From its suggestive title through a sequence of closely connected essays, many of them previously published, this is a fascinating volume. Divided into nine essays and three parts, the book explores issues and themes of enduring importance in some of David Fitzpatrick’s most recent works. The first part explores the Orange Order from several angles: via the army, in relation to the partition of Ireland, through personalities, and in relation to Methodism. The second part looks at the Ulster Covenanters (and non-Covenanters). A final section gets to grips again with a topic that has created much debate lately: the extent to which southern Protestants suffered what Peter Hart controversially called ‘ethnic cleansing’. The central theme of the book is really sectarianism, which is discussed subtlely, in a variety of ways, through politics and people, individuals and groups, ideas and actions.
Fitzpatrick’s title is not mere wordplay, though it is rather natty. Nonetheless, this book does chart the diminishing position of the once dominant Protestant minority in Ireland through the period of the Union on to the eventual unravelling of that constitutional association. The Ascendancy that characterised the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland faced many challenges and key curtailments, from the granting of Catholic Emancipation, the ending of tithe payments, and the granting of maintenance to the Catholic church and the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of Ireland. It was more than the Irish Revolution that pushed at the columns of Protestant hegemony, but the final denouement of the Union is what did for this Ascendancy once and for all.
Fitzpatrick is not, however, interested here in the sliding fortunes of the Anglican elite. For one thing, while he recognises the importance of this group and knows its dominant position, he also correctly points out that they were ‘utterly unrepresentative of Irish Protestants’ at large. Fitzpatrick really writes about a broader and more typical swathe of Protestants: middle- and working-class folk, those in professions and trades, those in the Orange Order, and those whose religion was Methodist. He demonstrates a characteristically strong facility with both qualitative and quantitative sources. The application of precision is rarely more apparent than when Fitzpatrick is writing in the third section about topics that have generated much heat in Ireland’s version of the ‘history wars’.
A central theme, Orangeism, is a subject on which Fitzpatrick has written extensively. The Order was (and remains) an organisation of ordinary Protestants. In the nineteenth century, it was also a tool of the Ascendancy and was utilised to protect the interests of elites against the perceived threat posed by rising Catholic power. Here we learn how the Order penetrated deeply into the armed forces, underpinning the instruments of law and order, whilst interlinking with northern Protestant elites. The discussion of Orangeism and the border (chapter 3) shows how members of the institution in the three Ulster counties within the Free State negotiated their identities, and explains why the organisation remained important in that setting. Fitzpatrick attributes the continuing robustness of the Order in Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal to its members’ clout in a political system that had proportional representation. Equally, he shows how, with the advent of the Troubles and renewed sectarian hostility on both sides of the border, Orangeism in the South fell into decline.
The final section of the book deals with the contentious question of the victimisation of southern Protestants during the Irish revolution. Reviewing the literature, in which excited passions have been expressed, Fitzpatrick makes a case for evidentiary ‘measurable outcomes’ rather than ‘imputed motives’. The issue is of course of great import if thousands of Protestants were indeed driven from their homes, or killed; but the treatment of Protestants also obtains purchase from the needs of political leaders, both North and South, to claim they represented everyone in their jurisdictions. Clearly, pogroms against minorities – even former elite minorities – would not play well against such claims. Fitzpatrick is very good at setting the scene for a reappraisal of the late Peter Hart’s use of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Accepting the particular spikes during the Belfast pogroms and the Bandon Valley massacre, Fitzpatrick questions the extent to which such activities spread wider in Irish society, though he explains how the overall ‘pattern of county losses is consistent with the model of “ethnic cleansing”’ because the counties with the smallest, ‘presumably vulnerable’ Protestant populations lost the highest proportions. By contrast, the largest Protestant populations in the three lost Ulster counties, and in Wicklow, Dublin and Cork, declined much less quickly. The factors causing Protestant decline were complex and varied by region and group, occupation and outlook; declining fertility; the dominance of Catholicism in mixed marriage; conversion; and an ageing population – each of these factors had some effect, regardless of how intimidation, violence, and forced migration played out. Failure to recruit, say Fitzpatrick, rather than attack outside, was the root cause of decline for Ireland’s Methodists when analysed both at the national level and on a micro-local level. The essays examining both the national picture and a west Cork example (chapters 8 and 9) are fine pieces of research drawing on rich evidence.
Notwithstanding Fitzpatrick’s considerable acumen with these rich data, however, the attempt to examine the fate of Protestants via the (admittedly richly-archived) Methodist congregation may raise some concerns among readers. When we think of the Protestant Ascendancy (which the title leads us to do), it is Anglicans, not Methodists, whose pre-eminence we imagine. Pogroms against the Church of Ireland’s ubiquitous and powerful presence, its once impressive control of land, institutions and top schools, and its power and influence, make more sense than the removal by violence of Methodists. And yet: while Methodists may only be surrogates for Anglicans to some extent, they were Protestants and they did reflect many of the demographic patterns seen in Protestantism more general. Scholars such as Bielenberg have reached different conclusions about ‘ethnic cleansing’ using different data, but Fitzpatrick’s work contributes significantly to the debate by illustrating that overall Protestant decline was less marked in the key years of the Revolution (1920–23) than before the First World War (1911–14). In its component parts and in the round, this is an important and stimulating study.
