Explaining Northern Ireland: A Brief Study Guide
| Author | D B O'Leary |
| Published date | 01 April 1985 |
| Date | 01 April 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.1985.tb00104.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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D
B
O'LEfRY
Introduction
Northern Ireland
(NI)
has occupied a considerable army of social scientists
in the last fifteen years. The range, richness and poverty of their work cannot
be explored in a brief article. What follows is a deliberately simple and
critical guide to some of the explanations habitually invoked. The survey is
brief, selective and doubtlless highly misleading. There is no attempt to
survey the extensive histories of
NI
before or after direct rule, nor any survey
of
armies
or
parties in Ireland whether legal, illegal or paralegal, nor any
evaluation of solutions. lrhe introductory bibliography attached should be of
assistance. Explanations should be distinguished by their capacity to account
for the origins of the current conflict and their ability to account for the
persistence of the political violence, and readers should make such an
evaluation of the ideas surveyed.
Four features of pre-twentieth century Irish history of relevance to
explaining contemporary
NI
are not disputed by serious commentators. First,
Ireland was a British colony, conquered albeit sloppily by successive waves
cf
Norman and English monarchs. The Anglo-Saxons, despite going on huntins
expeditions against the Irish, did not exterminate the natives. h!evertheless,
forced Anglicisation in language, law and religion occurred fitfully. Second:
the Protestant Reformation, completely successful in the British mainland, was
not successful in large parts of Ireland where the Gaelic Catholic peasantry
resisted Anglicisation. In the bulk of Ireland an Anglo-Irish Protestant
aristocracy ruled a Gaelic Catholic peasantry, dispossessed after the
Cromwellian and Villiamite settlements. Eighteenth century Ireland was
characterised by religious apartheid, although there was no pretence about
development being equal, merely separate. Third, the most successful colonial
plantation in Ireland was in the North and North East where non-aristocratic
Scots Presbyterians and Protestants were settled in the seventeenth century.
In Ulster religious and asi-arian land conflicts overlapped, leading to intra-
class struggles amongst the peasantry, whereas in the rest of Ireland agrarian
class war and religious/ethnic struggle were identical. Fourth, the spatial
development of industrial capitalism proceeded unevenly, and reinforced
existing religious cleavages. Belfast and the Lagan valley industrialised
first and extensively, and in the nineteenth century Irish urban working class
was largest in
141.
Dual labour markets, in which Protestants had a superior
position, developed early
in
Belfast (Budge and O'Leary,
19731,
and in
addition to other contrast:; with the largely agrarian and Catholic South, help
account for the successful rnobilisation
of
the Protestant working class
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