Burroughs 1 the Republican Threat

Burroughs 1 The Republican Threat: How Protestant Anxieties and Republican Plotting Destabilized Northern Ireland By Kimberly Burroughs Advised by Professor Harland-Jacobs April 16, 2012 Burroughs 2 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Republican Conspiracy 5 Chapter 2: The Civil Rights Movement Begins 13 Chapter 3: A Turn to Mass Demonstration 20 Chapter 4: The Real Republican Threat 29 Chapter 5: Internment 41 Conclusion 51 Burroughs 3 I would like to thank Professor Jessica Harland-Jacobs for her invaluable guidance and support throughout this project. I would also like to thank my family for always encouraging me to pursue my passions. Burroughs 4 Introduction The British occupation of Ireland began in the twelfth century and persisted until 1921. Over eight hundred years of British rule, imperial policies segmented the island into distinct cultural regions. The residents of the northern Ulster province strongly identified with British culture (and Protestantism), while southern Irish Catholics, exploited economically by centuries of British rule, rejected the Empire. By the early twentieth century the regions had established imagined communities based on these opposing ideologies. Southern nationalists (frequently Catholic) increasingly agitated for Irish independence, while Northern Protestants desperately clung to union with Britain, fearing absorption into an alienating Catholic state. Tensions between Unionists (who wanted to remain within the British Empire) and Nationalists would prompt violence as these two communities, feeling intrinsically at odds with each other, clashed over the future of Ireland. In 1916 a small band of Irish nationalists in the city of Dublin launched an uprising now known as the Easter Rising. Aware of the high-likelihood of failure, the revolutionaries martyred themselves in an effort to galvanize Irish Nationalists into revolution. Their ploy worked. The British brutally mistreated the rebels, exciting the passions of Catholic sympathizers and setting the stage for revolution. The island erupted into war from 1919-1921, which produced the Irish Republican Army, a militant Nationalist organization designed to defend Catholic communities and bring about an independent Irish Republic entirely free of British interference. Acknowledging the potency of nationalist resistance, which was largely concentrated in the southern portion of the island, the British ended the war in 1921 with the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty partitioned the island into a two separate entities, the Irish Free State, composed of the 26 southern counties, and Northern Ireland, home to the Unionist Protestant ascendancy that had Burroughs 5 maintained a strong hold of the region since the first serious British efforts to colonize the island. Thus Britain attempted to ease Protestant/Catholic tensions by appeasing both parties. It granted Irish Nationalists many of their demands and secured for Unionists the protection of a cultural majority in the province of Northern Ireland, which would remain within the United Kingdom. However, a large portion of the Republican movement, which had demanded freedom for the entire island, viewed Anglo-Irish Treaty and partition as a failure. In 1922 militant sections of the Irish Republican Army launched a civil war against Irish political leaders who had accepted the terms of the 1921 treaty. Although anti-partition forces were defeated and the border remained, Republicans continued to threaten the region without success for the next forty years. After decades of relative peace in which the Unionist ascendancy secured its position in the North and the southern Republic struggled to gain its footing, Northern Ireland devolved into a guerilla war that would take over three thousands lives from1969 to 2003. How did this war begin? Who was responsible? How did conflicting interest groups change the course of Irish history, and how might they have avoided violence? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper focuses on the Catholic civil rights movement of 1962-1971 to ascertain how sectarian divisions emerging from Ireland’s colonial history promoted the misunderstandings, suspicions, and mistrust that ultimately led to violence. Three key ideologies are fundamental to understanding the communal differences that would instigate this violence. The first is Unionism, a political persuasion held by residents of Northern Ireland who wish to remain within United Kingdom. Unionism is largely associated with Protestantism and Britishness. It corresponds to the Protestant Ascendancy of the sixteenth century, which reaped most of the benefits from participating in Britain’s colonial program. The Burroughs 6 second is Irish Nationalism, which largely but not exclusively corresponds to Irish Catholicism.1 Nationalists agitated for the increased autonomy of colonized Irish people through cultural movements like the Gaelic revival of the nineteenth century and through armed uprisings against colonial rule. The third and perhaps the most important ideology relevant to twentieth century Irish history is Republicanism, which emerged during the late 1800s and is largely associated with the Irish Republican Army. Republicanism, an extreme form of Nationalism, calls for the complete dismantling of all British influence over the island of Ireland and the establishment of a unified Irish republic under exclusive Irish sovereignty. The term “Republican” would become inextricably linked to militarism throughout the 1900s. Republicanism represented the most alarming threat to Unionists because it explicitly and violently opposed the existence of Northern Ireland, its Protestant Ascendancy and its neo-colonialism. This paper makes two related arguments concerning the sectarian divisions of the civil rights movement. First, to an artificially constructed and anxious Protestant majority, the Catholic civil rights movement appeared to be another iteration of Republican plotting. Fearing imprisonment within a Catholic republic, which would represent the antithesis of Protestant beliefs, Unionists reacted to the civil rights movement with fearful anxiety, leading extremist elements to engage in terrorism and violence. As a result, Protestant Unionists and their radical constituents ultimately brought about the very Republican threat they so feared by alienating the Catholic population, producing similarly beleaguered sentiments and prompting an embrace of Republican militarism. While this cyclic model of oppositional tension is not remarkably original, most scholars fail to acknowledge the validity of initial Protestant anxieties and construe Unionists as irrational. 1 Nationalist sentiments would also attract Labor movements, Socialists, and Communists who, like Catholic Nationalists, rejected the status quo. Socialists and Communists would apply a Marxist formula to the Northern Ireland situation that would call for proletarian resistance. They were a key factor in civil rights agitation. Burroughs 7 This historiographical failure introduces the second argument of this paper. An autobiography of Roy H.W. Johnston released in 2004 reveals that Unionists’ fears were not entirely groundless.2 While Republicans never exercised unilateral control over the civil rights movement, they did maintain a constant presence within it, exerting indirect influence over its leadership and pushing it in certain directions. While Protestants grossly overestimated the power of the Irish Republican Army, a persistent Republican presence within the movement did reinforce Unionist anxieties. This paper further develops the neglected elements of the Protestant anxiety thesis by juxtaposing both Republican and Unionist source material, including political pamphlets, speeches, and declassified government documents, in an effort to trace the co- evolution of communal tensions. To make these arguments, this paper explores the narrative of events from 1964-1971. Chapter One consults Johnston’s autobiography and demonstrates the real (although weak) Republican threat emanating from the civil rights movement. Chapter Two unpacks the nature of Protestant anxieties at the time, noting their consequences at both a grass roots and parliamentary level. Chapter Three traces the first political demonstrations of the civil rights movement. Chapter Four explores the consequences these demonstrations, noting that that they were integral to solidifying sectarian tensions and radicalizing the conflict. Five reveals how this sectarianism infiltrated the upper echelons of Stormont governance and led to the fatal error of internment. This final misstep sealed the fate of Northern Ireland, making a non-violent solution impossible in the wake of insurmountable communal tension. 2 Roy H.W. Johnston, Century of Endeavour: A Biographical and Autobiographical View of the 20th Century in Ireland (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2004). Johnston’s book is an anomaly among historical texts. Johnston himself was a Republican insider throughout the crisis with access a variety of documents that remain inaccessible to the general public. In his book, Johnston has attempted to synthesize these documents into an internal narrative of Republican activities throughout the civil rights movement. It remains one of the few sources in existence that allow scholars access into the internal events of Republican circles at the time. Burroughs 8 Chapter 1: Republican Conspiracy Following the partition of Ireland in 1921, Republicans fixated on the border issue.3 For the

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