From 1649 onwards, Oliver Cromwell, who had just won the English Civil War, turned his attention to Ireland and attempted to subdue the rebellious Catholic Irish. Such was his success that by 1655, four-fifths of the land in Ireland had been taken by the English. It is in this period that contemporary Irish Protestant rituals and myths can be located. In 1688, when the Catholic monarch James II was displaced, he fled to Ireland and claimed authority there. The Protestant communities in the northern towns of Deny and Enniskillen rose against him, in support of his son-in-law, William of Orange, who had succeeded to the British throne. In May 1689, when the Protestant garrison in Derry was besieged by an Irish Army, the apprentice boys locked the town's gates and withstood the attacks until they were relieved by one of William's armies, over three months later. During the next two years, the forces of King William defeated the Jacobite armies in Ireland. He scored two notable victories at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Battle of Aughrin in 1691. These victories became enshrined in Protestant mythology.

The Protestant community, which was primarily located in the North-east, became identified as the holders of wealth, power and land shored up by the English. Throughout the following years, the hegemony of the Protestant community was upheld by the use of violence and intimidation. Organizations such as the Orange Lodges and the Peep O'Day Boys were formed to maintain a hold on the land. These groups continually clashed with the secret societies formed by the Irish natives, such as the Defenders and the Ribbonmen, which were dedicated to the overthrow of English Protestant power.² In 1798, the Irishman Wolfe Tone, aided by the French, attempted to overthrow English power. He led a rebellion in Co. Mayo, but was defeated by Crown forces at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. As a result of this rebellion, the English Parliament passed the Act of Union in 1801, declaring the integration of Ireland with England and Scotland, thus ending one part of Irish history. In part, the Act of Union arose from fears that Napoleon Bonaparte might have taken advantage of rebellious Ireland to launch an attack on the mainland as had been feared in 1798. The British took the view that Ireland must be subdued and secured through military force if necessary.

The period before the Act of Union clearly revealed the different dimensions of the conflict in Ireland: military force was used by the English to subdue the rebellious Irish; political violence was also a feature of the conflict between the native Irish and the settlers; while the competing interests of the landed classes during the English Civil War sparked bloodshed. The use of foreign armies in these conflicts formed part of the Irish historical landscape. From the Act of Union, however, the primary struggle in Ireland took place between the nationalists and the English, backed by the Protestant Unionists who wanted to maintain the connection with England. This axis was reinforced by formidable military power. Throughout the nineteenth century, the British military establishment in Ireland varied between 15,000 and 30,000 troops with battalions rotated in and out of the country on a three-year basis. Lord Redesale, who was sent to Ireland as Lord Chancellor in 1802, neatly summed up the twinning of British and Irish Protestant interests when he said: T have said this country must be kept for some time as a garrisoned county. I meant a Protestant garrison.’³ This assumption was underwritten by successive British Governments.

The estrangement between the Unionist and nationalist communities in Ireland was further sharpened in the nineteenth century as two trends developed. The first was the growth of a dynamic nationalist consciousness in Ireland among the Catholic communities that culminated in the Home Rule Campaign of the 1880s. The second trend was the rise of a distinct Protestant identity in Ulster, which arose partly as a response to nationalist demands. Unionists believed that Home Rule would threaten their economic and religious interests. This fear led to the grouping together of Unionist interests, premised on the need to maintain their power base through the connection with Britain.

By the 1880s therefore two distinct communities were in place. The two were distinguished by religion, culture and the vexed question of the connection with Britain. The North wanted to maintain its special relationship with the mainland, while the southern nationalists were determined to sever the connection with Westminster. It was this issue of the relationship with Britain that, more than any other, began to mark the struggle between the two at the end of the nineteenth century. The century had, on the whole, been marked by an uneasy co-existence, but the nationalist campaign for Home Rule exposed the cleavages between the two. For example, in 1885 Ulster had not been completely opposed to Home Rule – of the thirty-three seats in Ulster, seventeen of them were actually won by the Home Rule Party – but over the next twenty years, the picture was transformed and resistance to Home Rule in the Irish North-east grew. The opposition of the Unionists to an independent Ireland arose from a diversity of sources.

