Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1992), 914pp. with index. [New Edn. 2005]

Peter Woodman, who excavated Mountsandel, believes genepool of Irish population probably set by Stone Age. [7] Celtic civilisation not the creation of a separate race but a language and a way of life spread from one people to another … [no] evidence of a formidable invasion; rather there was a steady infiltration from Britain and the European mainland over the centuries. The first Celtic speakers may have come as early as 1,000 BC and in greater numbers from about 500 BC, equipped with iron weapons and on horseback … a constant blending of language, belief, and tradition followed and the Gaelic civilisation which emerged in Christian times—to survive independently longest in Ulster—evolved not just from the Celts but also from their predecessors to the earliest times. [9]

Early geographies of Ireland. Sailing directions written by sea captain of Greek colony at Marseilles, 55 BC refered to the Sacred Isles two days from Armorica; Himilco the Carthaginian journey to Tin Ilses of Scilly around 480 BC; Pythaeus, of Marseilles, made an epic voyage circumnavigating Britain and visiting Norway, 300 BC, giving the correct position of Ireland, his account now lost formed basis of Ptolemy’s map in the 2nd Century AD, which itself is known from a 15th c. copy; the map includes identifiably names such as Logia (Lagan), Isamion (Navan Fort), and Volunti (the Ulaid); Strabo, c.55; Pomponius Mela, 105 AD:’It’s climate is unfavourably for the maturing of crops, but there is such a profuse growth of grass, and this is as sweet as it is rich, that the cattle can sate themselves in a short part of the day’. Tacitus’s account of the Continental Celts, and his life of Agricola, which includes the account of the Irish pettry king driven out in civil war who sues Agricola for help. [11-11]

Emain Macha, excavated by Michael GL Baillie, finds central portion established of timber palisade felled about 95 BC (Ann Hamlin and Chris Lynn, Pieces of the Past, Belfast 1988). Origin tale of Emain Macha an analogue of Romulus and Remus, acc. to which at a fair Crunnuic mac Agnomain boasted that his wife Macha could outrun a chariot, and forced her to do so in spite her pregnancy and protests: ‘Then she raced chariot. As the chariot reached the end of the field, she gave birth alongside it. She bore twins, a son and a daughter. The name Emain Macha, the twins of Macha, comes from this. As she gave birth she screamed out that all who heard that scream would suffer from the same pangs for five days and four nights in their times of greatest difficulty. This affliction, ever afterward, seized the men of Ulster who were there that day.’ Kinsella, Táin, (1970) p.7 [12]

Patrick’s voice of the Irish, heard as he reads a letter brought him in a dream: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk among us once again’, and it completely broke my heart and I could read [the letter] no more’ (Arnold Marsh, St Patrick and His Writings, 1966. [1]

Patrick’s letter to Caroticus expressing anger that the British Christians could slay his new converts. [16] Breastplate of St Patrick.

Battle of Dunangay; Battle of Moira.

Quotations from Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh [25-26]: ‘In a word, although there were an hundred hard steeled iron heads on one neck, and an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting, brazen tongues on each head, and an hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could not recount, or narrate, or enumerate, or tell, what all the gaedhils suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardship and of injury and of oppression in every house, from these valiant, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people.’ (Todd, 1867), p.51.

Laudibiliter: John of Salisbury, adviser to Archb. of Canterbury, prevailed on Nicholas Breakspear, elected Pope Adrian IV in 1154, to grant Ireland to Henry; John wrote later: ‘in response to my petition the Pope granted and donated Ireland to the illustrious King of England, Henry, to be held by him and his successors … he did this in virtue of the long established right, reputed to derive from the donation of Constantine, whereby all islands are considered to belong to the Roman Church.’ (FX Martin NHI, vol. 2, 64.) [32]

Giraldus gives account of John de Courcy’s incursion in the North; Giraldus’s account of Irish weaponry: ‘two darts, well-forged axes, and quicker and more expert in throwing things than any others.’ [36]

Annals of Connacht related: ‘Edward the Bruce, he who was the common ruin of the Galls and Gaels of Ireland, was by the Galls of Ireland killed at Dundalk by dint of fierce fighting. MacRuaidri, king of the Hebrides, and MacDomnaill, king of Argyle, and their Scots were killed with him; and never was there a better deed done for the Irish than this, since the beginning of the world and the banishing of the Formorians from Ireland. For in this Bruce’s time, for three Years and a half, falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.’ [53]

Ramon, Visc. of Perellós and of Roda, made a journey to Patrick’s Purgatory after the death of his master King John of Aragon, 19 May 1396, having read Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, written by a 12th c. monk describing the Knight Owein’s journey to the underworld; travelled with the blessing but contrary to the advice of Benedict III; entertained by Richard II; urged to halt his pilgrimage by Roger de Mortimer as leading through lands of ‘savage, ungoverned people whom no man should trust’; met Archb. John Colton at Armagh and was against advised against travelling on into ‘the lands of King O’Neill’; left his escort and rode singly into Ulster; gave an account of O’Neill and his soldiers, ‘like the Bernese’; made welcome; ‘his table made of rushes spread on the ground’. His account of clothing speaks of tunics without linings cut low in the manner of women, of no hoses nor shoes, and spurs on bare heels; and of the poor going naked without shame. (Carpenter, in Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy, eds., The Medieval Pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Enniskillen/Monaghan 1988). [60-64] SEE ALSO Constantia Maxwell, The Stranger in Ireland (1954).

Tadhg Og Ó hUiginn advises Henry O’Neill to stay in Ulster rather than take up Tadhg O’Brien’s invitation to become highking and drive the English out: ‘Let the prince of Uí Néill delay in marching south—this is good advice, and let him heed my word—till he make sure of his power even over his own land ..’ [69]

Pride of Shane [[79] Treachery of Essex at Belfast Castle, 1574, when Sir Brian O’Neill, his brother and wife were seized, their people slaughtered, and themselves taken to Dublin and quartered, told as narrated in Annals of the Four Masters [83] Spanish Armada [87]; slaughter of Spaniards of Don Alonso de Luzon, Regt. of Naples, in command of La Trinidad Valencera, whose crew was first rescued by the O’Dohertys, in a field by Irish soldiers in English pay, under Major John Kelly, perhaps on orders of Hugh O’Neill, at Gallagh, nr. Derry [88]

Girona, under Don Alonso de Leiva de Rioja, Kn. of Santiago, Comm. of Alcuesar, gen.-in-ch. of land forces; complement of 1,300, wrecked off Lacada Pt. [90]; off Bundoran, the San Juan, the Lavia, and the Santa Maria de Vision [90].

De Cuellar’s account, publ. 1897. This is barely listed in the notes and not in the bibl.

In 1591 Hugh O’Neill, aged fifty, eloped with Sir Henry Bagenal’s 23 year old daughter. Bagenal, Marshall of the queen’s army, became his fixed enemy [94]

bonaghts, the first Irish common levy of troops [bonnadha] ceartharnaigh, kerne.

In Bardon’s interpretation, O’Donnell and O’Neill knew that outside help was essential for total victory, help not only of disaffected lords in the other three provinces but also of overseas enemies of England. The fate of the Catholic Church was a constant them in letters sent to Spain [98]

Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, believed himself in constant ill health [103]

Sir Warham St Leger and Hugh Maguire kill each other in horse-borne encounter [104] Sir Henry Docwra at Derry [104ff.] Fynes Moryson, sec. to Lord Mountjoy.

Docwra’s ‘A Narration of the Services done by the army ymployed to Lough-

Foyle’, Miscellany of the Celtic Society, ed., John O’Donovan (Dublin 1849)

O’Neill knew it was as a defender of the faith that he was most likely to gain support; Fr Edmund MacDonnell dean of Armagh and Peter Lomard bishop of Waterford and later archb. of Armagh most energetic representatives [108]

One of the members of the English Derry garrison was Josias Bodley, br. of Thomas, the founder of the library. [109]

Annals of the Four Masters, on Kinsale: ‘manifest was the displeasure of God, and misfortune to the Irish of fine Fodhla … Immense and countless was the loss in that place; for the prowess and valour, the prosperity and affluence, nobleness and chivalry, dignity and renown, bravery and protection, devotion and pure religion of the island, were lost in this engagement.’ [111]

O’Donnell dies of illness [sic] at Simancas [Bardon’s view is contrary to standard Irish biogs.]

CITATIONS FROM FOUR MASTERS, 1177 AD; 1210 AD; 1567 AD; 1574 AD; 1591 AD; 1601 AD; 1608 AD.

Moryson gives account of reduction of country—famine and cannibalism—by the O’Neill rebellion., incl. ‘three children all eating and gnawing with their teeth the entrails of their Mother, upon whose flesh they had fed 20 days past, and having eaten all from the feet upwards … ‘; also, some old women at Newry who had been killing and eating little children. [113] Moryson, An History of Ireland from the year 1599 to 1603, 2 vols. London 1617, rep. Dublin 1735), the foregoing from Bk. 3.

Tyrone pardoned by Elizabeth; held as guest by Sir Garrett Moore, Mellifont Abbey, Mar 1603, where Mountjoy and he made a peace, called the Treaty of Mellifont [114]

Mountjoy, O’Neill, and O’Donnell travelled to London in the Tramontana, 2 June 1603. Mountjoy created Earl of Devonshire. O’Neill was in Meath helping Mountjoy at court sessions when news of O’Donnell and Maguire’s departure arrived. He journey quickly to Lough Swilly. His party left Fri. 4 Sept. 1607. O’Neill died Rome, July 1616.

Flight of Earls, 117. Account of O’Neill’s procedure north given by Sir John Davies, in Calendar of State Papers. ‘he travelled all night with his impediments, that is, his women and children; and it is likewise reported that the Countess, his wife, being exceedingly weary, slipped down from her horse, and weeping, said she could go no farther; whereupon the Earl drew his sword, and swore a great oath that he would kill her in the place, if she would not pass on with him, and put on a more cheerful countenance withal.’ [117]

Annals of Four Masters on Flight:’Woe to the heart that meditated, woe to the mind that conceived, woe to the council that decided on, the project of their setting out on this voyage, without knowing whether they should ever return to their native principalities or patrimonies to the end of the world.’ [118]

Revolt of Cahir O’Doherty [118]

Bardon cites sources in which the Flight or ‘undutifulle departure of the Earls of Tirone, Tirconnell, and McGwyre’ is said to ‘offer good occasion for a plantation’, and of the resistance of the crown to this suggestion [118] In the same spirit we learn that O’Neill’s son Conn was perhaps most fortunate to emerge with 60 townlands, since there were many claimants to Lwr. Clandeboye.

Sir John Davies, camped near Coleraine, 5 Aug 1, reports to King that he has six counties ‘now in demesne and actual possession in this province; which is a greater extent of land than any prince in Europe has to dispose of’, and urged a thorough colonisation, and warned of the risks ‘if the number of civil persons who are to be planted do not exceed the number of the natives, who will quickly overgrow them as weeds overgrow the good corn.’ (Calendar).

Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh, regretting that he had not been taught a trade: ‘Alas that the fosterer in lore did not teach the breaking of steeds/Or the steering of ships, or the yoking of plough behind oxen,/To the men who compose lays./Woe to the scholar who knows not some craft that would be/No cause to censure, that he might join timbers, or shape a vat,/ere he attained the service of learning./The honour of poesy is departed;/the credit of guardianship is gone,/So that the school of Ireland’s land were bertter/As husbandmen of the ploughland.’ Quoted in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds., Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the making of Irish Colonial Society 1534-1641 (Dublin 1986), p.162 [131]

Wentworth’s Black Oath; alienated every interest group; oppression of Presbyterians; raised army of 3,000 for king in Ireland [134]

Rebellion of 1641; Massacres of 1641 [136ff] Lecky debates Depositions at length.

Munro defeated at Benburb [139]

Cromwell, after Drogheda, taken 11 Sept. 1649, when all but 200 of 2,300 were killed: ‘priests knocked promiscuously on the head’; ‘I am persuaded that this is the righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands with so much innocent blood.’ (Quoted from John Ranelagh, Ireland, an Illustrated History, 1981). [140]

General Monck fought on both sides.

