{{Short description|none}} {{Use Hiberno-English|date=March 2026}} {{Use dmy dates|date=January 2025}} [[File:Ireland,_United_a_Nation.jpg|thumb|''The Irish People'' March 1909: "All for Ireland – The One, and Only Hope!" William O'Brien's All for Ireland League.]]
'''Protestant Irish nationalists''' are people of Protestant persuasion or background in Ireland who with their Catholic-majority countrymen and women campaigned for Ireland's independence and the dissolution of its union with Great Britain. Through the nineteenth century, they attained positions of leadership in a succession nationalist movements, but they did so without the support of the broader Protestant community. Content with representation in the United Kingdom parliament, Protestant opinion remained overwhelmingly unionist.
In the former, separate but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland, in which Catholics were excluded from public office, Irish Protestants readily identified as patriots. The focus of their patriotism was the parliament in Dublin. Its high-point was the armed Volunteer movement which in 1782 secured from the British Crown recognition of the parliament's exclusive right to legislate for Ireland. The movement subsequently split on the question of Catholic emancipation. In 1798, the more radical faction, concentrated in the Presbyterian north-east, broke into open rebellion in an effort, as "United Irishmen", to abolish confessional privilege and establish a representative republic.
Reconciled after 1800 to the union, Protestants were broadly hostile to political and cultural movements that, in arguing a new case for Irish nationality and statehood, celebrated Ireland's fealty to the Catholic Church and its Gaelic heritage, and depreciated the ties by which Protestants in particular felt bound to Britain and to its empire. The nationalist tradition nonetheless honours the contribution of individual Protestants, among them: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel as dissenters from the compromising leadership of "the Emancipator" Daniel O'Connell; Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell as leaders of the Home Rule movement; Douglas Hyde and Alice Milligan as promoters of a linguistically and culturally "Irish Ireland"; and, in the early twentieth century, Roger Casement, and Constance Markievicz as "physical-force" republicans.
Following the partition settlement of 1921, in the six Ulster counties retained as Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, Protestants in labour and socialist circles continued to be drawn to James Connolly's vision of an all-Ireland workers' republic. In the 1940s, a number of northern Protestants formed a "squad" within a reactivated Irish Republican Army. From the late 1960s, a stricter sectarian division was imposed by the onset of "the Troubles". It is reflected in the exclusively Catholic background of the present leadership in Sinn Féin, and of the SDLP, as it is in the exclusively Protestant background of unionist party leadership.
==Pre-Union background== [[File:Henry_Grattan.jpg|left|thumb|257x257px|Henry Grattan (1746-1820)]]
=== Anglo-Irish patriots === When, in 1782, the Patriot leader in the Irish House of Commons, Henry Grattan, in his Volunteer uniform, carried by acclaim a declaration of legislative independence from London, he reportedly cried: "Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!"<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kelly |first=Patrick |date=1988 |title=William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland |url=https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/eci.1988.11 |journal=Eighteenth-Century Ireland |volume=3 |issue=1 |pages=(133–148) 133 |doi=10.3828/eci.1988.11|url-access=subscription }}</ref> William Molyneux's ''The Case'' ''of Ireland stated'' (1696) and Jonathan Swift's ''Drapier's Letters'' (1724–25) are sometimes cited as the first stirrings of a modern Irish nationalism.<ref>{{Citation |last=McBride|first=Ian|title='The common name of Irishman': protestantism and patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland|date=1998|work=Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850|pages=236–262|editor-last=McBride|editor-first=Ian|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/protestantism-and-national-identity/common-name-of-irishman-protestantism-and-patriotism-in-eighteenthcentury-ireland/30E34E272CC54CCFFC4A4B2A342870E0|access-date=2025-11-12|place=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press|doi=10.1017/cbo9780511560439.010|isbn=978-0-521-62077-2|editor2-last=Claydon|editor2-first=Tony|url-access=subscription}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Murphy|first=Adam C|url=https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1371792303&disposition=inline|title=Perpetuating Nationalist Mythos? Portrayals of Eighteenth Century Ireland in Twentieth Century Irish Secondary School Textbooks|publisher=A master's thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, Ohio|year=2013|pages=57–67}}</ref> Yet their rejection of English claims that Ireland was a colony, and insistence that the island was, in the words of Molyneux, "a Compleat Kingdom within itself",<ref>{{Cite web |last=Molyneux|first=William|date=1698|title=The Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated {{!}} Online Library of Liberty|url=https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/molyneux-the-case-of-ireland-being-bound-by-acts-of-parliament-in-england-stated|access-date=2025-11-12|website=oll.libertyfund.org}}</ref> was entirely circumscribed by their commitment to Ireland's Anglican ascendancy.<ref>{{Cite book |last=McBride |first=Ian |url= |title=Eighteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland 4): The Isle of Slaves – The Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland |date=2009 |publisher=Gill & Macmillan Ltd |isbn=978-0-7171-5927-7 |pages=275 |language=en}}</ref>
Swift objected to extending civil and political rights to Presbyterians and other Protestant "Dissenters" from the Church of Ireland communion.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=McMinn|first=Joseph|date=1987|title=A Weary Patriot: Swift and the Formation of an Anglo-Irish Identity|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30070840|journal=Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr|volume=2|pages=103–113|doi=10.3828/eci.1987.8 |jstor=30070840 |issn=0790-7915}}</ref> As for the Catholic "five sixths of the population", the English national historian Lord Macaulay proposed that, dispossessed and excluded under the Penal Laws, they were accorded no more place in the Irish nation as conceived by these "planted" Protestants than "than the swine or the poultry". The patriotism of the Anglo-Irish "squireen" was as disinterested, he suggested, as the invocation of "inalienable right" by the slave-holding "Virginia planter"<ref>{{cite book |last=Macaulay|first=Lord|title=The History of England from the Accession of James II|publisher=Longman, Green & Co|year=1864|location=London|pages=IV 231–232, III 287}}</ref> Even while pressing for further reform, Volunteer conventions did not address the "Catholic question", save in Ulster<ref name=":10">{{Cite book |last=Smyth|first=Peter|title=The Volunteers, 1778-84, Education Facsimiles 141-160|publisher=Public Record Office of Northern Ireland|year=1974|isbn=0337231222|pages=14|chapter=Introduction}}</ref> where delegates concurred only in approving "the relaxation" of the civil disabilities imposed upon their "fellow subjects".<ref name=":12">{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=A History of Ulster|publisher=Blackstaff Press|year=1992|isbn=0856404764|location=Belfast|pages=214–217}}</ref>
The exclusively Protestant nature of the constitution was breached first, not by Protestant patriots, but by direct Catholic appeal to the British government in London then intent on engaging Catholics in both Ireland and abroad in a war with the new French Republic.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Elliott|first=Marianne|title=The Catholics of Ulster, a History|publisher=Allen Lane, Penguin Press|year=2000|isbn=0-7139-9464-9|location=London|pages=236–237}}</ref> In 1793, with the vice-regal administration in Dublin Castle supplying the necessary inducements and pressure, Grattan piloted a relief bill through parliament that re-admitted Catholics, not to parliament itself, but to the electoral franchise.<ref name=":13">{{cite book |last1=Bardon|first1=Jonathan|title=A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes|date=2008|publisher=Gill & Macmillan|isbn=9780717146499|location=Dublin|pages=296}}</ref> The concession, votes for a small, albeit growing, number of property-qualified Catholics, could have little impact upon the conduct of government. Two thirds of the seats in the Commons remained in the gift either of landed grandees sitting in the House of Lords or of Dublin Castle, the Irish executive that continued to be appointed from London.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kennedy|first=Denis|date=1992|title=The Irish Opposition, Parliamentary Reform and Public Opinion, 1793–1794|journal=Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr|volume=7|pages=(95–114) 96–97|doi=10.3828/eci.1992.7|issn=0790-7915|jstor=30070925|s2cid=256154966}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Kee|first=Robert|title=The Most Distressful Country|publisher=Quartet|year=1976|isbn=0-7043-3089-X|location=London|pages=36–38}}</ref>
=== United Irishmen === [[File:Wolfe Tone.jpg|thumb|upright|Wolfe Tone (1763-1798)]]
Limited reform satisfied neither Catholic or Dissenter. Disaffection concentrated in Belfast where already, in 1784, Volunteer companies had been admitting Catholics to their ranks in the conviction that "a general Union of ''all'' the inhabitants of Ireland is necessary to the freedom and prosperity of this kingdom".<sup>[12]</sup> Re-animated by news of the revolutionary events in France, in October 1791 a group of Volunteer veterans among the town's Presbyterian merchants responded to an invitation from the physician William Drennan to enter into "a benevolent conspiracy — a plot for the people", its "general end real independence to Ireland".<sup>]</sup><ref name="9bSrV">{{cite web |date=February 2020|title=William Drennan to Samuel McTier, 21st May 1791 (Agnew, Drennan-McTier Letters, vol. 1, p. 357). Category Archives: William Drennan|url=https://www.irishphilosophy.com/category/person/long-18th-century/william-drennan/|access-date=10 May 2020|website=assets.publishing.service.gov.uk|pages=15–16}}</ref> Calling themselves, at the suggestion of a Protestant secretary to the Catholic Committee in Dublin, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Society of United Irishmen, and adopting his draft resolution, they observed that in a "great era of reform ... when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people," the Irish people find themselves with "no national government" — "we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen". The remedy lay in "a cordial union among all the people of Ireland" and "a complete and radical reform" of their representation in parliament.<ref name=":19">{{Cite book |last=Altholz|first=Josef L.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zsnwc3fadxAC|title=Selected Documents in Irish History|publisher=M E Sharpe|year=2000|isbn=0-415-12776-9|location=New York|page=70}}</ref>
This resolve, adopted by United societies that then convened in Dublin and across the country, and which was to harden in the face of government repression into a republican conspiracy, would be invoked by later generations of nationalists. In 1913, at what he described as "the holiest place in Ireland", the grave of Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown, Patrick Pearse declared Tone "the greatest of Irish Nationalists".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Pearse|first=Pádraic|date=1915|title=How Does She Stand? Three Addresses|url=https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E900007-002/text001.html|access-date=2025-11-13|website=celt.ucc.ie}}</ref> When proclaiming the Irish Republic in 1916, Pearse presented the Easter Rising as the sixth occasion in the past three hundred years in which the Irish people had asserted in arms their right to sovereignty. This placed the rebellion, urged by Tone in 1798, in a line succession from the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the resistance to the Williamite invasion of 1689.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Foy|first1=Michael T.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wUI7AwAAQBAJ|title=The Easter Rising|last2=Barton|first2=Brian|date=2011|publisher=The History Press|isbn=978-0-7524-7272-0|pages=174|language=en}}</ref>
Contemporary historians have taken issue with this "teleological" narrative.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Malešević|first=Siniša|date=2021-01-02|title='Small' and 'greater' nations: empires and nationalist movements in Ireland and the Balkans|url=https://doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2021.1877895|journal=Irish Political Studies|volume=36|issue=1|pages=132–148|doi=10.1080/07907184.2021.1877895|issn=0790-7184}}</ref> In Tone's call to "substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denomination of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter",<ref name=":14">{{Cite book |last=Tone|first=Theobald Wolfe|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZxQvAAAAMAAJ|title=Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Volume I|date=1827|publisher=H. Colburn|location=London|pages=64|language=en}}</ref> they see a political project for which the precedents were not Irish, but American and French: the realisation of an Enlightenment, legal-rational ideal of citizenship, a vindication of the ''Rights of Man''.<ref name="McBride-19992">{{Cite journal |last=McBride|first=Ian|date=1999|editor-last=Keogh|editor-first=Dáire|editor2-last=Furlong|editor2-first=Nicholas|editor3-last=Gahan|editor3-first=Daniel|editor4-last=Weber|editor4-first=Paul|editor5-last=Wilson|editor5-first=David A.|editor6-last=Blackstock|editor6-first=Allan|title=Reclaiming the Rebellion: 1798 in 1998|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30007150|journal=Irish Historical Studies|volume=31|issue=123|pages=(395–410) 399|doi=10.1017/S0021121400014231|issn=0021-1214|jstor=30007150|s2cid=146881848|url-access=subscription}}</ref> On the principle that they should "attend those things in which we all agree, [and] to exclude those in which we differ",<ref name=":123">{{Cite journal |last=Quinn|first=James|date=1998|title=The United Irishmen and Social Reform|journal=Irish Historical Studies|volume=31|issue=122|pages=(188–201) 191–192|doi=10.1017/S0021121400013900|issn=0021-1214|jstor=30008258|s2cid=164022443}}</ref> United Irishmen had positively eschewed reference to Ireland's past. Are we "forever", asked the Dublin Society, "to walk like beasts of prey over fields which [our] ancestors stained with blood?" Better, they suggested to "think little of our ancestors [but] much of our posterity".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=O'Brien|first=Eugene|date=2014|title=Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O'Donovan Rossa and Tone|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24332390|journal=Nordic Irish Studies|volume=13|issue=1|pages=(1–17) 9|jstor=24332390 |issn=1602-124X}}</ref>
At the same time, Tone's promised unity of creeds elicits scepticism.<ref>{{Cite book |last=A. T. Q.|first=Stewart|title=The Narrow Ground, The Roots of Conflict in Ulster|publisher=Faber and Faber|year=1977|isbn=9780571154852|location=London|publication-date=1977|pages=110}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Magennis |first=Eoin |date=1998 |editor-last=Curtin |editor-first=Nancy J. |editor2-last=Whelan |editor2-first=Kevin |editor3-last=Keogh |editor3-first=Dáire |editor4-last=Furlong |editor4-first=Nicholas |editor5-last=Stewart |editor5-first=A. T. Q. |editor6-last=Chambers |editor6-first=Liam |title=Revising the Rising of 1798 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25746849 |journal=Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society |volume=17 |issue=2 |pages=229–233 |issn=0488-0196}}</ref> In Dublin where, reflecting the capital's larger, more denominationally mixed middle class, the Society encompassed from the outset Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, Drennan promoted a secret "inner Society" that was to be "Protestant but National".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Durey|first=Michael|date=1994|title=The Dublin Society of United Irishmen and the Politics of the Carey-Drennan Dispute, 1792-1794|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2640053|journal=The Historical Journal|volume=37|issue=1|pages=(89–111), 96|doi=10.1017/S0018246X00014710|issn=0018-246X|jstor=2640053|s2cid=143976314|url-access=subscription}}</ref> Convinced that the object of many of the Catholic members was "selfish" (i.e. focused on emancipation rather than on reform and independence), Drennan concluded that, while the Catholics might "save themselves", it is "the Protestants who must save the nation".<ref>{{cite book |last=Mansergh|first=Martin|title=The Legacy of History|publisher=Mercier Press|year=2003|isbn=978-1-85635-389-2|location=Cork|pages=116}}</ref> As it was, when the society began to arm, both Drennan and the leading Catholics dropped out of its inner counsels.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Smyth|first=Jim|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g5brRiiJT0IC&dq=samuel+turner+(informer)&pg=PA63|title=Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s|date=2000|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-66109-6|pages=63–64|language=en}}</ref> This left Protestants in spring of 1798 — William James MacNeven, Samuel Neilson, Edward FitzGerald, Arthur O'Connor, Oliver Bond, and the brothers John and Henry Sheares — to plan and direct an insurrection from Dublin.<ref name="Cullen-1993">Cullen, Louis. (1993), "The internal politics of the United Irishmen", in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan eds., ''The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion,'' Dublin: Lilliput Press, {{ISBN|0-946640-95-5}}, (pp. 176–196) pp. 95–96</ref>
In Ulster, the Society was strongest in the comfortably Protestant-majority districts in the east (Belfast, and immediate hinterlands) but conceded ground to the new-formed Orange Order in the west where folk memories of the massacres of 1641 sharpened the sectarian competition for tenancies and employment.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Stewart|first=A. T. Q.|title=The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster 1609–1969|publisher=Faber & Faber|year=1977|location=London|pages=107–108}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=The Plantation of Ulster|publisher=Gill and Macmillan|year=2011|isbn=978-0-7171-4738-0|location=Dublin|pages=333–334}}</ref> The Belfast directory did seek to mediate in the increasing sectarian disturbances through its agents both Protestant (James Hope and Thomas Russell) and Catholic.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Smyth|first=Jim|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rEyvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA118|title=The Men of No Property, Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century|publisher=Macmillan|year=1998|isbn=9781349266531|location=London|pages=118–119}}</ref> For some of the Catholics displaced, they helped provide refuge on Presbyterian farms in counties Down and Antrim, and the used goodwill earned used to persuade the Catholic Defenders, more Jacobite and Jacobin in outlook, of something they had only "vaguely" considered: the necessity of a complete break with the British Crown.<ref name=":142">{{Cite journal |last=Curtin|first=Nancy J.|date=1985|title=The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a Mass-Based Revolutionary Organisation, 1794-6|journal=Irish Historical Studies|volume=24|issue=96|pages=(463–492) 483, 486|doi=10.1017/S0021121400034477|issn=0021-1214|jstor=30008756|s2cid=148429477}}</ref> In the aftermath of the rebellion, the Defenders in turn opened their cell-structured organisation for Protestant rebels in Antrim, enabling them to maintain (as later celebrated in Ethna Carbery's ballad "Roddy McCorley")<ref>{{Cite book |last=Patterson|first=James G.|url=https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781847791528/9781847791528.00008.xml|title=The second wave: Active resistance, 1799–1800|date=2013|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-1-84779-152-8|language=en-US|doi=}}</ref> an outlaw existence until March 1800.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Patterson|first=James G.|title=In the Wake of the Great Rebellion: Republicanism, Agrarianism and Banditry in Ireland after 1798|publisher=Manchester University Press|year=2008|isbn=978-0719076930|location=Manchester|pages=38–44}}</ref> In the rebellion itself, however, there are stories of Catholics being driven from Henry Joy McCracken's ill-fated march upon Antrim Town by sectarian taunts,<ref>{{Cite book |last=McSkimmin|first=Samuel|title=Annals of Ulster from 1790 to 1798|publisher=E. J. McCrum|year=1906|location=Belfast|pages=74–75}}</ref><ref name=":02">Elliott, Marianne (2003), "Religious polarization and sectarianism in the Ulster rebellion", in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds.), [https://books.google.com/books?id=F41nAAAAMAAJ ''1798: A Bicentenary Perspective'', Dublin], Four Courts Press, ISBN 1851824308, (pp. 279-297), p. 289.</ref> and, although the accounts are disputed,<ref name="Elliott-2000a">{{Cite book |last=Elliott|first=Marianne|title=The Catholics of Ulster: A History|publisher=Allen Lane|year=2000|isbn=0713994649|pages=254–256}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Madden|first=Richard Robert|url=http://archive.org/details/antrimdownin98li00madd_0|title=Antrim and Down in '98: the lives of Henry Joy M'Cracken, James Hope, William Putnam M'Cabe, Rev. James Porter, Henry Munro|publisher=Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd. ...|year=1860|location=London|pages=240}}</ref> of withdrawing from the rebel camp of Henry Munro on the eve its rout in the battle of Ballynahinch.<ref name="Proudfoot-19974">Proudfoot L. (ed.) ''Down History and Society'' (Dublin 1997) chapter by Nancy Curtin at p. 289. {{ISBN|0-906602-80-7}}</ref>
In Leinster, in counties Wexford and Wicklow, the rebels were led to their first successes, not by a United Irishman, but by a renegade Catholic priest, Fr. John Murphy.<ref>{{Citation |last=Furlong|first=Nicholas|title=Murphy, John|date=2009|work=Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/murphy-john-a6081|access-date=2025-11-08|publisher=Royal Irish Academy|doi=10.3318/dib.006081.v1|doi-access=free}}</ref> Murphy did submit to the command of Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant barrister, but when their united forces were defeated at New Ross, rebels in the rear killed loyalist prisoners at Scullabogue and, after a United Irish Committee of Public Safety was swept aside in Wexford Town, at Wexford Bridge.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Gahan|first=Daniel J.|date=1998|title=New Ross, Scullabogue and the 1798 Rebellion in Southwestern Wexford|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25520035|journal=The Past: The Organ of the Uí Cinsealaigh Historical Society|issue=21|pages=3–33|issn=2009-2040|jstor=25520035}}</ref><ref>Ó hÓgartaigh, Margaret (2010). ''Edward Hay: Historian of 1798''. Dublin: The History Press. p. 44. {{ISBN|978-1-84588-992-0}}</ref> Notwithstanding greater military atrocities, reports of the massacres helped prompt Protestant defections from the republican cause.<ref>Gahan, D. [http://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/the-scullabogue-massacre-1798/ "The Scullabogue Massacre, 1798"], ''History Ireland'', v. 4 (1996), 3</ref><ref name="Swords-1997">Swords, L. (1997) ''Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798'', Columbia Press, p. 176</ref> Loyalists were soon able to report that "the word 'Protestant', which was becoming obsolete in the north, has regained its influence and all of that description seem drawing closer together".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Blackstock|first=Alan|date=1996|title=A Forgotten Army; The Irish Yeomanry – History Ireland|url=https://historyireland.com/a-forgotten-army-the-irish-yeomanry/|access-date=2025-11-20|website=historyireland.com}}</ref>
