Read: Irish Realities

From: Church & State: Editorials

Date: January, 2014

By: Editorial

Irish Realities

Irish Realities
"Ne Temere became a principal reason why we do not have a united Ireland", according to the Mixed Marriage Association (Irish Times letter, January 6).
Other reasons why we do not have a united Ireland are that there was a nationalist rebellion in 1916, that the country voted overwhelmingly in 1918 to establish an independent Government for itself, and that the Fine Gael/Labour/Clann na Poblachta Coalition took the country—the part of it over which it exercised jurisdiction—entirely out of the British Commonwealth in 1948.
A more credible reason is that Daniel O'Connell founded a mass nationalist movement in 1830. But that reason is never given, because O'Connell is a 'sacred cow' to 'moderate' nationalists because at Clontarf in 1843 he backed down in the face of Wellington's threat to dragoon his meeting.
But O'Connell had sown the seeds of division long before his submission to the threat of force at Clontarf.

He had not backed down in 1829. He had dared the Government to keep him out of Parliament because he would not take a Protestant Oath to enter it. The Government did not meet his dare. It repealed the requirement that anybody elected to Parliament must take a Protestant Oath before sitting in it. For fear of what O'Connell's movement might do if it was thwarted, it enacted Catholic Emancipation. And that was a profoundly divisive measure.
One might hold the opinion that Catholic Emancipation was morally right, regardless of its consequences. But holding that opinion does not in any way lessen the actual consequences of Emancipation.
The Government did not enact it because it weighed the matter up in some moral scales and saw that it was right. It repealed that particular anti-Catholic provision of the British Constitution—which was supported by an extensive framework of moral opinion—because it feared the consequences of not repealing it at a time when the population of Ireland was half that of England and O'Connell had roused the greater part of it to active support of his demand and had disabled the opposition of most of the rest.

The United Kingdom was a sectarian Protestant State, as the Kingdom of Ireland under the British Crown had been before the Union. The admission of Catholics to Parliament did not secularise the State. But it opened up the prospect of the Irish representation at Westminster being predominantly Catholic, leading to intensified Irish pressure on the sectarianism of the State, with further erosion of the privileged position of the Protestant population in Ireland.
That was bad enough—divisive enough. But the following year O'Connell launched his Repeal movement. Repeal would have restored the Irish Parliament of the 18th century, which during its last twenty years had been a sovereign Parliament—the glory of the Protestant Nation.
But the Protestant Nation had shot its bolt. And a restored Irish Parliament in 1830 would have been entirely different in composition to the Parliament that abolished itself under the influence of British bribery in 1800.
The Act of Union deprived the Protestant Nation of the sovereignty (under the Crown, of course) which it had gained in 1782, when it seized the opportunity provided by Britain's difficulty in America. For some years after 1800 there was a Protestant Repeal movement. The Protestant Nation knew that, without its own Irish Parliament, it was vulnerable.

O'Connell in those years of Protestant Repeal was a nominal Catholic with the outlook of an English radical. He returned to Ireland in the 1790s and (the Irish Parliament having opened the practice of law to Catholics under British pressure) slotted himself into the milieu of the Protestant nation. He took part in the Protestant Repeal movement and declared that he would be happy to have things as they were before 1801, Penal Laws and all.
But it is problematical being a very broad-minded liberal if one wants to cut a dash in the public life of a sectarian Protestant State.
After about ten years following the Union, during which conviction leaked out of the Protestant Repeal movement, and a national movement was generated in the Catholic population, O'Connell began to be a Catholic in earnest in Ireland,while in British affairs retaining the outlook of a radical.

After he achieved the admission of Catholics to Parliament, he might have acted the part of a Whig politician in Ireland. Many certainly expected him to do that. And, if he had done it, who can tell what the outcome might have been. Whiggery, with its radical undergrowth, might have become the party of political reform throughout Ireland. But, instead of phasing Ireland into British party politics, O'Connell launched a new Repeal movement. And by doing so he soon came to the point of rupture with the Ulster Protestant reformers.
The Rev. Henry Montgomery's public letter against him was published in 1831, uniting all political tendencies in Protestant Ulster against the post-Emancipation Repeal movement. After that rupture there was no turning back. The future, down to the present day, has been a working out of that rupture within the varying political circumstances of the British state.

