Protestant Irish nationalists are people of Protestant persuasion or background in Ireland who with their Catholic-majority countrymen and women campaigned for Ireland's independence and the dissolution of its union with Great Britain. Through the nineteenth century, they attained positions of leadership in a succession nationalist movements, but they did so without the support of the broader Protestant community. Content with representation in the United Kingdom parliament, Protestant opinion remained overwhelmingly unionist.
In the former, separate but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland, in which Catholics were excluded from public office, Irish Protestants readily identified as patriots. The focus of their patriotism was the parliament in Dublin. Its high-point was the armed Volunteer movement which in 1782 secured from the British Crown recognition of the parliament's exclusive right to legislate for Ireland. The movement subsequently split on the question of Catholic emancipation. In 1798, the more radical faction, concentrated in the Presbyterian north-east, broke into open rebellion in an effort, as "United Irishmen", to abolish confessional privilege and establish a representative republic.
Reconciled after 1800 to the union, Protestants were broadly hostile to political and cultural movements that, in arguing a new case for Irish nationality and statehood, celebrated Ireland's fealty to the Catholic Church and its Gaelic heritage, and depreciated the ties by which Protestants in particular felt bound to Britain and to its empire. The nationalist tradition nonetheless honours the contribution of individual Protestants, among them: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel as dissenters from the compromising leadership of "the Emancipator" Daniel O'Connell; Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell as leaders of the Home Rule movement; Douglas Hyde and Alice Milligan as promoters of a linguistically and culturally "Irish Ireland"; and, in the early twentieth century, Roger Casement, and Constance Markievicz as "physical-force" republicans.
Following the partition settlement of 1921, in the six Ulster counties retained as Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, Protestants in labour and socialist circles continued to be drawn to James Connolly's vision of an all-Ireland workers' republic. In the 1940s, a number of northern Protestants formed a "squad" within a reactivated Irish Republican Army. From the late 1960s, a stricter sectarian division was imposed by the onset of "the Troubles". It is reflected in the exclusively Catholic background of the present leadership in Sinn Féin, and of the SDLP, as it is in the exclusively Protestant background of unionist party leadership.
Pre-Union background
Anglo-Irish patriots
When, in 1782, the Patriot leader in the Irish House of Commons, Henry Grattan, in his Volunteer uniform, carried by acclaim a declaration of legislative independence from London, he reportedly cried: "Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!" William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland stated (1696) and Jonathan Swift's Drapier's Letters (1724–25) are sometimes cited as the first stirrings of a modern Irish nationalism. Yet their rejection of English claims that Ireland was a colony, and insistence that the island was, in the words of Molyneux, "a Compleat Kingdom within itself", was entirely circumscribed by their commitment to Ireland's Anglican "Protestant ascendancy".
Swift objected to extending civil and political rights to Presbyterians and other Protestant "Dissenters" from the Church of Ireland communion. As for the Catholic "five sixths of the population", the English national historian Lord Macaulay proposed that, dispossessed and excluded under the Penal Laws, they were accorded no more place in the Irish nation as conceived by these "planted" Protestants than "than the swine or the poultry". The patriotism of the Anglo-Irish "squireen" was as disinterested, he suggested, as the invocation of "inalienable right" by the slave-holding "Virginia planter". Even while pressing for further reform, Volunteer conventions did not address the "Catholic question", save in Ulster where delegates concurred only in approving "the relaxation" of the civil disabilities imposed upon their "fellow subjects".
The exclusively Protestant nature of the constitution was breached first, not by Protestant patriots, but by direct Catholic appeal to the British government in London then intent on engaging Catholics in both Ireland and abroad in a war with the new French Republic. In 1793, with the vice-regal administration in Dublin Castle supplying the necessary inducements and pressure, Grattan piloted a relief bill through parliament that re-admitted Catholics, not to parliament itself, but to the electoral franchise. The concession, votes for a small, albeit growing, number of property-qualified Catholics, could have little impact upon the conduct of government. Two thirds of the seats in the Commons remained in the gift either of landed grandees sitting in the House of Lords or of Dublin Castle, the Irish executive that continued to be appointed from London.
United Irishmen
Limited reform satisfied neither Catholic or Dissenter. Disaffection concentrated in Belfast where already, in 1784, Volunteer companies had been admitting Catholics to their ranks in the conviction that "a general Union of all the inhabitants of Ireland is necessary to the freedom and prosperity of this kingdom". Re-animated by news of the revolutionary events in France, in October 1791 a group of Volunteer veterans among the town's Presbyterian merchants responded to an invitation from the physician William Drennan to enter into "a benevolent conspiracy — a plot for the people", its "general end real independence to Ireland".] Calling themselves, at the suggestion of a Dublin proponent of cooperation with Catholics, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Society of United Irishmen, and adopting his draft resolution, they observed that in a "great era of reform ... when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people," the Irish people find themselves with "no national government" — "we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen". The remedy lay in "a cordial union among all the people of Ireland" and "a complete and radical reform" of their representation in parliament.
