Mcdowell Crisis & Decline

The Fate of the Southern Unionists
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84351-445-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

'Receding imperialism usually leaves behind those who have for generations staunchly upheld its authority and flourished under its aegis - Germans in Bohemia, Swedes in Finland, loyalists or tories in the American colonies, Greeks in Asia Minor, Muslims in the Balkans. Among those abandoned adherents of a lost cause were the unionists in the south and the west of Ireland.' So begins R.B. McDowell's preface to this lively, meticulously researched account of the fate of Irish unionists outside Ulster from the era of Parnell through the early years of the Irish Free State. McDowell details the efforts of a ruling minority to maintain the union between Britain and Ireland, and tells the story of what became of them during and after the Anglo-Irish war and the handing over of the twenty-six counties. The bastions of Southern unionism - Trinity College Dublin, The Irish Times - come under sympathetic scrutiny from a man who became intimately acquainted with the ex-unionist world while a student at Trinity in the 1930s, as chronicled in the colourful Afterword. Crisis & Decline also records the testimony of ordinary unionists - farmers, shopkeepers, policemen, and others - who sought compensation for losses suffered during the 1920s. McDowell gives us a nuanced portrait of a distinctive social group, much mythologized in literature but hitherto neglected by historians, who clung steadfastly to a doomed vision of Ireland within the British Empire. Originally published in 1997, R.B. McDowell's pioneering study of Irish unionism is now being reissued in paperback by The Lilliput Press.

R.B. McDowell (1913-2011) was one of Ireland's most celebrated historians. He was a Professor of History and Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. His more recent works included Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760-1801 (1979), Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs (1993), and biographies of Alice Stopford Green, J.P. Mahaffy and Henry Grattan. His Historical Essays 19382001 (2004) and McDowell on McDowell: A Memoir (2008) are also published by The Lilliput Press

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mcdowell, R. B.

Leseproben

II The Mobilization of a Minority

THE SOUTHERN UNIONISTS were held together by a number of organizations. In the political sphere the most outstanding was the Irish Unionist Alliance, founded in 1886 as the Loyal and Patriotic Union, changing its name in the early nineties. The Alliance had constituency, later replaced by county, branches, and local branches, of which there were about 220 in 1900. The county branches elected a General Council and there was an Executive Committee, composed of the president, the vice-presidents, forty members elected by the General Council and thirty co-opted members.1 The Alliance collected information from all over Ireland, and published a large number of short pamphlets and leaflets on the Irish situation, composed largely of quotations from nationalist speeches and writings with pungent comment. In 1909 it published a work of two hundred pages on the Home Rule question. When the 1893 Home Rule bill was being debated the Alliance distributed two million leaflets and arranged five hundred meetings in Great Britain. In the 1895 general election it distributed seven million leaflets.2 When the 1912 Home Rule bill was introduced the Alliance took an office in Manchester and had ‘missionaries’ touring England. It may be added that at least one local branch – the Gorey branch, with 320 members – sent Irish unionist newspapers to England and supported financially the Alliance’s intervention in English by-elections, ‘as one of the best ways of educating the electorate on the Irish question’.3 The Alliance was an all-Ireland body, but as its headquarters was in Dublin and the Ulster unionists from 1905 had their own powerful representative body, the Ulster Unionist Council, the Alliance came more and more to speak for Southern unionism.

There were also in the twenty-six counties eighty Orange Lodges, including thirty-eight in the three Ulster counties and ten, together with the Trinity Lodge, in Dublin. The order, Protestant and conservative, provided its members with political inspiration and social life. It manifested itself in the twenty-six counties in the border areas (Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal) by colourful parades on 12 July. A distinguished Oxford classical scholar, born in County Cavan, described one of these demonstrations on the Cavan-Leitrim border affectionately, and after referring to ‘the Dorian and Phrygian moods of drums and fifes and brazen instruments’, pronounced that ‘anything deserves to be kept alive which tends to isolate the stronger race and prevent it being absorbed’.4

In Dublin there were the City and County Conservative Club (providing some club facilities) in Dawson Street, and the Dublin Constitutional Club and the City of Dublin Unionist Registration Association, both concerned with the registration of electors and both having premises in 10 Leinster Street. The same building also housed the Dublin Women’s Unionist club, an active body, with 3000 members in 1914. (Incidentally, early in 1905 Mrs Dockrell, whose husband was later to be a unionist MP, was a candidate for the chairmanship of the Blackrock urban council. On another unionist being elected, she declared, ‘it is not party … it is sex prejudice’.5) There was also the Unionist Association in Grafton Street, which kept in touch with the Ulster Unionist Council. Finally there was the City and County of Dublin Conservative Working Men’s Club, founded in 1883, whose membership embraced many middle-class men, a fair number of clerks, civil servants, a commercial traveller, and a dentist. It provided its members with the amenities of club life, concerts and political lectures and, most important of all, took considerable trouble over the registration of electors.6

