A PEOPLE UNDER

SIEGE

Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. Born in Belfast in 1980, he obtained his PhD in Politics from Queen’s University Belfast in 2006 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2012. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Transworld Books, 2014), UVF: Behind the Mask (Merrion Press, 2017) and Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA (Merrion Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Fortnight, The Irish Times, The Irish News, Belfast Telegraph, Belfast News Letter, Irish Independent and the Dublin Review of Books.

Also by Aaron Edwards:

Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA

UVF: Behind the Mask

Strategy in War and Peace: A Critical Introduction

War: A Beginner’s Guide

Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire

Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945

The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner, 1969–2007

The Northern Ireland Conflict: A Beginner’s Guide (with Cillian McGrattan)

A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism

Transforming the Peace Process in Northern Ireland: From Terrorism to Democratic Politics (edited with Stephen Bloomer)

A PEOPLE UNDER

SIEGE

The Unionists of Northern Ireland,

from Partition to Brexit and Beyond

Aaron Edwards

First published in 2023 by

Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Aaron Edwards, 2023

978 1 78537 299 5 (Paper)

978 1 78537 302 2 (Ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

‘The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going but going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now – ?’

From C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, pp. 75–6

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Prologue: A Sense of Belonging

Introduction

1. A State Born in Violence

2. The People of Independent Thought

3. Masters of Our Own House

4. Whipping Up the New Recruits

5. Responsible Members of the Community

6. An Ulster Divided Against Itself

7. A Regime Under Fire

8. A Very Loyalist Coup

9. Prisoners of the IRA’s Strategy

10. The Duisburg Formula

11. An Image Problem

12. Lifting the Siege

13. Ulster’s Answer to Leaderless Resistance

14. The Changing of the Guard

15. A People Under Siege (Again)

16. Toppling the New Tower of Babel

17. Circling the Wagons

18. Political Unionism and the Greater Good

Epilogue: Everyday Patriotism

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACE Action for Community Employment

CLMC Combined Loyalist Military Command

CLR Campaign for Labour Representation

DUP Democratic Unionist Party

GOC General Officer Commanding

HQNI British Army Headquarters Northern Ireland (Thiepval Barracks)

INLA Irish National Liberation Army

IRA Irish Republican Army

JIC Joint Intelligence Committee

LCC Loyalist Communities Council

LOL Loyalist Orange Lodge

LVF Loyalist Volunteer Force

MI5 Military Intelligence, Section 5 (Security Service)

MLA Member for the Legislative Assembly

NCO Non-Commissioned Officer

NICRA Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association

NIHE Northern Ireland Housing Executive

NILP Northern Ireland Labour Party

NIO Northern Ireland Office

PBPA People Before Profit Alliance

PIRA Provisional Irish Republican Army

PONI Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland

PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

PSNI Police Service of Northern Ireland

PUP Progressive Unionist Party

RAF Royal Air Force

RDA Rathcoole Defence Association

RSHG Rathcoole Self-Help Group

RHC Red Hand Commandos

RIC Royal Irish Constabulary

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary

SAS Special Air Service (British Army Special Forces)

SDLP Social Democratic and Labour Party

TUV Traditional Unionist Voice

UDA Ulster Defence Association

UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence

UDP Ulster Democratic Party

UDR Ulster Defence Regiment

UESA Ulster Ex-Servicemen’s Association

UFF Ulster Freedom Fighters

ULDP Ulster Loyalist Democratic Party

UPA Ulster Protestant Association

UPL Ulster Protestant League

UPRG Ulster Political Research Group

USC Ulster Special Constabulary

UUC Ulster Unionist Council

UULA Ulster Unionist Labour Association

UUP Ulster Unionist Party

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force

UWC Ulster Workers’ Council

UWUC Ulster Women’s Unionist Council

PROLOGUE

A Sense of Belonging

I did not learn the Protestant version of history from books, but by word of mouth passed on from generation to generation. The ‘quality’, who had education and leisure, knew the details and the dates, but ordinary folk like ourselves carried the facts – or alleged facts – of history in our very bones and in our hearts. We were the people who had never surrendered and would never surrender. As each Twelfth of July came round, Protestant fervour would rise again and be reaffirmed.

Robert Greacen, The Sash My Father Wore: An Autobiography¹

Whitewell Road, North Belfast, 12 July 2001

THE BRICKS AND BOTTLES RAINED down thick and fast. I ducked to avoid a golf ball hurtling in my direction. I wove to narrowly miss a bottle smashing on the ground beside me. Up ahead was a solid line of police Land Rovers blocking the bridge. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in full riot gear huddled closely together in front of their vehicles in a well-disciplined formation, holding their reinforced shields tightly to their chests.

Facing off against the police officers were about thirty Orangemen, who had also formed up in orderly ranks, their standard-bearer spearheading their advance towards police lines. The young man carrying the bright blue, gold and red bannerette depicting the local lodge’s emblem – a crest emblazoned with the words ‘For God and Ulster’ – was a friend of mine. We grew up in the same housing estate and occasionally socialised together. As I stood observing the lodge at close quarters, I felt like I was amongst friends. Amongst people like me. The lodge regalia was completed with a huge banner depicting a painting of soldiers from the 36th Ulster Division going over the top in the trench warfare of the First World War. The soldiers on the banner were portrayed as stoic, defiant and determined. It flapped in the warm July breeze, a reminder of the slaughter of the Somme, held aloft by two Orangemen as bricks and other debris flew above our heads, thrown by angry nationalists behind police lines. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. A red mist descended over those around me. Fear, anger and frustration animated them, and I could see it was taking considerable willpower for the Orangemen to maintain their dignity in the face of such violent provocation.

The lodge had walked the short distance from the Master of the Lodge’s home in White City to hand over a letter of protest to the police. No band accompanied them. ‘Party Tunes’, as they are known, were banned. They wanted to cross Arthur’s Bridge and make their way down the Longlands Road, up Church Road and past a cluster of out-of-town shops before entering the Rathcoole estate, about a mile away, the home of most of the members of the lodge. For generations Orangemen like these had walked along what they called their ‘traditional route’. What they did not know at the time was that the labelling of this parade as ‘contentious’ was not a by-product of the Troubles, nor of the recent Drumcree, Ormeau Road and Derry controversies. Many Orangemen perceived these protests to be a deliberate Sinn Féin strategy of forming residents’ groups against parades as a means of stopping them from performing their age-old tribal rites,² though, in reality, such actions had a long history that predated the formation of Sinn Féin and even Northern Ireland itself.

The local Loyal Orange Lodge (LOL) 658 in Greencastle had been formed a few hundred yards from this spot in 1886, amidst frequent disputes between local Protestants and Catholics over parading. Indeed, there had been frequent rioting in the Greencastle and neighbouring Whitehouse areas in 1867, and then again in 1887 and in 1897, commonly involving clashes between Orangemen, bandsmen and the police.³

In July 1899 one local, who went by the nom de plume ‘Unionist’, wrote to the Belfast News Letter to complain about the treatment of the Orangemen of Greencastle and was at considerable pains to state that it was not a nationalist district and, out of the 225 families living there, 135 were Protestant. The ‘rowdier elements’ amongst the remaining ninety Catholic families, he said, were ‘like a lot of Smithfield corner-boys’.⁴ Complaining about heavy-handed treatment by the police, he called on his local MP to ‘find out the reason why a rebel procession can walk in Belfast when a procession of men sworn to uphold the empire is not allowed’.⁵ The News Letter agreed and chastised nationalists who ‘glorify rebellion; they express over and over again their unabated hostility to England; and their great aim is to fracture and weaken the Empire’. As far as the newspaper was concerned, nationalism was ‘at its old game – trying to bring discredit on Orangeism’.⁶

Other letters flooded the News Letter columns, each one arguing that loyalists had not been responsible for disturbing the peace in the district.⁷ One even went as far as to suggest it was ‘time that something was done to prevent the Nationalists from taking possession of the village’. The Protestant people, the letter writer said, ‘must be blind, or they have closed their eyes, to what has been going on for the past few years, otherwise they would have been up in arms long since’.⁸ Another loyalist, signing his letter ‘Anti-Rebel’, stated ‘that they won’t have any more of this nonsense. All that the Protestants of Greencastle want is equality of rights, and this much they intend having.’⁹

