Originally published last year and now available in paperback, ‘Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920’ by Professor Edward Burke offers interesting insights into the path followed by Monaghan, Cavan, and Donegal Protestants after partition.
Since the Ulster Plantation, Protestants in all nine of Ulster’s counties had for the most part embraced one unifying conception of Protestant Ulster’s identity.
Due to unionist fears of Catholics eventually becoming a majority in the province – and the unwillingness of unionist leaders to treat the other Ulster tribe with some level of consideration – a decision was taken to demand the partitioning of both nation and province.
To preserve the Red Hand and maintain its grasp on power, several of its fingers were cut off. Around 70,000 Ulster Protestants were thus abandoned by their Orange brethren.
In surveying the evidence about what happened and how Protestants within the ‘lost counties’ felt, the UCD Professor writes that these Protestants experienced “a sense of separation from the new Irish state” for a surprisingly long period, while adding that Protestants from the three counties who relocated to Northern Ireland “played a disproportionate (relative to population) and important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.”
Far from being easily absorbed by the Irish state, Burke shows that there was considerable Protestant resistance to the changes which occurred.
The Farney County looms large here, and the geography of Ulster shows why. During the Troubles, Monaghan was a thorn in the side of the security services, with the Provisional IRA’s most deadly units in the South Armagh and East Tyrone Brigades constantly using the county as a base of operations.
A quarter of Monaghan’s people were Protestant in 1911. A year earlier, 95% of eligible Protestant voters had supported the unionist candidate in the North Monaghan constituency. A year later, more than 83% of eligible Protestants in Monaghan signed the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant.
One of the main contributions which Burke makes here is showing just how strongly Monaghan Protestants resisted the IRA during the War of Independence.
Whereas in other parts of the country, arms raids on private homes by IRA volunteers were met with compliance, in Monaghan, such activities often resulted in gun battles.
A ‘Protestant Defence Association’ was established in 1920 and its members took direct and sometimes lethal action against the Monaghan IRA Brigade led by Eoin O’Duffy.
The bad memories of this low-level civil war were long-lasting for both sides; when Belfast Catholics were subjected to sectarian attacks in 1935, a number of Protestant-owned Clones businesses were quickly torched in response.
Being smaller in number and more dispersed, Cavan and Donegal Protestants were quieter in their opposition to Ireland’s separation from the United Kingdom, yet the same loyalties were obviously felt.
When the Donegal border village of Pettigo was temporarily occupied by British troops in 1922, a delegation of local Protestants travelled to Belfast to ask that it remain under British rule permanently. In the following years, many Pettigo Protestants enrolled their children in schools on the other side of the border so that they could avoid learning Irish.
In a democratic state, the mood of various communities can be observed from studying the ballot boxes.
Here again, Burke shows how long unionist views persisted. In Donegal East, the Independent Deputy William Sheldon was elected on many occasions in the 1940s and 1950s, and was a key critic of the decision to leave the Commonwealth. In Monaghan, Alexander Haslett’s background in the Ulster Volunteer Force was no impediment to him being elected as a TD in the 1920s and 1930s.
More darkly, Burke’s examination of the track record of three-county loyalist radicals within Northern Ireland shows just how destructive nostalgia for a lost homeplace can be.
Some of the most notorious loyalist killers were, in fact, Protestants from the Republic.
Generations of Belfast Catholics came to despise the memory of RUC District Inspector John Dixon, who presided over the sectarian pogroms against Catholics in the early 1920s, but few know that Dixon came from Ballyjamesduff in Cavan.
The murderous Glenanne Gang had a Monaghan member, the RUC officer John Weir. The Ulster Defence Association Brigadier Andy Robinson was from Donegal.
Away from paramilitarism, arguably the most strident Ulster unionist in recent years has been the leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice, Jim Allister MP. His Monaghan parents left their home not long before he was born, as Allister Senior “felt the noose was tightening.”
During the Troubles, Protestants in the three counties were sometimes the victims of false suggestions that they were loyal to Britain, such as when Fine Gael’s Billy Fox was called a ‘B Special’ in the Dáil – Fox would later be murdered by the Provisional IRA.
A member of the Clones Urban Council probably spoke for many local Catholics when he said during a council meeting in 1971 that the “Protestants here would still rather pay their taxes to the Queen.”
