Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 June 28

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June 28

Sectarianism in Northern Ireland.

I was watching the Rebellion (miniseries) show on Netflix. It dramatizes the events of the 1916 Easter Rising in Nothern Ireland. The show seems to be reasonably accurate (although it's definitely a drama and not a documentary) - every major plot point - and some of the characters - seem to fit well with the various Wikipedia articles on those subjects.

But what I don't understand is that the show says essentially nothing about the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics that has been the polarizing factor in "the troubles" ever since I can remember.

Instead it shows various families being ripped apart as one set of people follow the rebellion with huge enthusiasm and the others don't. I don't see evidence of those families having divided religious loyalties.

Is it merely skipping over that for the sake of drama - or did the religious overtones of the split between those wanting reunification with Eire and those wanting to stay British not emerge until sometime later?

SteveBaker (talk) 01:45, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe it was ever a simple black-and-white (or orange-and-green) thing. It wasn't like "All Catholics want reunification and all others want the status quo". Catholics were historically repressed and persecuted in Ireland (and the rest of the British Isles) after the English Reformation, and that's certainly a factor in "The Troubles", but the overriding issue is a political one: whether the UK should withdraw from NI and leave it to the Irish, or stay. There's a range of very passionately held views on that, which vary within religious denominations as much as between them. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:28, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

According to the article, it is set in Dublin, which is in the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland. Currently Northern Ireland is 42% Protestant and 41% Catholic, while the Ireland is 84.2% Catholic and only 4.6% Protestant. I don't know what the proportions were in 1916, but they would have been similar (hence why NI chose to remain part of the UK when the South chose independence). Which would mean that in Dublin, the number of people opposing the rebellion because of their Protestantism would probably be fewer than the number of people opposing it for other reasons. Iapetus (talk) 08:48, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Also, there was no Northern Ireland at the time. According to that article: "Ireland was partitioned between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland in 1921 under the terms of Lloyd George's Government of Ireland Act 1920". StuRat (talk) 17:53, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Our Easter Rising article has a section Reaction of the Dublin public which says:

"There was great hostility towards the Volunteers in some parts of the city. Historian Keith Jeffery noted that most of the opposition came from people whose relatives were in the British Army and who depended on their Army allowances. Those most openly hostile to the Volunteers were the "separation women" (so-called because they were paid "separation money" by the British government), whose husbands and sons were fighting in the British Army in World War I. There was also hostility from unionists. Supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party also felt the rebellion was a betrayal of their party. When occupying positions in the South Dublin Union and Jacob's factory, the rebels got involved in physical confrontations with civilians who tried to tear down the rebel barricades and prevent them taking over buildings. The Volunteers shot and clubbed a number of civilians who assaulted them or tried to dismantle their barricades."

"The aftermath of the Rising, and in particular the British reaction to it, helped sway a large section of Irish nationalist opinion away from hostility or ambivalence and towards support for the rebels of Easter 1916".

Alansplodge (talk) 15:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

First, the 1916 Rising had nothing to do with Northern Ireland, which didn't exist yet. All of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and had been promised Home Rule (limited self-governement within the UK), implementation of which had been delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. The Rising was instigated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who wanted complete independence.

Secondly, sectarianism goes back a long way. The Plantation of Ulster, starting in the early 17th century, settled largely Scottish Presbyterians and English Anglicans on land confiscated from Catholic Irish people. The Gunpowder Plot in 1605 was an attempt by Catholic conspirators to assassinate the King of England and Scotland, so the idea that Catholicism was hostile to Britain was common. The sides in the Williamite War in Ireland in the late 17th century were also religiously divided - Catholics supporting the Catholic James, Protestants supporting the Protestant William. After that, you had the Protestant Ascendancy, where mainly Anglicans dominated politics and land ownership, and other religious groups, primarily Catholics but also at times "dissenters" like Presbyterians, were excluded.

At the time of the annexation of Ireland with the Act of Union 1800, Catholic emancipation - the right to stand for Parliament - was promised but not delivered until Daniel O'Connell's campaign in the 1820s, but most land was still owned by Protestant landlords, to whom Catholics were tenants with few rights or possessions - something the Potato Famine in the 1840s showed clearly - before Charles Stewart Parnell, himself a Protestant from a landowning family, campaigned for land reform in the 1870s. This is all part of the background to the campaign for Home Rule in the late 19th century and for independence in the early 20th. Protestants had a privileged position under British rule and didn't want to give it up, and feared being in a minority in a Catholic-dominated country, and of course the British, like all imperial powers, played divide and rule for all they were worth, ensuring that they kept hold of the north, which was at that time Ireland's industrial heartland. And so the country was split into a Catholic-dominated south and a Protestant-dominated north, with both groups having historical reasons not to like or trust each other. --Nicknack009 (talk) 19:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

• Perhaps my favorite anecdote of all time was Christopher Hitchens's, who when crossing the North/South border, was asked if he was a Protestant or a Catholic, to which he answered, "Atheist." The border guard said, "Yes, but Catholic atheist, or Protestant atheist?" μηδείς (talk) 22:11, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I like it, and will repeat it on sundry occasions to all my friends of an ecclesiastical persuasion (= 0). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 05:21, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Replace "Atheist" with "Jew" and he stole that line from Harry Towb. Keresaspa (talk) 01:07, 5 July 2016 (UTC)