Eamon de Valera – the founding father of the Republic of Ireland – escaped from British custody courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church. After several months working as a server at Lincoln Prison’s Sunday Mass he noticed that, during the service, the visiting priest always left his bunch of keys on the table in the vestry. De Valera made an impression of each one on the wax – the remnants of altar candles – with which he had filled an old tobacco tin. In December 1919, prisoners were allowed to make their own Christmas cards. De Valera’s was decorated with a pattern of keys – each one exactly the shape and size of the impressions in the tobacco-tin wax. The first set of duplicates that was smuggled into the gaol would not turn in the locks. The second did. On the moonless night of February 3th 1919 the future President of Ireland walked out of Lincoln Prison and scrambled through a hole that had been cut in the fence by which it was surrounded. As he made his secret way home to Ireland he hid in the Manchester presbytery of Father Frank O’Mahony. He was back in Dublin on February 20th, safely hidden by Father Curran, secretary to Archbishop Walsh, in the gatehouse of the Archbishop’s residence.
De Valera, a ‘good Catholic’, had been in and out of prison ever since he was captured, commanding the Irish Volunteers in Boland’s Mill. He had initially been condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life because he was a citizen of the United States. Before the reprieve was granted he had prepared for death by reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Despite his piety he was prepared to confront the Hierarchy in the cause of Irish independence. The need to challenge the bishops’ reluctance to ‘engage in politics’ arose in April 1918 during one of de Valera’s periods of licensed freedom. The issue on which he demanded their support was the extension of conscription to Ireland. Tim Healy, a veteran of Parnell’s Home Rule campaign, argued that to disagree with the episcopacy was to lack respect. De Valera told him, ‘There’s nothing to that.’1
The day after the extension of conscription was announced, Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, convened a protest meeting in the Mansion House. The idea of mounting some sort of demonstration may have come from Archbishop Walsh, who certainly approved of its aims and sent a messenger to O’Neill with the news that the Irish bishops were to meet on the same day at Maynooth to discuss, but not necessarily to oppose, the government’s decision. The Mansion House meeting swiftly recorded its unanimous agreement to a public declaration of support for ‘Defying the right of the British Government to enforce compulsory service on this country, we pledge ourselves solemnly to one another by the most effective means at our disposal.’ It was further agreed that the Hierarchy must be invited to endorse the meeting’s conclusions, and a delegation, which included O’Neill and de Valera, set out for Maynooth, where it received ‘a great ovation’ from the seminarians.
The bishops responded more cautiously. But after an hour’s discussion – during which they refused to give their blessing to the Mansion House resolution – they agreed to a statement of their own: ‘We consider that conscription, forced in this way upon Ireland, is an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist by every means consistent with the law of God’ – the law of man being more restrictive. In the end, even Cardinal Logue, notorious for his allegiance to the crown, agreed, though he confided to Archbishop Walsh that he feared it was ‘the worst day’s work the bishops ever did’. But, for once, nationalist politicians and the Hierarchy were united. A special anti-conscription Mass was held in Dublin and, on the day that the trade unions held a general strike, Maynooth closed down and sent its seminarians home.
The Catholic Church in Ireland – both its bishops and its priests – had always been divided about the call for Home Rule which evolved into the campaign for independence. However, all but a small and unrepresentative minority of militant priests had been strongly and publicly opposed to the violence that accompanied the nationalist movement. One of the exceptions – identified only by his great age – was with the Volunteers on the roof of the besieged General Post Office on Easter Day 1916. As they waited for the final attack he suggested that, as they were about to die, he should give them conditional absolution. ‘I shall ask each of you in turn to say that you are sorry …’2 They knelt, one by one – still holding their rifles – and asked for forgiveness of their sins.
In Boland’s Mill – where the Volunteers were under the command of Eamon de Valera – confessions were made in the privacy of a commandeered baker’s van and Cathal MacDowell, one of the small number of Protestants to take part in the Rising, converted to Catholicism during the siege and was baptized before the garrison surrendered. Whether or not Catholics made the Rising, the Rising certainly made Catholics. Three of the sixteen executed leaders – James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh – were married to Protestants. The three widows became Catholics.
The Easter Rising was suppressed and there followed six years of sporadic violence – at first Irish republicans against the British, and then Irishmen against Irishmen in a conflict that was sufficiently widespread and organised to amount to civil war. The Catholic Church was virtually unanimous in its condemnation of the often-indiscriminate slaughter. Its attitude was typified by a conversation between a priest and an elderly farmer, overheard by an English journalist, at the end of a by-election meeting in Clare. The Sinn Fein Candidate was Eamon de Valera, on parole from prison. The tone of his speech had been sufficiently incendiary to make the old farmer ask one of the priests in the audience, ‘Is there another rising in the air, Father?’ The priest replied, ‘God forbid, Pat, we want no more bloodshed and we won’t have it.’3
Nationalism, in its most violent form, proved too strong for even the Church to hold at bay, even though many of the men who committed murder in Ireland’s name went to church each Sunday and – having confessed some of their sins – took Communion. The ‘outrages’ continued and the Church grew increasingly vocal in its condemnation. That did not prevent priests, who believed in Irish independence, supporting Sinn Fein. They were inclined, with dubious authority, to claim that the outrages were not sanctioned by the nationalist leadership. When, in January 1919, two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary were shot dead in Tipperary, an anonymous priest told the local newspaper, ‘Leaders of the popular movement are far too local and God-fearing to countenance such a crime.’4 The theft of dynamite – which was accompanied by the gratuitous murder of the two policemen – was certainly a local initiative. But there was no reason to believe that the leadership disapproved of the deaths that followed. Public condemnation was left to the Catholic Church.
On the Sunday after the shootings, priests – at Masses throughout County Tipperary – condemned the murders and the murderers, led prayers for the souls of the dead constables and warned that to support the crime, or the criminals, was a mortal sin. In Thurles Cathedral, the Archbishop of Cashel described the killings as a ‘Crime against God’ and instructed the congregation to ‘pray that we may be spared the recurrence of such a deed’.5 At St Michael’s – in the town of Tipperary – Monsignor Ryan ended his sermon, ‘God help poor Ireland if she follows this deed of blood.’
