Episode 9 - Panel 3a - The southern Protestant exodus myth and ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Ireland - Dr. John M. Regan

Southern Irish Loyalism in Context

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 conflict in 1920-1923 in the 1990s mirrored interpretations of contemporary violence in Northern Ireland 1968-1998. In the 1980s and 1990s, the dominant narratives of the war in contemporary Northern Ireland modified. The story of nationalist armed struggle for a united Ireland was sometimes replaced by so-called ‘primitivist’ interpretations. These said the conflict in Ulster was an ancient and intractable sectarian war between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Coinciding with this turn, in the early 1990s, some journalists and historians reported the Provisional IRA’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Protestants on Northern Ireland’s margins. In 1993 Canadian born historian, Peter Hart, claimed the IRA attempted to ‘exterminate’ and ‘expel’ the Protestant minority in county Cork in 1922. In 1996, Hart said in the early 1920s what might be described as ‘ethnic cleansing’ had been widespread in southern Ireland. These revelations, Hart argued, explained the 34% decline in the minority southern Protestant population between 1911 and 1926 (as much as 45% in some southern counties), with ‘almost all’ being forced to leave by the IRA during the revolutionary years of 1920-23. ‘The timing and context of population loss turn the census figures in to a political and social event’, wrote Hart in 1996, ‘and turn Protestant decline into a Protestant exodus’. In the furore following the publication of Hart’s prize-winning monograph, The IRA and its enemies (Oxford, 1998), the liberal academy sided with Hart against detractors. Re-examining Hart’s statistical analysis it is now clear he miscalculated multiple datasets. These miscalculations supposedly enumerated a false statistical premise – tens of thousands of Protestants experienced forced migration in 1920-23. Hart found anecdotal evidence to support his false statistical premise, but this evidence suffered from a selection bias. That southern Irish Protestants did not experience forced migration associated with intimidation and violence because of their religion on the scale Hart claimed is now accepted by many historians. Nevertheless, Hart’s ethnic conflict thesis still informs some historical interpretation. John M Regan lectures in history at the University of Dundee, Scotland. After completing a doctorate at Queen’s University Belfast in 1994, Dr Regan became the Irish Government’s Senior Scholar at Hertford College, Oxford. He was later elected to a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College Oxford and awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 1999, he published The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921-36, (Gill & Macmillan) and in 2013 Myth and the Irish State: Historical Problems and Other Essays (Irish Academic Press). He has published extensively in Historical Journal, Irish Historical Studies, History, Reviews in History and The Journal of British Studies.