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April 22 - April 25, 2019
Most of the Protestants were descendants of settlers who emigrated from England and Scotland to various parts of Ireland with the encouragement of English governments, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A major aim of the settlements was to plant a loyal British garrison community to establish control in the face of periodic Irish uprisings which at times threatened English security by linking up with England’s traditional Catholic enemies, France and Spain.
Although there was some inter-marriage between the Catholic natives and Protestant settlers, the two communities, especially in the north-east, continued down through the years to regard themselves as largely separate entities.
The communities were differentiated primarily on the basis of conflicting national identities, but the various other important points of difference kept communal divisions fresh and potent.
Unionists feared Home Rule as a threat to the Union with Britain, and as a prelude to complete Irish independence and the ending of Protestant and British domination of Irish affairs.
1916 saw the Easter Rising in Dublin, with a small number of republicans staging an armed rebellion against British rule. The rising itself was quickly put down, but the action of the British government of the day in executing many of its leaders rebounded: London was deemed to have overreacted and a huge swell of sympathy for the republicans ensued. By the time World War One ended in 1918, the Irish desire for Home Rule had been swept away and replaced by the demand for an independent Irish republic. The newly formed Irish Republican Army, known as the IRA, began a violent campaign against
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In essence this act hoped to solve the problem by keeping all of Ireland in British hands while providing for a Home Rule parliament in the twenty-six southern counties, together with a separate devolved parliament for the six north-eastern counties. As well as having its own parliament Northern Ireland would continue to send MPs to Westminster. Aware of the rising nationalist tide, Ulster Unionists reluctantly accepted this and Northern Ireland came into existence. Irish nationalists rejected the plan and their war for independence continued until a treaty in 1921 created a twenty-six-county
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Those Catholics considered themselves trapped in this new state, denied their Irish identity, cut off from their co-religionists in the Free State and politically powerless. To this was quickly added another complaint: that the Unionist establishment, which was to run the state on the basis of Protestant majority rule for the following half-century, actively discriminated against Catholics in the allocation of jobs and housing, over political rights and in other areas.
The defining feature of the new entity was its demographics: it was two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, the guiding concept in deciding its borders having been that it should have a decisive Protestant majority.
Most Unionist politicians had not wanted their own devolved parliament in Belfast, preferring to remain more closely integrated with Britain. But once the 1920 settlement had handed almost all political power into their hands, they realised they could make effective use of it to buttress and protect the new Northern Ireland.
The government system put in place in the 1920s is one of the keys to explaining the later troubles, since there was such extraordinary continuity in its workings over the decades, and since the outbreak of the troubles was so directly related to it. The Catholic civil rights movement would take to the streets in 1968 with complaints which related directly to the arrangements of the 1920s.
In 1922 the voting system known as proportional representation (PR) was abolished. Its removal was by no means simply a technical adjustment, since it had been built in both as an actual safeguard for Catholic and Protestant minorities in the two parts of Ireland and also a symbol of respect for their views.
As a result of the changes nationalists lost their majorities in thirteen of twenty-four councils they had originally controlled.
Northern Ireland’s second city, Londonderry, moved from nationalist to Unionist control even though it had a clear nationalist majority.
Nationalists branded this boundary manipulation as ‘gerrymandering’, a term which was to have a prominent place in the political lexicon for many decades.
The original abolition of PR in local government was so successful in enhancing the Unionist party’s power that in the late 1920s Craig did the same thing for the Belfast parliament. Again PR was dropped and again constituency boundaries were redrawn.
In Craig’s terms the ending of PR in elections to parliament worked beautifully, his party winning thirty-seven of the fifty-two seats in 1929.
In 1933, in fact, the entire general election became a formality since twenty-seven seats were uncontested by non-Unionists. As a result the Unionist party won the election before a vote was cast.
Nationalists regarded all this as deeply undemocratic.
Judges and magistrates were almost all Protestants, many of them closely associated with the Unionist party.
The political, legal and policing worlds were thus inextricably linked: one community governed, judged and policed the other.
There were no Catholics among the cabinet, the senior staff in the Stormont Commons, the top ranks of the RUC, the Civil Service Commission and other important public bodies.
Unsurprisingly, Catholic unemployment was generally more than double Protestant unemployment, partly because of these patterns and partly because a higher proportion of Catholics lived in areas of high unemployment such as the west.
Housing was another area that produced much Catholic complaint, especially after World War Two when a major building programme was introduced to improve the very poor housing standards.
What made house building and allocation so sensitive was that voting in local government elections was limited to ratepayers and their spouses. A new house would thus often carry two votes, a matter that could be of great political significance in areas where the Unionist and nationalist votes were evenly balanced.
This restriction, which most affected the poorer sections of the population, was later to provide one of the most potent slogans for the civil rights movement with its demand for ‘one man – one vote’.