Most of those who wrote letters blamed the trouble on the rise in the number of Roman Catholic police officers stationed in the area, although one letter writer refuted this allegation, arguing that the Greencastle nationalist band was ‘prohibited by the Roman Catholic sergeants here from entering the neighbouring village of Whitehouse just as the Protestant bands are prevented from entering the Roman Catholic village of Greencastle’.¹⁰ In the final correspondence published by the News Letter, ‘Unionist’ said the ‘Nationalists have had too much of it their own way in this district, but the Protestant people do not intend to tolerate it any longer.’¹¹

Violence never seemed far from the surface in Greencastle, though it was not until a generation later, during serious civil unrest in the 1920s, that gunmen opened fire at a funeral of a local Protestant, Herbert Hazard, killing one man, Hugh McNally, and wounding another, Thomas McBride. At the same time, it was claimed that a loyalist mob had wrecked the Emmett Hall, chasing a few Catholics out of the area.¹² Then came a long détente lasting half a century.

With the re-emergence of violence in the early 1970s, Greencastle’s strong grassroots leadership was tested, with community activist Joe Camplisson lamenting how intercommunal rioting in July 1971 led to a serious deterioration in community relations in the area.¹³ It would get worse. Much worse.

On 6 January 1973, eighteen-year-old William Rankin was shot dead as he inflated his car tyres at the corner of Mill Road and the Shore Road.¹⁴ A few years later, a particularly grisly double murder of a Catholic couple, twenty-six-year-old Mervyn McDonald and his wife, twenty-four-year-old Rosaleen, was carried out in front of their two young children – one aged two-and-a-half, the other four months – at their home on the Longlands Road on 9 July 1976. One neighbour was watching television when they heard the shots. ‘I looked through the curtains and saw two people coming down the path from the house. One of them was carrying a gun. They were so casual it was unbelievable.’¹⁵ The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) terror group subsequently claimed responsibility, which the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) claimed was part of ‘a deliberate murderous campaign’ to ‘drive Catholics from Newtownabbey, Whitehouse and Greencastle’.¹⁶ The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) subsequently murdered David Nocher, a member of the Workers’ Party, as he cleaned a shop window on the Mill Road in Greencastle on 29 October 1983.¹⁷ A few weeks later, the UVF shot and killed Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) member Joe Craven, a neighbour of Nocher’s from Bawnmore Park, while he collected his dole money at the benefits office on the edge of the Rathcoole estate.¹⁸

Against this backdrop, tensions remained high between the two communities in the Greencastle area. Changing demographics also conspired to challenge claims to tribal rites the Orange Order may once have exercised in areas like this.¹⁹ And so, in July 2001, as I watched the local lodge register its solitary act of protest, I couldn’t help but wonder about the motivations of the youths from the nationalist community on the other side of the bridge. They had gathered at police lines to express their displeasure at what they saw as an act of loyalist defiance. Some of them had empty milk bottles, which they fashioned into Molotov cocktails, known locally as petrol bombs, as well as broken paving slabs, golf balls, and bottles filled with urine. Yet, ironically, the police were facing in my direction, where no one had resorted to violence, only peaceful protest. In any event, the battle lines had been firmly drawn in the minds of the authorities and the other community, no doubt shaped by generations of antagonism.

For much of my life until that point, we had called the persistent conflict between Catholics and Protestants the ‘Troubles’, which was a reflection of earlier sporadic violence in the early 1920s. But there was nothing sporadic about those three decades of sustained and organised slaughter. With the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, we were led to believe such violence had finally abated, once and for all. It was hard to square this myth with the reality as another bottle of piss whizzed past me.

I began to question why I was even here. The truth was I liked to accompany this lodge every Twelfth of July. It was my grandfather’s lodge. Like my grandmother, he had been born and reared a few hundred yards along the Whitewell Road in a tough, working-class row of terrace homes in Barbour Street. Those were hard times, when the shadow of the Great Depression touched their lives and the lives of their Catholic neighbours in what was known locally as ‘Pope’s Row’. Relations between the two communities were generally good except for times, such as in the mid-1930s, when loyalist and republican gunmen re-emerged to wreak havoc. After my grandparents married, they moved to Mill Road, a few hundred yards across what was now Arthur’s Bridge, before finally settling in East Way, Rathcoole, in the mid-1960s. As the Troubles picked up pace in the 1970s, between 8,000 and 15,000 families were intimidated out of their homes, leaving places like Greencastle, Bawnmore, Longlands and the Whitewell Road predominantly Catholic and nationalist, while Protestant families moved in large numbers to the neighbouring White City and Rathcoole estates.²⁰ Against this backdrop of changing demographics, my grandfather and his Orange brethren were confronted by the harsh reality of social and political upheaval. Their traditional route, which had never fully been ‘theirs’ anyway, was impassable.

Unexpectedly there came a lull in the fracas as the angry shouts and sounds of broken glass and crashing masonry died down. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted some community activists from the local branch of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) emerge from a side street to seek a peaceful resolution, and within a few minutes the violent protest had ended. The Orangemen returned to the White City side of the Whitewell Road, where they were bused out of the area and to Rathcoole to complete the remainder of their filter parade to join the much larger Twelfth celebrations. Many of the Orangemen on the bus that day felt their tribal rights had been infringed. It left them deflated and humiliated. There were plenty of people to blame: quite apart from the other side, the police – who they had come to see as their police – were singled out for especially harsh criticism. History repeated itself that day in North Belfast.

Later that evening, in a social club in Rathcoole, the Orangemen recalled how ‘the Provies’ had prevented them from walking ‘their traditional route’ and how they were lucky the police were there to prevent matters ‘getting out of hand’. All they wanted was ‘their rights’ respected. Where was ‘their parity of esteem’ promised by the recent Belfast Agreement? The conversation soon turned to great danger lurking round every corner.

During a visit to Belfast in the late 1970s, writer Dervla Murphy spent time in the company of loyalists like these, pondering ‘for how long more can the dying Orange tradition linger on? It is very much a wary, close-the-ranks tradition, always suspecting threats, plots betrayals, conspiracies, always on the look-out for danger … As a social force it is as negative and destructive as the Republican hatred of England.’²¹ I can’t now remember the exact moment it dawned on me that I was amidst this ‘close-the-ranks tradition’, but I knew that as a young man I had begun to think to the contrary. I had got to know nationalists during three years as an undergraduate at the University of Ulster. Quite a few were committed republicans from Belfast, Derry and Armagh, who had their own version of history and understanding of politics. I was aware that their reading of the past was, like the unionist and loyalist interpretations of history, frequently manufactured from misperceptions and misremembrances. As historian Brian Walker has so eloquently observed, the ‘Unionist sense of history … with its great emphasis on 1641, 1689 and 1690, and with the accompanying idea of constant conflict between Protestant and Catholic, is highly selective.’²²

In working-class communities, where oral tradition is the principal means of passing on history, customs and tradition, this lived experience was streetwise knowledge designed to keep us safe, while republican violence and political agitation posed an existential threat to our very existence. While my undergraduate history degree had taught me to be sceptical of received wisdom, to question everything I was being told, I knew that being on the Whitewell Road that day, amongst loyalists who felt themselves to be under siege, meant I was part of something greater than myself. I was part of a community, both real and imagined. We were Protestants loyal to Her Majesty the Queen, her heirs and successors, and to the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Above all, though, we were loyal to each other. Some might even have called us ‘loyalists’. It felt good to belong, even if we felt embattled by our physical encounter on the bridge that day or in the stories that sprang from our lived experience.²³

