Arthur Aughey (University of Ulster) reviews Irish Protestant Identities Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge, Manchester University Press 2008 pp389 + xvii. In his careful response to the scholarly papers he concludes with a lesson for Gordon Brown that devolution, especially to Northern Ireland as it is now, has proundly altered what it means to be British - and that this can no longer be defined by the 'centre'. 

This book of twenty-five chapters is a selection of papers presented at a conference organised by the British Association for Irish Studies held at the University of Salford in September 2005. An additional commissioned chapter deals with the fortunes of the two major Unionist parties since the Belfast Agreement of 1998, in particular tracking the transition of the Democratic Unionists from opposition to the ‘Trimble-Adams Pact’ to miraculous support for a Robinson-McGuinness Executive. Appropriately, the book retains the diversity of the papers’ subject matter and, in keeping with recent academic convention, there is no attempt to identify either the ‘mind’ of Protestant Ireland or its ‘character’. It is not the singularity of tradition but the plurality of experience which the editors try to convey and they do so successfully. One of the merits of the book is that it deals with Protestantism in southern as well as Northern Ireland and also considers the impact of Protestant migration to North America and Great Britain, along with the influence of the Orange Order in Scotland and England. It cannot provide a complete picture, of course, but it does provide a more subtle and honest one. This is to be welcomed since Protestantism in Ireland and specifically in Northern Ireland has often been the subject of crude stereotyping. Irish Protestant Identities, along with John Bew’s new study, The Glory of Being Britons (Irish Academic Press 2008), will be an indispensable source of reference for anyone interested in the history, politics and cultures of Irish Protestantism.  

How can one frame the diversity of the evidence which this book indicates, ranging as it does over four centuries of Irish history? I would suggest that an appropriate approach can be found in Michael Oakeshott’s On History and Other Essays (1983) where he uses the image of the dry stone wall to conjure the relation of historical. History has no premeditated design, but events are connected one to another by their distinctive interlocking shapes. The value of that image is to evoke historical change in terms of historical continuity. But this continuity is not the continuity of permanent traits or fated behaviour but of contiguity, a contiguity that has space for events which appear to challenge much of what went before (as the DUP’s recent behaviour shows). The image of history as the dry stone wall of related events is a modest one because it is sceptical of two ideas: first, that there is in history some destiny to be fulfilled or some fate that awaits and second, that certain events or moments are of such revolutionary significance that all is changed and changed utterly. Both of these ideas have informed much of Irish thinking and much of thinking about Ireland. The lure of historical destiny and the justification by historical suffering informed the terror campaign of the Provisional IRA but traces were there also in constitutional nationalism as well, what Conor Cruise O’Brien once called the echo of Ireland’s ‘ancestral voices’. For unionists, this Irish destiny was their apocalypse and they too heard ancestral voices calling them to resist all conspiracies against their civil and religious liberties which it had been the providence of British history to secure. The irony in both cases is that the grand cause of Irish freedom or the providence of British liberty required one to act as if there was no choice but only inevitability and this may account for the pointlessly protracted course of the Troubles.

The dry wall image shifts the focus from destiny to how people and events stand in relation to one another. Some things come on to the agenda but some things also go off. Some things come up for debate but others are settled, at least pro tem. Some things may improve but others may get worse. The dry stone wall of Irish history changes shape, as does the perspective on the relations between its parts, with each modification and addition to it. The eccentricities, irregularities, inconsistencies and - some may think - absurdities, are not defects or irrationalities but actually its constitutive characteristics. Then again, these things are not ‘set in stone’. They are not ‘natural’ but ‘artificial’ in the sense that they are the contingent outcomes of political artifice and so are always open to amendment. The historical and political questions then are: in what manner have circumstances been modified and what have historically adjusted ‘standings-in-relation’ meant (in this case) for Irish Protestants? It is very unlikely that the answer will be found in tracing some evolution (or degeneration) from the origin of Protestantism in Ireland as if this constituted a single ‘original’. As the historical chapters show, there was no original. Nor can it be understood through the specification of some authentic core which persists through change. Identities in history relate neither to some original founding nor to some unchanging substance but to change and to difference. In short, as circumstances are modified in history, as the standings-in-relation of Protestants to Catholics, Protestants to Protestants in Ireland and of both to state authority change, so too do their identities. Identity, then, far from excluding change and difference, is meaningless without them. One of the great merits of these chapters is that they help to clarify that simple but often neglected insight. Full justice to all of the chapters cannot be done in a short review so I merely select which struck me to best illustrate that insight.