==From Emmet to the Fenians==
=== Emmet and the Union === [[File:RobertEmmetWatercolor.png|left|thumb|235x235px|Robert Emmet (1778-1803) by John Comerford]] Protesting the "accused union" with Britain that in 1801 had stripped Ireland of its last "vestige of self government", its parliament,<ref name=":102">{{Cite book |last=Geoghegan |first=Patrick |title=Robert Emmet, a Life |publisher=Gill & Macmillan |year=2002 |isbn=9780717133871 |location=Dublin |pages=120}}</ref> in July 1803 Robert Emmet pressed forward with an ill-starred attempt to rekindle the United Irish rebellion with a rising in Dublin. This was despite conceding that "no leading Catholic is committed" ("we are all Protestants"),<ref>{{Cite book |last=Madden |first=Richard Robert |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=E9pUAAAAcAAJ&dq=Madden,+the+United+Irishmen,+Their+Lives+and+Times,+Volume+3&pg=PA424 |title=The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times. Volume 3 |publisher=James Duffy |year=1858 |location=Dublin |pages=357 |language=en}}</ref> and the failure of Hope and of Russell to secure pledges in what had been the Presbyterian heartlands of the movement in the north.<ref name=":022">{{Cite web |last=Quinn|first=James|date=2003|title=The dog that didn't bark": the North and 1803|url=https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/the-dog-that-didnt-bark-the-north-and-1803/|access-date=2021-03-07|website=History Ireland}}</ref>
Not only was there no appetite for a renewed resort to arms, but those whose hopes had been defeated in 1798 had begun to look for solace in the union. From exile in Hamburg, Archibald Hamilton Rowan hailed "the downfall of one of the most corrupt assembles that ever existed" and predicted that the new United Kingdom Parliament would see "the wreck" of the old Ascendancy.<ref>{{cite book |author=Fergus Whelan|title=God-Provoking Democrat: The Remarkable Life of Archibald Hamilton Rowan|publisher=New Island Books|year=2014|isbn=978-1-84840-460-1|location=Stillorgan, Dublin|page=201}}</ref> Drennan, at first defiant, counselled patience in the hope that Westminster might in time realise the original aim of his conspiracy{{snd}}"a full, free and frequent representation of the people". "What", he reasoned, "is a country justly considered, but a free constitution"?<ref>Wright, Jonathan Jeffrey (2013), ''The 'Natural Leaders' and their World: Politics, Culture and Society in Belfast c. 1801–1832'', University of Liverpool Press ({{ISBN|978-1-84631-848-1}}), p. 75</ref>
In the decades that followed the admission of Catholics to Parliament in 1829 and the first of a succession of reform acts in 1832, Protestants settled on a conciliatory consensus: had their forefathers been offered a union under the constitution as it later developed, with "equal laws for the whole Irish people", there would have been "no rebellion".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Shaw|first=James J.|url=http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/ulsterscots/usep_pdf/Final%20History%20Texts/J.%20J.%20Shaw,%20Mr.%20Gladstones%20two%20Irish%20policies%201868%20and%201886.%20A%20letter%20to%20an%20Ulster%20Liberal%20elector%20(London,%201888).pdf|title=Mr. Gladstone's Two Irish Policies: 1868–1886|publisher=Marcus Ward|year=1888|location=London|pages=0–11}}</ref> In the meantime, the thirty years of popular agitation that been required for the union to deliver on its original promise of emancipation had mobilised every class of Catholic in the south, an achievement in which Protestants perceived in increasingly threatening terms.<ref name=":83">{{Cite book |last=Foster |first=R. F. |title=Modern Ireland 1600–1972 |publisher=Allen Lane |year=1988 |isbn=0-7139-9010-4 |location=London |pages=291}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Geoghegan |first=Patrick M. |date=2000 |title=The Catholics and the Union |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679381 |journal=Transactions of the Royal Historical Society |volume=10 |pages=243–258 |doi=10.1017/S0080440100000128 |issn=0080-4401 |jstor=3679381 |s2cid=153949973 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>
=== Repealers === [[File:George_Ensor.jpg|thumb|267x267px|George Enso<nowiki/>r (1769-1843) by John Comerford]] Daniel O'Connell declared the subscribers to his penny-a-month Catholic Association to be "the people, emphatically the people" and "a nation".<ref name=":5">{{Cite book |last=Fergus|first=O'Farrrell|title=Catholic emancipation: Daniel O'Connell and the birth of Irish democracy, 1820–1830.|publisher=Gill & Macmillan|year=1985|isbn=9780717115174|location=Dublin|pages=123}}</ref> Few Protestants who had supported Catholic emancipation were willing to join O'Connell when he repurposed the association for a campaign to give this nation a parliament through a repeal the Act of Union. In stating the new case for Irish statehood, the O'Connellite paper, the ''Pilot'', was satisfied that "the distinction created by religion" was the one "positive and unmistakable" mark of separating the Irish people from the English people.<ref name="Foster">{{cite book |last1=Beckett|first1=J.C.|title=The Making of Modern Ireland 1603–1923|date=1966|publisher=Faber and Faber|isbn=0571092675|location=London|pages=332}}</ref>
Among the Protestants who did support repeal, was the prolific pamphleteer and correspondent to the press, George Ensor.<ref name=":9">{{Cite book |last=Ensor|first=George|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LqzRW-MXTEAC|title=Anti-Union Ireland as she ought to be|date=1831|publisher=Morgan and Dunlop|location=Newry|language=en}}</ref> Ensor was among the first Armagh members of the Catholic Association, a notable position in a county renowned as a stronghold of the Orange Order and loyalist Brunswick Clubs.<ref name=":7">{{Cite journal |last=MacAtasney|first=Gerard|date=2007|title='Brunswick Bloodhounds and Itinerant Demagogues': The Campaign for Catholic Emancipation in County Armagh 1824-29|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/29742843|journal=Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society|volume=21/22|pages=165–231|issn=0488-0196|jstor=29742843}}</ref> On the recommendation of Jeremy Bentham, in 1828 O'Connell had considered taking on Ensor as his running mate in the 1828 by-election for the two-member County Clare constituency where O'Connell's success was to prove critical in forcing the government to amend the sacramental oaths that had barred Catholics from higher office and from Parliament.<ref>Crimmins, James E.(1997), "Jeremy Bentham and Daniel O'Connell: their correspondence and radical alliance 1828–1831", ''Historical Journal'', xl (1997), pp. (359-387) 373.</ref> But Ensor was critical of O'Connell's willingness to accept "disenfranchisement project" attached to the developing Catholic relief bill.<ref name=":7" />
The Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, which received its royal assent on the same day as the Roman Catholic Relief Act, raised the freehold qualification for the county vote in Ireland fivefold to English ten-pound level. Ensor cautioned that "casting two or three million" forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, "into the abyss" so that a few Catholic gentlemen might be returned to Parliament would prove "disastrous" for the country.<ref>MacAtasney (2007), p. 176</ref> It broke the connection between Catholic inclusion and democratic reform, and projected a parliament for Ireland unlikely to address the true source of country's misfortune, the inordinate concentration of wealth.<ref name=":82">{{Cite book |last=Ensor|first=George Ensor|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XrRjAAAAcAAJ|title=Of property, and of its equal distribution, as promoting virtue, population, abundance|publisher=Effingham Wilson|year=1844|location=London|language=en}}</ref>
In the end O'Connell stood for the Clare seat alone.<ref name=":03">{{Cite web |last=Ritchey|first=Rosemary|date=2009|title=Ensor, George {{!}} Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/ensor-george-a2931|access-date=2023-02-16|website=www.dib.ie|language=en}}</ref> He described Ensor as "a man of pure principle and excellent notions", although, "if a Christian at all, certainly not a Catholic", and a "radical" rather than (as most of O'Connell's Protestant and English friends) a Whig.<ref name=":32">{{Cite book |last=Duddy|first=Thomas|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2TJBtm__n3sC|title=A History of Irish Thought|date=2012|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-134-62352-5|pages=118–119|language=en}}</ref>
In Dublin, O'Connell had a more reliable ally in John Gray, the Protestant proprietor of the ''Freeman's Journal''. Following his assistance in promoting a series of "monster" Repeal meetings (with crowds counted in the hundreds of thousands), in 1844 Gray was sentenced with O'Connell to nine months imprisonment on a charge of sedition (remitted on appeal).<ref name="dnb">{{Cite DNB|first=John Thomas|last=Gilbert|wstitle=Gray, John (1816-1875)|display=Gray, John (1816–1875)|volume=23|page=9}}</ref> Later, in an alliance with the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, a man devoted to O'Connell's memory,<ref>{{Cite web |last=Joseph|first=Seán|date=2020|title=Paul Cullen: The Saviour of Irish Catholicism|url=https://www.theburkean.ie/articles/2020/07/26/the-saviour-of-irish-catholicism|access-date=2025-11-22|website=The Burkean|language=en-US}}</ref> Gray's newspaper supported the National Association of Ireland. Established in 1864 as a constitutional alternative to the physical-force republicanism of the Fenians, it called for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, land reform, and greater educational provision. Gray ended his career in 1875 as a Home Rule League MP for Kilkenny.<ref name="Oxford2">{{cite book |title=Oxford Dictionary of National Biography|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2004|volume=23|pages=436–7|quote=Steele, David, ''Grey, Sir John (1816–1875), newspaper proprietor and politician''}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Boylan, John|title=Dictionary of Irish Biography|date=1998|isbn=0-7171-2507-6|volume=3rd.ed|pages=153–4}}</ref>
In Dublin, O'Connell was also admired, and supported in Repeal, by the unitarian social reformer and fellow abolitionist James Haughton.<ref name=":07">Roger Courtney (2013), ''Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition'', Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, p. 156</ref>
=== Young Irelanders === [[File:Thomas_Davis_Young_Irelander.JPG|left|thumb|221x221px|Thomas Davis (1814-1845)]] Indicted alongside O'Connell and Gray in 1844 was Charles Gavan Duffy, proprietor in Dublin of ''The Nation.'' When he had first followed O'Connell, Duffy, an Ulster Catholic, conceded that he had "burned with the desire to set up again the Celtic race and the Catholic church".<ref name="Moody3">{{cite journal |last1=Moody |first1=T. W. |date=Autumn 1966 |title=Thomas Davis and the Irish nation |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23039825 |url-status=live |journal=Hermathena |issue=103 |pages=11–12 |jstor=23039825 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210922231610/https://www.jstor.org/stable/23039825?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A5672e823f379bee9e2566b59f8bae282&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents |archive-date=22 September 2021 |access-date=3 September 2020}}</ref> But, under the influence his co-editor, Thomas Davis, a Protestant from Mallow, County Cork, he dedicated the new weekly to an idea of "nationality" that would embrace as easily "the stranger who is within our gates" as "the Irishman of a hundred generations."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes|publisher=Gill & Macmillan|year=2008|location=Dublin|page=367}}</ref>
In pursuit of this vision, and seeking an "alternative national hero" to O'Connell,<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal |last=Quinn|first=James|date=2000|editor-last=|editor-first=|editor2-last=|editor2-first=|editor3-last=|editor3-first=|editor4-last=|editor4-first=|editor5-last=|editor5-first=|editor6-last=|editor6-first=|editor7-last=|editor7-first=|title=Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Historians|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30007020|journal=Irish Historical Studies|volume=32|issue=125|pages=(113–128) 113–114|doi=10.1017/S0021121400014681|issn=0021-1214|jstor=30007020|s2cid=163810571|url-access=subscription}}</ref> Davis contributed to an hagiography of the United Irishmen, centred on the figure of Wolfe Tone. In 1843, he published his elegiac poem ''Tone's Grave'', and with the blessing Tone's widow Mathilda (in American exile), organised the first Bodenstown Tone memorial.<ref name=":11">{{Cite book |last=Woods|first=C. J.|title=Bodenstown Revisited: the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone, its monuments and pilgrimages|publisher=Four Courts Press|year=2018|isbn=9781846827389|location=Dublin|pages=18–19}}</ref>
Conscious of his family's Cromwellian roots, Davis was influenced by the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Gray |first=Peter |date=1994 |title=Rethinking Irish Nationalism |journal=Studies |volume=83 |pages=9}}</ref> For Herder nationality was not genetic but the product of climate, geography, history and inclination. Davis did write of an "unsaxonised" Ireland,<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Boyce|first=D. George|title=Nineteenth-Century Ireland, The Search for Stability|publisher=Gill and Macmillan|year=1990|isbn=0717116212|location=Dublin|publication-date=1990|pages=81}}</ref> but this was not an Ireland ethnically cleansed of those of his own British ancestry and reformed religion. Rather it was an Ireland in which Catholic and Protestant alike, find sufficient unity and strength in their education and in their "recollections, ancestral, personal, national" to resist England's "unnatural", "cosmopolite" influence.<ref name=":2">Quoted in {{cite book |last1=MacDonagh|first1=Oliver|title=Ireland: The Union and its Aftermath|date=1977|isbn=978-1-900621-81-6|location=London|pages=58}}</ref> Davis decried the new liberal political economy, associated in England with O'Connell's friends among the Whigs rather than the tradition-bound Tories. Ireland would never attain nationhood so long as it remained in thrall to what he described as "modern Anglicanism: i.e. Utilitarianism . . ., Yankeeism, Englishism, which measures prosperity by exchangeable value, measures duty by gain, and limits desire to clothes, food and respectability".<ref name=":1" />
To assist in erecting a barrier to this anglicisation, Davis made ''The Nation'' a vehicle for promoting Irish,<ref name="Hoppen">{{cite book |last1=Hoppen|first1=K. Theodore|title=Ireland since 1800: conflict and conformity|date=1999|publisher=Longman|isbn=9780582322547|edition=Second|location=London|pages=22, 24}}</ref> a language "inseparably mingled", in his view, with the history and "soul" of the Irish people.<ref name=":1" /> While a Gaeilgeoir himself, for O'Connell this meant little. He declared "the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication" too great a consideration for him to regret the gradual abandonment of Irish.<ref name="Ó Tuathaigh">{{cite journal |last1=Ó Tuathaigh|first1=Gearóid|year=1975|title=Gaelic Ireland, Popular Politics and Daniel O'Connell|journal=Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society|volume=34|pages=21–34|jstor=25535454}}</ref>
In 1845, shortly before his unexpected death, Davis clashed with O'Connell over the Emancipator's denunciation of the "Queens Colleges", a "mixed" or non-denominational scheme that the government had proposed for higher education in Ireland. When Davis pleaded that "reasons for separate education are reasons for [a] separate life", O'Connell accused him of proposing it a "crime to be a Catholic". He suggested that Davis and his colleagues were becoming "Young Irelanders"—a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy who in 1849 had briefly imposed a republic upon the Pope in Rome.<ref>Dennis Gwynn, ''O'Connell, Davis and the Colleges Bill'', Cork University Press, 1948, p. 68</ref> "I am", O'Connell declared, "for Old Ireland".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Macken|first=Ultan|title=The Story of Daniel O'Connell|publisher=Mercier Press|year=2008|isbn=9781856355964|location=Cork|pages=120}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Mulvey|first=Helen|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ikdUr7-_bLkC&pg=PA180|title=Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study|publisher=The Catholic University of America Press|year=2003|isbn=0813213037|location=Washington DC|pages=180}}</ref>
Davis's place at ''The Nation'' was taken by a man whom Pearse would later venerate as a "fierce" and "sublime" apostle of Irish republicanism,<ref name="Pearse">{{cite book |last1=Pearse|first1=P. H.|url=http://www.thefuture.ie/wp-content/uploads/1916/03/The-Sovereign-People.pdf|title=The Sovereign People|date=1916|publisher=Whelan|location=Dublin|page=10|access-date=23 December 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164102/http://www.thefuture.ie/wp-content/uploads/1916/03/The-Sovereign-People.pdf|archive-date=9 June 2021|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Russell|first=Anthony|date=2020|title=John Mitchel: The forgotten man in a decade of commemorations|url=https://belfastmedia.com/the-forgotten-man-in-a-decade-of-commemorations|access-date=2023-07-30|website=Belfast Media Group|language=en}}</ref> John Mitchel, a Protestant solicitor originally from Dungiven in County Londonderry. With onset in 1846 of the Great Famine, Mitchel accused the government of devising a "relief" policy to slaughter a portion of the people and pauperise of the rest. When the London journal the ''Standard'' observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport government troops to quickly curb any unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed. O’Connell publicly distanced himself from ''The Nation,'' appearing to set Duffy, as the proprietor, up for prosecution.<ref name="Irish Confederation formed">{{cite web |last1=McCullagh|first1=John|date=8 November 2010|title=Irish Confederation formed|url=https://www.newryjournal.co.uk/history/1800-1900/irish-confederation-formed/|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200925090507/https://www.newryjournal.co.uk/history/1800-1900/irish-confederation-formed/|archive-date=25 September 2020|access-date=27 August 2020|website=newryjournal.co.uk/|publisher=Newry Journal}}</ref> When Mitchel successfully defended Duffy in court,<ref name="Irish Confederation formed" /> O'Connell and his son John pressed the issue. On the threat of their own resignations, they carried a resolution in the Repeal Association declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms.<ref>O'Sullivan (1945). ''Young Ireland''. The Kerryman Ltd. pp. 195-6</ref>
In January 1847, the Young Irelanders withdrew and formed the Irish Confederation. Mitchel had already antagonised his colleagues by carrying Davis's rejection of "modern Anglicanism" to the point of protesting British intervention against the Atlantic slave trade,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Duffy|first1=Charles Gavan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6fE9AQAAMAAJ&q=mouthpiece+for+Irish+rights|title=My Life in Two Hemispheres|date=1898|publisher=Macmillan|location=London|page=70|access-date=28 December 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164218/https://books.google.com/books?id=6fE9AQAAMAAJ&q=mouthpiece+for+Irish+rights|archive-date=9 June 2021|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Roy">{{cite news |last1=Roy|first1=David|date=11 July 2015|title=John Mitchel: a rebel with two causes remembered|url=https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2015/07/11/news/john-mitchel-a-rebel-with-two-causes-remembered-160950/|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210214130430/https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2015/07/11/news/john-mitchel-a-rebel-with-two-causes-remembered-160950/|archive-date=14 February 2021|access-date=23 December 2020|work=Irish News}}</ref> and he now broke with them in turn. The famine crisis, he argued, required "a more vigorous policy against the English Government" than they were willing to pursue.<ref name="William Dillon Ch VI">William Dillon, ''The life of John Mitchel'' (London, 1888) 2 Vols. Ch I-II</ref> After sixteen issues his new paper, ''United Irishman'', was suppressed and, convicted in April 1848 of a Treason Felony, Mitchel was sentenced to be "transported beyond the seas for the term of fourteen years."<ref name="P. A. Sillard">P.A. Sillard, ''Life of John Mitchel'', James Duffy and Co. Ltd, 1908</ref>
In meantime, his former confederates were already advancing plans for an insurrection. Mitchel, although the first to call for action, had scoffed at the necessity for systematic preparation. The task fell to William Smith O'Brien, a former Whig MP, who, as a Protestant and a landowner, Duffy, in the effort to hold together a broad national coalition, had promoted to the leadership.<ref>LaRocca, p. 63</ref>
In July 1848, O'Brien raised the standard of revolt in Kilkenny.<ref>Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, ''Four Years of Irish History 1845–1849'', Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 1888, p. 389</ref> This was a tricolour he had brought back from Paris of the Second Republic, its colours (green for Catholics, orange for Protestants, and white for harmony between the two) intended to symbolise the United Irish republican ideal. But with "Old Ireland" and Catholic clergy against them, the Confederates had no organised support in the countryside.<ref name="Duffy 18832">{{cite book |last1=Duffy|first1=Charles Gavan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WLWeAQAACAAJ|title=Four Years of Irish History, 1845-1849|date=1883|publisher=Cassell, Petter, Galpin|location=Dublin|pages=640–645|access-date=4 September 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164307/https://books.google.com/books?id=WLWeAQAACAAJ|archive-date=9 June 2021|url-status=live}}</ref> As O'Brien proceeded into Tipperary found himself in command of only a few hundred ill-clad largely unarmed men who scattered after their first skirmish with the constabulary.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Grogan|first1=Dick|date=29 July 1998|title=Taoiseach to announce purchase of 1848 'Warhouse' in Tipperary|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/taoiseach-to-announce-purchase-of-1848-warhouse-in-tipperary-1.177847|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210923110455/https://www.irishtimes.com/news/taoiseach-to-announce-purchase-of-1848-warhouse-in-tipperary-1.177847|archive-date=23 September 2021|access-date=6 September 2020|newspaper=The Irish Times}}</ref> Following a public outpouring, O'Brien and his colleagues had their death sentences for treasons commuted to penal transportation to Van Diemen's Land, where they joined Mitchel.
