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The Peril of Home Rule (Author: Peter Kerr-Smiley)

Chapter 9

Position Of Ulster

Mr. John Redmond in a recent article on Home Rule declared that there was ‘no Ulster question.’ He might have as truthfully declared that there was no such thing as matter. From the moment Home Rule was introduced the Protestants of Ulster spoke with no uncertain sound against it. In the days when Mr. Gladstone was denouncing the attempt to break up the Union he had a large and enthusiastic following in Ulster, but the moment he surrendered to Parnell, Ulster Liberals bade him a final good-bye, and combined with their Conservative neighbours for the purpose of combating the attacks on the Legislative Union.

Since 1886 Protestant Home Rulers have been as scarce in Ulster as white blackbirds. As showing the hostility of Protestants to Home Rule, it may be noted that out of a thousand non-episcopal clergymen in Ireland in 1892, only eight were in favour of Home Rule, and of these eight there were some who made reservations. Ulster Protestants, whether episcopal or non-episcopal, were almost to a man opposed to Home Rule in 1886 and 1893, and the feeling of opposition has not


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decreased in the interval. The attitude of the Protestants of Ulster is fully endorsed, not only by the Protestants of the other three provinces, but by a large and growing section of influential Roman Catholics, who, having had experience of the lawlessness practised by the Nationalist organisations, do not wish to see more power entrusted to them.

It is sometimes said that Irish Protestants object to Home Rule because they fear it would destroy their ascendancy, but there is no Protestant ascendancy in Ireland to-day. In fact, since the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, there has been no religious ascendancy in Ireland. All parties and all denominations stand on an equality. If the Protestants occupy a larger share of the official positions than the Roman Catholics, it is because of their superior education. For the greater part of sixty years the Queen's Colleges in Belfast, Cork, and Galway were banned by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, so that the majority of the Roman Catholic youth of Ireland did not venture to attend them, and were thus, by the intolerance of their ecclesiastical rulers, deprived of university education. Almost all the Government offices are filled by open competition, and the best educated man selected. The Roman Catholics have no real grievance in this matter.

The people in Ulster know from the lessons of


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history and from the lessons of everyday life, that Home Rule would fill the country with religious rancour and civil strife. They hold, as Mr. Gladstone held for the greater part of his life, that ‘if Ireland were detached from her political connection with this country (Great Britain) and left to her own unaided agencies, it might be that the strife of parties would then burst forth in a form calculated to strike horror through the land.’ Home Rule would mean the dethronement of liberty and the establishment of a tyranny worse than any the country has ever seen. It is a well-known fact that the moment the Home Rule controversy becomes acute, religious differences become more marked. With the disappearance of the danger after the rejection of the Bill of 1893, a more kindly spirit began to spread over the country, and all parties, both the Protestants of the North and the Roman Catholics of the South, co-operated in promoting the material welfare of the people. The reappearance of Home Rule has already checked this beneficent movement, and has done much harm to the best interests of the country. Irish Protestants, the large majority of whom are living in Ulster, constitute about one-third of the Irish population, and they hold that their past history, as well as their present position, entitles them to the sympathy of their brethren in Great Britain. They are constantly abused by the

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Nationalists because of their loyalty to Great Britain. They are proud of the fact that their forefathers who settled in Ireland three or four hundred years ago, were Scotsmen and Englishmen. They have lived up to the best traditions of those from whom they have sprung. They have given the United Kingdom some of its finest soldiers and statesmen. Wherever the Imperial flag has been planted there Ulstermen have always been ready to defend it. Are we to be told to-day that loyalty is a crime, and that the loyal must submit to be trampled underfoot by the openly disloyal? Englishmen and Scotsmen should remember the sacrifices that Ulstermen have made in order to maintain the unity and the greatness of the United Kingdom, and they should lend them a sympathetic ear when they protest against being cut off from the privileges of British citizens.

Ulstermen know that Mr. Redmond's promised safeguards would not be worth the paper on which they were written. No one in Ireland, whether he be Unionist or Nationalist, seriously imagines that Home Rule would not greatly increase the power of the Church of Rome in Ireland. If Mr. Redmond even tried to thwart the power of that Church he would be speedily driven from public life. No one knows this better than Mr. Redmond, who has had experience of how ruthlessly the Roman Church crushed the Parnellites after the divorce case. Ulstermen are not prepared to submit their


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civil and religious liberties to the Church of Rome, and they know that, no matter what paper guarantees may be given under an Irish Parliament, the Protestants of Ireland would be as effectively under the control of that Church as if they lived in Spain or Quebec, and the experience of Protestants in those two countries are not such as to encourage Protestants in Ulster to submit to a Parliament which would always have as its main object the promotion of the interests of the Church of Rome.