Daniel Cohalan, the Bishop of Cork, although a committed and public supporter of Irish independence, went further. Some apologists for nationalist violence tried to justify assaults on officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary with the accusation that they were both willing agents of British oppression and instigators of random acts of violence that exceeded, in brutality, the crimes they were employed to suppress. In March 1920 – after a spate of killings of which the RIC were almost certainly guilty, Bishop Cohalan asked a rhetorical question: ‘Who are the Police?’ His answer combined naivety with a more understandable longing for peace. ‘They are Irishmen doing their duty. I am satisfied that the National Organisation, which this county accepted and which it supports, has no responsibility for the murders.’6 The peace for which the bishop hoped was a long time coming.
After the Irish Free State was founded in 1921 and the bloody battle for independence turned into a civil war between supporters of the settlement and irreconcilable opponents of partition, the Catholic Church in Ireland was again required to pronounce on the justice of the rival causes. Opposition to the treaty which partitioned Ireland and created the Irish Free State was led by paramilitary ‘Volunteers’, who fought their erstwhile colleagues in the independence movement with the ferocity with which they had opposed the British. The violence with which they went about their work was publicly condemned in a statement signed by Cardinal Logue, three archbishops, the entire Hierarchy of bishops and scores of parish priests. But the justice of the campaign against the Six Counties remaining part of the United Kingdom, and the predictions of the anti-partition parties, were both confirmed by the result of dividing Ireland into two nations. For more than half a century after the foundation of the Free State in the south, the Catholic minority in the Protestant north was subject to legalised repression and political discrimination which disqualified it from being described as a free country. Nothing like it had been seen in Britain since the reign of Ulster’s hero, William of Orange.
Northern Ireland was created as a Protestant state. The boundary, which divided north from south, was drawn in a way that guaranteed it would so remain for the foreseeable future. Only six of the nine Ulster counties were included. Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal – where Catholics were, or soon would be, in a majority – were excluded on the principle, laid down by the Belfast Telegraph, that ‘it was better for two thirds to save themselves than all the passengers drown’. Northern Ireland Protestant politicians warned the province of two related dangers. The first was open aggression from the Free State, supported by subversion by Catholics in the North. The second was the prospect of demographic change, brought about by the irresistible force of the Catholic birth rate. Both supposed threats to the integrity of the Protestant province were said to justify keeping the overt suppression of the ‘enemy within’.
Anti-Catholic sentiment in the England of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been heightened by the fear – sometimes justified, but more often not – that ‘Papists’ were standing ready to support an invasion from France or Spain. In twentieth-century Northern Ireland, belief that the Free State was plotting and planning to create a unified Catholic Ireland was increased by the behaviour of Dublin politicians, all of whom came together in their support of a United Ireland. And, when the constitution of the Irish Republic was written, it explicitly refused to recognise the border and formally asserted the South’s claim to the Six Counties. The unification clauses were purely symbolic. And the shrewd Protestant politicians of the North must have known that much of the fighting talk was merely posturing. But exaggerating the threat was a convenient way of justifying the suppression of Catholics and the demonisation of Catholicism. The fact that the Protestant politicians often rendered themselves ridiculous did nothing to make their behaviour less sinister. The Belfast Newsletter claimed that the beatification of Oliver Plunkett, ‘an Irish rebel hanged for treason’, was intended to encourage rebellion.7 On the night that it was announced, Catholics were attacked on the streets of Belfast. The sectarian violence was subsequently attributed, by the Orange extremists, to the malevolent influence of Rome. ‘The bigotry of the [Catholic] Church and its constant efforts [open and secret] to increase its powers [had],’ the Belfast Newsletter asserted, ‘brought a large part of Ireland to lawlessness.’
The Catholic Hierarchy – constantly subject to harassment that included Cardinal Logue being stopped and searched at gunpoint and bishops’ homes being raided – was said to have justified its pariah status by expressing its formal disapproval of partition. Different bishops expressed their individual opposition in different ways. Cardinal MacRory offered the considered view that Protestants were not real Christians. He was disowned by the rest of the Hierarchy. But when the IRA transmuted from the army of the nascent republic into a secret terrorist society, there was always an episcopal reluctance (and sometimes a refusal) to excommunicate its members, no matter how hideous their crimes. The Bishop of Waterford stood out from the crowd when he described IRA membership as a mortal sin. But the Church, as a whole, was flaccidly ‘against all violence’, and Bishop Mageean reconciled the conciliatory inclination with the rejection of partition by arguing that the border was created to perpetuate ‘those religious animosities that have for so long disgraced the north-east corner of Ireland in the eyes of the civilised world’.8
The Protestant majority in the Six Counties never hid its intention of forming what Sir James Craig – the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland – called ‘A Protestant government for a Protestant people’. Craig gloried in being blatantly partisan. ‘I have always said that I am an Orangeman first and a politician afterwards.’9 The prejudices, which he called principles, were the product of the belief that every Catholic was a potential terrorist who was determined to absorb the Protestant, and obsessively British, Six Counties into what became the Catholic Irish republic. That meant guaranteeing an overwhelming Protestant majority in Stormont, the Belfast Parliament, and control of local authorities – if necessary, achieved and secured by manipulation of the voting system and the gerrymandering of boundaries. But that was only the beginning. The security of the state required the administration of Northern Ireland’s national and local government to be purged of Catholics who were, by definition, enemies of the state.
