Belfast's first bomb, 28 February 1816: class conflict and the origins of Ulster Unionist Hegemony

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2004 by Kerby A. Miller

Like the Petty Sessions Courts (established in 1827), such bodies reinforced hierarchy and deference on local levels and connected those local relationships with supra-local or metropolitan rules, institutions, and power structures. In Ulster especially, perhaps, they not only strengthened traditional, cross-class social bonds but also instilled, encouraged, and rewarded new proto-bourgeois habits and outlooks compatible with the needs of commercialization and industrialization. (34) Equally important, they sifted Ulster's and Ireland's inhabitants into two broad groups--the "loyal" and the "disloyal," the "respectable" and the "insubordinate," the "worthy" and the "unworthy" of patronage and respect--and ensured that ultimately the distinctions between them would be made almost invariably on Protestant versus Catholic lines. To be sure, the clergymen who officiated in 1816 at the hangings of Johnson's assailants probably included Belfast's parish priest and future Catholic archbishop, William Crolly, and both he and many affluent Protestant liberals no doubt would have been happy to enlist their Catholic peers among the "friends of order." (35) Unfortunately, however, for three crucial decades after 1800 the Tories largely controlled the British government and Dublin Castle, and their refusal to grant Catholic Emancipation and their support for ultra-Protestantism virtually ensured that Irish unionism would develop, in a climate of rising Catholic alienation and nationalism, as a predominantly (and militantly) Protestant phenomenon. Yet perhaps even more crucial was that, given the rampant class-conflict of the early 1800s, the Protestant elite's successful imposition of capitalist relationships and mores on Ulster's Protestant poor necessitated the creation and continual reinforcement of a sectarian moral economy that combined "free labor" ideology with the selective reality, or at least the seductive rhetoric, of Protestant patronage and privilege. (36)

Discrimination of various kinds was present of course in the operations of charitable and other institutions and in many other, less formal social relationships: most obviously in anti-Catholic sectarianism as enforced, for example, by ultra-Protestant landlords and magistrates, or by ordinary Orangemen and Yeomen--the latter often synonymous. At least initially, however, both elite and plebeian distinctions between the "loyal-respectable-worthy" and the "disloyal-insubordinate-unworthy" were also made among Protestants, often on denominational grounds. During the 1798 Rebellion, for instance, Protestant liberals in Donegal and elsewhere were fearful that loyalist Orangemen, then overwhelmingly Anglican, were "Sworn to Distroy all Prisbitearans" as well as "Rommans": an apprehension that helps explain Presbyterians' subsequent, if always underrepresented, membership in both the Orange Order and the Yeomanry--their enrollment in the latter albeit often expedient or even "insincere," as Dublin Castle recognized. (37) Likewise, in the 1820s loyal Protestants felt obliged to "all show themselves" in the annual Twelfth of July parades, as one Orangeman demanded, "else how could we tell whether they are of the right or wrong sort?" (38) Yet at least equally important was that these distinctions were made and pressures imposed along class lines as well. During the social crises of the early 1800s, Irish municipal authorities often instructed parish relief committees not to grant charity to applicants who lacked certificates of "good character" from clergymen or employers, testifying, for example, to the petitioners' non-membership in working-class combinations. (39) Similarly, Ulster's few remaining "rhyming weavers"--formerly the heralds of sociopolitical discontent and religious liberalism--learned, often from bitter experience, that elite patronage and publication prospects were generally closed to those who resisted the tide of convention. And after 1831, especially, the North's Protestant schoolmasters fell under the sway of conservative clergymen, their own ranks successively purged of "disloyalty" and "heresy" by men, such as Cooke, who increasingly dominated the Ulster Synod and other religious bodies and who distributed their resources according to political and doctrinal criteria. (40)