestants10

. See the entertaining account of the episode in John Cooney, JohnCharles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland (Dublin, ), , .

. Daithi Corrin,Rendering to God and Caesar:The Irish Churches and theTwoStates in Ireland, (Manchester, ), . A confident minority was the titleof Bishop Arthur Butlers sermon on the eve of the general synod of the Church ofIreland on May .

. J.C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish Tradition (London, ), ; Kurt Bowen,Protestants in a Catholic State: Irelands Privileged Minority (Dublin, ), .

. Between the and censuses of population in the Republic of Ire-land, the Church of Ireland population increased by a remarkable percent, from, to ,; this was all the more remarkable since it reversed a steadydecline since . Migration and its side-effects, such as Protestant partners ofreturning emigrants, played a large part. While relative fertility also improved, anec-dotal evidence from southern parishes appears to bear out the rather pessimisticconclusion that the residual ethnic group defined as Church of Ireland is, at best,no more than in a steady state. See Malcolm Macourt, Counting the People of God?

ionable, apparent in the enthusiastic colonization of fee-payingProtestant schools by the offspring of prosperous Catholics. Roy Fos-ters contention that by the s Catholics became Protestants isquite believable. Protestantness, if not Protestantism, is the flavor ofthe moment.5

But if Protestants were still perceived to possess outsider statusnearly half a century after independence, it is perhaps worth askingwhy. Was it imposed on them by the insiders, the Catholics? Or wasit self-determined, a cocoon created to ensure that difference wasmaintained? Edward Saids argument is appositethat nations arethemselves narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other nar-ratives from forming and emerging, is very important.6 Yet, despitea dominant plangent nationalism, a distinct Protestant narrativeexisted side-by-side right through to the s.A Church of Irelanddeclaration in that we are Irish and Ireland is our homemight seem unexceptional and could have been subscribed to bySinn Fin.7 But Protestants and Catholics were divided by a com-mon language; that simple declaration contained a minefield of dif-fering interpretations of we, Irish, Ireland, and home.

We cannot tell what political change lies before our country, ser-monized the newly elected archbishop of Dublin in July , butone thing is certain, the Church of Ireland must never let itself be astranger in Ireland.8 And southern Protestants, often perceiving Ire-land as a country rather than a nation,9 were never strangers in

ire-Ireland 44: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 09 Perspectives on Southern Irish Protestants 11

The Census of Population and the Church of Ireland (Dublin, ), . See alsoRobert Tobin, The Evolution of National and Religious Identity in ContemporaryIreland, in Redefining Christian Britain: Post Perspectives, ed. Jane Garnett et al.(London, ). My essay assumes (perhaps heroically) religious constancy. SeeJulie Anne Stevens, The Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross (Dublin, ), , onsouthern Anglicans; she comments that although their politics or their sexualitymay be open to question, their religion remains firm.

. First articulated by Marie-Claire Charon, Protestant Schools in IrelandaFrench View,Studies (Spring ): ; Eddie Holt, in IrishTimes, Nov. ; R.F.Foster,Luck and the Irish:A Brief History of Change, (London, ), .

. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, ), xiii.. Church of Ireland Gazette and Family Newspaper (hereafter cited as CoIG),

July .. George Seaver, John Fitzgerald Gregg,Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin, ),

.. J.M. Hone, The Bell , no. (Sept. ): .

their own land, as shown by the empathetic words of the Anglo-Irishnovelists Somerville and Ross:

The very wind that blows softly over brown acres of bog carriesperfumes and sounds that England does not know:the women digging the potato-land are talking of thingsthat England does not understand. The question that remainsis whether England will ever understand.10

This passage raises the significant issue of identity. Approaches tosouthern Protestantism in the twentieth century are wide in scope,from demographic and sociological studies, through cultural analy-ses and anecdotal narrative, to the examination of high politics.11 Yetmany of these concentrate on describing the experience of southernProtestants outside an adequate context of establishing that identity,ignoring or being unaware of the thesis that the uncertainty andcomplexity of their status may itself shape that experience.12 Onefruitful avenue of study is the comparative, and there is much to belearned from the history of other, similar minorities.13 France in par-


. Edith Somerville and Martin Ross,Some IrishYesterdays (London, ), .. A small selection of the relevant literature includes Joseph Ruane and David

Butler, Southern Irish Protestants: An Example of De-ethnicisation?Nations andNationalism , no. (): ; John Coakley, Religion, Ethnic Identity, andthe Protestant Minority in the Republic, in Ireland and the Politics of Change, ed.William Crotty and David Schmitt (London, ); Jack White, Minority Report(Dublin, ); Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State; F.S.L. Lyons, Culture andAnarchy in Ireland, (Oxford, ), and The Minority in the Counties,in TheYears of the Great Test, , ed. F. McManus (Cork, ), ; MarkBence-Jones,Twilight of the Ascendancy (London, ); Michael McConville,Ascen-dancy to Oblivion: The story of the Anglo-Irish (London, ); Donald Akenson,Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, (Quebec, );Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism, :The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland, (Dublin, ); Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, (London, ); Corrin, Rendering to God and Caesar; Ian dAlton, Remem-bering the Future, Imagining the Past: How Southern Irish Protestants Survived,in Librarians, Poets, and Scholars: A Festschrift for Donall Lanaigh, ed. Felix M.Larkin (Dublin, ), ; Bernadette Hayes andTony Fahey, Protestants andPolitics in the Republic of Ireland: Is Integration Complete?, in Irish ProtestantIdentities, ed. Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal, and Jonathan Tonge (Manchester,), .

. Ruane and Butler, Southern Irish Protestants, .. See, for instance, Patrick Cabanel, Protestantism in the Czech Historical

Narrative and Czech Nationalism of the Nineteenth Century, National Identities

ticular offers a rewarding contrast. French Protestants, with onlysome percent of the population, appear to have a heroic view andknowledge of their history that are almost entirely lacking in IrishProtestantism.The dominant narrative has made sure of that.14

Survival within a shifting sense of identity is the concern of thisessay. Southern Irish Protestants utilized four modes to achievethisengagement, exclusivity, invisibility, and assertionand fourexemplars are used to illumine them. Political and cultural engage-ment is appraised by exploring local politics before the end of theUnion and by gauging reactions of the IrishTimes newspaper to theindependent Irish state. Exclusivity is examined through the proxyof Anglo-Irish writing on the Big House. The dangers of both visi-bility and invisibility between and especially, and in thefollowing decades, are analyzed in terms of the social and the demo-graphic.The green shoots of a returning assertiveness are inspectedthrough the prism of a revealing religious spat in .

Who were these southern Protestants? In they numberedabout ,.15 Their spread throughout the general populationwas uneven, with a proportion of percent in Dublin but only percent in the west.16 Mainly urban in , by mid-century thecommunity was much more evenly balanced between town andcountry. Dublin and Cork cities not only possessed substantial mid-dling professional and entrepreneurial classes, but also a Protestantworking class, most evident in the capital and numbering some,.17 Prosperous farmers, shopkeepers, and small businessmen


, no. (March ): ; and Philippe Rigoulot, Protestants and the FrenchNation under the Third Republic: Between Recognition and Assimilation, ibid.,.

. J. Ruane, Beyond Ethnicity: Protestantism and Peoplehood in France andIreland (unpublished paper in the possession of Ian dAlton).

. H.C. , vol. , Cd. , . For the purposes of this sectionsouthern Ireland is defined as the area of the Irish Free State, i.e., the threeprovinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connacht, and the three Ulster counties ofCavan, Donegal, and Monaghan. Irish Protestants are generally defined as includ-ing members of the Church of Ireland, Methodists, Presbyterians, and some minorChristian denominations. See Census of Ireland, , vol. .

. R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline:The Fate of Southern Unionists (Dublin,), .

. The people of the playwright Sean OCasey. See Martin Maguire, TheDublin Protestant Working Class, : Economy, Society, Politics (Masters

formed a significant component of the Protestant community.18 TheAnglo-Irish gentry, largely a busted flush by , were a small partof the Protestant population but contributed a large part of the noise.

Protestants comprised only percent of the population ofsouthern Ireland in , yet they punched far above their numeri-cal weight, accounting for nearly half the lawyers, over a third ofdoctors, and nearly three-quarters of bankers. By the Protes-tant population had declined to percent of the total, yet it still had percent of the lawyers, over percent of the doctors, and wellover percent of the bankers.19 More than a quarter of large farmswere still in Protestant hands in . Of the managerial classes,nearly one-fifth were Protestants.20 This economically dominantand resilient minority had a vital interest in how the economy of thenew state was organized, especially in its tariff, taxation, and land-distribution policies, and in its attitudes toward education, the pro-fessions, and the public service.21

II

The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen, in her memoir SevenWinters,22 says of Edwardian Dublin that the twentieth century


thesis, University College Dublin, ); idem, The Organisation and Activism ofDublins Protestant Working Class, , Irish Historical Studies , no. (May ): .

