A devout Presbyterian and Christian Socialist, Jack White was born in County Antrim, the son of Field Marshal Sir George White VC, who held almost every honour the British Army could bestow, especially after his defence of Ladysmith during the Boer War. The family were part of the Irish landowning class, being friendly with the Royal Family, and Jack White followed his father into the Army. He was awarded the DSO after seeing action against the Boers at Magersfontein and Doorknop. An incident at the latter engagement gives a clear indication of his character. Advancing towards the enemy lines they found only one Boer left, a terrified teenage boy. One of White’s fellow officers ordered the boy to be shot. “If you shoot him,” White is reputed to have said , “I’ll shoot you.” His comrades dispute this account, however.  White eventually dropped out of the Army and worked his way around Europe and North America.

When he returned to Ireland Sir Edward Carson was rallying the Protestants of the North in their resistance to the proposed Home Rule Bill. The leading barrister of his day, Carson’s “magnificent presence and rock-like attachment to the cause provided perfect leadership.” Undeterred, White organised one of the first Protestant meetings, at Ballymoney, which opposed the Irish Unionist position, speaking on the platform alongside another prominent Protestant, the mentally unstable renegade Sir Roger Casement.

Carson was too strong in the North, however, and White was invited to Dublin. There he met the Scottish Marxist leader, James Connolly, and offered his services to the working-class cause during the time of the ‘Dublin lock-out’ (Frithdhúnadh Mór Bhaile-Átha-Cliath). White addressed a mass meeting in Liberty Hall and proposed that a drilling scheme be started as a means of bringing discipline “into the distracted ranks of Labour”. Samuel Levenson has commented: “Short-tempered, a commanding speaker, versed in military affairs, he gave lavishly of his knowledge, time and money to the Citizen Army when it was first formed. On the following evening, 13 November, the Civic League held its first meeting, and the formation of the Citizen Army was announced.”

White was to be wounded when an unemployed procession, led by himself and four other Citizen Army leaders, was charged by police. The confrontation shocked conservative Irish opinion, and, soon afterwards, when White offered to put a section of the Citizen Army at the disposal of the Irish Volunteers, the latter organisation replied that it could not enter into relations with a body that had recently been in conflict with the police.

Two incidents while White was in the North highlight the contradictory nature of Irish political attitudes. On one occasion Connolly had booked St Mary’s Hall in Belfast to protest against the agitation for partition. When White addressed the mainly Roman Catholic working-class audience he was given a vociferous reception and an attentive hearing by the capacity audience, while Connolly received a lukewarm reception. The chairman of the meeting, William McMullen, was of the opinion that White’s enthusiastic reception was due to him having forsaken the traditional politics of his family and having come over to the nationalist side. However, when White went to Londonderry to organise a brigade of Irish Volunteers there and was dismayed by the sectarian attitudes some of them held, he was dismissed as just ‘defending his own’ when he tried to reason with them.

When the First World War broke out White joined an Australian ambulance unit, but his association with Casement — who was to be hanged for treason after he tried to obtain guns for the Irish Nationalist cause from the Germans — meant that here too he was constantly regarded with suspicion. His ‘own’ people in Ulster, the unionist establishment, had long regarded him as a ‘Shinner’, so the cycle of suspicion was complete. When Connolly was sentenced to be executed for his part in Dublin’s Easter Rising, White took the one step he felt might save his friend — he rushed to South Wales and tried to bring the Welsh miners out on strike. For that he was sentenced to three months imprisonment.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, White, like many other Irishmen, and indeed Ulstermen, including those from the Shankill Road, went off to fight for the beleaguered Spanish Republic, though he soon expressed disagreement at the way he felt the Communists were manipulating the International Brigades. However, in Spain, White was to witness a situation which convinced him that there was an alternative not only to the stagnant political attitudes of Ireland but to authoritarian Communism. As he recalled later to Albert Meltzer, he discovered, much to his surprise, that a profound social revolution was taking place within the areas controlled by the Spanish Republic.

This popular revolution, spearheaded by anarcho-syndicalists, was attempting to establish a totally new form of society. Factories were taken over by their workers; the countryside by the peasants; Barcelona — a city of one and a quarter million people — was being fed and controlled by its own citizens; and all of this organised in a vast co-operative effort which has been described as “the greatest experiment in worker’s self-management that Western Europe has ever seen”.