I was born in 1980 and grew up at a time when the armed conflict on the streets was winding down, though the violence continued to shape and influence our lives in both direct and indirect ways. Family and friends seemed consumed by a state of heightened anxiety, occasionally punctuated by outright fear when, for instance, republican terrorists gunned down a member of the local community. Fifty-one-year-old John Gibson was shot dead as he arrived home from work on 21 October 1993 not far from my front door. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) justified his murder on the basis that he worked for a construction company that rebuilt police and army barracks. Then there was my father’s friend, forty-three-year-old Sergeant Robert Irvine, who was shot dead at his sister’s home in Rasharkin a year earlier, on 20 October 1992, because the PIRA deemed him a ‘legitimate target’ for belonging to the local battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. I had a schoolfriend whose father, thirty-eight-year-old John McConnell, a civilian contractor, was murdered on his way home from work, when the IRA detonated a 1,500lb bomb at the Teebane crossroads between Omagh and Cookstown on 17 January 1992. The Provos said he and his co-workers were legitimate targets because they helped to rebuild security force bases. Finally, there was forty-four-year-old Gerry Evans, who had just opened a fishing tackle shop in Glengormley. My father had been talking to him a few hours before he was gunned down by the PIRA on 27 April 1994. The mere fact that he was a loyalist was enough for them to sign his death warrant.²⁴

One thing all these people had in common was their community identity. They were unionists. Although they were very different as individuals, the local insistence on ascribing political identities to everyone meant they were part of an imagined community that saw their murders as a common assault on all of us.²⁵ As far as we were concerned, these people were our kith and kin – part of a broader unionist family. An insidious feeling of fear gripped us in the wake of their deaths. It made us paranoid that we were on the verge of destruction – about to be eradicated like those communities in the Balkans and elsewhere we read about in newspapers and saw on television. We hunkered down. Our enemies were out to get us. They could be anywhere. We were a people under siege.

When I think back to those years, I can still feel the fear and anxiety I experienced, as death or serious injury skulked around every corner. You carry it in your bones and your blood forever. During times of great uncertainty, we all want to belong. It’s what makes humankind the social species it has become.

A People Under Siege is a book about the sense of belonging felt by the unionist community in Northern Ireland, but it is much more than that – it is an attempt to articulate what is meant by unionism. In taking this approach it is necessary to confront both the narrow, sectional beliefs and prejudices of unionists and loyalists, as well as the more positive and forward-thinking aspects of this political creed. As a people, I believe unionists in Northern Ireland are capable of being great innovators, problem-solvers and thinkers. ‘Northern Protestants have an eloquent artistic and intellectual tradition,’ wrote journalist Susan McKay, ‘though it is often obscured.’²⁶

However, McKay is generally dismissive of unionists and even more so of loyalists, lampooning them for their flags, their Orangeism, their values, and going as far as to stereotype them as counting ‘inflexibility’ amongst ‘traditional Unionist virtues’.²⁷ She is not alone. Unionists have frequently been misrepresented in Great Britain by journalists like Max Hastings, who once claimed his memory was ‘far too unreliable to offer valid testimony’ to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday,²⁸ yet has, nonetheless, been especially vivid in his recollections of ‘several hundred thousand embittered “Proddies”’²⁹ who ‘have been able to sustain a sorry pantomime, conscious that they are unloved beyond their own streets’.³⁰ There may be some truth to this, but it does not excuse attempts to misrepresent and denigrate an entire community.

I no longer live in Northern Ireland. I relocated to England when I was in my late twenties, though I return home regularly to the place of my birth to try to understand its people and what makes them tick and, importantly, why the community I grew up alongside continues to harbour the sort of deep-seated feelings of fear and anxiety I once felt. I believe unionism is a political fraternity that has the potential to be much more benevolent, positive and inclusive than its critics admit, and so it is important to spell out how and why it can realise this potential. A People Under Siege, therefore, seeks to explain key developments within unionism from the point of view of its prominent personalities and political parties, including the forms of unionism and loyalism that run like tributaries into a fast-flowing river of British national identity. It also attempts to examine how they are seen from the perspective of others beyond their community.

Political unionism in Northern Ireland is much more than a sense of belonging. It is also about how people organise themselves according to their relationship with one another, with those they elect to govern on their behalf, and how, as a people, they contribute to their country, the United Kingdom. At a time of considerable domestic political turmoil and global uncertainty, I have seen much more pragmatism than pessimism, and more self-reflection than the flagrant displays of primordial sectarian bigotry you read about in the columns of denigratory journalism. It is for this reason that a new book on Northern Irish unionists is badly needed. If we do not acknowledge, accept and respect our differing political outlooks, we may never move to a position of mutual acceptance, tolerance and understanding that will help us build a lasting peace in this troubled part of the world.

INTRODUCTION

[T]here can be no right to power except what is either founded upon, or speedily obtains, the hearty consent of the body of the people.

Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy¹

NATION STATES ARE IN CRISIS. Everywhere, from the United States to Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia and beyond, identity politics are on the rise, calling into question who we are and forcing us to rethink how we live our lives and how we organise ourselves politically.² Humankind appears to be in the grip of constant fear, anxiety and uncertainty about what the future holds.

The advent of identity politics did not create this crisis. Rather, this struggle for security has been going on since time immemorial. We can trace its intellectual origins to the birth of the modern state in the mid-seventeenth century, which sprang from the smouldering embers of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).³ Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) were among the first to grapple with the idea of reconciling our individual liberties with the benefits offered by banding together with others for greater collective security. Hobbes had a deeply cynical view of life. As far as he was concerned, humankind was locked in a state of perpetual conflict where individuals had to resign themselves to the depressing certainty that ‘every man is Enemy of every man’, where he or she was locked in a persistent nightmare of ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death’, and where people were destined to live out a life that was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.⁴ Hobbes’ seminal book Leviathan (1651) reflected a world where this ‘state of nature’ reigned supreme and where humankind was destined to fight out a ‘war against all’. People were ‘continually in competition for Honour and Dignity … and consequently amongst men there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre’.⁵ As an antidote to such feelings of insecurity, Hobbes suggested that people required a ‘Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit’.⁶ In practice, this meant ceding individual rights and liberties to a political authority or what he called a ‘Common-Wealth’.

Hobbes was writing at a time when the evidence for his theory of perpetual conflict was all around. In the decade leading up to the publication of Leviathan, the English Civil War had seen the arrest, trial and execution of King Charles I (1600–49). The British Civil War, as it is more correctly termed by most historians nowadays, drew in other parts of the Stuart kingdom too, with significant battles taking place in Ireland.

Under Charles’ father, James I (1566–1625), the plantation of Ireland had seen the influx of economic migrants from England and Scotland, who rapidly presided over the confiscation of land from the native Irish and ‘Old English’.⁷ The colonisation of the country from the early seventeenth century left the door open to the more intensive planation of Ulster after the flight of the local Gaelic earls.⁸ However, this resolved little of the insecurity felt by Protestants there. A Catholic insurrection in Ulster in 1641, in which many planters were massacred, ‘left a deep impression upon Ulster Protestants’,⁹ who promptly raised militias to defend themselves against further attack.¹⁰

Formed in the aftermath of the massacres, the Laggan Army was one such fighting force.¹¹ Raised by two wealthy landowning brothers, Sir William and Sir Robert Stewart, the Laggan Army initially operated in Donegal but would fight several key battles during the Civil War. Robert Stewart was the army’s titular military chief, on account of his extensive military experience in the Thirty Years’ War. He knew the value of Protestants banding together for collective security and in 1643 committed himself to the Solemn League and Covenant in Coleraine.¹² This was an agreement between the English Parliamentarians and the Scots, by which the latter gave an undertaking to support the former in their disputes with the Royalists who sided with King Charles I.¹³ Although it was couched in explicitly religious language aimed at protecting the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, for Ulster Protestants the Covenant provided a ‘public band against the danger, now all too apparent, from the natives’.¹⁴ The idea of covenanting stretched back to biblical times, but in mid-seventeenth-century Ulster it meant an evolving contractual relationship between Ulster Protestants and the sovereign authority.¹⁵ Covenanting was, therefore, seen as a spiritual means of binding people together in a contract or agreement as they embarked on a joint venture – in Ulster, this meant defending themselves against external threats.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Presbyterians had come to be seen as Dissenters in the eyes of the Established Episcopalian Church,¹⁶ which was closely linked to the Church of England after the Restoration of King Charles II. With Presbyterianism marginalised, the Established Church formed the ‘fountain of privilege in Ireland’.¹⁷ Ulster Presbyterians, therefore, became leading advocates of the ‘Protestant Succession’, by which they hoped to preserve the Protestant royal lineage. One of the most influential Presbyterian radicals was a clergyman from Drumalig in County Down, John Hutcheson, who had assumed a key role in recruiting men to bear arms in anticipation of a ‘Protestant Succession’.¹⁸ His son, Francis, was born on 8 August 1694 and would rise to prominence, first as a leading academician in the principal Dissenter Academy in Dublin in the 1720s, and then as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1729 until his death in 1746.¹⁹ While at Glasgow, Hutcheson taught and corresponded with David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90) and was regarded by both as a major intellectual influence on their work.²⁰