. Idem, The Church of Ireland and the Problem of the Protestant Working-Class of Dublin, ss, in As by Law Established:The Church of Ireland sincethe Reformation, ed.Alan Ford, James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (Dublin, ),; Saorstt Eireannn,Census of Population, , X,General Report (Dublin, ),(P.), . While the total proportion of Protestants employed in agriculturaloccupations was percent (i.e., close to the average of . percent in the populationat large), it was heavily skewed in favor of prosperity, having percent of farmmanagers, for instance, in contrast to only . percent of agricultural laborers.

. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, ; Saorstt Eireannn, Census of Population,, , .

. Saorstt Eireannn, Census of Population, , , ; R.B. McDowell, TheChurch of Ireland, (London, ), .

. Lord Midleton sought direct representation in for commerce as wellas property in the new Irish Senate. See Peter Martin, Unionism:The Irish Nobil-ity and Revolution, , in The Irish Revolution, , ed. Joost Augusteijn(Basingstoke and New York, ), .

. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowens Court & SevenWinters (London, ), .

governed only in name; the nineteenth was still a powerful dowager.If the birth of democratic Irish politics lies truly in the era of local-government reform after , its conception was in the franchiseand constituency reforms of .23 At the general election,encouraged by the recently formed Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union,loyalists in various guises (conservatives, independents, liberals)contested many southern constituencies. Head-on confrontationwith nationalism served only to demonstrate starkly the numericalweakness of southern unionism. In Ireland as a whole, fifty-two con-tests resulted in fifty defeats. A lesson well learned, mass parlia-mentary candidatures were not attempted again. Henceforth, south-ern Protestants were wont to rely on Irish unionists sitting forEnglish constituencies rather than on northern unionists to representtheir interests in parliament.24

What is interesting about is the lack of support for the loy-alist candidates generally. Given the proportion of Protestants in theelectorate, the loyalist vote should have been much higher. It wasalmost as if at a national level southern unionists had already givenup. But below the parliamentary level, Protestant unionists exhibiteda more vigorous political engagement after the mid-s. Urbanunionism especially exhibited freshness and vitality.25 To take Corkas an example, Sir John Harley Scott, one of the citys leading ship-ping merchants and a revitalizer of civic unionism, exploited nation-


. Alan ODay, Irish Home Rule, (Manchester, ), .. In eight Cork constituencies, for instance, loyalist candidates amassed a

total of , votes, against more than ten times that number for the nationalists. SeeParliamentary Election Results in Ireland, , ed. Brian Walker (Dublin, ),; Ian dAlton, Cork Unionism: Its Role in Parliamentary and Local Elections,, Studia Hibernica (): . A.H. Smith-Barry (South Hunting-donshire, ), R.U. Penrose-Fitzgerald (Cambridge city, ), andJ.R.B. Pretyman-Newman (Enfield, , and Finchley, ) representedCork unionists, variously, between and . Only right at the end of theUnion was there one final throw of the national unionist dice, when Cork loyalistsattempted to exploit the nationalist/Sinn Fein split at the general election. SeeWalker, Parliamentary Election Results, . The unionists received , votes, incontrast to , for Home Rulers and , for Sinn Fin.

. In this, it helped that southern unionism was possibly a frame of mindrather than an immutable political constant. See Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionismand the New Ireland, in Revolution in Ireland, , ed. D. George Boyce(Dublin, ), .

alist divisions over Parnell to fine effect, seeing off those from his sidewho found the constant adaptation and necessarily shifting politicalalliances distasteful. Allying first with Parnellites, then with anti-Parnellites, the minority unionist bloc in the city corporationmaneuvered to improve its numbers and morale, culminating inScotts election as mayorto the fury of the nationalist Cork Exam-inerof this Catholic and National city in .26

This set the scene for the first local-government elections in,27 in which unionists did better than expected. Despite misgiv-ings about inevitable humiliation and loss of self-respect, many gen-try heeded the Tory minister Gerald Balfours call to the naturalleaders of the people to stand.28 In the largest Irish county, Cork, forinstance, although none won a seat, their average vote was percent,nearly three times the proportion received in the parliamentaryelections. Several candidates received votes in excess of percent,though at the price of considerable fudge in relation to Home Rule.This pattern of the more local, the more successful, was also demon-strated at the levels of urban district councils and town commissions;the January elections produced a respectable eleven unionistcouncilors in ten different towns in that county.29

Yet, for all this, the unionist success was temporary. In , inwhat was to become the area encompassed by the Irish Free State, unionists had seats on county councils. After the local-govern-ment elections of that number had shriveled to .30 By the game was up. Despite Scotts triumph in riding the tiger ofnationalist splits in the sexhilarating, but dangerousa Cork


. Cork Examiner, Dec. .. Brendan O Donoghue, From Grand Juries to County Councils: The

Effects of the Local Government (Ireland) Act , in Larkin,Librarians,Poets, andScholars, .

. Parliamentary Debates, th series, vol. ( Feb. ), .. Full results can be found in the Cork Examiner, Jan. (towns) and ,

, and April (county divisions). See also Catherine Shannon, Local Gov-ernment in Ireland: The Politics and Administration (Masters thesis, UniversityCollege Dublin, ); O Donoghue, From Grand Juries to County Councils,.

. George Arbuthnot, How Local Government Is Worked in Ireland, inNineteenth Century (June ), ; among the rural and urban district coun-cils there were nationalist chairmen and only unionist. The disappearance ofex-officio members in contributed heavily to the decline.

city unionist party, a decade before the end of the Union, hadceased to exist as such. Its erstwhile members emerged as inde-pendents, ratepayers representatives, and (prefiguring later supportfor the Fine Gael party) a surprising number as All-for-IrelandLeague supporters.31 By avoiding the larger national question,unionists found a role as economic patriots based on the local.32

Political engagement was not a defining feature of southernProtestantism after independence. But in the cultural sphere, onevisible Protestant institution tried to remain engaged. The IrishTimes newspaper was a significant channel for, and shaper of,Protestant opinion. When Lawrence Knox founded it in ,Protestantism was still a dominant political and cultural force onthe island, and for its first sixty years the paper was in tune with thepolity of which it was part. Indeed, Ireland in was in a situationnever to be repeated, with a majority of conservative MPs.33 Knoxhad chosen a propitious moment since, in the words of a landlord,country quiet, prices good, farmers prospering, rents well paid.34

By the time of independence the Times had had long practice atplaying to a prosperous and literate constituency. Even as the pro-portions of Protestants in the upper economic echelons declined, itastutely marketed itself toward those who took their places, theCatholic middle classes.35

If the economics broadly worked, politics was a trickier play. Fin-tan OToole suggests that the reality was that a unionist newspapercould never really avoid being a Protestant one.36 If that was true,


. Ian dAlton, Southern Irish Unionism: A Study of Cork City and CountyUnionists, (Masters thesis, University College Cork, ), .

. Idem, Keeping Faith: An Evocation of the Cork Protestant Character,, in Cork History and Society, ed. Patrick OFlanagan and CorneliusButtimer (Dublin, ), .

. Andrew Shields, The Irish Conservative Party, : Land, Politics, andReligion (Dublin and Portland, OR, ), xi, .

. K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, (Oxford,), .

. Mark OBrien, The Irish Times:A History (Dublin, ), . See alsoCaleb Richardson, Transforming Anglo-Ireland: R.M. Smyllie and The IrishTimes,New Hibernia Review , no. (Winter ): , , n. .This article is anexcellent analytical introduction to the history of the Times.

. Fintan OToole, A Paper for All Ireland, in The Irish Times @ , March , .

what about the converse, which in the new dispensation, was whatreally mattered? The eccentric genius of the Times, edited and man-aged by eccentric geniuses, was its adaptive abilitymirroring inmany ways the little-appreciated chameleon-like qualities of much ofsouthern Protestantism. In this respect the paper was much moresuccessful than some of its peers. It was a case of adapt or die. TheProtestant unionist Cork Constitution newspaper, with its stridentsectarian agenda, could not survive the change of regime in , as,indeed, neither could the Freemans Journal on the other side of thefence, for somewhat different reasons.37 The world of the IrishTimesoffers a proxy for the path that much of southern Irish Protes-tantism was to follow, with the newspaper becoming, as OTooleputs it, an example of the virtues preached in its own leading arti-cles, a solid, practical achievement by Protestants who, instead ofstanding aloof, threw themselves into the daily life of Ireland.38

This view, however, is slightly rosy. Reflecting the generality ofsouthern Protestantism, the Times still possessed outsider statusnearly half a century after independence. Indeed, under the editor-ships of R.M. Smyllie and Douglas Gageby in particular, it gloriedin its contrarianism.39 Still, its contrariness and outsider qualitywould have been missed if these attributes had gone under at inde-pendence. On the one hand, for southern Protestants the Timeshelped to supply an essential narrative of continuity, easing the ex-unionists into a tolerancealbeit often grudgingof the new Ire-land. On the other hand, the Times held to principles of personalresponsibility and the questioning of verities almost single-handedlyuntil rescued by the Protestantization of southern Irish societybeginning in the s.40 (In one particular sense it is a miracle thatthe Irish Times survived at all. Across the wide, busy road from the


. Felix M. Larkin, A Great Daily Organ: The Freemans Journal,,History Ireland , no. (MayJune ), .