Redmond O’Hanlon; b. Poyntzpass, footboy to Sir George Acheson, Markethill; joined kinsman Loughlin O’Hanlon, imprisoned for stealing horses; bribed out of Armagh jail; popular biog. of 1681; attempted betrayal by Franciscan Edmund Murphy, using Cormack Raver O’Murphy; kills Henry St John, grandson of former lord deputy; William Lucas authorised to hunt him outside the law; O’Hanlon shot deat by Art O’Hanlon, his foster brother, at Eight Mile Bridge, nr. Hilltown. [144]

Judicial murder of Lawrence O’Toole, Tyburn 1681, on evidence trumped up by Edmund Murphy [145]

‘Religion rather than blood, was the badge of ethnic division—a division which yawned wide again on the accession of James II. [147]

William Molyneux gathered MSS contributions for a projected vol. of Moses Pitt’s Grand Atlas; these include William Brooke (Armagh), William Montgomery (Ards); Richard Dobbs (Carrickfergus, home parish of Kilroot), rendering an eccentric and chaotic acc. of Co. Antrim. In Dobbs’ parish there were no Irish, some Anglican gentry, and the rest presbyterians. [149]

Richard Talbot, one of the few survivors of Drogheda. ‘Lillibulero’, by Thomas Warton, to tune of Purcell, could later claim that he whistled a king out of three kingdoms: ‘Ho, brother Teig, dost hear de decree/Lillibulero Bullen a la!/Dat we shall have a new Deputy?/Lillibulero Bullen a la!/Ho, by my Soul, it is a Talbot,/And he shall cut all de Protestant t’roat’ [150]

Siege of Derry [154] Walker, ‘we had but few horses to sally out with and no forage; no Engineers to instruct us in our works; no Fireworks, not so much as a hand-grenado to annoy the enemy; nor a gun well mounted in the town.’ (Quoted in Patrick Mcrory, The Seige of Derry, 1980, p.214); also ‘Horse-flesh, 1/8d a lb; quarter of a dog, 5/6 (fattened by eating the bodies of slain Irish); a dog’s head, 2/; a cat, 4/6; a rt, 1/0, a small flook taken in the river, not to be bought for money ..’ [156]

NOTE that in relating the seige, with accounts from Thomas Ash, Cpt. George Holmes, George Walker, and John Mackenzie, Bardon relies exclusively on Macrory, 1980.

Boom broken by the Mountjoy; according to account, the shore gunners were drunk with brandy. Defeat of Justin McCarthy Mountcashel at Newtownbutler [VP]

Battle of the Boyne; The Boyne Water [161ff]; Bardon quotes verses by an unnamed Irish poet, saying ‘it was the coming of James that took Ireland from us/With his one shoe English and his one shoe Irish/He would neither strike a blow nor would he come to terms,/And that has left, so long as they shall exist/misfortune upon the Gaels’ [cited in Simms, NHI, vol 3 (1978), no further source given]. [VP]

Patrick Sarsfield was a grandson of Rory O’More of 1641; Ballyneety [164]; halfpike known as rapaire, skirmishers; at Aughrim, St. Ruth exclaimed, ‘they are beaten, mes enfants’, but a cannon fired at close range took off his head; 7,000 were killed.

DATES: Boyne, 1 July 1690; Aughrim 12 July 1691.

Penal Code, from 1695; conciliatory attitude of William, and after of Anne; attitude of Irish Parliament; branding unregistered priests ameliorated to castration [169]; final penal law depriving Catholics of vote entered statute book in 1728. [168] Protestant ascendancy so-named in 1790s; Patrick Donnelly, bishop of Dromore, dubbed in song ‘The bard of Armagh’ on account of his disguise.

NOTE: St Patrick’s Purgatory Lough Derg ordered to be destroyed, 1632; Lough Derg specifically outlawed in the 1704 Act. [169]

CRIT: Quotes Hugh MacMahon, Cath. bishop of Clogher, later arch. Armagh, on the means of attending Mass, cited from Livingston, 1980 [no further details]: ‘Over the countryside people might be seen signalling to each other on their fingers the hour that Mass was to begin in order that people might be able to kneel down and follow mentally the Mass being celebrated at a distance’. [169] Also, MacMahon, 1714: ‘Although all Ireland is suffering, this province [Ulster] is worse off than the others, because of the fact that from the neighbouring country of Scotland, Calvinists are coming over here daily in large groups of families, occupying town and vill villages, seizing the farms in the richer parts of the country and expelling the natives.’ [Livingstone]

Dr Johnson, on visiting the Giant’s Causeway, is quoted as reflecting:’The Irish are in a most unnatural state, for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no instance even in the Ten Persecutions, of such severity as that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholics.’ (Quoted from Lecky, History of Ireland, 1892-6, vol 1, p.170). [170]

Quotes also Edm. Burke: machine of elaborate contrivance ‘as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of Man’ (also Lecky, ibid.) Bardon comments: Burke as a product of the Enlightenment, but earlier in the century all major Christian sects sought not toleration but victory. [171]

Edward Synge, bishop of Tuam, estimated that 50,000 Scots families came to Ireland, 168-1715; Bishop MacMahon, quoted in Livingstone, records that in Ulster the Calvinists coming daily in large groups were expelling natives. [171] Jonathan Swift at Kilroot, with no Anglicans. [171]

5,500 official converts to Anglicanism, 1703-89. [170]

English privy council added clause to Irish bill To Prevent the Further Growth of Popery, stipulating that all public office holders must have certificate of receipt of Holy Communion in Anglican church. [172]

Daniel Defoe, in prison, issued The Parallel, or Persecution the Shortest way To Prevent the Growth of Popery in Ireland, arguing: ‘instead of being remembered to their honour … have been ranked amongst the worst enemies of the church, and chained to a Bill to prevent the growth of Popery’; further ‘will any man in the world tell us that to divide Protestants is a way to prevent the further growth of Popery when their united force is little enough to keep it down? This is like sinking the ship to drown the rats, or cutting off the foot to cure the corns.’ (WD Killen, ed., JS Reid, History of Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1867, 3 vols., p.3.

Swift may have had a hand in the vicar of Belfast William Tisdall’s A Sample of Trew-Blew Presbyterian Loyalty in all Changes and Turns of Government [ref. to Bardon, 1982] [172]

John Richardson, preached and published in Irish, Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland (1712), won approval of William King, who imported Gaelic speaking clergy to minister to Island Scots in Inishowen and Antrim. [170]; 10 Dec. 1712, Presbyterian ministers gathered at Belturbet to establish a new congregation, encouraged by the absence of John Richardson, famous for his attempt to end the Lough Derg pilgrimage. The bishop of Kilmore complained to the Lord Lieutenant, ‘notwithstanding my repeatd commands, [he] has absented himself from his Cure, which has given encouragement to those schismatics to make so bold an attempt ..’ [source in PRONI, T781/1 p.50] [173]

Only 5,500 Catholics officiall converted between 1703 aand 1789 [701]

King corresponds with Swift: ‘I do not know any officer that has on account of the Test parted with his command and I do not believe there will’ (JC Beckett, Protestant Dissent, 1948) [173]

Under the act of 1692 for the Encouragement of Protestant Strangers in Ireland, all sects allowed their own rites; Louis Crommelin granted large subsidy in 1698 to bring a colony of Huguenots to Lisburn, scattered by fire of 1707. [174]

Henry Maxwell, MP Finneybogue, MP for Bangor in reign of Queen Anne; cited in Beckett as remarking that the class of the Presbyterians, being ‘the middling and meaner sort of people, chiefly in the north,’ would prevent them holding office and rank in any numbers. [174]

1741 was bliadhain an áir [year of the slaughter], when 300,000 died in a famine. See The Groans of Ireland (1741), pamph. (McCracken, NHI, vol. 4)

William King, on the emigration: ‘no papists stir … The papists being already 6 to 1, and being a breeding people, you may imagine in what condition we are like to be in.’ (RJ Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1966, p.2)

Arthur Young’s account of linen-merchanting and manufacturer is particular about prices, methods, machines; all cited from AW Hutton, ed., Tour, 1776-79, 2 vols., Lon 1892. [184-85] His strictures on the neglect of farms as a result of the new source of income:’the linen manufacture spreads over the whole country [of Ulster] consequently the farms are very small, being nothing but patches for the convenience of the weavers’. [188]. Sees hoe-ers preparing land for grass at Shane’s Castle and is ‘more pleased than if I had seen four emperors’.

Quotes from Harris, The Antient and Present State of the County of Down (1744), remarks on the short-term gain and longterm loss from marling or liming the soil. Manure kept in plain view of houses because of value. Harris also notes the gathering and firing of kelp which has export value as fertilisers to Glasshouses in Dublin and Bristol, ‘as appears in Custom House Book records of Portaferry’ Harris, 1744, p.98.

In 1780, Coleraine was second to Dublin as a distillery centre.

Thomas Nesbit of Kilmacrennan claims to have invented the harpoon gun. (Cited in de Latocnaye, 1797.) Also in Latocnaye, remarks on the opulence of Castle Coole, the house of Armor Lowry-Corry, 1st Earl of Belmore, at the expense of £90,000: ‘temples should be left to the gods’ (p.187). When confronted with the style of life adopted by the Bishop-Earl, he could only say: ‘O what a lovely thing it is to be an Anglican bishop or minister! These are the spoiled children of fortune, rich as bankers, enjoying good wine, good cheer, and pretty women, and all that for their benediction. God bless them!’ (p.201). Of Derry, Latocnaye says, in 1796: ‘Londonderry has not the air of an Irish town. There is there an activity and an industry which are not generally to be found in other parts of the country.’ (p.200)

NOTE that paintings by Murillo, Rubens, Durer, Correggio, Tintoretto were lost when Downhill was destroyed by fire in 1851.

bleaching power of chlorine discovered in 1785, replacing dilute sulphuric acid, and before that buttermilk sour. [186]

Bardon quotes Young’s passage on the tyranny of an Irish landlord—copied from de Vere White in RX—and bibl., Maxwell, 1949, p.176. [199]

William Molyneux on the rebuilding of Lisburn in 1708, cited in Camblin, Ulster Town, 1951, p.92.; he also describes Derry, since the siege ‘it does not seem to be a place of much business, riches, or trade’ (Camblin, p.87).

A theatre in Newry opened in 1769 with a production of Farquhar’s The Inconstant. (Tony Canavan, Frontier Town: Ill. History of Newry, 1989).

Robert Joy in partnership built Belfast’s first cotton mill in Francis St. [203] Primate George Stone part of coal-mining partnership in Tyrone. [204] high standard of secondary road system [205]

Hearts of Oak resistance to cess [207] cannibalism [209] the Providence from Portrush, passengers abandoned by crew [209] governor gen. of Carolina, Arthur Dobbs, only one of many colonial land developers anxious to attract Ulster families to American backwoods [210]

Paul Jones in the Ranger sails into Belfast Lough and takes the Drake [210] Volunteer company formed in Belfast

Charlemont’s account: ‘Ireland was hourly threatened with Invasion—the Enemy was at our Doors, and the Administration had no possible means of Assistance—Unsupported by England and destitute both of Men and Money they shuddered at the idea of the most trifling Incursion—They feared and consequently hated the Volunteers, yet to them alone They looked for Assistance, for Safety—and They saw, with a Mixture of Grief and Joy, the Country, which They were unable to defend, compleatly protected by its own Efforts, without that Expense to which they were wholly unequal.’ (PRONI Educ. facs., Vols, p.147). [212]

Grattan once called the volunteers ‘the armed property of Ireland’ [213] Patriot Hussey Burgh said, ‘Talk not to me of peace; Ireland is not in a state of peace; it is smothered war’, and ‘England has sown her laws like dragon’s teeth, and they have sprung up armed men.’ [214] In the same debate, Thomas Conolly, MP for Londonderry, said: ‘You represent property not numbers’. Yelverton, who was then attorney-gen. admired the Volunteers, but ‘when they formed themselves into a debating society, and with that rude instrument the bayonet probe and explore a constitution which requires the nicest hand to touch, I own my respect and veneration for them is destroyed’. (cited in Thomas Wright, History of Ireland … from period of annals, 1870). [216]

John Wesley confided to his diary of the Volunteers, ‘if they answer no other end, at least they keep the Papists in order’, and wrote to the Freeman’s Journal opposing relaxation of the remaining Penal Laws in 1780: ‘I would not have the Roman Catholics persecuted at all. I would only have them hindered from doing hurt: I would not put it in their power to cut the throats of their quiet neighbours.’ [217]

Belfast-Newsletter, enthusiastic about French Revolution [218]

Volunteers, at White Linen Hall, Belfast, send declaration to France in celebration of 2nd anniversary of Bastille Day: ‘We too have a country, and hold it very dear ..’ [219]

United Irishmen fnd. in Peggy Barclay’s tavern in Crown Entry St., Belfast, given its title by Tone but the brainchild of William Drennan, son of New Light minister at 1st Presbyterian Church, Rosemary St. [220] organising done by Samuel McTier, Drennan’s brother in law; first sec. Robert Simms, owner of Ballyclare paper mill [resigned at the eleventh hour]; Northern Star, ed., Samuel Neilson, owner of largest woollen drapery business; Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the only landlord of consequence to join; Jemmy Hope of Templepatrick, a weaver. [220].