But if there was no religious question whatever, Ulstermen would still be opposed to Home Rule, on the ground that it would have the effect of breaking up an Empire which they have had such a large part in building. Ulstermen know that the surest way of creating prosperity in Ireland is by maintaining the undivided rule of the Imperial Parliament. Ulster possesses no natural advantages over the other three provinces, and yet under the Union Ulster has progressed as satisfactorily as any other part of the United Kingdom. The reason for this is not far to seek. The brain and sinew of the men of Ulster have been applied to the building up of industries. In the other parts of Ireland the Nationalists have been too prone to spend their energy in promoting agitations. If the methods applied in Ulster had been applied to the other districts, we should hear less of poverty and discontent.


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The Nationalists are in the habit of harping on the fact that the British Parliament, long ago, destroyed the woollen industry in Ireland, but they forget to add that the men who owned this industry were chiefly Protestants, and that their descendants, without nursing a grievance, put their shoulder to the wheel and created other industries that are now the pride of the country. Ulstermen believe that the social and economic conditions of Ireland make her specially unsuited for Home Rule. The population is divided on the lines of race and religion, and as the Belfast Chamber of Commerce put it in a manifesto issued in 1893, ‘the two parties are filled with distrust and with historical jealousy of each other. The chief economic necessity of the country is the development of manufactures, trade, and commerce; but the vast majority of the population have no appreciation of the conditions under which alone such necessity can be met. They do not seem to know that while a Government can destroy prosperity by destroying security and credit, no Government can create it in the face of insecurity and suspicion.’ It is because of the security given by the Imperial Government that the industries of Ulster have developed so rapidly. If the matter is looked at from a practical point of view it will be seen that Ireland is not capable of supporting a local Parliament. If

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Great Britain were to get local Parliaments on the population basis of Ireland she would be entitled to ten, and if on the basis of valuation, to fifteen or sixteen.

The total rateable valuation of Ireland is a trifle over £15,000,000 while that of England is £203,000,000, Wales £9,000,000, and Scotland £32,000,000.

The valuation of Lancashire is £25,000,000 and that of the West Riding of Yorkshire £14,000,000, or only a little less than that of Ireland. London and Lancashire have each larger populations than Ireland. The amount of income-tax raised in Ireland last year was £1,825,234; in Great Britain, £58,679,860.

Ireland has very little mineral wealth compared with Great Britain. On the railways in Great Britain 507,903,360 tons of minerals and merchandise were carried in 1910; in Ireland 6,331,362 tons, and of this amount the railways terminating in Belfast carried 43.47 per cent. The total railway receipts of Great Britain last year amounted to £119,451,549 and those of Ireland to £4,402,655; the railways having their termini in Belfast contributing 38.04 per cent. of this amount. The capital of the Irish railways amounts to £44,114,441, while the capital of the Yorkshire and Lancashire is £69,988,806, London and North-Western £125,041,616 and Great Western £98,236,890.


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The commercial and manufacturing districts are mainly to be found in Ulster. Under the protection of the Imperial Parliament Ulster has been able to build up her industries, but the larger part of the rest of Ireland has not got the business qualities that are necessary to the building up of industries.

As showing the effect which Home Rule would have on Irish credit, it is only necessary to point out that when Mr. Gladstone introduced his Bill in 1893, Irish securities depreciated to the amount of £5,000,000.

Since Mr. Asquith's pledge to make Home Rule the first item on his programme next year, Irish securities have been steadily declining. All over Protestant Ulster there are thriving industries, and the very existence of these industries depends on the maintenance of security. That security certainly would not exist under Home Rule. The linen industry, for example, is a great source of wealth and employment in Ulster, but what prospect would there be for it under the rule of Mr. Patrick Ford? Here are a few extracts from the Irish World (Mr. Ford's organ) on the Linen Trade of Ulster:
‘I was much impressed by an article by John F. Finerty, in which he has the wisdom and courage to declare that the destruction of the linen industry in Belfast was a matter that Irish Nationalists have no cause to deplore.’


