Despite its eye-grabbing title and dust-jacket promise of examining “loss of Protestant power and self-confidence in Ireland since 1795”, at first glance Descendancy does not seemed suited to the general reader. Professor David Fitzpatrick teaches history at Trinity College Dublin, and he says this collection represents “a drawerful of unpublished and rather obscure published articles”. The papers are arranged under three headings: Orangeism, the Ulster Covenant, and Exodus?, which examines claims of ethnic cleansing in west Cork before and during the civil war. There are only passing references to anything later
than the 1930s; hence little examination of Protestant descendancy in the two states of modern Ireland.
However, this unpromising outline builds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fitzpatrick approaches each topic from an arresting angle, armed with carefully selected source material. Orangeism, for example, is introduced as part of Irish military history and presented as a Protestant conspiracy that spread from the volunteer militias of the rebellion period to the Irish and Irish-based regiments of the British Army. Records from the Grand Lodge of Ireland show this spread, while testimony from early 19th-century official inquiries shows how dimly the authorities viewed it.
Since its creation, the Orange Order has proclaimed grandiose notions of civil, religious and more recently cultural liberty. Its founding myth of the “Battle of the Diamond” portrays small farmers defending their homes and families. So there is something gleefully refreshing in seeing it through Fitzpatrick’s sharp contemporaneous prism of Protestant soldiers swearing oaths in pubs, while their officers fretted about the impact on the — mostly Catholic — ranks.
Of course, religion was central to Orangeism. The author’s examination of its links to Methodism, by far the smallest and most idiosyncratic Protestant denomination, seems eccentric at first. But the choice is inspired, because Methodist church records provide a detailed picture of population movements around Ireland, while the generally moderating influence of such a small congregation on the swelling ranks of the order can be clearly demonstrated.
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In the book’s most esoteric essay, on the poets WB Yeats and Louis MacNeice, Fitzpatrick contends that Yeats’s focus on Anglo-Irish “Big House” Protestantism and MacNeice’s pretence of being raised by Home Rulers masked liberal embarrassment at middle-class Orangeism, a feature of both their upbringings. This is as recognisable in Northern Ireland today as the book’s more conventional nuggets on 200-year-old parade flashpoints or desperate attempts to stop everyone in a “temperance” organisation getting drunk.
Analysis of the Ulster Covenant’s signature sheets reveals Protestants were least inclined to sign where they were most numerous. Responses to a 1912 Daily Mail survey of every clergyman in Ulster — many from other parts of Ireland — let Fitzpatrick show the range of Protestant opinion leading up to partition, full of foreboding about the south and especially the three “lost counties” of Ulster.
The Exodus? section is likely to draw most interest, given the 12-year debate that has raged since the late Peter Hart applied the term “ethnic cleansing” to Protestation depopulation in the revolutionary period. Fitzgerald takes a two-pronged approach
to the controversy, beginning with a step-by-step statistical debunking of any Yugoslavian-style explanation for the disappearance of one-third of the south’s Protestants during the long gap between the 1911 and 1926 censuses. British military personnel account for a big chunk of the missing third, and are easily discounted by examining only the female population. Though surprisingly small, Protestant-Catholic differences in age structure, marriage rates and fertility explain most of the rest of the decline. Long-term patterns of emigration do not seem to have spiked; only a handful of “religious refugees” crossed the Irish Sea or the new border.
The spectre of Yugoslavian-style ethnic cleansing is something of a straw man, as Fitzpatrick concedes in his final essay, again making use of detailed Methodist records, this time from west Cork. But it is no small matter for a population to decline, even without deliberate extermination. Fitzpatrick’s sources leave no doubt that Protestants in the south were terrified by the murder of alleged “informers” and “collaborators”, the expulsion of their families and the seizure of land and property.
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The author has scant sympathy with notions that the Bandon Valley massacre of 12 Protestants was anything other than sectarian blood-letting, and says it had a huge psychological impact. The fear that Protestants felt partly explains their reluctance to get married and have children, particularly in areas where they were least numerous. Fitzpatrick’s main way of assessing this fear is by examining the London-based Irish Grants Committee, which was set up to compensate refugees. The author seems to find the refugees’ testimonies overblown, given their protestations of loyalty to the crown and the fact many later returned to Ireland. However, the committee’s remit and tight-fistedness drove applicants to exaggerate their losses and their loyalty, while still leaving many so out of pocket they had to return.
This quibble aside, Fitzpatrick’s reliance on measurable outcomes rather than “imputed motives” throws some objective light on what has become a source of far too much heat — but his plea that the matter now be “laid to rest” seems an optimistic hope.
Descendancy Irish Protestant Histories since 1795
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by David Fitzpatrick
Cambridge University Press £65 pp271