I

On one occasion, in 1980, the distinguished Southern Irish Protestant man-of-letters Hubert Butler observed that religion was as much a factor in contemporary Yugoslavia or Israel as it was in Ireland.Footnote ¹ At the time, at the height of the Cold War and the Ulster Troubles, not many observers would have agreed with him. On the contrary, the continuing importance of religion in Ireland was regarded as a feature of that country's ‘exceptionalism’, in contrast to the rest of the ‘developed world’, where secularization had allegedly changed everything at an early stage, a transformation which was perceived as integral to the process of ‘modernization’. In hindsight, Butler's judgement looks more perceptive than the then contemporary historical and sociological consensus. Since the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and its secular worldview has been accompanied by a new awareness of the continuing political and cultural relevance of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other faiths, and this in turn has encouraged interest in minority studies and related subjects, with a proliferation of publications, conferences, and major collaborative projects.Footnote ² We now think of ‘modernity’ more in terms of religious pluralism than secularization.Footnote ³

Indeed, the age which saw the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of fascism now appears very ‘religious’, not only because those events and related ideologies had important mystical and ritual dimensions, but also because they failed to supplant confessional sectarianism. The latter experienced a revival, in response to the rise of fledgling nation-states, which – despite the mantra of self-determination and because of majority rule – created new, unreconciled, and disgruntled minorities carved out of the multi-ethnic empires that collapsed at the end of the First World War. Everywhere, the new criteria of belonging involved not only loyalty to a particular political project and its founding myths, but also the adoption of negative attitudes to some ethnically and culturally defined ‘other’.Footnote ⁴ Thus, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and throughout much of Eastern Europe the issue was whether or not one hated Germany and ‘its’ Protestant religion, while Jewish, Magyar, and other minorities were distinguished by religious affiliation as much as by family names, language, culture, and political attitudes.Footnote ⁵

In Ireland, the situation was in many respects comparable.Footnote ⁶ Here, the test of political orthodoxy was primarily about attitudes to Britain, whose national identity was closely interwoven with the legacy of the Reformation and residual anti-Catholicism.Footnote ⁷ Thus, in Unionist Ulster the predominantly Catholic nationalist minority attracted sectarian as well as political animosity, while in the South, because ‘Protestants lacked the … anti-Britishness that for most Catholics was an essential ingredient of Irishness', some nationalists questioned ‘whether [they] were Irish at all’.Footnote ⁸ Of these two minorities, the Ulster Catholics have inspired a considerable amount of academic and media coverage, partly because of the Troubles, in which they were heavily involved.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, for most of the past century Southern Protestants did not attract much attention: they were too quiet to make headlines, and did not fit in with the dominant Irish national narrative, focusing on an ‘800-years struggle against English oppression’, of which many Irish Protestants were (or were supposed to have been) the agents and beneficiaries. This was reflected in the relevant historiography, which fell into three main categories: works on Southern Unionism, monographs on particular crises such as the wars of 1919–23, and socio-historical analyses of the various churches.Footnote ¹⁰ Not surprisingly, it was the social elite – the ‘Big House’ setFootnote ¹¹ – and the intellectuals – the poets and public moralists such as W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, and Sean O'Casey – who received and continue to attract the greatest amount of academic attention.Footnote ¹² Much less known was the experience of the rest, those living in rural areas, the non-intellectuals, the working class, and the shopkeepers. However, the situation is rapidly changing. More has been published on the topic over the past five years than over the previous fifty, with further works in the pipeline.Footnote ¹³ Such an explosion of interest reflects the way Ireland has changed since Mary Robinson's presidency (1990–7), when pluralism and diversity ceased to be frowned upon and became part of a new understanding of the national identity and the question of citizenship.Footnote ¹⁴ The present article reviews the state of the debate, starting from the way the question is presented by Tom Bartlett in the most recent and widely acclaimed survey of Irish history.

II

Bartlett's reconstruction of nearly 1,500 years of Irish history is framed by religious events: at one end, the Patrick and Palladius missions of ad 431–2; at the other, the impact of the paedophile priests' scandal, which has rocked the Republic since the 1990s, and the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, which marked the end of the most violent phase of sectarian conflict in the North. Bartlett does not explicitly propose any particular grand theory, but highlights certain patterns, such as a tendency to syncretism in both religion and politics and ‘the interaction of the oral and the written’ in the development of a distinctive Irish culture. The latter emerged as a synthesis of established domestic traditions and new cultural influences. The encounter was not necessarily peaceful or harmonious, especially when accompanied by foreign invasion and settlement. It did not help that newcomers tended to conceptualize their supremacist ambitions in terms of excluding the people whom they had defeated from the Christian covenant and ‘from the protection of the law’ (pp. 41, 52). Yet, they often displayed also a certain respect or grudging admiration for the older culture which they wished to supplant. Thus, Christian monks and missionaries, although primarily devoted to biblical studies and committed to the eradication of paganism, also preserved Gaelic sagas, setting an unusual example of tolerance in contemporary Europe. Later, many Protestant scholars developed a keen interest in the Irish language and literary tradition, even when they despised and abhorred the ‘superstition’ and popery with which they seemed to be associated. Likewise, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic nationalists affirmed the legacy of the Protestant reformers – from Wolfe Tone, to Thomas Davis and Charles S. Parnell – a tradition which influenced the non-sectarian, secular aspiration of modern Irish constitutionalism and republicanism.