White threw himself enthusiastically into this people’s revolution, training Spanish militiamen and village women in Catalonia in the use of firearms, and speaking at meetings in London on behalf of the anarchist trade union, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo). However, the gradual destruction of the revolution by an alliance of Republican and Communist political parties weakened the popular effort in the Civil War and Franco and his Fascist allies eventually overwhelmed the Republic. White returned to Northern Ireland, attempted unsuccessfully to reconcile himself with the Unionist establishment and died a disappointed man in 1940. He is buried in the First Presbyterian Cemetery, Broughshane, County Antrim.

To be continued

In 1937 de Valera was thus able to produce a new Constitution which was in essence a documentation of contemporary Roman Catholic social theory. Not unnaturally it had its attractions for the Catholics of Northern Ireland, especially since Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, who had “turned Ulster into a nation”, had announced three years previously: “all I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state”. A bitter debate had arisen in the Parliament of Northern Ireland on 24 April 1934 on the rights of the minority (the minority in Northern Ireland being Nationalist supporters, who were mostly Catholic), itemising how these had generally deteriorated since 1921. Craigavon denied the assertions at length, ending with: “Since we took up office we have tried to be absolutely fair towards all the citizens of Northern Ireland. Actually, on an Orange platform, I, myself, laid down the principle, to which I still adhere, that I was Prime Minister not of one section of the community but of all, and that as far as I possibly could I was going to see that fair play was meted out to all classes and creeds without any favour whatever on my part.”

George Leeke then retorted: “What about your Protestant Parliament?”, to which Craigavon replied: “The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.”

Similar phrases he used were “That is my whole object in carrying on a Protestant Government for a Protestant people”. The correct phrase was quoted by Jonathan Bardon, and Professor Ronan Fanning, but the common misquotation of “A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People” has been relayed by eminent historians such as Diarmaid Ferriter, Seán Cronin, Patrick Buckland and Mark Tierney, to the extent that this phrase has now become very widely accepted as the actual quotation. In 1967, the then prime minister, Terence O’Neill also attributed the phrase itself to his predecessor, but strongly argued that it was no longer representative of the present spirit of Ulster Unionism. Newspapers continued to use the term in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in relation to the former Stormont Parliament.

Yet from the outset Carson had pleaded that the Catholic minority should have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority: “Let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past. While maintaining intact our own religion let us give the same rights to the religion of our neighbours.” That this reconciliation was not achieved was due to faults on both sides. It is a tragedy of Irish history that the men who now dominated Northern Ireland were far removed in their vision from those radical ancestors who in their own day had shown that the North could be the most enlightened part of the island. On both sides of the ‘Partition’ the political and religious establishments entrenched themselves behind ultra-conservative and rigid mentalities, and within Northern Ireland the two communities became beleaguered, each by the other.

To be continued

In France the human tragedy of Verdun would soon dispel any doubts that may have remained by then that modern warfare, particularly as it was fought out in the mud-filled trenches, was anything other than a man-made obscenity. As the intense German pressure on the French army at Verdun took an ever-increasing toll not just in young French lives but on the very fighting spirit of a once proud army, a new offensive was launched to see if the deadlock could be broken. The place chosen for this offensive was the River Somme.

On the morning of 1 July 1916 a hundred thousand Allied soldiers left their trenches and began a lonely walk across the no-man’s-land which separated them from the German positions. By the end of that day the British Army had suffered 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of them killed — the greatest loss ever suffered in a single day by the British Army or by any army in the First World War. The 36th (Ulster) Division was one of the few units to achieve its objectives that day, yet not only was their gallant success not followed up, but the price they paid was high – with casualties of over five thousand five hundred officers and men, the dead accounting for half of this number.

As Captain W.B. Spender wrote: “I am not an Ulsterman, but yesterday, the 1st July, as I followed their amazing attack, I felt that I would rather be an Ulsterman than anything else in the world. My pen cannot describe adequately the hundreds of heroic acts that I witnessed… The Ulster Volunteer Force, from which the Division was made, has won a name which equals any in history. Their devotion deserves the gratitude of the British Empire.”

