Buried Lives Read online

  To John, my brother.

  First published in 2017

  The History Press Ireland

  50 City Quay

  Dublin 2

  Ireland

  www.thehistorypress.ie

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  This ebook edition first published in 2017

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  © Robin Bury 2017

  The right of Robin Bury, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 6570 5

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 The Protestant Exodus

  2 Personal Stories: 1919 to 1923

  3 A Chain of Bonfires

  4 Low-Intensity Unhappiness

  5 Grabbing their Children

  6 Some Protestant Voices

  7 Some Donegal Voices

  8 The Triumph of Intolerance

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to my brother, John, for all his encouragement and for starting me on the long journey of writing this book. He was puzzled by our mild apartheid-style lives in east Cork and set me on this road of exploration and discovery some twelve years ago. This led to an M.Phil. dissertation in Trinity College Dublin in 2012/13 when I researched a point of time in history which was pivotal for Protestants in Southern Ireland.

  I thank David Dickson for his patience and guidance as my supervisor for the M.Phil. He suggested I concentrate on Protestants in Co. Tipperary during a period of armed conflict, an area not examined in any considerable detail by historians. He sometimes respectfully disagreed with drafts for my dissertation and helped to make me ‘keep on my historian’s hat’, as he put it, to shape and balance my writing.

  Thanks to those people in the taught graduate M.Phil course in Modern Irish history who gave support and encouragement to a rather mature student. Eunan O’Halpin encouraged me to apply and accepted my last minute application, for which sincere thanks. Anne Dolan’s knowledge of the period is highly impressive, though we did not always see eye to eye. David Fitzpatrick, my examiner, provided me with much valued help for my research on the decline in Protestant numbers.

  I am particularly grateful to the very helpful people in the Representative Church Body Library (Milltown, Dublin), particularly Susan Hood and Mary Furlong who met my endless demands for information and leads. Thanks also to Aideen Ireland, Head, Reader Services Division, and the National Archives of Ireland, who helped me to locate Irish compensation archives. Mary Guinan-Darmody in the Tipperary Libraries Study section graciously met my many requests for research material used in the dissertation, particularly newspaper reports. David Griffin in the Irish Architectural Archives has been a friend and inspiration.

  Thanks to the various Church of Ireland clergy in Roscrea, Cashel and Nenagh, and to Marjorie Quarton in Nenagh, who gave unstintingly of their time and who introduced me to people who supplied sources of information on local history.

  Eoghan Harris has been hugely supportive for many years and I am indebted to him for suggesting the title, Buried Lives, where my surname comes into play. Dr Mark Dooley read early drafts and made a number of suggestions for shaping the book in its early stages: to him sincere thanks. Also to Dr David Butler of University College, Cork.

  Gerald Murphy gave me much information on the various cases of Protestant intimidation in the early chapters of the book, adding most valuable insights. His book The Year of Disappearances: Political Killings in Cork, 1920–1921 was highly revealing and shocking.

  Brian Walker more than anyone else, made possible the finalised version of the book. He tirelessly edited it in a gentle and humorous manner. His own book, A Political History of the Two Irelands, much quoted by me, is inspirational.

  Finally, my family gave me the strength and untiring support to keep going. My siblings Catherine, Richard, John and Anne, and my children Sophie, Emily and Mark. Thank you all. Sophie, and your generous partner Bill, both in Toronto, merit particular thanks for proof reading my dissertation up against a very tight deadline. This dissertation forms the backbone of this book.

  Preface

  Some 12 years ago my brother, John, told me that he was puzzled by the apartheid lifestyle our Church of Ireland family experienced when growing up in east Co. Cork in the 1950s and ’60s. My father was a clergyman, the Dean of Cloyne, the seat of an ancient bishopric and famous for the Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who once lived there. We lived in isolation, among a small scattering of Church of Ireland people who worshipped in the three little churches in the parishes of Ballycotton, Corkbeg and Inch as well as the ancient Norman cathedral in Cloyne. We mixed with our own faith at whist drives in the Deanery, parish fêtes and private tennis parties. The only Catholics I knew when growing up were the local doctor and shopkeepers. The Church of Ireland members included the once large landlord, the Longfields/Ponsonbys, whose children were educated in England, the now-famous Allen family, who ran a restaurant near Ballycotton, and the Pierces. Philip Pierce was English and his wife, Lucy, was Welsh. He was a pacifist who left England during the Second World War to start a pottery in Shanagarry. His Shangarry pottery brand became a household name in Ireland. So why had this mutually accepted form of apartheid, which had deeply divided the Catholic and Protestant communities and nation, come to be?

  It is a long and troublesome story that this book attempts to tell. I have used the subtitle of the Protestants of ‘Southern Ireland’ rather than ‘Republic of Ireland or ‘Irish Free State’, because this book goes from before 1921 until the present. The early twentieth century saw the transformation of the southern Irish Protestants from a once strong people into an isolated, pacified community. Their influence, status and numbers had weakened greatly by the end of the civil war in 1923 and they were to form a quiescent minority up to modern times. The historian Patrick Buckland believed that after 1917 there was a ‘disintegration’ of the Protestant southern unionists. Their numbers fell sharply, events having ‘shattered the confidence of those who remained in Ireland and undermined their determination to continue distinctive political activity.1 They were denied ‘a powerful Senate’ in the constitution of the Free State, and a new Ireland emerged based on blood, religion and – above all – enmity with Britain. A homogenous society came into being, nationalist and Catholic with an ‘Anglocentric obsession’.2 In such a world, those supporting England were unwanted, their rights as a minority in conflict with the ethos of the Free State.