Before his exile, Tone climbed Cave Hill with others: ‘Russell, Neilson, Simms, McCracken, and one or two more of us, on the summit of McArt’s fort took a solemn obligation—which I think I may say I have on my part endeavoured to fulfil—never to desist in our efforts until we have subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted her independence.’ (quote McDermot, Theo. Wolfe Tone and His Times, Tralee 1969, p.145). [223]

Sectarian disturbances in 1791, Peep o’ Day v. Defenders; atrocity at Forkhil [224-25]

Battle of the Diamond, 21 Sept. 1795, near Loughgall, at a cross-croads of that name, recounted by William Blacker (quoted from David W Miller, ed., Peep o’ Day and Defenders: Selected documents on the Co. Armagh disturbances (Belfast 1990) [no source], p.121 [226] William Blacker narrates how the Peep o’ Day Boys on a brow overlooking the Diamond fired on the assembled Defenders [extract]: ‘with cool and steady aim at the swarm of Defenders … cooped up in the valley and present[ing] an excellent mark for their shots … by the bodies found after by the reapers in the cornfields … I am inclined to think that not less than thirty lost their lives.’ (p.121). William Blacker was one of the very few of the landed gentry who joined at the outset. He further describes the inaugural: ‘It was a scene worthy of the pen of a Scott or the pencil of a Salvator Rosa to view the assemblage of men, young and old, some seated on sods or rude blocks of wood, some standing in various attitudes, most of them armed with guns of every age and calibre ..in as much as rust and antiquity had blighted the spring of their days into utter incapacity to strike fire. There was a stern solemnity in the reading of the lesson from Scripture and administering the oath to the newly admitted brethren … Unhappily … a determination was expressed of driving from this quarter of the county the entire of its Roman Catholic population … A written notice was thrown in or posted on the door of a house warning the inmates, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to betake themselves ‘To Hell or Connaught’. [ibid. 125]

NOTE: John Troy, Catholic archbishop, declares the Defenders excommunicate. (Elliott)

Bantry Bay, Tone on board the Indomitable: ‘Well, England has not had such an escape since the Spanish Armada’. [229]

William Orr, executed 14 Oct 1797, Gallows Green Antrim, his Dying Declaration printed by the thousand: ‘If to have loved my Country, to have known its Wrongs, to have felt the injuries of the persecuted Catholics and to have united with them and all other Religious Persuasions in the most orderly and least sanguinery [sic] Means of procuring Redress;—If these be Felonies, I am a Felon, but not otherwise.’ (Charles Dickson, Revolt in the North: Antrim and Down, 1960).

James Thompson, the father of Lord Kelvin, was a witness to preparations for the rebellion, aged 11. (Also in Dickson, 1960.) [234]]

Elizabeth Gray of Gransha, her brother, and lover Willie Boal [235] death of Henry Munro by execution as recalled by an officer who stood near and remembered his coolness, cited from W.H. Maxwell, History, 1880 ed. [235]

Napper Tandy arrived in corvette Anacreon at Rutland Bay, Donegal [236]

George Macartney, former chief sec. of Ireland, on secret mission in Dec. 1779 to determine how Union would be received. [237] Assured Pitt that even the lord lieutenant had ‘not the slightest suspicion of my real errand’ and reported bluntly, ‘the idea of a union at present would excite a rebellion.’ [238]

Cornwallis dislikes jobbing. [238] Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, first Presbyterian to reach high office, chief. sec. in 1798, worked on abstainers from Union vote with consummate skill. The new Union Jack, incorporating St Patrick’s Cross, run up 1 Jan. 1801. [238-49]; after the Union Castlereagh opposed Emancipation following George III’s declaration that ‘I shall reckon any man my personal enemy who proposes such a measure.’ Castlereagh was wounded in the thigh in a duel with Canning. [241-42].

Grattan at Westminster: ‘As long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty, and the common rights of man, we are not a people.’ (quoted in P. O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Problem: Anglo-Irish Relations 1534-1970, 1971). [241]

Battle of Garvagh [243] Pastorini, the pseud. of an 18th c. English Catholic bishop [who] foretold the violent destruction of Protestant Churches in 1825, cheap eds. circulating freely. [243] ‘locusts from the bottomless pit’; and Ribbonmen’s oath: ‘..destroying the Heriticks … [243]

Thomas Verner, brother in law of Lord Donegall, first Grand Master of the Orange Order. From 1821 lords lieutenant consistently attempt to stop Orange demonstrations. Viz, Unlawful Societies Act, 1825.

Tone:’wretched tribe of forty shilling freeholders, whom we see driven to their octennial market, by their landlords, as much their property as the sheep or the bullochs’ (Connolly, NHI, vol. 5, 1989, p.99)

Contrary to the general view, Irish Protestants, especially in the north, did not accept Catholic emancipation as inevitably and henceforthmost say themselves as a beleaguered people. [247]

Census of 1861 in Ulster shows 29% of Catholics to 59% Presbyt. and 50% Church of Ireland could read. [248] Slow progress of Catholics curbing traditional practices (wake, etc.). [248]

In 1801, Martha McTier is recording her attendance in evangelical meetings, though she admits to no liking for the ministers views on political dissent [249] (RF Holmes, Henry Cooke, Belf. 1981). [249]

Henry Cooke: champion of Presbyterian orthodoxy, declared Catholics to be ‘greatly inferior in point of education … farming . they put up with far less comfort, both in point of dress and food.’ [248]; in Newry, 1822, Cooke launched virulent attack on Belfast Acad. Institute declaring that the teachers held Arian beliefs in direct opposition to scripture; originally Henry Macook of Maghera; Dr Henry Montgomery successfully defended New Light teacher, but at synods in Coleraine, 1825, and Strabane, 1827, he failed to convince the members to tolerate a range of beliefs, and formed the rump synod of 1830 which became Nonsubscribing Presbyterian Church; the great majority of Presbyterians united to form General Assembly in 1840, with Cooke as dominant figure. [250] Cooke, dubbed ‘the American doctor’ in view of a degree awarded by Jefferson Coll.,; principal speaker at the great Conservative demonstration at Hillsborough, 30 Oct 1834, called by Lord Roden to unite all Protestant sects, spoke against the O’Connell-Whig alliance as ‘this close-compacted phalanx of infidelity and Popery’ and called Repeal ‘just a discreet word for Romish ascendancy and Protestant extermination’; he ‘published’ banns of marriage between Presbyterianism and the Established religion, ‘a sacred marriage of Christian forbearance where they differ, of Christian love where they agree, and of Christian cooperation in all matters where their common safety is concerned’. When O’Connell accepted an invitation, in Jan 1841, to speak to the Loyal National Repeal Assoc. in Belfast, Cooke challenged him to a debate: ‘When you invade Ulster and unfurl the flag of Repeal, you will find yourself in a new climate … I believe you are a great bad man, engaged in a great bad cause—and as easily foiled by a weak man, armed with a good cause, as Goliath &c’ (Repealer Repulsed, pamph. in Linen Hall) [255] O’Connell. In Dublin O’Connell said ‘My friend Bully Cooke, the cock of the North has written a most insulting letter’, but did not accept the challenge. On coming north, his sojourn in Belfast was marked by riots; indoors, O’Connell scoffed at the ‘boxing buffoon of the Divine’; on 21 and 22 Jan. 1841, Cooke orated on ‘the numerous and solid advantages which have accrued to Ireland’ from the Union. He sketched the industrial prosperity of Belfast: ‘All this we owe to the Union. no, not all—for throned above our fair town, and looking serenely from our mountain’s brow, I behold the genii of Protestantism and Liberty, sitting inseparable in their power, while the genius of Industry which nightly reclines at their feet, starts with every morning in renovated might … showers down his blessings in the fair and smiling lands of a Chicester, a Conway, a Hill. … we will guard the Union as we guard our liberty … &c.’ The following day he put forward what would be the Unionist case for decades to come, that Protestant liberties would be imperilled by a Catholic majority in Dublin; Ulster’s prosperity was due to Protestant enterprise; and Ulster’s future lay in supplying the markets of the empire. [257]

Bardon cites surveys including Dubourdieu, 1802; Sir Charles Coote, Armagh, 1804; Rev. Vaughan Sampson, Co. Londonderry, 1802.

Ordnance Survey staff at Phoenix Park, mapping Ireland, scale six inches to one mile; a senior officer, Joseph Portlock, triangulation of Co Donegal; Lieut. Taylor described Currish in s.w. Monaghan, 1835; Lieut. J Greatorex, memoir of Aghalurcher, Co. Fermanagh; another on Drummaul Co Antrim, castigating the tenancy practices in the estate of Lord O’Neill [of Shane’s Castle]; a detailed memoir of every parish was intended but abandoned for costs, and perhaps because of the tendency of some of the disclosures [~275]

Lord George Hill, 5th son of 2nd Marq. of Downshire, purchased 25,000 acres at Gweedore from 1838; learned Irish; was met by Carlyle [279]

FAMINE Phytophthora infestans [280] Peel’s repeal of the Corn Law brought about his fall and the formation of a cabinet by Lord John Russell, who sought advice from permanent head of treasury Charles Trevelyan, who recommended a reduction of subsidised food distributions and an increase of public works of the kind called not ‘reproductive’. [281-2]

Quaker’s soup kitchens sans proselytism. [285] Marquess of Downshire published handbill objecting to levy on landlords for relief [287]

Forms of famine sickness were: famine fever, or typhus and relapsing fever trnsmitted by lice; the bloody flux, or bacillary dysentry; famine dropsy, or hunder oedema; and scurvy. [291-2]

Victoria Channel, opened 10 July 1849. [301-02] fight at Dolly’s Brae, 12 July 1849. [302]

William Stewart Trench, agent on the Bath estate in Co. Monaghan, notorious for robust approach to removing unwanted tenants, arranged emigration of 2,500 to the US, serving ejectment orders on those who refused to co-operate [311] [cf. Mr Barton in George Moore’s Muslin: ‘emigrate his tenants’]

John Mitchel, fiercely propagandist tract, The Last Conquest of Ireland, looked back on his years as a solicitor in Ulster:’At every quarter sessions, in every county, there were always many ejectments [..] signed … by hundreds in one sheaf. They were placed in the hands of the bailiffs and police, and came down upon some devoted townland with more terrible destruction than an enemy’s sword and torch. Whole neighbourhoods were often thrown out upon the highways in winter.’ Bardon comments that this is propagandist exaggeration in relation the pre-Famine period but nevertheless accurate in regard to the post-Famine clearances. [312]

