Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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      The Irish minority, to which the term Anglo-Ireland had recently been attached so uncomfortably, and which hoped for survival in these difficult circumstances, was not a large one in the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State. Before the partition of the country in 1920, Protestant Ireland had been able to feel a certain security inasmuch as it comprised one-quarter of the population of the entire island. In 1926 the census in the Free State revealed that only 7.4 percent of the population of the twenty-six counties was recorded as professing the Protestant faith. Of these, only a few were the substantially landed Protestant gentry that for generations had intermarried with one another, with the better-born Catholic Irish, and with the English aristocracy and had supplied the empire with politicians, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors and Ireland with a ruling caste, with sportsmen, churchmen, and occasionally patriots. Many of these Irish gentry had resided on large estates in the predominantly rural provinces of Munster and Connacht, where by 1926 they comprised an extreme minority of the population. Indeed in the 1926 census only 2.6 percent of the population of Connacht was returned as Protestant while in Munster the figure was 3.6 percent.

      For the rest, the Protestant population of the Irish Free State was made up of inhabitants of the three counties of Ulster that had been included in the state where 18.2 percent professed the Protestant faith and inhabitants of Leinster where 10.1 percent of the population was Protestant. In the Ulster counties of Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal many of the Protestants were small and medium-sized farmers, whose emotional centre of gravity often lay across the Irish border as bonds of blood and political instinct tied them to a more vigorous and populist Protestant unionism than had commonly been espoused by the Anglo-Irish gentry to the south (the Orange Order remained a strong influence on Protestant life in these counties almost to the present day). In Leinster much of the Protestant population was made up of professional and businessmen (Protestants were particularly well represented in the banking and legal professions and in the biscuit, brewing, distilling, and builders’ providers trades), who undoubtedly felt a kinship with the Irish Protestant gentry of the former Ascendancy to whom they were often related, but whose interests would increasingly lie in a prudent accommodation with the new order. Such people and their families, helping to give a distinctive social tone to such fashionable areas in and near Dublin as Rathmines and Rathgar, where in 1926 33.2 percent of the population was Protestant, and Greystones, where 57.4 percent of the population declared themselves to be such, probably shared more in social terms (though they often did not care to admit it) with their Catholic, suburban, middle-class contemporaries than with the landowners of the former Protestant Ascendancy. As time went on and the political climate relaxed, this would allow for their integration into the new Ireland in ways which would not be so easily possible for their landed coreligionists and kin, whose possession of such tracts of the Irish soil as they still owned would always be liable to affront nationalist sensibilities. So what before independence had been a social minority bound together by religious affiliation and Unionist politics became fragmented upon independence: the remaining landowners isolated in the countryside, the farmers of the Ulster counties unsettled in mind and ready to move to the more congenial atmosphere of Northern Ireland, and the Protestant professional and business community concerned about stability and nervously ready to accept the new order if it offered such. What they all shared was a sense of isolation and of political impotence.

      Independence marked therefore the end of the Protestant minority’s significant political power in the South of Ireland. Indeed, in its fragmented state it is difficult to see how any political party could have represented its interests in specific ways. None attempted the task, and the political associations that had directed the Unionist cause before independence swiftly became defunct. It is true that about seventeen former Southern Unionists were to be granted seats as non-elected members of the Upper House of the Oireachtas, Seanad Eireann (the Senate), but the actual political insecurity experienced by the Protestant community in Ireland at independence can be adjudged the more certainly by the remarkable spectacle of a delegation dispatched by the general synod of the Church of Ireland on 12 May 1922 to wait on Michael Collins to inquire in what may strike one now as plaintive terms indeed, “if they were permitted to live in Ireland or if it was desired that they should leave the country.”⁴ (It is surely revelatory that it was a church body and not a political party or association that took this step.) Collins’s firm assurance that they were welcome to remain and would be protected by his forces must have relieved them as it evidenced in a very important quarter indeed the existence of that republican strand in modern Irish nationalism which owes something to an eighteenth-century vision of an Irish democracy which could offer a secure home to Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter alike. But events in the country itself, over which it is only fair to emphasize Collins and the provisional government’s army had a far from satisfactory military control, must have seemed to many Anglo-Irish people to suggest that less idealistic forces might swamp the exemplary conscientiousness of the new administration. Between 6 December 1921 and 22 March 1923, 192 Big Houses were burned by incendiaries as reported in the Morning Post of 9 April 1923.⁵ Although these attacks on the houses of the former Ascendancy can be understood as part of a political and military strategy (many of the houses were burned by republicans who considered probably rightly that their occupants were supporters of the Treaty party), to Anglo-Ireland itself this must have seemed a veritable Jacquerie and a painful demonstration of their isolated vulnerability in an Ireland which no longer appeared to accept them.

      The emotional state of Anglo-Ireland in the period was registered in a number of novels which appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s which employed the Big House as a metaphor that might allow the author to explore the socially disintegrated world of the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1925 Edith Somerville published The Big House of Inver, a chronicle of passion, vice, enmity, and corruption which destroy the great house of the work’s title. In the opening chapters the writer ponders the decline in the fortunes of the house as an emblem of social decay among her Anglo-Irish peers. She is tough-minded and ironic about their plight, convinced that they and their ancestors were in large measure the architects of their own downfall. The Anglo-Irish Big House had been a noble conception: “Inver House embodied one of those large gestures of the mind of the earlier Irish architects, some of which still stand to justify Ireland’s claim to be considered a civilized country.”⁶ Such defiance, she recognizes, comes too late; too many houses have been burned, destroyed before the fire took them, from within. The house that “faced unflinching the western ocean” suffered a fierce blow in the Famine of 1845, but the line of succession had been sullied before that by an act of lustful folly. From this primal sin can be traced subsequent incapacities to outface the blows of fate and history: “The glories and the greatness of Inver therewith suffered downfall. Five successive generations of mainly halfbred and wholly profligate Prendevilles rioted out their short lives, living with country women, fighting, drinking, gambling.”⁷ The Famine was only the axe that felled the dying tree:

      Many an ancient property foundered and sank in that storm, drawing down with it – as a great ship in her sinking sucks down those that trusted in her protection – not alone its owners, but also the swarming families of the people who, in those semifeudal times, looked to the Big Houses for help. The martyrdoms, and the heroisms, and the devotion, have passed into oblivion, and better so, perhaps, when it is remembered how a not extravagant exercise of political foresight might have saved the martyrdoms. As for other matters, it might only intensify the embittering of a now outcast class to be reminded of what things it suffered and sacrificed in doing what it held to be its duty.⁸

      Such stern resignation to Anglo-Ireland’s demise, with its flash of anger at wasted opportunities, was rare in the ranks of her Anglo-Irish contemporaries, but Edith Somerville bears eloquent testimony here to the bitterness and sense of social isolation many of her fellows experienced in the 1920s.

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