Bartlett's chapters on the ancient and medieval periods are excellent, but the book concentrates on the centuries since the Reformation, to which the author devotes about 500 pages out of a total of 625. This reflects not only his ‘modernist’ background and interests, but also his assessment of what really matters in explaining the country's development and identity. One of the decisive turning points was the rebellion of 1641 – resulting in the famous massacre of Protestants and the later Cromwellian slaughter of both Catholics and Protestants at Drogheda and Wexford. The affront to Christian standards which these butcheries involved provided later generations with rhetorical stereotypes for the ‘othering’ of competing religious groups and fostered the emergence of a paranoid relationship whereby people of a religious persuasion, when confronted by organized groups belonging to the other, tended to anticipate the worst, often causing it to happen. It may sound like Paul Bew's verdict that what Irish history boils down to is the ‘politics of enmity’,Footnote ¹⁵ though Bartlett stresses that there was nothing uniquely ‘Irish’ in this tragedy: in its sectarianism and violence, the country conformed to then dominant European trends. This is true. However, it should also be noted that the seventeenth-century bloodbaths became enshrined in Irish historical memory to an extent which finds no parallel elsewhere, not even in Germany, despite the devastation which that country suffered during the Thirty Years War. Thus, Ireland was atypical not because of the experience of religious conflict or its severity, but because of the way its memory and commemoration divided the country for the next few centuries.Footnote ¹⁶

This sharing in the wider European experience while reading it in a specifically Irish way is further exemplified by developments in the age of the Enlightenment. The latter, and especially the French Revolution, injected into Irish culture a new political optimism, with the notion of ‘secular’ liberty providing a common ground between Protestants and Catholics. Here, there was the hope that it would be possible to reconcile sectarian differences within a new overarching civil religion, an aspiration which was crucial to the movement of the United Irishmen. Such optimism proved short-lived, and soon sectarianism struck back – though it did so not only in Ireland, but also elsewhere in Europe: no Irish excepionalism here. Thus, if the 1798 rebellion degenerated into religious and agrarian atrocities, much the same happened in the Vendée, in Tuscany and Naples – with the 1799 ‘Viva Maria’ and Sanfedista (‘Holy Faith’) movements – and, after the Restoration, in the region of Gard and Nîmes, where thousands of Protestants were massacred or wounded and others forcibly baptized as Catholics during the ‘White Terror’ which followed the Restoration.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite the Act of Union and the British military presence, in Ireland too sectarianism and agrarian tensions raised the nightmare of ‘a beleaguered Protestantism about to be stormed by a resurgent Catholicism’, resulting in ‘hundreds of thousands of … Protestants, perhaps as many as half a million between 1815 and 1844, [fleeing the South and the West] that had become increasingly uncomfortable to them’ (p. 252). Here, Bartlett echoes Brian Jenkins, who has written of an exodus of almost biblical proportions, driven by ‘the desire to escape from violence’, ‘second only to the goal of economic independence’, with the minority in some areas, such as County Longford, as heavily hit during this period as they were going to be in 1911–26.Footnote ¹⁸ For those who left, exile must have felt even more bitter because Daniel O'Connell ‘sneeringly dismissed Irish Protestants as “foreigners”’ (p. 266). These emigrants brought with themselves a lasting and deep hatred of the Roman Catholic religion and a corresponding attachment to the Loyal Orange Order, which became increasingly international and disaporic, as Southern Irish Protestant refugees settled in Ulster, Britain, Canada, or the US.

It was no fun for the minority, although their fate was immensely preferable to the experience of their co-religionists in southern Europe. Moreover, everywhere in Ireland cross-fertilization between different traditions and philosophies continued within an institutional and political environment defined by parliamentary elections and a vigorous and free press. If O'Connell paid lip service to sectarianism, he also played a pedagogic as well as a demagogic role, teaching his followers ‘the strategy of mass participatory democracy in peaceful pursuit of a political objective’ (p. 265). It also helped that day-to-day life was dominated not by grand ideological clashes, but by the localism of clienteles and personal loyalties, which became even more important after the Great Famine.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite nationalist claims that the British and the Irish Protestant gentry were to blame for the mass starvation and appalling death toll of 1845–50 (a view first articulated, ironically, by a Protestant), the catastrophe did not directly worsen sectarian strife in the country, partly because many landlords displayed a more compassionate attitude than nationalist propaganda credited them with.Footnote ²⁰

However, the Famine was followed by both the Evangelical Revival and the Catholic ‘devotional revolution’, which together added doctrinal rigidity and clerical control to the existing confessional divides. In the following decades, the combination of religious conformity, economic recovery, and democratic-style elections under a reformed franchise created a new Ireland, in which the Protestant Charles S. Parnell and the Catholic Michael Davitt forged a movement aiming at secular goals such as Home Rule and land reform.

Bartlett is not particularly fond of either of these leaders, but is very kind to political women – like the Unionist Isabella Todd and the republican Hannah Sheehy Skeffington – who contributed an Irish voice to the contemporary Euro-Atlantic debate on emancipation and citizenship. Ultimately, it was the rise of the ‘Rights of Women’ that ushered in a democratic renewal in society and culture from the 1980s. Yet, the country has never experienced a radical revolution such as the one promised by the 1916 ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’, which even a liberal feminist such as President Mary Robinson revered as a milestone in the struggle for civil rights. Although historians have not yet fully examined this document in terms of its rhetoric and place within Irish political thought, Bartlett – like Bill Kissane and others – regards the Proclamation as an improvised, although brilliant, summary of ideas drawn from both Catholic and Protestant sources.Footnote ²¹ In this respect, this document epitomizes that tendency to compromise and syncretism that Bartlett finds so typical of Irish history.

III

Whatever the case, in the early 1920s the Irish settled their differences not by compromise, but by means of war and Partition. Bartlett has little to say about the consequences of these developments for the minorities – especially the Southern Protestants. This is a pity, for their experience has become a topic of considerable public interest, as illustrated by the debates surrounding the work of Peter Hart. His claims about IRA brutality and the deliberate targeting of civilians in 1919–22 have been widely echoed in the press and other media, where Hart has found powerful allies and robust rebutters, all animated by a passion not often associated with historical inquiry. It is remarkable that the polemics continue long after Hart's untimely and tragic death.Footnote ²² Outsiders, like the present writer, may find it difficult to understand why so many people feel that the credentials of twentieth-century republicanism depend on the interpretation of some 1921 events in Dunmanway, Co. Cork. However, as the Republic enters the decade of commemorations – 2012–22, from the centenary of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant to that of the Constitution of the Irish Free State – and looks back at its origins, it is clear that there is considerable unease about the history of the relations between majority and minority.