. OToole, A Paper for All Ireland, .. OBrien, IrishTimes, , .. Hayes and Fahey in Protestants and Politics in the Republic of Ireland,

, conclude from examining the European Values Study that south-ern Irish Protestants have values virtually indistinguishable from those of theirCatholic neighbors. Because of a lack of comparative data over time, what they havenot been able to consider is the extent to which Catholics may have moved towarda Protestant position.

paper, the Palace Bar in Fleet Street was a favorite haunt of thehacks.Truly, a Protestant God must have been watching over them.How were large-scale casualties avoided in those inebriated dashesthrough the traffic?)

III

If political and cultural engagement, and the shape-shifting thatnecessarily went with it, constituted one mode in which southernProtestants dealt with the other Ireland, another was to ignore it andretreat into social exclusivity. Here identity did not really have to beaddressed. In their separate worlds nationalist and unionist Irelandconfronted each other . . . from positions of monolithic security;competition was unnecessary.41 The history of the ascendancy BigHouse stands as a symbol of such exclusivity.42 In importantrespects, however, the history has been overwhelmed by the fiction;it needs careful treatment.43 As Oliver MacDonaghwho champi-oned the value of the literary to the historicalwarned in relation tothe novel, It is not an historical source as the term is ordinarilyunderstood, nor should it ever be regarded as history manqu. Buthe also recognized that it can yield insights and possibilities ofrecovering special portions of the past, for which we shall search invain in any other matter.44


. Roy Foster,Modern Ireland, (London, ), .. For the Big Houses in reality Terence Dooley provides an excellent

overview in The Decline of the Big House in Ireland:A Study of Irish Landed Families, (Dublin, ), and in The Big Houses and Landed Estates of Ireland: AResearch Guide (Dublin, ). For treatment of the imaginative dimensions, seeVera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse, ) and JohnWilson Foster, Irish Novels, : New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (Oxford,). See also Ian dAlton, The Last Big House: Perspectives from LennoxRobinson and Elizabeth Bowen (unpublished paper, Royal Irish Academy, Com-mittee for Irish Literatures in English Conference on The Big House in TwentiethCentury Irish Writing, Oct. ).

. For example, Roy Foster points out that Elizabeth Bowens The Last Sep-tember is sometimes treated as historical evidence, though it was really written as ahistorical novel. See Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr.Punch (London, ), . See alsoKreilkamp, Anglo-Irish Novel, ; Jean Genet, The Big House in Ireland: Reality andRepresentation (London, ), .

. Oliver MacDonagh,The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Irish Social History:Some Aspects (The ODonnell Lecture, National University of Ireland, ), . For

Lennox Robinsons play The Big House was first performed on September in the Abbey Theatre. Set in the period from to , it deals with that important, though by no means domi-nant, subset of southern Protestantism, the Anglo-Irish.The houseacts as both canvas and character. It is a largely interior world dis-turbed by outside forces, hostile and friendly, and ultimatelydestructive of both itself and the way of life it represented.45

Its the morning after. Ballydonal, the eponymous Big House, is acharred and smoking ruin. So is its owner.46 Yet St. Leger Alcock isrelieved: Im just damned glad its all over and theres no reason tomake an effort any more. His feisty daughter, however, is as firedup as the house. Unwilling to go quietly, Kate protests its centralityto her existence: I believe in Ballydonal, its my life, its my faith, itsmy country.47

MacDonagh maintained that for the Anglo-Irish, the physicalprecincts were . . . central to identity;48 and Kate Alcocks declara-tion of allegiance to her countrythe Big Houseis no less fiercethan that of a Sinn Finer to Caitln N Houlihan.This autonomousstate worked for the gentry, because Protestants and Catholicscould live side by side, as they frequently did, and still live in com-pletely different worlds.49 As Lionel Fleming wrote of his childhood


a thought-provoking analysis of the issue, see Tom Dunne, A Polemical Introduc-tion: Literature, Literary Theory, and the Historian, in TheWriter asWitness (His-torical Studies ), ed. Tom Dunne (Cork, ), .

. Robinsons play was written in . See Selected Plays of Lennox Robin-son, ed. Christopher Murray (Gerrards Cross, ), . The play is cited as TBHin subsequent notes. Last performed in , it was revived by the Abbey Theatre(producer, Conall Morrison) in a run from July to September . See The BigHouse at the Abbey from July (program notes). For reviews, see Web sitehttp://bonhom.ie///review-the-big-house-abbey-theatre.html; Irish Independ-ent (Bruce Arnold), Aug. (consulted on Sept. ); Sunday Business Post(Sara Keating), Sunday Independent, both Aug. . Fintan OToole (IrishTimes, Aug. ) characterizes it as follows: Hovering between its own ambiguities, itlands neither on the Chekovian comedy it flirts with nor on the grand tragedy itsometimes glimpses.

. TBH, . St. Leger Alcock, though a nonsmoker, is moved to seek a pipeand then a cigarette.

. TBH, , .. Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of the Anglo-Irish Conflict,

(London, ), .. Akenson, Small Differences, .

before the First World War: Nothing counted for about three mileson any side of us, because there were no Protestants until then.50

That self-contained interior existence was one in which social ritual,often pointless and tedious, was acted out as if to a script, withCatholics, lower-class Protestants, and military garrisons playing thewalk-on parts and supplying the bit actors. It was a world thatinvolved a great deal of class- and gender-consciousness and inwhich family trees were meticulously composed.51 Hermione Leecharacterizes it as a society in which grandeur has become snob-bery, fanaticism has dwindled to eccentricity.52

And if there was a script governing this private world, it wasincumbent upon the participants to learn it. This remembrance ofthe future largely drove the life of the Anglo-Irish, emerging in thespate of Protestant memoirs and chronicles that appeared from thes onward, from such writers as T.R. Henn, Hubert Butler, JoanDe Vere, and Annabel Goff. In the poet Thomas McCarthys words,The gentry, and southern Irish Anglicans in general, were born forremembrance. Their children took to autobiography as naturally astheyd taken to horse-riding.53

These writers had a standard box of props. A principal one wasthe Big House itself. And while comprehending it as stage-set isnecessary for understanding how the Anglo-Irish livedand sawtheir lives, it is hardly sufficient. As indicated by the subtitle ofRobinsons playFour Scenes in Its Life54these houses are also


. Lionel Fleming,Head or Harp (London, ), .. For instance, Timoleagues tiny tennis club was open only to Protestants,

and not even to all of those, and the Royal Cork Yacht Club was a bastion of theProtestant political establishment. See dAlton, Southern Irish Unionism, ;Fleming,Head or Harp, , ; General Rules and Regulations of the Royal CorkYachtClub. Corrected to st May (Cork, ), (persons to be admitted as hon-orary and ex-officio members); Bowen, Bowens Court & SevenWinters, , .

. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen (London, ), .. Thomas McCarthy, Introduction to Bowen, Bowens Court (reprint ed.,

Cork, ), xi.. TBH, . Robinson, through his observer the Rev. Brown, was extraordi-

narily interested in watching this house and the fight its making. One of his char-acters, the Englishman Despard, asks, What the dickens is it fighting for? Robin-sons answer? Its life. See TBH, , exchange between the Rev. Henry Brownand Captain Montgomery Despard.

sentient characters.55 Personalization is demonstrated in the treat-ment of Big Houses as victims of war and its collateral damage. Likepeople, they have glorious ends, or cower in the countryside, thank-fully unnoticed, lucky to survive, living on, dying in their beds.56

Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country likean invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smoldered as thesehouses, like Elizabeth Bowens Danielstown in her novel The LastSeptember, awaited their executioners in the period between and . As Yeats later put it in his play Purgatory,57

Great people lived and died in this house;Magistrates, colonels, members of parliament,Captains and governors, and long agoMen that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.Some that had gone on government workTo London or to India came home to die,Or came from London every springTo look at the May-blossom in the park. . . .