  In the words of another historian, Marianne Elliott, Irish nationalism was ‘another form of religion in disguise’; Irish Catholics ‘became the “real Irish” in common perception’.3 In the newly independent Ireland, ‘the prevailing Catholic and anti-English ethos … has caused real problems, and the claims that the Protestant minority has been treated well by the State rather ignores the fact that in that ethos Protestants had been considered England’s “garrison” and u
n-Irish, tolerated rather than accepted’.4

  In 1911, Protestants in the 26 counties numbered some 300,000 (excluding Protestants in the British Army, which departed in 1922), or 10 per cent of the total population. By the time of the last census in 2011 there were only 137,000 southern Irish Protestants (excluding non-Irish Protestants), or less than 3 per cent of the population. They had become an insignificant minority, having once ‘played such a conspicuous and powerful role in Irish life’.5 They had been responsible for much of Ireland’s finest architecture, both domestic and civic. In Dublin, once called an English city, the Protestants built superb buildings, which are ‘in all their geometrical simplicity and austerity, among the glories of domestic architecture … The Georgian squares, the Houses of Parliament on College Green … and the great public buildings designed by James Gandon had their counterpart in the country houses of the gentry.’6 They produced a glittering array of the world’s greatest writers, among them Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and, more recently, Samuel Beckett. They produced important painters in the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as William Orpen, Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats and Francis Bacon. They led the country in manufacturing industries, too: international brands Guinness, Jacob’s Biscuits and Jameson Whiskey, among many others, were dominant in commercial and financing enterprises. Their decline and virtual disappearance was a loss to an independent Ireland.

  Protestant disintegration had started in the late nineteenth century, when their economic strength had been fatally eroded by a series of land acts which placed the land of Protestant landlords in the hands of their tenant farmers: Ireland, therefore, quickly became a land of peasant proprietorship. Their once-strong influence at local government level was removed by the Local Government Act of 1898.

  The process of their becoming an insignificant silent, even silenced, minority began in the early twentieth century. It accelerated rapidly during the years between 1919 and 1923, a period of armed rebellion and civil war. The period immediately before and after the signing of the Treaty, up to the end of the civil war, saw many Protestants come under attack when they ‘felt the threat of harm and dislocation with particular acuteness.’7 At that time the screws were turned on some of their often isolated and defenceless communities by violent nationalists. Agrarianism played an important part, with land being seized and cattle driven off. Protestant businesses were boycotted and up to 300 ‘big houses’ owned by Protestants were burnt down. During this period, and until 1926, possibly as many as 40,000 people emigrated; Protestants who would otherwise have stayed on had there been neither violence nor the threat of violence. Statistics do not reveal the exact number of those who fled, but ‘it is fair to say … that the pressure exercised on unionists … partly accounts for the striking fall in the Protestant population of the 26 counties between 1919 and 1923.’8

  In the family documentary, The Other Irish Travellers, Fiona Murphy touchingly tells the story of her Church of Ireland family in Co. Mayo before and after Irish independence. Her family, termed ‘planters’, had lived there for hundreds of years and had been given land by the British Crown. They held much affection for the land and people. Yet Fiona Murphy asks at the beginning of the documentary,9 ‘How does a whole community know when it’s time to just go away? That their faces don’t fit? That they’re not wanted?’ She points out that, as far as they were concerned, ‘you were different anyway because you were a Protestant’, and goes on to claim that the exodus of the Protestant community from 1919 in large numbers ‘was a polite form of ethnic cleansing’. In some cases, this was perhaps far from polite, as we will see in the early chapters of this book. The violence directed against many Protestants, the burning of their houses and their decline in numbers, will be addressed in the first three chapters in some detail.

  What sort of Irish State emerged after 1921? How did this affect the dwindling Protestant minority? The violence directed against them had all but ended in 1923, except for the widespread anti-Protestant riots and assaults in 1935, but the Gaelic, Catholic, nationalist emphasis of the State and its educational system, particularly in terms of the new emphasis on teaching of history in a hibernocentric manner, left little doubt that the ex-Unionist community had become marginalised. Chapter 4 looks at the new Ireland that came into being after 1921.

  As well as nationalism of a narrow nature, which isolated Protestants once loyal to the Crown, a Protestant religious affiliation saw to it that ‘you were different’, as Fiona Murphy asserts. If a Protestant married a Roman Catholic up to 1970, the Roman Catholic Ne Temere decree of 1908 seriously eroded Protestant numbers in the many mixed-religion marriages that took place. This is examined in some detail in the infamous Fethard-on-Sea incident in Chapter 5.