The 1916 Proclamation asserted that membership of the nation was not voluntary, but compulsory and hereditary, involving Ireland's claims on all its ‘children’ and resources and the rejection of all competing and contrasting aspirations. This did not bode well for the minority. It did not help that the Proclamation had been preceded by another major statement of principle: in 1912, the Northern Unionists signed a Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule at all costs. Taken together, the two documents expressed the consolidation of a bipolar Ireland. Between 1912 and 1918 all negotiations to find a compromise between such opposing visions failed: the only practicable way forward became Partition for both the island as a whole and the Protestant community in particular. Andrew Scholes maps the way in which the latter responded. His book focuses on the Church of Ireland, which was the largest non-Catholic denomination in the South. As an organization, it was significantly different from its sister, the Church of England, because from 1869 Disestablishment had transformed it into ‘a self-governing voluntary body’, whose polity was ‘representative in nature and parliamentary in style’ (p. 7). This was its strength, but to an extent also its weakness, because the synod system made the church more responsive to regional, in contrast to national, concerns. The fear that Home Rule would mean ‘Rome Rule’ had recently been increased by the papal Ne Temere decree (1908), which prescribed that the children of ‘mixed marriages’ were to be raised as Catholics. The prospect of legislative devolution compounded the fear of what amounted to forced conversion one-generation removed: for in a self-governing Ireland the government might lend legal support to the wishes of the ‘sect’ encompassing the majority of the electors.

It was unfortunate that the Home Rule debate came at a time when the Catholic church was particularly militant and intolerant, for this weakened the case of the few Protestants who actually supported devolution and also discredited those Southern Unionists who were prepared to consider a compromise in preference to Partition. As for the latter, across the community ‘there was little indication that members of the Church of Ireland viewed Ulster as entitled to separate treatment or some form of exclusion from home rule’ (p. 26). On this point rested the church's political unity, which Ulster Day destroyed as the Solemn League indicated that the North was prepared to abandon Southern Protestants if this was the only way to escape ‘Rome’ Rule. The division became immediately clear among the bishops, with the southerners refusing to hold intercessory services on the actual Covenant Day (28 September).

The outbreak of the First World War forced a sort of truce within the church as much as between Unionists and Nationalists, and at one stage there seemed to be a chance that the ‘blood sacrifice’ in the trenches would be sufficient to atone for old divides. As the bishop of Ossory, John Bernard, argued in 1915, there was ‘no distinction between [Irish soldiers], no distinction between Unionists and Nationalists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and Churchmen when we spoke with pride through our tears of their brave deeds, of what our children's children should tell their children in the days to come’: the ‘same grass grew over the graves of them all’ (p. 103). This was no empty rhetoric: he had just lost his son at the front.

Did the Easter Rising change everything? Not really. In 1916, Bernard, then archbishop of Dublin, came up with a series of intemperate remarks about the rebels deserving death, but, while Scholes argues that this emotional response was partly due to his recent bereavement, it must not be forgotten that some nationalist organs (in particular the Irish Independent) expressed similar feelings at the time.Footnote ²³ At any rate, nationalist opinion soon rallied round the cry for clemency and Bernard reverted to his consensual strategy and his efforts were supported by other southern clerics, including Berry, Plunkett, and J. A. F. Gregg, then bishop of Ossory and future archbishop of Dublin. However, the church remained divided and the Ulster Episcopalians proved as relentless as the Presbyterians in opposing Home Rule. There was no schism, but that Dublin and Armagh could only speak with one voice when backing the wrong cause (Conscription in 1918) proved a major blow to the church's influence in the South. Scholes makes excellent use of the existing archives, and offers an innovative and detailed discussion of the whole period from 1910 to the end of the First World War. In this respect, the title understates the book's significance, which goes beyond the actual Home Rule crisis. On the other hand, his most original contribution concerns the pre-war period, while in his treatment of the 1917 Irish Convention – the last-ditch attempt to hammer out a compromise – Scholes does not significantly update R. B. McDowell's older studies.Footnote ²⁴

As already noted, Partition seemed the only way to address the demands of quarrelling neighbours: once again, Ireland followed a European pattern. As in the territories of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov, and Ottoman monarchies, imperial disintegration created minorities struggling to come to terms with the expectations of ‘nation-states’. When violence escalated, religious minorities felt increasingly exposed. In Ulster, this resulted in a renewal of the old sectarian politics. In the South, many Protestants chose to leave: by 1926 over 34 per cent had fled to the UK or elsewhere. Many of those who decided to stay felt imprisoned within a need to remain silent, ‘keeping their head down’ and trying to preserve their identity through separate religious, social, and educational facilities. From the minority point of view, as the Irish Protestant Primate observed in 1923, the Versailles-era ‘dreams and visions’ of ‘an era of peace and universal brotherhood … [a] world made safe for democracy’ looked little more than ‘an indication that human thought, no longer anchored to the basic facts of life, was swinging rudderless on an uncharted sea’.Footnote ²⁵

Among the social groups that suffered the consequences of Partition, the landed aristocracy has perhaps attracted the greatest attention. Its vicissitudes have been celebrated, caricatured, and immortalized by generations of Southern Irish Protestant writers, including Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Martin), Elizabeth Bowen, David Thompson, and Barbara FitzGerald.Footnote ²⁶ Owen Purdue's work complements Terence Dooley's study on the Southern counties: together, they provide a complete and accurate analysis of the gentry's political, economic, and social trajectory from Ascendancy to oblivion.Footnote ²⁷ Predominantly Church of Ireland, the landed elite had always had a close relationship with the state. The end of the Dublin Castle system left them to deal with two different governments – the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Given Ulster's avoidance of revolution, its aristocracy was partly sheltered from IRA violence. However, the tenant farmer lobby was as strong in the North as in the South, and demanded compulsory land purchase, which was introduced in 1925, resulting in the sale of 805,500 acres to 38,500 tenants. The terms were more generous than under the allegedly ‘confiscatory’ 1923 Hogan Act, which achieved a similar result in the Irish Free State, but the principle was the same, and had been hammered out during the 1917 Convention (the only area in which the delegates reached unanimity).