But he killed the house; to kill a houseWhere great men grew up, married, died,I here declare a capital offence.

While many of these houses were victims of the proper conflictthat of independenceBallydonals destruction is a reprisal for aCivil War execution far away in Dublin, and unfathomable for all


. This point was made in John Cronin,The Anglo-Irish Novel ( vols., Belfast,), :.The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in G. Bachelard, M. Jolas,and J. Stilgoe, The Poetics of Space (Boston, ), envisages the notion of the houseas home, that is, a place in which we are protected. Crucially, the house is a mater-nal figure in which we store our treasures collected from our different lifetimes,although in Phyllis Lassners phrase, Bowens portraits of empty but claustropho-bic houses challenge our stereotypical associations of family homes with a nurtur-ing and beneficent female essence. See Otto Rauchbauer, AncestralVoices:The BigHouse in Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin, ), ix; Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen(London, ), .

. Elizabeth Bowen was haunted by images of Bowens Court burning. SeeVictoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of aWriter (London, ), , .A kind of guiltmuch like that experienced by the survivors after the First WorldWarwas in evidence.

. E. Bowen,The Last September (London, ), , ; Yeatss elegies for theBig House are in Coole Park () and Purgatory ().

that like being run over by a bicycle rather than a Buick. Is thatwhy were to be burnt! is the English-born Mrs. Alcocks futile cryof incomprehension.58

It is temptingand the play encourages usto characterize thehistorical burnings as a sort of suttee: the Anglo-Irish flingingthemselves on the funeral pyre, so to speak. And with immolationmay come resurrection; renewal through fire is age-old imagery inmany cultures. Yet in the case of the Irish Big House it rarely hap-pened. Instead, there is merciful release from the house as thetyrannous invalid aunt forever banging on the bedroom floor forattention, the spoilt, demanding child gobbling up resources, theall-too-visible sleepy sentry in a hostile territory. In Killycregs inTwilight, a quasi-sequel to The Big House,Robinson, with theawful s and s behind him, recognized the folly andimpracticality of rebuilding: I wish wed been burned out in theTroubles. . . . I wouldnt have behaved like that fool-girl in the play,The Big House. I would never have rebuilt Killycregs. Id havethanked God to be quit of it.59

Its economic justification was largely gone by the early s,60

but as it died as a social actuality, the Big House was reborn inIrish literature.61 Robert Tobin maintains that this phenomenonled to the readiness with which many Protestant writers haveembraced, or at least acquiesced in, the imagery and language ofextinction.62 Prisoners of their genealogy, hostages to their futures,the gentry struggled with the opposing centrifugal and centripetalforces of their houses.

Anglo-Irish disengagementsocially, culturally, economically, asmuch voluntary as involuntaryhad begun long before independ-ence.The Alcockss busyness and their insistence on being involved


. TBH, .. Murray, Selected Plays, .. Even though the erstwhile landlords still had control of nearly million

untenanted acres in , this was a relatively small proportion of total farmland. SeeTerence Dooley, The Land for the People:The Land Question in Independent Ireland(Dublin, ), . See also idem, Decline of the Big House, , .

. Quoted in Kreilkamp, Anglo-Irish Novel, .. R.Tobin, Tracing Again theTiny Snail Track: Southern Protestant Mem-

oir since , TheYearbook of English Studies , no. (Jan. ): .

in the local life around them in were becoming unusual.63 Butif by the beginning of the twentieth century the engine was still run-ning, it was in neutral gear.64 A fin-de-sicle angst was in full cry, typ-ified by the self-deprecatory and bewildered doggerel of a County Clare unionist:65

For over the seas and far awayThe poor West Briton must sadly stray.He is out of fashion and out of date,And the deeds of old are forgotten of late.He brings no votes and he counts no more,And little is thought of the days of yore.And rare as the dodo, as all may see,A loyal West Briton full soon will be.

IV

The slow-motion collapse of Big House culture symbolizes theirrelevance of southern Protestantism to the other Ireland, evenbefore the end of the Union. But if in this irrelevance could be dis-cerned failure, in it too were the seeds of survival. It can beargued that, just as independence might not have seemed so attrac-tive if it had been postponed until the advent of the British welfarestate and the switching of the financial flows toward Ireland ratherthan away from it, the Ireland that we made, as Arthur Balfourlater proudly claimed,66 was one in which the great issuesland,local government, education, the churchhad to be settled beforethe Union could be dismantled. And they were. By then all thatmasked Protestant impotence was the Union. Once that was gone,


. TBH, , , , .Theo Hoppen, however, makes the point that whatwas remarkable about the landed gentry of southern Ireland was not that it lostpower but that by maximizing its advantages, it stayed relevant for as long as it did.See Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society, .

. Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, : In the novel [The Last September of ], theclass and the tradition . . . have become ineffectual and redundant within Ireland.Were shown their absurdity, their isolation, their lack of an active position, theirhelplessly conflicting loyalties.

. Poems of a County of ClareWest Briton (Limerick, ), (see Lament ofa West Briton).

. Blanche Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour ( vols., London, ), :.

in Bowens words, in the life of the new Ireland . . . the lives of myown people become a little thing.67

Not so little as to be happily left in peace, however. The cumula-tive and serial effect of land agitation, political Parnellism, Catholicreligious aggression, and above all, the Gaelic cultural revival led toan Ireland with a narrative that inexplicably required Protestantsadherence to the nation and their exclusion from it at one and thesame time. Looked upon, in the words of a Protestant novelist in, as illegitimate children of an irregular union between Hiber-nia and John Bull, they were caught in this perplexing and mad-dening paradox.68

For a time, around independence, that paradox of visible invis-ibility could not be sustained peaceably. Protestants were on arough journey from a situation in which Britishness was normativeto one where, not alone was it out of favor, but its public expressionalso carried a degree of risk. Between the censuses of and the Protestant population of the Irish Free State declined by per-cent in contrast to a decline of only percent in Catholic num-bers.69 When the departures of military families, civil servants, andpolice are counted, when any overestimation of the effects of the warof is discounted, and when the impact of mixed marriagesis entered into the equation, we are left with the inevitable conclu-sion that a significant proportion of the overall decline was due toinvoluntary migration.70 Recently assessed at about , fromthe south,71 this exodus constitutes about percent of the Protes-tant population decline between and .72 Irrelevance carriedlittle value, but visibility had its price.


. Bowen, Bowens Court & SevenWinters, .. Susanne R. Day, The Amazing Philanthropists (London, ), .. Saorstt Eireann, Census of Population, , .. See McDowell, Church of Ireland, , for a detailed discussion of pop-

ulation trends between and .. Dr. Andy Bielenberg, as reported by Eoghan Harris, Scarred by Forced

Exodus of Southern Protestants, in Sunday Independent, Dec. .. In the case of County Cork, nearly half its Protestant population was driven

out or left in the period from to , even though they had seemed to be rel-atively well integrated with their Catholic neighbors. See Peter Hart, The Protes-tant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland, in Unionism in Modern Ireland:New Perspectives on Politics and Culture, ed. R. English and G. Walker (London,

Peter Hart has characterized all this as the only example of themass displacement of a native ethnic group within the British Islessince the seventeenth centurynothing short of ethnic cleansing,comparable to that in Armenia and the Balkans in the twentiethcentury.73 On the surface he may have a point. But this episode wasno Bosnia. The artifacts of religious differencechurches, parishhalls, graveyardsremained virtually untouched. In retrospect, itseems to have been much more an opportunity to get rid of thoseindividuals and families who had most provoked personal hatredfrom individuals on the other side, for whatever specific reasonimagined or real slights, the wrong politics, or overzealous religios-ity.74 Land envy was a particular flashpoint:


), . See also Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies:Violence and Community inCork, (Oxford, ), , , , ;Terence Dooley,The Plight ofMonaghan Protestants, (Dublin, ). The west Cork incidents havebecome something of a proxy in a parallel war between revisionists and antirevi-sionists. On the one hand, some historians and polemicists have alleged an omissionby Hart of relevant information. For instance, it is claimed that Hart quoted a sen-tence from a British intelligence assessment, The Record of the Rebellion in the thDivisional Area, to bolster his view that shootings in were sectarian but left outa sentence immediately following indicating that they were not. It has been sug-gested that the names of those shot were on list of helpful citizens left behind byBritish Auxiliaries after they evacuated their quarters in Dunmanway workhouse.The intelligence diary was published in the Southern Star local newspaper in with the names redacted. By it was felt that these names could now be safelypublished. See N. Meehan, letter in IrishTimes, July . On the other hand, seeTom Wall, Getting Them Out (a review of Coolacrease:TheTrue Story of the Pear-son ExecutionsAn Incident in the IrishWar of Independence, by Paddy Heaney et al.,Aubane Historical Society),Dublin Review of Books (), for a thorough demo-lition of the validity of the sources used by Meehan, Ryan, and other apologists.