Duffy alone escaped. Part of the evidence against him, an anonymous leader in ''The Nation'', was challenged when the poet and early suffragist, Jane Elgee, confessed her authorship of what had amounted to a call to arms from the gallery of the court. Elgee, the granddaughter of a Protestant rector from Wexford,<ref>{{Cite web |last=Anton |first=Brigitte |title=Women of The Nation – History Ireland |url=https://historyireland.com/women-of-the-nation-by-brigitte-anton/ |access-date=2026-01-15 |website=historyireland.com}}</ref> and an ardent admirer of Davis, was later, as Lady Wilde (the mother of Oscar Wilde), to denounce the Fenians ("Heaven keep us from a Fenian republic!") but declare for home rule and for the Land League.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Broderick |first=Marian |title=Wild Irish Women |publisher=The O'Brien Press |year=2002 |isbn=9780862787806 |location=Dublin |publication-date=2002 |pages=27–35}}</ref>
=== Fenians === Succeeding Emmet's attempt in 1803, the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was Pearse's fourth precedent for the 1916 Rising. The last were the armed actions of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), formed in 1858 in Dublin, and of the sister Fenian Brotherhood (later Clan na Gael) established in the United States by Irish exiles. In 1867, the Fenians, mobilising Irish veterans of the American Civil War, raided across the northern border of the United States with a view to holding Canada hostage to the grant of Irish Independence,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Senior|first1=Hereward|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Wmwi_6dS-UQC|title=The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866-1870|date=1991|publisher=Dundurn|isbn=9781550020854|language=en|access-date=26 June 2020}}</ref> while the IRB (who in time were also referred to as "Fenians") attempted an armed rising at home.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes|publisher=Gill & Macmillan|year=2008|isbn=9780717146499|location=Dublin|pages=389}}</ref> In Canada the Fenian raids were repulsed. In Ireland, British infiltration ensured that action was limited to minor skirmishes in the south-west including outside Mallow, Thomas Davis's hometown in County Cork.<ref>{{Cite web |last=O'Donovan|first=John|date=2018|title=A Forgotten Son of Mallow (and Ireland)? William O'Brien (1852–1928) and his world|url=https://medium.com/@j_goddy/a-forgotten-son-of-mallow-and-ireland-william-obrien-1852-1928-and-his-world-4b53f3b9cc1|access-date=2025-11-23|website=Medium|language=en}}</ref>
Two years before, David Bell, a member of the IRB executive council, had evaded a police dragnet in Dublin, fleeing first to Paris, then to the United States.<ref name="Bell2">{{cite journal |last1=Bell|first1=Thomas|date=1967|title=The Reverend David Bell|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27695597|journal=Clogher Historical Society|volume=6|issue=2|pages=253–276|doi=10.2307/27695597|jstor=27695597|s2cid=165479361|url-access=subscription|access-date=3 October 2020}}</ref> As a Secessionist Presbyterian minister in Ballybay, in County Monaghan,<ref name="Courtney2">{{cite book |last1=Courtney|first1=Roger|title=Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition|date=2013|publisher=Ulster Historical Foundation|isbn=9781909556065|location=Belfast|pages=203–205}}</ref> Bell had shared platforms with Catholic priests to promote the all-Ireland Tenant Right League with its call for fixity of tenure at fair rent.<ref name="Courtney2" /> Despite the strength of the movement among Protestant tenant farmers, Bell was unable to deliver for what Gavan Duffy had optimistically hailed as the "League of North and South". In the elections of 1852, Bell found that of the one hundred Presbyterians who had signed the requisition asking John Gray (of the ''Freeman's Journal'') to stand as the Tenant Right candidate in Monaghan, only eleven had voted for him.<ref name="Bell2"/><ref>Bell, p.258</ref> The only Ulsterman among the fifty League-endorsed candidates returned from Ireland (the majority committed Repealers), was William Kirk, a liberal Protestant, who benefitted from the exceptional Catholic vote in Newry.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Hoppen|first1=K. Theodore|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JLdnAAAAMAAJ|title=Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1832-1885|last2=Hoppen|first2=Karl T.|date=1984|publisher=Clarendon Press|isbn=978-0-19-822630-7|pages=267|language=en}}</ref><ref name=":43">{{Cite book |last=Courtney|first=Roger|title=Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition|year=2013|isbn=9781909556065|location=Ulster Historical Foundation|pages=156–160, 192}}</ref>
Bell had been sworn into the IRB by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa in England where, after being forced to resigned his ministry, he was editing an Irish nationalist weekly.<ref name="Bell2"/> In American exile, Bell encountered, and denounced, John Mitchel (escaped from his penal colony in Australia) who had been an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause.<ref name="Quinn">{{cite web |last1=Quinn|first1=James|date=28 February 2013|title=Southern Citizen: John Mitchel, the Confederacy and slavery|url=https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201112024944/http://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/|archive-date=12 November 2020|access-date=21 December 2020|website=History Ireland}}</ref> With the "Fenian poet" Michael Scanlon,<ref name="dib">{{cite journal |last=McGee|first=Owen|date=October 2009|title=Scanlan, Michael|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/scanlan-michael-a7942|journal=Dictionary of Irish Biography|doi=10.3318/dib.007942.v1|doi-access=free}}</ref> in 1867, Bell began publishing the ''Irish Republic'' initially in Chicago,<ref name=":05">{{Cite web |title=Newly Digitized Immigrant Newspaper: Irish Republic – Illinois Newspaper Project – U of I Library|url=https://www.library.illinois.edu/illinoisnewspaperproject/irish-republic/|access-date=2024-01-17|website=www.library.illinois.edu}}</ref> but then, at the request of the Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant, in New York City.<ref name="Yanoso">{{cite book |last1=Yanoso|first1=Nicole Anderson|title=The Irish and the American Presidency|date=2017|publisher=Routledge|isbn=9781351480635|location=New York|pages=75–80}}</ref> Under the masthead, "A Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", Bell tried to associate physical-force Irish republicanism of the Fenians with the Radical Republican agenda in the United States of black enfranchisement and Reconstruction.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Knight|first1=Matthew|date=2017|title=The Irish Republic: Reconstructing Liberty, Right Principles, and the Fenian Brotherhood|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680371/summary|journal=Éire-Ireland (Irish-American Cultural Institute)|volume=52|issue=3 & 4|pages=252–271|doi=10.1353/eir.2017.0029|s2cid=159525524|url-access=subscription|access-date=9 October 2020}}</ref>
==Home Rule era== [[File:Portrait_of_Isaac_Butt.jpg|thumb|245x245px|Isaac Butt (1813-1879) by John Butler Yeats]]
=== Home Rulers === In response to the "arrests, trials, speeches from the dock, imprisonments, sufferings, and occasional daring rescues" that followed the "Fenian rising" in Ireland, an amnesty movement formed in which moderate political figures were willing to intercede.<ref name=":24">{{Cite book |last=Foster |first=R. F. |title=Modern Ireland 1600-1972 |publisher=Allen Lane, Penguin Press |year=1988 |isbn=978-0-7139-9010-2 |location=London |pages=393, 397}}</ref> These included, as president of the Amnesty Association, Isaac Butt, who in 1848 had represented Duffy and other Young Irelanders.<ref name=":6">{{Citation |last=Bull |first=Philip |title=Butt, Isaac |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/butt-isaac-a1311 |access-date=2025-11-24 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.001311.v1 |doi-access=free}}</ref> Butt, the Liberal MP for Youghal, began, in turn, to lay the groundwork for a future political compromise. With William Shaw, another Protestant Liberal, MP for Bandon, in 1873, Butt established the Home Rule League. Rather than repeal, Ireland would accept a parliament within the United Kingdom with powers to control its domestic affairs devolved from Westminster.<ref name=":24" />
It was in protest against what he insisted would continue to be "foreign rule" that, in 1875, Mitchel returned to Ireland, dying at his home in Newry days after repeating O'Donovan Rossa's achievement six years before of being returned as the MP for Tipperary on an abstentionist ticket.<ref name="Patrick Mitchel">{{cite web |last1=Mitchel |first1=Patrick |date=19 May 2020 |title=John Mitchel's Return to Ireland 1874-75 |url=https://faithinireland.wordpress.com/category/ireland/john-mitchel/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164221/https://faithinireland.wordpress.com/category/ireland/john-mitchel/ |archive-date=9 June 2021 |access-date=27 December 2020 |website=FaithinIreland}}</ref><ref name="Sullivan">{{cite web |last1=Sullivan |first1=A. M. |title=John Mitchel, the Story of Ireland, A. M. Sullivan (c 1900), Chapter XCL (continued) |url=https://www.libraryireland.com/Atlas/XCI-John-Mitchel.php |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200925205826/https://www.libraryireland.com/Atlas/XCI-John-Mitchel.php |archive-date=25 September 2020 |access-date=21 December 2020 |publisher=Library Ireland}}</ref>
When, Isaac Butt, the son of a Church of Ireland rector in County Donegal, first entered Parliament for Youghal in 1852, it was as a Conservative. But already, as a political economist, and in response to the catastrophe of the Famine, he had concluded that for Ireland the British union and its common market posed an existential threat. The prospect (outside of Ulster which, alone, seemed to attract Scottish and English capital) was of continued pressure, and poverty, on the land. At the same time, with the tenant righters, he agreed that there was an immediate question of land tenure, one that involved "the very life of the nation, the right of the Celtic race to live in their own land" and which approached "the very foundation of society and proprietary rights".<ref name=":6" />
In its early stages, Butt's Home-Rule association had included an "incongruous alliance" of Protestants who as conservatives still wished for "a union of Irishmen rather than a union of parliaments",<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Golden |first=J.J. |date=2013 |title=The Protestant Influence on the Origins of Irish Home Rule, 1861–1871 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24473895 |journal=The English Historical Review |volume=128 |issue=535 |pages=1483–1516, 1483 |doi=10.1093/ehr/cet322 |jstor=24473895 |issn=0013-8266}}</ref> and upper-middle class Catholic Whigs and their clergy.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Miller|first=Kerby A.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6nljz5N8JlUC|title=Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America|date=1985|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-505187-2|pages=440|language=en}}</ref> Following success of the Home Rule League in the 1874 general election (fifty-nine members returned to Westminster in a first-time use of the secret ballot),<ref name=":92">{{Cite book |last=Beckett|first=J. C.|title=The Making of Modern Ireland 1603–1923|publisher=Faber & Faber|year=1966|isbn=0-571-09267-5|location=London|pages=381}}</ref> Butt contended with a more radical coalition of former Fenians and other advanced nationalists and militant tenant farmers. The champions for these, more impatient, elements were Joseph Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell.<ref name=":6" />
=== Parnellites and anti-Parnellites === [[File:Charles_Stewart_Parnell_-_Brady-Handy.jpg|left|thumb|251x251px|Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891)]] After his election in 1874 from Cavan, Joseph Biggar, a wealthy Belfast provision merchant, converted to Catholicism.<ref>{{Cite web |last=O'Day|first=Alan|date=2009|title=Biggar, Joseph Gillis {{!}} Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/biggar-joseph-gillis-a0652|access-date=2023-02-06|website=dib.ie}}</ref> He also joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and accepted a seat on its Supreme Council, but only, he was to insist, with a view to winning Fenian support for Home Rule League's parliamentary strategy.<ref name="Moody2">T. W. Moody. ''Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–82''. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1981</ref> In Biggar's hands, this strategy had some appeal. Abandoning the restraint traditionally exercised in the House of Commons by oppositions who might themselves attain office,<ref name="Moody2"/> Biggar led the Irish MPs in filibustering and generally frustrating the business of the government in the House in order to force the consideration of their demands.<ref name="Sheehan">D.D. Sheehan, ''[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13963/13963-h/13963-h.htm Ireland Since Parnell]'', London: Daniel O'Connor, 1921.</ref><ref name="Brown">Malcolm Brown, ''The Politics of Irish Literature''. Chapter 16 – [http://www.astonisher.com/archives/mjb/irishlit/irishlit_ch16.html Parnell and Davitt]</ref> In this obstructionism, Biggar was supported against the disapproval of Butt by Parnell.<ref name=":15">{{Citation |last=Callanan|first=Frank|title=Parnell, Charles Stewart|date=2009|work=Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/parnell-charles-stewart-a7199|access-date=2025-11-24|publisher=Royal Irish Academy|doi=10.3318/dib.007199.v1|doi-access=free}}</ref> When, in 1879, Butt died, Parnell succeeded him in leadership of what was to become, in 1882, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).