As a key architect of the Scottish Enlightenment, if not its leader,²¹ Francis Hutcheson became renowned in his lifetime for his work on ethics, aesthetics and moral philosophy, but his greatest contribution was, perhaps, ‘in the field of politics’.²² This included the concept of political union, which saw him depart significantly from Hobbes’ understanding of a ‘state of war’. For Hutcheson, in what he characterised as a ‘civil society’, people did sometimes disobey the law by stealing or being violent towards one another, but that did not necessarily mean a ‘political state is a state of war among men thus united’.²³ Although he acknowledged the imperfection of humankind, Hutcheson maintained that they must have observed ‘dangers or miseries attending a state of anarchy’ to know that they were much greater than ‘any inconveniences to be feared from submitting their affairs along with others to the direction of certain governors or councils concerned in the safety of all’.²⁴ For it was in that realisation, Hutcheson believed, that people ‘would begin to desire a political constitution for their own safety and advantage, as well as for the general good’.²⁵ In one of his most important observations on political unions, Hutcheson concluded that as men were ‘naturally endued with reason, caution, and sagacity; and civil government, or some sort of political union must appear, in the present state of our nature, the necessary means of safety and prosperity to themselves and others, they must naturally desire it in this view; and nature has endued them with active powers and understanding for performing all political offices’.²⁶

Hutcheson’s radical ideas on the relationship between the people and their rulers made him a ‘standard author in pre-Revolutionary America’, in France and in Ireland.²⁷ His ideas percolated through those countries’ revolutionary movements and, along with other Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Locke and Paine, ‘provided inspiration and political ideas to Irish Catholic (and Presbyterian) radicals in the 1790s’, prompting an uprising by the United Irishmen in 1798.²⁸ In Ireland, the emergence of these revolutionary ideals also prompted the formation of a counter-revolutionary movement, the Orange Order, following a skirmish between an offshoot of the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders at the Diamond near Loughgall on 21 September 1795. The Order sought the preservation of the Protestant ascendancy²⁹ and the exclusion of Catholics from public life. This acted as a catalyst to the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen. Their leader, Wolfe Tone, thought the British by ‘birth, breeding and bigotry’ feared the ‘Irish infant of 82’ and the ‘natural development of its capacities and its powers’, which brought a fear of ‘political and religious schism’ and of Defenderism, Presbyterianism, Catholicism, United Irishism that ‘may, gradually, yet not slowly, change into PATRIOTISM’.³⁰

The Act of Union, which came into effect on 1 January 1801, was ‘intended to heal and manage these divisions’.³¹ Under Article VI of the Act, it promised that ‘his Majesty’s subjects of Ireland shall have the same privileges, and be on the same footing as his Majesty’s subjects of Great Britain’.³² William Drennan, one of the founders of the United Irishmen, had parted ways with that organisation in 1794,³³ but he opposed the Union, and wrote of his ‘fixed abhorrence, and my instinctive antipathy, against this legislative and incorporating Union, that takes away the BODY, as well as SOUL of the Irish people’.³⁴

According to historian Richard English, ‘The 1790s were a crucial decade in the emergence of modern Ireland,’ giving birth to ‘popular republicanism, separatism, loyalism and Orangeism … [and] nationalist Ireland’.³⁵ Throughout the nineteenth century these ideologies gradually began to offer competing world views about how the state and its people should be organised. Orangeism, loyalism and unionism became entrenched in reaction to a ‘resurgent Irish Catholicism and nationalism’, with a ‘pan-Protestant, ethno-national formation’³⁶ taking shape in the form of Ulster unionism towards the end of the century. Unionism in Ulster ‘grew from a process whose origins preceded organised nationalism’, which was largely attributable to the manipulation of Belfast conservatives in establishing their ‘authority over both the urban working class and rural tenant farmers by outflanking the traditional landed elite’.³⁷ The growth of a new capitalist class undoubtedly intersected with the manufacture of a form of unionism that owed more to attempts to invent a form of territorial-based nationalism than to the global ideas of political unionism first articulated by Francis Hutcheson.³⁸ As Britain’s colonial authority decayed in Ireland, two communities emerged as ‘national peoples in conflict for the same land’ in what came to be called an ‘ethnic frontier’.³⁹

In the late nineteenth century, Ulster unionists mobilised in vast numbers against British government plans to push through a policy of Home Rule for Ireland. Lord Randolph Churchill exploited the opportunism of the ‘Orange Card’, ‘declaring that “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,” in an address to Conservatives and Orangemen at the Ulster Hall in Belfast’.⁴⁰ It was the alliance between Conservatives and Liberal Unionists in 1886, however, that would lay the foundations of a political party organisation that would eventually emerge in 1905 under the auspices of the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC). At the time, the Irish Nationalist Party remained dismissive of the unionist situation, despite the latter’s embattled position and the British government’s attempts to remove them from the United Kingdom without their consent.⁴¹

Supporters of Home Rule found it difficult to understand the rationale for unionist attachment to the Union between Great Britain and Ireland. ‘With all their hard-headedness and practicality, the men of Belfast and Ulster … true to their Scottish origin, are a singularly emotional people,’ opined the English Home Ruler Sydney Brooks in 1909.⁴² ‘Their political creed is really a political cult, a compound of fears, instincts, hatreds and suspicions in which facts are metamorphosed out of all semblance to reality,’ he complained. Brooks regarded unionists as little more than an ‘English garrison’ in Ireland and dismissed them when writing about his adopted Sinn Féin cause, which, he claimed, aimed to ‘make the Irish politically virile, united and constructive’.⁴³ Like other champions of Home Rule, Brooks underestimated the strongly held belief of unionists that they were better off both economically and in terms of their physical security within Britain’s imperial orbit, incorporating two territories under one parliament, rather than carving out a future as part of an independent, small island nation.

The unionist mobilisation against Home Rule involved all members of the community, including women and young people. By 1911, thousands of women had come together to form the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC), effectively giving them a political voice despite them being unenfranchised until the passing of the Representation of the People Act (1928) seventeen years later.⁴⁴ Formed under the presidency of Mary Anne, 2nd Duchess of Abercorn, the UWUC saw 40,000–50,000 women enrol in its first twelve months. In a mass gathering at the Ulster Hall on 18 January 1912, the Duchess of Abercorn told the audience how they were assembled for one purpose – ‘to protest with one voice against the action of the present government in trying to force Home Rule upon Ireland and the people of Ireland’. To rapturous applause, she continued: ‘I cannot understand why anyone should want Home Rule, and by it to relegate Ireland to the wretched position of importance held by the Isle of Man. The only hope for a small island like ours is to be incorporated for all legislative purposes with a powerful country such as Great Britain.’⁴⁵ The Countess of Kilmorey reminded the same audience how:

[The] women of Ireland had a great part to play in the political struggle, and complete confidence in their own leaders as well as in those comrades, the loyal men of Ireland, they would go forward, hand in hand, with a firm determination to fight to a finish for the unimpaired maintenance of the Union, until the battle was won and the victory theirs.⁴⁶

The UWUC served as ‘an effective illustration of the degree of political interest many women possessed in the early years of the twentieth century, even years before they possessed the right to vote’.⁴⁷

On 26 September 1912, almost half a million men and women signed the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, which reiterated the unionist belief that Home Rule ‘would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the Empire’. It expressed the loyalty of its signatories to King George V, pledging ‘in solemn Covenant throughout this our time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom’. Crucially, the Covenant’s signatories agreed to use ‘all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’, refusing to recognise the authority of such a parliament should it be forced upon them. With the Covenant pledge, some people signing in their own blood, Ulster unionism had now adopted all the trappings of a nationalist movement.