See also Web site http://www.reform.org/TheReformMovement_files/article_files/articles/cork.htm (consulted on December ) for an informative, if slanted,analysis of the decline of the Protestant population of County Cork in the period. Something quite similar had happened elsewhere at an earlier time ofupheaval: the period echoes , especially in County Wexford. See TomDunne, Rebellions:Memoir,Memory and (Dublin, ), , , .

. Peter Hart, The IRA atWar, (Oxford, ), , ; Hart, TheProtestant Experience of Revolution, ; Joseph ONeill,Blood-DarkTrack:A Fam-ily History (London, ), . Yet curiously, in a letter to the Irish Times of June , Hart insisted, I have never argued that ethnic cleansing took place inCork or elsewhere.

. See CoIG, June : The small Protestant community is at the mercyof local bands of lawless men who have learnt the use of the revolver for obtaining the

There were times when we were at one with themIn the hunting field over smuggled wine.We worked in their houses, but did not ever yieldOur secret claim to them, saying to the long-memoried neighbours

By right these lands are mine.75

The execution of the fictional Sir John Hamilton by rebels in KenLoachs film, TheWind That Shakes the Barley, is representedas essentially due to Hamiltons role as an informer rather than asjust a generic Protestant landlord.76 The real-life murder of BoyleSomerville, a former high-ranking naval officer, at Castletownshendin west Cork in March was explained at the time in terms of hisalleged recruiting activities for the British forces.77

And the west Cork experience was particularly bad. Between and a cascade of shootings, burnings, and evictions ofprosperous Protestant farmers, professionals, and small-town shop-keepers occurred around the towns of Bandon and Dunmanway.One must be careful, however, not to generalize from the particular.


property of others which they covet [my italics]. See also letter from Niall Meehan, IrishTimes, July , in which he takes detailed issue with Harts conclusions aboutsouthern Protestants not being informers because, except by chance, they had notgot [information] to give. (Meehan quotes an extract from The Record of theRebellion.)

. Maurice Farley, Ascendancy, in Before the Cattle Raid and Other Poems(Belfast, ), .

. Paul Laverty, Screenplay of TheWind That Shakes the Barley (Cork, ),, , . See also perceptive reviews of the film by Roy Foster, in DublinReview (Fall, ): , and by Brian Hanley, in History Ireland , no. (Sept.Oct. ): .

. ONeills Blood-Dark Track is a remarkable family memoir in which heattempts to ascribe the murder solely to the fact that Somerville was a Protestant;ONeill reasons that many Catholicspriests, local politicians, or other prominentpersonscould equally have been targeted for assisting in recruitment. Yet his logicdoes not necessarily invalidate the particularity argument. The fact cannot beignored that Somerville was not just any Protestant; he was a former high-rankingBritish military officer and thus, in the eyes of an IRA desperate at the time for a mil-itary revival, a legitimate target. His status as a Protestant could not have been theonly justification for killing him. See ONeill,Blood-DarkTrack, , , .I am indebted to Felix Larkin for drawing my attention to this book. Its powerful andimaginative writing carries it toward what seems a predetermined conclusion. AsONeill himself notes, families and nations have self-serving editions of their past(ibid., ). In this way his memoir replicates the subtle, if unconscious, subversionof Elizabeth Bowens Bowens Court.

A theory about the visibility of minoritiesthe Goldilocks postu-lationmight explain why Cork (and especially that part of westCork within the Bandon and Ilen river valleys) seems to have suf-fered more than most from sectarian violence in the period. Too small a minority, and the majority is indifferent; toolarge a minority, and the majority is reluctant to take on its rivals.78

West Cork appears to have been just right, it seems. A visible,high-density settler community and remembered animosities overland made this place special. There, a critical threshold of violencewas surpassed; consequently, many more probably fled throughpanic and feared economic deprivation than need have.79 In CountyLongford, by contrast, the IRA leader Sean MacEoin attempted toallay Protestant fears by issuing a soothing proclamation; and afterthat, he wrote, the families that had their bags packed, ready toleave, remained in their homes.80 The decline of the southernProtestant population in the period should be set alongsidethe fact that it fell by a similar proportion again between andabout , and by a further quarter from to owing tolow fertility, an older age structure, and the operation of theCatholic Churchs Ne temere decree up to the s.81 These laterdata put into context R.B. McDowells cool assessment of the ear-lier period that hardships sustained by the southern loyalists wereon the whole not excessively severe nor long-lasting.82


. Of course, a minority that was quite small might well feel isolated and thusbe prone to voluntary migration. Consider the case of Clare, where it was claimedthat almost all of the sixty-five gentry families in the county had left by . See L.Perry Curtis, Jr., The Last Gasp of Southern Unionism: Lord Ashtown of Wood-lawn, ire-Ireland , no. (FallWinter ): .

. For instance, Bishop Godfrey Day of Ossory was a vigorous opponent ofwhat he saw as a travesty of the truth in the representation of Catholic-Protestantconflict in his diocese. See R. Hartford,Godfrey Day,Missionary, Pastor, and Primate(Dublin, ), . For a description of loyalist problems in , see Buck-land, Irish Unionism, :.

. Quoted in Marie Coleman, County Longford and the Irish Revolution(Dublin, ), . Coleman remarks that none of the attacks on Protestants,described as ethnic cleansing by Peter Hart, which appear to have been widespreadin southern Ireland in , took place in Longford (ibid., ).

. Brendan Walsh, Religion and Demographic Behaviour in Ireland (Dublin,); idem, Trends in the Religious Composition of the Population in the Repub-lic of Ireland, , Economic and Social Review , no. (): .

. McDowell,Crisis and Decline, ; Buckland, Irish Unionism, :, .

Particularity is an explanation of why visceral hatred ran out offuel so quickly. Furthermore, those Protestants who remained werethe beneficiaries of the tragedies of those who had fled. Catharsiseventually produced a species of deliberate amnesia on both sides.83

There is still, over years later, sensitivity to community memorywhether real or imagined is beside the point. A conference on theCork Protestant experience between and , organized bythe Anglican dioceses of Cork in December , was carefully con-trolledby invitation only to members of the dioceses and theirguests, and with advance publicity virtually nonexistent.84

Such modern sensitivity echoes the conduct of a deputationfrom the general synod of the Church of Ireland, which sought anaudience with the chairman of the provisional government,Michael Collins, in , rather pathetically inquiring whetherProtestants were to be permitted to live in Ireland or if it wasdesired that they should leave the country.85 This was the lowestpoint. As they struggled to move away from this nadir, it helpedthat southern Irish Protestants did not maintain (perhaps theywere incapable of so doing) a separate, irredentist, and aggressivepolitical identity. Southern unionists had tried for the best dealthey couldbut not only had they been dealt an impossible hand,they were also poor negotiators against the likes of de Valera andLloyd George.86 Their presence in the Irish Free State senatebetween and was oratorically impressive but mostlysound and fury, signifying nothing.87 In retrospect, this was all


. See ONeill, Blood-DarkTrack, , , for a fascinating discussionabout why southern Protestant memory is so selectiveessentially serving as adefense mechanism, he maintains.

. United Dioceses of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, Diocesan Magazine , no. (Dec. ): . Bishop Paul Colton of Cork wrote of this gathering that for now . . .this . . . will be an in-house conference principally for people from this diocesealone. See also Church of Ireland United Dioceses of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross,Understanding Our History: Protestants, theWar of Independence, and the CivilWar inCounty Cork, Dec. , Cork. The conference was addressed by Peter Hart, JoeRuane, David Butler, Andy Bielenberg (all cited above), John Borgonovo, and Sen-ator Eoghan Harris.

. Buckland, Irish Unionism, :.. Martin, Unionism: The Irish Nobility and Revolution, , ;

Buckland, Irish Unionism, :, , , .. William Shakespeare,Macbeth, act , sc. .

to the good.88 Otherwise, the new regime might have been painfulindeed. To those for whom the Irish Free State was anything butfreeeconomically, socially, or culturallydeparture was the onlyoption, and many did leave. But those who remained or who, likeElizabeth Bowen, traveled back and forth across the Irish Sea inthe perpetual transits between Anglo and Irish, were freed froman albatross of history.89

The generation that spanned crown rule and republic had todecide how its members were to deal with the new state of things.Were they to be visible or invisible? Robinson and Yeats were in lit-tle doubt.At the end of Robinsons play, in contrast to her spineless,weary parents, Kate Alcock is defiant: Theyre afraid of us still. . . .We must glory in our difference, be as proud of it as they are oftheirs.90 Protestants could be formidable if we care to make our-selves so.91 Kates tone echoes Yeatss speech in , when he hadelectrified the senate with his boast about Irish Protestants:

We are one of the great stocks of Europe. . . . If we have not lost ourstamina, then your victory will be brief, and your defeat final, andwhen it comes, this nation may be transformed.92

He was not the first to articulate such sentiments: the historianLecky had written in similar terms at the time of the first homerule bill, the jurist Dicey at the second.93 But the context in was radically different. Yeatss claim of past glories and futurerobustness grated painfully with the position of powerlessness thatsouthern Protestantism now occupied. In this subversive and clev-erly crafted speech, he attempted to create a myth from the realitythat he perceived Irish Protestantism to be. With a breathtakingarrogance the poet sublimated an entire people into an imaginedpast, content to send them into a stern and predetermined future.