The treaty, by which the borderline was drawn and Northern Ireland founded, required a quota of Catholics – previously employed as civil servants in Dublin Castle – to be transferred to Belfast and employed in jobs that were similar to those they had occupied before partition. The quota was never filled. That did not prevent the Ulster Protestant Voters’ Defence Association from sending a deputation to Craig with the complaint that Catholics were receiving a greater share of public appointments than was their due. The result was a year-by-year reduction in their already-depleted number. The treaty also stipulated that one-third of the Royal Ulster Constabulary should be recruited from Catholic members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. No attempt was made to meet that requirement. Instead the RUC was made up of Protestants from the Ulster Special Constabulary, members of the violently (and often lawlessly) anti-Catholic Ulster Volunteer Force and the ‘Specials’ who had played such an ignoble part in the suppression of the rebellion. Within weeks of the supposedly non-sectarian force being founded, its members set up their own Orange Lodge.
Although the creation of a northern state in which Catholics were overwhelmingly outnumbered had guaranteed a Protestant majority in the Stormont Parliament, the Unionist Party felt neither satisfied nor secure. So, in defiance of the treaty which founded the state, it changed the Northern Ireland voting system from proportional representation to the election of single-constituency Members. The Westminster government was complicit in the flagrant breach of the treaty. In 1928, a delegation from the Six Counties minority parties asked the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, to insist that the terms of the agreement be respected. He replied that it was purely a matter for James Craig, to whom he wrote with what amounted to the reassurance that Westminster would not stand in the way of continued malpractice. ‘I don’t know whether you would care, at any time, to discuss the matter with me; of course I am always at your disposal. But beyond that “I know my place” and don’t propose to interfere.’10
The Catholic minority was permanently under-represented in the Northern Ireland Parliament. In the 1929 general election, Protestant-Unionist candidates won thirty-seven seats and Catholic-Nationalists together with Sinn Fein won fifteen. The Unionist majorities were so entrenched that in twenty-seven seats anti-Unionist candidates did not even contest the election. As a result the Protestant-Unionist Party knew it had won power two weeks before polling day. The situation was tailor-made for exploitation by the IRA, whose members argued that direct action was justified when political representation was denied. That enabled the Ulster Protestants’ Defence League to claim that the denial of civil and political rights was justified by the obvious presence of a threat from an enemy within. The official, though unspoken, policy of the Catholic establishment was to work, as best the minority could, within the system. When the Catholic Members of Stormont were on the point of refusing to take their seats, it was their bishops who persuaded them to change their minds.
Protestants were just as determined to take and keep control of local councils as they were to maintain their hegemony in the national Parliament and just as unscrupulous in the pursuit of those objectives. The great municipal prize was Londonderry. In 1920 – against the odds and despite a variety of malpractices – it elected a Catholic mayor. There would have been riots in the city even had he not announced, in a reference to the Prentice Boys who closed the city gates against the advancing army of the Catholic Earl of Antrim, that the ‘No Surrender citadel has been conquered after centuries of oppression’ and that ‘Ireland’s right to determine her own destiny will come about whether the Protestants in Ulster like it or not.’11 The Unionist Party reacted in the only way that could ensure its return to power. It re-adjusted the Londonderry ward boundaries. And it continued to adjust them, year by year, as demographic changes increased the Catholic vote in previously solid Protestant council seats. By 1930, 10,000 Derry Catholics (voting nationalist) were represented by eight councillors; 7,500 Protestants (voting Unionist) were represented by twelve. But the Protestant Unionists still did not feel safe. As late as 1936, a member of Craig’s Cabinet wrote to him in near panic, ‘Unless something is done now, it is only a matter of time until Derry passes into the hands of the nationalists for all time. On the other hand, if proper steps are taken now, I believe Derry can be saved for all time.’12 By ‘proper steps’ he meant another boundary redistribution that tilted the balance of power further in the Protestant direction. The ‘proper steps’ were taken.
Ulster Protestants lived in constant dread of eventually being outnumbered because of the high Catholic birth rate and infiltration from the south. What James Craig tastefully described as ‘breeding like bloody rabbits’ was beyond Unionist control. But it was possible at least to reduce the number of immigrants from the Free State by denying them work in the North. The danger of Catholics from the South taking the jobs of loyal Ulstermen – and in the process acquiring voting rights in the Six Counties – was a constant theme of Belfast Newsletter editorials, and the Ulster Unionist Labour Association was particularly exercised by the influx of ‘farm boys’ who, after a few days’ work, could register to vote. ‘They have no stake whatever, not owning a blade of grass. Their power at the ballot box is, however, great.’13 Speaking at a rally of Orangemen, a Major McCormick warned that ‘thousands of Roman Catholics have been added to the population. In many places Protestant majorities are now minorities and at that rate of increase twenty years would see the Church of Rome in power.’14 The Prime Minister himself joined the chorus of demands for discrimination, and the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge was frank about the reason why job applicants should be subject to a religious test: ‘Whenever a Roman Catholic is brought into employment, it means one Protestant vote less.’
During the First World War, industries that had only employed Protestants were obliged to widen their recruitment policies. After the armistice and demobilisation, the Unionist Party demanded more than the right and proper reinstatement of returning servicemen. It made clear that it would settle for no less than the re-establishment of exclusively Protestant industries and, when employers were slow to respond to its call, organised riots in protest against what it described as ‘pandering to Rome’. Anti-Catholic riots – usually called to protest against imaginary grievances – became a feature of life in Northern Ireland. In 1920 they succeeded in intimidating the dock owners into dismissing 2,000 Catholic workmen and it was estimated that, by the end of the year, 4,000 more were sacked from other Belfast companies. Protestant workers acquired the habit of forcing suspected Catholics to open their shirts to show whether or not they were wearing holy medals. The Prime Minister – in a fine example of his strange use of language – put on record his approval of the campaign to re-create exclusive Protestant companies: ‘You boys have taken in the past.’
