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

In conclusion, the "taming" of Ulster's Protestant lower classes would be a prolonged and uneasy development, involving the transformation of "Wild Irish" in America and Britain into respectable "Scotch-Irish" and "loyal Britons," as well as the creation of staunch unionists in Northern Ireland itself. (47) Even the latter process would remain bedeviled by intracommunal conflicts--over tenant-right and industrial relations, for example--as Ulster's Protestant upper, middle, and lower classes sought to define the practical implications of unionism in different ways. From at least the middle of the nineteenth century, however, such issues would be contested almost invariably within the "unionist family": within a hegemonic framework of shared political, social, and cultural assumptions that had been forged and imposed by Ulster's Protestant elites in the early 1800s. Thus, "Belfast's first bomb" in 1816 was by no means the most destructive that would be exploded during the next two centuries. To historians, however, it may signal the importance of a hitherto-unappreciated, intra-communal social conflict, the resolution of which was of momentous importance for the future of Ulster and Irish society.

(1.) I would like to thank Roger Hayden of Ithaca, N.Y., for providing photocopies and transcripts of Coyne's letter and for granting permission to publish it.

The violent incident that Coyne described is omitted from the standard histories of Belfast--by J.C. Beckett and R.E. Glasscock, eds., Belfast: Origin and Growth of an Industrial City (London: BBC, 1967), and by W.A. Maguire, Belfast (Keele, England: Ryburn, 1993)--but is mentioned briefly in Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), 259; John W. Boyle, The Irish Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 15-16; and E.R.R. Green, The Lagan Valley, 1800-50 (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 101.

(2.) According to the Belfast Street Directory (c. 1813) and Bradshaw's Belfast Directory of 1819, William Co[y]ne (or Cain), cooper, lived at 10 Bluebell Entry, off Waring Street. Perhaps he was the same "Mr. William Coyne" who died, aged 75, on 31 Aug. 1846, at his home on the Falls Road. Belfast News-Letter (BNL hereafter), 4 Sep. 1846; from the death records in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, which also contains the BNL on microfilm.

Assumptions as to Coyne's religious affiliation are based on early census data from Magheragall parish, to which Coyne refers in his letter. In 1766 Magheragall contained 420 households, 365 (86.9 percent) of which were Protestant, 55 (13.1 percent) Roman Catholic. Employing the eighteenth-century households-to-persons multiplier devised for Ulster by Dickson, O Grada, and Daultrey, in 1766 Magheragall probably contained about 1,840 Protestants and 277 Catholics. By 1831 Magheragall's population included 2,279 Anglicans (67.0 percent of the total, 74.6 percent of the parish's Protestants), 646 Presbyterians (20.8 and 23.2 percent, respectively), 63 "other Protestants" (2.0 and 2.3 percent, respectively), and 314 Catholics (10.1 percent of the total). Thus, by 1831 the Protestant proportion of Magheragall's inhabitants had risen to nearly 90 percent. However, due to heavy migration to America, Britain, or nearby industrial towns such as Belfast and Lisburn, between 1766 and 1831 the annual growth rates of Magheragall's populations had been extremely low: merely 0.64 among the parish's Protestants, and much less (0.19) among local Catholics.