by Bury, Robin;
The historian Ian D’Alton thinks exclusivist Catholic nationalism led Protestants to retreat into what he calls their own Free State, arguing that:
[if] the Irish Catholic Free State was uncongenial, then the only option left to those for whom Ireland had to be their patria was a liveable-in Protestant Free State. In terms of southern Protestants’ developing sense of identity, this held considerable significance, since it was one which was referenced to themselves – at last, and at least, they had ownership of it. That was challenging – but also invigorating. Furthermore, it was dynamic, representing, more often than not, an attainment of equilibrium with the contemporary – and it is their own contemporary; they’re waving, not drowning. If it was the strange death of unionist Ireland, it presaged a resurrection. In that sense, their so-called identity crisis was never really a crisis at all.9
This is a seductive argument in which there is undoubtedly some truth, though perhaps it does not paint the whole picture and needs challenging. Protestants do not form a monolithic community. Along the border areas there are Church of Ireland, Presbyterians and Methodists who have different views and some relate to Northern Ireland and feel they were left on the wrong side of the border in 1922. Protestants further south also vary. In terms of ‘victimhood’, it should be remembered that nonconformists like Presbyterians were also subjected to the strictures of the penal laws. There is an urban/rural divide. In the major cities arguably Protestants have integrated better than in isolated rural areas. Some in rural areas have experienced past hostility and are not wholly at ease in their environments. They opted out of an ‘uncongenial’ State, retreating into their own world, their own ‘Free State’, opting for what could be called a ghetto of the mind. They play cricket, badminton and bowls and keep their ethos alive in their schools and churches. But to argue that this did not cause ‘an identity crisis’ is surely avoiding the much-debated question of what constitutes an Irish identity? We have seen from some Protestants interviewed in chapter six, and from other research, in particular Heather Crawford’s interviews with Protestants, that the question of identity is a real difficulty for many southern Protestants.10 It signals that Protestant identity and beliefs are ‘other’. And they certainly are. No doubt there are Protestants who are content to be ‘other’. They would argue it is positive to be outside the ‘glow’ which Heather Crawford writes about, the ‘glow’ of Catholic nationalism, made up of unquestioned obedience to the Catholic Church, its shameful treatment of women embodied in de Valera’s constitution much influenced by the ethics of the Roman Catholic Church, the acceptance of the expensive force-feeding of a all but dead language which Irish people have decided they do not want to speak, a nationalism whose foundation stone and lifeblood is Anglophobia based on distortions of Irish history. However, an exclusivist form of nationalism has, by definition, involved an identity crisis for many Protestants, as Ruane and Butler have made clear in their study of west Cork Protestants.11 One only has to read the still unaltered preamble to the 1937 constitution of de Valera to get the message of Irish national exclusivism:
We, the people of Eire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain rightful independence of our Nation …12
Many Protestants continue to believe today that ‘a culturally revivalist, Catholic regime [was] hostile to their culture, religion and economic interests’.13 Very many Protestants chose to leave, their numbers going from 164,000 in 1926 to 104,000 in 1961. But above all there are ‘doubts that some Catholics still raise about whether Protestants are “really Irish” and Protestant resentment of this.’14 Edna Longley’s thinks that Catholics are born Irish, whereas Protestants have to ‘work their passage to Irishness’.15 And arguably this journey is taken without a ticket. But significantly, unlike advanced nationalist Catholics in Northern Ireland, we might also note that, drawing on the European Values Study, 1999–2000, Bernadette Hayes and Tony Fahey came to the conclusion that: ‘Protestants are closer to the ideal of the model citizen than are Catholics’,16 meaning they are law-abiding and loyal to a State that has not gone out of its way to embrace them. Southern Church of Ireland Protestants have followed the advice of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Gregg, who had ‘stressed the pragmatic necessity of offering “to the Irish Free State … our loyalty and goodwill” … he condemned those “who think of us as an alien minority … his community had “an identity genuinely Irish”, although he emphasized that it was “not necessary to be Gaelic in order to be Irish”.’17
How has the Catholic Church changed and, more significantly, how have people’s attitudes to the Catholic Church altered in recent times? Mary Kenny, a conservative Irish Catholic journalist living in England outlines the changes in direction made by Catholic Church 50 years ago as follows:
The liberalisation of Ireland really began 50 years ago, with the launch of Vatican II, when Pope John XXIII opened the Vatican Council whose purpose was to renew the Catholic Church, and indeed, modernise it.