There was a large and zealous unionist newspaper press. In Dublin there were The Irish Times, the Dublin Daily Express and The Evening Mail. The Irish Times (founded in 1859) aspired with some success to be the Irish equivalent of The Times – providing for its readers a broad coverage of United Kingdom and foreign affairs, finance, sport and literature. Its first editor was a classical scholar and this was reflected in the tone of its editorials, which with Olympian dignity and apparent detachment vigorously expounded unionist orthodoxy. The Daily Express, ‘Protestant and constitutional’, declared that its mission was ‘to promote loyalty and peace in Ireland, to maintain the imperial connection, to cultivate a cordial and friendly intercourse with Great Britain and to give a practical tone and direction to the national sentiment’. The Cork Constitution, which ‘circulated amongst the nobility, the gentry, landed proprietors and mercantile classes’, forcefully advocated the unionist cause in the South, and scattered throughout the twenty-six counties there were about twenty local weekly or bi-weekly newspapers, mainly filled with local news and advertisements, that proudly claimed to be upholding the conservative or unionist cause.7

In addition to the unionist organizations that have been mentioned there were a number of institutions, ostensibly non-political but overwhelmingly unionist in membership, that bound Southern unionists together, giving them companionship, cohesion and confidence. These included the Irish Landowners Convention, founded in 1887 to defend the interests of landlords when land purchase was being debated; the Church of Ireland, with its general synod, diocesan synods and its rectories, nearly always diffusing an air of gentility; the other Protestant Churches; the Masonic order, with its awesome rituals, its charities and social dinners; three leading Dublin clubs; the country clubs; a number of sporting clubs; the Protestant schools; and Trinity College. In fact a Southern unionist when not at work could spend almost all his time with those who shared his opinions and prejudices.

Trinity College, ‘the college of the Anglo-Irish breed’, according to a provost, ‘the one really successful English institution in Ireland’,8 with its squares and park in the very centre of Dublin, prided itself on its traditions and achievements. A critic might suggest that pride could easily develop into complacency, but at the time of its tercentenary in 1892 the College had much to be complacent about: a galaxy of brilliant scholars on its staff, a long list of famous graduates (often readily recited) and an excellent reputation for teaching and research. The medical school was associated with the great names of Graves and Stokes; the College had close links with the Irish bar (in 1914 of the fourteen high court and appeal court judges ten were Trinity graduates) and the Divinity school supplied the Church of Ireland with most of its clergy (in 1914 of the eleven bishops ten were Trinity graduates). Life intra muros was full and vigorous and Trinity dons and undergraduates could participate in the varied activities of a lively city. It is, then, scarcely surprising that Trinity men and (from 1904) women were passionately loyal to the College. The College itself was fervently unionist. It had been founded as an Anglican and anglicizing institution; now it prided itself on being open to all creeds at a time when the Catholic Church was emphasizing that for Catholics education at all levels should be strongly influenced by Catholic doctrine. The College had officially declared its opposition to the Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893, and in 1885 the then provost, J.H. Jellett, a man in his seventies, had set an example by going down to Cork to vote against a Home Rule candidate.9

The university MPs were always unionists. The ten men who sat for the university constituency between 1880 and 1918 included two unionist cabinet ministers, a unionist solicitor-general for England (Carson) who was to be a member of the War Cabinet, and Lecky, one of the leading unionist intellectuals. Many of the graduates worked in England or joined the imperial services; those who remained in Ireland were often leading local unionists. As for the undergraduates drawn largely from the Irish unionist world, they tended to be exuberantly unionist, for instance on the occasion of Joseph Chamberlain’s visit to Trinity in Black Week to receive an honorary degree, a party of undergraduates seized the green flag floating over the Mansion House and tore it to pieces. Meanwhile the older generation seated in the Public Theatre, applauded loudly when they detected amongst the public orator’s polished Latin phrases a reference to Chamberlain’s consistent support of the union.10

When the Home Rule bill of 1912 was introduced Trinity did not pronounce officially on the measure. It might have been felt that it was unnecessary to do so – the two sitting MPs, both unionist, had been returned unopposed in 1910. Moreover, there might have been a growing sense that academic detachment (a fashionable concept) dictated that the College as an institution should abstain from intervening in politics, though its members of course could hold and express strong views. When the bill was in committee, James Campbell, one of the Trinity MPs, proposed at the request of the senior fellows that Trinity College should be exempted from the jurisdiction of the impending Irish parliament. But even strong unionists felt that an extra-territorial status for the College would have been a standing provocation to an Irish parliament...