The Ulster Question

Welcome to the History of Ireland. The historian Pierce Lawler describes Ulster in the period of the War of Independence as follows. For the people of Ulster, the events taking place in the rest of Ireland during 1918-1919 seemed remote. However, the ripples of violence spread northwards and by 1920, the war was on the doorstep of the Nationalists and Unionist populations in Ulster.

At the end of the last episode, I briefly mentioned the rioting which had erupted in the north of Ireland due to the assassination of Police Commissioner Gerald Smith in July of 1920. Now, the keen-eared listeners among you may have noticed that I have not really touched all that much on the north of Ireland. Really, there hasn’t been that much to mention since way back when we introduced the Ulster Volunteer Force. Part of this is down to the fact that as Lawler’s quote describes, the War of Independence didn’t really make its way up to Ulster until the summer of 1920. Marie Coleman, a historian at the Queen’s University Belfast, puts it as follows. Arguably, a separate conflict occurred here. Contemporaneous with the Southern War of Independence, the Northern Conflict covered a different time span from mid-1920 to mid-1922.

In the next few episodes, we’re going to examine this contemporaneous conflict, asking why it was different and why it didn’t really kick off until the summer of 1920. And while we’re doing it, we’ll study the forces that led to the foundation of what’s now known as Northern Ireland. So let’s first give a very brief overview of why Ulster was so different from the rest of the country. Ulster is, for want of a better term, complex. And anyone who knows anything about Ireland will know that that is putting it mildly.

Bear with me for a moment while we jump all the way back to the 17th century. Buckle in, because as always this is a super quick overview of a lot of history. As I always say, maybe someday in the future we’ll come back and go through it all in detail. But for now, I just want to give you the gist to help you understand what was going on in 1920. Before the 1500s, Ulster was culturally quite similar to the rest of Ireland. Of course there were differences between each of the four provinces, but broadly Ulster was culturally Gaelic and Catholic. However, due to its geography it had the advantage of being a very difficult region to conquer. But that wasn’t going to stop the English, and in 1542 Henry VIII declared that the King of England, his heirs and successors be King of Ireland forever.

After a bunch of fighting and famine and the flight of the Catholic earls off to Europe, the population in Ulster was fairly diminished. This made room for a revolutionary experiment. From 1606 it was decided that Scottish and English settlers would be given plantations in Ulster, on the condition that they defended against native resistance and, as historian Mac Mulholland describes, build a society based upon Protestantism, English law and, in contrast to Gaelic pastoralism, settled agriculture. Now Ulster, due to its proximity to Scotland, always did have a little bit of interchange between the Scottish and Northern Irish. But never anything like this. The plantations worked a treat. The Protestant landowning class took control of Ulster, and the province fell very much under the command of the English King. But things were never exactly peaceful. What followed was two centuries of fighting between the Protestants and Catholics in the area. And despite the unrest, generally the Protestants remained in control.

By 1800, you had the Acts of Union, which merged the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland, and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This ensured the Irish Protestants remained the majority within Great Britain, rather than the minority within Ireland. This was pretty important to the Protestants, as Catholics got to vote 30 years later. With me so far? Throughout the 1800s then, Belfast saw an industrial and economic boom thanks to shipbuilding. And, even briefly, became more economically important than Dublin. So, as well as now being culturally different, it became its own economic power.

Then, after skipping over a bit, we get to the 1900s. By this point, those Scottish and English settlers had 300 years to create a very unique British slash Irish identity. The Unionists saw themselves, and still do, as Irishmen with intrinsic links to Britain. They were proud of their historical ties to Britain, but equally proud of being Irish. They didn’t see a separation between the two. And as we’re all very aware, by 1920, there was a very real danger of these people losing their connection to what they saw as the rest of Britain. It’s kinda like if you told a bunch of Texans they were going to become Mexican. Those Texans would be both cut off from their legitimate American heritage, while becoming the English speaking minority in a Spanish country. It’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch of the imagination, but hopefully you get what I mean.

I find a lot of the time, especially in Irish examinations of our history, the Unionist perspective is brushed over. So it’s important to try and see it from their point of view. Which is not at all what Sinn Féin did at the time. As Charles Townsend puts it, quote, It had been difficult to put the North into the trajectory of the Irish Revolution. There were very few Northern Nationalists involved in Sinn Féin, and though all the Nationalists saw the North as an integral part of the movement, the majority of the Northerners saw things quite differently.

In the South of Ireland, things were arguably less sectarian. Though most Southern Unionists were Protestant, there were a lot of Southern Protestants who were Nationalists. Make sense? It was more of a blurry line. In Ulster it wasn’t. It was very much, as it had been for 300 years, Catholics versus Protestants. Again Townsend puts it well, saying, In their social complexity they amounted to two distinct cultural systems. Sinn Féin never really acknowledged this, and never really had the same power as they did in the rest of Ireland. In the 1918 election, as we know, Sinn Féin won a landslide. Everywhere but the North. The Unionists won a bunch of seats, and even the Irish parliamentary party managed to keep a seat or two up North.