The trendy word was ‘aggiornamento’ (bringing things up to date) and it was, believe it or not, widely used in the inns and taverns of Ireland wherever lively conversationalists gathered. Almost overnight, it seemed, the tone of Catholic values softened, just as, almost overnight, nuns threw off their wimples and their seventeenth-century habits to wear more simplified, modernised garb.18
Yet this view needs challenging. After Vatican II there can be little doubt that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland failed to adequately reform. Its undemocratic governance continued and it tolerated sexual deviants amongst its clergy. It remained aloof until the recent devastating revelations of the media, resulting in the beginning of disillusionment and a process whereby Ireland started to become a modern, increasingly secular State in which the Catholic Church has lost much influence and credibility.
Recent revelations of the harsh treatment of innocent children in Catholic institutions have shocked Catholics. As has the behaviour of the Catholic hierarchy when it was aware of the many incidents of paedophilia by its priests. Instead of reporting such behaviour to the gardaí, the offenders were moved to new parishes and inevitably continued to abuse children under their care. The Magdalene Laundry abuses caused outrage and were the subject of the film The Magdalene Sisters. The treatment of pregnant unmarried women was portrayed in the film Philomena, which tells the story of a mother who searched for her son who had been adopted by American parents. She got little help from the nuns and had a painful and dangerous breech birth. By the time she located him he had died. Many mothers and children died while in the care of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary in the Sean Ross Abbey Mother and Baby Home in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary where Philomena had her baby.
Recently a mass grave was found where up to 800 babies were buried in the Tuam Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home which was run by nuns. ‘The infants were buried without coffins in the grounds of a former Bons Secours home for unmarried mothers between 1925 and 1961. The unmarked grave was discovered accidentally in 1975. Death records show many of the infants died from malnutrition and infectious diseases.’19 These scandals were not confined to Catholic homes: the discovery of the unmarked graves of 219 children in Mount Jerome Cemetery from the Bethany Protestant Home for children of unmarried mothers in Rathgar, Dublin, shocked Protestants. Other Protestant homes also had scandals.
Following the revelations of these scandals, a more questioning Catholic laity has largely deserted the Catholic hierarchy and clergy, particularly in urban centres, with less than 50 per cent attending Mass on a regular basis today. Many rural parishes, however, continue to command strong support.
In this changed, more secular environment, Protestants are no longer looked at as heretics but arguably they are still considered as ‘other’. Any public expressions of pro-Britishness would be considered unpatriotic. However, the reality
is that many Protestants think ‘the British connection had been positive for Ireland and remained essential to its prosperity’20 and the history of an independent Ireland has made their point. Exports from indigenous companies very largely go to Britain. There is scarcely a family in Ireland who does not have relatives living in England, often for generations.
Ironically, today certain Protestant values are admired by many Irish Catholics. Their married priests are mostly envied and the consecration of the Revd Pat Storey as Bishop of Meath and Kildare at a ceremony in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral on 1 December 2014, the first female Church of Ireland Bishop, was positively covered by the most of the media. The Church of Ireland Gazette editorialised in August 1998: ‘the Church of Ireland has found itself at the centre of a new pluralism in recent years … A Church which was very uncertain about its future now has a confidence and optimism inconceivable 20 years ago.’21
Many Protestants prospered, and continue to prosper, in an independent Ireland. Only 26 years before this editorial was written, 100 Protestants from the elite Protestant lay establishment wrote a short letter to the papers showing an almost unquestioning attitude to the nature of the State in which they prospered, declaring:
We want it known in Northern Ireland – for it does not seem to be – that Southern Protestants have every opportunity here to play a full part in the affairs of the community. Protestants hold positions of trust at least in proportion of their fraction of the population. Opinions and points of outlook are exchanged easily and without acrimony whilst the respect of one man for another is habitually related to the man rather than to his religious views.22
Tellingly, beside this letter is an article written by a prominent Catholic journalist, John Horgan, who pointed out that the average income of the signatories was ‘significantly higher’ than that of their fellow Protestants so they were not representative of the Protestant community as a whole. Not only this, but Horgan correctly thought that these high-profile Protestants were opting out of expressing concerns about ‘the erosion of human rights’ and the ‘contraception, divorce provision and adoption legislation’,23 all of which were highly conservative. Horgan believed that many southern Protestants he knew had a ‘don’t rock the boat mentality’ but that ‘Protestantism was all about rocking boats’.24
Horgan was right in that this group of 100 had prospered in an independent Ireland, whether as academics in Trinity College, Dublin, in business, medicine and the arts. They had much reason not to start ‘rocking boats’. Protestants with lower incomes might not have signed such a letter.