It was some days before the closely-knit communities in Ulster became aware of the extent of the sacrifice in young lives. As A.T.Q. Stewart wrote: “In the long streets of Belfast mothers looked out in dread for the red bicycles of the telegram boys. In house after house blinds were drawn down, until it seemed that every family in the city had been bereaved.” A few months later it was the turn of other Irishmen to be flung into the battle, this time the men of the 16th (Irish) Division. This Division included five Ulster battalions and also the 6th Battalion The Connaught Rangers, which contained over 600 Ulstermen recruited mainly from the Falls Road district of West Belfast. The 16th Division is most prominently identified with the capture of the villages of Guillemont and Ginchy.

In his history of the Great War, Frank A. Mumby described the Irish effort: “Our greatest success [on the 3rd September 1916] was the capture of Guillemont by the Irish troops. They advanced on Guillemont with an impetuosity which carried all before it: charged through the German positions with the wild music of their pipes playing them on. Before the afternoon was out the 2000 Prussians who constituted the garrison — with imperative orders to hold the ground at all cost — were killed, wounded, or captured… The same Irish troops charged into Ginchy as they had charged into Guillemont, through the barrage of shells and the storm of machine-gun fire, clambering over shell-holes, fallen trees, and the great mounds of bricks and rubble which were all that remained of the village itself; cheering like mad, and driving the enemy before them in a fierce assault against which nothing could stand.”

Altogether the Battle of the Somme dragged on for four and a half months — a series of offences in a savage war of attrition which resulted in more than 400,000 British casualties for an advance of only six miles. Yet German casualties were probably as high as 700,000 and constituted a severe blow to the German Army. The irony was that soon after the battle ended, the Germans withdrew to the newly constructed Hindenburg Line, giving up ten times more ground than was won at such a cost in 1916. Furthermore, during the German offensive of March 1918, their Army swept over the old Somme battlefield in one day.

It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the Battle of the Somme came to exert such a strong hold on the popular imagination, albeit largely based on myths perpetuated by those who wished to apportion blame for the failure of the offensive, in particular the then Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had political motives for attacking the generals’ conduct of the war. In Ulster, the Somme came to hold a special place in the national consciousness of ordinary people, comparable to that of Gallipoli to the Australians and New Zealanders, Vimy Ridge to the Canadians and Delville Wood to the citizens of South Africa. In fact the Somme became the new Northern Ireland.

On 7 June 1917 the Battle of Messines took place, the first completely successful single operation on the British front, and as H.E.D. Harris has pointed out: “It is also memorable to Irishmen as largely an all-Irish achievement; two of the three divisions in the attacking line were Irish, the 36th on the right and the 16th in the centre of IX Corps, a unique line-up of Irish fighting men, and the largest in modern history. They showed to the world the sight of nearly 30,000 Irishmen shoulder to shoulder, men of all four provinces, and the only rivalry that existed between them was that of gallantry. In his book As from Kemmel Hill, Andrew Behrend wrote: ‘I should like to put on record one further memory of the Battle of Messines. However little it interested me then, it fascinates me today, that during this battle and for weeks before, the 16th (Irish) and the 36th (Ulster) Divisions lived and fought side by side, got on with each other splendidly and at times even pulled each other’s chestnuts out of the fire…’.”

A year later, both Divisions were to receive yet another battering. As Brigadier A.E.C. Bredin commented, the 16th and 36th Divisions “suffered the heaviest losses of any formation during the great German offensive of March, 1918.” A genuine comradeship-in-arms had developed between many Irishmen because of their experiences during the war, but the political situation to which they returned would not suffer such friendships gladly, for Ireland was now heading for its inevitable crisis.

In recent years I was honoured to take Dr Ian Paisley, the Lord Bannside and Baroness Paisley to a Commemoration Service organised by John Ballard of the Orangemen of my native village of Conlig for their Brethren of  Ards and North Down (Dal Fiatach) at the Somme Museum at Whitespots. This is held annually on 24th June when the Barrage commenced signalling the start of the Somme Campaign. The date is also significant in that on Tuesday, 24th June 637 was fought the great Battle of Moira in County Down. Such important dates have been lost to us in the Academic Suppression but thankfully we are now able to speak of our own history.

