Framing the overlapping networks of unionism, conservatism and loyalism in pre-revolutionary Ireland is a challenge. This becomes more acute the closer one gets to the twentieth century and the disappearance of political power from the unionist class. ‘Hard’ power became replaced with ‘soft’ power (much to the chagrin of diverse characters such as …

From the 1860s nationalists gradually came to dominate Dublin Corporation. In 1898 new legislation dramatically expanded the municipal franchise and the arrival of Labour and Sinn Féin in the early twentieth century radicalized city politics. Throughout this period, however, a small but solid bloc of unionists were consistently returned to City Hal…

Most of the large manufacturing firms in the Irish Free State in 1922 had been established by Protestant unionist families and remained under Protestant ownership and management. These included Guinness, Jacobs, Goodbody’s (jute), the Cleeve Brothers’ Condensed Milk Company of Ireland, Goulding’s (fertiliser), Smyth & Co. (hosiery), Denny’s (bacon)…

In this paper the experiences of southern protestants during the period 1919-23 will be charted through eye witness accounts in the form of speeches from annual synods of the Church of Ireland, a source which has hitherto been ignored. Members of the Church of Ireland comprised the largest section of the protestant population in the 26 counties whi…

Throughout the course of the Second World War the position of the southern Irish Protestant community was decidedly pro-British. Nevertheless, the ideological stance of members of the remnant Irish unionist faction within the Irish state was tempered by a general respect for the policy of neutrality initiated by Eamon de Valera’s government in 1939…

Ireland provided a rich recruitment ground for the British overseas services in the latter half of the long nineteenth century with the result that, by 1919, Irish administrators, doctors, lawyers, policemen, educationalists, and engineers were to be found working in every corner of the colonial empire. Recent research has exploded the notion that …

On 28th Sept 1912 over 400,000 loyal men and women across the nine counties of Ulster appended their names to either the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant or the Ulster Declaration. In doing so they pledged their loyalty to the King, their allegiance to the United Kingdom and vociferously proclaimed their opposition to the planned creation of a hom…

This paper sets out to identify areas of significant Unionist electoral support in ‘Southern’ Ireland. This paper is deliberately refraining from an examination of the six predominantly Unionist counties in Ulster, and will instead examine Unionist support in the rest of Ireland. This paper will start in 1885 as the controversy over the Home Rule b…

In January 2002 at the residual house clearance auction at Farnham House, county Cavan Lot 53 described as “including four coronet shields; flags etc” was sold for €70. It was by no means the most valuable lot but the flags, a few tattered and faded Union Jacks, were symbolic remnants of the fervent loyalism of the Maxwell family of Farnham during …

Were British ex-servicemen in Ireland viewed only as ‘British loyalists’ or those who had fought for or were still associated with ‘the enemy’ in the wake of the Great War and Irish Revolution? To date the works of Taylor, Fitzpatrick and Robinson have gone a long way to address that question and to show the scale and nature of hostility faced by t…

During the First World War thousands of women in Ireland performed a parallel war service to that of men in the British Army. The women joined the Red Cross, St John Ambulance Association, the Irish War Hospital Supply Depot and many other voluntary organisations, offering their time and labour for free. They did so for a variety of motives: person…

The conference keynote was delivered by Dr Tim Wilson, Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. Dr Wilson is the author of a range of publications on political violence, ethnic violence, and terrorism, including Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Si…

This paper focuses on the loyalist community in Cavan and Monaghan from the signing of the Ulster Covenant through to the establishment of the Irish Free State and the Civil War. In particular, it focuses on the awkward questions of identity faced by the community after the partition of Ireland in 1921 (and by the growing likelihood of this event i…

This paper will highlight the continued leadership that southern unionists gave to the unionist position across Ireland during 1919-1922, not least by acting in an advisory capacity to the British cabinet. Highlighting the active role played by the Earl of Midleton upon replacing Sir Edward Carson as the leader of Irish unionism, it will demonstrat…

I discuss the differing reasons put forward by academics for the sharp decline between 1911 and 1926 of the Protestant population of the twenty six counties that formed the Irish Free State. Census reports from the 1871-1911 period are used to question theories of long term Protestant natural decline. I argue that, up to 1911, Protestant natural ch…

After 1968, Northern Ireland experienced nearly thirty years of civil war. Though some denied it, the so-called ‘Long War’ influenced aspects of professional historical writing on Ireland. This paper addresses historical interpretations of the ‘exodus’ of Protestants from southern Ireland between 1911 and 1926. It argues explanations of ethnic conf…

“I had been brought up under the union jack and had no desire to live under any other emblem.” The words of C.P. Crane, a Tipperary R.M., in 1923, would have found an echo in the hearts of many of Waterford’s loyalist community. By 1926 their population had declined by 40% compared to 1911 and those who survived now lived in a different environment…

The proposed paper is a study of the Southern Unionist community in County Kildare in a time of social and political upheaval. Kildare, in contrast to other counties outside Ulster, was different due to the presence of substantial British army garrisons stationed in the county. With the military at times peaking at ten percent of the population, Un…

This paper rests conceptually on a borrowing from sociology, principally a 2011 article by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, 'Constructing citizenship: exclusion, subordination and resistance'. The talk examines examines how, in post-1922 Ireland, southern Irish Protestants approached acquiring a sense of citizenship in the new Ireland. In this, they had to bri…

In 1928, a wealthy Protestant landowner moved his family from their ancestral home in Kilderry, County Donegal, where the family had long been associated with the area, to Ballynagard, County Londonderry. Although Ballynagard was just a few miles along the road from Kilderry crucially they crossed the border. The differences between the two homes w…

In his influential work Crisis and Decline, R.B. McDowell referred to Henry Lawrence Tivy as ‘an extremely proud and sensitive man.’ Born into a patrician family in Cork, Tivy was a merchant prince who acquired the Cork Constitution newspaper in 1882 and later launched the weekly edition, the Cork Weekly News. In 1915 he purchased the Dublin Evenin…

Voting to maintain the Union in 1918: ‘the strongest pillars upon which they stood’ Tom Garvin in The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics stated that ‘the general election of December 1918 was, in the language of political science, a critical election.’ It was the dawn of intense electioneering and the creation of adroit propaganda campaigns ai…

This paper argues that the Irish Senate of 1922–28 is a rare case of a non-partisan chamber in a bicameral system which effectively occupied the role traditionally assigned to the opposition within a unicameral parliamentary system. In some respects it was the de-facto opposition. In many ways, particularly in those early years, it was a model seco…

This podcast is a collection of conference papers delivered at the Southern Irish Loyalism in Context Conference in July 21st - 22nd at Maynooth University. The conference was generously funded by the Irish Research Council and hosted at An Foras Feasa, Maynooth University. For more information about the conference use the following link: https://s…