100 Years of the Covenant30

John Lyons

Introduction politicians, as the divisions within North- ern Irish society were once again exposed. The Ulster Covenant and the subsequent formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) marked the beginning of a decade of events which were to determine the fu- ture course of Irish history, events that shaped twentieth century Ireland, north and south, and as such will be the subject of this article.

Edward Carson signing the Ulster Covenant. A Loyal Ulster Rebellion BEING CONVINCED in our The years 2012 - 2022 will be a decade consciences that Home Rule of commemorations, as the centenary an- would be disastrous to the ma- niversaries of some of the defining events terial well-being of Ulster as of twentieth century Irish history are re- well as of the whole of Ireland, membered, celebrated, re-analysed and re- subversive of our civil and re- vised: from the all out class warfare of the ligious freedom, destructive of Dublin Lock-out of 1913; the First World our citizenship, and perilous to War 1914-1918; the Easter Rising and the the unity of the Empire, we, slaughter on the Somme in 1916; to the whose names are underwrit- outbreak of the War of Independence in ten, men of Ulster, loyal sub- 1917; through to the partitioning of the is- jects of His Gracious Majesty land of Ireland and the establishment of King George V, humbly rely- two states, north and south, in the early ing on the God whom our fa- 1920s. thers in days of stress and trial This year, however, witnessed the first confidently trusted, do hereby of the series of commemorations, as over pledge ourselves in solemn 30,000 members of the Northern Protes- Covenant, throughout this our tant community celebrated the one hun- time of threatened calamity, to dred year anniversary of the signing of the stand by one another in de- Ulster Covenant in 1912. The commemo- fending, for ourselves and our ration was, however, surrounded by height- children, our cherished posi- ened tensions as extensive rioting in work- tion of equal citizenship in the ing class areas of took place in , and in us- the weeks preceding the anniversary of the ing all means which may be signing of the Ulster Covenant: the rioting found necessary to defeat the was orchestrated by loyalist paramilitaries present conspiracy to set up a and given legitimacy by leading Unionist Home Rule Parliament in Ire- 30Also known as the Solemn League and Covenant.

66 land. And in the event of would be abandoned. To ensure that this such a Parliament being forced would happen, he sanctioned the establish- upon us, we further solemnly ment of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and mutually pledge ourselves in 1912, an event which ‘unleashed violence to refuse to recognize its au- into twentieth-century Irish politics2. thority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right, we The establishment of the UVF and the hereto subscribe our names1. signing of the Ulster Covenant signalled the intent of the loyal Unionist population The signing of the Ulster Covenant by of the north east of Ireland to resist any over half a million Protestant men and severing of their link to the United King- women, who pledged to defend their “cher- dom. The UVF expanded very rapidly ished position of equal citizenship in the and ‘by late 1913 was claiming a member- United Kingdom, and in using all means ship of 100,000: the true total may have which may be found necessary to defeat fallen somewhat short of this boast but a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland” was probably not by much’3 .By late April of Protestant reaction to the British the following year, 1914, the UVF was an Liberal Partys introduction of a parliamen- armed militant force with the landing in tary bill that proposed a measure of in- Larne, of ‘some 25,000 ri- dependence be granted to Ireland Home fles and 3 million rounds of ammunition’4. Rule. The constitutional nationalists of In November of that year the Irish Volun- the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had teers were formed, a response by nation- pursued Home Rule for Ireland for over alist Ireland to the unionist mobilisation. two decades but their attempts, in alliance The threat of civil war loomed over Ire- with the British Liberals at Westminster, land until the outbreak of the First World had been thwarted on two previous occa- War put hostilities on hold. The years that sions in 1886 and again in 1893 by an al- followed witnessed the slaughter of thou- liance of Ulster Unionist and British Con- sands of Irish Catholics and Protestants in servative politicians, backed up by a mass the First World War. The leaders of the movement of northern Protestants fearful Easter Rising in 1916 had sought the com- of being ruled from Dublin by an Irish par- plete separation of Ireland from Britain, liament. The leading Ulster Unionist at not mere Home Rule (“Little more, indeed, the time of the third attempt to introduce than glorified local government”5) and the Home Rule for Ireland was Edward Car- outbreak of the War of Independence in son, a Dublin-born lawyer, whose strat- 1917 saw nationalist Ireland striking out egy was to exploit Ulster unionist oppo- for full independence of the whole of is- sition as a means of preventing Home Rule land. After four years of guerrilla war- and maintaining Ireland within the union fare with British forces, the leaders of this of the United Kingdom and Ireland. He movement signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in believed that if Ulster could not be co- 1921, a settlement which granted a level of erced into accepting Home Rule, the policy independence for the twenty-six counties 1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Covenant 2 J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), p. 1. 3Alvin Jackson, Ireland: 1798-1998 (Oxford, 1999), p. 236. 4 Ibid., p.237. 5 F.S.L Lyons, ‘The Meaning of Independence’, in B. Farrell (ed.) The Irish Parliamentary Tradition (Dublin, 1973), p. 227.