Parnell had been born into a landed, Ascendancy, family in County Wicklow, that had celebrated its past connection to the Volunteer movement and opposition to the Act of Union. Parnell's refusal to see Ireland treated as a "geographical fragment" of England is also been attributed to the influence of his American mother.<ref name=":15" /><ref>{{Cite book |last=O'Brien |first=R. Barry |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=I9nvyWhWxBEC |title=The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell -- 1846~1891 |date=1898 |location=New York |pages=7, 29–31 |language=en}}</ref> When first elected to the House of Commons in the 1875 County Meath by-election it was with the endorsement of the IRB's Patrick Egan. Parnell's first reported intervention in the House was a defence of the Manchester Martyrs, the three IRB men hanged in 1867 for the death of a police sergeant.<ref name=":15" /> He consolidated his bid for leadership by securing from leading IRB and Clan na Gael figures, including, on his release from prison, Michael Davitt, endorsement for a "New Departure". This was a constitutional path to Irish self-government conditioned on energetic resistance to coercion acts and vigorous agitation on the land question.<ref>Bew, Paul (1978). ''Land and the National Question in Ireland: 1858-82''. Amherst: Humanities Press. {{ISBN|978-0-391-00960-8}}</ref>
Parnell was simultaneously elected president of Davitt's newly founded Irish National Land League. On both Party and League, he sought to impose the same centralised discipline. This may have enabled them weather the waves of indignation and accusation that accompanied the escalation of the Land War and the Phoenix Park murders, so that he was still able to hold Gladstone's Liberal government to promises of land reform (1881, 1882) and, at the cost of splitting the government majority, of a Home Rule bill (1886). It also sowed dissension. Michael Davitt was later to suggest that the leader's "dictatorship" had replaced nationalism with "Parnellism".<ref>Foster (1988), p. 401</ref>
Parnell's position was abruptly undermined when, in 1890, he was when named in a divorce case, revealing his affair with Kitty O'Shea. In advancing candidates for Westminster, Parnell had favoured northern Protestants: putting Isaac Nelson into his own former seat Mayo, after the Presbyterian minister, who had refused to support the endowment of a Catholic university, was rejected in Leitrim ;<ref name=":04">{{Cite book |last=Hourican|first=Bridget|title=Dictionary of Irish Biography|title-link=Dictionary of Irish Biography|date=2009|publisher=Royal Irish Academy|chapter=Nelson, Isaac|doi=10.3318/dib.006152.v1|access-date=29 May 2025|chapter-url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/nelson-isaac-a6152}}</ref> and John Pinkerton into Galway Borough, after the founder-member of the Protestant Home Rule Association failed to top the poll in his North Antrim constituency.<ref>{{Citation |last1=Pole |first1=Adam |title=Pinkerton, John |date=2012-08-01 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/pinkerton-john-a7355 |access-date=2025-12-12 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.007355.v2 |last2=Lunney |first2=Linde|doi-access=free }}</ref> Yet in the split within the Irish party over Parnell, which was to persist long after his death in October 1891, Pinkerton stood with the majority Anti-Parnellites, as did other senior Protestant MPs: Jeremiah Jordan, the Member for the Western division of County Clare, and later South Fermanagh;<ref>{{Citation |last=Maume |first=Patrick |title=Jordan, Jeremiah |date=2013 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/jordan-jeremiah-a9560 |access-date=2025-11-26 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.009560.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref> J. G. Swift MacNeill, who was to represent South Donegal for over thirty years,<ref>Walker, Brian M. ed. (1978). ''Parliamentary election results in Ireland 1801–1922''. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. p.155, 350. {{ISBN|0-901714-12-7}}</ref> and Samuel Young MP for East Cavan.<ref>{{Citation |last=Lunney |first=Linde |title=Young, Samuel |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/young-samuel-a9179 |access-date=2025-12-13 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.009179.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref> Priests may have "swarmed the polling stations and kept the voters constantly in view" to ensure the defeat of Parnellites (reportedly the fate in North Meath of Parnell's close ally, Pierce Mahony, the Anglican grandson of a Repeal MP).<ref>The Times, 23 February 1893.</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Maume |first=Patrick |title=O'Mahony, Pierce Charles de Lacy ('The O'Mahony of Kerry') |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/omahony-pierce-charles-de-lacy-omahony-kerry-a6881 |access-date=2025-12-13 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.006881.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref> But the condemnation of Parnell by the Catholic bishops was not greater than that of Protestant churchmen, and while Parnellites decried clerical dictation, they continued to count on a "small but significant division" in the ranks of the priesthood.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Callanan|first=Frank|date=1990|title='Clerical Dictation': Reflections on the Catholic Church and the Parnell Split|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25487499|journal=Archivium Hibernicum|volume=45|pages=64–75|doi=10.2307/25487499|jstor=25487499 |issn=0044-8745|url-access=subscription}}</ref>
=== Cultural nationalists === [[File:Alice_milligan_and_anna_johnston_(1).jpg|thumb|Alice Milligan (l) (1865-1953) with Ethna Carbery]] In June 1891, Parnell was seen "beaten and ashamed" at a public meeting in Dublin by Alice Milligan. Defying a "Tory and Protestant" upbringing, as she followed him in his appearances across the city she claims to have "turned into a Parnellite" while "in the tram going up O’Connell Street".<ref name="Harp">{{cite journal |last1=Harp|first1=Richard|date=2000|title=No Other Place but Ireland: Alice Milligan's Diary and Letters|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20557634|journal=New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua|volume=4|issue=1|pages=82, 84–85|jstor=20557634|access-date=27 January 2021}}</ref><ref name="Morris 22">{{cite journal |last1=Morris|first1=Catherine|date=2003|title=Becoming Irish? Alice Milligan and the Revival|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25517215|journal=Irish University Review|volume=31|issue=1|pages=82, 87–88, 91, 94|jstor=25517215|access-date=25 January 2021}}</ref>
Already a student of the Irish language, which as a child she had heard spoken by farm hands in her native Tyrone, in 1893 Milligan was among the first to join Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League.<ref name="Morris2">{{cite book |last=Morris|first=Catherine|title=Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival|date=2013|publisher=Four Courts Press|isbn=978-1-846-82422-7|location=Dublin}}</ref> Her command of Irish was never fluent, and on that basis Patrick Pearse was later to object when, in 1904, the League hired her as a travelling lecturer.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Morris|first=Catherine|date=2010|title=Alice Milligan: Republican Tableaux and the Revival|url=https://imma.ie/en/downloads/catherine_morris-field-day.pdf|journal=Field Day Review|volume=6|via=Irish Museum of Modern Art}}</ref> She proved herself by establishing new branches throughout Ireland and raising funds along the way. In Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants. She collaborated with, among other activists, League president Douglas Hyde and the Galway MP Stephen Gwynn, both sons of Church of Ireland clergymen,<ref name="Morris2"/> and with Francis Joseph Bigger, a wealthy Presbyterian solicitor, whose house on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, {{lang|ga|Ard Righ}}, offered a salon for the northern poets and writers of the Irish Literary Revival.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Eamon|first1=Phoenix|title=Feis Na Ngleann: Gaelic Culture in Antrim Glens|date=2005|publisher=Ulster Historical Association|isbn=9781903688496|location=Belfast|page=73}}</ref>
In founding the League, Hyde (the future first President of Ireland) declared that "in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have to nationality".<ref>{{cite book |last=Hyde|first=Douglas|title=The Revival of Irish Literature|publisher=T.E.Unwin|year=1894|editor-last=Duffy|editor-first=C.G.|location=London|page=116|chapter=The necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland}}</ref> While this commitment to an "Irish Ireland" was in the spirit of Thomas Davis,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ó Conchubhair |first=Brian |url= |title=The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 4: 1880 to the Present |date=2018 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-107-11354-1 |editor-last=Bartlett |editor-first=Thomas |series= |volume= |location=Cambridge |chapter=The Culture War: The Gaelic League and Irish Ireland |doi=}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Ó Tuathaigh |first=Gearóid |title=Culture in Ireland: Division or Diversity |publisher=Institute of Irish Studies, Q.U.B. |isbn=0853894132 |editor-last=Longley |editor-first=Edna |pages=54–71 |chapter=The Irish Ireland Idea: Rationale and Relevance}}</ref> Hyde initially tried to avoid association with political nationalism and to cultivate unionist participation. The Irish language, he declared, "is neither Protestant nor Catholic, it is neither a Unionist nor a Separatist."<ref name="Tanner2">{{cite book |last=Tanner |first=Marcus |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AXyq-Umw9DgC&q=stamp+out+any+lingering%2C+semi-pagan+remnants&pg=PA82 |title=The Last of the Celts |publisher=Yale University Press |year=2004 |isbn=0-300-10464-2 |pages=89}}</ref> In 1895, the League's first branch in Ulster was formed in Belfast under the patronage of Orange Order Grand Master, Richard Rutledge Kane.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Geoghegan|first=Patrick|date=2009|title=Kane, Richard Rutledge|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/kane-richard-rutledge-a4379|access-date=2022-12-19|website=Dictionary of Irish Biography|language=en}}</ref> Protestants had been playing a leading role in promoting the study of Irish, not least in the service of proselytising church missions. In the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster (where his pan-Protestant unionism was opposed by Isaac Nelson),<ref name=":04" /> Henry Cooke proposed all students for the ministry learn Irish, "the tongue of your native hills".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Stothers|first=Jim|date=2015|title=Presbyterians and the Irish Language|url=https://presbyterianhistoryireland.com/history/presbyterians-and-the-irish-language/|access-date=2025-11-26|website=Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland|language=en-GB}}</ref> But from the beginning Milligan understood the conflict between the Hyde's non-political rhetoric and the nationalism implicit in the League's revivalist project.<ref name="Mac Póilin">{{cite book |last1=Mac Póilin|first1=Aodán|title=Our Tangled Speech: Essays on Language and Culture|date=2018|publisher=Ulster Historical Foundation|isbn=9781909556676|location=Belfast|pages=83, 119, 134–137}}</ref>
In 1896, with Anna Johnston (writing under the name, Ethna Carbery), the daughter of local IRB man,<ref name="ria">{{cite book |last1=McGuire|first1=James|title=Dictionary of Irish Biography|last2=Quinn|first2=James|publisher=Royal Irish Academy-Cambridge University Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-521-63331-4|volume=II|location=Dublin}}</ref> Milligan began publication in Belfast of a new, explicitly nationalist, monthly. ''The Shan Van Vocht'' (The "Poor Old Woman" in Irish, the metaphor for Ireland in a popular 1798-era ballad) followed broadly the formula pioneered by Davis in ''The Nation''. Together with the Irish language, a unity-above-creed-and-class nationalism was promoted to an English-language readership in a mixture of poetry, serialised fiction, Irish history, political analysis and announcements.<ref>{{cite web |title=Full text of "The Shan Van Vocht"|url=https://archive.org/stream/shanvanvocht14unse/shanvanvocht14unse_djvu.txt|access-date=26 January 2021|website=Internet Archive|date=1896 |publisher=Boston Public Library}}</ref> Although much of the writing was her own, Milligan offered a broad political platform. Notwithstanding his argument that language and literary societies would likely achieve little, Milligan included in the first edition James Connolly's Socialist Republican manifesto, "Socialism and Nationalism".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Connolly|first1=James|date=January 1897|title=Socialism and Nationalism|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm|journal=Shan van Vocht|volume=1|issue=1|access-date=26 January 2021}}</ref>
Milligan's attempt in the journal to unify nationalists across region, class, sex and religion proved untenable: no faction or party was prepared to provide enough financial support to sustain it.<ref name="Steele">{{cite journal |last1=Steele|first1=Karen|date=2002|title=Editing out Factionalism: The Political and Literary Consequences in Ireland's "Shan Van Vocht"|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20083865|journal=Victorian Periodicals Review|volume=35|issue=2|pages=113–132|jstor=20083865|access-date=26 January 2021}}</ref> In 1899, the IRB persuaded Milligan and Johnston to pass their subscription list on to Arthur Griffith and his new Dublin weekly, the ''United Irishman'', organ of the original ''Cumann na nGaedheal,'' the forerunner of Sinn Féin.<ref name="Stokes">{{cite web |last1=Stokes|first1=Tom|title=Tag Archives: Shan Van Vocht: A Most Seditious Lot: The Feminist Press 1896–1916|url=https://theirishrepublic.wordpress.com/tag/shan-van-vocht/|access-date=26 January 2021|website=The Irish Republic}}</ref>
Other Protestant figures within the Irish literary revival ran afoul of nationalist opinion. Together with Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, a poet and dramatist "determined to write himself and his people into the Irish nationalist story",<ref>{{Cite book |last=English |first=Richard |title=Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland |publisher=Macmillan |year=2006 |isbn=9780330427593 |location=London |pages=237}}</ref> found himself accused by Griffith,<ref>{{Cite web |last=Westhead |first=Tom |date=2022 |title=The Playboy Riots: Synge's Incendiary Play |url=https://www.liverpoolirishcentre.org/post/the-playboy-riots-synge-s-incendiary-play |access-date=2026-01-26 |website=LiverpoolIrishCentre |language=en}}</ref> among others, of promoting, at their Abbey Theatre in Dublin, work that outraged Irish moral and national sensitivities.<ref name="Remport">{{cite book |last1=Remport|first1=Eglantina|title=Lady Gregory and the Irish National Theatre|date=2018|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=9783030095345|page=75}}</ref> Between 1904 and 1907, they staged three plays by John Millington Synge, a writer who had declared his wish to "work on my own for the cause of Ireland",<ref>{{Cite news |last=Donoghue |first=Denis |date=1983 |title=Rembrandt and Synge and Molly |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n22/denis-donoghue/rembrandt-and-synge-and-molly |access-date=2026-01-26 |work=London Review of Books |language=en |volume=05 |issue=22 |issn=0260-9592}}</ref> all which met with nationalist and clerical disapproval. The last of these,''The Playboy of the Western World,'' triggered a riot.<ref>{{cite web|author=Una Mullally|date=30 January 2019|title=Rioting in Dublin theatres is nothing new – Two new productions mirror disturbances at the Abbey over ''The Playboy'' in 1907|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/rioting-in-dublin-theatres-is-nothing-new-1.3879935|access-date=27 October 2025|website=The Irish Times}}</ref> Years later, the Abbey's staging in 1926 of ''The Plough and the Stars'' by Seán O'Casey, another Protestant writer who had broken with nationalist mainstream, provoked similar protests.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hogan|first1=Robert|last2=Kilroy|first2=James|title=The Irish Literary Theatre: 1899–1900|date=1975|publisher=Dolmen Press|location=Dublin|isbn=9780851052748|page=152 n.19}}</ref>
=== Dissident nationalists and conciliators === [[File:William O'Brien 1917.jpg|left|thumb|273x273px|William O'Brien (1852-1928)]] The son of a modest Protestant family in the birthplace of Thomas Davis, Mallow, County Cork, William O'Brien's advocacy of Irish Independence followed in the tradition of his predecessor: he acknowledged the existence of many strands of Irishness.<ref>O’Donovan, John: ''The All-for-Ireland League and the Home Rule debate, 1910–14'' Ch.7 p.157, in Doherty, Gabriel (Ed.): ''The Home Rule crisis 1912–14'' , Mercier Press Cork (2014) {{ISBN|978-1-78117-245-2}}</ref> Citing "the gloom of inevitable failure" he abandoned his early involvement with the Fenian brotherhood, opting instead to work with Parnell in the Irish National Land League. As the author, in 1882, of the Land War ''No Rent Manifesto,'' and member of League's "the de facto military council",<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dungan |first=Myles |title=Land is All That Matters: the Struggle that Shaped Irish History |year=2024 |isbn=9781801108157 |pages=384}}</ref> O'Brien faced repeated imprisonment. After the 1887 ''Bloody Sunday" riots in London, he briefly went into exile in America.<ref>{{Citation |last=Bull |first=Philip |title=O'Brien, William |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/obrien-william-a6503 |access-date=2025-12-02 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.006503.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref>
Following the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill in 1893, and disillusioned by the Parnell split, O'Brien retired from Parliament in 1895 and, with Michael Davitt, established a new grass-roots organisation the United Irish League (UIL). By 1900, it was the largest nationalist organisation in the country, with 1150 branches and 84,355 members.<ref>{{cite book |last=Garvin |first=Tom |author-link=Tom Garvin |title=The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics |publisher=Gill & Macmillan |year=2005 |isbn=0-7171-3967-0 |pages=101 |orig-year=1991}}</ref> The discredited IPP factions responded with a quick defensive reunion under John Redmond (a Parnellite who quickly redeemed the favour of the Catholic Church).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Mulvagh |first=Conor |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yWy5DwAAQBAJ |title=The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900–18 |date=2016 |publisher=Manchester University Press |isbn=978-1-5261-0017-7 |language=en}}</ref>
Tensions mounted as O'Brien pursued the goal of transferring land to tenant farmers by working with those in the Irish executive who, after the Gladstonian commitment to a Dublin Parliament had run its course, called for "constructive unionism".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hudson |first=David R. C. |title=The Ireland That We Made: Arthur & Gerald Balfour's Contribution to the Origins of Modern Ireland |publisher=The University of Akron Press |year=2003 |isbn=1884836976 |location=Akron, OH}}</ref> He led the tenant representation, which included T. W. Russell from Ulster, to the December 1902 Land Conference, an initiative of moderate landlords led by Lord Dunraven. Tenants' demands were conceded, and following a policy of "conference plus business", O'Brien helped secure passage of the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903. This was followed in 1906, legislation – "scarcely less wonderworking", in O'Brien view, "than the abolition of landlordism itself" – that provided housing and plots of land for rural labourers.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Crossman |first=Virginia |date=2004 |title=Building the Nation: Local Administration in Rural Ireland 1850–1920 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26265798 |journal=Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift für moderne europäische Geschichte / Revue d'histoire européenne contemporaine |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=(188–207), 202 |doi=10.17104/1611-8944_2004_2_188 |jstor=26265798 |issn=1611-8944}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=McKay |first=Edna |date=1992 |title=The Housing of the Working Classes 1883–1916 |journal=Saothar |volume=17 |pages=27–38}}</ref>
O'Brien was criticised by party leaders for putting resolution of the land question before Home Rule. The transfer of ownership was on terms that did not make tenants feel sufficiently beholden to the IPP.<ref>{{cite book |last=Maume |first=Patrick |title=The long Gestation, Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 |date=1999 |publisher=Gill & Macmillan |isbn=0-7171-2744-3}}</ref> In 1904, Redmond subverted O'Brien's influence within the UIL by securing the appointment of Belfast west MP, Joseph Devlin, Grandmaster of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, as its new secretary.<ref name="garvin">Garvin, Tom: ''The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics'' : pp. 105–110 ''The Rise of the Hibernians'' Gill & Macmillan (2005) {{ISBN|0-7171-3967-0}}</ref>
O'Brien had opposed the IPP's involvement with "that sinister sectarian secret society". With their ethnic, exclusively Catholic, nationalism, he regarded the AOH (the "Molly Maguires") as "the most damnable fact in the history of this country" – the nationalist equivalent to the Orange Order. Compromised by the AOH, O'Brien saw the IPP set upon a path which would frustrate any All-Ireland Home Rule settlement.<ref name="garvin" />
Following his engagement with the Irish Reform Movement 1904-5 and support of the 1907 Irish Council Bill which he viewed as a step in the right direction, or "Home Rule by instalments", in 1909 O'Brien inaugurated the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL).<ref>{{Cite thesis |last=Murphy |first=P. J. |title=The Banshee's Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict and the All for Ireland League |date=2019 |degree=phd |publisher=University of Liverpool |url=https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3061037 |language=en}}</ref> Under the banner of the "Three Cs" – Conference, Conciliation and Consent – he hoped to obtain an All-Ireland parliament without coercing Protestant Ulster. The League was supported by many Munster Protestants, including landowners and business figures, and was joined from Ulster by Lord Rossmore, once Grandmaster of the Orange Institution, and James Sharman Crawford, a tenant-right Liberal.<ref>Clifford, Brendan, ''Canon Sheehan: A Turbulent Priest'' p.17, Irish Heritage Society, Dublin (1990) {{ISBN|1-873063-00-8}}</ref> Despite bitter opposition from the IPP and local bishops, in the 1910 general election, the Cork electorate returned eight "O'Brienite" MPs.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Lyons |first=F. S. L. |date=1979 |title=Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922. Edited by Brian M. Walker. Pp xvi, 438. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. 1978. £9. |url=https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021121400113227 |journal=Irish Historical Studies |volume=21 |issue=83 |pages=344–345 |doi=10.1017/s0021121400113227 |issn=0021-1214|url-access=subscription }}</ref>
