The Bloody Red Hand by Derek Lundy

Author:Derek Lundy [Lundy, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36990-1
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2006-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

However, a widespread and lasting rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants was impossible in the eighteenth century. This stark fact contradicts the standard version of Irish history. That version’s current political myth, selectively drawn from history for present purposes (as we’ll see, the myth has changed greatly over the years), says that Catholics and Protestants came together in the years before 1798 and joined in a battle to free Ireland from England, its ancient enemy. The great insurrection was yet another glorious rising of the Irish nation against the 800-year occupation. The Ninety-Eight became part of the romantic rebel ethos of blood sacrifice for Mother Ireland and a further celebration of the exploits of the boys—except that, this time, Protestants were part of it.

Protestant participation in the fight for Irish freedom in the 1780s and 1790s, relatively limited though it was, has been used for two present-day political purposes. First, to support the benign argument against the unionists of Northern Ireland (“unionism” is the constitutional unity of Britain and Ireland) that Protestants and Catholics have joined together before in the cause of a united Ireland and that, therefore, there is no reason why they should fear to do so again. The year 1798 is a precedent for cooperation and power-sharing between the two communities; the extremist Prod preacher Ian Paisley need not fear governing together with the ex-IRA gunman Gerry Adams. The second lesson of the insurrection is to prove that there is no such thing in Ireland as a separate Protestant people—British and not Irish—as the northern unionists claim. The Protestants of the North should just accept that they’re “really” Irish and a minority part of the whole country. They “became” Irish in 1798 and can do so again. Only their own pigheadedness and wrong-headedness—and England’s continuing and unwelcome intrusion into Irish affairs—prevents them from acknowledging that. They have to give up their separate little statelet, or entity, or whatever it is.

Unless, of course, you’re a hard-line Catholic Irish nationalist, for whom the northern Prods are, indeed, British. In which case, you would offer them the less kindly advice: Get off the land you stole four hundred years ago and get out of the country.

The original, and simple, premise of the arguments to support the lessons of 1798—widespread and wholehearted sectarian cooperation and amity—is simply not correct. One of the historical “mysteries” of the Insurrection of 1798 was the fact that, when it was over, it seemed that the Protestants, who had been radical nationalists, became instant conservative unionists. The explanation is the simple one that the great majority of Protestants were never radicals to begin with. Even most Presbyterians—the ones outside Belfast and the radical towns of Counties Antrim and Down—remained staunch believers in the Protestant Ascendancy and in keeping Catholics in their place. The records of the Synod of Ulster, the Presbyterians’ governing body, damn the insurrection and the egalitarian republican principles that made it happen.

The events of 1798 and the two decades leading up to it gave the nationalists and the republicans their few moments of opportunity and fame.

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