67 of Southern Ireland, the six north eastern Anglo-Irish Protestant group counties of Ulster being granted a sepa- was not a handful of landlords rate Constitutional arrangement in 1920. and squires but a substantial The island of Ireland was to be parti- tenant-farming class6. tioned. This was, in major part, the result of the mass mobilisation of parliamentary The was an ex- and paramilitary forces by Ulster Union- traordinarily ambitious effort by the late ist politicians, business interests and the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies to se- British Conservative Party. The anger and cure Englands western flank and subdue insecurity of the Protestant working class the most lawless and rebellious part of Ire- was exploited in the early years of that tu- land. According to Moloney, it was dur- multuous decade and led to a movement ing this period in Irish and British his- of opposition to Home Rule that brought tory that a doctrine emerged that is key Ulster to the edge of insurrection. to understanding the world of Ulster loy- alism, namely “conditional loyalty”: ‘the idea that citizens and the state are bound The Ulster Plantation together by a contract in which the citi- What were the motivations that drove the zens agree to support and defend the state Northern Protestant population to arm only as long as the state defends and sup- 7 and to threaten insurrection so as to re- ports them’ . The concept of conditional tain their link with the United Kingdom? loyalty goes a long way in helping to un- The answer, as always, lies in the past. derstand, Moloney continues, why Protes- The 891,000 Protestants of Ulster in 1911 tants take up arms and threaten to defy were largely descendant from seventeenth- the government they claim as their own; it century English and Scottish settlers who encapsulates perfectly the Unionist para- 8 arrived in Ireland at the time of the Ulster dox: Loyalists being disloyal . Plantations: With momentum for Home Rule in- creasing in the early years of the twen- Ulster was then the most re- tieth century, the Protestant population mote and troublesome of the of Ulster felt their position within the Irish provinces, and after the United Kingdom was coming under in- defeat of the last of the na- creasing threat. The British government tive Irish chieftains the British was intending to betray them, sell them administration brought over out and leave them isolated in an indepen- English and Scottish planters dent and overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. and settled them on confis- This scenario revealed another aspect of cated land in order to se- what Moloney believes makes up the Ul- cure the area. The planters ster Protestant political persona alongside were Protestants, the native conditional loyalty: that is, insecurity9. Irish whom they were replac- The Ulster Protestants were feeling not ing were Catholics. So Ul- only isolated but insecure too: their cher- ster became different from the ished position of equal citizenship in the rest of Ireland in that the United Kingdom was now, they felt, under 6Michael Farrell, : The Orange State (London, 1976), p.13. 7Ed Moloney, Voices From The Grave: Two Mens War in Ireland (London, 2010), p. 324. 8Ibid., pp 324-6. 9Ibid., p. 326.

68 threat. Their ‘infuriated reaction’ to the mercantile classes had come to recognise threat of Home Rule10 was all the more that the trading and commercial relation- strongly felt as they had believed their po- ship which the British had imposed on sition within the United Kingdom to be se- Ireland had restricted their economic ad- cure, as it had been given legislative effect vancement’13. some one hundred years before with the By the mid 1790s the United Irishmen, passing of the Act of Union in 1801 and with Wolfe Tone a leading figure, had de- had faced no serious challenge in the inter- veloped ever closer ties with the revolu- vening years. The Act of Union which had tionaries in France (with whom Britain provided the Northern Protestant popu- had been at war with since 1793) and had lation with such security had been intro- developed as a revolutionary movement de- duced by the British government in re- manding an independent democratic Re- sponse to the outbreak of rebellion in Ire- public with full equality for the Catholic land in the late eighteenth century the majority of the population14. Membership 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. of the United Irishmen numbered some 280,000 in the early months of 1798, made 1798: Protestants and up in the main of the Catholic peasantry of Leinster who were led by members of the Catholics Unite? Catholic and Presbyterian middle classes The United Irishmen was a coming to- based in Dublin and Belfast. By the time gether of some of the descendants of Ul- rebellion in Ireland finally broke out in ster Plantation Protestants (namely, Pres- March 1798, the British administration byterians) and native Catholics in Belfast had virtually snuffed out the threat by and Dublin in 1791, and initially ‘called arresting several leading United Irishmen for a complete and radical reform of the and by declaring martial law in the months representation of the people in parliament, before. Fighting did break out, however, and the unity of all Irishmen in order to when ‘thousands of badly armed peasants pursue this end’11. Many of the leading mobilized to take on the worlds strongest 15 figures of the United Irishmen were North- imperialist power’ but the rebellion was ern Presbyterians ‘who resented the privi- crushed in less than a month: ‘The 98 leges of the Anglican Church the church of was a devastating experience a short but the landlords and aristocracy12’ and many bloody civil war, which involved the explo- were looking towards self-government as a sive release of pent up economic and sec- 16 political programme: ‘In part this sprang tarian pressures’ . from the restrictions they themselves had suffered under the British governments sectarian policies, which were designed to suppress all signs of unorthodoxy; in part The explosion of pent up sectarian pres- it was because the Presbyterian gentry and sures witnessed during the rising was in ev- 10Lee, Ireland, p. 1. 11Jackson, Ireland, p. 12. 12Farrell, Northern Ireland, p.14. 13Geoffrey Bell, The Protestants of Ulster (London, 1976), p. 15. 14Farrell, Northern Ireland,p. 13. 15Mark Hewitt, 1798 The Year of Revolution: Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen (Dublin, 1998), p. 25. 16Jackson, Ireland, p. 20.