When, after 1912, the IPP again held the balance of power at Westminster, and the Liberal government's passage of a Home Rule bill was assured, O'Brien offered a series of amendments as alternatives to IPP's "Ulster must follow" policy. In a final Commons debate in May 1914, O'Brien stated that "we are ready for almost any conceivable concession to Ulster that will have the effect of uniting Ireland, but we will struggle to our last breath against a proposal which will divide her, and divide her eternally". O'Brien and his followers abstained on the final passage of the Government of Ireland Act 1914, denouncing it as "plan for the dismemberment of Ireland".<ref>{{Cite web |title=GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND BILL. (Hansard, 1 April 1914) |url=https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1914/apr/01/government-of-ireland-bill-1#S5CV0060P0_19140401_HOC_304 |access-date=2025-12-02 |website=api.parliament.uk}}</ref>
O'Brien saw the outbreak of the Great War in August as an opportunity to undertake a last crusade to preserve the unity of Ireland, by uniting the Green and Orange in a common cause, and was the first Nationalist leader to call on Irish Volunteers for the front.<ref>{{Cite book |last=MacDonagh |first=Michael |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JpRpAAAAMAAJ |title=The Life of William O'Brien, the Irish Nationalist: A Biographical Study of Irish Nationalism, Constitutional and Revolutionary |date=1928 |publisher=E. Benn |isbn=978-0-598-54835-1 |pages=200 |language=en}}</ref> However, by 1916, the combination of home rule's suspension until a date "as may be fixed" after the war,<ref>{{cite book |last=Bromage |first=Mary |author-link= |url= |title=Churchill and Ireland |date=1964 |publisher=University of Notre Dame Press |isbn= |location=Notre Dame, Illinois |page=54}}</ref> the mounting casualties, and the impact of the Rising, persuaded O'Brien that there was no future for his conciliatory stratagems. After intoning that "it is to Sinn Féin that Ireland must now look to mould the future of her people", his paper, the ''Cork Free Press,'' was suppressed.<ref>O'Brien, Joseph V.: ''William O'Brien and the course of Irish Politics, 1881–1918'', ''The All-for-Ireland League'' p.223, University of California Press (1976) {{ISBN|0-520-02886-4}}</ref> During the anti-conscription crisis in April 1918, O'Brien and his AFIL left Westminster and joined Sinn Féin in the mass protests in Dublin, and in the December 1918 general elections they put their seats in Cork at the disposal of the now republican party, whose candidates were returned unopposed.<ref>MacDonagh (1928), p. 234</ref>
Some middle-class Dubliners of both moderate unionist and nationalist found an alternative home in the Irish Dominion League, launched in June 1919 by Sir Horace Plunkett. The League sought unsuccessfully to mediate between Sinn Féin and the Government.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Broin |first=León Ó |url= |title=Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland: The Stopford Connection |date=1985 |publisher=Gill and Macmillan |isbn=978-0-389-20569-2 |pages=154 |language=en}}</ref>
=== Opponents of "Carsonism" === thumb|308x308px|Protestants protest "the Lawless Policy of Carsonism", 1913 At {{lang|ga|Ard Righ}}, Milligan met Roger Casement, then a fellow Gaelic Leaguer (with family roots in Belfast and Ballycastle),<ref name=":4">{{Cite news |last=Dudgeon |first=Jeffrey |title=Roger Casement: a campaigner, not a conspirator or even an Ulster Protestant |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/roger-casement-a-campaigner-not-a-conspirator-or-even-an-ulster-protestant-1.2680244 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160613111614/https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/roger-casement-a-campaigner-not-a-conspirator-or-even-an-ulster-protestant-1.2680244 |archive-date=2016-06-13 |access-date=2025-12-09 |newspaper=The Irish Times |language=en-US}}</ref> and together they travelled Antrim. They were in Larne in April 1914 after Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers had run German guns through the port, a feat Casement told her nationalists would need to match.<ref name="Morris3">{{cite book |last=Morris|first=Catherine|date=2013|title=Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival|location=Dublin|publisher=Four Courts Press|isbn=978-1-846-82422-7}}</ref><ref name="Ulster-Scots">{{cite web |title=Alice Milligan|url=http://www.ulster-scots.com/uploads/14121272881559.pdf|website=Herstory III: Profiles of a further eights Ulster-Scots women|publisher=Ulster-Scots Community Network|access-date=29 January 2021}}</ref>
Returning from British consular service in Africa and in South America, where he had born witness to the savagery of European colonialism, Casement (already a teenage Parnellite) <ref name=":4" /> was determined that Ireland should, as far practicable, distance herself from imperial Britain. With Arthur Griffith, he believed this could be, if not republican independence, something more than a devolved parliament.<ref>Inglis, Brian (1974). ''Roger Casement''; Harcourt Jovanovich, pp. 118–120, 134–139</ref> But the immediate task was to prevent Carson's mobilisation of Protestant Ulster from derailing the final passage of the third home rule bill. In October 1913, Casement, in his first ever public speech, addressed a meeting at which the "Protestants of Ballymoney and the Route" were invited to protest "the lawless policy of Carsonism".<ref>{{Cite web |date=2016 |title=Roger Casement talk to reveal links to Ballymoney |url=https://causewaycoastandglens.gov.uk/news/roger-casement-talk-to-reveal-links-to-ballymoney |access-date=2025-12-07 |website=Causeway Coast & Glens Borough Council |language=en}}</ref>
The event was sponsored by James Armour, a Presbyterian minister who led tenant agitation in north Antrim, despite his conversion to Home Rule.<ref name="Courtney3">{{cite book |last1=Courtney|first1=Roger|title=Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition|date=2013|publisher=Ulster Historical Foundation|isbn=9781909556065|location=Belfast|pages=156–160}}</ref> A sympathetic audience in Ballymoney may also have been anticipated on the strength, locally, of the Independent Orange Order.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Morrissey|first=Conor|date=2017|title=Rotten Protestants: Protestant Home Rules and the Ulster Liberal Association, 1906–1918|journal=The Historical Journal|volume=61|issue=3|pages=743–765|doi=10.1017/S0018246X1700005X|s2cid=148801140|url=https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/9ac238d2-7766-4293-aedc-0c62d4e3cfee|language=en}}</ref> The order's first Grand Master, Robert Lindsay Crawford had promoted Independent lodges as "strongly Protestant, strongly democratic" and "strongly Irish". In the order's 1904 Magheramorne Manifesto, he had invited Irish Protestants to "reconsider their position as Irish citizens and their attitude towards their Roman Catholic countrymen".<ref>Roger Courtney (2013), ''Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition'', Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, pp. 286–287. {{ISBN|9781909556065}}</ref>
With Casement on the town-hall platform was Alice Stopford Green and Captain Jack White. Stopford Green, who had supported Casement in the Congo Reform Movement, was the daughter of the Anglican Archdeacon of Meath.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Johnston |first=Roy |date=1999 |title=Alice Stopford Green's Life |url=http://www.iol.ie/~rjtechne/century130703/1900s/asgmcd.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090107014922/http://www.iol.ie/~rjtechne/century130703/1900s/asgmcd.htm |archive-date=2009-01-07 |access-date=2025-12-17 |website=www.iol.ie}}</ref> A popular historian, she was best known for ''The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, 1200–1600'' (1908), a chronicle of England's systematic pillaging and disruption of an Ireland that was self-confident, internationally connected, and Gaelic-speaking.<ref name="britannica1">{{Cite encyclopedia |url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Stopford-Green|title=Alice Stopford Green|encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica|date=28 May 1929|access-date=5 February 2009}}</ref> Jack White, a local Boer War veteran, was fresh from addressing a motion against "the stirring up of religious rancour and intolerance in N.E. Ulster" from the platform of Pinkerton's Irish Protestant Home Rule Association in London, alongside George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Gwynn M.P. and Arthur Conan Doyle. He now proposed a Home Rule pledge to match the Carson's Ulster Covenant: "We intend to abide by the just laws of the lawful parliament of Ireland until such time as it may prove itself hostile to democracy, in sure confidence that God will stand by those who stand by the people irrespective of class or Creed."<ref>Appendix G in J.R.B. Mc Minn, Against the Tide, PRONI Belfast,1985.</ref> Circulated at some peril across County Antrim, the alternative covenant collected some 12,000 signatures.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Morrissey |first=Conor |date=2018 |title='Rotten Protestant": Protestant Home Ruler and the Ulster Liberal Association, 1906–1918 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0018246X1700005X/type/journal_article |journal=The Historical Journal |language=en |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=(743–765) 762 |doi=10.1017/S0018246X1700005X |issn=0018-246X}}</ref>
Casement attempted, but failed, to build upon the Ballymoney meeting with further engagements.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ullans Speakers Association|title=A Ripple in the Pond: The Home Rule Revolt in North Antrim|publisher=Ulster Scots Agency|year=2013|location=Ballymoney}}</ref> ''The Times'' of London concluded that the meeting had represented but a "small pocket of dissident Protestants, the last survivors of the Old Liberals.”<ref name=":132">{{Cite web |last=Mulhall|first=Ed|date=2016|title=Punching the Wind: Captain Jack White, the misfit of the Irish Revolution {{!}} Century Ireland|url=https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/punching-the-wind-captain-jack-white-the-misfit-of-the-irish-revolution|access-date=2022-10-19|website=www.rte.ie}}</ref> Within a year, White was in Dublin drilling James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army,<ref name=":21">{{Cite book |last=Nevin |first=Donal |title=James Connolly. 'A Full Life' |publisher=Gill & Macmillan |year=2006 |isbn=9780717129621 |location=Dublin |pages=552–553}}</ref> and Stopford Green had extended Casement a loan to help run German guns into Howth for the Irish Volunteers.<ref>Inglis, B (1973). ''Roger Casement''. Coronet. {{ISBN|0-340-18292-X}}, pp. 262-265.</ref>
==Independence era==
=== Revolutionary republicans === [[File:Countess_Constance_Markiewicz-1.1.2_(cropped).jpg|thumb|267x267px|Constance Markiewicz (1868-1927) in the uniform she designed for the Irish Citizen Army.|left]] While formed to protect picket lines and union rallies during Dublin lock-out of 1913, both Connolly and White regarded the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) as part of a broader response to the arming of unionism in the north.<ref name=":62">{{Cite book |last=Levenson|first=Samuel|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=atIuAAAAIAAJ&q=%22james+connolly%22++%22Little+Ireland%22.|title=James Connolly: a biography|publisher=Martin Brian and O'Keeffe|year=1973|isbn=978-0-85616-130-8|location=London|page=240}}</ref> As desertions mounted with the defeat of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, White moved on to the more credible counterweight to the Ulster Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers. He was given command of brigades in Derry City and the northwest, but found his authority weakened by the suspicion in the ranks that, as a Protestant, he would never lead them into a fight against Orangemen.<ref name=":1102">{{Cite web |last=Murray|first=Daniel|date=2014|title=Book Review: Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchism and the Irish Citizen Army by Leo Keohane|url=https://www.theirishstory.com/2014/11/06/book-review-captain-jack-white-imperialism-anarchism-and-the-irish-citizen-army/#.Y0nB13bMKUk|access-date=2022-10-14|website=The Irish Story|language=en-GB}}</ref> After the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, he tried to persuade the British authorities to pay and equip the Volunteers as a home guard under their own command. Of his attempt to invoke the Volunteers precedent of 1782, his comrades were no less suspicious than the government: "I was taken to be recruiting for Britain, whereas I was trying to use Britain to put Ireland into a position to enforce her own claims".<ref name=":173">{{Cite book |last1=White |first1=Jack |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eVpjAAAAMAAJ |title=Misfit: An Autobiography |last2=White |first2=James Robert |last3=White |first3=J. R. |date=2005 |publisher=Livewire Publications |isbn=978-1-905225-20-0 |pages=211 |language=en}}</ref> White was dismissed from his Volunteer commands.<ref name=":1622">{{Cite web |last=McGarry|first=Fearghal|date=2009|title=White, James Robert ('Jack') {{!}} Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/white-james-robert-jack-a9003|access-date=2022-10-22|website=www.dib.ie|language=en}}</ref>
Connolly, meanwhile, had found a new source of ICA recruits, the nationalist youth of Fianna Éireann.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cardozo|first=Nancy|title=Maud Goone: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart|publisher=Victor Gollanz|year=1979|isbn=0-575-02572-7|pages=289}}</ref><ref name=":112">{{Cite book |last=Ó Faoláin|first=Seán|title=Constance Markievicz or The Average Revolutionary|publisher=Jonathan Cape|year=1934|pages=198}}</ref> The Fianna were a link to the IRB and to the Irish Volunteers—unacceptable to Seán O'Casey who, resigned from the ICA Council rather than cooperate with those he saw as having failed in the lock-out to stand by men trying to exercise "the first principles of Trade Unionism".<ref name=":223">{{Cite journal |last=Newsinger |first=John |date=1985 |title='In the Hunger-Cry of the Nation's Poor is Heard the Voice of Ireland': Sean O'Casey and Politics 1908–1916 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/260532 |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=20 |issue=2 |pages=221–240 [227–228] |doi=10.1177/002200948502000202 |issn= |jstor=260532 |s2cid=}}</ref> Casey, who had been an active member of the Church of Ireland until his mid-twenties, continued as an independent republican and socialist, and as a dramatist: the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.<ref>{{Citation |last=Lowery |first=Robert G. |title=O'Casey, Sean |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/ocasey-sean-a6553 |access-date=2025-12-12 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.006553.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref>
Fianna Éireann had been formed in 1909 by the Bulmer Hobson in Belfast and by Constance Markievicz in Dublin, and later engaged both Pearse<ref>{{cite book |last=Pearse |first=Pádraic |title=Political Writings and Speeches |publisher=Phoenix Publishing Co. |others=Hosted online at CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts |year=1924 |place=Dublin |pages=110–116 |chapter=To the Boys of Ireland |access-date=31 December 2020 |orig-date=1913 |chapter-url=https://celt.ucc.ie//published/E900007-006/index.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200807215918/https://celt.ucc.ie//published/E900007-006/index.html |archive-date=7 August 2020 |url-status=live}}</ref> and Casement.<ref>{{cite book |last=Casement |first=Roger |title=Fianna Handbook |year=1913 |pages=75ff |chapter=Chivalry |access-date=31 December 2020 |chapter-url=http://nuigarchives.blogspot.com/2016/01/pearse-hyde-casement-markievicz-and-na.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210925144625/http://nuigarchives.blogspot.com/2016/01/pearse-hyde-casement-markievicz-and-na.html |archive-date=25 September 2021 |url-status=live}}</ref>
Hobson was the son in Belfast of a Protestant home-ruler.<ref>{{cite book|author=Marnie Hay|title=Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth—Century Ireland|publisher=Manchester University Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-7190-7987-0|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GHf7PAAACAAJ&q=hay+bulmer+hobson|access-date=27 June 2009|page=7}}</ref> At age 13 he had had his own subscription to ''The Shan Van Vocht'', and through his English suffragist mother was introduced to Milligan and the {{lang|ga|Ard Righ}} set.''<ref name="Townshend3">Charles Townshend, ''Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion'', pp. 18-19, Penguin Books, 2005; {{ISBN|978-0-14-101216-2}}</ref>'' In 1904, he was inducted into the IRB, and with Ernest Blythe, who at the time had the distinction of being simultaneously a member of the Gaelic League, the IRB and the Orange Order,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Ernest Blythe—Orangeman and Fenian – History Ireland|url=https://historyireland.com/ernest-blythe-orangeman-fenian/|website=historyireland.com|access-date=2025-12-01|date=2017|last=Fitzpatrick|first=David}}</ref> he helped set up the Protestant-outreach Dungannon Clubs.<ref>Jackson, T.A (1947) ''Ireland Her Own'', Lawrence & Wishart, Rp 1991, pp. 105-113. {{ISBN|0-85315-735-9}}.</ref> Named after the Dungannon Convention of 1782,<ref name="Laffan">Michael Laffan, ''The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923'', Cambridge University Press, 1999, {{ISBN|9780521650731}}, [https://archive.org/details/resurrectionirel00laff/page/n40 pp. 21–22]</ref> they invoked the memory not only of the old Volunteers but also of the United Irishmen, declaring that: “The Ireland we seek to build is not an Ireland for the Catholic or the Protestant, but an Ireland for every Irishman Irrespective of his creed or class."<ref name="Townshend3" /> Among those they persuaded that "the real Irishman is neither essentially a Celt nor essentially a Catholic" was the Belfast-born writer, literary essayist and socialist Robert Wilson Lynd.<ref>Ó Snodaigh, Pádraig (1995). ''Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language''. Belfast: Lagan Press. p. 91. {{ISBN|1-873687-35-4}}.</ref>
In 1911, Hobson was elevated to the IRB's Supreme Council. In July 1914, as secretary to Irish Volunteers, he organised the distribution of the German arms landed at Howth,<ref name="Townshend3" /> from the ''Asgard,'' a yacht owned amd crewed by the English-born Volunteer Erskine Childers and his American-Irish wife Molly Childers.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The riddle of Erskine Childers|publisher=Hutchinson|date=1977|location=London|isbn=978-0-09-128490-9|first=Andrew|last=Boyle|pages=95–99}}</ref> A week later, a further consignment was landed from the ''Chotah,'' at Kilcoole county Wicklow, a boat owned by a prominent nationalist defector from the Anglo-Irish establishment, Sir Thomas Myles.<ref>{{cite book |last=Macardle|first=Dorothy|author-link=|date=1965|title=The Irish Republic|url=|location=New York|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|page=115|isbn=}}</ref>
For IRB, the Irish Volunteers and the ICA, like the Gaelic League (a regular source of recruits from as early as 1903),<ref name="Mac Póilin2">{{cite book|last1=Mac Póilin|first1=Aodán|title=Our Tangled Speech: Essays on Language and Culture|date=2018|publisher=Ulster Historical Foundation|isbn=9781909556676|location=Belfast|pages=83, 119, 134–137}}</ref> the Dungannon Clubs and the Fianna Éireann, were "open fronts". They sustained a republican network that the Supreme Council believed they could spring into action when they judged the moment opportune. But in planning the 1916 Easter Rising, Pearse, whom Hobson had sworn into the IRB in December 1913,<ref>See: National Library of Ireland, [http://www.nli.ie/1916/pdf/3.2.1.pdf 3.2.1 Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080228140800/http://www.nli.ie/1916/pdf/3.2.1.pdf|date=28 February 2008}}, in ''The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives'', p. 18. Retrieved 1 January 2008.</ref> was engaged in an internal IRB conspiracy (with Connolly included only at the last possible moment).<ref name=":52">{{Cite book |last=Cronin|first=Seán|url=|title=James Connolly: Irish Revolutionary|date=2020|publisher=McFarland|isbn=978-1-4766-3997-0|location=Jefferson, North Carolina|language=en|pages=168}}</ref> When he learned of Pearse's mobilisation orders, Hobson alerted the Volunteers' chief-of-staff Eoin MacNeill, but was kidnapped to stop him from spreading news of the countermanding order that followed.<ref name="Clavin">{{cite book|last1=Clavin|first1=Terry|title=Dictionary of Irish Biography|date=2009|publisher=Cambridge University Press|editor1-last=McGuire|editor1-first=James|location=Cambridge|chapter=Séamus O'Doherty ''In'' O'Doherty, (Michael) Kevin|editor2-last=Quinn|editor2-first=James}}</ref> During the Rising, which he later described as having "no plans.....which could seriously be called military",<ref>{{Cite book |last=O'Donnell |first=Ruán |title=16 Lives: Patrick Pearse |publisher=O'Brien Press |year=2016 |isbn=978-1847172624 |location=Dublin |page=278}}</ref> Hobson went into hiding, re-emerging after the June amnesty, largely to scorn.<ref>{{Citation |last=Hay |first=Marnie |title=Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909–23: Scouting for rebels |date=2019 |work= |pages=71 |access-date= |publisher=Manchester University Press |language=en-US |doi= |isbn=978-1-5261-2775-4}}</ref>
Had the British not captured him on his return by U-boat from Germany, Casement might also have advised the Volunteers to stand down. He had concluded from his negotiations for further arms, that the Germans were toying with him,<ref>{{Cite journal|title=The Treason of Sir Roger Casement|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1843187|journal=The American Historical Review|date=1955|issn=0002-8762|pages=(283–302) 299|volume=60|issue=2|doi=10.2307/1843187|first=Giovanni|last=Costigan |jstor=1843187 |url-access=subscription}}</ref> and hoped to convince MacNeill (who he believed was still in control) to call any plans for a rising off.<ref>{{cite book|author=Keith Jeffery|title=1916 The Long Revolution, The First World War and the Rising: Mode, Moment and Memory|page=[https://archive.org/details/1916longrevoluti0000unse/page/93 93]|others=G. Doherty & D. Keogh (editors)|date=2007|publisher=Mercier Press|isbn=978-1-85635-545-2|url=https://archive.org/details/1916longrevoluti0000unse/page/93}}</ref> After a highly publicised trial for treason Casement went to the gallows at Pentonville Prison, 3 August 1916, three months after the summary court-martials of the rebel "ringleaders" in Dublin.
