Buried Lives review: Are the Protestants of Southern Ireland really under siege?

Buried Lives: The Protestants of Southern Ireland

Author: Robin Bury

ISBN-13: 978-1845888800

Publisher: The History Press

Guideline Price: €20

In 1921 the Church of Ireland Gazette declared of Irish Protestants that "we are Irish and Ireland is our home". In 1949 The Irish Times urged its (still largely Protestant) readership to be "unconditionally loyal" to the fledgling Republic. On the eve of the general synod of the Church of Ireland in 1963 Bishop Arthur Butler's sermon was entitled "A confident minority" – with no question mark. The historian RB McDowell declared in 1997 that, in relation to the 1919-23 period, "hardships sustained by the southern loyalists were on the whole not excessively severe nor long-lasting".

Robin Bury’s vision of southern Irish Protestants is somewhat different. For him they form a minority that is “quiescent”, “insignificant”, “silent, even silenced”, “a former people” suffering “cultural and constitutional discrimination”, “a once-confident people . . . in effect laid low”. The glass is invariably half-empty; even the advantages of being left alone are seldom appreciated. As Sean O’Faolain drily remarked in 1944, it was a fate “which many Catholics sometimes envy”.

In this Bury is in a long line of decay-and- decline historians, sociologists and writers. Bathos and self-pity are their watchwords as they seek, first, to portray southern Irish Protestants as perpetually under siege within a self-made laager and, second, to interpret the bad things that happen to individuals and families as the effects of malign outside forces ranged against the tribe. Daithí Ó Corráin's important 2006 book, Rendering to God and Caesar, which almost entirely contradicts Bury's thesis, does not feature in the bibliography.

Different dynamic

This reviewer comes from the southern Church of Ireland tradition. Unlike Bury, however, he grew up in the salubrious Dublin suburb of Dalkey, where Protestants were not exactly thin on the ground. But, like Bury, he also lived in Cork, where the dynamic was different. If Protestants felt “outside the glow”, in Heather Crawford’s phrase, that was not necessarily a negative. Some of us rather gloried in our outsiderness; we were often deferred to, as exotics with a fresh perspective on things – and my recollection is that we had Catholic friends (and girlfriends) with whom we got on well. I have no memories of serious negative discrimination. Yet, accepting that this is a particular experience, I would not presume to apply it to the entire Protestant community.

Here and there, indeed, Bury recognises that there are other stories to be told, other angles to be explored. In discussing attacks on Protestants in 1921 he notes that they were not the only outsiders targeted: tramps, vagrants and Redmondites were also in the cross hairs of republican guns. In a long description of the Bandon Valley massacre, in April 1922, his emphasis is on attack and flight, but he does acknowledge that although between 100 and 200 Protestants fled from Cork after the killings, some eventually returned. While excoriating compulsory Irish and (rightly) demonstrating that most Irish Protestants thought it a nonsense, he mentions, in contrast, that two Anglican archbishops of Dublin, George Otto Simms and Donald Caird, were language enthusiasts. He admits sometimes that the narrative of almost relentless marginalisation and intolerance is overdramatised.

Bury makes great play of perceived discrimination against Protestants, almost up to the present. He devotes much space to mixed-marriage child-custody cases, such as Tilson (1950) and Fethard-on-Sea (1957). There is an entire chapter on the proposal for, and subsequent cancellation of, an Orange parade in Dublin in 2000. He is particularly critical of the Church of Ireland role in that controversy. However, why so much attention is given to this is puzzling; apart from the Border counties, Orangeism in the Republic has about as much relevance to the vast majority of Protestants as a bicycle has for a fish. Freemasonry is probably more significant, yet it is barely mentioned. In an epilogue Bury examines Protestant reaction to the 1916 rebellion, pointing out that, unsurprisingly, prominent Protestants universally condemned it at the time – and that some still do. Those opinions may differ in quantum, but they were (and are) found on the Catholic side too. He goes on to criticise the Church of Ireland’s inability to hold services on Easter Sunday 2016 in Dublin city because of the centenary celebrations. Yet, in a bureaucratic world, that was as much about traffic control and “health and safety” issues as anything else.

Central weakness

The emphasis placed on these episodes illustrates the central weaknesses of Bury’s approach: selectivity and ascribing of motive. The Tilson case captures both. Ostensibly about

Ne temere

, it was perhaps as much to do with money as religion; and its principal claim to fame was its rarity. To find a parallel would be to hark back to the McCann case in Belfast in 1910. Presumably, it will be another 100 years before Protestant churches in Dublin city centre will again have to close because of a centenary commemoration. The boycott at Fethard has not, to my knowledge, been replicated.

This study would have benefited from reference to Tim Wilson’s comparative work on the German minority in Poland and southern Irish Protestants in 1918-23. Wilson’s view is that southern Protestants were, in the end, successfully assimilated. German communities in Poland were ultimately totally destroyed. Southern Irish Protestantism, considering its “dominant minority” status and political proclivities, got off lightly. One reason is that the state was acutely conscious of the economic and reputational damage that mass departure would cause. Consequently, it wrapped its Protestant citizens in cotton wool.

The murders and burnings between 1919 and 1923 were noteworthy because they were never repeated, and they were certainly no Armenian-Christian persecution by Turks, as Bury admits. The artefacts of purely religious difference – churches, parish centres, graveyards – remained largely untouched.

The book would have benefited from more assiduous proofreading. Obvious errors in minor matters always raise the question of larger mistakes that might have slipped through. As instances: on the first page of the book proper, the name of the pottery family at Shanagarry is Pearce, not Pierce; the earl of Midleton was St John Brodrick, not Broderick; and the Anglo-Irish novelist was Somerville, not Sommerville. There’s also a superfluous “m” in Bishop Brendan Comiskey’s name; Mary Lou is McDonald, not McDonnell; and it’s the Ancient Order of Hibernians, not Hibernia.

But the wealth of detail, in a book well presented by the History Press, is valuable. It is engagingly written, and obviously from the heart (Bury is a leading light of the Reform Group, which advocates Ireland rejoining the Commonwealth). A particularly refreshing and thought-provoking discussion of the mathematics of the Protestant “exodus” between 1911 and 1926 is worthy of an article on its own.

At the end, though, the book presents a somewhat dystopian view of the decline of a community that is contradicted by Protestantism’s continuing stubborn survival and by its determination to be a moral force and “confident minority” in Ireland.

Ian d'Alton is coediting a book of essays, to be published by Cork University Press, on the southern Protestant accommodation with Ireland between the 1920s and the 1960s