Ulster Unionism

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Loyal Ulster was once the most rebellious of the Irish provinces, holding out the longest against the English invaders and only finally succumbing in 1607 with the defeat and flight of the Gaelic chiefs, the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconell.

The land that the Catholic Irish had been driven from was planted with English and Scottish farmers Unlike the English who let much of the land they had acquired to the native Irish, the Scottish landowners let their land to Scottish tenants thus creating in Antrim and Down where they principally settled a kind of extension of the Scottish lowlands.

In their struggle to hold on to what had been secured for them by force the Scottish and English farmer forged a consciousness that saw every advance that the Catholic made or attempted to make as a threat to himself.

UNITED IRISHMEN

The failure of the revolt of the United Irishmen of 1798, in which the Presbyterian and Catholic middle class attempted to lead the peasantry against English and landJord domination, closed the door upon a unified capitalist development of Ireland. Instead the Presbyterians were pulled away from their temporary alliance with the Catholics, the Irish Parliament was abolished and their representatives sent to Westminster.

Under the 'union' that the English government imposed Ire land developed as two provinces of Britain. The South and the West developed chiefly as an agricultural province that provided Britain with cheap food and cheap labour while the North-East developed as an industrial province engaged in linen, engineering and shipbuilding, looking not to Ireland but to Britain and her Empire for her raw materials and her markets.

The rural depopulation and emigration that followed the Famine of the 1840's allowed a reorganisation of agriculture into larger units. Various land acts led to a lessening of the grip of the landlords and stimulated the emergence of a rural Catholic middle class whose growing control of the land was paralleled by the Church of Rome's growing control over education and social life in general.

HOME RULE

This was the background against which the Liberal prime minister Gladstone advanced the neo-colonia strategy of Home Rule. Ireland would remain economically tied to Britain but it was hoped that by devolving government onto an Irish Parliament the social steam would be taken out of the nationalist movement.

In 1860 the Irish middle class had £20 million on deposit in Irish banks while having double that, £40 million, invested in British stock. A clear indicator of their subordination to (hence suitability for representing) British imperial interests in Ireland;

The strength of Ulster resistance to Gladstone's strategy was slow in emerging and consequently allowed the Catholic nationalists and their Liberal imperialist sponsors the illusion of believing it was of no consequence and could be discounted. Gladstone's first move in elaboration of his neo-colonial strategy was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869.

NATIONALISM

Correctly interpreting this as e-dha Dentsatent nar andanr for nationalism! "Dissolve the article of union between Church and State", declared a protestant clergyman to the Daily Express in March of that year, "and you will see how few protestants will be loyal to the connection between England and Responding to the threat of a new 'union' being forged between the English government and the Catholic middle class the Protestant ascendancy attempted to lead a nationalist movement against Eng land. The next year Isaac Butt, an Ulsterman, a Protestant and a Conservative, set up the Home Government Association, in which a Protestant leadership predominated.

MINORITY

But representing as they did only 10% of the country's population and with their bourgeois and proletarian domination restricted to the North-east the control of the Association passed to the Catholic middle class and clergy. So that in the 1874 elections, of 59 Home Rule candidates only two apart from Butt himself were ex-Tories.

Having failed to capture the nationalist movement the Protestant ascendancy set its face against Home Rule. Yet it required substantial nationalist successes in Ulster to propel the divided and disorganised landlords and capitalists to combine their forces into what became Ulster unionism.

In 1883 Tim Healy unexpected: ly won a bye election in Monaghan for the nationalists who rather prematurely declared "All Ulster is ours" • Two years later in the general election of 1885 the Liberals lost all their seats while the nationalists increased theirs from three to seventeen, thus becoming the largest party in the Province. Seeing this seemingly irresistible nationalist tide Gladstone openly at the end of the year came out for Home Rule and in 1886 introduced the first of the Home Rule bills, that was defeated only because a section of the Liberal Party defected to the Tories.

While the second Home Rule bill of 1892 was defeated by the Lords after passing the Commons, the Ulster unionists knew that with the restriction that had been placed on the Lords in 1911, the defeat of the third Home Rule bill would ultimately depend upon their own efforts.

To resist Home Rule an exion of anarchy and rebellon which uniforms to "drive popery and radicalism before us as we have done many a time before"

But the Orange Order proved incapable of rallying the antinationalist forces of the province.

Its working class character and its sectarian exuberance were feared to be the very means. of driving the entire Catholic population of Ulster into the arms of nationalist agitators. More important, the Belfast bourgeoisie wanted an instrument that they and not the landlords controlled. This they worked for and finally got with the formation. of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1904.

Only the bankruptcy of the nationalist leadership enabled the Belfast capitalists and the Protestant landiords to hold onto their mass base which time and again was in revolt against its masters. In 1881 at the very moment that Protestant tenants were leaving the Orange Order to join the Land Teamie Parnell called off the agitnamed the League League" and invited anto its committees.

THREAT An even bigger threat to Ulster unionism was posed by a Belfast shipyard worker Tom Sloan who broke with the Orange Order in 1903, formed his own Independent Orange Order which by 1905 had formed 71 lodges, and stood in alliance with the Belfast Trades Council and Joe Devlin's nationalists against official unionism in the elections of 1906.

Yet the enormous potential of this working class unity was squandered by Devlin within a year when he withdrew his support for the big Belfast strike of 1907 and denounced its leader, Jim Larkin. Larkin too was attacked by the more radical nationalist party Sinn Fein, whose journal in 1908 sneeringly referred to him as "that English strike organiser" who fomented strikes for the purpose of diverting trade away from Ireland and towards England!

