Southern Irish Loyalism, 1912–1949, ed. Brian Hughes and Conor Morrissey

Abstract

The experience of the Protestant and loyalist (not necessarily always the same thing) minority in independent Ireland has of late been the subject of a volume of literature disproportionate to that group’s numerical size. This volume complements a related compendium on Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for a Place in Independent Ireland (2019), edited by Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne and featuring a number of the same authors, including the editors of the volume under review, Brian Hughes and Conor Morrissey. Both Hughes and Morrissey have also produced recent monographs, Defying the IRA (Hughes, 2016; rev. ante, cxxxiii [2018], pp. 1000–1002), and Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900–1923 (Morrissey; 2019), which delve deeper into aspects of the earlier part of the period covered by this volume. As the product of an academic conference held at Maynooth University in 2017, the content reflects the self-selecting nature of a response by individual contributors to a call for papers, a process affording editors less curatorial control over content. As a result, and while the editors have tried to focus ‘less on religious identity (Protestantism), or a firm political programme (unionism), and more on the outlook, perspective, or economic choice that characterised southern Irish loyalism’ (pp. 2–3), nevertheless the content is overwhelmingly focused on Protestants. The effort to move away from the Protestant/unionist focus is a helpful pointer to the potential for further exploration of ‘loyalism’ per se to encompass the attitudes of the lesser studied Catholic loyalists, such as those who figure in Niamh Gallagher’s Ireland and the Great War (2020; rev. ante, cxxxvii [2022]), explored there through the prism of their support for a war effort unpopular with the majority of their co-religionists.