SOUTHERN PROTESTANTS

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Just looking at their Twitter account, The Long Room Hub is an intellectual and visual ferment 24/7. And why not. It is a great facility and it's in a university.

I ended up there last Wednesday (11/4/2018) at a talk on the very provocative subject you see illustrated on the opening screen in the illustration above. I was certainly looking forward to the talk. The assimilation of Southern Protestants, or what's left of them, is truly a saga in itself. But how I came to be there has a much more obscure cause, or more properly causes.

Ida Milne & Ian d'Alton

I worked with Ian d'Alton in the long defunct Department of Economic Planning at the end of the 1970s. I lost contact with him when that Department was beheaded by Charlie Haughey though I have been aware of his distinguished public service career since. It is only in very recent times that I have bumped into him again and it was this that led me to his talk in the Hub rather than the subject matter as such.

Ida is a different kettle of fish. I had never heard of Ida until recently, when I learned of her forthcoming book, Stacking the Coffins, which deals with the 1918 flu epidemic. I am working on a talk which takes a whimsical look at death in my family. I have infant death, TB, drownings (plural), war and even a possible double poisoning. My plan is to talk about these causes of death in a thematic way and illustrate this with family examples. It was only when I learned of Ida's forthcoming book that I realised I had no examples of flu deaths in the family despite the prevalence of the epidemic at the time.

So my real reason for being in the Hub was Ian and Ida rather than the Southern Protestants as such. But thinking on the matter I figured who better to give a talk on Southern Protestants than two Southern Protestants.

The term Southern Protestants is a contested one. Referring to the Republic as the South has many adverse connotations which it might be wise to avoid, but then what do you say? The Free State has a cut off point in 1937 and the Twenty Six Counties is clumsy, not to mention it reminding us forcibly of the other six. So, as Ian says, Southern is a term of convenience and we'll stick with it.

The talk was a teaser/trailer for a book that is in gestation, or possibly in the labour ward. It's title is Protestant and Irish and it consists of more than a dozen essays dealing with the Southern Protestant experience, many of them case histories.

Eunan O'Halpin

The session was introduced by Eunan O'Halpin who is Professor of Contemporary History in TCD.

I'm not going to go through the talk seriatim. In fact I may say very little about the talk itself as an audio podcast will be available on the Hub's Soundcloud page shortly. [Update 15/1/2019: for technical reasons the podcast never appeared.]

The method of delivery was one I had not come across before. It wasn't quite a duet as the two presenters did not both speak at the same time. More like an agallamh beirte where they alternated covering a few paragraphs at a time. I've no clue how this alternation related to content or authorship. Suffice it to say it gave them both a crack of the whip while the audience got a seamless presentation. Some lessons here for Stormont maybe.

The book's contributions are grouped under three themes: belonging, engaging, and other(ness).

Protestants spanned the full range of Irish life but generally at the top of the heap. Today's generation may well be unaware of this, being less preoccupied with the other person's religion, if any.

The slide above gives some idea of this spread. Some of the names will be familiar but their religion less so.

It is very easy at this remove to underestimate the shock of Southern Independence to Southern Protestants. Could they succeed in belonging to this new, somewhat alien, entity? Did they even want to? How best to engage with it? To what extent would they remain "other"?

How these questions were answered would have implications right down to my own time.

Before the talk, in conversation with Ian, I mentioned the hate counter in Hodges Figgis which was there up to the start of the 1970s. This was an obscure corner at the back end of the shop which was packed with anti Roman Catholic literature. Ian had been totally unaware of it. Mind you it didn't last long after Michael Viney's exposé in the Irish Times but it was interesting that it had survived unscathed for so long.

I picked up a pamphlet advising Protestants never to marry a Roman Catholic. I don't think that would be viewed too kindly today but you could see where it was coming from. The Protestant community was a tiny minority and the Roman Catholic Church insisted that all children of (religiously) mixed marriages should be raised as Catholics.

There was a famous, or rather infamous, case in the 1950s in Fethard on Sea, which is Ida's part of the country. The whole saga was very confrontational across the religious divide and even RC Bishop Michael Browne, or cross Michael as he was known, got involved though Fethard is far from his Galway bishopric. He was one of the terrible trio of his day with Connie Lucy in Cork and John Charles McQuaid in Dublin.

Whatever about the formal confrontation which involved a boycott of Protestant businesses, Ida suggests that there was a much more live and let live process attempting to break out behind the scenes.

Ida mentioned that as far back as 1798 when Protestant ascendancy landowners were being burned out of the big house, her own people were saved by local Catholic neighbours.

I always knew that the GAA was a force for community development but I also thought of it as Catholic. It had not occurred to me that it was also a force for integration across the religious divide.

For historical reasons the business class in Ireland tended to be Protestant at least at the level of management and that took a long time to normalise. Guinness and Dockrell come most immediately to my mind.

If I can be excused a little bit of celebrity puff here to mention Bono. His parents had a mixed marriage (in fact two of them) in 1950 and it did not seem to go down too well with either family. Despite having been married in the Protestant church in Drumcondra, the local curate in Dolphin's Barn dragooned them into a second marriage in his church which he duly registered with the State making them doubly civilly married, a process for which there is not yet a word in the English language, as far as I know. I'm suggesting bonomy.

As far as the rural scene is concerned I'd just mention the experience of Colm Ó Gaora in Bangor Erris in Co. Mayo in the early 20th century.