However hurtful the councillor’s words were, this book shows that many Protestants in Monaghan and elsewhere did retain an affection for Britain and its monarchy which Catholic Irishmen could not understand.
A case-in-point is police recruitment. A surprisingly large number of southern Protestants enlisted in the RUC, and a newspaper report from 1987 cited here shows that the village of Drumkeen in Donegal had 12 local men serving as RUC constables. Conversely, Protestants were remarkably unlikely to join the Gardaí in this time period.
What does all this mean?
When pondering the possibility of Irish reunification, we need to be aware of the scale of the challenge in adding more than 820,000 Ulster Protestants (a figure which does not include the many people of no religion, who mainly come from unionist backgrounds) to the national community, including many who are ardently opposed to the idea, and including many areas where the overwhelming majority of the population is Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist.
What happened a century ago is in no way a comparable challenge.
According to the census of 1911, Protestants accounted for 21.3% of the overall population of the three Ulster counties examined here. After the initial post-partition displacement, this had fallen to 18.2% by 1926, and would decline further in subsequent decades, before stabilising temporarily at a figure of around 13% from the 1960s onwards.
Throughout Leinster, Munster and Connaught, the numerical decline experienced by Protestants was sharper in the 20th century than in the ‘lost counties,’ where the Protestant community was large enough – and close enough to the rest of Ulster – to sustain both its numbers and its obvious ‘otherness.’
Protestants adapted to life in an independent Irish Republic, surely, and in interesting ways.
The Monaghan unionist vote died out in time, and eventually a new pattern of voting behaviour emerged which has seen a succession of Protestant Fine Gael members holding the same seat, essentially: Seymour Crawford (1992-2011) was in time replaced in the Cavan-Monaghan constituency by Heather Humphreys (2011-2024) who was recently replaced by David Maxwell.
This small population has succeeded in the Republic overall without losing its own identity, its cultural practices or its institutions – particularly Protestant schools. They did not have the numerical strength to change the political trajectory of the country, for instance, by preventing the removal of the British monarch from Irish law or stopping Ireland’s departure from the British Commonwealth. The Protestant minority had to accept majority rule, and if they could not stomach that, they had little choice other than to relocate north of the border, as some did.
The founders of the Irish state did not persecute Protestants but they also made few concessions to them when it came to breaking all ties with Britain (particularly removing the British monarch from Irish life and leaving the Commonwealth) or in creating a state with a Catholic identity (from the 1920s onwards, Protestants always resented the ban on divorce).
Most importantly, the demographic realities of dealing with a minority which is less than 10% of the country’s population is fairly straightforward. Dealing with a minority which is considerably larger than this post-unification would be another task entirely.
Irish nationalists need to ask themselves what concessions they are prepared to make. Changing the flag and the national anthem is the least of what this might entail.
What about rejoining the Commonwealth, including a reference in the Constitution to the British monarch’s importance to the Protestant population, or maintaining the royal residence at Hillsborough Castle at the Irish state’s expense?
If the answer to all these hypotheticals is that nationalists will have none of this, that a United Ireland will be an Irish Ireland and nothing else, then what is the plan for dealing with the armed resistance which could come from a community which has always seen Irish nationalism as its opposing force?
Amidst all of the talk about the need to expand the Defence Forces – the need for more naval vessels, the possibility of acquiring fighter jets, the argument over the ‘Triple Lock’ – has anyone yet considered what sort of military Ireland would need to manage a counter-insurgency in those parts of north Down, north Armagh, east Derry and Antrim where the Protestant majority remains massive, and where a not insignificant number of Protestants have military backgrounds and/or paramilitary affinities?
Burke’s book includes a story which is particularly apt. In 1931, a group of Orangemen erected a platform in the Leitrim village of Newtowngore. Seeing what was happening, a larger crowd of IRA veterans and other republicans tore the platform down along with the Union Jacks, and raised the Tricolour in their place. Gardaí did not interfere, and the participants then posed for a victorious picture around a sign reading ‘The men who put an end to Orangeism in Connaught.’
Orangeism in Connacht was indeed at its end and given the harsh realities of Irish history, few Catholics were ever going to mourn for it.
It lives on in Ulster though, and those who are intent on ending partition need to think long and hard about how they intend to live alongside it.