Two rites make many wrongs

Sir Edward Carson came to regret his treacherous plotting over Home Rule.

He was a deserving recipient of the old curse:

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

He was a “southern Unionist”, born in Dublin’s Harcourt Street, educated at Wesley College and Trinity, Dublin, where he was in the hurley team. Indeed: don’t tell the GAA.

He was called to the Irish Bar, and became Solicitor-General for Ireland. He sat in Parliament for the Dublin University seat. One can recognise his like, to this day, in the Universities Club, overlooking Stephens’ Green, or at the trough in the Shelbourne.

It was only in 1893, nearly aged forty, that he joined the Middle Temple and became a member of the English Bar.

He was not enthusiastic about the Orange Order (though he joined while at Trinity) but his oratory made him the frontman for the Craig Cabal. So his signature was the first on the 1912 Ulster Covenant; and he was a prime mover in the Ulster Volunteers. His finger-prints were all over the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which created partition and set up the Stormont Parliament. Even the Times wrinkled its nose at the brazenness of this measure:

… the bill as presented to Parliament , bears … evidence of painstaking adjustment to the susceptibilities of Sir Edward Carson and his followers.

Once he was able to stand back, and contemplate what he had wrought, he recanted. His cry of anguish was Promethean:

I did not know, as I know now, that I was a mere puppet in a political game .. I was fighting with others whose friendship and comradeship I hope I will lose from tonight, because I dod not value any friendship that is not founded upon confidence and trust. I was in earnest. What a fool I was! I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power …

The Conservative Party never yet took up a cause without betraying it in the end.

Too late!

The Ulstermen had their statelet. Carson, and the other southern Unionists were shrugged off.

This can be exemplified by a little spat in 1933. Major John Henry McCormick, Unionist MP for Belfast, St Anne’s, went to the Twelfth at Newtownbutler. He relieved himself of a nice piece of bigotry:

Too many Protestants were giving employment to Roman Catholics … the Protestant who did so was a traitor to his country and his Protestantism was virtually lost.

Just over the Border, in Cavan, the Reverend W.J. Mitchell remonstrated gently, in a letter to the Irish Times:

Speakers seemed to have little or no consideration for their Protestant brethren across the Border … where many of the lads and lassies were depending for their livelihood on Roman Catholic employers. As an Orangeman [I feel] their Six-County leaders should be more considerate of their brethren across the Border.

Mitchell was skewered by the full Jovian thunder of Basil Brooke:

Mr Mitchell was probably correct when he said that Protestants in the Free State were getting a square deal … but the question was an entirely different one in Northern Ireland. In the Free State Protestants were in a minority and the Roman Catholics could do what they liked with them … On the other hand, Roman Catholics were increasing in the North … Ninety-seven per cent of the Roman Catholics in Ireland politically were disloyal and disruptive and if they in the North would increase their power by employing such people, in a few years Ulster would be voted into the Free State.

12 July 1933 in small-town Newtownbutler, but 26 June 1933 in big-city Munich’s Völkisher Beobachter:

We must build up our state without Jews. They can never be anything but stateless aliens, and they can never have any legal or constitutional staus. Only by this means can Ahasuerus be forced once again to take up his wanderer’s staff.

Spot the difference between Major McCormick and Reichsminister Goebbels.

We might also pause for a moment to recall the curious doings at Fethard-on-Sea, in the County Wexford, in the summer of 1957.

This started with what the Police would term a “domestic”. A Protestant wife left her Catholic husband, following a disagreement. One of the issues between them, the one who featured in the Press, was the education of their children. The wife upped and headed to Belfast.

Few situations fail to be exacerbated by the soothing words of clergy.

Fortunately the fearsome and high-principled Dr Michael Browne, Bishop of Galway, was in Wexford, ready at hand:

There seems to be a concerted campaign to entice or kidnap Catholic children and deprive them of their faith.

The broad-minded citizens of Fethard instigated a boycott of Protestant businesses. This had Bishop Browne’s unqualified approval:

Non-Catholics do not protest against the crime of conspiring to steal the children of a Catholic father, but they try to make political capital when a Catholic people make a peaceful and moderate protest.

Taoiseach de Valera was more emollient:

I can only say, from what has appeared in public, that I regard this boycott as ill-conceived, ill-considered and futile for the achievement of the purpose for which it seems to have been intended; that I regard it as unjust and cruel to confound the innocent with the guilty; that I repudiate any suggestion that this boycott is typical of the attitude or conduct of our people; that I am convinced that ninety per cent of them look on this matter as I do …

I would like to appeal also to any who might have influence with the absent wife to urge her to respect her troth and her promise and to return with her children to her husband and her home.

Malcolm doesn’t see that working with the feminists of his acquaintance.

Sadly, Fethard was a symptom, not an anomaly.

The root of the problem was Pius X’s Ne Temere decree. It gave priests the power to deny marriage to mixed-faith couples, unless the obligation was accepted for the children to be baptised and brought up as Catholics. It might also be required for the non-Catholic partner to accept instruction with a view to conversion “from heresy“. Hence accounts like:

At that time the Catholic Church insisted on people in mixed religion marriages getting married not only in a Catholic church, but at a side altar therein, preferably early in the morning when no one was around to witness the ceremony. Prods, after all, could not get into heaven. I had to take the Ne Temere decree …

In 1952 the matter came to court in the case of Tilson v. Tilson, when Judge Gavan Duffy tried to reconcile Ne Temere and de Valera’s 1937 Constitution:

… an order of the court designed to secure the fulfilment of an agreement peremptorily required before a mixed marriage by the Church, whose special position in Ireland is officially recognised as the guardian of the faith of the Catholic spouse, cannot be withheld on any ground of public policy by the very State which pays homage to that Church.

The result was the flight of the Protestants.

By the end of the 1960s, they totalled just 130,000 out of nearly 3 million.

Malcolm now adds a contemporary footnote to the the sad story, courtesy of the Londonderry Sentinel:

‘Donegal Protestants abandoned’

A DONEGAL Protestant business owner forced to flee Letterkenny in the 1970’s has told the Sentinel he fears his Northern Ireland co-religionists are going to face the same fate as he did.

Joe Patterson who has resided in Canada since 1974, lost his thriving meat business after an industrial dispute with workers escalated into vicious sectarianism at the height of the troubles.

Mr Patterson claims that not a single law or justice agency came to his aid in the republic at the time, forcing him to relocate to Vancouver. He also alleges irregular practices by union officials, senior politicians, the police and law practitioners leading to the supposed ‘burying’ of his case

“Northern Ireland unionist politicians turned their backs on Protestants south of the border in 1922. From 1922-1974 the Protestant population dropped from 20 per cent in 1922 to 2 per cent in 1974. From 1960-1973 37 Church of Ireland churches were closed.
“The refusal of Northern Ireland unionist politicians to expose the fate of the Republic of Ireland Protestants only guarantees the same fate for their own supporters in Northern Ireland,” Joe Patterson said.