Luminous Traitor by Martin Duberman

Author:Martin Duberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520298880
Publisher: University of California Press

PART 4

Ireland

EDWARD CARSON, FORMER CROWN PROSECUTOR—and defense attorney for Lord Queensberry in Oscar Wilde’s libel suit against him—is a fiercely determined combatant, as brilliant as he is pugnacious, his powerful oratory a match for his intelligence and his presence on a stage commanding enough to silence a crowd of thousands. As of 1910, Carson is the undisputed leader of Ulster, the northeastern-most province of Ireland and the only one with a Protestant rather than Catholic majority—though the margin is slim and there are sizeable pockets of dissent in the province, especially in Ballymena and County Antrim, Roger Casement’s birthplace.

Ulster is Unionist—that is, determined to remain part of imperial, Protestant England, and it strongly resents the growing call for Irish Home Rule; to Ulster that would mean being submerged in a poverty-stricken, Catholic-dominated Ireland. Class snobbery as well as religious antipathy color Ulster’s view. The province is distinct from the rest of Ireland in having early on developed linen and shipbuilding industries; capital accumulation and industrialization are far more advanced in Ulster than elsewhere on the island, and economically the province is more centrally connected to the English cities of Manchester and Liverpool than to the predominantly rural areas of Catholic Ireland to the south. The prosperous, English-identified “Protestant Ascendancy” in Ulster likes the status quo. It doesn’t want its thriving image tarnished by undue association with what it regards as the rampant “Papism” and the uneducated, unemployed minions endemic to the rest of Ireland. Issues arising from poverty—like trade unionism—are for the Carsonites less important than issues relating to the protection of property.

Edward Carson himself is no bigoted reactionary or one-dimensional demagogue: he favors the creation of a Catholic university, women’s rights, and an end to capital punishment. But the fear, subliminal or otherwise, of Catholic tyranny in a unified Ireland is a potent undercurrent in Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule. If Irish Catholics are not bent on hegemony, Ulster Protestants ask, then how else do you explain the pope’s recent Ne Temere decree requiring that non-Catholic members of mixed marriages agree to raise their children as Catholics? And what of the 1911 papal ruling that no layman can bring a Catholic cleric before a civil court? Is a privileged class of citizens to be above the law? In short, isn’t a Home Rule Bill tantamount to establishing a Catholic theocracy?

John Redmond is head of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the House of Commons and a fervent Home Ruler. He’s himself the product of a mixed marriage (his mother Protestant, his father a well-to-do Catholic barrister); educated at the Clongowes, the exclusive Jesuit school that (like Roger Casement’s) steers clear of “extravagant” nationalism, Redmond regards Gaelic as “the language of the kitchen.” He tries to appease Protestant Ulster’s fears by cautioning against too quick an equation of the views of certain “extremist” Catholics with the political intentions of the Roman Catholic majority. Those “extremists,” in turn, remind Redmond that as far back as the Emancipation Act of 1793, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland openly lamented the extension of the franchise to Catholics.

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