Southern Irish Loyalism in Context SIL Conference

Framing the overlapping networks of unionism, conservatism and loyalism in pre-revolutionary Ireland is a challenge. This becomes more acute the closer one gets to the twentieth century and the disappearance of political power from the unionist class. ‘Hard’ power became replaced with ‘soft’ power (much to the chagrin of diverse characters such as Lord Barrymore and DP Moran). The nostalgia of prudent management and benevolent dispersal of money and services became more acute as the acien regime was swept from their bastions of power following the passage of the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898.

In the sphere of the press, conservatism, loyalism and unionism were quite obviously a minority taste, and only served by a few daily newspapers. The majority of these, however, only spoke to the commercial unionists and loyalists. Few newspapers took a stance in favour of nostalgic prudence, and loyalty to the government of the day. One such (as I will argue in this paper) was the eccentric Skibbereen Eagle.

The Eagle was first and foremost an outlet for the foibles and viewpoints of its founder, Fred Potter. Conservative viewpoints and loyalist outlooks were common, even more so after 1898 and during the first turbulent years of the twentieth century. Yet even after Potter’s death in 1907 the Eagle (under Catholic nationalist ownership) continued to transmit a modified version its founders’ outlook.

This paper will examine the Eagle’s worldview through its commentary on issues central to the shrinking loyalist population of its hinterland. It will argue that the paper deserves to be studied as the agent of a different kind of loyalism than that preached by its heavyweight counterpart, the Cork Constitution.

John O’Donovan works part-time at University College Cork, and holds a BA and MA in History from the university. He has published a number of articles and book chapters, including “The All-for-Ireland League and the Home Rule Debate, 1910-1914 (G. Doherty (ed.): The Home Rule Crisis 1910-1914 (Cork Studies in the Irish Revolution (Cork, 2014)) and “The United Irish League in Cork 1898-1918: Resistance and Counter-Resistance”, Studi Irelandesi: a Journal of Irish Studies 4 (2017). His PhD Thesis, which he hopes to commence in autumn 2017, will focus on the All-for-Ireland League in a number of Irish and international contexts.

From the 1860s nationalists gradually came to dominate Dublin Corporation. In 1898 new legislation dramatically expanded the municipal franchise and the arrival of Labour and Sinn Féin in the early twentieth century radicalized city politics. Throughout this period, however, a small but solid bloc of unionists were consistently returned to City Hall. Meanwhile, in Dublin’s suburbs unionist enjoyed secure majorities, administering the daily affairs of Rathmines and Pembroke Urban District Councils. How did this long-established, resilient and influential electorate fare as Home Rule loomed and revolution erupted?

Local government played a crucial, and intimate, role in the lives of the electorate - it really mattered who ran your local council. Slums, poor drainage, high taxes and allegations of municipal waste and inefficiency plagued Dublin Corporation. Unionists highlighted these nationalist failings in City Hall to show the likely outcome of Home Rule. Suburban life, in contrast, ran far more smoothly thanks to unionist councillors being ‘better men of business’, or so the argument went. But how accurate was this depiction of life on either side of the municipal boundary? Who were these unionist men of business? Was a typical unionist councillor just like his nationalist, Labour or Sinn Féin opponent? How did the emergence of women as municipal voters and candidates affect the selection or activity of Dublin’s unionist councillors? As a permanent minority, what local alliances did they seek? What compromises did they make?

This paper will look at unionist responses to nationalist dominance in the Dublin region in the first two decades of the twentieth century. By examining their electoral performances in the city and suburbs, and identifying their political concerns and strategies, it will attempt to measure how successful they were in pursuing their goals. And, following the revolutionary events of 1916 – 1923, it will suggest where this resilient electorate, and their municipal activism, may have ended up.

Dr Ciarán Wallace completed his PhD on Local politics and government in Dublin city and suburbs 1899-1914 in 2010 at Trinity College, Dublin. His research interests include civil society, Irish urban history and its placement in a wider United Kingdom framework. He has taught on British and Irish history, Irish studies, Culture & Heritage studies and historiography. He is currently an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow working on a monograph Divided City: Dublin and its unionist townships 1899-1916.

Most of the large manufacturing firms in the Irish Free State in 1922 had been established by Protestant unionist families and remained under Protestant ownership and management. These included Guinness, Jacobs, Goodbody’s (jute), the Cleeve Brothers’ Condensed Milk Company of Ireland, Goulding’s (fertiliser), Smyth & Co. (hosiery), Denny’s (bacon), the Limerick Clothing Co., and a number of linen manufacturers. These firms were export-oriented and fully integrated into the British and colonial markets.

The large Catholic/nationalist-owned firms of the time, by contrast – in sectors such as clothing, bread, printing and agricultural implements – were largely oriented towards the domestic market.

The political orientation and economic interests of Protestant manufacturers (quite apart from loss of privilege and fear of potential religious discrimination under the new dispensation) were thus aligned, since independence and partition would be particularly detrimental to export-oriented firms.

The moderate protectionism of the 1920s and the much more extensive protectionism of the 1930s would also have been damaging to export-oriented firms. The paper documents the sale of a number of Protestant-owned businesses to British “tariff-jumping” firms that established in the Free State to avoid the newly erected protectionist barriers.

It has been suggested that protectionism also resulted in "positive discrimination in favour of Catholic firms", as import substitution favoured newly established Catholic manufacturing businesses. The paper analyses the differential experiences of the large Protestant and Catholic-owned firms over the first two decades of independence.

The paper therefore aims:
to identify the different degrees of internationalisation of the leading Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist manufacturers of the immediate pre-independence era,

to assess the extent to which these divergent economic interests were explicitly recognised in political discourse,

to chart the exit of Protestant-owned manufacturing businesses over the 1920s and 1930s, and

to chart the relative growth of the leading Protestant and Catholic-owned manufacturing businesses over these decades.