Three conclusions that we may draw are, first, that post-war land reform is one of the areas in which Partition does not need to constrain the historian's work: throughout the thirty-two counties, land ownership remained politically more important than any other social problem, and this explains the contrast between the effectiveness of the land policies implemented by all the governments and their neglect of the problems of the urban poor. The second conclusion is that comparative generosity (or lack thereof) characterizing post-war land purchase was a question of money, not of ideology or sectarianism: sponsored by Downing Street, Belfast could afford to bail out the Ulster landlords on better terms than those of Dublin, whose ‘meanness’ reflected no vindictive attitude to the Protestant gentry, but rather the country's economic difficulties (although Dublin too was financed by London).Footnote ²⁸ Finally, the landed elite declined steadily and almost at the same rate throughout the island. The Northern gentry remained comparatively stronger until the 1960s, not only because of the more generous land purchase terms from which they benefited, but also because of their enduring social prestige, their ability to marry into American wealth, secure well-paid jobs in the British empire, or co-opt industrialists such as James Craig.Footnote ²⁹

IV

If the history of the landed elite transcends Partition, what about that of the Protestants belonging to other social classes? After all, many of the sources (for example, ecclesiastical records) are pan-Irish, while private family and business records sometimes encompass realities which are even wider than Ireland, as in the case of firms such as Guinness. Likewise, we cannot easily ‘partition’ specific questions, such as Protestant participation in the administration and garrisoning of the British empire, or their contribution to the Irish diaspora. These are all good examples, but in many other cases – and generally when we discuss the domestic experience of the minority – a pan-Irish approach is difficult to adopt because of the eminently local nature of their experience: Protestant concentration in a particular town or county affected both their self-perception and the way they were viewed by the wider community, and was in turn reflected in local traditions and the manipulation of collective memory. Methodologically, this demands a heavy reliance on regional studies, which have proved particularly important in the study of the wars of 1919–23.Footnote ³⁰

We have already observed that scholars have focused on ‘Big House’ Irish Protestants and the Protestant intelligentsia, while neglecting the rest – which means most of the community, whom we might perhaps refer to as the ‘small-house’ Protestants. As Alvin Jackson has pointed out, the world of Irish Unionism/Protestantism was much wider and more diverse than many people today appreciate.Footnote ³¹This Protestant Ireland is one that, with few exceptions – such as Kerby Miller's brilliant study of Andrew Johnston – remains largely unstudied.Footnote ³² Some of the books reviewed here shed light on this alternative Ireland and its emotional and geographical interior.

Ulster Presbyterian belief deals with a period well before Partition, or indeed the Union, but has methodological implications of considerable significance also for the twentieth century. Ulster is a good example of how a group's demographic concentration affected its nature and culture, and eventually shaped the distinctiveness of a whole region. Holmes's sophisticated and splendidly researched book is not primarily organized around the notion of a shared geographical space: rather, it focuses on the way religion helped to organize time, through the church's calendar and rites of passage, and how public worship structured culture and the relationship between gender and age groups. Already in the eighteenth century, Presbyterians in Ulster had reached the critical mass necessary to become culturally hegemonic: such was their demographic concentration that they felt ‘constrained by … the fixed geographical limits of [the] Scottish settlement’ (p. 12). In this sense, for Holmes, community was dependent on religion, instead of the other way round, as argued by D. W. Miller.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, he disagrees with both I. McBride and D. W. Bebbington about evangelicalism: while they see it as a new eighteenth-century departure, Holmes stresses its continuity with the older Calvinist tradition. The latter encompassed a broad theological and cultural world, within which change was gradual, with the churches allowing for a plurality of experiences and beliefs among its members and the Presbyterian ‘man in the pew’ fully confident of his right to follow the light of his conscience in interpreting the authority of scripture. ‘Popular’ religion then was not a sub-orthodox version of high culture, but consisted instead of the beliefs of the laity ‘in all their variety’, as they emerged from the ‘interactive relationship between ministers and congregants’ (p. 21). As elsewhere in Ireland, demographic concentration in a comparatively small area contributed to the intensity of such interchange and the consolidation of shared theological language and related practices.Footnote ³⁴

Holmes gives us an impressive and compelling reconstruction of this world. Its relevance for the question whether a partitioned religious community must be reflected in a partitioned historiography is clear: the book's emphasis on Ulster does not emerge from the author's political agenda, but is shaped by the evidence. Thus, although Holmes discusses the Southern Presbyterians, he stresses that the environment in which the latter operated made them different from the bulk of their brethren in the north-east, affecting their self-perception, relations with both their Catholic neighbours and other Protestant dissenters, and cultural orientation.