The first was that the Protestants in the North-east regarded themselves as different from the Catholic occupants of the island, in the simple terms they were Unionists first and foremost. They saw a division of Ireland lying between the Catholic Irish and the rest of Britain. The geographical separation of Ireland from the mainland was not, to Unionist minds, the important boundary. As descendants of British settlers they believed that they had carved out and constructed an enclave that was superior economically, culturally and socially to that of the native Irish peoples. This enclave had to be protected against absorption into an Irish Catholic state.⁴

Cultural and historical factors which prohibited Protestant Ulster's acceptance of Irish Republicanism were underwritten by powerful economic rationales. Unionists believed that the relative economic prosperity of the business centres in the North would be threatened by southern rule. Business interests in Belfast did not believe that a nationalist government in Dublin would maintain the necessary economic links with the mainland. In addition, many in the North feared the nature and political immaturity of any future government in the south. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Unionists saw themselves as inhabiting a flourishing region that needed to maintain the industrial link with imperial Britain, not be tied to the agrarian south.⁵

Opposition also centred on the issue of the church and the state. The Protestant North was deeply distrustful of any regime which would be dominated by a Catholic majority. Many Protestants equated rule from Dublin with ‘Rome Rule’. This distrust of Catholicism ran deep. In Ulster itself, Catholic communities had long suffered discrimination. The Catholics, on the whole, underwent relative economic deprivation in comparison with their Protestant counterparts. The nature of the Catholic communities, with their devotion to the church in Rome, helped set them apart from the majority in the North.⁶ The Unionists had no desire to cede control of the region to a government in the south which they believed would not only side with the Catholics but actively oppose Protestant religious beliefs. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century most of the British establishment had accepted that some measure of self-government for Ireland was both necessary and appropriate; it was a question of how much. Much of the debate on the British mainland over Ireland was over exacdy what constitutional solutions would be acceptable to the Unionists yet would also stem the rising tide of nationalism.

In their opposition to Home Rule, the Unionists felt confident that they could count upon the support of at least part of the British establishment. The Conservative Party had, at the end of the nineteenth century, openly sided with the Unionists. While this support was motivated by pure political opportunism as much as anything else, it provided a powerful filip to the Unionist cause. In 1886, for example, the Conservatives under Randolph Churchill had used the issue of Home Rule to break the Liberal Government of Gladstone. Lord Randolph Churchill declared that the Orange card was the card to play. Churchill decided that if Gladstone opted for Home Rule, the Conservatives would oppose it. He declared: ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ There was at this point, however, no need for Ulster to fight as the bill for Home Rule was defeated in Parliament. In Belfast the Unionists were triumphant and during the ensuing ‘celebrations’, several Catholics were killed. The British Parliament was subsequently dissolved and the Conservatives were returned to office under Salisbury. The battle over Home Rule was not yet over and in 1882 Gladstone was returned, and with the support of the Irish representatives in the House carried a Second Home Rule bill in 1893. This time it was defeated by the House of Lords and it appeared as if Home Rule was indeed a lost cause. Yet outside the British Parliament, the forces of Irish nationalism continued to grow. In 1893, the Gaelic League was founded. This movement was dedicated to the revival of Irishness in a non-sectarian fashion and attempted to foster the Irish language and Irish literature. Around this group, Irish nationalist political aims developed and, as the century drew to a close, the nationalist aim became an Irish republic divorced from the mainland.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the triangular shape of the violent struggle in Ireland had been set. The nationalists were intent on independence from Britain, antagonizing the Protestants in the North who sought and gained a commitment to the Union from the Conservative Party in Westminster. This in turn provoked bloody sectarian violence between the two communities in the North.

The decade between 1910 and 1920 was one of particular turmoil. In 1912, under the Liberal Government of Asquith, the Third Home Rule bill passed through the British Parliament. This was made possible not only by the genuine commitment of the Liberal Party to the cause of Home Rule, but also by the rise of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The votes of the eighty-four Irish nationalist seats were critical to the life of the Asquith regime. This combination of Irish nationalism and Liberal commitment forced the success of the bill. The Home Rule Act was placed on the statute books in 1914 but remained dormant. The Ulster Unionists were determined that it should not be implemented and half a million Protestants, under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, signed a covenant to defeat Home Rule. Conservative politicians once again pledged their support to the Unionist cause. In Ulster the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was founded with a membership of 100,000 and the aim of defeating Home Rule through military means if necessary, and then to form a provisional government if required. Some of the British military garrison in Ireland announced that they would not ...