Ulster Tenant Right Assoc. founded in 1847 by William Sharman Crawford, radical MP who had helped draft People’s Charter of 1838; National Tenant League fnd. Aug 1850 by Frederick Lucas, of Catholic Tablet; Sir John Grey, of Freeman’s Journal; and Charles Gavan Duffy, Monaghan Young Irelander, with Crawford in the Chair, and Dr McKnight, ed. of Londonderry Standard, as first elected president. For Duffy this was ‘The League of North and South’; the three FFFs formulated by McKnight (fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure. [314] When the Pope re-established territorial bishoprics in England, the so-called Irish Brigade of independent Irish MPs was formed in separation from the English Liberal govt. that enacted a bill confirming the illegality of Catholic territorial prelates; against the advice of Duffy, the League threw in its lot with the Irish Brigade (otherwise the Pope’s brass band); in the south of Ireland, 48 MP’s supporting Tenant rights were elected, but in the North, only on, Crawford standing for Down. Then William Keogh and John Sadleir accepted office under Lord Aberdeen’s administration and the party disintegrated; a long quarrel with Paul Cullen of the Dublin diocese ensued; Crawford retired to Crawfordsburn (where he had £8,000 p.a. in rent), and Duffy went to Australia in 1855. (Foster, 1988, p.311) [316]

Patrick McGill:’Nine of the older men dug the potatoes from the ground with short three-prong graips. The women followed behind, crawling on their knees and dragging their two baskets a-piece along with them. … The first day was we … The job bad enough for men, was killing for women. All day long, on their hands and knees, they dragged through the slush and rubble of the field. The baskets which they hauled after them were cased in a clay to the depth of several inches, and sometimes when emptied of potatoes a basket weighed over two stone. Pools of water gathered in the hollows of the dress that covered the calves of their legs.’ (Cited in Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson, Irish Farming 1750-1900, 1986, p.128 [319]

The Deryveagh Evictions, 1861: perpetrated by landlord John George Adair, Queen’s County owner who bought north Donegal estates of Gartan, Glenveagh, and Derryveagh from 1857, for scenic value; employed thuggish bailiffs and served notices to quit from Dec 1859, shortly after purchase of Derryveagh; a Letterkenny contingent of constabulary under sub-sherriff Samuel Crookshank unwillingly executed the orders; 244 people evicted; William Scully, MP for Cork, read the nespaper reports to the House of Commons, and a fund was formed effecting the emigration of the families to Australia; Adair died peacefully in Missouri, 1885; Glenveagh Castle occupied by his widow, and bought in 1937 by Henry McIlhenny, a direct descendant of one of those evicted; now national park. The evictions were justified by reference to the murder of James Murray, 1860, his steward—which, however, seems to have been motivated by a case of marital infidelity not land agitation. [321-24]

Rev William M. O’Hanlon, series of letters in Northern Whig, 1852, on Belfast poverty. (Bardon, 1882, 1985) [324]

Pulmunory diseases occasioned by factory production of linen incl. phthisis produced by pouce, or flax dust. [331]; also TB from ‘kissing the shuttle’, not stopped by law till 1958. [332]

HARLAND AND WOLFF, ships built by: Khersonese, 1855; Circassian, 1856; Venetian and Sicilian, 1859; Syrian, 1860; Oceanic, Mar 1871; Atlantic, Baltic, and Republic, 1872; Adraitic, 1872; Britannic and Germanic, 1874; Teutonic and Majestic, 1889. [336-40]

Religious Revival of 1859: surged across the Atlantic … struck a chord deep in the hearts of many Protestants who had remained faithful to the beliefs of their forefathers when so many co-religionists across the Irish Sea had long since abandoned theirs. [340] [See Paisley]

Catholic Renewal [344] Synod at Thurles, 22 Aug. to 10 Sept. 1850, led by Paul Cullen, ultra-montane, bishop of Armagh, translated to Dublin, 1852, and first cardinal in 1866. Cullen declared that he had never dined with a Protestant, and once said: ‘the devil who animates Protestantism does not hold himself obliged to observe any promise’ (Lee, 1973 [see RX]), but did eventually dine with the Prince of Wales in 1868.

Patrick Dorrian, succeeds to bish. of Down and Connor, May 1865; commences revival campaign in Belfast;

Bardon, on the effects of the Thurles revival: now, probably for the first time in Irish history, attendance at Mass became universal. [347]

Church building: Charles McNally, bish. of Clogher, made Monaghan his episc. seat and began to build a cathedral, the Archbish. of Cashel laying the foundation in June 1861 before a crowd of 10,000; Lord Rossmore provided stone until a quarrel over the independence of the Church in local elections; walls finished 1874; priests sent to Australia and New Zealand to collect; Charles G. Duffy contributed £2,000; 3-ton bell erected in 1885, and dedication of completed cathedral 21 Aug. 1892. (Livingstone, 1980).

Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, 1864, included the separation of church and state. Bardon remarks: Irish support at best described as tepid. Cullen had no desire for a theocratic state and, indeed, it would not be wrong to describe the Church in Ireland as the most liberal European wing of the Catholic Church. Catholic bishops were not true liberals, however, as their unswerving campaign for denominational education demonstrated and, in any case, the subtle distinctions within Catholicism were lost on most Protestants. He goes on to compare the Catholic and Protestant revivals in their Victorianism [348]

Frankfort Moore remembered ‘a warm interchange of opinion on a basis of basalt’ and other details of Belfast rioting, Aug 1857. Acc. him, the riots of 1864 were ‘due to the importation the previous year of some hundreds—perhaps thousands—of navvies to dig a new dock … The balance of the fighting power among the belligerent classes was thereby disturbed.’ (F Frankfort Moore, the Truth about Ulster, Lon 1914). [349] And note, Moore one of the journalists who got the news by electric telegraph that the ‘unspeakable nationalists’ were beaten in the House by the defection of some liberals [380]

Bardon on continental nationalism [354] Cullen campaigns for Irish support of Pius IX, and following monster meetings, the largest being at Clones, 7 Feb 1860, Count Charles McDonnell, an Austrian of Irish extraction, mobilised a Brigade to defend the Pope in Rome; drunken spree at Macerata; 500 prisoners at Spoleta and Perugia. [352]

Funeral of Terence Bellow McManus, opposed by Cullen [352]

William Johnston of Ballykilbeg, reacts to 1867 Representation of the People Act, giving votes to artisans and halving property qualification in 1870. Led great parade against advice of Orange Lodge, Newtownards to Bangor, 12 July 1867, in defiance of Party Procession Act [intro. Aug. 1823]; refused to apologise to authorities, and sentenced to short prison spell, Feb. 1868; ‘fearless’ and ‘indomitable’; rapturous applause at Indignation meeting called in Belfast on his release; he said ‘we will have an Orange Party, please God, after a while in the House of Commons; stood on his own account, rather than for the Conservatives, in 1868 general election; won seat, as did Thomas McClure, Presbyterian tobacco maker [356] Johnston did however vote for the Land Bill in February 1870, showing his difference from the Conservative, land-owning party. [358] Bardon comments [356]: triumph of Johnston in Belfast did warn the Conservatives that they could not rely on deference where landlord influence was weak that a populist traditional loyalism might well b the way to win support of the new enfranchised artisans.

Gladstone: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’; ‘So long as the Establishment lives, painful and bitter memories of the Ascendancy will never be effaced’; on preparations for the Land Bill: ‘I have puzzled & puzzled over it & cannot for the life of me see how it is to be legalised without being essentially changed [the Ulster custom]. [357]

Joseph Biggar, Presbyterian pork merchant, Belfast: ‘This country, in my opinion, can never rise from her present state of stagnation until she has once again a native parliament’ (Walker, Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868-86, 1989. [359]

Life and death of William Clements, 3rd Earl Lord Leitrim; 2 Apr. 1878 [364]

Captain Boycott, agent of Lord Erne’s Mayo estate, described his plight in letter to The times; his crop brought in by hired and guarded labourers at the expense of £10,000; Cpt. Boycott admitted to Belfast News-letter that he charged the workers 9d. for a stone of potatoes during the work. [366]

Davitt proposes a motion at the Saintfield meeting, 23 Oct 1880: ‘That, as the Ulster custom has utterly failed to protect the property of tenants against the rapacity of landlords, the land question can be definitely sttled only by making the cultivators of the soil proprietors’. (Moody, 1981, p.446.) [367]

period of cooperation between green and Orange under auspices of Land League. Davitt, touring Ulster: Letterkenny, 19 Jan, declared that the Boyne could no longer divide Ireland; at Kinnegoe, Co. Armagh, 21 jan. addressing 2,000 Protestant farmers with James Weir, master of the Orange Lodge, in the chair, Davitt said: ‘You are no longer the tame and superstitious fools who fought for their amusement and profit with your equally foolish and superstitious Catholic fellow workers … No, my friends, the landlords of Ireland are all of one religion—their God is Mammon and rackrents, and evictions their only morality, while the toilers of the fields, whether Orangemen, Catholics, Presbyterians or Methodists are the victims whom they desire to see fling themselves beneath the juggernaut of landlordism. (Walker, in Clark and Donnelly, eds., Irish Peasants, 1983) [368]

Victoria’s response to IPP obstructionism and filibuster in Parliament, in not to Lord Hartington:’The Queen trusts that measures will be found to prevent the dreadful Irish people from succeeding in the attempt to delay the passing of important measures of coercion’.

In 1881, Gladstone reckoned that the Land Bill of 1870 required major adjustments: ‘what the brewers would call treble X’; also, ‘I must make one admission, and that is that without the Land League, the Act of 1881 would not be on the statute books’ [in 1882] (Juls Abells, The Parnell Tragedy, Lon 1966).

Tim Healy takes seat in Co. Monaghan, 1883.

WC Trimble, ed. of Impartial Reporter, for a time welcomed Land League, but wrote to the contrary in 1883, complaining that Parnell’s promise to speak at Dungannon had ‘roused the Orange blood of the county’. He quoted the Orange appeal which referred to Parnell as ‘leader of the enemies of our united empire, the champion of the principle, Ireland for the Irish … meaning Ireland for the Romanists … &c’ [372]

Lord Rossmore, 5th Baron Rossmore, and master of the Orange Order in Monaghan, organises counter demonstration at Rosslea, and speaks incitingly; dismissed from post as magistrate. [373]

8 June 1885, 39 Irish Nationalist MPs voted down the bill on added tax on wines & spirits (263 against 252), setting Randolph Churchill and others screaming in anger, to which they replied, ‘Remember coercion’. [373-4]

William O’Brien in the Glenties: ‘Here in Dongeal you and your fathers before you lived in perpetual terror of your lives, terror of eviction, terror of starvation … You had no body to speak for you, no body to fight for you … Well, those days are gone—thank God for it—and the day of the people’s power has come.’ (Walker, 1989).

General election of 1885 returned 85 IPP seats in Ireland (and TP O’Connor’s in Liverpool’s Scotland Road Division. Parnell said, ‘Ireland has been knocking long enough on the English door with kid gloves … now it will knock with the mailed fist.’ (Abels, 1966, p.235)

Gladstone joined the Irish nationalists and supported Parnell’s policy on Home Rule, in order to defeat the Conservative govt. of Lord Salisbury, 27 Jan 1886. Exhaustive research has confirmed that he acted from high motives. Britain now had a duty to right past wrongs. [376]

Victoria overcomes her disinclination to accept Gladstone as PM, and ‘take[s] this half-crazy and in many ways ridiculous old man for the sake of the country’ . [376]

On 22 Feb 1886, Randolph Churchill was chief speaker a Orange and Conservative monster meeting, Ulster Hall, Belfast, having decided that if Gladstone when for Home Rule ‘the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out to be the ace of trumps and not the two’ [Stewart, The Ulster Crisis, 1967, p.21]; at Larne he called, ‘Ulster shall fight and Ulster shall be right’. In the Hall he said: ‘On you it primarily rests whether Ireland shall remain an integral portion of this great empire sharing in its glory, partaking of all its strength, benefitting by all its wealth … or whether, on the other hand, Ireland shall become the focus and the centre of foreign intrigue and deadly conspiracy.’ [B. News-Letter, 23 Feb 1886] [377]

Frank Harris present at Westminster when Gladstone introduced Home Rule bill, known as Government of Ireland Bill, 8 Apr 1886: ‘The House was so thronged with that members sat on the steps leading from the floor and even on the arms of the benches and on each other’s knees … every diplomat in London seemed to be present; and cheek by jowl with the black uniforms of bishops, Indian princes by the dozen blazing with diamonds lent a rich Oriental flavour to the scene. … [Gladstone spoke for two and a half hours] His head was like that of an old eagle—luminous eyes, rapacious beak and bony jaws … His voice was high, clear tenor; his gestures rare but well chosen; his utterance s fluid as water … he seemed so passionately sincere and earnest that time and again you might have thought he was expounding God’s law conveyed to him on Sinai.’ (Quoted in Jules Abels, The Parnell Tragedy, 1966, p.242. [378]

Irish Protestant Home Rule Association formed by Portadown Liberal Thomas Shillington, May 1886. [379] Salisbury said that democracy ‘works admirably when it is confined to people who are of Teutonic race’ and concluded that loyalist violence would be justified against it. (Abels, 1966, p.244 [379]

At the victory of the Conservative and Orange parties in the division, occured the worst outburst of violence in 19th c. Ireland, in Belfast riots centred on the west centre. Use of ‘kidneys’ [380-82]

Justin McCarthy wins Derry at gen. election, July 1886, only after an electoral petition—the seat having gone the other way by a dozen votes in the previous election. Chamberlain and Lord Hartington’s Liberal defectors join to form Conservative and Unionist Party, known as Unionists to 1922.