Two of the leaders, who had had positions of command in Dublin during the Rising, escaped execution: Éamon de Valera, it was widely thought because of his American birth;<ref name="Oxford">{{cite book |title=Oxford Companion to Irish History|author=S. J. Connolly|publisher=Oxford University Press|page=607|year=2004|isbn=978-0-19-923483-7}}</ref> and Constance Markievicz. Markievicz had supervised the setting-up of barricades on Easter Monday and was in the middle of the fighting all around St. Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper.<ref>{{cite book|last1=McKenna|first1=Joseph|title=Guerrilla Warfare in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921|date=2011|publisher=McFarland|isbn=978-0-7864-8519-2|page=112|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BxLb0aZOFOMC&pg=PA112|access-date=22 March 2016}}</ref> She was sentenced to death, but the court recommended mercy "solely and only on account of her sex".<ref name="FoyBarton303">{{cite book|last1=Foy|first1=Michael T.|last2=Barton|first2=Brian|title=The Easter Rising|date=2011|publisher=The History Press|isbn=978-0-7524-7272-0|page=303|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wUI7AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA303|access-date=30 March 2016|archive-date=29 July 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200729161714/https://books.google.com/books?id=wUI7AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA303|url-status=live}}</ref>
Markievicz, ''{{née}}'' Gore-Booth, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish family with an estate in County Sligo, had associated in Dublin with the leading figures in the literary revival, the Gaelic League and, in time, the IRB.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz|url=https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161242/revolutionary-lives|access-date=2025-07-27|website=press.princeton.edu|date=2015|last=Arrington|first=Lauren}}</ref> In 1908, she joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ("Daughters of Ireland"), a revolutionary women's movement founded by Maud Gonne, like herself the daughter of Anglo-Irish gentry, and a muse of their mutual friend, W.B. Yeats. After helping found Fianna Éireann in 1909, in which teenage boys were instructed in the paramilitary style of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouts, she had had to rely on the support of Bulmer Hobson to avoid being excluded on the grounds that women did not belong in a physical force movement.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Townshend|first1=Charles|title=Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion|date=2006|publisher=Penguin Books|location=London|isbn=978-0-14-190276-0|pages=21–2|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g6FNKxBJXMYC|access-date=27 March 2016|archive-date=29 July 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200729162647/https://books.google.com/books?id=g6FNKxBJXMYC|url-status=live}}</ref>
In 1913, while working with the Inghinidhe na hÉireann to assist the locked-out workers and their children, Markievicz joined James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army which, in contrast to the Irish Volunteers, gave women "rank and duty just as if they were men".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ó Faoláin|first=Seán|title=Constance Markievicz or The Average Revolutionary|publisher=Jonathan Cape|year=1934|pages=213}}</ref> Her biographer, Seán Ó Faoláin, suggests that, devoted as she was to Connolly, Markievicz "did not understand, and did not try to understand" his socialism.<ref>Ó Faoláin (1934), p. 193</ref> Seizing on Connolly's portrait of Gaelic society in ''The Reconquest of Ireland'', (1914), she was content to summarise his revolutionary syndicalism as the "application of the social principle which underlay the Brehon laws of our ancestors".<ref name=":532">{{Cite web |last=McNulty|first=Liam|date=2023|title=The "legacy" of James Connolly {{!}} Workers' Liberty|url=https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2023-08-10/legacy-james-connolly|access-date=2024-04-17|website=www.workersliberty.org|language=en}}</ref> After being released, with de Valera, under the general amnesty 1917 (and, following Casement's eve-of-execution conversion, taking Catholic communion),<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kenny|first1=Mary|title=Would the countess have supported repeal of the 8th?|journal=History Ireland|date=November–December 2018|url=https://www.historyireland.com/volume-26/issue-6-november-december-2018/would-the-countess-have-supported-repeal-of-the-8th/|access-date=9 December 2021|archive-date=9 December 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211209120459/https://www.historyireland.com/volume-26/issue-6-november-december-2018/would-the-countess-have-supported-repeal-of-the-8th/|url-status=dead}}</ref> she stood for Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election. Returned from Dublin St Patrick's, she was one of the 73 Sinn Féin MPs who constituted themselves as the revolutionary Dáil Éireann with de Valera as President.<ref name="dec28">{{cite web|url=http://www.irishlabourhistorysociety.com/pdf/Markievicz.pdf|title=Countess Markievicz—'The Rebel Countess'|website=Irish Labour History Society|access-date=17 December 2017|archive-date=18 April 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200418145050/http://www.irishlabourhistorysociety.com/pdf/Markievicz.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref>
=== Pro- and anti-Treatyists === [[File:Robert Barton, 1921 (cropped).jpg|thumb|267x267px|Robert Childers Barton (1881-1975)]] Also court-martialed in 1916, having fought under Éamonn Ceannt at the South Dublin Union, was George Irvine from Enniskillen. Until his death a devout Anglican, with Ernest Blythe and Sean O’Casey he had formed what became the Irish [language] Guild of the Church of Ireland, and, as an IRB man, led the guild's republican takeover. After being amnestied, Irvine was selected in 1918 as the Sinn Féin candidate for North Fermanagh but his nomination was successfully blocked by local Ancient Order of Hibernians. He was imprisoned for his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and was to protest the Catholic ethos of the dominion-status, twenty-six county, Irish Free State it created. In a letter to the press in 1940, Irvine insisted that, given the loyalty of generations of Catholic leaders to the Crown, the struggle of Irish independence "owes a lot to protestants, and the spirit of protestantism".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Morrissey |first=Conor |date=2023 |title=Irvine, George |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/irvine-george-a10311 |website=Dictionary of Irish Biography}}</ref>
Combined with the conscription crisis that followed, the Rising and the execution of its leaders had a profound effect upon initially hostile public opinion.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dorney |first=John |date=2018 |title='A Declaration of War on the Irish People' The Conscription Crisis of 1918 – The Irish Story |url=https://www.theirishstory.com/2018/04/24/a-declaration-of-war-on-the-irish-people-the-conscription-crisis-of-1918/ |access-date=2025-12-07 |language=en-GB}}</ref> Among those personally affected were Erskine Childer's cousins, Robert Childers Barton and David Lubbock Robinson. As a British officer on duty in Dublin, Barton had contact with many of the imprisoned leaders.<ref>{{cite book|last=O'Connor|first=Batt|title=With Michael Collins in the fight for Irish independence|publisher=P. Davies, ltd|year=1929|pages=60|asin=B00086A93Y}}</ref> He resigned his commission, joined the IRB, and in the 1918 general election was returned as the Sinn Féin member for Wicklow West.<ref name="oireachtas_db2">{{cite web|url=https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/members/member/Robert-Childers-Barton.D.1919-01-21/|title=Robert Barton|work=Oireachtas Members Database|access-date=21 November 2011|archive-date=7 November 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181107185559/https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/members/member/Robert-Childers-Barton.D.1919-01-21|url-status=live}}</ref> After imprisonment during the War of Independence, he was a signatory in London to the Treaty.<ref>{{Citation|title=Barton, Robert Childers|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/barton-robert-childers-a0485|publisher=Royal Irish Academy|work=Dictionary of Irish Biography|date=2009|access-date=2025-12-01|doi=10.3318/dib.000485.v1|first1=Pauric J.|last1=Dempsey|first2=Shaun|last2=Boylan|doi-access=free}}</ref>
Robinson, who in the trenches won the Croix de Guerre, opposed the Treaty and fought on the Republican side in the Civil War.<ref name="dib3">{{cite web |last=Pole |first=Adam |title=Robinson, David Lubbock |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/robinson-david-lubbock-a7719 |access-date=6 February 2024 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography}}</ref> He was present in Annamoe, County Wicklow when Childers was arrested by Free State Troops and taken to Dublin which would result in his court-martial and execution.<ref name="irishtimes2">{{cite web |title=Mr. David Robinson |url=http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1943/0823/Pg002.html#Ar00205:7400BE7A10DA7AA0DB7E40F07AB16E7E41837B33377EC34C73F0E07640F5 |access-date=22 August 2012 |work=Irish Man's Diary}}</ref> As publicity director for the Dáil, Childers had helped bring the British to the negotiating table in 1921 by advertising the growing strength of pro-nationalist opinion in the United States, but, with de Valera, he had rejected the final compromise.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Boyle |first=Andrew |url=http://archive.org/details/riddleoferskinec00boyl |title=The riddle of Erskine Childers |date=1977 |publisher=Hutchinson |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-09-128490-9 |location=London |pages=271}}</ref> Robinson was himself arrested in 1922 and spent forty days on hunger strike during his eighteen months' internment in Mountjoy Prison.<ref name="irishtimes1">{{cite web |title=Mr. David Robinson |url=http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1943/0823/Pg002.html#Ar00205:7400BE7A10DA7AA0DB7E40F07AB16E7E41837B33377EC34C73F0E07640F5 |access-date=22 August 2012 |work=Irish Times Obituary}}</ref>
The Treaty was also opposed by Dr. Kathleen Lynn, daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman in County Mayo. Deeply affected by the poverty and disease she had witnessed as a child, she trained as a doctor and, working alongside James Connolly during the Dublin lock-out, became the chief medical officer of the Irish Citizen Army. In 1916, following the loss of their officer in charge, Sean Connolly, with Helena Maloney she had assumed command of the insurgents at Dublin's City Hall. In 1923, Lynn was elected an abstentionist TD for North Dublin, but the failure of republicans to embrace social reform drove her from politics. She devoted herself to St. Ultans, the children's hospital she had established in 1919.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Broderick |first=Marian |title=Wild Irish Women, Extraordinary Lives from History |publisher=The O'Brien Press |year=2001 |isbn=9780862787806 |location=Dublin |pages=121–125}}</ref>
Despite his signature on the Treaty, de Valera's Fianna Fáil, victors in the 1932 Irish general election, elevated Barton to the Senate.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.oireachtas.ie/members-hist/default.asp?MemberFirstName=david+&MemberName=robinson&disp=src&housetype=&HouseNum=&ConstID=|title=Directory of Members – 1919 – 2018 – Houses of the Oireachtas – Tithe an Oireachtais|website=oireachtas.ie}}</ref> There he was joined by Ernest Blythe for the new-formed Fine Gael, a party in which Blythe had sought, unsuccessfully, to effect an alliance between his colleagues in the previous Cumann na nGaedheal government and pro-Treaty war veterans organised in the fascist-style Blueshirt ranks of Eoin O'Duffy.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Modern Ireland: 1850-1950|url=|publisher=Gill and Macmillan|date=1972|isbn=978-0-7171-0640-0|language=en|first=Mark|last=Tierney|pages=172–182}}</ref> Among other Protestant Sinn Féiners who had supported the Treaty were authors of the 1922 Free State constitution, first deputy chair of the Senate James G. Douglas and Howth gunrunner Darrell Figgis.<ref>{{Citation |last=Gaughan |first=J. Anthony |title=Douglas, James Green |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |editor-last=Quinn |editor-first=James |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/douglas-james-green-a2723 |access-date=2026-04-03 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |language=en |doi=10.3318/dib.002723.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Murphy |first=William |title=Figgis, Darrell |date=2009 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |editor-last=Quinn |editor-first=James |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/figgis-darrell-a3078 |access-date=2026-04-03 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |language=en |doi=10.3318/dib.003078.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref>
=== North American envoys === After his pursuit of reconciliation with nationalist Ireland forced him out of the Independent Orange Order in 1908, Robert Lindsay Crawford emigrated to North America where, in 1918, he was among the Protestant Friends of Irish Freedom in New York.<ref name="Dempsey & Boylan">{{cite web |last1=Dempsey|first1=Pauric|last2=Boylan|first2=Shaun|title=Crawford, (Robert) Lindsay|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/crawford-robert-lindsay-a2163|website=Dictionary of Irish Biography|publisher=Cambridge University Press|access-date=14 December 2020}}</ref><ref name="Boyle 23">{{cite journal |last1=Boyle|first1=J. W.|title=A Fenian Protestant in Canada: Robert Lindsay Crawford 1910–1922|journal=Canadian Historical Review|year=1971|volume=LVII|issue=2|pages=165–176|doi=10.3138/CHR-052-02-03|s2cid=162210866}}</ref> Introduced as "a stout-hearted son of Ulster", in April 1920 he appeared on a Clan-na-Gael platform in the city with de Valera, and he subsequently toured Canada as the president of the Self Determination for Ireland League.<ref name="Mannion2">{{cite web |last1=Mannion|first1=Patrick|title=The Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland|url=https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/the-self-determination-for-ireland-league-of-canada-and-newfoundland|website=Century Ireland|publisher=Raidió Teilifís Éireann|access-date=16 December 2020}}</ref> Encountering sometimes violent Orange Order opposition, he insisted that the fight for Irish self-determination was neither "racial nor religious in its origin" and he avoided declaring publicly for the republic.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Mannion|first=Patrick|date=January 2015|title=Contested nationalism: The "Irish question" in St. John's, Newfoundland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1919–1923|url=https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/24359/28203|journal=Acadiensis|volume=44|issue=2|pages=27–49|via=UNB Libraries}}</ref> From 1922, Crawford served the Irish Free State as New York consul.<ref name="Phoenix">{{cite news |last1=Phoenix|first1=Eamon|title=From Orangeman to republican envoy|url=https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/2014/06/05/news/from-orangeman-to-republican-envoy-93372/|access-date=14 December 2020|work=Irish News|date=5 June 2014}}</ref>
In 1920, de Valera was also joined on platforms in New York, and on an Irish bond drive through the American south, by James Alexander Hamilton Irwin, the Presbyterian minister for Killead, Country Antrim. Irwin had endorsed the liberal home-rule resolutions of Rev. Armour's Ballymoney meeting, but in the wake the 1916 Rising embraced the republican cause. He assured American audiences that "if Britain would withdraw her present army of occupation not one hair upon the head of a man, woman or child would be injured in any part of Ireland,”<ref name=":8">{{Cite web |date=2020-12-18 |title=The local Presbyterian Minister who refused the Irish Presidency |url=https://www.antrimguardian.co.uk/news/2020/12/18/gallery/the-local-presbyterian-minister-who-refused-the-irish-presidency-12380/ |access-date=2026-01-03 |website=www.antrimguardian.co.uk |language=en}}</ref>
On his return to Northern Ireland, Irwin was detained two weeks on a weapons charge (reportedly, possession of a 1798 blunderbuss).<ref>{{Citation |last=Coleman |first=Marie |title=Irwin, James Alexander Hamilton |date=2013-03-01 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/irwin-james-alexander-hamilton-a4223 |access-date=2026-01-03 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.004223.v2|doi-access=free }}</ref> In 1926 he left for a ministry in Scotland. From 1935, he ministered in Lucan, County Dublin, and from 1945 until his death in 1954 served on Fianna Fáil's National Executive. He declined an offer from the party to stand for the Presidency of Ireland.<ref name=":8" />
== Post-partition == thumb|Belfast Socialists walking behind "Break the Connection with Capitalism" banner, Tone Memorial, Bodenstown, 1934. Mural, Northumberland Street, Belfast, 2024
=== Shankill Road Connellyites === In addition to Markievicz, Sinn Féin nominated one other woman in the 1918 election. With no prospect of topping the poll, Winifred Carney, supported by Alice Milligan,<ref name=":2222">{{cite book |last1=Ryan|first1=Louise|title=Irish Women and The Vote: Becoming Citizens|last2=Ward|first2=Margaret|publisher=Irish Academic Press|year=2007|isbn=978-0-7165-3393-1|location=Wales|pages=195–200, 202–205}}</ref> stood in Belfast Victoria.<ref name=":024">{{Cite journal |last=Woggon|first=Helga|date=2018|title=Winifred Carney in the 1918 Elections: Her Stand for Women, James Connolly & the Workers' Republic|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/45408443|journal=Saothar|volume=43|pages=55–68|jstor=45408443|issn=0332-1169}}</ref> Carney, the Catholic daughter of a mixed marriage, had been Connolly's personal, as well as union-branch, secretary, in Belfast, and had been his adjutant throughout the Easter week fighting in Dublin.<ref name=":74">{{Cite book |last=Woggon|first=Helga|url=|title=Silent Radical - Winifred Carney, 1887-1943: A Reconstruction of Her Biography|date=2000|publisher=SIPTU, Irish Labour History Society|pages=|language=en}}</ref> In 1924, she joined the militant Court branch of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP).<ref name=":423">{{Cite web |last=Quinn|first=James|date=2009|title=Carney, Winifred ('Winnie') {{!}} Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/carney-winifred-winnie-a1489|access-date=2024-03-09|website=www.dib.ie|language=en}}</ref> The party acknowledged the reality of partition and of a Belfast parliament but without any profession of loyalty. It was an equivocation on the national question—a "pragmatic silence"<ref>{{Cite book |last=Goldring|first=Maurice|title=Belfast, from Loyalty to Rebellion|publisher=Lawrence and Wishart|year=1991|isbn=9780853157281|location=London|pages=159}}</ref>— that allowed for an uneasy co-operation between Connellyites and those who, despite its refusal to organise in Northern Ireland, continued to look to the Labour Party in Britain.<ref name=":45">{{Cite journal |last=Walker|first=Graham|date=1984|title=The Northern Ireland Labour Party in the 1920s|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23195875|journal=Saothar|volume=10|pages=(19–30) 21–22|jstor=23195875|issn=0332-1169}}</ref>
