Northern Ireland and the Ulster League Essay Example for Free

Northern Ireland and the Ulster League Essay This paper will deal with the well known battle in Ulster between Catholics and Protestants, specifically in the pre-independence document known as the Ulster league and Covenant, a document that sought to maintain allegiance to the English state and ultimately, after southern independence, to create the 6 county statelet in the North that would be dominated by Protestants and their vehicle, the Orange Order. During World War I, and up until the recognition of the independence of the 26 counties in 1921, Ireland was in turmoil. The older, 19th century parliamentary politics had broken down, and a more militant movement deriving from the secret Irish republican Brotherhood (Townshend, 2006, 3-7ff) had emerged under the charismatic leadership of Michael Collins and the â€Å"President† of the Provisional Republic, Eamonn de Valera. Given this growing militancy, the Ulster League, realizing that the 6 counties of the northeast were the only place in Ireland where Protestants can create a state where they can be the majority, drew up this famous document, a document that drew the battle lines between the two communities that rages to this day (Townshend, 2006, 36-37). â€Å". . . that home rule would be disastrous to the material well being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland. . â€Å" This pointed phrase speaks to the financial dominance of Protestants in the industrialized six counties, as well as â€Å"our civil and religious freedom. † The Ulster Orangemen believed that a Catholic Ireland would launch a new Inquisition to eliminate Protestants, and ally the strategic island with enemies of the British Empire. The basic view is that the Protestant ascendency did not hold Catholics to be as civilized or as educated (in the sense of â€Å"intelligent†) as the British, the Protestants (Townshend, 2006, 33ff). This is class Orangism: Protestantism means individual rights and liberties, as well as Catholic economics, Catholicism means oppression and national subservience to Rome and its allies (Townshend, 2006, 77-80). For the Orange Order, loyalty to the English Crown did several things: it protected their economic ascendency, Protestantism, their traditions as Englishmen, and their connection to a wealthy Empire and civilization that contrasted poorly to the poverty stricken agrarianism of the south. IN other words, a militant Irish Catholic movement, a nationalist movement, could disrupt the economy of the north, tightly connected to England and the Empire, and, given their numerical superiority and greater fertility, could overwhelm and outvote the Protestants, taking their wealth and privileges. This is the main issue of the Covenant. IN reference to the IRB and its militancy, eventually to become the IRA, the Ulster Protestants hold that they are â€Å". . . defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament in Ireland. . . † This statement says several things. First, that the British state needs to realize that Protestants are not going to become part of a Catholic, agrarian and united Ireland, and that they are willing to fight in order to opt out of such ain institution. Second, they recognize that the old Irish parliamentary nationalism is over, and now, a new militancy has emerged, forcing Protestants to use whatever means they deem necessary, a clumsy way of disguising the fact that they are arming against any kind of nationalist movement (Townshend, 2006, 33-4; 54-8). Given this early date, 1912, the idea of partition is not explicitly raised, what is being dealt with here is a â€Å"Home Rule† parliament for the whole of Ireland. But it is the stand of the Orangemen that will eventually lead to partition and civil war in 1921 as a compromise with Ulster Protestants. â€Å"And in the event of such a parliament being forced upon us we further solemnly and mutually pledge to refuse to recognize its authority. . . † The very fact of the proposed existence of such a parliament is, to the Orangemen, undemocratic. This is because first, it is granted solely by the force of arms of the IRB and its allies, and second, that the tiny minority of Protestants in the country could not hope to find representation in such a parliament. Hence, again, by holding that Protestants will refuse to recognize such an institution, the Orangemen and their allies are threatening civil war over the question of Home Rule. One needs to keep in mind several issues in dealing with this document. First, that it is primary and centrally about the nature of economics: the Protestants in Ulster were by far the most wealthy element in Irish society. Second, that this wealth, as well as political loyalties conditioned by religion, created a strong sense of corporate identity among Ulster Protestants, finding its institutional expression in the Orange Order and eventually, the 6 county statelet. Third, that the Protestants in Ulster were not living there alone, they lived cheek by jowl with a large and increasingly militant Catholic minority. The basic idea here is that in th event of a militant takeover, the Protestants would be dealing with urban warfare on a black by block basis with only a small population to draw on for defense. The union with the Empire, in other words, was a military and economic guarantee of the physical safety of the Ulster Protestants and Protests elsewhere in urban Ireland. It was not helping matters that the Irish movement developing into a military revolution was also moving towards a form of national-socialism. Such movements as that of James Connolly and papers such as the Irish Worker or Irish Freedom were backing a nationalism as well as a socialist rebellion (Towhshend, 2006, 157-160; 48). Hence, the Ulster Protestants were dealing with a hydra with three heads: Catholicism, nationalism and socialism, the three evils. In conclusion, this document was basically a defense of the privileges of the Ulster protestant community. While this community did have a Protestant working class, the grave threat to this privileged way of life can be summarized as â€Å"popery,† or the enslaving of the freedom loving Protestants to Romish ideology, socialism, or the destruction of Protestant financial supremacy, and nationalism, the destruction of Protestant political supremacy. Hence, it is not much of a stretch to hold that this document came into existence to defend a tiny oligarchy in urban Belfast against the overwhelming majority of Irish citizens of Catholic background, for many centuries second class citizens in their own country. Townshend, Charles. Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. Ivan R. Dee, 2006.