There were, however, two men who did ‘rock the boat’, the writer Hubert Butler in Kilkenny and Dean Griffin in Dublin’s national cathedral, St Patrick’s. In his classic essay ‘Portrait of a Minority’ Butler wrote: ‘So now our amiable inertia, our refusal to express grievances or cherish hopes about Ireland, are really delaying our ultimate unity and the reconciliation of our two diverging communities’.25
As Edna Longley wrote, ‘Butler healthily broke interdenominational Taboos and “rocked the boat”. There is sometimes a fine line between boat rocking and coat trailing, but it’s better to be damned if you do than damned if you don’t.’26
Dean Griffin, who was raised in the South in Co. Wicklow, spent 22 years in Londonderry from 1947 and then a further 22 years as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. He protested strongly about the Ne Temere decree and was critical of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Irish politics. He supported the removal of the constitutional ban on divorce and worked with David Norris to get homosexuality decriminalised. Significantly he wrote in his book Enough Religion to Make Us Hate:
In the overwhelming Roman Catholic ethos of the new independent Ireland Protestants, a beleaguered minority, felt vulnerable, not really accepted as the ‘genuine article, associated in the public mind with the British ascendancy. Understandably they kept a low profile, their heads down, especially when it came to religion and politics.27
Southern Protestants have had a tradition of not ‘rocking the boat’ and there are reasons for this, as we have seen. But there are reasons in today’s more tolerant and secular Ireland for ‘rocking the boat’. As we have seen, some Catholics deny that Protestants are ‘really Irish’. However, Irish Protestants have been in the Republic since the Reformation and before and many are descended from ancient Gaelic families such as the O’Haras in Sligo and the O’Briens in Co. Clare. They deny that Catholics have a monopoly on Irishness.
Catholics in Northern Ireland have seen legislation put in place to end discrimination as part of a larger programme. In 1976, fair employment legislation, designed to address discrimination in employment on grounds of religion, was introduced, as well as other human rights legislation. Their economic status has improved and numbers have grown. In contrast in the Republic, Protestant economic standing has weakened and their numbers have decreased sharply. They now live in pockets confined to Dublin and the Pale, the border counties, with a scattering of Protestants in west Cork, Galway (particularly in Tuam), Waterford city, Co. Wexford and Kilkenny city. Since Independence in 1921, the only new Church of Ireland churches were those re-built to replace ones destroyed from 1920–23 in Kilmallock, Co. Limerick and one in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin. Much later in Sneem, Co. Kerry the church was radically renovated and St Mary’s church in Crumlin, Dublin replaced an earlier church. In Killorglin, Co. Kerry, a fine modern church, St Michael’s, opened in 1996 to replace St James’s church, which was in poor condition. It has a community centre. However, the general overall picture is quite gloomy. When Marcus Tanner, the writer and journalist, visited some Church of Ireland churches recently, he wrote:
… to visit the churches in the west of Ireland was to see a Church near the end of its life. There were broken spires, smashed windows and overgrown churchyards. At Askeaton, the centre of the Second Reformation in County Limerick, where Bishop John Jebb had confirmed hundreds of converts in the 1880s, trees grew through the church roof. At Tourmakeady, the grave of Bishop Plunket, leader of the Second Reformation in Connaught, has disappeared under a forest of weeds and the nearby church was an impenetrable, ivy-clad ruin. When Peig Sayers wrote her popular account of life on Great Blasket Island, off the coast of Kerry (generations of school children were required to read this book and thus discouraged from learning Irish), she recalled a time when the Protestants of Dingle had been numerous enough to constitute a threat to Catholics. When I attended a Sunday service in Dingle it might not have taken place had I not turned up.28