The Ne Temere Decree of 1908 hardly deserves a mention in this context. It was the belated implementation in Ireland of a Catholic Decree discouraging mixed marriages.
The Mixed Marriage Association says:

"Dr. Garret Fitzgerald has shown that the net result of this was the reduction of the Protestant population in the Irish Free State/Republic by 80%. In the same period the Roman Catholic population of Northern Ireland increased by 60%."

Dr. FitzGerald was a wizard with statistics. It would be interesting to see how he established that the discouragement by the Ne Temere Decree of Protestants who wanted to marry Catholics reduced the Protestant population by 80%—how he isolated the influence of the Ne Temere Decree from the other influences tending to reduce the Protestant population and discourage mixed marriages.
The other tendencies reduced the Protestant population in obvious ways.
The Famine/Holocaust system reduced the Catholic population by many millions. It was hoped that this would break the spirit of the Irish. A new landlord Plantation was projected on that assumption. The London Times looked forward to a time when Irishmen would be as rare in Ireland as Red Indians in New York. But what followed the Famine/Holocaust in the greatly-reduced Irish population was a purposeful tenant-right movement which undermined the new landlordism, leading many of them and their retainers to return home. The tenant-right movement grew in strength every decade from then on until it abolished landlordism as the general system of the country in the first decade of the 20th century. Associated with this was the democratisation of Local Government.
The conditions of Protestant existence in the greater part of the country were undermined, under Irish pressure, by British legislation, with a consequent outflow of the Protestant population.
Then the Irish voted themselves independent, and defended their independence by war against the British military. During that War, judging by the Church Of Ireland Gazette, there was widespread Protestant expectation that Britain would again bring the Irish to heel. When Britain failed to do that, there was a further outflow of Protestants.
The Land War and the War of Independence caused a reduction of a Protestant population that actually existed by narrowing its economic base. How could the Ne Temere Decree have actually reduced an existing Protestant population? It was not backed by any power of State—as Protestant discouragement of mixed marriages had been. Did Protestants who had married Catholics before the Decree was promulgated leave the country after it was promulgated?
Or did Dr. FitzGerald mean that the Decree prevented an increase in the Protestant population by deterring Protestants from marrying Catholics under its terms? But prevention of increase is a very speculative, uncertain thing, not at all synonymous with reduction.
If Dr. FitzGerald made an estimate of the numbers of Protestants who wanted to marry Catholics but refused to do so if the children were to be raised as Catholics, it would be interesting to see how he did it.

The increase in the Catholic population in the North and the reduction of the Protestant population in the South are clearly not results of the same cause. They are substantially unrelated.
Under the undemocratic and sectarian British regime in the Six Counties, Catholics were driven together to live their own lives by a devolved local administration which had the specifically anti-Catholic Orange Order at its core. And the possibility of developing through participation in the political life of the state was not open to them. The Catholics did not refuse to participate in the political life of the state. They were shut out of it. But the community was bulky enough to live a purposeful life of its own—and to avail of British educational and social welfare and other amenities while being shut out of British political life.
The Northern Catholics had freed themselves from centuries of systematic oppression and were in the course of rapid development when they were confined in the Northern Ireland system. The Southern Protestants were a privileged community whose privileges had been seriously undermined and who were in the course of serious decline. They remained the wealthy segment of the population. And the possibility of taking part in the political life of the state was open to them. But on the whole they refused to avail of that opportunity. They preferred to live their own exclusive life in superior mode. It was a narrow constricted life, whose high point was an occasional house-visit from minor Royalty. They were themselves inertly loyal to the state in which they lived, in the sense that they were not in rebellion, but it was not their state. They were living abroad. And, judging by Elizabeth Bowen, they did not much care for the vulgar turn of events at home after Churchill was ousted by the plebs.
How many of them does Dr. FitzGerald reckon wanted to marry Catholics but didn't want Catholic children?
(Dr. FitzGerald was himself the product of a mixed marriage and that personal fact seemed to blind him to social realities on the island.)

