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Divisions between north and south Ireland were prevalent since the 1920s. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified. This book examines in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society during the period 1968-79. It begins with the aftermath of the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968 and traces the reaction to the events until the autumn of 1972. The impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday are examined. The book looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost, and examines state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. A general outlook at the changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists is provided before describing the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. The controversies concerning the Irish Republican Army and their activities are highlighted. The book looks at the question of revisionism and how debates about history were played out in academia as well as at a popular level. A variety of social and cultural responses to the conflict are examined, including attitudes to Britain and northern Unionists. For many southerners, Ulster was practically a foreign country and Northern Ireland did not seem very Irish. By 1979, the prospect of an end to the conflict seemed dim.
7 ‘The other minority’1 On the 2 February 1972 (the National Day of Mourning), people in Newbridge, Co. Kildare awoke to find the town’s Anglican church, St. Patrick’s, and shops belonging to local Protestants had been daubed with sectarian slogans.2 It was one of a number of such incidents, illustrating how war in the North was reviving dormant questions about southern Protestant loyalties. Most, however, denied that sectarianism played any part in southern life. Shortly after Bloody Sunday, Jack Lynch assured a correspondent that there had been ‘no … threats
and 2 trace the reaction to events after October 1968 until the autumn of 1972, examining the impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday. Chapter 3 looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost. Chapters 4 and 5 examine state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. Chapter 6 looks at changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists more generally. Chapter 7 describes the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. Chapter 8
the emergence of the “Solid South.” If religion informed all aspects of Southern society, then it is surely plausible that lynching was as much reinforced by religious sensibilities as by any of the region’s other institutions. Lynching, in other words, was not an aberration from but an organic outgrowth of the theological framework of Southern Protestantism that emerged in the New South where “Protestant Evangelicalism [had] long been the largest Christian tradition, its most prominent and dominant religious form.”2 Yet, even if the connections between Southern
union” amongst English-speaking whites and Afrikaners. The DRC neither vilified blacks as irredeemably evil nor fingered them as the principal cause of the Afrikaner crisis; instead, it actively cooperated with the black and white Social Christians in the Benevolent Empire to establish a racial order that it could defend on Christian and moral grounds. Driven by its republican mission and a “Christian paternalist” approach to race relations, the Afrikaner version of Lost Causism exuded none of the virulent hatred that marked Southern Protestantism. By refusing to
that sacralized the South’s defeat at the hands of a Northern army they viewed as morally inferior. Protestant leaders subsequently nurtured a distinctive “Southern religious identity” that was dominated by a soul-saving evangelism, a suspicion of the Social Gospel and a pronounced conservative disinclination to confront, let alone transform, the racial and class politics of the New South.49 Instead, Southern Protestantism placed a heavy premium on the “conversion experience” and the “rapture” that signified the individual’s full submission to God. Southern
6 “The weakness of some …”: Afrikaner civil religion and racial paternalism For white Protestants in the New South, the lineage through which racial violence descended did not begin with slavery but with the theology of Atonement-through-punishment. Southern Protestantism embraced the image of “God as Supreme Hangman” but concentrated his cleansing firepower on the “black-beast rapist.”1 Especially for poor whites, the virtue of this theological orientation was that it potentially transformed every white man into a rope-carrying footsoldier of Christ. In sharp
being their own, but slowly and gradually they felt themselves losing touch with a Dublin-centred institutional framework. They saw, in the passivity, decline and marginalisation of their Southern brethren, their own likely future in any Irish state, witnessing in particular the demographic collapse of that population south of the border. For Southern Protestants that stayed, the picture was more nuanced. Unimpressed with the stridency and overt sectarianism evident in some aspects of the Northern Ireland state, they defined their own survival in terms of
Russell, Electoral registration statistics and voting patterns (Belfast: OFMDFM, 2014). 8 Anna Mercer, ‘Overview of NI Assembly Election 2016’, Strategem, 9 May 2016. Available online at www.stratagem-ni.com/latest/2016/may/overview-of-ni-assem bly-election-2016/ (accessed 10 January 2017). Conclusion 207 9 See, for example, Seamus Dunn and Valerie Morgan, Protestant alienation in Northern Ireland: a preliminary survey (Coleraine: Centre for the Study of Conflict, University of Ulster, 1994); Neil Southern, ‘Protestant alienation in Northern Ireland: a
. The problem is that such fears and hostilities cannot be removed by a postnationalist interpretation that the Republic has somehow changed. Unionists constantly seek the body of Irish nationalism within the Republic of Ireland. The failure of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) to allow soccer to be played at Croke Park,14 the remaining sectarian nature of the Irish constitution and the ‘history’ of decline among southern Protestants aids the belief that the Republic of Ireland remains, in spite of the ways in which it has changed, a place within which unionists