Protestant and Irish: The Minority's Search for Place in Independent Ireland by Ian d'Alton, Ida Milne (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland, Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne (eds) (Cork: Cork University Press, 2018), 396 pages. In 2010, Ida Milne presented a paper to the sixtieth convention of the Irish History Students’ Association entitled ‘The quiet corner back: how rural Protestants contributed to the GAA within the 26 counties’. It examined ‘the ways in which rural Protestants involved themselves with the GAA – an involvement that tended to be unostentatious but pervasive’. Milne is one of the editors of the compendium of essays under review, which contains further research on ‘the concept that involvement with the organisation was a way in which some Protestants chose to clearly delineate their Irishness and also to be part of their local community’, as well as the different conceptions of the organisation amongst Protestants on either side of the border, and it is as good an example as any of the many and varied (and frequently unconsidered) experiences of this minority in its search for place in independent Ireland. Milne’s contribution lies in the middle of the three sections into which this book is divided: ‘Engagement’, while that of her partner in enterprise and co-editor, Ian d’Alton (a fellow of some jest, as his entry in the list of contributors will attest) is in the previous division. Entitled ‘Belonging’, and deals with the ‘coming to terms’ of ‘this apparently beached people’ between the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and its departure from the Commonwealth in 1948. Admitting that ‘some sort of umbilical cord had been snapped’, d’Alton proposes that the emergence of the Republic ‘opened the potential [for] a truly common patriotism to emerge’ that would lead to Bishop Butler’s ‘confident minority’ just seventeen years later. D’Alton and Milne are joined by fourteen other essayists between the covers of ‘Protestant and Irish’, the italicised middle word of which title serves to emphasise both the aspirations and experiences of this sometimes embattled group of fellow citizens in an independent Ireland. In a sentiment that will resonate with other historians (and many a novelist), the editors admit setting out to write one book only to produce another, as the contributions received introduced them to some of their own blind spots. The editors’ original intent had been to tell of the experiences of Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies • volume 108 • number 431 351 Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 119 21/08/2019 09:14 Protestants fitting in, ‘not out of a sense of unease, but because … it suited’. The material received allowed them to realise the same idea in a different way, as they broadened the definition of ‘fitting in’ to embrace those who found their places both noisily and by ‘keeping [the] head down’. The collection is sub-divided into three sections, the aforementioned ‘Belonging’ and ‘Engagement’ and the final ‘Otherness’, and comprises contributions that range from ‘Defining Loyalty’ to ‘Women and Interchurch Marriage’, by way of ‘Class Politics’ and ‘The Life and Death of Protestant Businesses’. ‘Belonging’ addresses different types of loyalty and ‘belongingness’ between 1922 and 1948, while ‘Engagement’ deals with several aspects of Protestant involvement in Irish life from TCD to the GAA. The concluding ‘Otherness’ addresses the plight of ‘outsider’ and even ‘Double outsider’ communities – ‘cut off from one community while never quite able fully to enter the experience of the other’ – as in the case of ‘Protestant Republicans in the Revolution and After’ by Martin Maguire. The sixteen compositions span the decades from the foundation of the Free State to the 1960s and examine the experiences of the Protestant survivors in this period, as opposed to bewailing the losses of prestige and power, not to mention the genteel lifestyle, of the privileged few in the world of the ‘Big Houses’. These are the tales of Irish people, who wanted to be Irish, more so than latter day unionists craving for a return to their erstwhile position as residents of ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ (which Shaw had dubbed ‘the real old Ireland’). The period in question (1922–mid-1960s) was a formative one for a formerly dominant minority in a new political environment...