In one of the most famous books on the development of this Ulster movement, Ulster’s Stand for the Union, Ronald McNeill MP observed how its leader, Sir Edward Carson, ‘may not have succeeded in bringing the Ulster people into a Promised Land’, but ‘he had at least conducted an orderly retreat to a position of safety’.⁴⁸ McNeill continued:

The almost miraculous skill with which he [Carson] had directed all the operations of a protracted and harassing campaign, avoiding traps and countless crises, frustrating with unfailing adroitness the manoeuvres both of implacable enemies and treacherous ‘friends,’ was fully appreciated by his grateful followers, who had for years past regarded him with an intensity of personal devotion seldom given even to the greatest of political leaders.⁴⁹

McNeill disputed the notion that unionism’s mobilisation against Home Rule was really a rebellion in the proper sense, especially when the aim was to preserve what he believed to be the democratic will of the people. ‘It was resistance to the transfer of a people’s allegiance without their consent,’ he stated, and ‘to their forcible expulsion from the Constitution with which they were content and their forcible inclusion in a Constitution which they detested. This was the very antithesis of Revolution.’⁵⁰ McNeill, perhaps more than any other politician and author at the time, did more to legitimise the idea of unionism as a form of nationalism centred on the ancient province of Ulster (though Protestants only enjoyed a numerical majority in six of the nine counties), a province which was prepared to fight for its right to oppose political designs being hatched at Westminster on the future organisation of self-government for the entire island of Ireland.⁵¹

In opposing Home Rule for Ireland, unionists lobbied instead for the creation of a new state based on a Protestant head count in Ulster. They saw this as the best way to avoid being subsumed within a Catholic-dominated all-island political structure. However, the establishment of Northern Ireland between the passing of the Government of Act (1920), which partitioned Ireland, and the reporting of the Boundary Commission in 1925, which confirmed the course of the Irish border as outlined in the Act,⁵² left Ulster unionists with a mammoth task ahead of them. They had won a veto on Home Rule for Ireland but were left to administer ‘a form of Home Rule that the Devil himself could not have imagined’.⁵³ By threatening the use of force, they had won political concessions and the prospect of building a new political entity that was distinct and independent from its southern neighbour, one that was ‘unlikely ever to be abolished without its own consent’ and could not be ‘altered except by the will of its own Parliament’.⁵⁴ But they were hampered by ‘the turmoil of the new state’s early years’, which saw Northern Ireland forge its ‘essential identity in bitter suffering and adversity’.⁵⁵ The new state was challenged in its physical security by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign designed to make it ‘impossible for the new government to function’, one that, ‘inevitably set in train … [an] ancient sectarian war’.⁵⁶

Despite the Government of Ireland Act laying the constitutional architecture for the formation of two states imbued with religious tolerance, the unionist government in Belfast did little to reach out to the minority Catholic nationalist community living in their midst.⁵⁷ Although it was subsequently characterised as a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’, a derogation on the boastful words spoken by Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister Sir James Craig in a speech in 1934, this well-worn cliché underscored the political insecurity, intolerance and internal divisions facing unionist leaders as they sought to lay the foundations of a new state-based identity.⁵⁸

In religious terms, the number of Protestants (those identifying principally as Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist) living in the new six-county state in 1926, when the first census since 1911 was carried out, was recorded as 762,929, while the number of Roman Catholics was 420,428. Importantly, the non-aligned population numbered 73,204.⁵⁹ Believing in safety in numbers, the unionist leadership played to the narrow sectional interests of the majority community. However, this overconfidence in the sectarian headcount and belief in the efficacy of their one-party system of government sowed the seeds of the unionist regime’s ultimate political destruction. Not only did many Catholics opt out of Northern Ireland, but there were Protestants who were more socialist in their political unionism and who rejected all forms of parochial bigotry and elitism. The Stormont regime tended to play up the threats posed by physical force republicans, but the reality was that their greatest challenge came from independently minded and left-leaning people who believed in a more inclusive form of political union with Great Britain. The system the unionist leadership ultimately constructed was, therefore, based around a curious mix of attempts to manufacture consent while holding coercion in reserve, meaning it forever ran the risk of having to reconcile the logic of this mixed approach with the outlook and aspirations of a divided people. The fact that the unionist government spent much of its time looking for ways to stop its working-class supporters from voting for labour and socialist political representatives at election time – while also gerrymandering and discriminating against Catholics – said more about unionist fear, anxiety and uncertainty than it did about a systematic effort to repress the minority community.

By the mid-1960s, right-wing unionists and extreme loyalists saw a direct challenge to their way of life from three principal directions. The first was from the IRA, which, despite having failed to mount a successful armed campaign along the border in 1956–62, was continually represented as a security threat by rabble-rousers like the Reverend Ian Paisley. The second associated challenge was believed to emanate from the Irish government, which had opened dialogue with Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister Terence O’Neill in 1965. Ever since the worsening of relations between North and South in the 1930s, irredentism was believed to guide Dublin’s policy towards Belfast. A thawing of relations in the 1960s under O’Neill brought a rapprochement between the two jurisdictions, though some extreme loyalists believed it was a trap. Lastly, there were mild attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to enter into ecumenical dialogues with Protestantism aimed at promoting greater understanding between all the Christian denominations. Although fears of what might eventually accompany these changes – a unification of Ireland under Dublin rule – were largely manufactured out of paranoia, they were seen as real enough for some right-wingers within the Unionist Party to launch what amounted to a coup d’état, which eventually toppled O’Neill. This coup was to be driven by a cabal of right-wing unionist politicians, who presided over the formation of a secretive paramilitary group they called the Ulster Volunteer Force in homage to the earlier paramilitary force established to resist Home Rule.⁶⁰

By the summer of 1969 the outbreak of serious intercommunal violence had shattered the façade that unionists and nationalists could live in harmony without the redistribution of rights amongst all those living in Ulster. In late March 1972, the British government finally stepped in to terminate what civil rights leader Kevin Boyle called ‘an orange-unionist monopoly built through repression, jobbery and British apathy’.⁶¹ Crucially, Boyle also characterised the unionist experiment as ‘an artificial society they never did consent to’.⁶² In reply, the Unionist Party MP for South Belfast, Rafton Pounder, urged unionists to enter a period of quiet reflection. He thought it important that the ‘next year is spent in thinking deeply, positively and realistically about the form of regional government which we wish to see and indeed are determined to press for in Northern Ireland’.⁶³ A committed supporter of devolution, Pounder felt Stormont should return in more meaningful form – less a ‘glorified county council’ and more a regional legislature in its own right. ‘No one disputes that Westminster is the sovereign parliament of the United Kingdom, and thus is all-powerful,’ he observed. ‘What rankles so bitterly has been the manner in which that power has been used, and the considerations which it is suspected weighed most heavily in deciding upon the exercise of that power.’⁶⁴