Native Protestant numbers fell from some 300,000 in 1911 to 142,280 in 2011, a fall of 49 per cent.29 Church of Ireland native Irish numbers increased by 5 per cent between 1991 and 2011 and Irish Presbyterians increased by 8.7 per cent in the same period. These figures show a small growth in numbers of native Church of Ireland Protestants as opposed to recent Protestant immigrants from the UK and elsewhere. Native southern Protestants constitute only 3.5 per cent of the population, a similar figure to the 1991 census. In other words, a stagnant population number for 10 years. Comparative figures do not exist for Methodists between 1991 and 2011. No doubt the losses in mixed religion marriages have declined as more young Catholics ignore the demands of their Church but inevitably some children in such marriages are raised as Catholics. Regrettably there are no statistics available to give an accurate picture. However, in contrast, in 1911 in the six counties which became Northern Ireland, Catholics numbered 430,161, while the figure was estimated at 651,700 in 1991, 737,472 in 2001 and 817,385 in 2011.
There has been widespread joining up of parishes under one priest and dioceses under one bishop. In the parish of Cloyne in east Cork, where I was raised in the 1950s, famous for Bishop Berkeley, there were once four churches. Today two have closed and are boarded up. There is the ancient Norman cathedral, built in about 1250, now struggling for funding with a congregation of perhaps two or three dozen on Sundays. The graveyard is overgrown and neglected. Local Church
of Ireland families have almost all entered mixed religion marriages and their children are mostly Catholics, or non-religious; my own family is not exempt from this. The influence of Bishop Lucey was a factor in the past. He was a conservative who strictly enforced the Ne Temere decree in the diocese of Co. Cork when he was bishop from 1951 to 1981. However, the replacement of the Ne Temere by the Matrimonia Mixta, discussed earlier, seems to have made little difference.
However, against this picture of decline and decay, there are many Church of Ireland churches throughout the country that have survived and are cared for lovingly by parishioners who are resilient and treasure their religious tradition.30
The Protestant-owned manufacturing companies have all but gone. They flourished behind tariff barriers but once these were removed and when Ireland joined the free trade European Economic Community, almost all of them succumbed to outside competition or takeovers. They had afforded employment to Protestants, especially W.R. Jacobs and Guinness Brewery, which gave rise to resistance from Catholics organisations, as mentioned in chapter four. Other Protestant companies that closed, or were bought, include Willwoods, Lambs Jams, Lairds, Lemons and Goodalls. Such Protestant employment citadels, some of which made products that became international brands like Guinness, Jacobs and Jameson, arguably were a tribute to Protestant entrepreneurship. One semi-State organisation, Coras Trachtala, the Irish Export Board, recognised Protestant business acumen and experience and recruited a number of Protestants, particularly in its early days.
Is one of the primary inspirations of Irish nationalism, the romantic nationalist belief in 800 years of English crime and oppression in Ireland, dying? According to Stephen Howe: ‘Early directives on primary education in the new Free State urged the main aim in history teaching should be ‘to inculcate national pride and self-respect … by showing that the Irish race has fulfilled a great mission in the advancement of civilisation’.31 However, Howe points out that ‘… other influences outside the formal educational process reinforced the same version of the past.’32 Howe suggests that ‘In political terms, the educational orthodoxies of cultural nationalism and of the Free State may have succeeded in their aims – and they may have done so in part … because they corresponded to genuine popular feelings and desires.’33 Also ‘… this vision of history served important State-building, cohesion-affirming and psychologically comforting functions in a weak and insecure new polity.’34