69 idence in the north of Ireland in the years Within two years of the 1798 Rebellions leading up to the outbreak of hostilities, defeat, the British government had intro- for ‘the United Irishmen never had the sup- duced the Act of Union which abolished port of the majority of Ulster Protestants. Irish legislative independence and thus in- Antagonism between Catholic and Protes- tegrated Ireland into the United Kingdom. tant was strong in many areas and was One consequence of this was that ‘restric- reinforced by competition for land tenan- tions on industry and trade were lifted and cies.17’ Indeed, it is in this period that Ulster, particularly Belfast, prospered un- we see the emergence of an organisation der the union21’. As the nineteenth cen- that formed one of the pillars of the Protes- tury progressed, the textiles and engineer- tant supremacy witnessed in Northern Ire- ing industries of the north east of Ireland land in the twentieth century: the Or- expanded rapidly: ‘Scottish raw materials, ange Order. Alongside the Unionist Party British finance and markets tied the North- and loyalist paramilitaries, it was a vital ern employers to the Empire. Belfast it- cog in the Orange machine that ensured self grew from 28,000 people in 1813, to the Catholic population of the north re- 100,300 in 1851 and tripled again from mained second-class citizens for many of 120,000 in 1860, to 350,000 by 190022’. By the decades of the century. Formed in 1795 the early twentieth century, the economy ‘as a militant Protestant organization ded- of the industrial north-east was outper- icated to preserving Protestant supremacy’ forming the more backward, mainly agri- the supplied many of the cultural economy of the rest of Ireland and recruits that formed the yeomanry of the there were a thousand strings that bound 1790s a part-time force officered by the Ulster to the United Kingdom. So with the landlords. ‘When the rebellion came in introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1911, 1798 more Ulster Protestants served the which threatened the vital economic inter- king in the yeomanry than fought against ests and constitutional position of Ulsters him in the United Irishmen18.’ The British Protestants, they mobilised: authorities were unnerved at the slight- est ‘possibility that the always disaffected At this point Dublin barris- Catholics and a section, albeit a minority, ter Edward Carson and the of the Protestants might come together’ Ulster Unionists entered the that they applied more vigorously than story, leading the opposition of ever before the age-old policy of divide Northern Ireland Protestants and rule19. Indeed, Ireland was saved for to Home Rule and bringing , according to Bell, ‘by encourag- them to the edge of insurrec- ing Protestant sectarianism, by mercilessly tion. Carson won the sup- putting down the republicans before and port of the British Conserva- during the rising and by assisting in the tive Party and set out on a hostility between Catholic and Protestant whirlwind campaign through- peasantry’20. out Ulster mobilising grass- roots Loyalists to the cause. 17Farrell, Northern Ireland, p. 14. 18Ibid., p.13. 19 Bell, Protestants of Ulster, p. 15. 20 Ibid., p. 16. 21Farrell, Northern Ireland, p. 14. 22 Hewitt, Northern Ireland, p.5.