Frank Barry is Professor of International Business and Economic Development at Trinity College Dublin. His main work in recent years has been on the transition from protectionism to outward orientation in the 1950s and beyond. He is currently working on a book on Manufacturing Firms and Manufacturing Interests in the Irish Free State Area, 1922-1948.

In this paper the experiences of southern protestants during the period 1919-23 will be charted through eye witness accounts in the form of speeches from annual synods of the Church of Ireland, a source which has hitherto been ignored. Members of the Church of Ireland comprised the largest section of the protestant population in the 26 counties which became the Irish Free State. In 1911 members numbered just under 250,000, nearly 8 per cent of the population, but in 1926 they numbered 164,000, a decline of 34 per cent. Throughout these turbulent years, a general synod of church members continued to meet in Dublin each May, after which local synods were held in various locations covering the whole country. Consisting of elected lay and clerical members, the synods were concerned primarily with general church matters, but during this time contemporary political matters intruded. These events began with a speech by the bishop, who acted as president, and it is their speeches which were recorded in the press, especially the Irish Times. For this study all available speeches have been copied and then studied and analysed. As both leaders and observers of their dioceses, the bishops in these speeches reflected many of the concerns and anxieties of their community. Through the testimonies of these key witnesses we can gain a valuable insight into the experiences of southern protestants during the revolutionary period. Afterwards, histories of the Church of Ireland, such as that edited by W.A. Phillips, preferred to a draw a veil of silence over what happened at this time. These contemporary personal accounts allow us to get a better understanding of what occurred.

Brian M. Walker is Professor Emeritus of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is an historian and political scientist. His research and writing interests cover a wide range of areas. Recently he was a consultant editor of the 400 page Illustrated history of the Church of Ireland, with its information on every parish. His History of St George’s Church Belfast was published last year. His volume, A political history of the two Irelands: from partition to peace, appeared in 2012. New research is underway into the experiences of southern protestants, 1919-23.

Throughout the course of the Second World War the position of the southern Irish Protestant community was decidedly pro-British. Nevertheless, the ideological stance of members of the remnant Irish unionist faction within the Irish state was tempered by a general respect for the policy of neutrality initiated by Eamon de Valera’s government in 1939. In addition, notable champions of the Irish unionist interest registered strong objections against the antagonism of the Stormont government towards neutral Eire. They defended the right of southern Ireland to remain neutral and criticized Belfast for stirring up sectarian animosity. They also adverted to the fact that tens of thousands of southern Irish volunteers had joined the British forces.
At the fore of the Irish contingent that served in the British forces were southern Irish Protestant volunteers. The majority were following a family military tradition of service that, for some, stretched back for centuries. Their motives for joining verify a presumption of pro-British affiliation. However, Irish Protestant service personnel in the British forces proudly retained their identity; some even assumed the popular wartime nickname of ‘Paddy’. Irish Protestant officers who served in Irish regiments of the British army, often following in the footsteps of fathers and grandfathers, would lead and encouraged distinctive Irish regimental traditions and encouraged cultural activities to reinforce the Irish character of these units.
Many Irish Protestant veterans later recalled the various factors which had led them to serve. Some would regard it merely as ‘the done thing’ within their community while others rationalized it as a duty owed to their family. This paper shall explore the attitudes of the Irish Protestant community in neutral Ireland during the war and will delve into the motivations of southern Protestants who volunteered for the British forces. In so doing, it will unveil the impact of the First World War and the Irish Revolution upon their families. Lastly, with the aid of oral history testimonies, it will evaluate their wartime experiences and their opinions on Irish neutrality and perceptions of their place within the pre-war Irish state.

Dr. Joseph Quinn completed his PhD thesis in the Center for Contemporary Irish History at TCD, graduating in June 2016. The object of his research was a study of the Irish volunteers serving in the British forces during the Second World War, but he now focuses more broadly on the connection between migration and military recruitment, specifically regarding the role of Irish personnel in the armed forces of Allied nations throughout the world wars. He is a contributor to The Irish Times and The Revolution Papers. He currently assists the Somme Association and Museum with an ongoing all-island oral history project, and has worked as a research assistant on two documentary productions. He works as an Academic Tutor at the School of History in University College Dublin.

Ireland provided a rich recruitment ground for the British overseas services in the latter half of the long nineteenth century with the result that, by 1919, Irish administrators, doctors, lawyers, policemen, educationalists, and engineers were to be found working in every corner of the colonial empire. Recent research has exploded the notion that Irish nationalism and British imperialism were, by their definitions, dichotomous. Nonetheless, the great majority of Irish colonial servants recruited during this period were drawn from what the Colonial Office termed Ireland’s ‘loyalist class' – Protestants and so-called ‘Castle Catholics’ who supported the constitutional status quo. This paper, which takes as its subject loyalists recruited into the British colonial services during the Irish Revolution and its aftermath, has a twofold focus. First, it assesses the impact of the Irish Revolution on their decisions to enlist, arguing that British imperial service provided a convenient route out of Ireland for loyalists unwilling or unable to remake their lives under the new dispensation in Dublin. Secondly, it scrutinizes these recruits’ loyalist credentials, assessing the extent to which they were born loyalists, became loyalists by conviction, or had loyalty thrust upon them through circumstance. As part of these processes, the paper examines the targeting by Irish Republican elements during the revolutionary period of both Irish colonial officials on home leave, and Irish Crown servants themselves, and draws comparisons between the fates of Irish loyalists and colonial loyalist communities (for example, those in Cyprus, Palestine, and Kenya) in their post-independence periods.

Dr. Seán Gannon,
IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Centre for Contemporary Irish History,
Trinity College, Dublin.