When the Great Depression of the 1930s brought increased unemployment to both religious communities, riots grew in frequency and violence. There was a brief moment when Protestants and Catholics, united in support of the non-sectarian Unemployed Workers’ Committee, joined together to protest about the inadequacy of outdoor relief. But the ecumenical mood did not last. The Ulster Unionist Labour Association was formed with the purpose of insisting that ‘it is the duty of our government to find employment for our people’. One of its complaints was that Catholic gravediggers were employed in Protestant cemeteries. The Minister of Labour denied ‘scurrilous rumours’ that Catholics were employed at Stormont in large numbers. Pressed to be more specific, he ‘admitted’ that one of the Parliament’s thirty-one porters was a Catholic but he was on a short-term contract that would not be renewed. The UULA was superseded in 1931 by the Ulster Protestant League. Although it was created for the specific purpose of ‘Safeguarding the employment of Protestants’, it also regarded it as its duty to expose defrocked priests and to vilify the Belfast City Corporation for proposing to allow Catholic missionaries to hold a conference in the Ulster Hall.
The demands grew increasingly strident. ‘When,’ asked the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge, ‘will the Protestant employers of Northern Ireland recognise their duty to their Protestant brothers and sisters and employ them to the exclusion of Roman Catholics?’ And the official response grew more and more accommodating. Sir Basil Brooke (James Craig’s successor as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland) expressed parallel prejudices in a speech that was notable both for the blatant bigotry of its message and for the naivety of the language in which, according to the Fermanagh Times, it was expressed:
There were a great number of Protestants and Orangemen who employed Roman Catholics. He felt he could speak freely on the subject as he had not one Roman Catholic about his place … He would point out that the Roman Catholics were endeavouring to get in everywhere and were out with all their force and might to destroy the power and constitution of Ulster. There was a definite plot to overpower the vote of Unionists in the north. He would appeal to Loyalists therefore not to employ Catholic lads and lasses.15
Brooke, or Lord Brookeborough as he became, maintained the faith. Not once, during all his years in office, did he visit a Catholic school or accept an invitation to a Catholic reception.
One Catholic ‘lad’ was, however, offered employment by the Ulster Unionist government. His name was Denis Stanislaus Henry and in August 1921 he was appointed Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland – in light of the riots, allegations of treason and accusations of religious persecution, a post of the utmost sensitivity. The incumbent had to be a man who could be trusted neither to feel the slightest sympathy for the nationalist cause nor to be swayed by sentimentality into treating Catholics who broke the law, in the battle against persecution and discrimination, with the slightest leniency. Denis Stanislaus Henry, despite his religious affiliation, was such a man.
Henry was described by T P O’Connor – an Irish Home Rule MP who represented a Liverpool constituency – as ‘a somewhat unique type in Irish life … Entirely at variance with the politics of his co-religionists.’16 He was the product of his birth and upbringing. The Henrys, landowners in County Derry, had been fierce opponents of the Land League and, although historically Liberals, they had described themselves as ‘reluctant to go with Mr Gladstone when he took up Home Rule’. Denis Henry was a pupil at Mount St Mary’s, an English boarding school in Derbyshire, and his education continued along an unusual path when he read law at Queen’s College, Belfast – an institution of which the Irish Hierarchy thoroughly disapproved. He was a brilliant student and was called to the Irish Bar at the tender age of twenty-one.
Active participation in politics had to wait until his legal reputation had been made and his fortune secured, but he spoke on Unionist platforms during the general election of 1895 and was a delegate to the inaugural meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council, ten years later. He was a defeated candidate in a 1906 by-election – when he was described by the Irish News as ‘one of that weird class of creature known as an Irish Catholic Unionist’ – but had to wait until 1916 before the South Londonderry constituency sent him to Westminster. In the Lloyd George Coalition of 1918 he was appointed Attorney General for Ireland. It was a bad time to be an Irish law officer. A bitter civil war was raging and British troops – together with the paramilitary auxiliaries – were being accused of murder. Henry, believing that he could defend the indefensible, was a disaster.
He was never at his ease in the House of Commons, but there were a number of occasions when his performance was particularly woeful. In April 1920, when he was challenged about the condition of Sinn Fein hunger strikers in Mountjoy Gaol, it was clear – though not admitted – that Henry barely knew of their existence. The result was the prisoners’ release and a confession to the Cabinet that the issue had been ‘badly handled’. Later that year he introduced the Restoration of Order Act, which established military-style court martials with the power to impose the death penalty – a measure that, he argued, was warranted by the need to suppress ‘rebels’ and ‘traitors’. It seemed that he saw his duty as defending the police and army, no matter how grave and indisputable the charge against them.
It was in November 1921, when the responsibility for law and order was transferred to Belfast, that Denis Henry became the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. His four years in office were notable for what might, charitably, be called ‘controversial judgements’. Chief among them was his denial of compensation to the relatives and dependants of three Catholic youths who were shot dead by Special Constables. The police claimed that they had returned fire after being ambushed. Sir Denis, as he had become, rejected their evidence. ‘My conclusion is that nobody except the police and military even fired at all.’17 But he dismissed the claim for compensation on the grounds that the youths had been taking part in an unlawful assembly, as defined in the Emergency Powers Act.
During Henry’s years as Attorney General for Ireland violence against Protestants had been just as widespread and indiscriminate as violence against Catholics. During the twenty-four months that led up to partition in 1921, 257 Catholics, 157 Protestant civilians and 37 members of the security forces (Protestant to a man) were murdered. After the creation of the Irish Free State and the province of Northern Ireland, the picture changed. South of the border, the Irish Catholic majority was preoccupied by the civil war between the pro- and anti-treaty factions. In the North the Protestants mounted a campaign of lethal violence, which exceeded in calculated brutality the organised savagery of Elizabethan England. During two months in 1922, 232 people – most of them Catholics – were killed, 11,000 Catholic workers lost their jobs, 23,000 Catholic families were evicted from their homes in so-called Protestant districts, and five hundred Catholic shops and businesses were burned and looted.18
The burning and looting – though the work of mobs – were an extension of official Orange Lodge policy. The boycott of Catholic shops and public houses began soon after partition, but after 1935 it was coordinated by the Ulster Protestant League. The campaign was nothing if not comprehensive. It required good Orangemen ‘neither to talk with, nor walk with, neither to buy nor sell, borrow nor lend, take nor give or to have any dealings with’ their natural enemy.19 Catholic businesses that could not be persuaded to leave the province by bombing and burning were to be forced out by bankruptcy. Commercial assault was to augment street violence. Half-hearted attempts at retaliation by Northern Irish Catholics were condemned by the Church.