There seem to have been quite a few mixed marriages in the North, despite the Ne Temere Decree, with a rule of thumb about the children. But, in the North, there were large working class populations of both Protestants and Catholics, with an accompanying laxness of morals. And working class marriages are not quite the same in substance as middle class marriages. And in the South it was not even a question of mixed middle-class marriage, but of mixed upper and lower class marriage. The extent to which the possibility of such marriages occurred, only to be deterred by Ne Temere, must be minute, because in this instance class alienation is compounded by colonialism.
There was in Ireland no gradual gradation from the native lower classes to the colonial upper class. A declining residue of the colonial gentry, disproportionately wealthy, continued to live its own life in its own cultural milieu in the independent state. Its life was narrow, exclusive, superior. It kept up standards. It didn't mingle.
There were, of course, Protestants who shrugged off the colonial heritage and mingled, but they were not the element represented by the writings of Hubert Butler, Elizabeth Bowen or Terence de Vere Whyte.
Butler asserted the inherent superiority of the colonial residue over the native democracy and demanded separate political representation for it, as the Catholic community had in the North. He treated the two minorities as being in some way equivalent. This was a debating point. He must have known very well that there was no equivalence. His one venture into electoral politics was based on an assertion of the racial superiority of the Protestants. In Kilkenny he lived the superior life of his ancestors on his little estate, keeping aloof from the upstart natives who were his neighbours, even though they had become his equals in wealth.

The little colonial enclaves dotted around the country did not flourish demographically. The clever thing to do was to blame this on Ne Temere instead of their own colonial exclusiveness.
The British region of the world used to be called "The Empire and Colonies". The distinction between the two seems to have been lost, but it is real. The colonies were pieces of England hived off to found English-type societies in regions ethnically cleansed of natives. Other regions were held by Imperial power, and administered by officials of the British Government, but populated by natives. In Ireland the two categories overlapped. It was both the first English colony and the first English Imperial possession. And the continuing difference within it, on which Partition was based, is an expression of the difference between the colonial element and the element that was subjected to Imperial possession and freed itself.
The whole island was intended to be colonised. There were Plantations in the Midlands and in Munster as well as Ulster. But it was only in Ulster that the colony flourished and became a rounded society. Elsewhere the colonial stratum became the ruling elite of an Imperial possession.

The Ulster colony did not need subjugated natives in order to exist, but the colonial stratum in the South did. The one became a society, the other an Ascendancy.
In Ulster, natives survived in the outlying regions. And grasping capitalists of the London Society soon began to break the conditions of the Plantation by employing native labour because it could be got cheaper. And the industrial economic development centred on Belfast began using native labour from the further reaches of the Province, and Belfast began to have a Catholic problem.
In the rest of the country the colonial stratum went megalomaniac. In 1780 it was overcome by the delusion that it had made Ireland a Protestant Nation. It freed itself from the guiding influence of its Mother Parliament, over-reached itself, and came to grief. The part of the population that was not colonial but was under Imperial control freed itself and took over. The colony did not then merge with the populace that displaced it in political power—or, rather, the part of it that did not merge and become part of the national development is what is now meant by the Protestant minority.

Religion is not the foundation of the difference in Ireland because in England the Reformation was primarily a political and not a religious event.
England declared itself an Empire at the same time as it separated itself from the Roman religion and its international associations. The declaration of Empire was basic: the religion followed. England did not know what its religion was going to be when it broke with Rome and set about suppressing Catholicism. Because it broke with Rome, it had to suppress the Roman Church. It was found that a wide range of popular institutions and customs were intimately connected with Rome, and they had to be rooted out. The first secular institution which had to be suppressed was the theatre. It was suppressed by Henry VIII's Minister, Thomas Cromwell, revved, and was suppressed again, more thoroughly, by the Rule of the Saints under Oliver Cromwell.
This was done in the name of religion. The ideological justification of the break with Rome was the need to purify Christianity of the pagan idolatry with which Rome had corrupted it. Therefore a new religion had to be made up in accordance with this ideology. Pure Christianity was to be restored. But nobody knew what pure Christianity was—supposing that it ever existed in coherent form. It was Rome that had made Christianity a world force. When Constantine established it as the religion of the Empire, what he called Christianity was an eclectic mix of various popular religious cults that were fermenting in the Empire. In the course of a thousand years this mixture was worked on by theologians, philosophers, Bishops, poets and statesmen of genius. In the early 16th century something stirred the Swiss and the Germans to repudiate the rich Roman mixture and spin something simple and systematic out of it, and call it the true Christianity of the pre-Roman Church.
Before breaking with Rome Henry considered waging a crusade against this Protestantism. And he wrote a condemnation of it, for which the Pope gave him the title of Defender of the Faith.