70 His efforts culminated in the have agreed to see Ireland as signing of the Ulster Covenant a nation disrupted politically at Belfast City Hall in Septem- and her children divided under ber 1912 by over half a million separate political governments men and women, some using with warring interests. their own blood for ink.23 Now, what is the position of Labour towards it all? Let This cross-class collaboration of North- us remember that the Orange ern Irish Protestants - a banding together aristocracy now fighting for its of wealthy industrialists, upper and middle supremacy in Ireland has at all class Unionist politicians, the rural poor, times been based upon a denial the urban Protestant working class and the of the common human rights emergence of a loyalist paramilitary force of the ; that the was so powerful a movement that once dis- Orange Order was not founded cussions of Home Rule recommenced after to safeguard religious freedom, their suspension during the First World but robbed whilst so sundered War, the north east area of Ulster was and divided, the Orange aris- excluded from any real prospect of being tocracy went down to the low- forced into a Home Rule settlement be- est depths and out of the low- tween the British government and nation- est pits of hell brought up alist Ireland. the abominations of sectarian feuds to stir the passions of ‘A Carnival of Reaction’ the ignorant mob. No crime was too brutal or cowardly; no The Government of Ireland Act, intro- lie too base; no slander too duced at Westminster in February 1920, ghastly, as long as they served brought the Northern Irish state into exis- to keep the democracy asun- tence: the Bill ‘proposed two Home Rule der. parliaments in Ireland, one for most of the country, the other for six of the nine Ul- And now that the progress of ster counties’24. The new northern parlia- democracy elsewhere has some- ment was opened in Belfasts City Hall on what muzzled the dogs of aris- 22 June 1921 and the occasion marked the tocratic power, now that in end of Westminsters direct authority over England as well as in Ire- Ireland, an authority dating back to the land the forces of labour are passage of the Act of Union in 1801. stirring and making for free- The partitioning of Ireland however dom and light, this same gang would, as James Connolly predicted in of well-fed plunderers of the 1914, lead to a ‘carnival of reaction’: people, secure in Union held upon their own dupes, seek by But Ireland, what of Ireland? threats of force to arrest the It is the trusted leaders of Ire- march of idea and stifle the land that in secret conclave light of civilisation and liberty. with the enemies of Ireland And, lo and behold, the trusted 23Moloney, Voices From The Grave, p. 329. 24Farrell, Northern Ireland, p. 22.

71 guardians of the people, the tionalist movement, lead by middle class vaunted saviours of the Irish leaders such as Arthur Griffith, Eamonn race, agree in front of the en- de Valera and Michael Collins, too readily emy and in face of the world gave up the idea of fighting for the North to sacrifice to the bigoted en- when settling peace terms with the British emy the unity of the nation government during the treaty negotiations and along with it the lives, lib- of 1920-1. The cross-class alliance of Ul- erties and hopes of that por- ster Protestants in the years leading up to tion of the nation which in the the founding of the two parliaments was midst of the most hostile sur- the major determining factor in their reluc- roundings have fought to keep tance to attempt to secure independence the faith in things national and for the whole of the island the signing progressive. of the Ulster Covenant and the formation Such a schemethe betrayal of of a loyalist paramilitary force, the UVF, the national democracy of in- marked the beginning of the division of dustrial Ulster would mean a Ireland, which ultimately saw the estab- carnival of reaction both North lishment of two conservative, reactionary and South, would set back the states in which the interests of the work- wheels of progress, would de- ing class in both jurisdictions were bottom stroy the oncoming unity of the of the ruling elites agendas. Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced move- Conclusion ments whilst it endured. To it Labour should give the bit- The creation of two Home Rule govern- terest opposition, against it ments in the early 1920s, one in Dublin, Labour in Ulster should fight the other in Belfast, led to the division even to the death, if neces- of the Irish working class as a whole on sary, as our fathers fought be- the island, and in particular, led to the fore us25. abandonment of the Catholic working class of the north. A minority within a ma- Any prospect of the ‘unity of the Irish jority Protestant state, cut off from their labour movement’ was destroyed, by the co-religionists in the new , partitioning of the island. The work- they were left to fend for themselves in a ing class men and women who were the new state which, from birth, had its work- backbone of the Irish Republican Armys ing class divided. The Catholics in the struggle against the British forces dur- north were to face decades of sectarian dis- ing the War of Independence from 1917- crimination: 1921, those who made the greatest sacri- fices, were the ones who gained the least. the Unionists set about con- The leaders of labour in the south, on the structing an Orange and crest of the European-wide revolutionary Protestant state with almost enthusiasm after the October 1917 revo- all political power and patron- lution, conceded too much to the nation- age in their own hands and op- alist movement in the fight for indepen- erated an elaborate and com- dence against the British; the same na- prehensive system of discrim- 25Irish Worker, 14 March. 1914.

72 ination in housing and jobs to create a ‘Protestant parliament for a which kept the minority in Protestant people’ in the subsequent years. a position of permanent and From its inception, the Northern Irish hopeless inferiority26. state was riven with sectarianism from the police to the judiciary, in housing, The Protestant working class, wedded education and employment. When the to the new Northern Irish state, led by up- Catholic population sought to end these per and middle class protestant politicians sectarian practices with their demands for heavily influenced by the economic imper- civil rights in the 1960s it provoked a fu- atives of the wealthy industrialists of Ul- rious backlash from the Protestant pop- ster and their business ties to the British ulation, it’s politicians and paramilitary Empire, believed they had more to materi- forces, which led to the outbreak of ‘the ally gain by sacrificing their class interests Troubles’, a thirty year conflict the effects and joined forces with their co-religionists of which we are still dealing with today.

26Farrell, Northern Ireland, p. 81.

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