After the collapse of the unionist experiment, Protestants generally diverged in their understanding of how regional government ought to make allowances for those who had withdrawn their consent to be governed by an ‘orange-unionist monopoly’. On the one hand you had the Ulster British, who harboured a much broader and more inclusive idea of who formed part of their imagined community. They looked to the United Kingdom as a whole – and its four nations of Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales – as their primary understanding of the state, with only a secondary regional identification with Northern Ireland.⁶⁵ They tended to be much more international in outlook and – through their commitment to liberty and tolerance – to see the potential for Catholics to form part of an organic political union with Great Britain.⁶⁶ Ulster loyalists, in contrast, tended to see Northern Protestants as ‘their primary imagined community’, while their ‘secondary identification with Britain involves only conditional loyalty’.⁶⁷ In order to preserve their political union and identity, they saw domination over Catholics as essential.⁶⁸ The ‘core assumption’ of Ulster loyalism was that the ‘only alternative to Ulster loyalist dominance is Ulster loyalist defeat and humiliation’.⁶⁹ Loyalists, therefore, interpreted the world in zero-sum terms. Their slogans reflected this: ‘What we have, we hold.’ ‘Not an inch.’ ‘No surrender.’ ‘A Protestant state for a Protestant people’ was, therefore, a natural outgrowth of such emotional sloganeering. For loyalists, after the fall of Stormont in 1972, the world looked and felt as if they were inhabiting a state of nature little different from what Hobbes had mapped out in the mid-seventeenth century. They yearned for a return to the ‘artificial state’ built by unionist leaders in the previous half-century in a way that jarred with the Ulster British sense of identity.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, unionist politicians proved particularly adept at exploiting these emotive slogans, even if they were ‘all too exclusive and self-indulgent’ and ‘generally lacked a deep or ideologically sensitive reflection upon the character of the unionist tradition’.⁷⁰ In reality, the collapse of the unionist experiment meant that unionism could no longer rely on ‘the same certainties which it had celebrated heretofore’: its absorption and domination over devolved government, and its strength in numbers.⁷¹ It required intellectual argument, reason and a vision for the future that could appeal beyond sectional interests. Few unionists were up to the task, with direct rule having had something of a discombobulating effect on those who found themselves in leadership positions. Few of them took Pounder’s advice to spend their time ‘thinking deeply, positively and realistically about the form of regional government which we wish to see’. Worse, they also failed to ‘explain to others or even give their politics a second thought’, leaving their opponents to ‘fix upon unionism the label of an ideology of sectarian supremacism or to dismiss it as nothing but the flotsam or jetsam of Britain’s imperial past’.⁷²

As revolts began against ideological forms of political union across Europe in the 1980s,⁷³ in Britain, ‘contentious assumptions about nation, state, identity and religion in Ireland’ coalesced ‘in the collective mind of Westminster and Whitehall’.⁷⁴ Unionism continued to live in a kind of groundhog day, stuck in a time loop, unwilling to let go of its belief in democracy as a form of majority rule, tethered to a fundamentalist notion of sovereignty as lying in a regional parliament with ‘orange-unionist’ trappings. Then, in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 behind the backs of unionist politicians, the British government left them with a ‘dawning realisation … that politics would not return full circle to those happier days before the autumn of 1968 when Stormont sat in magisterial splendour, when Orange marches filled the summers with the sound of Lambeg drums, and when politics still ministered to Protestant advantage’.⁷⁵

By the early 1990s, the British government had forced unionists to accept its policy, carefully crafted and drip-fed into everything from the Northern Ireland Office’s The Future of Northern Ireland: A Paper for Discussion (1972) to London’s entente cordiale with Dublin represented by the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Downing Street Declaration (1993). To paraphrase Kevin Boyle, the days of ‘repression, jobbery and British apathy’ were over. Sovereignty, in a British sense, now had several new connotations. It meant forcing unionists to accept London’s outlook that Northern Ireland would only continue to remain part of the UK until most of its people wished otherwise, countering any attempts to change this principle of consent by violence. It also meant a devolution of powers to local politicians in Belfast for as long as the arrangement was acceptable to both communities. And, finally, it meant addressing grievances, while demanding loyalists and republicans surrender to the rightful sovereign authority in the form of ‘the mother of all parliaments’ at Westminster.

However, this coercive approach would encounter problems during the emerging peace process. Both loyalists and republicans were reluctant to hand over their guns and, within unionism, a radical form of loyalism re-emerged to articulate a fundamentalist understanding of sovereignty, which saw the centre of gravity resting squarely with the Ulster loyalist people, rather than Westminster. This kind of narrow unionist outlook did much to perpetuate the myth of ‘a people under siege’, with ‘its injunctions to close the gates and man the walls’.⁷⁶ Yet, paradoxically, the peace process also ‘created new opportunities for meaningful political dialogue’ and the enabling of ‘more flexible definitions of Unionism’.⁷⁷

Under the leadership of David Trimble, a politician long regarded by civil servants as an ‘enlightened unionist’, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was persuaded to think positively and realistically by broadening its vision of who formed part of the political union. ‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island,’ Trimble said in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.’⁷⁸ Crucially, Trimble acknowledged what he saw as the imperfections and flaws of human nature that gave opportunities to fanatics who dreamt of ‘forcing the Ulster British people into a Utopian Irish state, more ideologically Irish than its own inhabitants actually want’, as well as those who dreamt ‘of permanently suppressing northern nationalists in a state more supposedly British than its inhabitants actually want’.⁷⁹ Trimble found solace in battling these ‘dark forces’ in the teachings of the founding father of Conservativism, Edmund Burke, who saw parliamentary democracy as the vehicle that ‘not local purposes, nor local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good resulting from the general reason of the whole’.⁸⁰

Since the Good Friday Agreement (1998), the British and Irish governments have worked in lockstep to realise the Burkean ideal of the ‘general good’ by way of power-sharing between unionists and nationalists. However, the eclipse of the more moderate UUP and SDLP by the more extreme Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin in the 2003 and 2005 elections sent unionists and nationalists down a more divergent path, with a return to power-sharing in 2007 reinforcing ‘local purposes’ and ‘local prejudices’. The DUP’s dominant position – in terms of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly – did little to resolve feelings of disaffection within the ranks of its supporters during these years. The so-called ‘flag protests’ in 2012–13 prompted the re-emergence of a populist form of Ulster loyalism, which slowly turned its grassroots supporters against dreams of a more inclusive future. Instead, this exclusionary form of political unionism induced nightmares populated by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. And it would soon have consequences in the real world when David Cameron’s Conservative government held a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU in June 2016. In a significant swing in favour of Brexit amongst the unionist community, the loudest voices coalesced around a fundamentalist reading of sovereignty in the UK, which left little room for that kind of political unionism articulated by Hutcheson or Burke.

Although it might have been the case that, historically, debate on unionism has tended to be ‘introverted and parochial, lacking any active sense of the wider history of political unions’,⁸¹ it has certainly got much worse in the wake of Brexit. Nowadays, we find Enlightenment ideals like reason, science and progress readily replaced by emotion, quackery and populist nationalism. In Northern Ireland, unionists have become more insular again, resurrecting ethnic and nationalist notions of what constitutes the Union, rather than focusing on a form of civic unionism that offers a cosmopolitan political outlook which transcends, rather than erects, barriers between people. It is depressing and all too familiar.

In A People Under Siege, I offer an alternative vision for unionism and urge a return to the core values and beliefs of classic political unionism, arguing that this venerated tradition offers a more liberal framework for organising people in the early twenty-first century. Building on Francis Hutcheson’s writings, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of unionism as a contract and set of relationships between individuals, their community and those who govern on their behalf in the common interest. This Hutchesonian unionism – ‘with its emphasis on rationality, rational assent to moral principles and the improvability of mankind’⁸² – offers a vision for political unionism that is more inclusive, progressive and benevolent. It places the greater good of humankind above and beyond narrow sectional interests defined by ethnic kinship. While Irish nationalism continues to reinvent itself as an extension of the ‘enlightenment project’ – with its accompanying bodyguard of millenarian republicanism⁸³ – it is time to map out the beginnings of a new political union that has the potential to offer a better future to all the people of Northern Ireland. But first we must return to the past to observe at close quarters how unionism lost its way and became so inward-looking and exclusive.

1

A

State Born in Violence

I am asked by Sir Edward Carson to convey to the people an expression of his earnest hope that they will give the authorities all possible assistance in quelling disturbances, whether by keeping away from areas in which trouble is likely to arise or, where it can be done, by using their influence for the prevention of disorder. Any other course would be simply to play into the enemy’s game.