On top of all of this, by 1920 the area was going through a post-war economic slump. Men had come back from WWI and found it increasingly hard to find work. What had once been a booming economy that set Ulster apart from the rest of Ireland, was now beginning to falter. Things were complicated. Sinn Féin’s lack of a foothold in Northern Ireland is what led those in Ulster feeling like the conflict was remote. Except for the likes of Eoghan O’Duffy burning barracks in Monaghan, the Northern IRA were small and disorganised. So 1918 and 1919 Ulster saw very little conflict. This began to change in 1920 as the Government of Ireland Act made its way through Parliament, and violence increased throughout the rest of the country.

So I’ve mentioned the Government of Ireland Act before, and discussed how ludicrous it was to Sinn Féin and those in the South. It was offering home rule to Ireland when Nationalists had pushed well past the idea. But just because Sinn Féin ignored the Act and made no real difference in the South, doesn’t mean it was ignored everywhere. In Ulster it was a bit of a big deal, and for that reason I want to discuss it now. The Act was drafted up by a committee led by Walter Long, Lord George’s right hand man and a staunch Unionist. Long’s committee decided on two distinct legislators for Ulster and the Southern Provinces, linked by the Council of Ireland. Now we know Sinn Féin thought this idea ridiculous, but as they were abstaining from Westminster and had set up their own government, they obviously weren’t able to make much of a case against it in Westminster.

That meant the only real dissenting voice was John Devlin, a Northern Nationalist and one of the few remaining IPP men. He hated the Unionists, hated Sinn Féin and hated the Bill. Devlin was quite prophetic with his arguments against the Bill. He stated that a separate parliament for Ulster would be the worst form of partition and, of course, permanent partition. Once they have their own parliament with all the machinery of government and administration, I’m afraid anything like subsequent Union will be impossible.

Edward Carson, the leading Unionist, had historically been extremely against any form of Home Rule, but saw an Ulster parliament as, I guess, a way of fending off Sinn Féin. He made a similar point as Devlin, but saw it as a plus, saying, Once a Northern parliament is granted, it cannot be interfered with. You cannot knock parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and once you’ve planted them there, you cannot get rid of them. Carson and the Unionists were pro an Ulster parliament, not because they were looking for independence or separation from Westminster. They were perfectly happy with how things were being run. Rather, they wanted their own parliament so as to fight off the influence of the Nationalist South. Historian J.C. Beckett explains it like this, What the Ulster Protestants put forward was not a positive demand to manage their own affairs, but a negative demand not to have those affairs managed by a parliament in Dublin.

So the Unionists were on board and by Devlin there was no one in Westminster to oppose the Bill. The only question left was how many counties would this new Northern Irish parliament control? You would think, as long as committee did, that this would be a fairly straightforward question. Simply partition the entirety of the nine counties of Ulster. Ulster was Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland was Ulster, easy peasy. Well, hopefully if there’s nothing else you learned from this episode, it’s that nothing in Northern Ireland is ever simple.

The Unionists were unhappy with taking on all nine counties, as this would have meant the new administrative area included too many Catholics. There was literally a worry that they would be outbred by the Catholics. Plus, those Catholic majority counties, well they wanted to stay with the South of Ireland, they were generally Nationalists. So instead the Unionists opted to take control of the fat-dyed counties, from Manor, Antrim, Tyrone, Derry, Armagh and down, F.A.T., D.A.D. Leaving the Catholic majority counties Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan to be administered by the South and without a fun acronym. The 70,000 or so Protestants in these areas were not particularly happy with this deal. But Carson and the Unionists reckoned it was for the best. In fact, one MP literally described it as follows, quote, in a sinking ship with lifeboats sufficient for only two-thirds of the ship’s company, were all to condemn themselves to death because all could not be saved? It’s probably one of the few times in history when a group of people asked to be in control of less land.

Basically, the whole thing was a bit mental. And remember, a war was going on across the majority of the country and this bill kind of just ignored that. Historian Cormac Moore describes it saying, that the Government of Ireland Act came into law as Britain was at open war with Champagne, which was supported by a considerable majority in the island, shows the total air of unreality that surrounded the Act. But it still had a big effect in Ulster. As J.C. Beckett explains, the Unionists did not indeed actually oppose the Government of Ireland Act, but they regarded their passive and reluctant acceptance of it as a generous concession made in the interest of peace. To use their own term, this was Ulster’s supreme sacrifice. The Unionists were unhappy, the Nationalists were unhappy, and tensions were rising.

So yeah, combine 300 years of on-again, off-again sectarian conflict, two very separate cultural systems, a booming economy that’s beginning to falter, and the complicated Government of Ireland Act, and you get a unique set of circumstances, unlike anywhere else in the country. Maybe unlike anywhere else, full stop. Next episode, we’re going to get into the specifics of how this all manifested itself in Ulster throughout 1920. And be warned, it’s not pretty.

Production help from Aoife Murphy. This podcast was recorded in the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded.