Protestant Irish nationalists

Protestant Irish nationalists are people of Protestant persuasion or background in Ireland who have joined their Catholic-majority fellow countrymen in campaigning for Irish independence and the dissolution of her union with Great Britain. Through the nineteenth century, they attained positions of leadership in a succession nationalist movements, but they did so without the support of the broader Protestant community. Content with representation in the United Kingdom parliament, Protestant opinion remained overwhelmingly unionist.

In the former, separate but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland, in which Catholics were excluded from public office, Irish Protestants readily identified as patriots. The focus of their patriotism was the parliament in Dublin. Its high-point was the armed Volunteer movement which in 1782 secured from the British Crown recognition of the parliament's exclusive right to legislate for Ireland. The movement subsequently split on the question of Catholic emancipation. In 1798, the more radical faction, concentrated in the Presbyterian north-east, broke into open rebellion in an effort, as "United Irishmen", to abolish confessional privilege and establish a representative republic.

Reconciled after 1800 to the union, Protestants were broadly hostile to political and cultural movements that, in arguing a new case for Irish nationality and statehood, celebrated Ireland's fealty to the Catholic Church and her Gaelic heritage, and depreciated the ties by which Protestants in particular felt bound to Britain and to her empire. The nationalist tradition nonetheless honours the contribution of individual Protestants, among them: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel as dissenters from the compromising leadership of "the Emancipator" Daniel O'Connell; Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell as leaders of the Home Rule movement; Douglas Hyde and Alice Milligan as promoters of a linguistically and culturally "Irish Ireland"; and, in the early twentieth century, Roger Casement, and Constance Markievicz as "physical-force" republicans.

Following the partition settlement of 1921, in the six Ulster counties retained as Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, Protestants in labour and socialist circles continued to be drawn to James Connolly's vision of an all-Ireland workers' republic. In the 1940s, a number of northern Protestants formed a "squad" within a reactivated Irish Republican Army. From the late 1960s, a stricter sectarian division was imposed by the onset of "the Troubles". It is reflected in the exclusively Catholic background of the present leadership in Sinn Féin, and of the SDLP, as it is in the exclusively Protestant background of unionist party leadership.

When, in 1782, the Patriot leader in the Irish House of Commons, Henry Grattan, in his Volunteer uniform, carried by acclaim a declaration of legislative independence from London, he reportedly cried: "Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!" William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland stated (1696) and Jonathan Swift's Drapier's Letters (1724–25) are sometimes cited as the first stirrings of a modern Irish nationalism. Yet their rejection of English claims that Ireland was a colony, and insistence that the island was, in the words of Molyneux, "a Compleat Kingdom within itself", was entirely circumscribed by their commitment to Ireland's Anglican ascendancy.

Swift objected to extending civil and political rights to Presbyterians and other Protestant "Dissenters" from the Church of Ireland communion. As for the Catholic "five sixths of the population", the English national historian Lord Macaulay proposed that, dispossessed and excluded under the Penal Laws, they were accorded no more place in the Irish nation as conceived by these "planted" Protestants than "than the swine or the poultry". The patriotism of the Anglo-Irish "squireen" was as disinterested, he suggested, as the invocation of "inalienable right" by the slave-holding "Virginia planter" Even while pressing for further reform, Volunteer conventions did not address the "Catholic question", save in Ulster where delegates concurred only in approving "the relaxation" of the civil disabilities imposed upon their "fellow subjects".

The exclusively Protestant nature of the constitution was breached first, not by Protestant patriots, but by direct Catholic appeal to the British government in London then intent on engaging Catholics in both Ireland and abroad in a war with the new French Republic. In 1793, with the vice-regal administration in Dublin Castle supplying the necessary inducements and pressure, Grattan piloted a relief bill through parliament that re-admitted Catholics, not to parliament itself, but to the electoral franchise. The concession, votes for a small, albeit growing, number of property-qualified Catholics, could have little impact upon the conduct of government. Two thirds of the seats in the Commons remained in the gift either of landed grandees sitting in the House of Lords or of Dublin Castle, the Irish executive that continued to be appointed from London.

Limited reform satisfied neither Catholic or Dissenter. Disaffection concentrated in Belfast where already, in 1784, Volunteer companies had been admitting Catholics to their ranks in the conviction that "a general Union of all the inhabitants of Ireland is necessary to the freedom and prosperity of this kingdom".^[12] Re-animated by news of the revolutionary events in France, in October 1791 a group of Volunteer veterans among the town's Presbyterian merchants responded to an invitation from the physician William Drennan to enter into "a benevolent conspiracy — a plot for the people", its "general end real independence to Ireland".^] Calling themselves, at the suggestion of a Protestant secretary to the Catholic Committee in Dublin, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Society of United Irishmen, and adopting his draft resolution, they observed that in a "great era of reform ... when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people," the Irish people find themselves with "no national government" — "we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen". The remedy lay in "a cordial union among all the people of Ireland" and "a complete and radical reform" of their representation in parliament.