Sir Edward Carson’s appeal to loyalists to support the authorities, telegraphed from London to the Belfast News Letter, 24 July 1920.¹

IN A PEN PORTRAIT OF the poet William Butler Yeats written in early 1920, the journalist and playwright St John Ervine departed from his biography of the great poet to observe the political context in which he was writing. There was nothing that made his ‘Orange blood boil more’, Ervine said, than the crudity of violence in Ireland. It was a land that gave birth to ‘violent, crude plays’, inevitable in a ‘land of violent, crude beliefs’. Ervine singled out what he called ‘Sinn Féiners’ as the main source of this violence, for it was ‘hard not to lose faith in human perfectibility when one considers how foolish are the political schemes they devise’.² He believed that the Irish people had lost the ability to think objectively about radical political schemes and that these critical faculties had ‘decayed’ and been replaced by ‘emotional nationalism’:

For all sorts of reasons, political, social and historical and also religious, the critical faculty has rarely been employed and certainly has not been developed. Either you are for a thing or against it. Doubt is treated as if it were antagonism. Reluctance to commit oneself to any scheme, however fantastic or ill-considered it may be, is treated as treason to the national spirit.³

Ervine had been born into a working-class community in East Belfast and was initially an early convert to Home Rule. He rejected Sinn Féin’s obsession with forcing through Irish independence at the point of a barrel of a gun, and also unionist propaganda asserting ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’.⁴ He observed how it had come to the stage where people were beginning to assert the belief – as if it were an article of faith – that an Irish Republic could only be established by force. In these tumultuous times, Ervine said, you were only really considered an ‘Irishman’ if you bought into this scheme wholeheartedly – there was no room for doubters, never mind dissenters. If you expressed views to the contrary, you risked being denounced as a ‘West Briton, an anglicised Irishman, even, on occasions, as “not Irish at all”, although his forebears have lived in Ireland for generations’.⁵

Ervine’s reservations about the revolutionary change blowing across the island point to broader political challenges on the eve of partition. Cultural historian Connal Parr reminds us that Ervine is probably best remembered for his ‘later incarnation as a pugnacious Unionist’,⁶ though his famous 1911 stage play Mixed Marriage, curiously, represented Orangeism ‘as a divisive force within the working class’.⁷ It might be observed that the Ervine of 1920 is, therefore, well-placed to offer us a window into the events surrounding the formation of Northern Ireland.

This was a period, according to historian Marianne Elliott, when the new political entity was ‘born amid heightened violence’ and a ‘sense of siege’.⁸ Elliott argued that one hundred years ago:

[N]o one in Ireland wanted partition. Unionists would have preferred the entire island to remain with Britain. Nationalists, for their part, had been seeking a form of devolution in the return of the Irish parliament abolished in 1801. Why Unionists fought so hard against such a moderate measure has long been a matter of historical debate. Yet they did and were the first to threaten armed resistance.⁹

This much may be true. The threat of force certainly fused intent and capability, especially when the unionist leadership landed guns at Larne and Donaghadee in 1914. Despite its trappings as a mass movement, however, unionism was not a revolutionary force.¹⁰ According to Irish nationalist historian Alice Stopford Green, a ‘cynic might have suggested that it was the last bid of the aristocratic and superior classes, lay and ecclesiastical, in alliance with English Tories, to guide the people for their good’.¹¹ The outbreak of war with Germany, nevertheless, upended any extreme Ulster Protestant notions of switching allegiance from an English king to a German one and went some way to ensuring that the thousands of European guns landed in Ulster were never fired in anger. Nevertheless, from a political point of view, the ‘position in which Ulster was now placed was … a very anxious one’.¹²

The absorption of an estimated 35,000 members of the UVF into the British Army soon followed, with unionist leader Edward Carson passionately informing the UUC on 3 September 1914 how, ‘England’s difficulty is not Ulster’s opportunity: England’s difficulty is our difficulty.’ Ulstermen – and other Irishmen – joined up and were deployed in large numbers along the Western Front. However, while they fought and died in the trenches of Thiepval Wood, among other places, a small group of their fellow countrymen – who had ignored the call to join the firing line – was preparing for an organised insurrection against British rule in Ireland. In Easter Week 1916, some 1,600 rebels took over prominent buildings in Dublin, fortified them and defended them against soldiers ‘whose superior numbers and firepower soon crushed their resistance’.¹³ According to Dublin Metropolitan Police reports from the time, 429 people were killed and 2,582 people were injured in the skirmishes that followed, most of them civilians.¹⁴ However, it was the execution of the rebellion’s leaders by the British that was ‘sufficient to effect a conversion to republicanism’.¹⁵

The Easter Rising ‘forced the government to take the Irish question out of cold storage’.¹⁶ In the aftermath of the attempted putsch, Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote to Edward Carson proposing that they settle the matter of Ireland ‘promptly’, intimating that it was too distracting to the war effort. One aspect of the proposals was the exclusion of the six north-easterly countries of Ulster from any future settlement. The UUC deliberated before agreeing to Lloyd George’s proposal. Unionists in Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan were said to have ‘shed tears’ on the occasion.¹⁷

More pressing war matters meant Lloyd George’s proposals for Home Rule for Ireland, minus the six counties, were ‘never implemented’.¹⁸ The idea of dividing Ireland according to religious and, therefore, political majorities had by now moved centre stage. Yet, it was not until 7 October 1919 that the London government set up a cabinet committee to review proposals for Irish self-government.¹⁹ By February 1920 the Government of Ireland Bill had been introduced into Westminster, which proposed the establishment of two parliaments, one in Belfast to preside over a six-county jurisdiction, and one in Dublin to govern the remaining twenty-six counties of Ireland.²⁰

In the weeks prior to the introduction of the Government of Ireland Bill, much political activity in Ireland focused on the local and municipal elections held on 15 January 1920. Contesting 1,470 vacant seats, Sinn Féin ran 717 candidates, while Labour stood 595 candidates and the Unionist Party ran 436 candidates. A further 588 candidates competed under different banners.²¹ In Belfast, the Unionists nominated ‘a good selection’ of candidates under the bannerette of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association (UULA), originally formed in July 1918 as a means of staving off electoral losses in the wake of an outbreak of intense class conflict across the United Kingdom. The Unionists used the UULA as a ‘means of initiating a purge from the local trade union movement of “Bolsheviks”’ and (what it saw as the same thing) republicans.²² The UULA led a targeted campaign against what they called ‘Sinn Féin trade unionism’. Fifty-five Official Unionist candidates were fielded against twenty-two Belfast Labour Party candidates, nineteen Nationalist Party candidates, thirteen Sinn Féin candidates, ten Independent Labour and three socialist candidates. The outgoing councillors consisted of fifty-two Unionists and eight Nationalists.²³

Despite their negative campaign against Labour candidates, the Unionists lost fifteen seats, while a mix of thirteen Belfast Labour Party and Independent Labour candidates were elected. ‘Unionist solidarity was broken in almost every ward of the city,’²⁴ with Labour councillors touting a progressive programme, including calling for the council to hold evening meetings so that working people could attend. This more transparent style of democracy was roundly attacked by the local unionist press, with the Belfast News Letter moving at a brisk clip to smear the socialists for adopting a collective silence on political assassinations in Dublin. In the wake of Labour’s electoral successes, the Unionist Party would scheme to reverse the British government provision in the Government of Ireland Act to hold local elections according to proportional representation. The prospective return to ‘a simple majority system reinforced the traditional sectarian rivalries’ and ‘greatly hindered the development of the Labour Party in Belfast’.²⁵ Nevertheless, the combined total of 97 Labour and 153 Sinn Féin councillors vis-à-vis 329 Unionist seats made them a notable political force for the time being.²⁶

