Migratory flows (16th–19th century)

The 1921 partition sets the 98% Catholic Irish Republic apart from the Protestant majority entrenched in the “Province” – alongside a Papist minority. Placed at a demographic disadvantage on the scale of the island, the Protestants developed a paranoid siege mentality. Thus, belonging to their community – the declared superiority of which was deemed essential to its security – came to take precedence over the person, their rights, conditions and prospects. Even poor Protestants considered themselves superior to the Catholics for the reason pure and simple that they belonged to the dominant group. Far from being understood as a democratic verdict, the political majority was experienced as the rule of numbers. Any reform towards equal rights would come to be perceived by the Protestants as discriminatory towards them. Political parties were formed along this social cleavage and politics became “ethnic” in order to secure an ongoing Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. Cronyism became the norm in local administration, the police, teaching, employment and housing, causing Catholic exasperation and, starting in 1966, demonstrations towards obtaining their full rights.

Anti-Catholicism can be traced right back to the Reformation. By the mid 19^th century, the feeling had been institutionalised in a sort of national mindset wherein Papism^[1] was seen as an obstacle to authentic Britishness. Their Majesties' loyal subjects considered the Catholics devoted to the Pope because, in his 1570 Regnans in Excelsis Bull excommunicating Elisabeth I^[2], Pius V had released the Catholics from the oath of allegiance given the sovereign. This contributed heavily to their image as potential traitors to the fatherland. The Irish elites' calls for support to Catholic monarchs, be they Philip II^[3], Louis XIV^[4] or Louis XV^[5], did little to dispel Protestant prejudice. Though no longer faith-driven, Catholic pleas for foreign help still aroused fears of rear attacks launched on the main island from an Irish bridgehead. Memories of the 1798 atrocities and of Revolutionary General Humbert's expedition loomed large in the rationale for a Union between Ireland and England as duly passed in 1801. Imperial Germany's delivery of weapons for the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, closely followed by the decimation of almost exclusively Protestant Ulster regiments on the Somme, came to reinforce that foreboding. And the Republic's policies during WWII would justify it : the lights shining in the self-declared neutral Irish Republic helped Luftwaffe bombers to locate blacked-out Belfast. As for the Catholic Diaspora, it was perceived as stirring up the violence at home : the convents, seminaries and other Irish establishments scattered about from Holland to Portugal, until most of them got shut by French Revolutionary armies, were seen as hotbeds of fanaticism stoked up by the Jesuits^[6] rather than places for the education of the young in their faith, or the training of clergy (who would later return secretly to the island). Later, Noraid (Irish Northern Aid), outwardly an American charity would be nailed as a donor to the IRA (Irish Republican Army).

Unconditional acquiescence to papal authority translates for those Protestants into submission to a foreign power, that is a theological error and worse still a shameful abdication of individual freedom and principled loyalism. Hence the rallying cry of « No Popery ! » that vindicates the promotion of individualism and anti-absolutist liberalism. In Protestant traditions, the cleavage between lay people and their clergy is more blurred, sometimes more egalitarian ; they share education and political loyalties ; it is an essentially moral leadership that distinguishes the latter. As if the sorry lack of democracy epitomised by the primacy granted to priesthood were not enough, the Catholic Church was further accused of stultifying the believers. The Protestants' indictment rests upon the ‘sacrilegious' cult of the saints, ‘idolatry' of the Blessed Virgin Mary and blind superstitions accepting of any old miracle, or venerating early martyrs' relics. The Catholic Church was suspected of perversely pressurising its congregations for ulterior motives. Its clergy's sexual morality was brought into question. Already in 1532, Article 32 Of the Marriage of Priests attacked the unnatural situation imposed on priesthood by compulsory celibacy. While homosexuality received little attention before the 20^th century, stories of priests abusing their housekeeper or of chaplains seducing their charge in the religious houses entrusted to them enjoyed an unbroken success in books and pamphlets. Regular and secular clergy suffered equal opprobrium and Protestant writers, painters and cartoonists declared open season on the convent and the confessional.

The men of no popery

http://www.iol.ie/~fagann/1798/orange.htm

Protestant anxiety regarding those institutions came to the fore more than ever after the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 when they were seen as a threat against daughters and wives. If orgy scenes got less of an airing than they had done in the gothic novels of the 18^th century's last decades, attention turned to innocent young girls locked for the rest of their life, separated from their family and from society. Mothers superior were accused, for good measure, of seeking to appropriate the nuns' personal wealth forcibly detaining them once, having ‘come to their senses', they wished to be released. As for the confessional, it was tainted with spiritual abuse, improper talk, indeed alleged immoral acts. As would some secular French, the Protestants had reservations about women's vote in their belief that it would come under the direction of the Catholic priest (and the nefarious powers a certain English literature had endowed him with), thus trespassing on the father or husband's authority in matters educational, familial, political, or indeed purely sentimental. Even when sectarianism stopped at the open acknowledgment of its connection with sexual issues, it occasionally let it slip dimly in the vocabulary it resorted to. Thus truth – Protestant truth, that is – was routinely associated with the love of purity whereas lies and duplicity – quintessentially Catholic – went hand in hand with sexual drive and prostitution. Some of the classical insults levelled by Protestants at the Roman church have rejoiced in the Book of Revelation's dire warnings against the « whore », the         « scarlet woman of Babylon ».

The reasons called upon in support of mistrusting the Catholics were reinforced by stereotyped images of the Celts' unbridled sexuality, and their inclination towards irrationality and violence. The 1641 bloodshed and the Moonlighters^[7]' exactions are summoned in evidence along with the pre-independence civil war and later IRA outrages. These disturbing, restless, rash ‘sub-humans', given monkey-like attributes by Punch magazine fully deserved the rigours of the Inquisition^[8] rather than the protection warranted by habeas corpus^[9]. With such a populace, and thus abandoned to its own devices, politically ‘backwards' Ireland was sure to lag behind economically as did many a Catholic nation in the 17^th and 18^th centuries ; that's what a simplified reading of Max Weber's theses in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism lead one to believe. Post-independence, the Northern Protestants' worse forebodings seemed vindicated first by the unrest then by the new Republic's options : De Valera^[10] presided over a protectionist state subject to the censorship of the Register of Prohibited Publications that would cause the likes of Beckett and Joyce to leave the island. The Church, whose role was enshrined in the constitution, regimented education, health, lifestyles so that from the sixties on, the bans on divorce, contraception and abortion brought the country into sharp contrast with liberal Britain and its fast evolving society. Accordingly, it was imperative for the North to protect itself from its impoverished ‘backward-looking' neighbour, the more dangerous since its constitution claimed the entire island of Ireland as its national territory.