Colm O'Gaora was a young teacher and a timire for Conradh na Gaeilge. He was new to the Irish speaking Bangor Erris disrict in Co. Mayo when he met a man along the road. "Dia dhuit" (God be with you) says he, in the traditional Irish greeting. The immediate and vehement reply took him aback: "May God and Mary bless you and may bad luck strike you down you dirty old Protestant".

It's a lovely story and it illustrates the depth of feeling across the religious divide in some rural areas. If you want to get the key to the "conversation", and my little bit of "poetic licence", have a look at my review of Colm's book.

There was a fairly lively Q&A after the talk with many contributions and questions from a packed, and in parts, distinguished audience.

I know I haven't done the talk justice and have rambled all over the place. But I'm in my anecdotage and there is nothing stopping you listening to the whole thing once the podcast goes up, and you can read the book once it hits the streets. [Update 15/1/2019: for technical reasons the podcast never appeared. However the book will hit the streets shortly.]

BIPOLAR WORLD

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I grew up in a bipolar world.

There were the Catholics, who might eventually get to Heaven if they successfully jumped the many hurdles of life, a lot of which were put in their way by their own church.

And there were the others, who ended up elsewhere, unless they somehow managed to contrive a deathbed conversion, accompanied by repentance for the perverse life they had lived and a firm purpose of amendment. This last bit would not, by then, be partcularly relevant.

The Protestants next door, while admittedly very nice people, were heading in the wrong direction. Adherents of the heretic Luther and followers of the serial adulterer Henry VIII, on whose bollix their church had been founded. Nice people but delusional.

As for the Jews. Well they crucified Christ so what could they reasonably expect in the next life.

And the rest of the world which worshipped false gods or none. Well, the less said the better.

And within the Catholic church it was the "sacrament" of confession which kept you morally afloat in this sea of troubles called life. The slate had to be periodically wiped clean of your horrendous crimes like missing mass or taking pleasure in the odd dirty thought, not to mention the other thing.

Looking back on it all, it is hard to believe it ever existed in all its perversity. You could not explain it to the present generation of youth, though I'll grant you they have their own hurdles to jump, but not these particular ones.

The greatest scandal was probably the rift within Christianity. Bitter spiritual enmity between neighbours, sustained by adherence to outdated and misunderstood medieval theological concepts.

As a Catholic, you could not even enter a Protestant church lest your faith be contaminated. As for attending their services, God forbid. And marrying one of them, Jesus wept, though you might get permission from the Bishop in an emergency.

"Outside the Church there is no salvation".

Now, if I am losing your attention at this point, let me give you a concrete example which will keep you on your toes.

Bob Hewson and Iris Rankin on one of their wedding days

I was recently accused of being related to Bono, perish the thought. But it led me to chasing up his ancestors in a frantic rush to put down this calumny before it took root. This involved looking into births, marriages and deaths and carefully examining all sorts of certificates. I had to find out "who were his people?" and, more importantly, were they also my people.

In the course of pursuing this investigation I took a look at a few U2 websites and quickly realised that there had been some controversy over where and when his parents had married. Not that they hadn't, just the where and the when. The online discussion was finally put to bed by the production of a letter from the Rector saying that they had been married on the 19th of August 1950 in the Protestant church in Drumcondra.

In chasing up this particular marriage through the civil registration system I came across a serious anomaly. The Drumcondra marriage had only been their first. There was yet more to come.

Six months later they remarried in the Catholic church in Dolphin's Barn, on 20th December 1950.

So what does this tell you about the bipolar world of my formative years. I was six at the time and just approaching the age of reason.

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Let's see what we can learn from the relevant marriage certs.

But first a bit of background. Both the Hewsons (Bono's father's family) and the Rankins (his mother's family) lived on the Oxmantown estate off Aughrim St. in Dublin's north inner city. The Hewsons were Catholic, the Rankins Protestant.

My own family, whose forbears had also lived on the estate, tell me that Iris was a looker but the boys were told to stay away from her because she was a Protestant. Clearly Bob Hewson took no notice of this edict and they ended up getting married.

So what do the certs tell us of the world they lived in? The first cert tells us that Bob was living at home but Iris wasn't. She gave her address as Melrose Avenue, in Fairview, a good walk from Oxmantown. Whether she was living there connected with her work or whether she had to leave home because of the impending marriage is not clear.

What is clear is that there do not appear to have been any Hewsons at the wedding. The normal practice would be for the best man and bridesmaid, witnesses to the marriage, to come one each from either side of the family. In this case it is Rankins only, Iris's siblings. I had originally thought that this signified Iris's rejection by the Hewson family but I was reminded of what I said earlier, that Catholics were not allowed inside Protestant churches and in any event might not have been welcome in those days.

Anyway, the happy couple moved in together in Haroldsville Avenue, Rialto, where they seem to have been discovered cohabiting by the local curate who recommended they regularise their relationship in the eyes of Mother Church as soon as possible. At least that's my take on it. There is no disputing the next step, however, and they were duly married, again, in the run up to Christmas in Dolphin's Barn church..

This time there don't appear to have been any Rankins present and the priest was so strapped for witnesses that he had to press his housekeeper into service.

But he did more than that. In those days the churches were authorised civil marriers and you simply signed the civil register in the vestry. So Father Muleady followed the normal practice and the marriage was duly civilly registered.

But it had already been registered via the Protestant church six month's earlier, and Bob and Iris were no longer bachelor and spinster respectively. So we have a false declaration and the same people married twice within the year.

I haven't yet found a single word to describe this. It's not bigamy, which requires a change of partner, but it must be bi- something, a shining example of the unintended consequences of the bipolar world I grew up in.

And, no, I'm not related to Bono, DG.