To be continued

Commenting on the fears raised by the spectre of Home Rule, Rory Fitzpatrick has written:
“There was a widespread assumption that Home Rule would mean the greatest eviction that Ireland had ever seen — the turning-out of the Scots-Irish from their lands, their factories and their homes. Ulster was filled with rumours of Protestant property being raffled at Catholic churches in anticipation. ‘Lots were drawn,’ says Frankfort Moore, ‘for certain houses, with the grounds, timber and livestock.’ In Belfast, people living in the more prosperous part of the city ‘were surprised to come suddenly upon strangers measuring their lawns and examining their fences’. One householder politely asked an intruder what he was doing: ‘The man replied with equal civility, that he had merely come to have a good look at the place, as he had been fortunate enough to win it in the raffle… by the Nationalist club.’

No doubt the impracticalities of an immediate wholesale expropriation of Protestant property — a reversal of the Plantation settlement — was realised at the higher levels of nationalist leadership, but within the Roman Catholic rank and file the expectation was there. Not since 1641 had so many spectres stalked the Ulster landscape. A British Prime Minister was preparing to sell the Ulster Protestants for a handful of parliamentary votes. They would be ruled by a Catholic administration in Dublin, with Catholic judges and a Catholic police; they would lose the industries which had made Belfast a great city (the chairman of the Belfast shipyard said he would move his firm to Scotland if Home Rule came about); and looming very close to them now was the menacing figure of the now infallible Pope whom they — and many Catholics — believed would be the real ruler of Ireland.”

In 1884 the Gaelic Athletic Association had been formed, which promoted hurling and Gaelic football and forbade the playing of “foreign games”. In 1893 the Anglican Douglas Hyde co-founded the Gaelic League, which had as its aim the ‘de-Anglicization’ of Ireland. From this sprang Gaelic nationalism: “Ireland not free only, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic only, but free as well.” Strangely enough, through the sentimentalist poets Yeats and Lady Gregory, a pseudo-Celtic Twilight Culture was created, which not only bowdlerised, but Anglicised the old Gaelic literature out of all recognition.

The political manifestation of the ‘Gaelic Revival’ was the foundation of ‘Sinn Fein’ (We Ourselves)  in 1905. This movement soon attracted and was taken over by the veteran Fenians. At the same time there was a growth of Marxist philosophy, and an active socialist movement was led by James Connolly and James Larkin. Connolly, however, tried to use Gaelic nationalism to further his own ideals, thus compromising the Labour movement in both Ireland and Britain. The blending of Roman Catholic and ‘Celtic’ mysticism created in people as diverse as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly the myth of the blood sacrifice, which was to have lasting consequences.

Perceiving all these forces as threats the Northern Protestants formed an Ulster Unionist Council to resist Home Rule. Civil War now seemed inevitable. In 1912 almost half a million Ulster Protestants signed a ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ whereby they swore to use “all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament in Ireland.” 1913 saw the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force under Sir Edward Carson and Sir James Craig, the Irish Citizen Army under James Connolly and the Irish Volunteers under Eoin MacNeill of the Gaelic League. Irishmen were girding themselves for the approaching conflict.

When the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed, Eoin MacNeill, President of the Irish Volunteers and author of The Pretanic Background to Britain and Ireland, tried to paint an optimistic picture of this marshalling of Northern Protestant forces: “A wonderful state of things has come to pass in Ulster… The Ulster Volunteer movement is essentially and obviously a home rule movement. [It is] the most decisive move towards Irish autonomy since O’Connell invented constitution agitation. It claims, no doubt, to hold Ireland ‘for the Empire’; but what really matters is by whom Ireland is to be held.” However, few could have been so easily beguiled, even MacNeill himself, by the seriousness of the situation now developing. And yet, ironically, the conflict that would soon fall upon them would be of European, not of Irish, making, for on 4 August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany.

To be continued

When in Leinster House during the Queen’s visit, as Chairman of the Somme Association, I was shown the original flag of Meagher’s Irish Brigade, who fought with such distinction in the Civil War The Irish tricolor was not adopted as the official flag of Ireland until after the country became a free state on 6th December 1921. But it had been around for nearly 80 years, albeit with its colours rearranged, having first been flown by Thomas Francis Meagher, a militant nationalist, in 1848 as the flag of the Young Ireland movement.

