Madam, – I hesitate to take issue with Dr Garret FitzGerald again on the part played by southern Irish Protestants in Ireland after 1922, but his assertion (Opinion, October 16th) that they opted out of participation in the new State “. . . despite the disproportionate role accorded to them initially in the Senate . . .” is rather disingenuous. They were hardly given a choice. The Senate positions were little more than tokenism, heavily outweighed by a virulent proselytising and prescriptive Catholic nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s that saw little value in anything else.
The fact that politicians occasionally stood up to bishops is really another form of tokenism. The substance is rather more disturbing. Think of the banning of divorce and contraception, the Intoxicating Liquor Act, the stultifying censorship, the imposition of compulsory Irish. Remember the Tilson case, the Mayo librarian affair, Fethard-on-Sea? Do not forget the Army at the Eucharistic Congress, neutrality, the Angelus on Radio Éireann, the appallingly biased history primers, the Cabinet skulking outside St Patrick’s Cathedral at Douglas Hyde’s funeral, the non-recognition of those who fought against the Nazi tyranny.
No, the point surely is not that Protestants opted out: the miracle is perhaps that so many were still willing to stay engaged in the face of, in the most charitable interpretation, hostile indifference. And I would take issue with his notion of blaming “alien rule” for a deficit of civic responsibility among Catholics (unless, of course, he means the Roman authorities . . .).
Despite all this, it seems unfortunately correct to ascribe a somewhat greater sense of civitas to southern Irish Protestants over their Roman Catholic fellow-citizens. The Republic of Ireland European Values Study of 1999-2000 showed that, of the seven “values” measured, Protestants were less lax on five of them, confirming, in Hayes’s and Fahey’s words (The Republic of Ireland: is integration complete?) that Irish Protestants “. . . particularly in the realm of civic morality . . . are closer to the ideal of the model citizen than are Catholics”.
Nevertheless, we should not see Irish Protestants entirely through spectacles of the rose-tinted variety. Protestants are politically unengaged. They may not want to participate. The narrative often conveniently wishes away southern Protestant conservatism and its uncritical acceptance of the then social and economic orthodoxies (the Bethany Home issue, now emerging, is surely evidence of this). Overall, it is probably difficult to say that the State would have been significantly different or better had they been enabled, or had wished, to play a greater role in its governance. – Yours, etc,