In the NILP, Carney met, and eventually married, George McBride. A working-class Protestant from the Shankill Road, McBride was Ulster Volunteer veteran, who had emerged from the experience of the western trenches as an internationalist and atheist. Carney was never able to persuade him that the deaths of Easter week "had been worth it",<ref name=":08">{{Cite book |last=Murphy|first=Allison|title=Winnie and George, an Unlikely Union|date=2017|publisher=Mercier Press|isbn=9781781174708}}</ref> but he shared her respect for Connolly's socialism. The couple were part of the organising committee for the Outdoor Relief protests that brought thousands of Protestant and Catholic working people out onto the streets in 1932. The following year, they joined the NILP affiliate, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland,<ref name=":74" /> a mainly Protestant organisation, with around 150 members in the Shankill Road and Ballymacarrett districts of Belfast.<ref name="saothar22">"[http://irelandscw.com/docs-SPNI.htm Letting Labour Lead: Jack Macgougan and the Pursuit of Unity, 1913-1958]", ''Saothar'', No. 14</ref>
In 1934, with other party members, and with Jack White, Carney and McBride joined a contingent of 200 Belfast Protestants, organised in James Connolly Worker's Republican Clubs, at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown.<ref name=":023">{{Cite book |last=Murphy |first=Allison |title=Winnie and George, an Unlikely Union |date=2017 |publisher=Mercier Press |isbn=9781781174708 |pages=263–264}}</ref> The clubs were an initiative of the popular front Republican Congress, promoted by, among others, the Anti-Treaty veteran George Gilmore, a Dublin Protestant, and within the NILP by Victor Halley and William McMullen.<ref>{{Citation|title=McMullen, William|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/mcmullen-william-a5742|publisher=Royal Irish Academy|work=Dictionary of Irish Biography|date=2009|access-date=2025-11-30|doi=10.3318/dib.005742.v1|first=Gerry|last=McElroy|doi-access=free}}</ref> On the approach to Tone's graveside, the visitors were blocked by members of Tipperary IRA who seized and ripped their "red", "Break The Connection with Capitalism", banner.<ref name=":63">Byrne, Patrick (1994). ''The Republican Congress Revisited''. Dublin: Connolly Association Pamphlet, pp. 23-24. {{ISBN|0-9522317-0-0}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |date=18 June 1934|title=Objection to Flag: Scenes at Bodenstown|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1934/0618/Pg008.html#Ar00803:0E77901B77BD|newspaper=The Irish Times|pages=8}}</ref> The banner was carried later that day to the graveside of James Connolly at Arbour Hill in Dublin. The 36 members of the Shankill Road James Connolly Republican Club attending described themselves as "the vanguard of Protestant workers entering into active participation in the fight for an Irish Workers' Republic".<ref>{{Cite news |date=18 June 1934|title=Belfast Men in Dublin|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1934/0618/Pg008.html#Ar00803:0E77901B77BD|newspaper=The Irish Times|pages=8}}</ref>
The "experiment of Protestant working men taking art in a pilgrimage to Tone's grave was not repeated".<ref name=":113">{{Cite book |last=Woods |first=C. J. |title=Bodenstown Revisited: the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone, its monuments and pilgrimages |publisher=Four Courts Press |year=2018 |isbn=9781846827389 |location=Dublin |pages=130}}</ref> The following year, Twelfth celebrations triggered deadly riots and workplace expulsions in Belfast that targeted not only Catholics but also "rotten Prods" – Protestants whose labour/left politics disregarded sectarian distinctions. It was a sectarian logic that extended itself to the interpretation of darkening events in Europe.<ref name=":18">{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=Belfast, An Illustrated History|publisher=The Balckstaff Press|year=1982|isbn=0-85640-272-9|location=Belfast|pages=226–233}}</ref> Contesting the Dock constituency in 1938, NILP leader Harry Midgley, who had sided with Connolly in his debates with unionist labour before the war,<ref name=":09">{{Cite journal |last=Walker|first=G. S.|date=1984|title=The Commonwealth Labour Party in Northern Ireland, 1942–7|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30008027|url-status=live|journal=Irish Historical Studies|language=en|volume=24|issue=93|pages=(69–91) 69–70|doi=10.1017/S0021121400034039|issn=0021-1214|jstor=30008027|s2cid=164114437|url-access=subscription|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210809205322/https://www.jstor.org/stable/30008027|archive-date=9 August 2021|access-date=9 August 2021}}</ref> and on the eve of partition had continued to press for all-Ireland home rule,<ref name=":22">{{Cite web|last=White|first=William Lawrence|date=2009|title=Midgley, Henry Cassidy ('Harry') {{!}} Dictionary of Irish Biography|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/midgley-henry-cassidy-harry-a5818|url-status=live|access-date=2021-08-09|website=dib.ie|archive-date=9 August 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210809205322/https://www.dib.ie/biography/midgley-henry-cassidy-harry-a5818}}</ref> found his support for the anti-clerical Spanish Republic regarded as another instance of "No Popery!" Catholic crowds disrupted his rallies with chants of "Remember Spain" and "We want Franco."<ref name="Bardon">{{Cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|title=A History of Ulster|date=1992|publisher=The Blackstaff Press|isbn=0856404764|location=Belfast|pages=544}}</ref> Unable to accept Irish neutrality in the face of "Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism", he formed the Commonwealth Labour Party, which proved to a path to his entry into the wartime Unionist government.<ref>Roger Courtney (2013), ''Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition'', Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, pp. 321-322</ref>
In 1944, with other Protestant trade unionists in west Belfast, Halley had joined Nationalist Party dissidents around Harry Diamond, and ex IRA volunteers, in re-founding a Socialist Republican Party.<ref name="AGTWU2">Matt Merrigan, ''Eagle Or Cuckoo?: The Story of the ATGWU in Ireland''</ref> In 1945, Jack White (declaring opposition to the ”Orange Order, the Unionist Party and the Special Powers Act") died before testing his candidacy for the party in Mid Antrim.<ref>TJ McElligott (3 August 1989), "Jack White of Ballymena", ''Ballymena Guardian'', p. 8.</ref> After losing to the NILP in a 1946 Belfast Central, with Diamond, Halley sought to persuade the Irish Labour Party to organise north of the border.<ref>Courtney (2018) p. 331-332</ref> Jack Beattie remained with the NILP. Targeted for accepting support from the Anti-Partition League, in the 1949 Northern Ireland general election, he campaigned in Protestant east Belfast wearing a steel helmet.<ref name="Bardon2">Bardon, Jonathan, A History of Ulster, p 523 (The Black Staff Press, Belfast, 1992)</ref>
=== Anti-partitionists === The Limerick born lead writer for the ''Freeman's Journal'' (until the anti-Treaty IRA destroyed its presses), James Winder Good, reluctantly accepted the 26-county settlement. Like others, he believed that "hard" economic facts would "open the eyes" of northern unionists to "the drawbacks of Partition".<ref name="Good 1922">{{cite journal |last1=Good |first1=James Winder |date=June 1922 |title=Partition in Practice |url=https://www.libraryireland.com/articles/PartitionPracticeStudies11-42/ |journal=An Irish Quarterly Review |volume=11 |issue=42 |accessdate=6 October 2020}}</ref> Criticising Irish economic policy from a Keynesian perspective, Bulmer Hobson spent his last years arguing that the hard facts did not favour unity.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.academia.edu/20534896|title=From rogue revolutionary to rogue civil servant: The resurrection of Bulmer Hobson|last1=Hay|first1=Marnie |date=November 2015 }}</ref> Denis Ireland, the Belfast son of a Protestant mill owner, drew broadly the same conclusion. De Valera, he wrote, had failed "to see [independence] through". In his otherwise assertive 1937 constitution, the Fianna Fáil leader had made no provision or commitment to exercise "the power to control National Credit and Currency." The Irish pound, and consequently the monetary policy effective within the state, continued to be regulated to Ireland's detriment by the Bank of England ("the witch-doctors of Threadneedle Street") and the City of London.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Age of Unreason: a Short History of Democracy in our Times|last=Ireland|first=Denis|publisher=Abbey Publications|year=1944|location=Dublin|page=2}}.</ref>
Denis Ireland was clear that his advocacy of greater "economic democracy" did not define him as a socialist (like Maud Gonne, he was a disciple, rather, of the social credit philosophy of C. H. Douglas) and that it did not bring him into line with the post-war Labour-majority in Westminster.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The politics of constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, 1932–70: Between grievance and reconciliation|last=Norton|first=Christopher|publisher=Manchester University Press|year=2016|isbn=978-0-7190-5903-2|location=Manchester|pages=57–58}}</ref> He was an active member of the Anti-Partition League, which in 1941 he had sought to assist with the creation in Belfast of the Ulster Union Club. Intended (like the Dungannon Clubs) to "recapture for Ulster Protestants their true tradition as Irishmen,"<ref>"Ulster Union Club. A new Protestant movement." ''Irish Times''. 19 February 1941</ref> it advertised a range of activities including discussions and lectures on current affairs, economics, history and the Irish language, and it published number of pamphlets.<ref>Ulster Union Club. ''What is the Ulster Union Club?'' Belfast, Ulster Union Club. 1941).</ref><ref>Guy Woodward (2015), ''Culture, Northern Ireland and the Second World War''. Oxford University Press. p.221</ref>
The Ulster Union Club was discovered to be a source of recruits to the Irish Republican Army. Meetings were being attended by John Graham, a Church of Ireland devout who at the time of his arrest in 1942 (following a gun battle with the RUC) was leading a "Protestant squad", an intelligence unit, that was preparing the armed organisation for a new "northern campaign."<ref>{{Cite book|title=The IRA|last=Coogan|first=Tim Pat|publisher=Macmillan|year=2002|location=London|page=178}}.</ref> Along with George Gilmore and George Plant (executed by the Irish government in 1942 for the murder of a suspected informer),<ref>{{cite journal|last=Moroney|first=Michael|title=George Plant & The Rule of Law: The Devereux Affair (1940–42)|journal=Tipperary Historical Journal|year=1988|pages=1–12|url=http://www.tipperarylibraries.ie/ths/thj1988.htm|access-date=13 March 2012}}</ref> Graham had been amongst a handful of Protestants who had come to the IRA through a split in the Republican Congress.<ref name="farrell2">Michael Farrell, ''Northern Ireland: The Orange State''</ref> In 1944, under Northern Ireland Special Powers Act, the club was suppressed. Its premises, and the homes of Ireland and other prominent members (among them Presbyterian clergymen, teachers and university lecturers) were raided by RUC Special Branch.<ref>{{Cite book|title=IRepublicanism and Loyalty in Ireland|last=Boyd|first=Andrew|publisher=Donaldson Archives|year=2001|location=Belfast|page=45}}</ref>
In 1948, with Victor Halley, Ireland organised a 150th-year commemoration in Belfast of the 1798 Rebellion. Barred from the city centre, the commemoration crowd of 30,000 gathered in nationalist west Belfast where they heard Halley declare: "The people who destroyed Tone in Ireland were those who feared the Protestant tradition of association with America, French Republicanism, Freedom and Democracy".<ref name=":010">{{Cite book |last=Courtney|first=Robert|title=Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition|publisher=Ulster Historical Foundation|year=2013|isbn=978-1-909556-06-5|location=Belfast|pages=331–332}}</ref>
In 1948 Denis Ireland entered the Seanad Éireann, the Irish Senate, for Clann na Poblachta. As a senator, Ireland was the first member of the Oireachtas, the Irish Parliament, to be resident in Northern Ireland.<ref name="oireachtas_db">{{cite web|url=https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/members/member/Denis-L-Ireland.S.1950-06-16/|title=Denis Ireland|work=Oireachtas Members Database|access-date=15 July 2013}}</ref> From his home in south Belfast, he lived to witness the onset of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Listening in 1972 to intermittent rifle-fire from the Falls Road in republican west Belfast, he wrote: "The shots did not begin in Belfast; they reached Belfast from the background of Irish history, all the way back to the battle of Kinsale".<ref>Ireland, Denis (1973), ''From the Jungle of Belfast: Footnotes to History 1904-1972.'' p. 7 , Belfast: Blackstaff</ref>
==During, and after, the Troubles==
=== Constitutional nationalists === Arising out of the bi-centenary celebrations of Wolfe Tone's birth in 1963, left-leaning elements of the IRA formed the Wolfe Tone Societies.<ref name="CAIN">[https://books.google.com/books?id=D07FBjetYM0C&dq=Muintir+Wolfe+Tone&pg=PA179 CAIN] – Century of Endeavour: Foundation of the Wolfe Tone Society.</ref> A key figure, with a Presbyterian background in Tyrone,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Treacy |first1=Matt |title=The IRA 1956–69: Rethinking the Republic |date=2013 |publisher=Manchester University Press}}</ref> was Roy Johnston. A Marxist, he argued for a national liberation strategy to unite the Catholic and Protestant working class, using democratic means, in the first instance, to challenge the Unionist regime in Northern Ireland.<ref>English, Richard (2003). ''Armed Struggle;– A History of the IRA'', MacMillan, London 2003, pp. 85-86. ISBN 1-4050-0108-9</ref><ref>[http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/nicra/nicra781.htm CAIN] – "We Shall Overcome" .... The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968 – 1978 by NICRA (1978)</ref>
In August 1966, a Wolfe Tone Society conference in Maghera, County Londonderry, proposed a civil rights campaign.<ref>Coogan, Tim Pat (1966). ''The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal, 1969–96, and the Search for Peace'', Arrow Books Ltd, p. 66, {{ISBN|0-09-946571-X}}</ref> The IRA's Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding was present and pledged support. A further meeting in Belfast in January 1967 saw the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.<ref>English, Richard (2003). ''Armed Struggle;– A History of the IRA'', London: MacMillan, p. 91, {{ISBN|1-4050-0108-9}}</ref> Its executive council included to trade unionists, communists, liberals, socialists, and republicans, and a Young Unionist Robin Cole.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Purdie |first=Bob |title=Politics in the Streets: the origins of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland |publisher=The Blackstaff Press |year=1990 |isbn=0-85640-437-3 |pages=133}}</ref> It was chaired by Betty Sinclair, a Communist Party veteran of the 1932 Outdoor Relief protests. As paramilitary, and state security-force, violence escalated, Sinclair and other non-republicans withdrew, conceding direction to Goulding's Official IRA-aligned faction until, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the association ceased its work.<ref>''The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party'', Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, pp. 22–70, {{ISBN|1-84488-120-2}}</ref>
Leading NICRA's participation in the anti-internment march in Derry on 30 January 1972, that the Parachute Regiment, killing fourteen unarmed civilians, turned into Bloody Sunday, was Ivan Cooper.<ref name="BBCObit" /> Cooper, born into a working-class Anglican family in Claudy, County Londonderry, had urged Catholics and Protestants in the summer of 1968 to fight together for their rights "as the blacks in America were fighting".<ref>{{cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|author-link=Jonathan Bardon|title=A History of Ulster|date=December 1992|publisher=Blackstaff Press|location=Dundonald, Belfast|isbn=0-85640-476-4|chapter=The O'Neill Era, 1963–1972|page=650}}</ref> In the 1969 general election, he was elected as an independent member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for Mid Londonderry, defeating the sitting Nationalist Party MP.<ref name="BBCObit">{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-34911802|title=Ivan Cooper: Civil rights leader forever linked to Bloody Sunday|publisher=BBC News|date=26 June 2019|access-date=26 June 2019}}</ref>