A monument at the Antietam battlefield was dedicated in his honour. The inscription on the granite monument reads:
“The Irish Brigade commander was born in Waterford City, Ireland on August 23, 1823; a well educated orator, he joined the Young Ireland movement to liberate his nation. This led to his exile to a British Penal Colony in Tasmania Australia in 1849. He escaped to the United States in 1852 and became an American citizen. When the Civil War broke out, he raised Company K, Irish Zouaves, for the 69th New York State Militia Regiment, which fought at First Bull Run under Colonel Michael Corcoran.

Subsequently Meagher raised the Irish Brigade and commanded it from February 3, 1862 to May 14, 1863 till later he commanded a military district in Tennessee. After the War Meagher became Secretary and Acting Governor of the Montana Territory. He drowned in the Missouri River near Fort Benton on July 1, 1867. His body was never recovered. The cicumstances of Meagher’s demise are unclear. He had made many enemies, none less than the American Indian Nations, his policies towards whom had amounted to no less than what we would now call ethnic cleansing and which have coloured his reputation.

The following United States Presidents have been of direct Ulster descent: Andrew Jackson (1829-37), James Knox Polk (1845-49), James Buchanan (1857-61), Andrew Johnson (1865-69), Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), Chester Alan Arthur (1881-85), Grover Cleveland (1885-89 and 1893-97), Benjamin Harrison (1889-93), William McKinley (1897-1901), and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21).

Many other famous Americans have some Ulster ancestry, from writers such as Stephen Foster, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, to astronauts Neil Armstrong and James B. Irwin. John Hughes the first Catholic Archbishop of New York was born at Auger in County Tyrone, and emigrated to America in 1817, prior to  that second great exodus from Ireland which occurred a century after the immigrations from Ulster, mainly composed of Irish Catholics fleeing from a land devastated by the Great Famine, an Gorta Mór. The highly influential Hughes became known as “Dagger John”, both for his following the Catholic practice wherein a bishop precedes his signature with a cross, as well as for his aggressive personality. His successor and first American Cardinal, John McCloskey, was born in Dungiven in County Londonderry.

There are many modern Americans who still take pride in their descent from Ulster-Irish families, though they often know little of Ulster itself. Not many of them are now Presbyterians, for most became Methodists and Baptists according to conscience. This was due to old-time preachers whose traditions also lived on in America’s Black community to be personified by Martin Luther King. Yet, until recently, very little about the Ulster contribution to America was taught in our schools and universities. As Harold R. Alexander has written: “The migration of the Ulster people was a diaspora similar to that of the Jews. North America provided ample scope for the national character and soaring vision of men of Ulster origin… It is sad that almost nothing of this is known in Ulster today. English ascendancy and Irish chauvinism have combined to suppress knowledge of Ulster and Ulster-American history, to deny the very concept of the Ulster nation at home or overseas, and to deprive Ulstermen of legitimate pride in their heritage and national identity.”

James G. Leyburn’s estimation of Scotch-Irish influence on the formation of the early United States includes the following assessment: “Weber’s idea of the Protestant ethic and Tawney’s of the connection between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism do not find their most convincing example in the Scotch-Irish; nevertheless, like other Calvinists, they believed in self-reliance, improving their own condition in life, thrift and hard work, the taking of calculated risks. They believed that God would prosper His elect if they, in turn, deserved this material reward by their conscientious effort. Farmers though they generally were, neither they nor their ancestors had been peasants in the sense of blind traditionalism of outlook. Their optimistic self-reliance, with a conviction that God helps those who help themselves, was to become the congenial American folk philosophy of the next century, not far removed from materialism and a faith in progress.

The Scotch-Irish were no more the originators of these American convictions than they had been the originators of the idea of freedom and individualism. What is significant is that, holding the attitude they did, and being present in such large numbers throughout most of the United States, they afforded the middle ground that could become typical of the American as he was to become. The Scotch-Irish element could be the common denominator into which Americanism might be resolved.”

