War and an Irish Town by Eamonn McCann;

Author:Eamonn McCann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2018-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Part 4

1

The Orange apparatus was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century by industrialists and landowners in north-eastern Ireland in order to capture and keep the loyalty of the Protestant masses. The all-class alliance contained within it was fraught with contradictions and consequently fragile. It has frequently threatened to disintegrate. The motivation of the Orange leaders was and is economic self-interest. At each point of crisis their primary consideration has been the ‘necessity’ not so much to repel Catholic encroachment as to prevent Protestant defection. Historically, Irish Protestant property owners’ attachment to ‘the link with Britain’ has in no way been sentimental. This was clearly demonstrated by their reaction to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland by the British Liberal government elected in 1868.

Disestablishment removed the formal legal basis of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. The instinctive reaction of a major section of the ascendancy was to withdraw its support for the union with Britain. ‘It is hardly surprising’, said the Belfast Newsletter, ‘that with the pages of history open before them, with the mire of their ancient privileges scattered all around, Protestants should care little to maintain a union which for them appears henceforth to have little value’ (16 May 1870). At the same time the two Dublin Protestant papers, the Irish Times and the Evening Mail, flirted with Home Rule. Issac Butt, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, noted that those attending the meeting in May 1870 which founded the Home Rule Association were ‘principally Protestants and Conservatives…all men of some mark and station’. The 61-man committee elected by the meeting contained 28 Conservatives, 10 Liberals, 17 Constitutional Nationalists and 6 Fenians, of whom 36 were Protestants and 25 Catholics. Protestant Conservative control of the HRA lasted only a few months, but the fact that they even attempted to take the leadership of the movement indicates that their primary concern was to preserve their own position in society, not the constitutional status quo. It was when Home Rule leadership eluded them that they turned to other things.

Within a few years the ascendancy was to be threatened by something much more formidable than a reforming Liberal government. In October 1879 the Irish National Land League was established under the effective leadership of the radical Michael Davitt. The League demanded a reduction in rents, state aid for tenants to buy out the land they worked on and an end to evictions. The League’s tactics included the ‘boycott’ of landowners and agents evicting or attempting to evict tenants. It arranged that all evictions were ‘witnessed by gatherings of people’. The witnesses in the nature of things were wont to set about the evictors. The success of the League can be gleaned from the fact that in 1881 there were 4,439 ‘agrarian crimes’ committed in Ireland, an increase of 900 per cent over the 1877 figures (Special Commission, vol. iv, p. 515).

The Land League was based in the south and west of Ireland among Catholic peasants, but its economic

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