From time to time moderate Protestants and Unionists, fearful of the commercial consequences of continued disturbance, spoke out against the anti-Catholic violence and discrimination. Lord Londonderry went as far as calling the attacks ‘reprehensible’20 and an alliance of businessmen, from both faiths, warned James Craig of the economic consequences that would follow continued disruption of trade. Protestants in the Free State dissociated themselves from the attacks and the all-Irish Protestant Convention denounced attacks on Catholics as ‘un-Christian’. The Northern Ireland government made a token gesture of support for the beleaguered minority. A handful of Protestants were interned under the Special Powers Act. Two of them were B-Special police reservists. They were swiftly released and reinstated. The outspoken Bishop MacRory was not impressed by the show of moderation. The Protestants, he said, ‘talk glibly of civil and religious liberty [but] appear by their actions not to have the most elementary idea of what either means’. The violence was temporarily halted. But the institutional discrimination remained. For Catholics, houses and jobs were in short supply for the next forty years.
Catholics knew they could expect to be protected by neither the law nor the police. Indeed, some of the worst acts of sectarian savagery were committed by police officers and auxiliaries acting, as they claimed, to uphold the peace. The official response to complaints of ‘suspects’ being shot in their beds and arbitrary executions was an Act of Parliament which provided the police with indemnity against legal action taken against them for conduct that – though outside the law – was certified as necessary to preserve the peace. The Catholic-Police Committee, set up under the provisions of the treaty, was intended to increase confidence in the minority community. It never had that effect. From the start, the Protestant senior officers were reluctant to discuss security with Catholics whose loyalty was automatically suspect. It was disbanded when two of its members were arrested.
The assumption of disloyalty and subversion was not the only – and perhaps not the most damaging – stereotyping that Northern Ireland Catholics had to endure. The ingrained conviction that they were feckless, work-shy and innately disreputable prejudiced their chances of receiving a fair share of what little help was available to the destitute: the desperate need of men who were denied employment because of their religion. The Belfast Board of Guardians, which was responsible for the distribution of outdoor relief, recorded that ‘faced with such sloth, fecklessness and iniquity’, it had a duty to ‘discourage idleness and create a spirit of enterprise’ by withholding payment whenever possible.21 The respectable well-to-do felt particularly resentful about large Catholic families being subsidised by more provident Protestants. Catholics, said one chairman of a Board of Guardians, do not suffer ‘poverty under the blankets’. Professor Corkey, a Presbyterian theologian and former Northern Ireland Education Minister, wrote that parents of large families should be fined for their irresponsibility. His proposal was endorsed by the General Council of the Presbyterian Church.
The education system that was set up in post-treaty Northern Ireland was built on the Protestant myths of Catholic idleness and treachery. The chairman of the Commission which was deputed to draw up the scheme was emphatic about the obstacles that he had to overcome. ‘There are two peoples in Ireland, one industrious, law-abiding and God-fearing, the other slothful, murderous and disloyal.’22 He accommodated the need for protection against disloyalty by including Northern Ireland teachers within the scope of the Promissory Oaths Act, thus requiring them to swear their allegiance to the British crown and Northern Ireland government. The Six Counties reintroduced the Test Acts four hundred years after their first incarnation.
Fortunately, Northern Ireland education was initially saved from further excesses of Protestant zeal by the appointment of Lord Londonderry, a liberal Unionist, as a responsible minister. He attempted the impossible – integrated elementary schools that would demonstrate and protect their non-denominational character by not including religious instruction in their curriculum. To encourage the cooperation of the Catholic Schools board it was announced – more stick than carrot – that the grant they received in support of their own schools was abolished.
The Londonderry proposals were universally condemned. Both Catholics and Protestants wanted sectarian education. Some Catholics refused to teach in the new schools. Others refused to accept a salary. The Protestant response was more bellicose and better organised, under the guidance of the United Education Committee of the Protestant Churches. Rallies and protest marches were organised and old slogans were amended to make them appropriate to the new ‘threat’ from Rome. The battle cry was ‘Protestant teachers for Protestant schools’ and the awful spectre was raised of Catholic teachers being paid from the rates to indoctrinate the young and innocent with ‘Popish’ theology. The formal demand of the Orange Lodges was extensive and precise. Protestant denominational schools were to be re-established. Religious instruction was to be reinstated. The schools were to be staffed by teachers who had been appointed by boards of governors which included at least one Protestant minister among its members and which were allowed to ask the religious denomination of applicants. The Stormont government agreed in principle, and Lord Londonderry resigned.
In 1930 a new Northern Ireland Education Act widened and entrenched the sectarian divide. James Craig described it as making state schools ‘safe for Protestant children’. The Catholic Church, if it insisted on its own schools, would have to pay part of the running costs. The alternative was Catholic children attending schools in which all children were to receive religious instruction that conformed to the ‘fundamental principle of Protestantism’. The attempts to end sectarian education in Northern Ireland foundered, as did all ecumenical initiatives in the province, on the intransigence of both Catholics and Protestants. But because the Catholics made up only a small percentage of the population they were forced to be defiant in defeat, while the Protestants were vainglorious in victory. The result was the brutalising of a whole community – forced to inhabit ghettos, as much by the discrimination in municipal housing policy as by the prejudice of private landlords, and subject to constant humiliation as well as the deprivation that follows long-term unemployment. The bigotry of the Six County Protestants is best illustrated by the refusal of the City Council to honour Belfast’s only First World War VC – because he happened to be a Catholic. The riots of the 1960s should not have come as a surprise. Looking back, it is incredible that the Catholics waited so long.