In August 1970, with John Hume, who as an independent had defeated the Nationalist leader Eddie McAteer in Foyle, and four other Stormont MPs—Gerry Fitt, (Republican Labour), Austin Currie (Nationalist), Paddy Devlin (Northern Ireland Labour), and Paddy O’Hanlon (Independent) —Cooper co-founded the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).<ref>{{cite book |last=Bardon|first=Jonathan|author-link=Jonathan Bardon|title=A History of Ulster|date=December 1992|publisher=Blackstaff Press|location=Dundonald, Belfast|isbn=0-85640-476-4|chapter=The O'Neill Era, 1963–1972|page=679}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.election.demon.co.uk/stormont/biographies.html|title=Biographies of Members of the Northern Ireland House of Commons|access-date=5 July 2007|last=Boothroyd|first=David}}</ref> While committed to "eventual" Irish unification, this would be on the basis of "the consent of the majority of the people in the North and in the South",<ref name=":182" /> —to a new all-Ireland constitution that would provide "the framework for the emergence of a just, egalitarian and secular society"<ref name=":17">{{Cite journal |last=Campbell|first=Sarah|date=2013|title=New Nationalism? The S.D.L.P. and the creation of a socialist and labour party in Northern Ireland, 1969-75|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43654444|journal=Irish Historical Studies|volume=38|issue=151|pages=(422–438) 422|doi=10.1017/S0021121400001577|issn=0021-1214|jstor=43654444|s2cid=162974539|url-access=subscription}}</ref>—this would be on the basis of "the consent of the majority of the people in the North and in the South" .<ref name=":182">{{cite book |last=Devlin|first=Paddy|title=Straight Left: an Autobiography|publisher=Blackstaff Press|year=1993|isbn=0-85640-514-0|location=Belfast|pages=141}}</ref> As a Protestant, Cooper was presented by Hume as evidence of the party's non-sectarian ''bona fides'', proof that "the important issue" for the party was "human rights not religion".<ref name=":06">{{Cite book |last=Farren|first=Sean|title=John Hume: In His Own Words|year=2021|isbn=9781846829987|location=Dublin|pages=57}}</ref>
After an election in June 1973 of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, in which the SDLP emerged as the sole representatives of the nationalist community, Cooper and his colleagues agreed to enter into a "power-sharing" government with Unionists. With former Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, as chief executive, Gerry Fitt as his deputy, and Cooper as minister for community relations, the coalition took office on 1 January 1974. By the end of May it had collapsed and the Assembly was dissolved in face of a paramilitary-supported loyalist general strike.<ref>Fisk, Robert S, (1975). ''Point of No Return: the Strike which Broke the British in Ulster'', HarperCollins, {{ISBN|0-233-96682-X}}</ref>
By the end of the 1970s, Devlin and Fitt had resigned from the SDLP, both arguing that in the executive the party had sacrificed the trust necessary to imbed power-sharing in the reckless pursuit of a cross-border Council of Ireland.<ref>Devlin (1993), p. 278</ref><ref name=":53">{{Cite book |last=O'Malley|first=Padraig|title=The Uncivil Wars, Ireland Today|publisher=Houghton Mifflin|year=1983|isbn=039534414X|location=Boston|pages=99}}</ref> According to Fitt, it had gone "too green",<ref>{{Cite news |last=Obituaries|first=Telegraph|date=2020-08-03|title=John Hume, SDLP leader who stood up for peaceful nationalism and won the Nobel Prize – obituary|language=en-GB|work=The Telegraph|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/08/03/john-hume-sdlp-leader-stood-peaceful-nationalism-won-nobel-prize/|access-date=2023-12-12|issn=0307-1235}}</ref> and become simply a "Catholic nationalist party".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Murphy|first=Michael A.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-defAAAAMAAJ|title=Gerry Fitt: A Political Chameleon|date=2007|publisher=Mercier Press|isbn=978-1-85635-531-5|pages=279|language=en}}</ref> Cooper remained, until 1983 boundary changes for the new Foyle constituency persuaded him to step aside in favour of Hume.<ref name="bbc">{{cite web |date=30 January 2002 |title=Bloody Sunday leader finds faith in film |url=https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/1791090.stm |access-date=5 July 2007 |publisher=BBC News}}</ref>
There was no other Protestant to take Cooper's place in the leading ranks of the party. John Turnley, scion of a wealthy Protestant family and a former British Army officer, had joined in SDLP in 1972. In 1975 he was elected for the party to the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, and in 1977 to Larne council.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Local Government Elections 1973–81: Larne |url=http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/73-81lglarne.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070220021823/http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/73-81lglarne.htm |archive-date=20 February 2007 |access-date=2 November 2007}}</ref> But disillusioned with the party, in late 1977 he co-founded the Irish Independence Party with Frank McManus and Fergus McAteer,<ref>[http://irishelectionliterature.wordpress.com/category/irish-independence-party/ Irish Independence Party] Irish Election Literature</ref> and became a leading member of the National H-Blocks Committee supporting the IRA blanket protest. He was assassinated by the loyalist Ulster Defence Association in 1980.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Young |first=Connla |date=2020-06-04 |title=John Turnley remembered as 'brave' on fortieth anniversary of murder |url=https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2020/06/04/news/john-turnley-remembered-as-brave-on-fortieth-anniversary-of-murder-1962163/ |access-date=2025-12-02 |website=The Irish News |language=en}}</ref>
Jonathan Stephenson, an English Protestant, served as SDLP party chairman between 1995 and 1998.<ref name="BBC">{{Cite news |date=2011-12-23 |title=Alasdair McDonnell pays tribute to ex-chairman Jonathan Stephenson |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-16314362 |access-date=2025-02-13 |work=BBC News |language=en-GB}}</ref> In 2025, his daughter Patricia Stephenson, an Irish Social Democrat, was elected to Seanad Éireann.<ref name="kp nov 24">{{Cite web |date=14 November 2024 |title=First-time candidate keen to offer people of Carlow-Kilkenny an alternative voice |url=https://www.kilkennypeople.ie/news/general-election/1654987/first-time-candidate-keen-to-offer-people-of-carlow-kilkenny-an-alternative-voice.html |accessdate=1 February 2025 |work=Kilkenny People}}</ref>
=== Republicans === Jim Kerr, born into a middle-class Protestant family in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, joined the IRA in the late 1930s and was interned at the Curragh Camp during World War II. A socialist and member of the Connolly Study Group at the Camp, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, like other left-wing IRA members he signed himself out to join the Royal Air Force (RAF). Kerr was active in the IRA Border Campaign of the late 1950s and became a close ally of young IRA member Seamus Costello. In 1974, Kerr, then a member of the Ard Comhairle of Official Sinn Féin, left with others form the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). In 1975, Kerr, was arrested on explosives charges and went on the run in continental Europe. There he built ties with left-wing militant groups and allegedly helped procure weapons from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.<ref>"[https://sammcgrathdublin.medium.com/the-life-of-republican-socialist-jim-kerr-263fbb709d6c The life of Republican Socialist Jim Kerr]", ''Sam McGrath'', 30 June 2021.</ref>
Ronnie Bunting, son of Ronald Bunting, a close associate of Ian Paisley, became a member of the Official IRA in the early 1970s and was also a founder-member of the INLA. Like Turnley, he was assassinated by the UDA in 1980.<ref name="guardian">{{cite news |last1=Beresford |first1=David |date=16 October 1980 |title=Leading Republicans Killed in Belfast |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/259587493/?terms=Ronnie%2BBunting |work=The Guardian |location=London |page=1 |author-link=David Beresford (journalist)}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Beginning of the End |url=http://www.irishdemocrat.co.uk/book-reviews/beginning-of-the-end |access-date=9 January 2010 |publisher=Irishdemocrat.co.uk}}</ref> Noel Jenkinson, a Protestant from a County Meath, emigrated to London in the 1950s and became involved in communist and Maoist politics. In 1969 he joined the Official IRA in London and in 1972 he was sentenced to thirty years in prison for the bombing of the headquarters of the 16th Parachute Brigade in retaliation for Bloody Sunday.<ref name="LR01">Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, ''The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party''. Penguin UK, 2009.</ref> In 1974, David Russell, a Presbyterian from Ramelton in Donegal, was accidentally killed in Derry by the premature explosion of a bomb he was placing for the Provisional IRA.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/chron/1974.html|title=CAIN: Sutton Index of Deaths|first=Malcolm|last=Sutton|website=cain.ulst.ac.uk}}</ref> Tom Berry, an Official IRA volunteer from Protestant east Belfast was killed by the Provisionals during the intra-republican feud in 1975.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/01/archives/two-are-shot-dead-in-belfast-as-factions-in-the-ira-feud.html|title=Two Are Shot Dead in Belfast As Factions in the I.R.A. Feud|work=The New York Times |date=November 1975 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hseNDAAAQBAJ&q=berry|title=I.N.L.A – Deadly Divisions|first1=Henry|last1=McDonald|first2=Jack|last2=Holland|date=29 June 2016|publisher=Poolbeg Press Ltd}}</ref> Harry Murray, who was shunned by his Tiger's Bay community after marrying a Catholic, volunteered with the Provisionals, assassinated a policeman in 1978 and was later involved hunger strikes and prison breaks.<ref>{{cite web |last=Kenny |first=Mary |date=12 November 2020 |title=Humiliating the IRA was a fatal mistake |url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/humiliating-the-ira-was-a-fatal-mistake |website=The Spectator}}</ref> Ronald Spence, whose father Edward Spence had joined the Communist Party and married a Catholic, in the mid-1970s served a sentence on the INLA wing of the Maze prison while his uncle, Gusty Spence, was OC on the Ulster Volunteer Force wing.<ref>{{Citation |last=Maume |first=Patrick |title=Spence, Gusty (Augustus Andrew) |date=2017 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/spence-gusty-augustus-andrew-a9899 |access-date=2025-12-04 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |doi=10.3318/dib.009899.v1|doi-access=free }}</ref>
The experience in 1969 of the Belfast to Derry People's Democracy march ambushed at Burntollet Bridge, and later, in 1971, of being arrested and interned, drew John McGuffin, a professed anarchist (and son of a Labour Unionist Stormont MP) into republican circles.<ref>{{cite news |last=McKay|first=Susan|date=31 July 2021|title=Internment: ‘A brush shaft up my backside and cigarettes on my eyelids’|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/internment-a-brush-shaft-up-my-backside-and-cigarettes-on-my-eyelids-1.4633821|work=Irish Times|location=|access-date=12 September 2022}}</ref> Although he denounced the Provisional IRA for the deaths and injuries on Bloody Friday (1972),<ref name="wsm">{{cite web |url=http://www.wsm.ie/c/black-flag-anarchism-free-derry-john-mcguffin|title=Black Flag of Anarchism flies over Free Derry – John McGuffin & a history of Free Derry Corner|last=|first=|date=30 March 2012|website=Workers Solidarity Movement|publisher=|access-date=12 September 2022|quote=}}</ref> under the pseudonym "the Brigadier", from 1974 to 1981 he contributed a regular column to ''An Phoblacht'' in which he satirised the British army and their understanding of the communities they patrolled.<ref name="wsm" />
=== Since the 1998 Belfast Agreement === Accompanied by paramilitary ceasefires and a withdrawal of British troops to barracks, the 1998 Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement re-established a devolved Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive. Its principles of compulsory coalition, and of privileging unionist and nationalist blocs by requiring their parallel consent, has been criticised for reinforcing, rather than unwinding, sectarian political division.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Wilson |first=Robin |date=5 March 2003 |title=Belfast Agreement power-sharing model can entrench sectarianism |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/belfast-agreement-power-sharing-model-can-entrench-sectarianism-1.351054 |access-date=2025-12-04 |newspaper=The Irish Times |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hall |first=Amanda |date=2018 |title=Incomplete Peace and Social Stagnation: Shortcomings of the Good Friday Agreement |journal=Open Library of Humanities |language=en |volume=4 |issue=2 |article-number=7 |doi=10.16995/olh.251 |doi-access=free |issn=2056-6700|hdl=10023/16022 |hdl-access=free }}</ref> All the current representatives of the unionist parties appear to be Protestant, all those of the SDLP and Sinn Féin, and of People Before Profit (a party that supports the reunification of Ireland<ref>{{Cite web |last=McKeown |first=Gareth |date=2017 |title=What the parties have said on a united Ireland |url=https://www.irishnews.com/news/2017/03/11/news/what-the-parties-have-said-on-a-united-ireland-960604/ |access-date=2025-12-04 |website=The Irish News |language=en}}</ref> while rejecting the designation of "unionist" and "nationalist" in the Assembly)<ref>{{Cite web |last=Duffy |first=Rónán |date=2017 |title=The 32-county People Before Profit and why it's anti-austerity and pro-Brexit |url=https://www.thejournal.ie/people-before-profit-ni-3221610-Feb2017/ |access-date=2025-12-04 |website=TheJournal.ie |language=en}}</ref> appear to be of Catholic background.
There was the anomalous case of Billy Leonard, a former Seventh-day Adventist lay-preacher and Royal Ulster Constabulary reservist, whose wife and children are Catholics. He was elected in 2001 to Coleraine Borough Council as an SDLP representative for the Skerries area.<ref name="elections">{{Cite web |title=Coleraine Council Elections 1993-2011 |url=https://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/lgcoleraine.htm |website=ark.ac.uk}}</ref> Citing insufficient emphasis on Irish unity, he switched to Sinn Féin in 2004. The party nominated him as an MLA for East Londonderry in 2010. But among other disagreements, he complained that "the tentacles of the [[IRA Army Council|[IRA] Army Council]] still run throughout" the republican party, and resigned.<ref>[http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/ira-still-have-a-big-say-in-sinn-fein-says-exmla-and-ruc-man-16175268.html "IRA still have a big say in Sinn Fein says ex MLA and RUC man"], belfasttelegraph.co.uk, 21 June 2012; retrieved 11 August 2012.</ref>
When Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar claimed, in 2021, that Sinn Féin had no Protestants representing the party either north or south, he was corrected by Violet-Anne Wynne, Sinn Féin TD (member of the Dáil) for Clare: "I am a Protestant and I am proud to be a Sinn Féin TD."<ref>{{Cite news |last=McGee |first=Harry |title=Varadkar withdraws claim that Sinn Féin has no Protestants TDs, MLAs or Senators |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/varadkar-withdraws-claim-that-sinn-fein-has-no-protestants-tds-mlas-or-senators-1.4506809 |access-date=2025-12-04 |newspaper=The Irish Times |language=en}}</ref> The following year, citing "psychological warfare" conducted against her within the local party organisation, Wynne resigned from Sinn Féin and served as an independent.<ref name="Resigns from SF">{{cite news |last=O'Connell |first=Hugh |date=25 February 2022 |title=Sinn Féin TD Violet-Anne Wynne resigns from party over 'psychological warfare' |url=https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/sinn-fein-td-violet-anne-wynne-resigns-from-party-over-psychological-warfare-41383485.html |access-date=25 February 2022 |work=Irish Independent |location=}}</ref>
There are Protestant members of the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland who, when asked, express a preference for Irish unity.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Breen |first=Suzanne |date=2024-03-03 |title=More Alliance Party members would vote for Irish unity than to remain in UK: survey |url=https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/more-alliance-party-members-would-vote-for-irish-unity-than-to-remain-in-uk-survey/a691093736.html |access-date=2025-12-07 |work=BelfastTelegraph.co.uk |language=en-GB |issn=0307-1235}}</ref> However, the policy of their party remains that unless and until the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (as provided for in the Belfast Agreement) calls a border poll, they take no position on the national question.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2025-10-15 |title=United Ireland: Clarity needed on border poll process, says Naomi Long |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y9pyj9w8wo |access-date=2025-12-04 |website=BBC News |language=en-GB}}</ref>
In 2025, Heather Humphreys, a Presbyterian from Drum, a border village in County Monaghan,<ref name="mna100">{{cite web |date=2018 |title=Heather Humphreys |url=https://www.mna100.ie/Cabinet_Ministers/HEATHER_HUMPHREYS.html |access-date=25 September 2024 |work=100 Years of Women in Politics & Public Life}}</ref> was the Fine Gael nominee for President of Ireland. She recalled being taken to local Orange parades by her father,<ref>{{cite web |last=Moriarty |first=Gerry |date=8 August 2016 |title=Protestant drum is still beating strong in Border village |url=http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/protestant-drum-is-still-beating-strong-in-border-village-1.2748306 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160916102557/http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/protestant-drum-is-still-beating-strong-in-border-village-1.2748306 |archive-date=16 September 2016 |access-date=12 June 2017 |work=Irish Times}}</ref> and of being impacted by the death of Billy Fox, a Protestant Fine Gael politician from nearby Ballybay, killed by the Provisional IRA in 1974.<ref name="IT Profile 2 September 2025">{{cite news |last=Coyne |first=Ellen |date=2 September 2025 |title=Heather Humphreys profile: Popular Fine Gael matriarch is no stranger to controversy but has broad appeal |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/09/02/heather-humphreys-no-stranger-to-media-criticism-or-controversy-but-a-popular-fine-gael-matriarch-with-broad-appeal/ |access-date=17 September 2025 |work=Irish Times |publisher= |location=}}</ref> While her successful rival, Catherine Connolly, the candidate of a broad alliance including Sinn Féin, called on the Irish government to "prepare" for unity, Humphreys spoke rather of the need to "build trust".<ref>{{Cite web |date=2025-10-12 |title=Irish presidential campaign: Call to prepare for Irish unity |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3rvr5lp5ppo |access-date=2025-12-10 |website=BBC News |language=en-GB}}</ref>
==References== {{Reflist}}
Category:Protestant Irish nationalists Category:Irish nationalism Category:Politics of Northern Ireland