So, when Henry declared England an Empire, and was faced with the problem of inventing a religion for it, he didn't have a clue as to what that religion might be. It was to be a religion that served his Empire. The Empire was prior.
The Swish and German varieties were found unsuitable. A kind of English religion was patched together but nothing like a national settlement was ever arrived at. Elements of the English populace which took to religion in earnest gave rise to Puritanism. But Puritanism, for all the argument that went into its elaboration, was not found to be an effective religion of state when it became the power in the state. It failed because the Puritans took it that the function of the State was to serve religion when, in accordance with the origin of the English Reformation, it was the business of religion to serve the State.
There was never a positive national settlement in England—a settlement that embraced the bulk of the populace. After the Restoration there developed an Established Church whose Bishops formed part of the ruling class of gentry, and whose doctrines were drawn up by fundamentalists of an earlier generation and were not intended to be believed. And in the populace there were various kinds of fundamentalist Protestants, who were excluded from the corridors of political power. The 'religious tolerance' announced after the 1688 coup d'état was tolerance between these various kinds of Protestantism based, in its religious dimension, on nothing more definite than anti-Catholicism. The political dominance of the gentry in the name of the Anglican Church, which was never allowed to meet as a Church, was accepted by the more believing forms of Protestantism in the medium of the expanding Empire.

The economic business of the Empire in the eighteenth and early 19th centuries consisted largely of the Slave Trade and the operation of Industrial Slave Labour Camps. A culture of race superiority naturally grew up with this business. This was combined with a conviction generated by fundamentalist Christianism in the populace, in which the Old Testament history was lived again, that the English were the agency of Providence in the world. They were God's chosen people.
The wealth of the Slave business, the discreet scepticism of the gentry, and the sincere religious belief of a very substantial body of believers in the society, somehow combined at home to produce a culture of refinement. The expression of crude anti-Catholicism was softened, but not weakened in this culture.
Fundamentalist Protestantism, whose influence was curbed at home, was given its head in the colonising of Ireland, where it ensured that the Reformationist colonists did not merge with the Irish as pre-Reformationist colonists had done.

The Ulster colony went through a phase of liberal confusion in the 18th century but reasserted its original character in the Revival of 1859. A quarter of a century later, the combination of religious Revivalism and Colonialism was very evident in the response to the first Home Rule Bill. 'Ulster' was a colonial partner in the great Imperial business of dominating and civilising the world, and it was not going to submit in local affairs to the democratic supremacy of the majority on the island, whose destiny was to be subject to the Imperial civilising process. And a century later that was still how things were seen in Ulster Unionist culture.
Religion, as active belief, was much stronger in Ulster Unionist culture than in Southern Protestant culture—and, of course, than in nationalist culture—but religion was far from being the only thing in it.
In the wealthy remnant of the failed colony in the South, which determined to uphold standards despite native rule, exclusive manners—one might say atavistic manners—appeared to be the main thing. But it was not only the Irish natives that were looked down upon. The vulgar colonial natives in the North were also viewed with distaste.

The contention that the Ne Temere Decree played a major part in the decline of the exclusive Protestant community in the South which refused to take part in national affairs—a decline which had set in long before Ne Temere was promulgated—needs to be argued.
As for the suggestion that it was a cause of Partition, there have been a long string of 'causes' suggested by various commentators for the Ulster Protestant abhorrence of the South, beginning with religion, backwardness, poor social services, and economic lack of development. As Irish society shrugged off clericalism, progressed to be a premier segment of the European Union, with a social security system only second to the Scandinavian countries, all these have lost credibility and fallen away. But Partition remains.

Henry Montgomery’s Letter To Daniel O’Connell. Introduction by Brendan Clifford. ISBN 1 874157 00 6. ABM, Vol 4, No 1. June 1991. €6, £5
Hugh Peters: Good Work For A Good Magistrate (1651). Intro: B. Clifford. 52pp. ISBN 0 58034 062 X. AB. Dec. 1992. €6, £5

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