To be continued

Disillusionment with conservative Catholicism came for the Young Irelanders when McHale of Tuam and the bishops insisted that Roman Catholic students at the newly founded Queen’s Colleges could not attend lectures on history, logic, anatomy, geology, metaphysics or moral philosophy “without exposing their faith and morals to imminent danger”, unless the lecturers were Roman Catholics. Furthermore, O’Connell’s call for a “Catholic parliament for a Catholic people” unfortunately signalled the rebirth of Catholic nationalism, that independent form of Irish Nationalism, alien to the ideals of ’98, which brought back bitter memories of Catholic sectarianism to Ulster’s Protestants. As O’Connell said, Protestants were seen as  “foreigners to us since they are of a different religion”. Yet the reality was that he was the foremost constitutional parliamentarian of his age. His mass peaceful mobilisation of the Irish people into the parliamentary process, resulting in Catholic Emancipation, was a template followed by many in later years. Not only was he a Liberator to his own people , he was a leading figure in the development of democracy and human rights in Europe. His commitment to the democratic process was best explained when in The Nation newspaper on the 18th November 1843 he wrote:

“The principle of my political life …. is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than they cure, and leave the country worse than when they found it”

While time may have distanced us from the impact he had on his age, his importance can be judged from those whom he influenced.  William Gladstone for instance described him as “the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen.” Balzac said “I would like to have met three men only in this century: Napoleon, Cuvier and O’Connell.” These few words testify in their fashion to the extraordinary impact left by O’Connell on European thought. William Grenville wrote that ” history will speak of him as one of the most remarkable men who ever lived.” Frederick Douglas wrote that “No transatlantic statesman bore a testimony more marked and telling against the curse of slavery than did Daniel O’Connell”.

However, an event was now to occur which was to change the social, economic and ultimately the political history of Ireland. The failure of the staple potato crop led to the Great Famine of 1845-49, probably the single most traumatic event in the island’s history, striking right to the very heart of Irish life . Up to a million of the starving and disease-ridden population would perish. The total demoralisation engendered by the tragedy not only dealt a near-fatal blow to the lingering beliefs in the ‘protective magic’ of the ancient Elder Faiths — which were still patently strong — but lent new impetus to the upsurge of nationalist sentiment. As if the loss of life caused by the Famine was not enough, Ireland was to lose a further million citizens during the massive emigration which followed. Many did not get beyond Glasgow and Liverpool. Other emigrants formed in the U.S.A. an unwanted nation within a nation, the Irish-Americans, whose influence on the further history of Ireland was profound.

Following the American Civil War (1861-65), the Irish-Americans formed a recruiting source for the violent anti-British Fenian movement. Founded in 1858 by James Stephens, who had fought in the Young Ireland rising of 1848, the Fenian Brotherhood saw themselves as the inheritors of the ideals of Tone and Davis. Believing that they could provoke an Anglo-American confrontation which would provide an opportune setting for revolt in Ireland, a party of Fenians made a raid on Canada in 1866. This was unsuccessful, as was an Irish uprising in 1867, and further invasion of Canadian territory in 1870 and 1871.

The bravery and tenacity to the ideals of ’98 shown by the Young Irelanders and Fenians influenced a former Unionist, Isaac Butt, who had spoken against Daniel O’Connell in his youth, to form the Home Government Association. A member of Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, Butt’s conservatism was supplemented by a great love of his country. One of the first Ulstermen to join the Home Government Association was John Madden, brother of a prominent Monaghan Orangeman. Madden felt alienated by Episcopalian disestablishment. The Home Government Association gradually grew in acceptability and size so that it became necessary to reconstitute the movement. The Home Rule League was therefore formed in 1873.

This was a turning point and, as Chris McGimpsey has said,  the evolution of Home Government Association to Home Rule League also signalled the movement away from aspects of Orange Home Rule and Protestant élite nationalism into a more O’Connellite, popular, democratic and Roman Catholic movement. After the election of 1874, therefore, Butt led a revamped Home Rule Party in the Westminster parliament.

To be continued

His progressive thinking had already led McCracken to confront the establishment in Belfast. In 1788 he and some friends voluntarily organised education classes for the working class of Belfast, who were being denied such education because of their poverty. Interference from the Town Sovereign, Rev William Bristow, compelled them to cease this experiment, but McCracken soon afterwards established a cheap lending library in opposition to the Belfast Reading Society, whose charges were so high that only the rich could afford to borrow books.

When hostilities finally broke out on 24 May, they quickly took on the character of a religious and bloody war in the South. In the North, McCracken managed to rally twenty-five Antrim regiments numbering some twelve thousand men, with as many again from Down, supported by contingents from Tyrone and Armagh. He addressed his men in confident tone: “Army of Ulster, tomorrow we march on Antrim; drive the garrison of Randalstown before you and haste to form a junction with your Commander-in-Chief.”