A model exposition of identity as a ‘standing-in-relation’ (though he does not use that term) is Tom Hennessey’s excellent chapter on Ulster Unionism in which he traces the changing emphasis in self-understandings in the course of the 20th century. As circumstances change, as the standing-in-relation modifies, the balance between Irish-ness, Ulster-ness, British-ness and Northern Irish-ness changes as well. ‘Understanding Protestant identity in Northern Ireland’, he concludes (p256), ‘seems less a case of Ulster Protestants being confused about their identity and more a case of confused academics’. Diversity lies in the fact that there are not ‘one, two, three, or no nations within the Ulster Protestant community, but clusters of regional and national identities’ (p.267). And, as other chapters reveal, there are also gender, class and intra-religious identities too. Hennessey (rightly, in my view) observes that it was the ‘armed struggle’ of the IRA which did more than anything else to ‘cement the Ulster Protestant identity as the British presence in Ireland’. There is now, post 1998, a new standing-in-relation between Catholics and Protestants within Northern Ireland and between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Opposing identities, then, are not necessarily subversive and destructive so long as the standing-in-relation of those identities is supported and sustained by other considerations in the dry wall of constitutional politics. Moreover, the DUP-Sinn Fein accommodation reveals something else about Irish experience, namely that the most ideological of parties can also be the most pragmatic. Pragmatic calculations (as Neil Southern’s concluding chapter shows) are holding the dry wall in place. The pieces may fit together with difficulty, they may not sustain the structure for ever, but for the moment it endures.  

The standing-in-relation of Protestants to Catholics in southern Ireland after 1921 has been very different. The Protestant proportion of the population halved under independence through emigration and through the Catholic Church’s enforcement of Ne Temere – compelling children of mixed marriages to be raised in the Catholic faith. Seamus Heaney’s celebrated ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ was always truer of the southern Protestant experience than of the northern Catholic one. You kept your mouth shut because nationalists believed they were the only ones with the right to speak. In the last few years has there been an increase in the Protestant population but that is mainly because of non-European immigration to the Celtic Tiger (one in four are non-national). The chapter by Hayes and Fahey traces this decline of southern Protestantism after 1921 – but it is a tracing which ignores the earlier sectarianism of the IRA’s campaign. If this is something of which a more integrated Protestant community, along with its Catholic neighbours, remains reluctant to speak (and the still rumbling controversy about a recent RTE documentary on the murder of a Protestant family in 1919 at Coolacrease shows just how raw such matters continue to be) it was certainly not missed by northern Unionists. I can remember as a child that the family next door to us was from ‘over the border’, one of those driven out from that ‘cold house’ for Protestants. Though the Protestant churches retain their all-Ireland structures, there can be no doubt that partition made it very difficult for common sympathy to hold (and I also remember that my parents were not sympathetic to their neighbours from the south if only because they thought them to be snobs). ‘The “greening” of the Protestant community in the south also led to a growing sense of distance from northern Protestants and a rejection of the characterisation of southern Protestants as an oppressed minority’ (p71). Hayes and Fahey conclude that the evidence reinforces the thesis of ‘complete Protestant integration into Irish society’ but this is easier to achieve when the process is individual rather than communal and as the Irish Republic becomes much less Catholic (as late as 1987, of course, it was still capable of mobilising a referendum victory against divorce). The Irish-ing of the Protestants has occurred in tandem with the Protestant-ing - in its secular, individualistic mode - of the Republic.