William Johnston told the Commons on the eve of the Home Rule vote that resistance would be offered ‘at the point of the bayonet’; his diary entry three days after the defeat of the Bill noted, ‘We decided to stop drilling for the present’ (Walker, 1989).

Chamberlain spoke at Coleraine, at a tent on Fair Hill, supplied by 210 gas jets, to 8,000, announced the govt. intention of a radical approach to the land question, foreshadowing the buy-out of landlords [384].

Marx, Das Kapital: ‘Capital also sets in motion, by this means, another army: that of the workers in the domestic industries, who dwell in the large towns and are also scattered over the face of the country. An example: the shirt factory of Mssrs. tillie in Londonderry, which emplos 1,000 operatives in the factory itself, and 9,000 people spread down the country and working in their houses. (Brian Lacy, Siege City: the Story of Derry and Londonderry, 1990) Bardon judges the figure given to be exaggerated. [395]

Kennedy’s Coleraine Foundry, a leading manufacturer of agricultural implements and water turbines. ‘Old Coleraine’ whiskey called ‘perfection in malt whiskey’. [398]

Carrickmacross lace, started by Mrs Grey Porter, Monaghan, 1820s, promoted by Tristram Kennedy, agent of Lord Bath, during the Famine by importing Brussels samples of guippure and appliqué; successful exports established by Order of St Louis in Carrickmacross in the 1890s, earning £20,000 in its first ten years; lady Aberdeen, wife of 7th earl and twice Lord lieutenant, faithful patroness, brought 40 laceworkers to Chicago World Fair, 1893, returned with profits of £50,000; £100,000 p.a. by 1907; low-paid work, required water filled glass globe around oil lamps; declined after WWI. [399]

‘MAINLAND’: With its modern industry, family farms, traditional crafts and efficient communications, Ulster in many respects looked like several provincial regions of the British mainland. In the peculiar nature of its [399] divided society, however, it seemed to have more in common with provinces of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Turkish empires.

On Celts, Celtic, and Celticism—terms of discrimination [400] On Ulster names as indices of racial mixing [401]

Thomas Sexton, Derry MP from Cork, considers that political partition would create two minorities. [403]

When Justin McCarthy unseated a unionist in Derry, 1886, the United Ireland exulted:’No surrender’ has got a new meaning. It is a national watchword now. The nation holds the inviolate city and means to keep it for all time … Today the territory occupied by the West Britons who won’t become Irishmen is growing narrower and narrower. (United Ireland, cited in Loughlin, Gladstone: Home Rule and the Ulster Question 1882-93, Dublin, 1986).

Gladstone influenced by Lecky’s account of Irish historical oppressions such as the incitement of the rebellion of 1798 and its repression [404]

Harland and other Belfast businessmen prepared to withdraw to Britain in event of Home Rule Act. [405]

Pius X, Ne Timere, 1907. [406]

Lynn Doyle, ‘Home Rulers, to my childish mind, were a dark, subtle and dangerous race, outwardly genial and friendly, but inwardly meditating farful things … and one could never tell the moment they were ready to rise, murder my uncle, possess themselves of his frm, and drive out my aunt and myself to perish on the mountains. … in my aunt’s stories it was on the mountains we always died … As for my aunt, I know taht in matters demanding honesty and fidelity she would have trusted Tom Brogan, her thirty years’ retainer, sooner than the worshipful masster of an Orange lodge. Nevertheless, the unknown Home Ruler remained to me an object of fear and suspicion. (Quoted in Loughlin, Gladstone &c, 1986).

Sir William Harcourt addresses himself sardonically to Unionists, as ‘watching them with as much alarm as he can manage’. [410]

Gladstone forms govt. in Aug. 1892 with Nationalist backing. [411] Gladstone presents Home rule Bill, 13 Feb 1893; Nationalist and Liberals made 459 speeches, 57 hours; Unionists spoke 938 times, 153, over 82 days. Parnellites unable to prevent their quarrel breaking out. Justin McCarthy wrote: ‘It is all a conflict of jealousies and hates and the national cause is forgotten ..I feel terribly depressed’. Davitt wrote to Dillon, ‘I feel almost ashamed to go before an educated English audience while we are showing ourselves so unworthy of Home Rule’. (Loughlin, 1986). [413]

William O’Brien launches United Irish League in Co Mayo, early 1898; 33,000 members by aug 1899 [415] IPP reunites in 1900 under leadership of John Redmond, MP Waterford

By-election in S. Belfast caused by death of William Johnston of Ballykilbeg, 1902. [416] Thomas Russell, Sloan, and Crawford, independent unionists [415-16].

George Wyndham, Great-grandson of Lord Edward [sic], Chf. Sec., in Nov. 1900. Cpt. John Shawe-Taylor writes to press inviting landlord and tenant reps. to solve land question. Lord Abercorn and Saunderson, Unionist leader, among those who participate under chairmanship of Lord Dunraven, whose report is universally praised by press; Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903 which proceeded from it encouraged sale on money advanced by treasury to be repaid over sixty-eight and a half years by annuities at a rate of 3.25%; immediate success; followed by act of 1909 obliging landlords to sell. [418]

Wyndham forced into humiliating retreat when Lord Londonderry and others repudiated his plan for a Catholic university [418] Spring 1905, Wyndham was forced to resign when Dunraven and Sir Anthony MacDonnell, a Catholic Irishman with a career in India, his undersecretary, drew up a devolution plan, which Wyndham (untruthfully) denied having seen. Devolution, said TP O’Connor, is Latin for Home Rule.

Francis Joseph Bigger, Ardrigh (demolished 1986); Presbyterian solicitor and Freemason; Sunday ‘firelight’ school, incl. uileann piper Francis ‘Da’ McPeake; romantic, mystical view of Gaelic past. Bardon cites precursor: Hardiman; Ferguson (Tain-Quest, Deirdre, Lays of Western Gael, and Congal, all called ‘somewhat overblown verse translations’); Dr William Reeves, CofI curate in Lisburn, rector of Ballymena, and bish of Down, trans. Adamnan’s life of Colum cille, used legacy of £300 to save Book of Armagh for the nation; George Sigerson, from Strabane; Sir Shane Leslie cousing of Winston Churchill, disinherited for prolific anti-Unionist writing; Roger Casement, of Ballycastle, organised feis at Cushendall, 1904, largely paid for by Bigger; Hannay, some-time exec. member of Gaelic League; Paul Henry and his brother Prof. Robt. H. Henry, who persuaded QUB to teach Gaelic; Robert Lynd and James Winder Good; Forrest Reid; Bulmer Hobson, Lisburn Quaker, founded with Bigger the Ulster Literary Theatre, 1902, and later Republican organiser; Harry Morrow, of Thompson in Tír na nOg; actor-playwright Samuel Waddell; Helen; Alice Milligan, dg. Protestant businessman in Omagh; Herbert Hughes, Methodist musicologist (all cited in Flann Campbell, 1991). Milligan joined by Ethna Carbery, dg. of veteran Fenian, to edit shortlived Shan Van Vocht; Bigger and Hughes toured Donegal collecting traditional melodies; produced Songs of Uladh with John and Joseph Campbell, 1904 (quotes account from Campbell of the composition to music by Hughes of My Lagan Love, citing Flann Campbell).

DP Moran bluntly stated what many in the island believed when he wrote that the Irish nation was Catholic and that if the Protestants refused to accept the majority culture then the only solution was partition, leaving ‘Orangemen and their friends in the north-east corner’ (George D. Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics 1868-1986, Lon 1988, p.231.) [422]

.. the full sewerag from the cloaca maxima of Anglicisation is now discharged upon us … Socialism ..’ Hierarchy’s Catholic Bulletin 1913 [423] (O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Question, 1971). [423]

THIS SECTION TREATS OF THE COMPLEMENTARITY AND FUSION OF GAELIC REVIVALISM AND CATHOLIC NATIONALISM, COMBINING OVER A LOATHING OF ANGLICISATION UNDER DIFFERENT FORMS, INCLUDING INDUSTRIALISM, COLONIALISM, PAGANISM, POPULIST JOURNALISM AND SOCIALISM.

Joseph Devlin, MP West Belfast from 1907. [423] Refounded Ancient Order of Hibernians, and a newspaper, Northern Star, which was openly anti-Protestant. [424] ‘Catholics cannot be socialists’ he once declared [429]

Denis McCullough, piano-tuner, cleaned up the Irish Republican Brotherhood, having been joined up in a slovenly swearing procedure at the backdoor of Donnelly’s pub in 1901, and was joined by Bulmer Hobson, together launching the Dungannon Club, 1905 [424]. Hobson recalled: ‘This club composed of fifty young men and boys was the most vital political organism I have ever known … without the influence of a single well-known name or any asset save the faith and enthusiasm of its members, it set itself the task of uniting protestant and Catholic irishmen to achieve the independence of Ireland’. The group attracted the attention of John Devoy who began funnelling funds towards it, leading to a take-over of the IRB in Ireland. [424]

1906 General Election gave Liberals a majority under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman without nationalist help. [425]

Augustine Birrell is ineffective with plans for a semi-devolved Irish Council, but puts through the Universities Bill creating National University and Queen University in 1908. [425]

Nov. 1910, Ulster Unionist Council formed secret committee to oversee buying of arms, secretary Mjr. Fred Crawford, founder of Young Ulster in 1892, Boer War veteran, and author a plan to kidnap Gladstone on Brighton Pier. [431]

Carson [432]; Craig [433] Kipling’s ‘Ulster 1912’, published in Morning Post: ‘The dark eleventh hour/Draws on and sees us sold … If England shall drive us forth/We shall not fall alone’ [434]

Father of Bonar Law b. Coleraine, and later Presbyterian minister there before moving to New Brunswick; Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative opposition, in close connection with Lady Theresa Londonderry, wife of the Marquess, who arranged his social life since his wife’s death [434] Bonar

Home Rule Bill introduced 11 April 1912 [435] Law promises support for unionist resistance: ‘there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities … I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’ (Spoken at Blenheim Unionist rally, July 1912 [436]

WC Trimble led volunteer unit of 200 cavalry to escort Carson to Portora Hill when he arrived at Enniskillen, 18 Sept 1912 [437]

Ulster Day, 28 Sept. 1912 [437] ‘Keep that which is committed to thy trust’, Tim. 6:20, preached Dr William McKean before Craig and Carson in Ulster Hall. [437] In all 471,414 Ulster people signed the Covenant; women signed separately, but over 30,000 more women signed than men. [438]

UVF; Lieu.Gen Sir George Richardson, veteran of Afghan Wars who had also led the final assault on Peking during the Boxer Rising, agreed to command this loyalist army, which reached 90,000 in a year, not incl. the Motor Car Corp, the Signalling and Dispatch Riders Corp, Ballymena Horse, Medical, Nursing, and other corps; rural training in Donard Castle; Castle Hume, Springhill, Shane’s Castle, and Killyleagh Castle. However, opinion was still that the UVF could not prevent Home Rule; that they would not turn on Catholics in revenge; and it was noted that the majority of Protestant men had not yet joined in Summer 1914. [439]

James B Armour of Ballymoney declared that the ‘principle of Home Rule is a Presbyterian principle’ and denounced his fellow ministers’ ‘senseless fear of Romanism’. Casement first spoke at a meeting called by Armour and Cpt. Jack White of Whitehall, Ballymena. (JRB McMinn, Liberalism in North Antrim 1900-14, Irish Hist. Studies (May 1982).