McCracken’s confidence was misplaced. The Ulster Presbyterians were dismayed by the lukewarm support from the Northern Catholics, and then horrified by the stories of atrocity and massacre of Protestants at Scullabogue on 5 June. Nevertheless, on 7 June, the United Army of Ulster took Larne and Antrim, but was soon defeated and Henry Joy captured. On 9 June the ‘Hearts of Down’ won the Saintfield skirmish and proceeded to Ballynahinch, where on 13 June they were decisively defeated and their leader Henry Munro captured and hanged.

On 26th June 1798, my ancestor Archibel Wilson of Conlig was hanged, aged only 26 years, at the Far Rocks above my home village of Conlig for his part in the Rebellion. He died protesting his innocence and indeed it was a family tradition that his sister was the real leader of the Hearts of Down in the area.The gallows tree with chain was still there when I was a boy. The rebels certainly were very active in Conlig and letters from the village at the time are kept in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. I used to visit Archibel’s grave in Bangor Abbey Graveyard regularly on my way home from Bangor Grammar School to Conlig. It is recorded in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology that he was hanged off Bangor Pier but Granny Kerr nee Sloan said otherwise. Some years ago I was sent a copy of his Court-martial in Newtownards confirming Granny’s opinion rather than the academics, so I have retained a healthy scepticism of academics ever since.

On 17 July the noble Henry Joy was executed in Belfast. His devoted sister Mary Ann wrote lovingly of his last moments:
I took his arm and we walked together to the place of execution, where I was told it was the General’s orders that I should leave him, which I peremptorily refused. Harry begged I would go. Clasping my hands around him, (I did not weep till then) I said I could bear anything but leaving him. Three times he kissed me and entreated I would go; and, looking round to recognise some friend to put me in charge of he beckoned to a Mr Boyd, and said ‘He will take charge of you.’… and fearing any further refusal would disturb the last moments of my dearest brother, I suffered myself to be led away.

As Packenham commented, McCracken was “a gentle, idealistic man, and determined that the rising in the North, at any rate, would not be disgraced by a counter-terror in the name of liberty. And to this principle he remained true in all the horrors of the succeeding week. In contrast to the wild scenes in the South, the northern United men acted with notable restraint [during] the short-lived Republic of Ulster.”

Thus did the rebellion in Ulster collapse.

To be continued

On 1 April 1791 a group of progressive thinkers met in Peggy Barclay’s tavern in Belfast with the purpose of forming a society to promote the ideals that were inspiring so many of the Belfast radicals, men like Dr William Drennan, Robert and William Simms, Thomas McCabe, Henry Joy McCracken and Samuel Neilson. The natural extension of this meeting was the invitation to the young Dublin lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone to come to Belfast on 14 October 1791, on which date was founded the Society of United Irishmen “to form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion.” Tone recorded in his Diary during his first visit to Ulster in July that Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man had already become “the Koran of Blefescu”, as he nicknamed Belfast in his private correspondence.

In December the proclamation which led to the famous harpers’ festival declared that “some inhabitants of Belfast, feeling themselves interested in everything which relates to the Honour, as well as the Prosperity of their country, propose to open a subscription which they intend to apply in attempting to revive and perpetuate the ancient music and poetry of Ireland.”The following year the United Irish Society established a radical newspaper, The Northern Star, in Belfast, edited by Samuel Neilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

In 1793 Britain declared war on France, and Pitt, the British Prime Minister, pressurised the Irish government to raise a largely Catholic militia to defend Ireland for the Crown. The Volunteers were at the same time disbanded by proclamation, and the proprietors of The Northern Star prosecuted. The Society of United Irishmen, or Liberty Men as they knew themselves, rapidly became a secret, oathbound movement dedicated to the overthrow of the state. In 1794 a Church of Ireland clergyman, the Rev William Jackson, landed in Ireland as an agent of the French government, and was captured the following year in possession of a paper which sketched a republican uprising. This paper described the Presbyterians of Ulster as “the most enlightened body of the nation”. Jackson was charged with treason and executed in April 1795. Suspicion also fell on Wolfe Tone, who was thus forced to leave for America. Before he did do, he and the Northern leaders, Tom Neilson, Henry Joy McCracken and Thomas Russell, ascended the Cave Hill outside Belfast, where they swore to overthrow the power of England in Ireland for ever.