In the South, Dublin saw by far the largest concentration of Protestants. Far from being dominated by the ‘Big House’ set, they represented different social groups, with important professional middle-class and large working-class components. They included not only members of the Church of Ireland, but also dissenters of all denominations. The latter are explored in Smyrl's Dictionary of Dublin dissent, a very helpful reference work that covers all the nonconformist groups (from the Presbyterians in the seventeenth century to the Plymouth Brethren and less-known denominations, such as the Walkerites, in the twentieth century). Smyrl gives details and brief historical entries for specific congregations in the metropolitan area, and provides, in the appendixes, a glossary, a guide to the records, a list of the Methodist Circuits, a compendium of the two main Acts of Parliament (1844 and 1863) regulating nonconformist marriages, and a list of useful addresses for archives and collections of papers. As the title suggests, the dictionary covers almost four hundred years, although it concentrates on the pre-1914 period, for which it provides an essential introduction to the rich and diverse histories of non-Episcopalian Protestants in the capital. His work further highlights a theme which also emerges clearly from Holmes, namely the extent to which, outside Ulster, the minority network was ‘local’, very ‘Irish’ in terms of structures and organization, but also oriented towards England, reflecting wider patterns of cultural exchange, migration, and trade. Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers were organized in autonomous local communities, without national structures and hierarchies. Their attitude to ‘Ireland’ was similarly dominated by locally relevant spheres of social interaction, a dimension further strengthened by their social profile: most of them belonged to the middle and working classes, and were involved in farming, the professions, shop-keeping, and manufacturing. For these minorities, a comprehensive Ireland-wide picture depends on the sum of local realities.

Padraig Deignan shows how much scope there is for such a methodological approach. His splendidly researched book on Sligo covers a critical phase in the history of the minority. Besides large numbers of memoirs and newspapers, the author has consulted just about all the relevant manuscript and printed sources available, including family correspondence, the papers of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the IRA, organizations such as the trade unions, the Land Commission and Sligo Harbour Board, vestry minutes, local government records, and many others. Deignan adopts a combined chronological and thematic strategy, moving from a detailed discussion of demographic change within the community via the study of the impact of war and Partition to a series of more thematic chapters on their ‘economic commitments’, ‘political interests’, religious life, and social and associational activities. In 1914, the Sligo community was comparatively large and economically dynamic. In politics, it was predominantly Unionist, although it produced a handful of high-profile Protestant republicans (most notably Constance Gore-Booth of Lissadell, Countess Markievicz) and, later, pro-Treaty politicians. As already noted above, since the publication of Peter Hart's milestone works, the fate of Protestants in the wars of 1919–23 has been the subject of heated controversy and has become one of the most eminently ‘public history’ dimensions of the Irish past, as if the issue involved the whole standing and credibility of the Republic.

Deignan's contribution to this debate is refreshingly irenic in spirit and driven by historical questions, rather than political agendas. The community's rapid and dramatic numerical decline is examined in a wide economic and social context. Two aspects stand out and help to define the question: the first is that Sligo was comparatively free from sectarian violence even during the worst period of the revolutionary crisis. The second is that the decline began well before the Revolution and was partly due to structural factors such as poverty and limited opportunities of employment and career for the young. The county was heavily affected by economic emigration, which depleted the Catholic community as much as the Protestants: between 1891 and 1911, both groups shrank by about 20 per cent. However, such considerations do not help to explain why between 1911 and 1926 the Catholic population declined by only 2 per cent while the Church of Ireland lost 34 per cent of its members, and the others were even more severely affected: Presbyterians experienced a drop of 51 per cent in Sligo Town and a fall of 84 per cent in Dromore West Rural District (catastrophic percentages, although we are talking of small absolute numbers). The author establishes that this decline cannot be explained solely by reference to the withdrawal of crown forces and officials, because the latter did not represent a sufficiently large group to account for a drop on such a scale (according to the 1911 census, the army, RIC, civil servants, and their families accounted for a mere 8 per cent of the Protestant population of Sligo). Neither can it be explained in terms of war casualties: only about seventy Protestants were killed in the First World War (together with 356 Catholics). Deignan rejects Michael Farry's view that the exodus was due to the IRA, which, on the contrary, from an early stage replaced the RIC as a law-enforcement agency in the rural districts, and as such was also involved in the protection of the Protestant community (although when it came to agrarian conflicts, republican courts were heavily biased against the landlords).Footnote ³⁵ What Deignan does not consider are other forms of pressure, such as those studied by Miriam Moffitt with reference to Leitrim, the Queen's and King's Counties, and indeed Sligo. Unlike Cork, these areas did not experience spectacular acts of terrorist violence, but illustrate the effectiveness of low-intensity intimidation and boycotting motivated by a mix of factors, including political suspicion and old agrarian issues. Moffitt has also highlighted the importance of class: victims included small farmers and shopkeepers, as well as other poorer Protestants, people who were competing at the lower level for scarce resources and jobs.Footnote ³⁶ By the same token, it is not clear that such actions were ‘sectarian’, because they targeted individuals rather than whole groups, and the main motivation was political or agrarian rather than religious. Indeed, active Redmondites were also targeted irrespective of religion, while Protestant republicans – for example Dorothy Stopford in Cork – were actually protected by the IRA.

In any case, in Sligo there does not seem to have been any particular local problem of post-war reconciliation between Unionists and Nationalists: once the fate of the Union was decided, those Protestants who had decided to stay embraced life in the Free State cautiously but sincerely. In 1914–18, social mobilization or active service in units comprising recruits from both confessions had paved the way for the emergence of an inclusive sense of national, or at least cross-community solidarity – a factor which may have been more important than historians have hitherto believed, and certainly contributed to the ‘conversion’ to nationalism of some Southern Protestants.Footnote ³⁷

It is true that the numerical decline of the minority continued in the years 1926–36, but then the Catholics suffered a similar proportional decline, especially affecting the younger age groups, with a drop of about 33 per cent for the Catholics and 29 per cent for the Protestants between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age (p.22). The slowing down of their decline is significant particularly in view of other factors which militated against the community's survival, including lower fertility rates, the comparative scarcity of Protestant females of childbearing age, and the notorious Ne Temere policy, which decimated the community through mixed marriages and deterred some Protestants from marrying at all. In 1939–46 the situation was further complicated by the demographic impact of the Second World War. In the age group of those between twenty and twenty-four there was a drop of 50 per cent among Protestants and 33 per cent among Catholics, with people of both communities leaving either to join the British armed forces or to work in factories across the Channel.