. Buckland, Irish Unionism, :.. Bowen, Bowens Court, .. TBH, .. TBH, .. The Senate Speeches ofW.B.Yeats, ed. D.R. Pearce (London, ), .. W.E.H. Lecky, A Nationalist Parliament, Nineteenth Century (April

): ; A.V. Dicey, The Protest of Irish Protestantism, ContemporaryReview (July ): .

If we ignore the inconvenient truth that it is doubtful whether hehad the majority of southern Protestants on his side, or that manyof them did not even understand what he was up to, to state a rea-son for existing was the point.94

Acquiescence seemed the only course open to them, and theyadjusted themselves to the new conditions more quickly and withless difficulty than might have been expected.95 Here the historianBeckett was referring not to post-independence Protestants butrather to those who had opposed the Act of Union. Southern Protes-tants in had been at this juncture before, it seemed. Yeats mayhave discomfited them with his glorification of their role in theprogress of the nation, but he comforted them with his belief thattheir time could come around: all things fall and are built again.96

Acquiescence, however, did not necessarily mean surrender. Cop-ing could take many forms. One such response was a private retreat:my pregnant grandmother was brought to Belfast in to ensurethat the child she bore would be indisputably a subject of George V.The long-term existence of the new state was by no means certain,and it was made progressively less congenial to Protestants by legis-lation in favor of the Irish language and censorship and by restric-tions on liquor sales, divorce, and contraception.97 Singularity isnever popular, advised the Anglican archbishop of Dublin in Octo-ber ; as white mice, Protestants were encouraged to keep a low


. Corkery later (in ) argued that Protestant culture was always an imper-manent structure. See Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork,), .The IrishTimes, a bellwether, was not enthusiastic about the speech. SeeRoy Foster,W.B.Yeats:A Life, :The Arch-Poet (Oxford, ), .

. Beckett, The Anglo-IrishTradition, .. W.B. Yeats, Lapis Lazuli (). See also F.S.L. Lyons, Yeats and the

Anglo-IrishTwilight, in Irish Culture and Nationalism, .The transcendental levelis perhaps reflected in the fiction: the Big House renews its life by drawing in the spir-its of the deadfor example, the son Ulick in Robinsons play, who is killed threedays before the Armistice, or the nearly ghost republican who silently moves throughthe garden of Bowens Danielstown in The Last September.This insight is brought toa climax in Bowens Court: With the end of each generation, the lives that sub-merged here were absorbed again. With each death the air of the place had thick-ened: it had been added to. See Bowen, Last September, ; Bowens Court & SevenWinters, .

. John Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, (Dublin, ),; Joseph Lee, Ireland, : Politics and Society (Cambridge, ), .

profile.98 The furor over the appointment of aTrinity College Protes-tant woman as a librarian in Mayo in brought an unappealingsectarianism to the surface.99 The Eucharistic Congress, heldshortly after Fianna Fails accession to government, seemed to sym-bolize the triumph of a narrative of cultural Catholicism and politicalnationalism in the Free State.

It is therefore not surprising that with a few exceptionscolum-nists in the more courageous Irish periodicals, writers such asHubert Butler and Yeats, and some prominent but totally atypicalchurchmenProtestants curled into a ball.100 Indeed, in the sand s their representatives often seemed, in public at any rate,to offer an unattractive, rather cloying, cozying up to the state.101

This stance was rooted in the realities. They had much to lose andhad nearly lost it. The economic position and educational privilegesof the largely middle-class southern Protestant were valuables wellworth preserving by whatever means possible.102 And this conser-


. Seaver, John Fitzgerald Gregg, . The phrase white mice is a recentdescription (CoIG, April , letter from Rev. A. Carter).

. Pat Walsh, The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (Cork, ), , .Letitia Dunbar Harrison was selected by the Local Appointments Commission asMayo County Librarian in . The County Council was abolished when itrefused to accept her appointment. Walshs view is that the dispute was as muchabout the powers of the County Council to make such appointments (and the cor-ruption stemming upon that prerogative) as about a religious issue (ibid., ).

. For instance, the Irish Statesman, the Bell, the Church of Ireland Gazette, andsometimes the IrishTimes.

. Clare OHalloran, Partition and the Limits of Irish Nationalism (Dublin,), .

. On the decline of poor Protestants, see Maguire, Church of Ireland,. In Cork city as well there had once been much destitution among membersof the Protestant working class. In , just before the Great Famine, an Anglicancleric there angrily wrote to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, about the ,Protestant inhabitants in his parish of St. Mary Shandonhundreds of them in thegreatest distress. See Rev. W. Neligan to Sir Robert Peel, Jan. (BritishLibrary Add. MS , ). One hundred and twenty years later, the authorsChurch of Ireland Boy Scout troop in Cork, in a fit of Christian enthusiasm, did upsome Christmas hampers for distribution to poor Protestant families in the city. Weasked the Church of Ireland dean of Cork to nominate deserving recipients. Despitehis endeavors, and to his great embarrassment, he could not find any! Illuminatingon economic conservatism is the career of Bryan Cooper, an independent T.D. whoheld a unionist Dil seat until in south Dublin. See Buckland, Irish Union-ism, :.

vative group wasat least until the snot much less illiberalthan Catholics on many social and economic issues. Raging radicalsthey were not. If the likes of Yeats and Butleras far removed frommany of their coreligionists as from the mass of Catholicsimaginedthat they led an army, it was mainly a conscript one, reluctant anduncomprehending.103

Some Protestants became visible in a different way, embracingparts of the nationalist narrative through such routes as a devotionto Gaelic. In the Church of Irelands own Irish languageorganization had implied, in its aim to provide a bond of union forall members of the Church of Ireland inspired with Irish ideals,that there were members not so inspired.104 But it could not be saidthat these were representative. More commonly, the duty that hadtugged insistently at Protestant sleeves before was no longerrelevant. The new state apparently did not want them; and theycould retreat selfishly into a private and near-invisible community oftheir schools, the stockbrokers, the freemasons, the churches, andTrinity College, while writing letters to themselves in the IrishTimes. Integration was not a necessity; even in a place like Cork city,where percent of the population was Catholic, it was still possi-ble to live a Protestant life and to die a Protestant death withoutentering into that Catholic world.105


. Lionel Pilkington, Religion and the Celtic Tiger:The Cultural Legacies ofAnti-Catholicism in Ireland, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the GlobalEconomy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin (London, ),; Corrin, Rendering to God and Caesar, .

. The Church of Irelands Irish language organization (Cumann Gaelach nahEaglaiseThe Guild of the Irish Church) was founded in . Its aims were topromote all that tends to preserve within the Church of Ireland the spirit of theancient Celtic church and to provide a bond of union for all members of the Churchof Ireland inspired with Irish ideals; promote the use of the Irish language in thechurch; collect from Irish sources suitable hymns and other devotional literature;[and] encourage the use of Irish art and music in the church. See IrishTimes, Jan., under Church of Ireland Notes. Two recent Anglican archbishops ofDublin, Alan Buchanan and Donald Caird, have impeccable Irish. See Web sitehttp://dublin.anglican.org/resources/seirbhis_as_gaeilge.php (consulted on Janu-ary ).

