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Protestant or Catholic, Unionist or Nationalist?
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Joseph RuaneJennifer Todd |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The partisan divisions evidenced in the Northern Ireland conflict are actually relatively recent in origin. The original stratification was much more complicated, and the development into two polarised communities was gradual. In this brief historical overview, Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd describe the Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic communities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. |
Anglican and Presbyterian identity
The eighteenth-century Anglican community found its symbolic centre in the established church and in the state whose political, judicial and coercive institutions it controlled. The community was highly stratified, and it was the upper class that exercised political control and owned the bulk of the land and property. But the different layers of the community were joined to it and to each other by multiple ties  kinship, economic, political, religious. The middle strata were often distant relatives of the leading families, their privileged tenants, their supports at election time, their pastors and the educators of their children. The less well off depended on those above them for work or patronage; in many cases they were live-in servants. Rich and poor worshipped together and participated in the annual celebrations of the success and survival of the community in the face of adversity. All were conscious of a common interest in the established order. |
Eighteenth-century Presbyterians also achieved an impressive level of communal solidarity, though for different reasons than Anglicans. It came from their geographical cohesiveness, their concentration in a relatively small area even of Ulster, their identification and continuing links with Scotland, their relative homogeneity in class terms, the communal nature of their church organisation, their self-perception as a group disadvantaged by the theological and political opposition of the Anglican establishment, their status as a middle group politically (though not religiously) between Anglican and Catholic. |
The nineteenth century saw a gradual convergence between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Radical Presbyterians allied with Catholics in the revolutionary United Irishmen in the 1790s, but the alliance was short-lived. The rising in the north was suppressed and that in Wexford degenerated into sectarian strife that alarmed all Protestants. The ensuing Act of Union abolished the Anglican controlled, apparently unreformable, Dublin parliament which Presbyterians had so much resented. Anglicans remained dominant in electoral politics until the end of the century, but the centre of power was now at Westminster. Successful Catholic agitation against tithes, against the established status of the Church of Ireland and for land reform removed residual Presbyterian grievances. Both groups found common political cause in defending the union against Catholic pressure for repeal; from the 1820s the evangelical movement was forging links across the Protestant denominations; later in the century industrialisation and urbanisation (particularly in Belfast) brought closer and more intimate contact. |
Catholic cohesion
The development of Catholics into a coherent community followed a different route. Eighteenth-century Catholics were much less a single community than either Anglicans or Presbyterians. The higher strata were interlinked at a national level and formed in some cases cohesive regional blocs, but the vast majority were locality-centred in their concerns and consciousness. Many were poorly integrated into commercial networks, excluded from the political system, with low levels of education and little if any access to the print media. The elite was English speaking; the masses were monoglot Irish speakers. The Catholic church had reemerged organisationally by the 1730s but for political reasons its emphasis was local and even there its resources were inadequate to the large and growing Catholic population. Catholic solidarity was strengthened by a shared sense of displacement and subordination, but the practical meaning of this varied widely from one subgroup to another and it did not have the integrative power that anti-Catholicism had for Protestants. |
The nineteenth century brought change. The expansion of the commercial economy integrated all Catholics directly into the national economy and expanded its middle and lower-middle-class component. Improvements in communications opened up previously inaccessible areas to outside influence. The political mobilisation of the Catholic masses under middle-class control to achieve Catholic emancipation and repeal in the 1820s and 1840s gave Catholics for the first time a single political identity. The changing rural economy, the Famine and emigration simplified the class structure and moderated division. The Catholic church reorganised itself locally and achieved much greater cohesion nationally; the Devotional Revolution and near universal Sunday mass attendance from the 1860s gave Catholics a new religious unity and discipline. The national school system and spread of the English language forged a new cultural and linguistic unity. The Catholic middle class was expanding, producers and consumers of a burgeoning Catholic and/or nationalist literature in newspapers, periodicals and books. |
Towards polarisation
By the late nineteenth century the structural preconditions existed for the emergence of just two communities, one Protestant, one Catholic. All that was needed was a catalyst. It came from the convergence of interests and opinions on both sides into radically conflicting views of the union--Catholics in opposition to it, Protestants in support. The small minorities of Catholic unionists and Protestant nationalists dwindled to insignificance. The struggle for and against the union completed the process of welding Catholics and Protestants into two separate and opposing communal blocs. Intra-community differences of a religious, political or class nature did not disappear. Unionism was divided between north and south and Protestants were divided theologically along denominational and liberal-fundamentalist lines. Catholics were united religiously but politically more divided. Class was a potent source of division within both blocs. Local and regional identities, organisations and rivalries also persisted. But overall the level of intracommunal solidarity and intercommunal division was very high. |
The roots of this tendency toward communal polarisation do not reside simply in the presence of difference in the society, or even in the fact that these differences overlapped. The tendency comes rather from the system of relationships as a whole. The existence of overlapping socio-cultural and ideological differences provided the distinctions on which a structure of dominance, dependence and inequality was built. This structure in turn generated the interests and alliances which when wider social and cultural conditions permitted made for an ever sharper communal division. The process was self-reinforcing. Communal division further intensified the sense of socio-cultural and ideological difference and the interests on which the structure of dominance rested, generating further tendencies toward communal division. |
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he polarisation of Ireland at national level into two separate and solidaristic Protestant and Catholic communities dates only from the later nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century Catholics were not a single national community in any significant meaning of the term; Presbyterians were a cohesive community but were concentrated in Ulster; only Anglicans were well organised at national level. Anglicans and Presbyterians shared a common political interest 