V

On the question whether Protestants adopted a low political profile after 1922 in order to avoid Catholic hostility, Deignan offers a complex answer: in the first instance, he shows that Protestants remained politically active, especially through the Sligo Ratepayers Association. Second, he argues that Sligo politics did not evolve along sectarian lines: economic concerns were much more important, and Protestant and Catholic property-owners and businessmen were ready to collaborate and, increasingly, mix together socially (in 1922 Lord Midleton tried to have this formalised by securing representation for commerce and ‘education’, as well as property in the new Senate).Footnote ³⁸ However, the author also notes that the Protestant community had no appetite for a fight with either the Catholic church or the government on any of the civil rights issues of the time, or indeed on any of the questions of cultural identity and national politics which exercised the likes of W. B. Yeats and Hubert Butler. Protestant passivity reflected a combination of prudence, provincialism, and social conservatism. An implicit choice was made to focus on the local community's immediate material concerns, prioritizing issues on which they could hope to build up wide coalitions with the local Catholic middle class, even if this involved appeasement or quietism over national issues.

To an extent, rather than representing a new departure reflecting post-independence weakness, this was the prosecution of a strategy which the minority had adopted from the 1890s in local elections.Footnote ³⁹ That Protestant quietism started so early suggests – as Fitzpatrick, Campbell, and others have argued – that well before the Treaty the old Irish establishment was aware that it needed to reach an accommodation with nationalist power.Footnote ⁴⁰ After 1922, although the state was formally separated from the church, there was no question of it moving towards anything like the French ideal of laicité, namely the assertive neutrality of the state in religious matters – which, as Philip Nord and Nandini Chatterjee have shown, embodied both a religious view and a way to defend religious minority interests.Footnote ⁴¹ Cases such as the sacking of the Protestant librarian in Mayo in 1930, on the grounds that her religion was a threat to the ‘moral integrity’ of the majority, illustrate the liberal deficit which this situation engendered. County librarians were supposed to wield influence on the mental life of their readers because they controlled library stocks and could recommend books: consequently, they were exposed to both communal and ecclesiastical scrutiny. Indeed, ‘[t]o preserve the support of the clergy, many libraries allowed them to examine their catalogues and promised “that every care would be taken to keep out all and any books dangerous to faith and morals”’.Footnote ⁴² The Mayo case, which has recently been revisited by Pat Walsh in a fascinating essay, was ‘curious’ (as the title of his book suggests) primarily because the Cumann na nGaedheal government had the guts to stand by the Constitution and civil rights against both the Mayo County Council and the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote ⁴³ Even so, the incident resulted in the transfer of the Protestant librarian from Mayo across the country, to a different job in Dublin: this was a face-saving exercise and provided a humane solution for the person involved, but it entailed a defeat for the state – a foretaste of more to come.

Thus, although Deignan is persuasive when he argues that the minority remained vigorous and self-confident despite falling numbers and Catholic ascendancy in law, politics and culture, the question must be asked whether his conclusions reflect more the nature of the specific sources which he studied than the actual reality on the ground. True, ministers and priests across the confessional divide affected esteem and support for each other: but the rather optimistic picture that such civilities suggest is based on the evidence provided by public, formal exchanges between clergymen of different denominations. It would be interesting to see what Protestants said and wrote to each other in private.

We can approach that side of the story through Leeann Lane's book. In her diaries Rosamond Jacob (1888–1960) – a non-practising nonconformist and a nationalist – chronicled in minute detail her disappointment with the outcome of independence and the Republic. As a Quaker, she belonged to a Protestant denomination with an unblemished record in charitable and humanitarian work and which had always enjoyed great respect among the Catholic majority. Predominantly Unionist before independence, the denomination had nevertheless produced a few leading nationalists, including the Parnellite MP Alfred Webb and James Douglas, who was selected by Michael Collins as a member of the committee which drafted the 1922 Constitution.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rosamond Jacob came from a solid upper-middle-class background, but was a nationalist of a rather more advanced type than either Webb or Douglas: she was a socialist, an anti-clerical feminist and an activist in various moral reform campaigns – including anti-vivisectionism, anti-vaccination, and vegetarianism. An early member of Sinn Féin, she joined Fianna Fáil at its foundation, became a flatmate of the republican historian Dorothy McArdle and the lover of the IRA leader Frank Ryan (who always felt troubled and embarrassed by such an ‘illicit’ liaison). In these respects, she ought to have been an insider and a ‘winner’ in the Ireland that emerged from the Revolution: instead, her diaries record her frustration and alienation on almost all fronts – sexual, social, religious, and political. The document is all the more poignant and revealing because the entries are about the trivial pursuits of a normal middle-class life – walking dogs, tea with friends, crosswords, shopping, holidays, travelling by train and bus, and the weather – as well as politics, religion, and social relations. Lane has produced a systematic exploration of this treasure trove. Her suggestion that Rosamond's life is interesting for the historian precisely because they document ‘a life more ordinary’ than those of leading republican women is basically right, although someone keeping such a rich and introspective diary for several decades cannot have been really ‘ordinary’. In any case, she was hardly representative of Irish women – let alone of Protestant women, most of whom would have been horrified by her politics and even more by her affair with Ryan.