. In Cork city one could be born in the Victoria Hospital, attend the CorkGrammar or the Rochelle School, date in church-run (and vetted) dances andsocials, be employed by the Lee Garage or Lesters, the chemists, socialize among the

VThe fourth exemplar, the controversy over the Assumption ofthe Virgin Mary, while showing the dangers of trying to engage withthat world, also demonstrated that southern Protestants were, albeitfeebly, finding assertiveness again.That controversy was preceded bya series of events that had seemed to marginalize them even further.The firstthe question of state prayersemerged as a conse-quence of the sudden declaration of the republic in . With theexplicit removal of the king as head of state, the question of prayersfor the president had to be addressed. The issue was particularlysensitive in that it created a further tension in relation to NorthernIreland. The Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, JohnFitzGerald Gregg, defused the controversy and ensured that hisdenomination moved on.106 The minimum change was made toreflect the new political reality, but there remained a strong feelingof betrayal among southern Protestants.107 The second disturbingepisode involved the sensitive issue of hospital control. In agroup of enthusiastic Catholic doctors engineered a legal putschand took over a Quaker-founded Dublin hospital. Several Protes-tant medics subsequently resigned or were sacked. It took a hastycombination of action by Archbishop McQuaid and a private mem-bers bill in the Dil to repair the damaged relations.108

Also in , Protestants had before them an image of the funeralof the former president of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, a member of theChurch of Ireland. The cabinet, with one exception, did not attendthe service in obedience to Catholic Church rules. The poet Austin


freemasons and the choir of St. Fin Barres Cathedral, play hockey with Church ofIreland Hockey Club and rugby with Cork Constitution rugby club, spend old agein the Home for Protestant Incurables, and be buried by Crosss, the undertakers.I am indebted to the Rev. Peter Hanna for this insight.

. See the papers of Gregg and others in the Maude material on the issue ofstate prayers issue (Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, MS ). Itwas deemed a matter of note by the Irish Times ( April ) that the new stateprayers were said in St. Fin Barres Anglican Cathedral, Cork, on the day that theRepublic of Ireland Act came into effect.

. Corrin, Rendering to God and Caesar, .. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, ; O Corrain, Rendering to God and

Caesar, .

Clarke caught the atmosphere of legalism that made the behavior ofgovernment ministers such an embarrassment:109

At the last benchTwo Catholics, the FrenchAmbassador and I, knelt down.The vergers waited. Outside.The hush of Dublin town,Professors of cap and gown,Costello, his Cabinet,In government cars, hidingAround the corner, readyTall hat in hand, dreadingOur Father in English. BetterNot hear that which for whoAnd risk eternal doom.

Beyond the symbolic significance of state funerals and stateprayers, a serious practical issue arose in . Intimately connectedas it was with the very survival of the caste, this sent a shiver downProtestant spines. Ernest Tilson was an Anglican who, under theNetemere decree, had signed the promise to raise his children asCatholics. On the breakdown of his marriage he sought to renege onthat promise. The Irish courts held that it was a legally enforceablecontract, notwithstanding Protestant protests of duress. While notrelying solely on Article of the Irish constitution acknowledgingthe special position of the Irish Catholic Church, the judgmentasIrish Protestants saw iteffectively enshrined Catholic canon lawin Irish jurisprudence.110

The other event in that left southern Irish Protestants feel-ing bruised was of little practical significance but had huge symbolic


. Austin Clarke, Burial of an Irish President, Dubliner , no. (Spring): , and idem, Flight to Africa and Other Poems (Dublin, ), ; RobertWelch and Bruce Stewart, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford, ),.The reference in the last three lines is to the then different versions of the LordsPrayer.

. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, , footnote; Cooney, John CharlesMcQuaid, ; Seanad ireann, Reports of Debates, vol. ( March ). Asrecently as February there was evidence of the still differing opinions on theTilson judgment in a speech by Archbishop John Neill of Dublin. See Irish Inde-pendent, Feb. .

importance. Radio ireann agreed that the Catholic devotion to theAssumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven should be marked bybroadcasting the Angelus bell. Archbishop McQuaid suggested thatit would be appropriate to commence on the feast day, August, and so it was done.111 The timing was no coincidence. Earlierin , Pope Pius XII had decided, after much popular pressure, todeclare the widespread pious belief in the Assumption an article offaith. We need not concern ourselves here with the theological argu-ments. What is especially notable is the level of vitriol that the con-troversy engendered in Ireland. For example, the Church of IrelandGazette on November reprinted a trenchant passage thathad first appeared in the British ChurchTimes: To assert as histor-ical an event for which there is no historical evidence is folly. Toexalt a pious but unscrupulous opinion into an essential dogma isheresy. To disguise expediency as an act of providence is near blas-phemy. And on Wednesday Rome finally insisted on doing all thesethings.112 This was strong language indeed. The mainstream voiceof the Church of Ireland, albeit by second-party quotation, was ineffect calling the pope unlearned, a heretic, and a blasphemer. Thesentiments expressed ran completely counter to the way in whichIrish Protestantism had generally conducted itself since the s.

Provoked by the papal declaration, the archbishops and bishopsof the Church of Ireland issued a pastoral letter that was read in allits places of worship on December .This was a rare instanceof Irish Anglicanism finding again its public voice.A masterful com-mentary against the dogma, the pastoral letter offered a theologythat might have been difficult for lay persons. That difficulty wasreflected in a general lack of public comment on the Protestant side,with the Tilson case attracting much more attention.113 On theCatholic side, however, the counterattacks descended into morethan theological criticism. Alfred ORahilly, president of University


. Web site http://www.rte.ie/laweb/brc/brc_s_a.html (consulted on August ).

. CoIG, Nov. .. One letter in each issue of the Church of Ireland Gazette relating to the

Assumption appeared on the following dates: Oct., Nov., Dec. and Jan.and Feb. . See CoIG :, , and . See also Irish Times, variousdates, Aug.Nov. .

College Cork, a devout papal follower, and a self-appointed oracleon every aspect of politics, sociology, economics, and religion,114

penned a seemingly unending series of articles against the Anglicanposition in the Catholic Standard newspaper between December and February .115 Referring to the legal arrangementssurrounding the disestablishment of Anglicanism in Ireland,ORahilly wrote disparagingly of the prelates of this little man-made church who could only be regarded by their flock as con-venient officials under the constitution of .116 And Dr. DanielCohalan, the nonagenarian Catholic bishop of Cork, suggested in his Lenten pastoral, rather mischievously, that the Anglican arch-bishops of York, Armagh, and Dublin were not qualified to discussthe finer points of Catholic theology, since in the sight of his churchthey were mere laymen.117

And so the debate petered out in some acrimony and mutualmisunderstanding. It was raised briefly by Gregg in his report to thegeneral synod in May .118 It resurfaced in when, in reac-tion to a series of lectures in the Queens University of Belfast, theAnglican dean of residences reissued the pastoral letter. DespiteGreggs labored attempt at humor (after all, it is only an assump-tion), the controversy marks the beginnings of an assertion, admit-tedly somewhat conditional and not yet strong, against a Catholicworld that was already past its Eucharistic Congressled peak.119

VI

If from the perspective of the mid-s such Protestant voicesseemed hesitant and weak, from the vantage point of the s mere


. J. Anthony Gaughan,Alfred ORahilly III, Part , Catholic Apologist (Dublin,), .

. Ibid., .. Ibid., . See also Stevens, Irish Scene, .. CoIG, Feb. .. Journal of Proceedings of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland, ed. R.

Ryland (Dublin, ), . The Standing Committee report referred to the Tilsoncase but not to the Assumption (ibid., ).

. A more extensive discussion, including the theological element, can befound in Ian dAlton, The Church of Ireland and the Promulgation of the Dogmaof the Assumption, in Search , no. (Spring ): .

survival could have been considered a kind of triumph.A two-pencehalfpenny stamp issued by the new republic in symbolized whyProtestants felt that they were in the tuppenny-halfpenny league asfar as the state was concerned: the stamp commemorated theCatholic Holy Year, featured Saint Patrick and his insignia, and borethe inscription Poblacht na h-ireannRepublic of Ireland.Aslate as the advice still offered by the Church of Ireland Gazettewas that we should keep ourselves to ourselves and, if we speak,confine our remarks to platitudinous exhortations on non-contro-versial subjects . . . , lest such attention should result in material orsocial disadvantages.120 Two years later, the general synod decidednot to use the term Anglican, as it suggested a vague West Britishsound.121 Perhaps, as a later writer has put it, as a vestigial popu-lation in the new nation-state, Protestants instinctively felt thattheir citizenship was a matter of indulgence and not of right, andthat they should act accordingly.122

They did this from the s through the s by adopting anarrative based largely on symbol, not substance, often centered ona sentimental fealty to crown and empire. Spontaneous renderingsof God Save the King at Armistice Day remembrances in and were rare public manifestations of a loyalty usually kept in-house, often in-church.123 Bishop Godfrey Day of Ossory orderedspecial services to be held in his churches for the silver jubilee ofKing George V in .124 Until the s southern Protestantsmay have listened to the Queens Christmas broadcasts, but this wasdone strictly in private between consenting adults. Since the Churchof Irelands Church Hymnal was designed for use in both parts ofIreland, it still contains the hymn God Save the King, but it did notacquire a rubricFor use in Northern Irelanduntil the year.125 Poppies sold to assist First World War veterans, and worn


. CoIG, Nov. .. CoIG, May , . I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Robert Tobin for this

reference. Churches of the Church of Ireland are now happy to describe themselveson their notice boards as Anglican.