Redmond: ‘Irish nationalists can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation … The two nations theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy.’ Oct. 1913; quoted in Joyce Marlow, Captain Boycott and the Irish Question (1973, p.201) [441] At a great rally in Sackville St., Mar. 1912: ‘Trust in the old party—Home Rule next year’ [442]

Complicated amendment allowing each Ulster county to opt out for six years reluctantly accepted by Redmond. Carson says to Asquith, 22 Jan 1914: ‘we do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years’. Further: come and try conclusions with us in Ulster. on leaving Westminster: ‘I am off to Belfast’; at the station: ‘I go to my people’ [441]

Joe Devlin quietly quashes plans to form nationalist volunteers in Belfast. [441]

Pearse: ‘Personally I think an Orangeman with a rifle is much less ridiculous figure than a nationalist without a rifle’. [442]

Larkin, on the first evening of the labour strike in Dublin, founding Citizen Army: ‘If it is right and legal for the men of Ulster to arm, why should it not be right and legal for the men of Dublin to arm to protect themselves?’ [442]

MacNeill published ‘The North Began’, a reference to the Davis poem ‘The Song of the Volunteers of 1782; Hobson persuaded him to preside at a Rotunda meeting 25 Nov., founding the Irish Volunteers ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the peopl of Ireland’ and their duties ‘will be defensive and protective, and they will not contemplate either aggression or domination’. (Martin and Byrne, The Scholar Revolutionary).

Of the 30 members of the Irish Volunteer executive, 4 were IPP; 4 Ancient Order of Hibernians; 12 secrt members of IRB; and of the remaining 10, 5 would participate in the 1916 Rising.

Lord Leitrim’s abortive gun-running; Carson backs Crawford in gun-running plan: ‘Crawford, I’ll see you through this business if I have to go to prison for it’ [143]; Larne gun-running, 24-25 April 1914 [444] Howth gun-running, 26 July 1914. [445]

Kitchener agrees to form all Ulstermen in a single Division; Carson immediately orders 10,000 uniforms from Moss Brothers [449]

Redmond speaks at Woodenbridge, Wicklow calling on Volunteers to fight ‘wherever the firing line extends’ [450] Kitchener refuses to give National Volunteers a Division of their own. The Ulster Division trains at Clandeboye and Ballykinler, Co. Down, and Finner nr. Ballyshannon in Co. Donegal; marched through Belfast, 8 May 1915; disembarked at Le Havre and Bologne, first days of Oct. 1915.

NOTE: Denis McCullough, piano-tuner; member of Dungannon Club, and commandant Irish Volunteers, also president of supreme council IRB [452]

RISING 1916, 2,000 participants, 450 lives, 2,614 wounded, £3,000,000 damages. [453] CF. WWI enlisted 170,000 Irishmen, being 41% of male pop. between 10 and 44 in 1911 census, about half from Ulster; 40-50,000 died. [461]

Redmond on 1916 Rising: ‘My first feeling on hearing of this insane movement was one of horror, discouragement, almost despair.’ [453] Redmond died Mar. 1918; his son defeated Sinn Féin candidate in by-election but the threatened conscription, denouncd by Cardinal Logue as ‘an oppressive and inhuman law’, destroyed the party. [459]

Men from Armagh, Monaghan, and Cavan Ulster Volunteers, called Blacker’s Boys, returned from Thiepval Wood and Schwaben Redoubt with only 64 men out of 600 who went over the parapet [455] 5,500 Ulster Division killed or wounded in first 2 days of Somme.

Conscription, instigated by Ludendorff’s offensive towards Paris in 1918, described by Cardinal Logue as ‘an oppressive and inhuman law’ [459] Sinn Féin reaps reward for leading campaign against conscription.

Lloyd-George ousts Asquith as PM, Dec 1916 [456] LG calls Irish Convention to placate IPP, meeting at TCD, 25 July 1917. Bonar Law, chancellor of exchequer [458]

De Valera, speaking at Bessbrook in support of Dr Patrick McCartan in S Armagh by-election, Feb. 1918, described Unionists s ‘a rock in the road’ to Irish settlement and told audience that they ‘must if necessary be blasted out of their path’. [458]

Redmond dies, Mar 1918. John Dillon tells Parliament that the Govt. means to leave Ireland with nothing but ‘republican separatists and Ulster unionists’ and leads the MPs out in protest against conscription [459] Effective one day strike, 23 Apr 1918.

Tom Kettle observed that the a couple of hundred republicans killed in the 1916 Rising ‘will go down in history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down—if I go down at all—as a bloody British officer’ (Cited in George D. Boyce, The Irish Question, 1988, p.261.) [461]

March, Lord French announces existence of German plot and arrests 73 leading Sinn Féin [459]

Reform Act doubled electorate from 701,475 to 1,936,673. Irish Volunteers gained recruits in men unable to emigrate during war [461] Irish electorate more than doubled by Reform Act in 1918 to include agricultural labourers and urban workers. [461] IPP/Sinn Féin Electoral pact arranged by Cardinal Logue [462]. With 73 seats, Sinn Féin claimed to be ‘the great representative organisation of the Irish people in Irland and throughout the world’ (cited in Farrell, 1971). [462] Lloyd George PM with 520 MPs in a coalition based on Conservative-Unionist absolute majority. [46]

Note that Churchill’s ‘steeples’ speech is quoted in Liam de Paor, Divided Ulster, 1970, p.101. [465]

Woodrow Wilson, of Ulster Presbyterian extraction baffled by Europe’s ethnic complexity does not countenance requests presented on behalf of the Dail by Gavan Duffy jnr and Sean T O’Kelly for sovereignty—among other nations including Vietnam—at paris Peace Conference [465]

Bardon regards the raid by Dan Breen at Solheadbeg, Tipperary, as the start of the ‘civil war’, postponed by the Great War. [465]

Bardon characterises Canon Sheehan’s novels are romantic nationalist writing contributing to militaristic climate in Ireland [466]

Chp. 11, pp.466, gives full account of sectarian riots and outrages in N. Ireland from Jan 1920.

Sinn Féin IRA guns raids answered by formation of special security patrols, armed by UVF rifles; retreat of RIC from small stations; IRA attack on Lisbellaw, Co. Fermanagh, and ambush by L-Col George Liddle; Basil Brook takes out UVF rifles from hidingplace at Colebrooke and forms 14-man vigilante; seeks permission from Gen. Macready, comm-in-chief Ireland for recognition; refused. [470]

Carson: ‘We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin … if you [the Govt] are unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Fein, and you won’t take our help; well, then, we … will take the matter into our own hands. We will reorganise [the UVF]’, spoken at the Field, Finaghy, 12 July 1920 [471]

Unionist Council revives UVF, 25 June 1920; Wilfrid Spender, now L-Col., takes charge of re-emerging UVF for Carson, 16 July 1920. [474]

Churchill: ‘What would happen if the Protestants of the six counties were given weapons … and charged with … maintaining law and order and policing the country?’, asked at joint meeting of cabinet and Irish administration, 23 July 1920. WE Wylie legal advisor, warned of pogroms and ‘unceasing and unending civil war’. [475]

Better Government of Ireland Bill, introduced 25 Feb. 1920. Bardon remarks: ‘with only a half-dozen demoralised Irish PP MPs in the Commons, Ulster Unionists essentially got the constitutional arrangement they desired [477] … set out to get as much territory as they could without endangering the majority [478]

Having failed to prevent any part of Ireland getting Home Rule, Carson retired in favour of Craig. [479] Better Govt. Act, Royal assent 23 Dec., comming into force 1 May 1921. [479]

de Valera, Sinn Fein candidate in Co. Down, asked the ‘men and women of north-east Ulster’ to vote ‘so that there may be an end to boycott and retaliation, to partition, disunion and ruin.’ (Buckland, Irish Unionism, 1973). [479]

Craig makes journey to Dublin, meets de Valera, and recalls: after half an hour, de Valera ‘had reached the era of Brian Boru. After another half hour he had advanced to the period of some king a century or two later. By this time I was getting tired. … fortunately, a fine Kerry Blue entered the room ..’ [480] de Valera reported, ‘I must say I liked him’ (Bowman, 1982, p.47)

Collins tells Hamar Greenwood that after the Custom House fiasco of May 1920: ‘You had us dead beat. We couldn’t have lasted another three weeks’. (Longford, 1962). [481]

George V addressed Unionist MPs at opening of N. Ireland Parliament, in city hall. Logue refuses invitation. [481]

Truce, 11 July, 1921. Treaty negotiations, from 11 Oct. 1921 [482ff] Gavan Duffy raises question of detaching nationalist areas, viz Monaghan and Tyrone [483]

Signatures, 6 Dec 1921. Churchill recalled: ‘unutterably wearied Ministers faced the Irish delegation themselves in actual desperatioin, and knowing well that death stood at their elbows.’ Further, ‘Michael Collins rose looking as if he was going to shoot somebody, preferably himself.’ (Pakenham, 1935).

Art XII, the Border Commission. Churchill regretted the continuation of the Boycott: ‘It recognised and established real partition, spiritual and voluntary partition, before physical partition had been established … it did not secure the reinstatement of a single expelled Nationalist, nor the conversion of a single Unionist. It was merely a blind suicidal contribution to the general hate. (The World Crisis: the Aftermath, 1929, p.318) Eoin O’Duffy, in the north with Dan Breen to stiffen nothern units, said at a rally outside Armagh, Sept. 1921, that members ‘would have to put on the screw—the boycott. The would have to tighten the screw and,, if necessary, they would have to use the lead against them [the Unionists]’ (Farrell, 1979).

De Valera included Art XII of the treaty in his Document No 2 verbatim [486] Dail approved Treaty, 7 Jan 1922, 64 to 57. De Valera left the chamber with followers. [486]

Shooting of contingent of Specials by IRA-men in railway carriage at Clones in the Free State, while transiting from Newtownards to Enniskillen, recalled by Patrick Shea (Voices and the Sound of Drums: An irish Autobiography, Belfast 1981).

IRA take arms at RIC station, Pomeroy, Maghera, and Belcoo. [488]

Collins supplies old IRA rifles from Cork to Belfast Catholics in the belief that a pogrom was under way [489] Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Bill, enacted 7 apr 1922. Replaced by Lloyd George’s Restoration of Order in Ireland Act. [490]

Burnt houses: Shane’s Castle, nr. Lough Neagh; Crebilly Castle, nr. Ballymena; Glenmona House in Cushendun; Garron Tower on the Antrim coast; Kilclief House at Strangford; Hawethorne Hill in Armagh. Mill at Desertmartin burned and all Catholic residents driven out [491]

Invasion of Ulster at Pettigoe panicks Churchill into sending several hundreds of troops, which shell Belleek and Pettigoe; Lloyd George’s amusement at his over-reaction and relief at avoidance of large-scale bloodshed. [492]

Field Marshall Wilson shot dead on a stale order from Collins, 22 Jun 1921, London. [492]

Collins calls together northern IRA units and instils policy of non-recognition of Northern govt., passive resistance, and avoidance of direct conflict with armed forces. [493] Dail decides that a ‘peace policy should be adopted in regard to future dealings with North-East Ulster Cosgrave encourages northern pro-treaty IRA leaders to take office in south. [493]

Cosgrave’s ruthless determination expressed in execution of 77 republican prisoners. [492] De Valera, 24 May: ‘Soldiers of the Republic, Legion of the Rearguard … Military Victory must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic.’ (Longford & O’Neill, 1970). [494]

Northern costs: 303 Caths, 172 Prots, and 82 security forces killed, July 1921-July 1922; 236 killed in Belfast in early 1922, 416 in the two year period (Cath257); as many as 11,000 Catholics unjobbed, 23,000 unhoused, and 500 Catholic owned businesses destroyed. Civil War in south costs 4,000 lives, £17 million debts, and bitter legacy. [494]

Kevin O’Higgins on new govt. and conditions: ‘simply eight young men … standing amidst the ruins of one adminstration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the key-hole. No police was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of the administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.’ (De Vere White, 1948, p.83). [494]

Craig: ‘There’s a verse in the Bible that says Czecho-Slovakia and Ulster are born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards’ (Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, ed. Middlemass) [495]

Bonaparte Wyse, permanent secretary, descended from Lucien brother of Napoleon I, unique as Irish Catholic holding high civil service office in early years of N Ireland. Treated his staff to readings from Greek and returned to Dublin at week-ends. [497]

Following removal of Union Jack from Enniskilllen courthouse by Thomas Corrigan, 21 local authorities incl. Newry, Armagh, Strabane, Cookstown, Downpatrick, Magherafelt, and Keady and county councils of Tyrone and Fermanagh dissolved and handed to commissioners [500]

Campaign for abolition of PR, leads Collins to say to Churchill: ‘Do you not see … the true meaning of all this?’, which was ‘to oust the Catholic and Nationalist people of the Six counties from their rightful share in local administration’ and ‘to paint the Counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh with a deep Orange tint’ (Buckland, The Factory of Grievances, 1979). Abolition of PR Bill passed 5 July 1922; royal assent, 11 sept. 1922.