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‘Belfast is a little Orange den where they combine against the peace and prosperity of Ireland. Every Irish attack on England should include Belfast.’
‘It is to Belfast that every enemy and slanderer of Ireland flies when it is deemed politic by the English Cabinet to raise a disturbance and division in Ireland. If the whole place were engulfed in an earthquake Ireland would be stronger, richer, happier, and more tranquil.’)
(February, 1888.)

These words have never been repudiated by any Nationalist leader. They are not the sort of words that the Nationalist agitators would care to use on a British platform, but for all that, we know by experience that their sympathies are with Patrick Ford, rather than with the men who have built up the Ulster Linen Industry. Because Ulstermen have shown that the country can be made prosperous and contented under the Union they are hated by the Nationalists. Ulster is a standing refutation of the charge that Ireland's backwardness is due to the Union. Ulster provides by far the larger part of the Imperial taxes at present raised in Ireland, and if further taxes were needed by an Irish Parliament — and this may be taken as a certainty — the burden would fall on the Ulster industries. Ulstermen would be helpless in an Irish Parliament, and the representatives of the farmers in the South and West would take care that


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the extra burden of taxation was shifted on to the shoulders of the industrial classes in the North.

Mr. Birrell says he is anxious to allay the fears and suspicions of the Protestants, but he has not done much during the time he has been Chief Secretary to quiet these fears or remove these suspicions. By his University Act he has handed over higher education in three parts of Ireland to the Roman Catholic Church in total disregard of the great Liberal principle that no denomination should have any privilege in respect of its religious creed. He has also established the principle that public funds shall be used for the purpose of denominational teaching in primary schools. Under Home Rule the Roman Catholic authorities, who claim to be supreme in all educational matters, would take care that Protestant Ulster was forced to pay for the teaching of Roman Catholic doctrines. English Nonconformists object to State money being used for sectarian teaching, but unfortunately many of them are endeavouring to place Irish Protestants under a Roman domination which would use the public taxes for the support of Roman Catholic training. They talk, of course, about safeguards, but Cardinal Logue, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, cares nothing for these so-called safeguards. On the passing of the Irish Universities Act, Mr. Birrell declared that the new Universities would be non-sectarian.


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Speaking at Dundalk on June 6, 1911, Cardinal Logue said:—
‘Unfortunately, here in Ireland, up to the present, our young people were handicapped, and badly handicapped. We might educate them in a school like St. Mary's until they were fitted for any University in Europe, but when they passed out of this they found all the colleges closed against them. Trinity was under the ban of the Irish Church [he means the Roman Catholic Church] since I was a boy, and the Queen's Colleges were looked upon as Godless institutions. But now there is an opportunity for the Catholic laymen of Ireland. They have an opportunity now of receiving a good university education, in which, at least, they will be exposed to no danger. There is no doubt whatever, England never gave us any boon that they did not put a crook in. They always tried to do something to introduce the drop of bitterness into the sweetest cup that ever was. That is precisely what they did in giving us a University. They gave what they hoped to be a Pagan University, but, please God, we will turn it into a Catholic University. (Applause.) They have brought a Mohammedan institution into this country, but turn loose upon it a lot of fine young Irish Catholics, and they will soon make it a Christian institution. That is what we will do with this new University. No matter what obstacles the Nonconformists of England may have inserted in the constitution of the University to keep it from being made Catholic, we will make it Catholic in spite of them.’ (Applause.)


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An Irish Parliament would have power to tax Protestant industries out of existence, and to establish a religious ascendancy as intolerant as the one that exists in Quebec to-day. If paper safeguards have been found worthless by the Protestants of Quebec they would be found equally worthless by Irish Protestants.

Ulstermen who realise the aspirations of the Nationalists are prepared to make any sacrifices rather than allow this new ascendancy to be established.

Home Rule would not build up; it would pull down and destroy what it has taken many years of laborious effort to establish. The men who were the authors of the Land League and the Plan of Campaign, and who adopt such brutal methods to-day for crushing out fellow-Nationalists who refuse to accept every detail of their programme, cannot be trusted to treat the loyal minority fairly. The people of Ulster are satisfied with the present position they hold in the Empire, and they are determined to remain citizens of the United Kingdom on equal terms with Englishmen and Scotsmen. They ask for no special privileges for themselves, and they object to their rights being impaired in order that special privileges may be granted to others.

