The man who invented
Northern Ireland Prof Ian McBride looks at the history of the formation of Northern Ireland through the eyes of ‘An Ulster Presbyterian’.
M
any years ago, I discovered a short pamphlet called Ulster on its Own, written in 1912. Its title page proclaims a revolutionary new idea: ‘A Proposal of Self-Government for the Five Counties around Lough Neagh’. The political background was the impending passage of the Third Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons, which meant that the establishment of a separate Irish parliament in Dublin was now almost certain. But all forms of home rule, the pamphlet insisted, suffered from the same fatal flaw. The mistake was the belief that the island’s inhabitants formed a single homogenous unit: “In reality there is not one, but two Irelands, different ideals, different in outlook, entirely different in ways of life and mind, drifting further and further apart… more opposed to each other in all that makes for nationality than are, for instance, the Austrian and the Hun.” This powerful argument had been heard before. And so too had the solution: what Ireland really needed was two parliaments, one for the dreamy Celts of the South and another for the industrious Protestants of the North. The Birmingham Liberal MP Joseph Chamberlain had called for an Ulster parliament 25 years earlier, when Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill had been introduced. More recently the editors of the Spectator and Observer had adopted the same view. But this was the first time that the idea of partition had been seriously floated by an Irishman,
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Herald Spring 2021
and it is probably no accident that the anonymous author signed himself ‘An Ulster Presbyterian’. Was there a distinctively Presbyterian view on the struggle that led to partition? When asked to imagine their future under a Dublin government, Unionists predicted religious persecution, economic ruin and the spread of disruption and disloyalty throughout the empire – in that order. When the Daily Mail surveyed 305 Ulster Protestant clergymen about the consequences of home rule in 1912, the Presbyterians were more likely than their Episcopalian counterparts to stress the religious factor, and less likely to raise economic fears, but the differences of emphasis were not very significant. The 88-year-old David Mitchel of Warrenpoint, brother of the famous nationalist revolutionary and later defender of American slavery John Mitchel, summed up thus: “Home rule would bring loyalists under the control of the disloyal and rebellious, and certainly lead to the ascendancy of a system always hostile to freedom and toleration.” Two other features of the Ulster Unionist case particularly resonated with Presbyterians. One concerned the Ne temere decree issued by Pope Pius X in 1908 which regulated ‘mixed’
…this was the first time that the idea of partition had been seriously floated by an Irishman…
marriages. Marriage and education were very sensitive issues for Presbyterians, who nurtured bitter memories of discrimination on both counts by the Church of Ireland. The second was the central proposition of Ulster on its Own – that Belfast might become the “fitting capital” of a free and prosperous new state. Unlike the Church of Ireland, Presbyterianism was overwhelmingly concentrated in the northern counties and partition was consequently less painful. The author calculated that almost 90% of Presbyterians lived within “the five counties”, whereas the corresponding figure for the Church of Ireland was a bare majority of 51%. Part of the attraction of a Belfast parliament was that it would empower the northern Presbyterians, still excluded from political and legal office by the remnants of the “old ascendancy party”. At the 1912 General Assembly, the Moderator echoed the theory put forward by Ulster on its Own: “There are two nations in Ireland, differing in race, in religion and in their sense of national and civic responsibilities.” The Witness (the Presbyterian newspaper) took this argument to its logical conclusion: “If Ireland should be separated from Britain, Ulster should be separated from Ireland”. But there was a flaw in the notion of self-government for ‘the five counties’. It was the same flaw that Unionists detected in Irish home rule: Ulster was not a homogeneous unit. In the northern province as a whole, Protestants formed about 55% of the inhabitants – hence the