While politicians in London debated the kind of new Ireland they wished to see established by the Government of Ireland Bill, tensions rose steadily in Belfast. A meeting was held by Protestant shipyard workers at the Workman and Clark south yard on 21 July 1920, attended by 2,000–5,000 workers. The speakers headlining the impromptu rally claimed that ‘all aspects of the British administration had collapsed and Sinn Féin was in effective control’.²⁷ With the prospect of Sinn Féin subversion and – by extension – guerrilla warfare knocking on the door of the six counties, tensions boiled over. The speakers spoke of British duplicity and Catholic complicity, assuring those present that Ulster’s position in the British Empire was in peril. A deputation of the Ulster Ex-Servicemen’s Association (UESA) even went as far as to claim that Catholic Sinn Féiners were keeping loyal men out of a job. After the meeting ended, several hundred workers marched through the Harland & Wolff shipyard, ‘ordering out all known Catholic workers and a minority of Protestants who were identified with the socialist movement. Some were beaten, kicked and pelted with stones and rivets; others, to escape, swam to the south side of the Musgrave Channel.’²⁸

Within twenty-four hours, the expulsions had spread to other parts of industrialised Belfast, with the Belfast News Letter dubiously explaining these away by claiming that the ‘outrages which have been committed by the adherents of the Republican party during the last two or three years are naturally much resented throughout the whole of Loyalist Ulster, and nowhere more so than in Belfast’.²⁹ So intense was the rioting between the two communities that the army had to be called in to reimpose order, resulting in the shooting dead of several rioters.³⁰ Violent confrontations between rival gangs soon escalated into a shooting war, with sniping particularly frequent in West Belfast. The situation in the Falls Road area was described as ‘rioting having developed into guerrilla warfare on the part of the armed Sinn Féiners against the military’.³¹ By the end of the week some 5,000 workers were out of work.

Some accounts of these expulsions see them as the result of sectarian bigotry and ‘the inevitable reaction to the threat to the Protestants’ national existence posed by the republican military campaign’, while others see the real driver as being the failure of the industrial magnates to integrate former soldiers back into the workplace, thereby creating the conditions for the ‘development of pogromist tendencies amongst the Protestant working class’.³² The unionist leadership, aided and abetted by the unionist press, remained silent on the expulsions, beyond Carson’s careful wording of a speech at the Twelfth celebrations when he ‘warned against the “insidious” tactic adopted by Sinn Féin of tacking on the “national question” to the “labour question” to try and bring about disunity amongst the loyalist population’.³³

Whatever the cause, the Belfast violence did not operate in a strategic vacuum and must be seen in the context of the IRA’s guerrilla campaign throughout Ireland, which, in 1919–20, claimed the lives of 236 soldiers and police officers.³⁴ Unionists in the emerging jurisdiction of Northern Ireland feared an attempt by the London government to renege on the promise of locally devolved security under a new Unionist administration, particularly when subjected to pressure from the IRA. Ironically, the outbreak of the sectarian conflagration in Belfast in July 1920 initially met with a muted response from the IRA leadership in the city. Militant republicans ‘remained aloof and resolutely opposed to any kind of participation in what they called “the usual fratricidal strife,” fearing that their involvement would detract from their elitist perception of themselves as members of the key revolutionary force in Ireland’.³⁵ Understandably, this led to growing Catholic hostility towards the Belfast IRA at this time.³⁶ Some 70–75 per cent of the local nationalist population was estimated to have been against IRA activity, regardless of the myth of the roots binding the IRA and the minority community. As with much republican mythmaking at that time and since, the truth was much more mundane.³⁷

Despite the fact that IRA attacks in the six counties in early 1920 were still quite rare, Ulster Protestants nevertheless felt vulnerable, organising defence committees and vigilante patrols. In Belfast and some smaller towns, ‘working-class Protestants responded in their traditional way, by rioting, which in their eyes was a form of defence’.³⁸ Many loyalists were also deputised as Special Constables in the newly created Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) and, simultaneously, steps were taken to reactivate the UVF.³⁹ The consequence of drawing officers from a large pool, including several back-street thugs, meant some members of the USC became ill-disciplined. In February 1921 one platoon of Special Constables in Newry had to be disbanded following an official inquiry that uncovered corruption and the contested shootings of two internees in Ballykinlar, who were shot by USC guards for getting too close to the wire.⁴⁰ By early April 1921 the numbers killed in the IRA’s revolutionary war had climbed to 363, the vast majority (270) being members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).⁴¹ As one loyalist propaganda pamphlet noted at the time, ‘the terrible tragedy goes on, gallant men are being killed, rebels equally, whose recklessness is often marvellous, are also being killed. Everywhere there is a feeling of insecurity and uneasiness.’⁴²

Against this backdrop of violence, the unionist leadership faced the uphill task of building a new state in the six counties. ‘Lacking the rich Anglo-Irish inheritance of the old metropolis,’ wrote geographer Emyr Estyn Evans, ‘the northerners had to create in Belfast not only the machinery of government and administration but the cultural centres necessary for a capital city.’⁴³ Amidst their truce with the IRA, the British government moved, in September 1920, to appoint a tax inspector, Sir Ernest Clark, as under-secretary to the chief secretary of Ireland in Dublin.⁴⁴ His task was to establish self-government in the North.

By the end of the month, Clark had ensconced himself in the Scottish Provident Building across from Belfast City Hall. Given the threat posed by the IRA, the local police erected steel shutters and posted an armed guard outside. Clark consulted regularly with Sir James Craig, the organisational brains behind Carson’s public leadership of unionism, about the British government’s plans for assisting in the creation of a new Belfast administrative centre. Given Carson’s reluctance to assume the mantle of leadership in the new entity, Craig was duly elected leader of the UUC on 4 February 1921. Later that month Clark shared his plans for self-government with Craig, particularly on the future composition of the civil service departments to support a new administration.⁴⁵ By May 1921, Clark and Craig had succeeded in building the political architecture of the new Northern Ireland state.

They then turned their attention to the inaugural elections for a local parliament and an attempt to reach out to republican leader Éamon de Valera to resolve tensions between North and South. On 5 May Craig travelled to Dublin to meet with de Valera, displaying what the Chief Secretary in Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, called ‘magnificent courage’. Craig’s reputation was ‘enhanced by the episode’, his biographer St John Ervine later wrote.⁴⁶ Newspaper coverage in the North proved favourable and Craig was greeted enthusiastically by supporters when he returned home.

In an address at Hillsborough shortly afterwards, Craig told supporters that they were ‘engaged in a great historical campaign’. He continued:

Never before in the history of their dear country had so much depended, not upon the leaders, but upon the people, and he was endeavouring by attending as many meetings as he possibly could himself … to bring home to all the people that the whole future of their six counties depended upon them receiving their votes on 24th of this month.⁴⁷

The elections for the new Belfast Parliament were famously the first in Europe where such a body was elected using the proportional representation single transferable vote method.⁴⁸ Ten constituencies – Belfast North, South, East, West and Queen’s University, as well as Londonderry, Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Tyrone and Fermanagh – were to elect between four and eight MPs each. The choice at the forefront of the minds of the electorate was the constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.⁴⁹ This overrode everything else, including the testing of a new piece of legislation passed in 1918 enabling women to contest elections, though, intriguingly, not to vote in them. Earlier in 1921, the UWUC’s president, Rosalind, 3rd Duchess of Abercorn, had expressed the view that the ‘time was not ripe for this and the essential thing in the first Parliament was to preserve the safety of the Unionist cause’, and that ‘much organisation and construction work would be necessary for which perhaps women had not the necessary experience, and except in the case of outstanding qualifications, men candidates were preferable’.⁵⁰ In reality, neither the unionist leadership nor the UUC encouraged female participation because of the organisation’s ‘integral conservativism’.⁵¹

In the ensuing election, the Ulster Unionists, Sinn Féin and the nationalists contested the poll. While the Belfast Labour Party did not field candidates, five Independent Labour candidates did run in four Belfast constituencies and one in Down; all of them lost their deposits, winning less than 1 per cent of the total votes cast. ‘The 1921 elections, therefore, provide a fairly clear-cut indication of the wishes of the Northern Ireland population on the border issue.’⁵² Out of an impressive turnout of 89 per cent,⁵³ the Unionists won forty of the fifty-two seats, with the other two parties winning six each. Anti-partitionist candidates duly boycotted the first Parliament.⁵⁴