However, the American War of Independence had also closed the door to further emigration from Ulster for the present, and sectarian rivalry for land began to come into prominence again. In September 1795, following a long period of disturbances, Catholic ‘Defenders’ attacked a notorious Protestant ‘Peep o’Day Boys’ tavern at the Diamond in County Armagh, and were defeated in a pitched battle. Out of this skirmish was born the Orange Society which was to develop later into the Orange Order. In the autumn of 1796 a new force named the Yeomanry was enlisted for the government in Ulster, and these were chiefly Orangemen.

Yet the majority of the Presbyterians of Ulster remained true to the ideals of the United Irishmen, who had now received a new convert in the tragic young Protestant aristocrat, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. In March 1797 the government decided to disarm the North, and this was done with great cruelty by General Lake. Belfast, in particular, suffered the scourge of the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking Monaghan Militia. By May the whole island was put under martial law, and many atrocities were committed both by British Army regiments such as the ‘Ancient Britons’, a Welsh cavalry regiment, and the Orange Yeomen. The latter were not a mass movement at this time but a small, mostly agrarian society who represented the interests of the landed gentry, particularly in Monaghan and Armagh. It is doubtful, however, if United Irish feeling would have remained strong in Ulster if it had not been for the hanging of one of the Presbyterian leaders, William Orr, in September 1797. ‘Remember Orr’ was a slogan as long imprinted on the hearts of Antrim as was ‘Betsy Gray’ later on the ‘Hearts of Down’.

To be continued

Although the Scotch-Irish were merging quickly now into the American nation, the Ulster speech itself was to stay alive in the hill-country of Appalachia and beyond, where Scotch-Irish traditional music may still be heard. Among the earliest songs were ballads of King William of Orange, so those who sung them became known as Billy-boys of the hill country or ‘hillbillies’. No attestation of the Scots or Northern English term “billie” meaning “friend” or “comrade” has been found in America apart from Bruce in 1801, so deriving “hillbilly” from this term is almost certainly incorrect. But William of Orange had a strong connection to the Appalachians through William and Mary College in Virginia, the intellectual epicentre of the Old Confederacy. “Hillbilly” like “Redneck” is used by outsiders in a derogatory manner and therefore generally avoided by the mountain people, except in a jocular or self-deprecating way. The first written attestation of the term by outsiders in America was as late as 1898.

Rooted deep in the traditions of the British Isles peasantry, the fiddle had become an instrument of major importance in the development of Irish, Scottish and Welsh jigs, reels and hornpipes. As with folk custom in general, traditional music themes reinforced the ancient cultural divide between North and West Britain and Ireland, and South and East Britain. Transposed to America, the hoe-down fiddle reached the peak of its development in the Southern States. Musicologist W.H. Williams has written: “Ireland’s initial impact upon American music came predominantly from Ulster… Whatever their influence in terms of cabin and barn styles, field layout, town planning, and so on, it seems likely that the greatest and most lasting contribution of the Scotch-Irish was music. And however one may define their particular religious and ethnic identity, musically they should be considered Ulstermen, for they brought with them the mixture of Scottish and Irish tunes which is still characteristic of large parts of Northern Ireland. When the great English folklorist Cecil Sharp went into the Appalachians to rediscover ‘English’ folk song, he was in fact often dealing with people of Ulster descent. Wherever they settled in large numbers and remained in relative isolation, balladry has been found ‘live and in a healthy condition’.”

The epitome of the various influences of Scotch-Irish music is Van Morrison, our greatest living musician . And that music is the oldest, deepest music in America that exists, carried from the western highland fringe of Europe by that most ancient of peoples, the Pretani, to the Appalachian mountains. It is a Serpentine trail, one made by the mountains themselves, as that vein of green mineral can be found from Georgia to Nova Scotia and on through Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall to the very Orkneys themselves. So are we made by the mountains and our music also, from the Gaelic singing of Stornoway to the Caledonian soul, from the choral psalmody of Bangor and St Gallen to the Hill songs of Tennessee. For Van searched it and rehearsed it, and he called it the birth of the Blues.

To be continued