It was Devlin who had formed the Catholic counterpart to the Orange Order; the Ancient Order of Hibernians. "This squalid confederacy of Catholic place-hunters as William O'Brien the nationalist MP for Cork described it "rose up.. • to alienate that powerful minority of our countrymen by the establishment of a pseudo-Catholic ascendancy leading to no alternative but the partition of Ireland"

"ALL FOR O'Brien and his "All for Ireland League" worked both to win the Protestants to Home Rule as well as to curb the power of the Catholic Church in the Home Rule movement, a policy which subjected them to abuse and physical assault by gangs of Hibernians.

The nationalists led by Redmond denied on the one hand that the unionists had any support in Ulster and on the other banked upon the British government to coerce them into a united Ireland if they did resist.

A speech by the Ulster unionist leader Edward Carson illuminates this very well. Speaking in the Commons he asks "Where have we any single instance in the whole conduct of the maiority in Ireland any encouragement to believe that we can expect fair play at their hands? Not one in twenty years.

There has been an attempt and I admit it fankly and freely by some few of the Irish members, led by the member for Cork (Redmondite laughter). See how it is laughed at..

"When the Hon Gentleman (O'Brien) and some others proceede to what they called trying to reconcile Ulster and the Protestants of Ulster and Ireland generally they made speeches which if they had been made by the majority of them for the last twenty years might I admit possibly have had some effect on some of the unionists in Ireland.

"WORTHY IDEA"

"Their idea was certainly a worthy idea, nobody can deny that, of bringing about reconciliation and better feeling and the moment they do that they are denounced and they are persecuted and they can hardly hold an election in Ireland"

From the comfort of their masters (parliament at Westminster) Redmond and his nationalists could have had a good chuckle at Carson and his "stage army". Yet that a man like Carson, a vicious enemy of labour and democracy was able to pose as a champion of political and nationalist leadership.

Carson's army did not remain a stage army for long. On the night of April 24th 1914 Fred Crawford guided the Clydevalley into Larne harbour with its cargo of 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition, allowing Carson to replace the wooden guns in the hands of the Ulster Volunteer Force with mausers.

The Tories had encouraged the unionists to defy Home Rule and the Liberal government, not because they served different class interests but because they were not ready for a neo-colonialist solution as Gladstone proposed. They feared thattany concession to nationalist sentiment in Ireland would be infectious. The feared its consequences in the rest of the empire.

MANIPULATED

This preoccupation comes through very clearly when we listen to the Tory leader Bonar Law addressing 100,000 unionists in Belfast at Easter 1912. He cleverly manipulates Ulster Protestant symbols but it is not for Ulster that he is urging them to fight:

"Once again you hold the pass The pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city, the timid have left you, but you have closed your gates"

The third Home Rule bill received the royal assent but the outbreak of the imperialist war in 1914 suspended its implementation. The effects of the war, the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary waves that swept Europe showed even the Tory party that they could no longer rule in the old sabre rattling way.

"This great advance in democratic sentiment" as the Times so delicately put it had to be placated while support for Carson appeared as a provocation to it. Bonar Law with his family ties to Ulster remained loyal but the Daily Express was much more representative of the new Tory mood when unEdward Carson the Daily Express had until recently so enthusiastically supported) he would be guilty of "criminal folly"

ACCEPTED

Sensing that unionist support in Britain was not what it had been before the war the Ulster unionists accepted ironically what they had resisted for thirty years, Home Rule for themselves. Charles Craig the brother of Northern Ireland's first prime minister expressed thei dilemma in the Commons on the 29th March 1920 when he said:

"We would much prefer to re main part and parcel of the Unitec Kingdom. We have prepared and wr have made our Province prosperou under the union and under thr laws passed by this:House. We dc not in any way desire to recede from a position that has been ir every way satisfactory to us. Bu we have many enemies in thi country and we feel that an Ulste without a parliament of its owi woyld not be in so nearly as strong a position as one in which i parliament has been set up"

EASTER RISING

The Easter Rising and the e ecution of its leaders created suc a revulsion against English rule tha the nationalist party of Redmon completely tied to British strateg was swept to oblivion. Supplante by Sinn: Fein it prosecuted a wi against the British that as it procer ed began to take on more an more a social character thus stimu ating Griffith and Collins to sett on terms no less humiliating tha had been offered to Redmont party, while also abandoning ti nationalist population of Ulst leaving it trapped inside Carson sectarian Protestant state.

QI

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Masaccio's wall painting of "St Peter paying the tribute money at the gates of Jerusalem". century - he tries to reconstruct it as an aggregate of the "experience' of the time.

Yet no matter how tough and intricate his subject matter he never substitutes routine enthusiasm for understanding. And the examples he describes confirm the richness and truth of the Marxist theory of human knowledge. They show us thinking men reconstructing the world (though through religious subjects); first in their minds and sketches, then on their panels. They do so as the intersection of abstractions - general ideas springing from practice and thought outside the particular situation. The more conscious this process is, the higher the level it can reach.

It was the commercial growth and the intellectual and scientific ferment of Florence in the early fifteenth century which formed the soil out of which men like Masaccio and • Piero della Francesca grew. (Piero was not only a painter and mathematician, but also wrote books on measurement and barrelgauging; many of his pictures reflect these techniques.)

The illustrations of this book

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Liberal, Colonel Saunderson revived the Orange Order as "the only body capable of dealing with the condit-

prevails in Ireland". He urged Oran- gemen to arm, drill and don