. ONeill, Blood-DarkTrack, .. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, ; IrishTimes, Nov. .. Hartford, Godfrey Day, .. SeeTerence Brown, Ireland, , for a wide-ranging discussion of the cul-

tural fate of the minority community between the wars.

in the lapel, were a particular flash point. Republican poppy-snatch-ers in Dublin during the s were painfully foiled by the youngbucks of Trinity College, who threaded their poppies through razor-blades. It helped that the public geography remained congenial:even if Kingstown was now Dn Laoghaire, Kingsbridge was notyet Heuston Station; Nelson still stared haughtily from his pillar inOConnell Street; associations, clubs, and professional bodies con-tinued to carry the Royal prefix; the postboxes had their royalciphers, if now painted a fetching Hibernian green; and Dublin,pro-rata, still had twice as many streets called after Queen Victoriaas London had. The Irish Times played its part, with its court andpersonal column, headed by the royal coat-of-arms, only removed inMarch as a result of wartime censorship.126

George Boyce makes the point that Irish society was too dividedon sectarian lines to enable any Protestant, however talented orcommitted, to enter into the experience of the other side.127 But itcan be argued that the same was equally true of Catholics. PopularCatholic nationalism, whether through ignorance or design, found itdifficult to comprehend an Irish identity that saw no hypocrisy invaluing cultural Britishness while evincing a strong spatial loyalty toIreland; that exhibited political aloofness but active economicengagement; and that displayed moral autonomy but tribal religios-ity.128 Admittedly, understanding was not helped by mutteringsfrom some Anglicans that they were the true heirs of Saint Patrickand that their church, unlike another, was not subject to foreign con-trol.129 Count Plunkett, like many nationalists, exhibited a simplis-


. OBrien, IrishTimes, .. D. George Boyce, One Last Burial: Culture, Counter-Revolution, and

Revolution in Ireland, , in The Revolution in Ireland, , ed. D.George Boyce (Dublin ), .

. The historian Lecky had defined his unionist allegiance thus: I have neverlooked upon Home Rule as a question between Protestant and Catholic. It is a ques-tion between honesty and dishonesty, between loyalty and treason, between indi-vidual freedom and organized tyranny and outrage (quoted in McDowell, Crisisand Decline, ).

. George T. Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church (th ed., London, ), ed.by Rev. Hugh Jackson Lawlor.This book advanced the notion of the lineal continuityof the Church of Ireland with what was portrayed as the independent Celtic churchbefore . Stokes declared, Irish national independence and Irish ecclesiasticalindependence, in fact, terminated practically together (ibid., ).

tic view when he said of Irish Protestants in that it should beleft to England to snub them.That should make them Irishmen.130

Southern Protestants were not just ripe plums waiting to fall intoCaitln N Houlihans capacious apron; they were never a Britishethnic minority that would mysteriously change into a docile Irishreligious one.

Multilayered Protestant Irishness was often exemplified in itsschools. In the founder of Cork Grammar School had expressedit thus:

The school was simply set on foot . . . with the objects of inducing per-sons who had been sending their children to England, to educate themat home. It is a great pity that Irish parents . . . will not see how desir-able it is to keep up the connection during the time of their educationwith the people amongst whom they are to live subsequently. . . .Theydid not want to make Englishmen of their boys. There was much toadmire in the Irish character and they wanted to maintain it.131

In the school was compulsorily gathered to hear the live radiobroadcast of the coronation of Elizabeth II. A mere thirteen yearslater, the pupils were again assembled, but this time for a reading ofthe proclamation of the republic by the head prefect.132 In thisinstance, by the declaration that we are Irish and Ireland is ourhome could clearly bear a resonance not applicable to earlier times.

In his book Luck and the Irish, Roy Foster reminds us of the ques-tion that cropped up with a wearisome regularity in the s onIrish-history examination papersWhy did the Reformation notsucceed in Ireland? From the perspective of the end of the twenti-


. Count George Plunkett to John Redmond, March , RedmondPapers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS ().

. Cork Constitution, July . This was mirrored in a speech by BishopDay of Ossory to his diocesan synod in . See Hartford, Godfrey Day, .

. For the information on what was done at Cork Grammar School in , Iam indebted to the Rev. Peter Hanna, who was then a senior pupil there; my infor-mation about the event is based on personal recollection. Two students woresmall Union Jacks on their lapels at this latter event, but, when the school authori-ties objected, the pupils maintained, in a fashion rather typical of the s, thattheirs was a protest against what they saw as the glorification of violence in theproclamation, and not against its republican sentiments.

eth century he furnishes an answer: It did, but it took years.133

If he is right, it is the result of a conflation of mindsets in whichCatholics have become more secular, Protestants a little less so;Catholics less assertive, Protestants more so.The narratives are con-verging.There is now more of a common discourse, a common lan-guage. Archbishop McQuaids view of Christian unity as essentiallyProtestant surrender to Catholicism may have been acceptable tomost of his flock in , but when another archbishop of Dublin,thirty years later, declared that a Catholic Irish presidents taking ofcommunion in an Anglican church was a sham, his declarationraised a storm of protest, not least from his coreligionists.134

Thus, what was once a contemporary political issueProtestantversus Catholic, nationalist versus unionistthen became fodderfor the historians and is today of almost archeological interest. Anaccommodation of historic proportions appears to have beenreached. Protestantsto reach this pointhave had to possessYeatss stamina and, in Edna Longleys phrase, to work their pas-sage to Irishness.135 That passage has not been easy. They may behappy that attention to minorities in twenty-first-century Ireland ismore likely to focus on Poles rather than Protestants, on Muslimsrather than Methodists.

Some aspects of southern Protestant history are seductivelyamenable to interpretation as grand tragedy and to relentless pre-determinism. The members of the Anglo-Irish gentry were mostexposed to Saids theory of a dominant narrative, and unlike theirmore prosaic middle-class Protestant cousins, they have all but van-ished. Today anyone who undertakes a pilgrimage to Farahychurchyard in County Corkwhere Elizabeth Bowens gravecrouches for shelter against a westering wallwill sense only ghosts.Close by, the wind shakes the barley where once stood, in VirginiaWoolf s words, the great stone box of Elizabeths own BigHouseBowens Court. Little is left of this life, except perhaps byvirtue of a sort of literary preservation order placed upon it by the


. Foster, Luck and the Irish, .. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, ; Independent, Dec. (article by

David McKittrick).. Edna Longley, The Separation of Political Irishness and Culture in Ire-

land, IrishTimes, Aug. .

craft of a Molly Keane, a William Trevor, or a Jennifer Johnston;these are novelists who, in Polly Devlins marvelous phrase, haveobserved and preserved . . . the sounding of the tocsins and theminutiae of the last days of the Irish Raj.136

And if a point has to be determined when those last daysarrived, there is a case for grounding it not in the Anglo-Irish Warbut rather at the start of the First World War. Elizabeth BowensLast August perhaps trumps her Last September. She captures afin-de-sicle atmosphere in her description of a garden party atMitchelstown Castle on this first day of the war in : Windraced round the Castle terraces . . . ; grit blew into the ices; the bandclung with some trouble to its exposed place. Here, the flower ofnorth Cork Anglo-Irish society met, still incongruously doing whatit did bestcomings-and-goings, entertainments. Here, in theintroverted integrity of a cause lost a long time ago and in the minia-ture worlds of Somerville and Rosss The Irish RM and The RealCharlotte, the landed classes still wove an intricate social filigree andindulged among themselves in a variant of Freuds narcissism ofsmall differences.137 And here was the as-yet unimagined catastro-phe for many of these Lilliputian grandees, the dead and dying sonsof St. Leger Alcock, to be reduced, like Anglo-Irish society itself, toghostly impotence: nothing left, even the Castle gone.138 In Bowenselegiac words, The unseen descent of the sun behind the cloudssharpens the bleak light; the band, having throbbed out God Savethe King, packs up its wind-torn music and goes home.139


. Obituary of Molly Keane by Polly Devlin, Guardian, April .. Akenson, Small Differences, .. Mitchelstown Castle was burned down in August during the Irish

Civil War, and most of the former demesne is now occupied by an agrifoods busi-ness. See Robert D. King-Harman, The Kings, Earls of KingstonAn Account of theFamily and Their Estates in Ireland between the Reigns of the Two Queen Elizabeths(Cambridge, ), , and Bill Power, White Knights, Dark Earls:The Rise andFall of an Anglo-Irish Dynasty (Cork, ), . For dead and dying sons, readTBH.

. Bowen, Bowens Court & SevenWinters, .

“a vestigial population”?: perspectives on southern irish protestants in the twentieth century

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