Ulster's progress has taken place under the Union. Belfast was a small and insignificant town at the time the Union was consummated. In 1783


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the population was 13,105, in 1891 it was 255,950, and to-day it is almost 400,000. In 1837 the funds at the command of the three local Banks, which have head offices in Belfast, were £1,488,134; in 1892 the amount was £14,797,285; and at the present time it is £23,776,431.

In 1837 the tonnage of vessels clearing from Belfast was 288,143. In 1892 it had risen to 2,055,637 tons, while last year it was 2,800,285 tons.

Of the Irish contributions to the Customs revenue in 1909 Ulster contributed £2,119,353, as against £911,826 from the other three provinces.

Even as things stand at present Ireland could not afford to pay the extra cost which a local Parliament would entail, but if Ulster were cut off from the rest of the country the remaining three provinces would be in a hopeless financial condition. The arguments used by the Nationalists in favour of an Irish Parliament separated from Great Britain because of the differences of race, religion, and ideals apply with even greater force to Ulster in its relation to the Nationalist parts of Ireland. If, according to the Nationalist theory, Celtic Ireland ought to be divorced from the United Kingdom, then there is no reason whatever why Protestant Ulster — or, indeed, Protestant Ireland — should be forced into a Dublin Parliament. The Irish Parliament would be sure to legislate on lines abhorrent to the minority, and from the very


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beginning there would be nothing but strife and turmoil. This incompatibility was never more forcibly shown than in the case of the General Council of Irish County Councils, which was established after the passing of the Local Government Act. The object of the Council was to deal with Local Government affairs, but it had not been in existence long before the Nationalists, who were in the majority, commenced to use it for Home Rule purposes, with the result that the representatives of the Unionist Councils were forced to leave it.

Those who imagine that Irish Unionists will accept a Home Rule Parliament after a mere verbal protest are under a serious delusion. In 1893 Unionist Clubs were established and every able-bodied Unionist was enrolled. The first object of the clubs was to defeat Home Rule by constitutional means, and the second was to make the rule of an Irish Parliament unworkable in Ireland. And just as elaborate measures were taken to attain the first object, precautions were taken to give effect to the second. People who are not in earnest do not go to the expense of arming and drilling. Irish Unionists felt that it was wiser to run all the risks of civil war rather than submit to the tyranny of a Dublin Parliament. They felt that the Nationalists unaided could not crush them by force of arms, and they were confident that the British people would never coerce them by employing an


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army against them. This policy was not lightly adopted. It was only after the most anxious thought on the part of men who for years had been fighting every form of ascendancy that it was decided to resist a Home Rule Parliament to the death. The Nationalists like to represent it as bluster, but the men who directed the policy of Irish Unionists then, and those who direct it to-day, have not been accustomed to bluster, and it is well Englishmen and Scotsmen should realise that when Irish Unionists declare they will neither obey the laws passed by an Irish Parliament nor pay the taxes levied by it, they mean what they say.

There are no differences among Protestants on this question. Presbyterians, who are chiefly concentrated in Ulster, are just as determined as Episcopalians; and be it remembered that Presbyterians went out from Ulster by thousands in the eighteenth century rather than submit to intolerance, and they furnished the American Colonists with many leaders, who were among the most determined advocates of Independence. A recent writer in the Times says of the Ulster leaders that they are men of ‘high intelligence whose minds have been broadened by education and by the liberalising effects of their world-wide commerce. But unless I greatly misread them, the old Adam is by no means dead in them yet. The character which led their ancestors to resent and to avenge — in the American Rebellion — the wrongs


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done the Presbyterians by the Irish Government, with the connivance of the English Government, has come down to them unchanged. Were they to suffer a like injustice they would assuredly brood over their grievances with a sullen anger not less deep and not less constant.’
The same writer truly says that:
‘The whole Protestant community is unanimous that the most strenuous and determined resistance must be offered to any kind of Home Rule, and quite resolved, with rare exceptions, to push this resistance in case of need beyond legal limits.’

This is no over-statement of the case. Irish Unionists hope that Great Britain in its wisdom will not establish a Parliament in Dublin; but if the worse comes to the worst, then they will confidently defy it, and one thing is certain, that the descendants of the men who held Londonderry, in face of pestilence, fire, and sword, against overwhelming odds, will never submit to be ruled by their hereditary enemies.