Ironically, as Naomi Doak shows in her sparkling (and in the context, brave) chapter on Protestant women writers, it is academics in Irish Studies – almost in an intellectual re-working of Catholic faith and fatherland - who have conspired to render silent an alternative literary voice to the dominant nationalist one. The result of ‘such theory-driven criticism is that literary histories are carved out to suit the theory, rather than as true reflections of what is actually out there’ (p.129). Indeed, insofar as ‘post-colonialism’ itself colonised Irish studies, then Protestants (unless they were politically nationalist) were put on the ‘colonial’ side of the literary binary where they could be either ignored or dismissed. Aligning nationalism with victimhood and unionism with oppression meant that, in literary terms, Protestant writers, especially Ulster ones, became non-Irish ‘aliens’. That this absence is not confined to the written text is illustrated in journalistic comment about (non)representations of Protestants in cinema following the release of director Steve McQueen’s award winning film, Hunger (once again, a drama without any sense of standing-in-relation, with no contextualisation of what people like Sands were in prison for. Indeed, the Hunger-Strikers were the first suicide bombers in that their own suicide led to the deaths of many innocent people). To paraphrase Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko: ‘The cinematic illusion of the Irish Troubles has become real and the more real it becomes the more desperate directors want to recycle it’. The only time I have ever witnessed this challenged – albeit indirectly and metaphorically – was in Charlie’s Angels 2 when Drew Barrymore (in a Union Jack T-shirt) kicks the ass of the Northern Irish gang leader Seamus O’Grady and in an old Columbo episode where the detective foils a republican gun running plot. The romance of the IRA terror campaign remains strong (where only ‘rogue’ republicans are open to criticism) such that the Protestant victims of its border campaign, related in the chapter by Hastings Donnan, are forgotten. The loyalist paramilitaries will never attract such a romantic aura and nor should they. As the thoughtful chapter by Stephen Hopkins shows, some loyalists and republicans are now in the autobiography business and the literature of self-exculpation but having spent a life of lies and deceit why should anyone believe a word they say?  

The chapter by Aaron Edwards on the Northern Ireland Labour Party recalls another neglected aspect of Protestantism, its working class radicalism. Like the British Labour Party, the NILP definitely owed more to Methodism than to Marxism and in our post-Marxist times we can now understand that to be a more democratic and conscience-led inheritance. It attracted support not only from organised labour but also from those who were neither socialist nor radical but who, like my own father, despised the pettiness and the insensitivity of the Unionist Government. Again, Edwards correctly identifies the IRA campaign of the 1970s as having destroyed the electoral prospects for the NILP and for its democratic socialism (its vote fell from 26% in 1970 to 1.5% in 1975) to which I can add a personal footnote. I recall as an enthusiastic schoolboy taking my application form round to NILP headquarters in Waring Street in Belfast only to witness the charred remains of it (possibly) floating in the air the next day after the IRA had left a car bomb outside. Sic transit gloria mundi. It is also interesting to note how things stay the same. Ian McKeane’s chapter on reporting of unionism in the French press in the 1920s shows its bloody-minded indifference to international opinion. Good propagandists unionist leaders were not, a refrain heard constantly throughout the recent Troubles and beyond. However, this chapter does throw up a certain irony. Orangemen come across to French readers as those believing the Catholic Church to be engaged in a permanent conspiracy to bring the electorate under its control, its clergy a Machiavellian force determined to undermine the civil liberties of the land (p225). Of course, in France that would have been a perfectly republican attitude and is more in tune with the European version than the parochial Irish version. When Shelley made his radical appeal to the Irish people in 1812 he got nowhere (according to T W Rolleston he desired the emancipation of Catholics but desired more their emancipation from Catholicism) and most of those 1916 boys were really just good Catholics in that Irish tradition. That it takes a good Prod to make a true republican is probably not too far off the truth, a truth implicit in Irish republicanism itself, since for much of the 20th century southern republicans appealed consistently to northern Protestants to save the 26 counties from itself (when they weren’t denouncing them as lackeys of imperialism). Protestant republicanism, one might say, would have been a terrible beauty to behold.

This is a book full of stimulating insights into the diversity of Irish Protestant identities and it is a worthy tribute to the conference from which it developed. It should be read by all those interested in Irish studies but not only by them. Gordon Brown, for example, could learn much by studying Hennessey’s exemplary chapter where he would discover that Northern Ireland is not peripheral to making sense of Britishness today but actually central to it. He would find reflections on the distinction between cultural, regional, national identities and political allegiance of a sort more considered than those in his own speeches. And perhaps he might discover too that devolution and globalisation mean that we can no longer talk so confidently, as we used to, of centre and periphery. The devolved parts of the United Kingdom now stand in a different institutional and democratic relationship to Westminster and that modification of British circumstances demands a more imaginative style of politics than hitherto.