Letter: Books make unionists think about what life might be like in a united Ireland

Robin’s seminal work Buried Lives: The Protestants of Southern Ireland (2017) detailed the dramatic fall in his community’s numbers. Robin concluded that between the years 1921 and 1926, some 42,000 Protestants involuntarily left the Irish Free State. The Protestant population of the South fell from around 11% pre-Partition to under 3% today. It hardly needs stating that the percentage of Catholics within Northern Ireland has risen steadily in the same period.

To complement the impressive scholarship of Buried Lives Robin has recently written a personal memoir. On the Margin (Freisen Press, 2024) ranges from Ireland to England, and across the world to India, Kenya, and eventually to Canada. With wry humour, Robin shares anecdotes from both his family history and his own very full and well-lived life.

But On the Margin contains a troubling message amid the entertaining reminiscences. The experiences of the Bury family serve to show how the Irish Free State was a cold house for its Protestant population (and indeed for people like Robin’s grandmother who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church). After the violence of 1916-23, and pronouncements by Eamon De Valera Southern Protestants like the Burys adopted what Robin calls ‘omerta’ in order to survive.

Robin relates how Buried Lives was largely ignored by a Dublin establishment that preferred to accept the emollient narrative that all has been well for the Protestant minority in the Irish state.

As we are likely to hear increasing demands from nationalists for a border poll, Northern unionists would be well-advised to acquaint themselves with the decline of the Southern Protestant minority – and they could do no better than by reading Robin Bury’s twin volumes.

We need to start thinking about what sort of minority we might be on a re-unified island. Will we choose emigration? Or ‘life on the margin’ like Southern Protestants over the past 102 years? Or will we be a hostile minority, threatening the security of the ‘New Ireland’?

Or might we be valued as a distinct group, secure in our own identity and fully engaged with whatever institutions might emerge? This will of course, largely depend on the attitude and actions of those now calling loudest for a poll.

Neale Jagoe, former British diplomat and now a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the Convenor of the Dunmanway Discussion Group (DDG) that formed after the failure of the Irish Government to mark the centenary of the Bandon Valley Massacre in April 2022. The DDG encourages North-South dialogue to promote reconciliation through truth.