The most depressing aspect of Northern Ireland after the Second World War was its similarity to Northern Ireland before the Second World War. Protestant fears of being absorbed into the Catholic Free State were, irrationally, increased by the Ireland Act, by which the Republic left the Commonwealth, and, rationally, by changes in the demographic pattern of the province. In 1945, Catholics made up 33 per cent of the Northern Ireland population. By the end of the century it was 40 per cent. The Protestant majority reacted to the supposed threat by adding blatantly discriminatory public housing policies to the manipulation of boundaries. ‘Loyal’ wards and constituencies were kept pure orange.
The boom in post-war council-house building gave the Unionist councils a new opportunity to solidify their support in Protestant areas – a domination that was promoted by the Northern Ireland local government franchise, which limited the vote to ratepayers and their spouses and therefore discriminated against large Catholic families with adult children living at home. The new houses were allocated to tenants on the waiting list by groups of councillors who often identified the applicants by name and religion. Slum clearance of Northern Ireland’s mass of condemned properties was concentrated in Protestant districts. The chairman of the Enniskillen housing committee could not have been more frank about the criteria on which the choice of areas was made. ‘The Council will decide which wards the houses are to be built in. We are not going to build houses in the South Ward and cut a rod to beat ourselves with later on. We are going to see that the right people are put in those houses and we are not going to apologise for it.’23 The result was double detriment – votes rigged to prevent Catholic control of councils, and Catholics condemned to remain in slum housing.
The most surprising feature of the ‘troubles’, which engulfed Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, is the time they took to begin. By the time that ‘power-sharing’ reduced, and almost eliminated, the violence, the dissidents’ main objective had become ‘a united Ireland’. But the civil-rights movement of the late 1960s, and the civil-rights marches it organised, were a response to blatant discrimination, not part of a political campaign. The beginning of the protests and demonstrations can be precisely identified. A house in Caledon, County Tyrone, was allocated to a nineteen-year-old unmarried Protestant woman (the secretary to the council’s solicitor, who was a Unionist parliamentary candidate) in preference to two Catholic families who were squatting nearby. The Tyrone Council had refused to build houses in nearby Catholic Dungannon. On June 28th 1968, after the squatters were forcibly evicted by the police, Austin Currie – a Catholic Stormont MP – symbolically ‘occupied’ the nineteen-year-old woman’s house. He too was evicted by the police, one of whom was the young lady’s brother and future tenant of the disputed property. That night, Catholic protestors marched from Coalisland to Dungannon, where they were confronted by Ulster Protestant Volunteers. The UPV was the creation of the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, then pastor of a Belfast church which subscribed to a form of Presbyterianism that Dr Paisley had invented. From then on, the march and counter-march fever reached epidemic proportions. The climax came on October 8th in the city of Londonderry when a giant civil-rights demonstration was first banned by the Stormont government and then, when the ban was ignored, broken up, with unrestrained violence, by the almost exclusively Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. As late as 2002, only 8 per cent of Northern Ireland police officers were Catholics.
The Westminster government had little choice but to intervene. Direct Rule, though inevitable, was postponed while Sir Terence O’Neill – then, by Northern Ireland standards, a progressive Stormont Prime Minister – first initiated and then extended ‘bridge-building’. The hard-line Protestant view was promoted by increasingly vocal Protestant workers who feared that ‘concessions’ to Catholics would threaten their entrenched employment in the industries that they dominated.
As late as March 1992 a survey of Northern Ireland’s major companies revealed that only 148 of Harland and Wolff’s 2,700 employees were Catholic24 – a ratio that had been achieved by the expulsion of 500 ‘Papists’ in June 1970, following riots in which four Protestants were killed. But in May 1977 – much to everyone’s surprise – Belfast shipyard workers refused to join the strike that had been called by Dr Paisley’s United Unionist Action Council in protest against the imposition of Direct Rule. The strike came to an inglorious end when employees at the Ballylumford power station refused to close down the generators.
It took another thirty years for universal human rights and civil peace to be established in Northern Ireland. By then the ‘troubles’ had regressed to their inter-war form and were principally concerned with the demand for Irish unity. Again, all Catholics were held in suspicion – stigmatisation that was said to be justified by the (undoubted but irrelevant) fact that most members of the IRA and of Sinn Fein (the anti-partition party) were nominal Catholics. The Catholic Hierarchy was open and explicit in its condemnation of the campaign of murder and mayhem. On September 12th 1971, Cardinal Conway and five bishops from his archdiocese denounced the ‘small group of people who are trying to secure a united Ireland by use of force … Who in their right minds wants to bomb 1,000,000 Protestants into a united Ireland?’25
In Northern Ireland, Catholic attitudes towards the British Government changed during the second half of the twentieth century. At first there was the fear that the ‘imperial parliament’ was only interested in preserving the union and that measures, claimed to be necessary to preserve the peace, had the real purpose of suppressing the minority. Sir John Peck, the British Ambassador to Dublin, wrote, with absolute justification, ‘Internment attacked the Catholic community as a whole. What was worse, it was directed solely against the Catholics, although there were many Protestants who provided just as strong grounds for internment.’26 Catholic attitudes changed as the ‘peace process’ ground on, bringing with it previously unknown levels of social justice and equality of treatment. Yet the Catholic Church, or sections of it, remained magnificently detached from the implementation of the policies that achieved those objectives.
On October 5th 1988 the Westminster government announced its intention of promoting integrated education. Six days later, Monsignor Colm McCaughan, the director of the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools, announced that Catholic parents who sent their children to non-denominational schools would be breaking canon law. It was not only Orangemen who cried ‘no surrender’ at the suggestion that Northern Ireland’s future depended on compromise.