  How do some Protestants relate to modern Ireland with its many transnational companies and its increased prosperity following membership of the European Union? How did they adapt, or fail to adapt? A series of interviews with Protestants in Chapter 6 and 7 give an account of some contemporary attitudes, including those of Protestants in the Orange Order, and chapter 8 is devoted to the failed attempt in 2000 to commemorate the founding of the Orange Order in Dublin. Finally, the Epilogue looks at some aspects of the position of Protestants in the modern Republic of Ireland post the economic collapse and much weakened position of the Catholic Church. This includes an account of the closure of six Church of Ireland churches in the centre of Dublin on Easter Day 2016 in order to accommodate parades commemorating the 1916 Rising.

  1

  The Protestant Exodus

  What happened to the Protestant minority in the 26 counties of Ireland during the period of revolutionary violence and civil war between 1919 and 1923? We know one thing that is indisputable. There was a dramatic, unprecedented decrease in their numbers between the censuses of 1911 and 1926. Between 1891 and 1901, the Protestant population had decreased by 7.1 per cent and between 1901 and 1911 by 4.8 per cent. However, there was a 33 per cent collapse in the Protestant population of the 26 counties that became the Irish Free State between 1911 and 1926. In 1911, Protestants in these counties numbered 327,179; 10.4 per cent of the population of 3,139,688.1 By 1926, they made up 7.4 per cent of the population, numbering 220,723, of which 164,215 were members of the Church of Ireland, 32,429 Presbyterians, 10,663 Methodists and 13,416 others. The total decline in Protestant numbers was 106,456.2 During this period, Roman Catholic numbers remained almost static, falling by just 2.2 per cent in the island. In Northern Ireland, the combined number of Protestant denominations rose by 2 per cent.

  In effect, the southern Protestant people suffered a very serious decline in numbers from 1919 to 1923. There was exceptional emigration, particularly during the civil war in 1922. ‘Although no reliable figures are available the tendency is clear … unionists of all shapes and sizes were leaving the south of Ireland in 1922 because of the troubles.’3 Also, their ‘political strength and unity evaporated in the south in 1922’4 and ‘the renewed violence of Irish life completed this disintegration. It did so in three ways. It weakened Anglo-Ireland numerically. It shattered the confidence of those who remained in Ireland and undermined their determination to continue distinctive political activity. Lastly, the disorder reacted upon the provisional government’s attitude to southern unionists’ claims for a powerful Senate.’5

  Research undertaken by historians has been handicapped by a lack of available data to fully explain the reasons for this sharp decline in numbers. Historians do agree on one thing: the decline was exceptional. According to Patrick Buckland:

  Some families died out but part of the decrease must have been the result of emigration. The ordinary rate of emigration must not be forgotten, but it is reasonable to assume that the quality of life for southern unionists before and after the Treaty increased the ordinary rate of emigration and accounts largely for the decline of the Protestant population.6

  Pet
er Hart wrote that this was ‘the only example of the mass displacement of a native ethnic group within the British Isles since the seventeenth century’.7 Hart believes that the widespread attacks on Protestants both before and after the Anglo-Irish truce led to a major exodus and were largely, though not entirely, inspired by sectarian motives, which were ‘embedded in the vocabulary and the syntax of the Irish revolution’.8 There is no doubt that many loyalists left the 26 counties during the violence and turmoil in the period 1920–23. There was a mini refugee crisis in London. The Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association was formed in July 1922 and had interviewed 9,400 refugees by 1928, assisting many with clothing, accommodation and loans.9 Many were Catholic members of the RIC, which had been disbanded in 1922. This exodus was at its most dramatic between 1922 and 1923, the time of the civil war.

  Kent Fedorowich wrote about this exodus:

  Equally important was the plight of the isolated and beleaguered Protestant community in the southern 26 counties whose population declined by 34 per cent between 1911 and 1926. This included 20,000 refugees who fled to the United Kingdom in 1922 to find sanctuary from continuous and sometimes violent nationalist persecution.10

  Enda Delaney points out that ‘the decline in [Protestant] numbers was a process initiated before the advent of Irish independence in 1921–22’.11 This is true, as was the decline in the Catholic population. Between 1861 and 1911, the decline in the number of Protestants was 30.2 per cent and Catholic decline 28.5 per cent. The difference was 1.7 per cent, but given the higher growth rate in the Catholic population, it could be argued that Protestant emigration was lower than Catholic. Furthermore, the Protestant percentage of the population was much the same as it was in 1861, so comparative decline, from whatever cause, was small. Not so from 1911 to 1926. The sharp rate of decline of Protestant numbers, particularly between 1921 and 1923, is remarkable compared to previous rates of decline, as Hart points out.12 Delaney does, however, conclude that ‘at the very least over 60,000 Protestants who were not directly connected with the British administration left southern Ireland between 1911 and 1926’.13 I would suggest that the figure is closer to 80,000, considering that the total decrease 1911–1926 was 107,000 and ‘… only about one fourth of this decrease can be attributed to the withdrawal of the British Army and the disbandment of the Police Forces and the emigration of their dependents.’14 In other words, some 27,000 of the decrease of 107,000 were people in the British forces and police.