Description
Book SynopsisIn 1989 Edna Longley remarked that if Catholics were born Irish, Protestants had to 'work their passage to Irishness'. With eighteen essays by scholars with individual perspectives on Irish Protestant history, this book explores a number of those passages. Some were dead ends. Some led nowhere in particular. But others allowed southern Irish Protestants - those living in the Irish Free State and Republic - to make meaningful journeys through their own sense of Irishness. Through the lives and work, rest and play of Protestant participants in the new Ireland - sportsmen, academics, students, working class Protestants, revolutionaries, rural women, landlords, clerics - these essays offer refreshing interpretations as to what it meant to be Protestant and Irish in the changed political dispensation after Irish independence in 1922. While acknowledging that Protestant reactions were complex, ranging from 'keeping the head down' in a ghetto, through a sort of low-level loyalism, to out-and-out active republicanism, this book takes a fresh look at the positive contribution that many Protestants made to an Ireland that was their home and where they wanted to live. It wasn't always easy, and the very Catholic ethos of the State was often jarring and uncomfortable - but by and large Protestants reached an equitable accommodation with independent Ireland. The proof of that lies in a continued community vibrancy - in Bishop Hodges of Limerick's words in 1944, more than ever able 'to express a method of living valuable to the State'.
Table of ContentsContributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations This book: an explanation Preface: The Protestant Accent Roy Foster Introduction: Content and Context Ian d'Alton and Ida Milne I. Belonging 'No Country'?: Protestant 'Belongings' in Independent Ireland, 1922-49 Ian d'Alton Defining Loyalty: Southern Irish Protestants and the Irish Grants Committee, 1926-30 Brian Hughes Peace, Protestantism and the Unity of Ireland: The Career of Bolton C. Waller Conor Morrissey This 'rotten little Republic': Protestant Identity and the 'State Prayers' Controversy, 1948-9 Miriam Moffitt Count Us in Too: Wanting to be Heard in Independent Ireland Deirdre Nuttall II. Engagement Gentry Inclusion via Class Politics? Negotiating Class Transition Politically in the Irish Free State Tony Varley Ostriches and Tricolours: Trinity College Dublin and the Irish State, 1922-45 Tomas Irish From Landlordism to Citizenship: Edward Richards-Orpen and the New State Philip Bull 'Old Dublin Merchant "Free of Ten and Four"': The Life and Death of Protestant Businesses in Independent Ireland Frank Barry 'The jersey is all that matters, not your church': Protestants and the GAA in the Rural Republic Ida Milne III. Otherness Protestant Republicans in the Revolution and After Martin Maguire 'We're Irish, but not that kind of Irish': British Imperial Identity in Transition in Ireland and India in the Early Twentieth Century Niamh Dillon 'My mother wouldn't have been as hurt': Women and Inter-church Marriage in Wexford, 1945-65 Catherine O'Connor Carson's Abandoned Children: Southern Irish Protestants as Depicted in Irish Cartoons, 1920-60 Felix M. Larkin Patrick Campbell's Easy Times: Humour and Southern Irish Protestants Caleb Wood Richardson Afterword: Ireland's Mysterious Minority-A French-Irish Comparison Joseph Ruane 283 Endnotes Index