This resolve, adopted by United societies that then convened in Dublin and across the country, and which was to harden in the face of government repression into a republican conspiracy, would be invoked by later generations of nationalists. In 1913, at what he described as "the holiest place in Ireland", the grave of Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown, Patrick Pearse declared Tone "the greatest of Irish Nationalists". When proclaiming the Irish Republic in 1916, Pearse presented the Easter Rising as the sixth occasion in the past three hundred years in which the Irish people had asserted in arms their right to sovereignty. This placed the rebellion, urged by Tone in 1798, in a line succession from the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the resistance to the Williamite invasion of 1689.
Contemporary historians have taken issue with this "teleological" narrative. In Tone's call to "substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denomination of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter", they see a political project for which the precedents were not Irish, but American and French: the realisation of an Enlightenment, legal-rational ideal of citizenship, a vindication of the Rights of Man. On the principle that they should "attend those things in which we all agree, [and] to exclude those in which we differ", United Irishmen had positively eschewed reference to Ireland's past. Are we "forever", asked the Dublin Society, "to walk like beasts of prey over fields which [our] ancestors stained with blood?" Better, they suggested to "think little of our ancestors [but] much of our posterity".
At the same time, Tone's promised unity of creeds elicits scepticism. In Dublin where, reflecting the capital's larger, more denominationally mixed middle class, the Society encompassed from the outset Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, Drennan promoted a secret "inner Society" that was to be "Protestant but National". Convinced that the object of many of the Catholic members was "selfish" (i.e. focused on emancipation rather than on reform and independence), Drennan concluded that, while the Catholics might "save themselves", it is "the Protestants who must save the nation". As it was, when the society began to arm, both Drennan and the leading Catholics dropped out of its inner counsels. This left Protestants in spring of 1798 — William James MacNeven, Samuel Neilson, Edward FitzGerald, Arthur O'Connor, Oliver Bond, and the brothers John and Henry Sheares — to plan and direct an insurrection from Dublin.Cullen, Louis. (1993), "The internal politics of the United Irishmen", in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan eds., The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, Dublin: Lilliput Press, , (pp. 176–196) pp. 95–96
In Ulster, the Society was strongest in the comfortably Protestant-majority districts in the east (Belfast, and immediate hinterlands) but conceded ground to the new-formed Orange Order in the west where folk memories of the massacres of 1641 sharpened the sectarian competition for tenancies and employment. The Belfast directory did seek to mediate in the increasing sectarian disturbances through its agents both Protestant (James Hope and Thomas Russell) and Catholic. For some of the Catholics displaced, they helped provide refuge on Presbyterian farms in counties Down and Antrim, and the used goodwill earned used to persuade the Catholic Defenders, more Jacobite and Jacobin in outlook, of something they had only "vaguely" considered: the necessity of a complete break with the British Crown. In the aftermath of the rebellion, the Defenders in turn opened their cell-structured organisation for Protestant rebels in Antrim, enabling them to maintain (as later celebrated in Ethna Carbery's ballad "Roddy McCorley") an outlaw existence until March 1800. In the rebellion itself, however, there are stories of Catholics being driven from Henry Joy McCracken's ill-fated march upon Antrim Town by sectarian taunts,Elliott, Marianne (2003), "Religious polarization and sectarianism in the Ulster rebellion", in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds.), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, Dublin, Four Courts Press, ISBN 1851824308, (pp. 279-297), p. 289. and, although the accounts are disputed, of withdrawing from the rebel camp of Henry Munro on the eve its rout in the battle of Ballynahinch.Proudfoot L. (ed.) Down History and Society (Dublin 1997) chapter by Nancy Curtin at p. 289.
In Leinster, in counties Wexford and Wicklow, the rebels were led to their first successes, not by a United Irishman, but by a renegade Catholic priest, Fr. John Murphy. Murphy did submit to the command of Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant barrister, but when their united forces were defeated at New Ross, rebels in the rear killed loyalist prisoners at Scullabogue and, after a United Irish Committee of Public Safety was swept aside in Wexford Town, at Wexford Bridge.Ó hÓgartaigh, Margaret (2010). Edward Hay: Historian of 1798. Dublin: The History Press. p. 44. Notwithstanding greater military atrocities, reports of the massacres helped prompt Protestant defections from the republican cause.Gahan, D. "The Scullabogue Massacre, 1798", History Ireland, v. 4 (1996), 3Swords, L. (1997) Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798, Columbia Press, p. 176 Loyalists were soon able to report that "the word 'Protestant', which was becoming obsolete in the north, has regained its influence and all of that description seem drawing closer together".
From Emmet to the Fenians
Emmet and the Union