It would be wrong to say that the bitter ancient sectarianism of Northern Ireland was exported to Liverpool. There had been bitter tension between Catholics and Protestants ever since the city had become reluctant host to refugees from the ‘Great Hunger’ in the 1840s and ’50s. But events in the Six Counties intensified the bitterness, and Liverpool Protestant extremists – most of them manual workers or unemployed – took every opportunity to hurt and humiliate the one stratum of society over which they could claim superiority. During the riots that followed the national police strike in 1919, the Liverpool Catholic Herald reported that ‘Catholic and Irish houses were the first to be attacked’ and noted that Peter Murphy’s shop had been subject to highly discriminating vandalism. The ‘window filled with tobacco and general goods was left untouched’, but the ‘window stocked with Irish literature, music, statues of Our Lady and other objects of devotion was smashed to atoms’.27
The diocese itself had begun the campaign to improve the reputation as well as the living conditions of Catholic Liverpool. Notwithstanding the poverty of many parishes, its status was to be elevated by investment in a prestigious project. Liverpool was to be the home of ‘The Cathedral of Our Time’, which was to combine half a dozen schools of architecture in a basilica that boasted a higher tower than the Anglican cathedral on the nearby hill. The crypt was constructed, but then the building fund was exhausted. It was forty years before a Catholic cathedral – of totally different design from the original concept – rose above the dashed hopes of the 1920s.
Other areas of activity confirmed that, although the cathedral-building fund dried up between the wars, the Liverpool Catholic Church remained determined to make its civic mark. It had always taken a detached interest in local politics. The nature of its members made tacit – though silent – support for the local (and essentially sentimental) Irish National Party inevitable, but in 1925 it plunged into deeper and more turbulent waters by setting up the Catholic Representation Council. Its founders insisted that it was ‘essentially non-political’. Is it, asked the Vicar General, ‘politics [for Catholics] to safeguard the Faith of their children? That is all the Council is out for. In the time of the old School Board we got our men in and politics was never dreamed of. If there is any attempt to renew sectarian trouble it will not come from our side.’28
The candidates who were defeated by CRC nominees could have found little comfort in the assurance that their victorious opponents had won a non-political battle. The Catholic Representation Council ran essentially Catholic campaigns in predominantly Catholic wards on a manifesto that was built around an unashamed promise to protect Catholic interests. Its candidates undertook, if elected, ‘to effectively safeguard the character of Catholic schools and the interests of Catholic children … [and] to strive for the social betterment of Catholic working men and working women’.29
The Catholic candidates were victorious in four seats out of the five which they contested – including the North Scotland ward, where Monsignor George himself won 80 per cent of the votes cast. In the exuberance of victory, they broke the inter-party convention, opposed the re-election of a sitting alderman and replaced him with P J Kelly, who was not even a city councillor. Kelly did, however, possess impeccable Catholic credentials. He was a major figure in the Ancient Order of Hibernians – the self-proclaimed ‘only Catholic and national friendly society in the world’.
The Catholic Party did not last long. Within days of the election it was amalgamated with the Irish Party. The policy of the new organisation remained ‘that of the Catholic Representation Association … Being opposed to reactionary Toryism on one side as well as destructive Communism on the other’. The Centre Party, as the new organisation called itself, was dissolved before its successful candidates had the opportunity to stand for re-election. It was infiltrated, overrun and eventually consumed by the Labour Catholics. In 1928, Richard Downey – the recently appointed Archbishop of Liverpool – accepted the inevitable and announced that, in his judgement, Catholic interests would best be served by the pursuit of the Church’s interests through the established political parties.
P J Kelly joined the Labour Party. More significant was the death of T P O’Connor, the long-serving Irish nationalist. The seat was inherited by Davie Logan, who had been elected to the council as a Nationalist but had defected to the Labour Party. Among his qualifications to follow the legendary ‘Tay Pay’ was his prominence in the Knights of St Columba – thought of by fearful Protestants as the ‘Catholic Freemasons’. The Knights had been praised by Archbishop Keating (Richard Downey’s predecessor) as the ‘spear-point for the Catholic movement in Liverpool’30 and many of the 3,000 men who made up the Order’s Merseyside ‘province’ certainly led the charge in support of Davie Logan during his by-election campaign. He won and became the first of the Liverpool Labour Members of Parliament to express a view of their duties which ran in parallel to the principles proclaimed by the Protestant leaders of the Northern Ireland Unionist Party. They were Catholics first and politicians second. For almost fifty years the Liverpool Labour Party sent a group of MPs to Westminster, who held, and freely expressed, the belief that their first duty was to their faith.
As late as the 1970s, Liverpool was still electing councillors who were candidates of the Protestant Party. It was less interested in promoting its apparent religious affiliation than in exploiting tribal loyalty. Paradoxically, many Labour councillors were more Catholic than socialist. The Church had a special reason for encouraging its members to become involved in local government. Councils were the conduit through which the national government financed schools. Liverpool Catholics faced a problem that was common to every diocese – how to maintain the religious integrity of Catholic schools and still qualify for the government grants which made possible expansion and improvement. Back in Archbishop Keating’s day, the Board of Education had condemned the buildings which housed four of Liverpool’s Catholic elementary schools and described four others as in urgent need of renovation. Keating had faced the dilemma with which Cardinals Manning and Vaughan had wrestled in London: to build a new cathedral to the glory of God or new schools for the education of His children. Of one thing he was certain. There could be no question of Catholic children being educated in non-denominational schools. In the end the Church was spared the choice between a cathedral and new schools. It could afford neither.
Financing Catholic education had become a problem throughout England as a result of the Fisher Education Act of 1918. The cost of doubling both teachers’ pay and pensions was borne by the Board of Education. But the Act raised the mandatory school-leaving age to fourteen, gave local education authorities the right to increase it to fifteen and required provision to be made, for pupils who left at fourteen, to attend ‘continuation schools’. In consequence, the school population was dramatically increased and the cost of new buildings, and the extension of old – which the increase required – had to be met by the denominations. A Catholic school place at the time of the 1870 Education Act was twenty-five shillings; this rose to £10 by 1918.31 Yet the Church built ninety-six new schools during the twelve years that followed the First World War, as well as opening, in London, St Vincent’s – one of the few Day Continuation Schools that prospered. The history of Catholic elementary education between the wars is primarily the story of the Church’s continuous struggle to win financial help without losing the independent right to appoint teachers and determine the syllabus.