Is it then possible to get a little closer to the experience of the ordinary Protestant? It does not seem easy, for the community is very protective of its own private sphere and memories. In her study (discussed below) Heather Crawford has found that as late as 1985 there was a tendency towards ‘Protestant silence, even apparent pusillanimity, in the face of controversial issues’: ‘they were reluctant to say, face to face, anything contentious’ (Outside the glow, p. 96). The attitude was: ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’ This is well illustrated by Protestant private responses to the relentless operation of the Ne Temere. All the authors reviewed here agree that this policy, for as long as it was enforced, posed the single most insidious threat to the survival of the community. It also contributed in a decisive way to perpetuating the segregation between the two groups at the level of leisure and socialization from childhood onwards. As in the Netherlands and Belgium, the price to pay for survival was ‘pillarization’ – the creation of a system of confessionally based, parallel institutions for the minority, with Protestant schools and hospitals playing a key role in the preservation of the community identity.Footnote ⁴⁵

The most infamous episode of what could happen when segregation was relaxed is provided by the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea boycott, reassessed by Tim Fanning in an engrossing and well-researched study which makes use of previously unpublished evidence, including some collected by the author himself through interviews. The incident involved not only a family – the Catholic Sean Cloney, his Protestant wife Sheila Kelly, and their small children – but the whole community of this town in Co. Wexford. Before the wedding, as prescribed by the Ne Temere, the Protestant partner signed a stipulation to bring up as Catholics any children which would issue from the marriage. Sheila was never happy about it, having previously privately agreed with her fiancé that they would bring them up in both religious traditions. When the time came for the first to enter the education system, the couple came under heavy clerical pressure to send her to a Catholic school. Her husband did not dare to stand by her against the priest, but Sheila, rather than submitting, left home with her daughters and sought refuge first in the North and then in Scotland. Instead of being regarded as a feminist hero resisting an act of unwarrantable oppression, she was promptly criminalized. Incited by a priest, the local Catholic community started to boycott local Protestant businesses and farmers on the (unfounded) assumption that they had somehow supported Sheila's flight. The boycott continued even after she returned, despite Taoiseach De Valera's intervention to stop it and a secret agreement between representatives of the two communities. It provoked parliamentary debates in Dublin, Stormont, and London, and secured global media coverage, with an article even in Time magazine. Fanning argues that the sectarian motivation was strengthened by economic rivalry and the fear that if children were allowed to grow up as something other than Catholics, the church would lose in revenue. Whatever the case, the incident had serious repercussions for all parties involved. The Irish state was seen to be impotent in the face of community-backed sectarianism. The Catholic church won a Pyrrhic victory, with its public profile coming under public scrutiny for the second time in a decade, after the equally damaging Mother-and-Child episode (when the hierarchy delayed essential welfare legislation in order to retain control over the care for pregnant women). As for the Protestants, they were in abject submission: Fanning shows how most of them – including the local rector, his bishop, and much of the local and national press – disowned Sheila and accepted the dictates of the Catholic church, feeling that surrender was the only way to end persecution.

It may well be, as Deignan argues about Sligo, that the Southern Protestant quietist strategy both contributed to bringing about a rapid consolidation of democratic life in the Free State and allowed for the successful defence of the minority's economic interests. But Fanning argues that this came at the cost of drastic restrictions in civil rights. The Fethard boycott was ‘a blip’, as some scholars have argued, ‘but only because Sheila Cloney, unlike so many of her co-religionists, stood up to the bullies’. Paradoxically, the only group to emerge in a positive light from the episode are the local IRA veterans: excommunicated by the church in the past, some of them did not miss the opportunity to annoy the priests by lending a helping hand to the beleaguered Protestants.

Nevertheless – with the exception of clamorous cases such as the 1957 boycott, which generated evidence because of its very exceptionality – it remains difficult to assess the experience of most ‘ordinary’ members of the minority. Most of them left behind no substantial body of personal written records. In order to obviate this problem, one option is to collect oral evidence.Footnote ⁴⁶Outside the glow is based on one hundred interviews, of which sixty-four were with Protestants and thirty-six with Catholics. Sixty-eight of the interviewees were women. One dramatic finding is that many of the attitudes discussed above survived well into the 1980s, sometimes at the level of unthinking assumptions and emotional distortions of the historical legacy, based on collective memory or the way history was presented in school (pp. 59–60). Both the level of majority ignorance and misconception about who the minority are and what they stand for are the most striking feature about the Catholic interviewees: one of them reported her surprise when she first realized that there were some Protestants who were hard-working poor (rather than members of the gilded Ascendancy) and that they could actually have many children, like Catholic families (p. 95). A fifty-seven-year-old rural Catholic spoke with great emphasis of her astonishment when she first found out that Mary Robinson had married a Protestant, as if she had discovered that the president had married an alien from outer space (p. 110). That this particular witness was young enough to have experienced the liberalizing and ecumenical influence of Vatican II in her formative years makes her evidence even more telling: obviously, old habits die hard. Outside the glow is a perceptive and revealing study, a ground-breaking work which shows the need for a much deeper and more systematic investigation of the private and intimate sphere of minority life since independence.

VI

The counterfactual question whether pluralism in Ireland might have been secured at an earlier stage by a more politically engaged attitude on the side of the minority is fascinating, partly because it lends itself to comparative analysis with other European countries, and partly because it can be further tested by looking at the experience of the small number of Irish Protestants who did actually adopt varieties of nationalism. Among the books reviewed here, the biographies of Leslie Shane and Stephen Gwynn suggest that adopting nationalism as a strategy of civic integration had its limitations and drawbacks.

