Letter: I live in the Republic – Protestants and Catholics get on tolerably well and there is little evidence of an 'ugly undercurrent of intolerance'
A letter from Ian d'Alton:
I see that the TUV's Jim Allister is at it again - recently stating, in the context of the Republic's presidential election, that “the treatment of Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys – targeted and abused because of her Protestant background – exposed the ugly undercurrent of intolerance that still runs through southern politics."
He is right in one sense – Heather herself admitted as much, saying: "My family and I were subject to some absolutely awful sectarian abuse. I was disappointed, because as a country, I thought we’ve moved on from that, and I do think there needs to be a greater understanding of other traditions in this country."
The issue is not that there were vile comments made online – it is how many of these there were, and how we can possibly claim that they were representative of the generality of public opinion in the Republic.
The short answer is, neither Jim Allister nor Heather Humphreys nor you nor I know. What I can say is as a communicant southern member of the Church of Ireland, a former Irish civil servant and CEO of an Irish state-owned company, I have barely been aware of any overt sectarianism in my lives in Dublin, Cork and Naas over many decades.
Also, as an historian of southern Irish Protestantism, the evidence would indicate that such sectarianism, where it existed, was light-years removed from the same phenomenon north of the border.
In 1995, fluent Irish speaker Church of Ireland Archbishop Donald Caird summed it up well, asserting that the Protestant community in the Republic is "a confident minority well understood and well accepted".
That is not to claim that life was always rosy for Protestants in independent Ireland, particularly up to the 1960s. But the point about well-known seemingly sectarian spats – such as the 1930 Mayo librarian case, the 1935 Limerick anti-Protestant riots, the Frost, Tilson and Fethard-on-Sea mixed marriage embroglios in the 40s and 50s – is how few of them there were.
This was helped on the Protestant side by a relative prosperity which allowed them to keep the head down. All this was reinforced by the construction of an invisible stockade, a border behind which southern Protestants could congregate within their own people.
Church of Ireland synods and parish vestries aped parliamentary and local government. Wider public service could be undertaken in the governance of denominational hospitals, schools and even a university. Voluntary engagement was through a cat’s cradle of church and charitable bodies, choirs and freemasons, and sporting and cultural organisations.
The State largely left them to their own devices. The structure was economically underpinned by Protestant firms and farms which, up to the 1960s, heavily favoured the denominational over the competent.
It was quite possible to live a Protestant life, and die a Protestant death, without much troubling the other side – which suited the other side too. All this more or less worked. It helped that the constitutional changes from 1922 to 1949 were relatively gradual, allowing southern Protestants to wind down their loyalism and royalism into something akin to a reluctant acceptance – but nevertheless an acceptance – of the Republic.
The multiculturalism of modern Ireland has further assisted the process. Historians of the later 21st century are much more likely to examine Muslims rather than Methodists, Poles rather than Protestants. The result has been that as regards Protestants and Catholics, they get on tolerably well. There is little evidence today of an "ugly undercurrent of intolerance" in these relations at any rate. In other parts of Irish society, things may be different.
Ian d'Alton, Naas, Co Kildare