The Hadow Report of 1931 required even more new buildings – for which the government was prepared to pay if, and only if, it was allowed to be responsible for the appointment of all teachers other than those who gave religious instruction. The Church was not given the chance to discuss the proposed bargain. The clause of the Education Bill, which would have given effect to the arrangement, was deleted – on the initiative of a Catholic MP – during the committee stage in the House of Commons. The support of the whole committee for the amendment was an example of Protestant laymen being more Catholic than the Pope – or, at least, more Catholic than the Archbishop of Westminster. Cardinal Bourne was prepared to consider the government playing some part in appointing teachers of general subjects. Archbishop Hinsley, his successor, was equally – perhaps even more – pragmatic and accepted a building deal which was worse than the one that had been offered to his predecessor.
The more pragmatic and practical the Church’s attitude to education became, the more it emphasised in its public statements the importance of not compromising with the secular authorities, national and local. ‘It is not,’ the Hierarchy thundered, ‘the normal function of the state to teach … The teacher is always acting in loco parentis, never in loco civitatis … Whatever authority he may possess to teach and control children, and claim their respect and obedience, comes to him from God through the parents.’ Conscience being salved, the Church accepted enough secular funding to allow the number of pupils in full-time Catholic education to increase from one in seventeen to one in fourteen of the total school population.
The Catholic Church in Scotland came to an agreement with the government which was at once tidier in its concept and application, and more satisfactory in terms of ensuring the continued integrity of Catholic education. The contentious issue was identical to the cause of disagreement in England – the guarantee that Catholic children received Catholic religious instruction. The Scottish Office initially proposed that what they called ‘administrative dualism’ – the Church’s right to appoint the teachers in its schools – should be abandoned.
The Bishop of Pella, the Pope’s Apostolic Visitor to Scotland, countered with an idea that he called ‘religious dualism’ – the Church approving the suitability of applicants for teaching posts in Catholic schools and the local education authorities making the actual appointments. Initially rank-and-file Catholics – especially parents with children of school age – were dubious about the merits of what came to be known as the ‘concordat’. But the Vatican, in a rare intervention in Scottish affairs, ordered its acceptance. The Catholic schools of Scotland were transferred to secular ownership and were financed directly by the local authorities.
It was one of the few victories in which, between the wars, the Catholics of Scotland could rejoice. In 1923, the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland published a pamphlet which, today, would justify prosecution for promoting racial hatred. It was entitled The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality. The dire warnings of ‘mongrelisation’ were given spurious credibility by the work of G R Gair, a luminary of the Scottish Anthropological Society who published a series of articles which ‘explained’ the cultural and psychological differences between the Irish and the people among whom they had settled. The dangerous Irish characteristics included ‘lack of obedience to prescribed ideas’32 – by which he meant the ideas of the Protestant establishment.
The Irish Catholics of Scotland had ideas of their own. It was because of them that, in the year before the General Assembly, the British Cabinet had to accommodate the selective iconoclasm of John Wheatley, the first radical Catholic (and one of the few Catholics of any political description) to sit at the Cabinet table in Downing Street. While in Liverpool Catholic local politicians were being drawn into the Labour Party, in Glasgow the ‘Red Clydesiders’ – a political grouping built around the militant socialist trade unionists from the engineering and shipbuilding industries – feared and complained that the Labour Party was being absorbed by the Catholic Church. As with Catholic football clubs, so with Catholic political parties. The same insidious process was being used to spread its influence over other aspects of the city’s life.
John Wheatley was an Irish immigrant and self-made businessman who had taken upon himself the task of convincing his fellow Irishmen that Home Rule was no longer their concern and that they should ally themselves to policies related to their new lives in their new country. Fearful that they would be reluctant actually to join Labour, he created a halfway house – the Catholic Socialist Society. At first it was the leadership of the Glasgow Catholic community who attempted to frustrate his plans. Sunday sermons were preached against the ‘godless doctrine’, and marches – often ending with noisy mass meetings outside his house – aimed to show that there was no support for the contradiction in terms called Catholic socialism. The turning point came as the result of the announcement that Hilaire Belloc was to visit Glasgow as part of his campaign to promote the growth of small businesses owned and run by sturdily independent craftsmen. Wheatley challenged him to a debate. It was held in the packed Pavilion Theatre. Belloc gave the more accomplished performance. Indeed, according to the criteria by which debating skills are normally judged, he won. But Wheatley – talking about colliery wages and working conditions in the dockyards – spoke a language the audience understood. There was a sudden surge in membership of the Catholic Socialist Society. As a result, it had a new enemy to combat: the Labour Party itself. The accusation was that Wheatley had introduced sectarian prejudice into a party which represented every faith and none. The fear was that he was building a power base which would enable him to become a Member of Parliament free from the shackles of the ‘Red Clydesiders’ who dominated Glasgow Labour politics. Wheatley became Minister of Health in the first Labour Government. His great achievement was a house-building programme which was more ambitious than anything that had gone before. He was certainly the success of the 1922 administration and arguably the most successful Catholic politician of the modern era. He was left out of the second Labour Government. As well as being ‘too left-wing’, he was said to be too Catholic. It was a time when family planning was becoming fashionable. John Wheatley would not support his Ministry of Health giving advice about contraception. The Catholic Church in Scotland regarded his exclusion as a new sort of martyrdom.
Catholics in Britain were never numerous enough to influence the course of parliamentary politics in the way that early-twentieth-century Nonconformists imposed their principles and prejudices on governments. The Catholics of the Irish Party can, however, take some credit for the invention of the parliamentary guillotine, since they were involved in the persistent obstruction of House of Commons business which, in 1887, led to the invention of a procedure by which debates can be curtailed. And in 1897 Catholic MPs – on the instruction of Cardinal Vaughan – ensured the passage of a contentious Education Bill, which, the Church hoped, would increase government subsidy of Catholic schools. But Catholic influence on Westminster politics has been more notable for the strength of its convictions than strength of numbers. In 2015, Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP, commenting on the proposal to legalise same-sex marriages, announced, ‘I take my whip from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.’