Shane Leslie – the subject of a fascinating study by the Austrian scholar Otto Rauchbauer – was a leading nationalist aristocrat whose seat was in the southernmost Ulster county, Monaghan. The latter had a Catholic majority and was therefore included in the Irish Free State in 1921. However, it also included a substantial Protestant minority, whose unenviable fate was to fall between two stools – they were too numerous to be ignored by the IRA, too few to make a stand or persuade the North to take them in.Footnote ⁴⁷ From their plight, Shane Leslie could not have been more remote, and this reminds us of the importance of class above religion and political allegiance. A Cambridge-educated man of letters, diplomat, first cousin of Winston Churchill, and, like him, a half-American imperialist, Leslie was also a cosmopolitan intellectual and founder member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Like many fellow aristocrats from the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy – with whose history his biographer is obviously familiar – Leslie was a patriot ‘beyond nationalism’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although a Catholic convert and a supporter of the Free State, he had been in the crown forces in the First World War and welcomed the Oath of Allegiance to the king in the 1921 Treaty. Likewise, while the author claims that he was ‘a passionate champion of the universalist Catholic Church’ (p. 204), the evidence suggests that he remained something of an Anglo-Catholic, unable to share the militancy which the Irish hierarchy expected from its children. Did he find in the Catholic church a counterpart of the global British empire which he loved so much? Perhaps not surprisingly, his son Desmond, also the subject of a recent biography, defied both Catholic teaching, by joining an esoteric sect called the White Lodge, and De Valera's nationalism, by enrolling in the RAF in the Second World War (his father was also once again a serving officer in that conflict).Footnote ⁴⁹ The two Leslies' steady imperial loyalism was typical of the Protestant gentry with whom they mixed, those such as Field Marshal Alexander, who was the owner of one of the neighbouring estates and a frequent visitor at Glaslough, Leslie's Big House. The latter welcomed all sorts of other distinguished guests, including diplomats such as Count Kano, the Japanese ambassador to London, and the Spanish duke of Alba. This in itself gives some idea of the circle in which Shane Leslie moved. Yet, in the end, it is difficult to disagree with the author's conclusion that he was a ‘sublime failure’: a man of great ideals and immense potential, but one who was unable to shape the course of events to the extent that he became (deservedly) ‘the victim of … circumstances and unrelenting fate’ (p. 204).

Stephen Gwynn was an altogether more engaged and passionate nationalist than Leslie. He too was ‘a failure’ in the end, but one who fought his corner with bravery, skill, and imagination. His vision of a pluralist Ireland was in many ways posthumously vindicated in the new millennium. Reid has produced a compelling analysis, which goes well beyond the biographical and uses the substantial archives and literary output of Gwynn to shed new light on the tension and missed opportunities of a generation of Irish reformers. He hailed from a distinguished family of scholars and clergymen and, through his mother, was linked to both the Victorian nationalist William Smith O'Brien and the eighteenth-century ‘Patriot’ gentry. Born in 1864, Gwynn had been a young man in Parnell's heyday, became a follower of John Redmond, and entered parliament in 1906. Within constitutional nationalism he positioned himself on the liberal wing, for example by opposing the 1909 proposal for the compulsory teaching of the Irish language at the National University (from whose Senate he resigned when the policy was adopted). In a spirit of conciliation and tolerance, he tried to persuade fellow-Protestants that the Ne Temere decree would not have the impact on civil liberty which they feared, but stood little chance of success after the 1910 McCann case, involving the break-up of a marriage under clerical pressure. It is clear that he was swimming against the tide, but World War I seemed to offer a new opportunity to his reconciliatory nationalism and for a while a new and inclusive sense of Irish identity seemed to emerge from the trenches of the Western Front. Both Gwynn and his son Denis joined up, consistently with their Redmondite vision of a nationalism which was firmly set within the framework of imperial loyalism. In a last-ditch attempt to secure a peaceful solution to the Home Rule problem, in 1917, Gwynn took part in the Irish Convention as the representative of the nationalist soldiers, and later he spent the last months of the war in a campaign to recruit volunteers for the forces. Colin Reid is mildly dismissive about this initiative, although the evidence suggests that it was a real success: despite the carnage of the Western Front and the impact of the Easter Rising, 10,000 Irishmen joined up in five months from July 1918, in comparison to 50,000 during the previous thirty-five months.

When the Redmondite project was finally defeated, Gwynn and a group of like-minded liberals tried to relaunch constitutional nationalism through the Irish Centre Party and the Dominion League, both of which sought independence within the empire and the avoidance of Partition. Defeated again, he supported the Treaty from the columns of the Observer and defied the IRA (who blew up his Dublin house in reprisal). After 1922, he withdrew from active politics, while continuing to protest against what in 1972 Garrett FitzGerald was to describe as a ‘mono-cultural nation-State’ which excluded Protestants. Like FitzGerald, Gwynn was proud of his mixed ancestry. ‘His essential point was that there was no uniform profile of Irishness: the country should cherish its divergent blood types, united in the common bond of nationality’ (p. 215). This was a battle which he continued to fight over the next years, despite feeling increasingly isolated. Both his wife and his children had converted to Roman Catholicism (his wife did so in retaliation against Gwynn's marital unfaithfulness). Thus, religion created a widening gap even within his own family, to the extent that, when Gwynn died, his children were not allowed to attend his Protestant funeral, having been denied the then prescribed papal dispensation to do so.

In many ways Gwynn's spiritual successor was Hubert Butler, whose life and career are the subject of Robert Tobin's recently published brilliant study. Butler (1900–91) was a Protestant liberal of the first post-independence, post-Partition generation. Unlike Gwynn, he never held public office, nor was he involved in any political party, but exercised a considerable influence as a publicist and a public moralist. In his many publications and through the media, he relentlessly criticized not only Roman Catholic authoritarianism and clerical interference with politics, but also Protestant complacency and acceptance of life in a pillarized society, within which the minority preserved its identity but at the cost of segregation and political subordination. His dogged advocacy of Protestant involvement in national life and his challenges to Catholic conformism made him a controversial figure, especially when he drew attention to uncomfortable aspects of contemporary affairs, such as the moral compromises involved in Ireland's neutrality during the Second World War and the Cold War, during both of which he defended human rights and helped persecuted minorities even when this ran against the demands of Irish Realpolitik.Footnote ⁵⁰

The experience of these three men confirms what Alfred Webb had noted as early as 1886, namely that ‘self-abnegation will be demanded from any Protestant (who means to keep to be a real Protestant) who enters in Irish politics [after the achievement of self-government] … But it is our duty to try and … show that we are for liberty and freedom and justice.’Footnote ⁵¹ Leslie, Gwynn, Douglas, Butler, and others did their best to show that they were ‘for liberty and freedom and justice’ as they understood it, but the amount of ‘self-abnegation’ required of them – as well as the rest of the community – was even greater than Webb had anticipated. Yet, at the end of Ireland's first century as an independent state, the academic and public interest which they receive suggests that the time has finally come for their vision and hope to be vindicated.