The Orange Order, a Protestant organisation viewed by Catholics as bigoted and anti-Catholic but regarded by most Protestants as an important guardian of their heritage, held a significant place in political life.
The Order was founded in 1795 following clashes between Protestant and Catholic factions in County Armagh. This mêlée, known now as the Battle of the Diamond, is one of the major events in Orange folk history, together with two incidents in the seventeenth century when Protestants prevailed over Catholics, the Siege of Derry in 1689 and the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In later years the Orange Order established what came to be known as the marching season, holding hundreds of parades during the summer months. In the nineteenth century these gave rise to recurring riots, particularly in
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‘The celebration of that (Orange July) festival is plainly and unmistakably the originating cause of these riots.’ It added that the occasion was used ‘to remind one party of the triumph of their ancestors over those of the other, and to inculcate the feelings of Protestant superiority over their Roman Catholic neighbours’.
Politically too, Orangeism became an integral part of the state. Between 1921 and 1969 only three of fifty-four Unionist cabinet ministers were not members of the Order.
Eighty-seven of the ninety-five Unionist backbenchers during the same period were members of the Order.
‘Membership was an indispensable condition of political advancement. It protected the employment of Protestants by its influence over employers, which is a polite way of saying that it contrived systematic discrimination against Catholics.
Orange marches became part of the fabric of Unionist government while at the same time nationalist parades were subject to severe restriction.
Ministers and MPs regularly made statements directed against Catholics.
Catholics were not actively persecuted by the authorities; they were not deported to the south; only a comparatively small number, nearly all active republicans, ever experienced internment without trial. The Catholic Church was free to go about its business, and to run its own schools and hospital facilities, though there was much wrangling about whether the Unionist government was adequately contributing to their upkeep. Nationalist newspapers, in particular the Belfast-based Irish News, were generally free to criticise the government and unceasingly did so.
But Catholics and nationalists were clearly regarded as second-class citizens, as intrinsically dangerous to the state, and as being less deserving of houses and jobs than their Protestant neighbours.
With Catholic unemployment at high levels and many of the better jobs regarded as the preserve of Protestants, the Catholic emigration rate was higher than that of Protestants. Many Catholic schools advised pupils not to apply to the civil service or local authorities for jobs, regarding such applications as pointless.
Northern Ireland and its Catholic minority were in a sense standing affronts to southern self-esteem, representing as they did constant reminders that the south’s nation-building efforts were deeply imperfect. Politically, northern nationalist leaders were unwelcome ghosts at the feast in Dublin.
Far from being acclaimed in Dublin, northern nationalist politicians were sidelined. They regularly pressed for invitations to state occasions in the south but were not particularly welcomed.
Unopposed elections were a feature of the Stormont system. Since elections were essentially decided on a religious headcount, the side which was in the minority in a constituency often simply gave up and stopped fielding a candidate there.
Although there were major economic changes over the decades, the basic elements of Unionist dominance, Catholic powerlessness and Westminster disregard survived relatively untouched even an event as cataclysmic as World War Two.
What went by the board in 1949 was the issue which two decades later would give rise to the civil rights movement: the question of the fairness of the Stormont system. When Lord Longford protested that Catholics were being discriminated against he was allowed to address the cabinet which received him, he recalled, with ‘chilly indifference’.
Thus the 1940s and 1950s came and went, with not even the war changing the basic grammar of Northern Ireland political life, and with the Unionist system as strong as ever.
Not until the 1960s would the Northern Ireland system first begin to tremble, disintegrate, and then descend into violence.
The years between 1963 and 1969 are often referred to as ‘the O’Neill era’. This is entirely appropriate in that the personality and approach of the Stormont prime minister of the time, Captain Terence O’Neill, represented a striking departure from tradition.
Terence O’Neill sought to change the entire tone of government, introducing the rhetoric of Protestant–Catholic reconciliation in place of the unapologetically Protestant stance of Craig and Brooke. In retrospect it was an inadequate attempt to brush away decades of division without tackling the underlying problems. These eventually produced a tidal wave of conflicting forces which swept O’Neill from office.
He felt it essential ‘to convince more and more people that the government is working for the good of all and not only those who vote Unionist’.
The fault line within Unionism between reformers and traditionalists was to remain visible throughout the troubles. One segment in effect would flatly refuse to contemplate striking a deal with Catholics and nationalists.
O’Neill, who projected complete faith in Britain, worried many Protestants in that he did not appear to share their almost genetic unease about London.
A rise in tension in 1966, as republicans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising, led to three killings carried out by a group styling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force.
The UVF, though named after the organisation that had helped bring Northern Ireland into being, was a far cry from the original body of that name. It was instead made up of at most a couple of dozen men who met in backstreet pubs, many in the Shankill Road district, to discuss over drinks means of combating the practically nonexistent IRA.
