Irish Protestant Identities
University College Cork
26th May 2011
Professor Joseph Ruane retired from his post in Sociology at UCC on 31st March 2011.
The School of History and ISS21 will jointly host a workshop on ‘Irish Protestant Identities’ to mark Joe’s contribution to scholarship in ORB 303 on Thursday, 26th May at 2pm. The workshop will be followed by a reception in the common area on the second floor, below, at 5.30 pm.
Everyone is welcome to attend the workshop and/or the reception.
IRISH PROTESTANT IDENTITIES
Workshop Speakers:
Professor Liam Kennedy, QUB
Dr. John Regan, University of Dundee
Dr. Andy Bielenberg, UCC
Dr. Catherine O’Connor, UL
Professor Joseph Ruane, UCC
PROGRAMME
SESSION 1: 2pm -3.30pm
Chair: Professor Geoff Roberts, Head, School of History, UCC
Professor Liam Kennedy, School of History and Anthropology, QUB
‘The Planter and the Gael’
Ireland has long been a land of invasions and inward migrations, giving rise to complex genetic, ethnic and cultural inheritances. The pure Gael, once held as an ideal, was always little more than a piece of ideological make-belief. Notions of Anglo-Saxon racial homogeneity, not to say superiority, with distinctive traits and characteristics, were similarly the product of political imaginings. The evidence in this paper suggests that mixing and intercourse between different ethnic groups, even in the post-Reformation period when religious difference served to harden ethnic boundaries, has been a feature of Irish society during the last three to four centuries. John Hewitt may be reassured: there is no necessary conflict between a “planter” origin and a twentieth-century Irish or Ulster identity, or indeed between a Gaelic or Old English ethnic origin and an Ulster or Irish unionist identity.
Dr. John M. Regan, Department of History, University of Dundee
‘The Bandon Valley Massacre Revisited’
This paper examines some of the sources/historical accounts of the massacre of West Cork Protestants at the end of April 1922. Close reading of the evidence identifies important, and hitherto unacknowledged, problems. Identification of these raises further issues, both with the interpretation of the massacre endorsed by some historians, and also with the methodologies employed by Irish historians more generally. We do not know precisely what happened during the massacre, or who perpetrated it or, ultimately, what motivated it. However, it is possible to argue that the massacre was not the example of unambiguous sectarian murder that some historians endorse.
Session II 3.45-5.30pm
Chair: Dr. Linda Connolly, Sociology and ISS21, UCC
Dr. Andy Bielenberg, School of History, UCC
‘Exodus: the emigration of southern Irish Protestants during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War’
The mass mobilisation of revolutionary nationalism and regime change across Europe during and after the First World War, led to communal divisions, revolutionary violence, and for a number of ethnic minorities defeat and emigration from a host of emerging nation states. The southern Irish Protestant minority were not exceptional in these respects, experiencing a population fall from 327,179 in 1911 to 220,723 in 1926; this fall was the equivalent of almost 33% of the 1911 minority population compared to a Catholic contraction of just 2%. The scale of this fall is generally recognised by historians, but the causes remain unclear. The longer than usual gap between the census years in question, and the major historical events which took place in the intervening years further complicate the picture. The issue which was and remains most contentious in the historiography is the portion of this exodus which was ‘forced’. This paper attempts to provide a coherent overview of all the causal factors driving Protestant emigration, including the impact of British military withdrawal, agrarianism and land reform, revolutionary violence and regular economic migration. Following an assessment of a wide spectrum of factors (including estimates of their respective magnitudes) the paper concludes that revolutionary terror accounted for a relatively small share of total Protestant departures.
Dr. Catherine O’Connor, Research Officer, University of Limerick Oral History Project (ULOHP)
‘Women and the Church of Ireland: Ferns 1945-65’
Issues of identity would appear to belie much of the history of the Church of Ireland in Ireland. The positioning of the contribution of women in the Church of Ireland diocese of Ferns as central to this paper, draws primarily on oral history interviews as source. Of interest is not simply a documentation of the twenty-one married women’s stories, (although the neglect of women in the twentieth-century historiography of southern Protestantism and Irish women’s history, makes this an attractive aim in itself), but also an investigation into their subjective narration of their past. The analysis of this oral as well as written evidence provides valuable insight into Protestant social organisation and community cohesion, in the context of a dwindling and ageing population and concerns with emigration and low and delayed rates of marriage.
The efforts made by the community to arrest this population decline are evident in church activity in education, the sanction of mixed marriage and the socialisation of young people into the church community. Women emerge as important actors in these efforts through their enthusiastic contribution to parish life, as rectors’ wives, and particularly through their vital role in the transmission of Protestant faith and values. Their accounts of this activity together with local documentary evidence illuminate a vibrant community life where religious identity is inextricably linked with social identity. In turn, the preservation of this religious identity is revealed as dependent upon a particular construction of gender identity, legitimised by official Church of Ireland discourse as well as by the state and Irish society in the period under review. In the prioritisation of their familial role, women contribute to the construction and maintenance of this gender identity, indicated in their internalisation and reproduction of gender roles and norms. This understanding of gender identity is valuable in the interpretation of the religious and social identity of this rural Church of Ireland community. Finally, this paper illuminates the historical experience of a minority religious community struggling to survive and adapt to a changing rural landscape, occasioned by the emergent modernisation of Irish society at the beginning of the 1960s. Features of increased social mobility, occupational change and increased living standards as well as changing social and cultural values are reflected in this analysis of Protestant women’s experience.
RESPONDENT: PROFESSOR JOSEPH RUANE
5.30pm RECEPTION, Common Area ORB 244
All welcome
FMRSI 