Bardon comments: the deep divisions in Ulster society ensured that a return to the x-system of voting meant that in most seats there were no contests because the outcome was so predictable … elimination of Labour complete ossification of N. Ireland’s political life. [501]

Charles S H Vane-Tempest, 7th marquess of L’Derry, became minister of education; attempt to introduce non-sectarian primary education in line with Govt of Ireland Act (making illegal ‘either directly or indirectly to establish or endow any religion’ or set religious tests for teachers’). Craig capitulated to Protestant pressure and included ‘simple Bible instruction’ which was unacceptible to Catholics as being tantamount to ‘the interpretation of sacred Scriptures by private judgement’ [503-04] Northern Ireland attorney gen. John MacDermott to declare, in 1945, the 1930 Education Act broke the terms of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. Catholic clergy did not object since it left them in control of Catholic schools, though the level of state support was lower than otherwise. Bardon: There is no dooubt that Westminster had allowed the Unionist government with its unassailable majorit to discriminate against Catholics in education provision. [505]

Border Commission; first Commissioner, Kevin O’Shiel, founds North Eastern Boundary Committee; Army Mutiny, 1924; Craig refuses to created Commissioner, May 1924; Richard Feetham of S. African Supreme Court appt’d by Westminster Govt for N. Ireland, and JR Fisher Northern Whig ed. appt’d by MacDonald; [506] terms of Act, Border Clause XII: to set border ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as it may be compatile with economic and geographical conditions, the boundaries of Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’ [506, 507]

MacNeill only Commissioner without legal training; remarkably inept; fails to press for appt. of Shiel to Commission secretariat; indicated that he would sign agreement for the sake of peace. [507]

Cosgrave admits ‘half-truth’ of ‘taunt of having sold Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland’ (Laffan, 1983) [509]

Joseph Devlin enters Stormont for W Belfast: ‘I could never consent to be the leader of a Catholic Party and I never will consent’ [512]

Nationalist propaganda in N Ireland Catholic newspaper Irish News typified in Brian Moore, Emperor of Ice-Cream: ‘A Jewish name discovered in an account of a financial transaction, a Franco Prussian victory over the godless Reds, a hint of British perfidy in international affairs, an Irish triumph on the sports field, an evidence of Protestant bigotry, a discovery of Ulster governmental corruption.’ (1987, p.36) [COPIED RX]

James B Armour: ‘Because they had yelled about No Home rule for a generation they were compelled to take a form of Home Rule that the devil himself could not have imagined.’ [514]

Difficult of financing services outlined in Better Govt. of Ireland Act, and reluctance of conservative conservative Northerners to pay higher rates; new state born in unremitting economic depression [515]; philosophy of managing opposed to ‘sheltered men and dole lifters’ [523]

Sir Samuel Kelly, the leading coal-merchant and noted UVF gunrunner; attempt to raise coal at Coalisland eventually abandoned [523]

Cabinet of Craig: Andrews, Bates, Pollock, Milne Barbour, and Spender.

Vincent de Paul dispenses £112,000 and helps 12 times as many of the poor that Poor Law Guardians; Board of Guardians swept away by Chamberlain, 1928 [525]

Ships launched: Warwick Castle; Winchester Castle; Highland Hope, Highland Princess. [526]

Unemployed Workers Committee (1929); nonsectarian riots against police;

Sam McAughtry gives account of children being sent to bakery for stale buns from over the weekend, a pillowcase-ful for a tanner, in The Sinking of the Kenbane Head (1977), p.26. [530]; malnutrition, rickets and deformation reported; high rate of death in childbirth; [531] high tuberculosis rate; slums.

calls for housing reform from Devlin, Cahir Healy, and Jack Beattie rambling and ill-informed [533]

Fianna Fail enters government, 9 Mar 1932; called by Lemass a ‘slightly constitutional party’ [535] Dev: ‘we have heard of frightful things that would happen as soon as the Fianna Fail government came to power; we have seen no evidence of these things’ (Longford and O’Neill, 1970, p.275). [535]

John Maynard Keynes describes deprivation of Northern farmers as ‘almost unbelievable’

Cardinal McRory:’The Protestant Church in Ireland—and the same is true of the Protestant Church anywhere else—is not only not the rightful representative of the early Irish Church, but it is not even a part of the Church of Christ’ (in Dennis Kennedy, Widening Attitudes &c, 1988.) [536]

De Valera to remove oath of fidelity to Crown from Irish constitution and withhold payment of land act annuities; 12 July 1932, Westminster imposed 20% duty on Irish meat and dairy imports; Irish deficit increased fivefold [536]

Dev tells News Chronicle that the govt. could ‘only protest’ about the Border, and that there were ‘no effective steps that we can take to abolish the Boundary. Force is out of the question.’ Takes view that Britain deliberately fomented tension in N Ireland and that the Border was the result. [536-37] Eucharist Congress, June 1932.

Sir Basil Brooke at Newtownbutler speaks of plot and appeals to Loyalists to employ only ‘Protestant lads and lassies’. [538] Calls himself an Orangeman first and points out that the South is a Catholic state [538]

Bardon: Southern politicians assumed that leaders in the North were responsible for dividing the people there but the roots of sectarianism ran deep in Northern Ireland society. While they can be condemned for failing to give a positive lead in promoting reconciliation, such men were merely reflecting views very widely held. [539]

Belfast Riots, 1935 [539ff]

De Valera’s Constitution; articles 2&3; opposed by JJ McElligott; opposed by Frank MacDermot, a founder of the new conservative party Fine Gael, since ‘it offers no basis for union with the north and contains various provisions tending to prolong partition’. (Bowman, 1982, p.155). [543]

Craigavon: ‘the government of the south is carried along lines which I presume are very suitable to the majority … [543]

Anglo-Eire agreement signed 25 Apr 1938 hands over Treaty ports and settles annuities debts of £100 million for £10 million, and retained Irish right to protectionism unilaterally [545]

WARTIME ULSTER [552]

MacNiece, in ‘Neutrality’: ‘But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks/A continent, close, dark, as archetypal as sin,/While to the west off your own shores the mackerel/Are fat—on the flesh of your kin.’ [557]

De Valera: ‘with our history, with our experience of the last war, and with part of our country still severed from us, we felt that we had no other decision and no other policy was possible.’ (in Joseph T. Carroll, Ireland inthe War Years 1939-45, 1975, p.12) [557]

Churchill’s cabinet agrees that ‘there should be a declaration on a United Ireland in principle … to become a belligerent on the side of the Allies’, shocked Craigavon; but de Valera rejects it. [559]

Harold Wilson visits Belfast in 1940 on behalf of Manpower Requirements committee [562] airraid of 7-8 Apr. 1941; raid of 15-16 Apr. 1941 [564ff]; raid of 4 May 1941 [569ff]; arrival and Americans [574ff]; Andrews as premier; Andres overthrown, Apr. 1943 [577]; Craigavon, 1940: ‘We are the King’s men, and we shall be with you to the end’ [581]

IRA leader Sean McCaughey [582]; Arrival of Americans drew from De Valera protest against foreign occupation of Irish soil galvanised new IRA campaign; execution of Tom Williams, IRA; arrest of Hugh McAteer; [582]; at death of Hitler, De Valera calls at Embassy to ‘express condolence’ [583]; VE day in Dublin marked by burning of Union Jack by Charles Haughey when TCD students ran up Allied flags and threw burning tricolour in street [585]

Churchill:’This was indeed a deadly moment in our life and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish for ever from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them though at times it would have been quite an easy and quite natural, and we left the Dublin Government to frolic with the Germans and latter with the Japanese representatives to their hearts’ content.’ (Carroll, 1975, p.163) [585]

Bardon lays heavy emphasis on the scale of the destruction wrought by the air-raids on Belfast, and the poor quality of housing revealed, but also on the glimmer of cross-border help the moment aroused.

CHP 13: THE QUIET YEARS

As the Cold war set in, N. Ireland assumed an apparently important strategic role for Nato. [588] No advantage was taken of the long period of internal peaace and isolation of the IRA to remedy obvious wrongs and soothe intercommunal resentment still stubbornly alive, especially where pockets of disadvangtage were dangerously concentrated. [588]

Clem Atlee’s landslide Labour victory and reforms [589]

William Grant, minister, established Northern Ireland Housing Trust, 1945 [592]

EDUCATIONAL REFORM; opposed by Catholic Church in Lenten pastorals, Card. MacRory seeing it as ‘unjust treatment of a large portion of the population on account of their religious convictions’, and Dr Mageean fearing ‘from bitter experience. what had happened in other countries when the state took control of youth’. Hall-Thompson proposed 50% increase benefits to voluntary schools incl. free meals, milk, and books for necessitous. The bishops saw it all as ‘an instalment to the complete transfer of our schools’ to the state system. [594] Meanwhile Protestant were also closing ranks.

Traditional grammar schools preserve their identity intact, through fee-paying, where British eleven-plus re-divided classes [595]

Mater Hospital Belfast would not come under state control because Govt. insisted on complete control through Hosp. Authority and refused to preserve its religious ethos. [597] Financed itself by YP pools. [597]

Health Act of 1947 involving education of women ‘in regard to motherhood’ and health inspection in schools denounced by Catholic clergy as being ‘entirely and directly contrary to Catholic teaching on the rights of the family’. Ulster protestants convinced of clerical obscurantism of state they were even more determined not to join. [598]

Sir John Maffey, ambassador to Dublin. In May 1946, de Valera remarked to him that ‘if he were a young man in Northern Ireland, he felt he would be giving his life to fight the existing order of things.’ De Valera privately proposed to David Gray, the US minister to Ireland, that the northern unionists could be sent to Britain and the Irish in Britain returned to a reunited Ireland. Gray considered this as difficult as expelling New Englanders from Massachusetts (Cited in Bowman, 1982). [599]

Dublin Coalition with John A Cosgrove, Fine Gael, andSean MacBride, Clann na Poblachta. Cosgrove declares Republic, 7 Sept. 1948, in Canada. Atlee confirms: ‘the view that no change should be made in th constitutional status of N. Ireland without N. Ireland’s free agreement’. Dail Passed Republic of Ireland Bill, 1948; N. Ireland given ‘sympathetic hearing’ at height of Cold War. [600]

Ireland Act of June 1949: ‘in no event will Northern Ireland or any part thereof cease to be part of his Majesty’s dominions and of the United Kingdom without the consent of the parliament of Northern Ireland’ [601]

De Valera in despair, would have preferred to keep dominion status as a bridge with the Unionists: it made him ‘desperate’ to see border nationalists being forced to ‘lie under the heel of the Ascendancy in the neighbourhood of Belfast’. [[601] Bardon notes that there is no evidence that Unionists took comfort from External Relations Act. [602]

Mother and Child: in the opinion of the bishops the measures were ‘in direct opposition to the right of the family … If adopted in law they would constitute a ready-made instrument for totalitarian aggression.’ Browne received letter from McQuaid: ‘I may not approve of the Mother and Child Service, as it is proposed by you to implement the Scheme.’ On Brown’s resignation, the Irish Times declared: ‘it would seem that the Roman Catholic Church is the effective govt. of this country’ [603]

Anti-Partition League, 601-03.

In 1951, O’Faolain wrote that Ireland had been ‘snoring gently behind the Green Curtain that we have been rigging up for the last thirty years—Thought-proof, World-proof, Life-proof’. (Bowman, 1982)

John D’Alton, Archbishop of Armagh, describes welfare state as ‘a milder form of totalitarianism’

IRA campaign: Operation Harvest, 1954, begins with raid on Gough Barracks. IRA 12 Dec. IRA announces intention of fighting for ‘an independent united democratic Irish Republic. For this we shall fight until the invader is driven from our soil and victory is ours.’ [606]. Sir Anthony Eden, then involved in Suez, pledges ‘safety for N. Ireland and its inhabitants’.

De Valera told Bandon crowd that ‘there was no single day he was in office that the idea of a united Ireland was not fully before his mind’; but said on BBC TV:’you always have people who think that force ought to be used. My own view is that the peaceful line of approach is best, in fact, the only one.’ De Valera introduced internment, 4 July 1957.[607]

In 1953, the nationalists in NI declared that they ‘hereby repudiate all claims now made or to be made in the future by or on behalf of the British Crown and Government to jurisdiction over any portion of the land of Ireland or of her territorial seas.’ [608]

Midgley, minister of education, at Portadown:’all the minority are traitors and have always been traitors to the govt. of N. Ireland.’ [609]

No doubt a sizeable proportion of Catholics would never have been reconciled to the political status quo but the tragedy was that Brookeborough seemed incapable of recognising the benefits of reconciling any of the minority to the regime. [611]

KS Isles and Norman Cuthbert, An Economic Survey of Northern Ireland (1957) [617] Chemstrand Acrilin plant, Coleraine, 1950.

FF victory 1957 election; de Valera let pragmatic Lemass begin to implement Whitaker plan, even though abandoning ideal of self-sufficiency. [619]

The Indivisible Island by Frank Gallagher was a traditional nationalist tract against partitiotn, but presented closely argued critique supported by evidence of unequal treatment of Catholics in NI. [621]

Chp. 14: TERENCE O’NEILL, 1963.

Siting of university at Coleraine determined by Lockwoord committee, which had no Catholics. John Hume organises University for Derry Campaign [625]

O’Neill meets Lemass: ‘a roadblock has been removed’, 1965. [628-30]

4 out of 5 Eire children born between 1931 and 1941 left the country; net emigration fell from 43,000 in 1956-1961 to 16,000 in 1961-1966. [629]

Paisley on Pope John XXIII: ‘This Romish man of sin is now in Hell’ [631]

Nationalist party agrees to become official opposition, Feb. 1965. [633]

Emergence of Paisley in demonstrations against Romanist tendencies connected with controversy of naming Lagan bridge after Eliz. rather than Carson [634]

UVF founded; UVF member sets fire to house killing elderly Protestant Mary Gould by accident. Three Catholics shot by UVF men, one of whom (Hugh McClean) declares ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisle or decided to follow him’. Paisley hounds O’Neill. [635]

Discrimination in employment was a natural product of a divided community and Catholics and Protestants discriminated with equal zeal, but for historical reasons Catholics were bound to be at a disadvantage in the game [641]

John Hewitt:’You coasted along,/And all the time, though you never noticed,/the old lies festered;/the ignorant became more thoroughly infected;/there were gains, of course;/you never saw any go barefoot.’ (The Coasters). [644]

Hume: ‘Weak opposition leads to corrupt government. Nationalists in opposition have been in no way constructive. They have—quite rightly—been loud in their demands for rights, but they have remained silent and inactive about their duties. In 40 years of opposition they have no produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economics plane to the development of Northern Ireland. … leadership has been comfortable leadership of flags and slogans. Easy no doubt, but irresponsible … It is this lack of positive contribution and the apparent lack of interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe that the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and therefore unfit to rule.’ Dismissed nationalist argument that Britain was the only obstacle to reunification, and called Catholics to ‘face realistic fact that a united Ireland, if it is to come, and if violence rightly is to be discounted, must come about by evolution, ie by the will of the Northern majority.’ (Article in Irish Times, May 1964; Cited in Barry White, John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles (Belfast 1984). [649]

Hume with Fr Mulvey and others founded Derry Housing Association [649]

Loyalists refused to see civil rights movt. as non-sectarian [653]

Joe Lee on ‘the dearth of atheist settlements’; loyalist refuse to see civil rights as non-sectarian [653]

Burntollet; Belfast-Derry march; Battle of Bogside, 12-14 Aug 1969 [666] 43,000 milkbottles destroyed in Belfast riots. Troops mobilised in Belfast 15 Aug. 1969

Bardon appears to regard Burntollet as illjudged: ‘the fateful decision, as he calls it, explained by Bernadette Devlin as attempt ‘to break the truce, to relaunch civil rights movement as a mass movement and to show people that O’Neill was, in fact, offering them nothing’ [665]

On Jack Lynch: he correctly assessed southern public opinion: the republic should stay out of the North’s imbroglio and yet something ought be done to bring relief to northern Catholics. [676] On May 6 1970 Lynch dismissed Haughey and Blaney from his govt. and on 28 May both men were charged with conspiracy to smuggle arms. [677] Haughey authorised grant of £100,000 to Red Cross, of which £30,000 went to import arms for IRA [677]

Reggie Maudling, Home Secretary, on visiting NI: ‘what a bloody awful country’ [679]

Internment, 4.00-7.30 a.m. 9 Aug 1971; 342 men siezed; Faulkner declares that his govt. is ‘quite simply at war with the terrorist’. [682]

Bloody Sunday, 30 Jan 1972; 108 rounds fired, injuring 13, incl. one woman, and killing 13, seven under 19 years of age. Lord Widgery concluded that some of the shooting ‘bordered on the reckless’. Others thought he paras ran amok. [687-88] Heath notifies Faulkner of plans to transfer security to Westminster; Faulkner and colleagues resign; prorogation of Stormont, and appt. of William Whitelaw as secretary of State for N. Ireland. [686-89]

Cardinal William Conway: ‘who wanted to bomb a million Protestants into a United Ireland?’ [685]

Until the end of the 80s there was a widespread tendency to regard the Ulster ‘problem’ as being a curious and unique historical survival … As Armenians and Azeris, and Serbs and Croats, slaughtered each other, it was plain they were impelled by atavistic urges remarkable parallel to those fuelling the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Bardon quotes adviser to Henry VIII ‘twyching the warre in Ireland, is lyke allwaye to contynue, withoute Godd sett in mennes brestes to fynde some newe remedye, that never was founde before.’ (Calendar of State Papers).

On reference only to White’s Interpreting Northern Ireland (1990), at [713]

Inability of constitutional politicians to find common ground could only encourage IRA to sustain and widen its campaign [722]

Kenneth Newman, from London Met. becomes senior dep. chf. constable RUC 1973 [724-25]

PEACE PEOPLE [727] Shankill Butchers [728] Murphy shot dead by IRA on information of UVF; Mervyn Rees and Roy Mason; Diplock courts [730] Edw. Kennedy calls for withdrawal of British troops, 20 Oct 1971 [731] Gadaffi’s aid and NORAID [731-32] La Mon atrocity [733] Warrenpoint [737]

Gerry Fitt resigns, Aug 1979: ‘nationalism has been a political concept in Ireland over many, many years but I suggest that it has never brought peace to the people of the six counties. I for one have never been a nationalist to the total exclusion of my socialist ideals.’ [739]

Bobby Sands last comm, Mar 1981, birthday request to ‘get me one miserly book and try to leave it in:the Poems of Ethna Carberry—cissy. That’s really all I want, last request as they say. Some ask for cigarettes, others for blindfolds, yer man asks for Poetry.’ [743]

Fitzgerald, premier since June 1981, encourages Prior to find internal solution [747] Fitt defeated by Gerry Adams in West Belfast [749]

May 1983: New Ireland Forum essentially a conference of 90 p.c. nationalists on the island [750]

Anglo-Irish agreement, Hillsborough [Nov. 1985] [755] Harold McCusker’s alienation [757]

John Darby of Conflict Studies at Coleraine points out that ‘the combatants permanently inhabit the same battlefield’ so that ‘it is not possible to terminate hostilities by withdrawing behind national frontiers … as a consequence, inter-community conflict is oftn characterised by internecine viciousness rather than the more impassive slaughter of wars’ [770]

Constitutional initiative of Gerry Adams and Morrison at Dublin Mansion House results in walk out for Ó Bradaigh and Ó Connaill [771]

Adams Guardian article, Mar 1987, claims that republicans too have vested interest in peace [772]

Enniskillen [775] Bono speaks out against NORAID during ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ when news of Enniskillen came through [777]

Daniel McCann, Mairead Farrell, and Sean Savage, on the Rock [778] Michael Stone attacks the funeral; at funeral of Kevin Brady, one of Stone’s victims, signalsmen Howes and Wood mobbed and killed [779] Stalker affair [780] Patrick Mayhew announces that the officers charged by Stalker would not be prosecuted for reasons of national security [781] Britannia ‘waives the rules’ (McKittrick) [781]

THE INDEPENDENT KEYNESIAN STATE OF N. IRELAND; Thatcher draws back from implementing Thatcherism [781-89]

HOUSING [789-93] ECONOMICS: Poverty remained a persistent problem in spite of subventions and NI was at the top of the UK lit of regions in the accepted indicators of privation [795] [Un]EQUAL EMPLOYMENT Catholic males 2.6 times as likely to be unemployed [796] emigrating school grads [797] 1 in 10 of all Protestant men in security force work; Fair Employment Agency replaced by FE Commission, 1989

University of Ulster by amalgamation [802]

Musgrave Park Hospital 2 Nov 1991 [812]; 2,000 Glengall St., Europa and Opera, 2 Dec. [813]; Aughnacloy army checkpoint, 29 Dec 1991; Karl construction minius Teebane Cross, nr. Cookstown 17 Jan., 7 dead [814]; Adrian Guelke [815]; Sean Graham betting shop, 5 Feb 1992, 5 dead, 7 wounded; Lurgan centre, 5 March 1992; London Baltic Exchange, 10 Fri Mar 1992, d. 15 Danielle Carter, IRA blame British ‘illegal occupation of N Irl; [818]

Revival and Boom: Ulster safer than American cities [819] day trippers from the Republic spent £120 in NI, 1984; Paddy Doherty struck deal with army allowing Bogside to run its own affairs for 9 weeks in 1969, 10 year regeneration campaign culminating in impact ‘92; Belfast council, ‘a bettier frozen little tableau’ (David KcKittrick) [820]

Rhonda Paisley declares the Irish language ‘drips with their bloodthirsty saliva’ [821] Nigel Dodd, reelected mayor, refused to meet Mary Robinson, 3 Feb 1992;

experiment in reconciliation begins with Michael McLoughlin’s ejection from Dungannon Council for protesting proportion of Catholics, 1986, and subsequent formation of peace committee with support of Ken Magennis, at risk, in 1988; local government voters support new consensus, resulting in steady marginalisation of extreme voices up to 1992; vote to declare Dungannon ‘violence free zone’ [822] Down District Council rotate chairmen, Unionist Sam Osborne elected 1 June, 1992; Derry City Council elects William Hay, DUP, 6th unionist since 1973; failed by one vote in Fermanagh, and failed completely in Belfast [823]

Absence of cardboard city due to high quality of public housing and danger of victimisation by paramilitaries [824] ghettos and joyriders, risks.

Comparison to Sarajevo at ‘eye of Balkan storm’ [826]

NUTSHELL: John Hume, ‘we are a deeply divided people’. Gerry Adams: the only barrier to peace was the continued British occupation. Padraig O’Malley, Dáil: ‘the relationship between the two communities within Northern Ireland must be addressed before the North-South relationship can be resolved’ [828]

cost of unification: cost of NI born by Irish would be £570, more than 15 times higher than present rate per capita in UK. [89].

the need to break the political deadlock … more urgent … // perceptible shift in attitude … widely accepted solution still remote [but] no longr quite so inconceivable. [END 830]