This is a deeply engaging, original and distinctive work, a learned mixture of modern Irish history, literary criticism and social comment, with some excursions into theology and dogmatics: it offers some important (if understated) contemporary resonances. The range is appropriate because the work’s author – Ian d’Alton – has for long combined careers as a prize-winning scholar and a distinguished public servant, who served in the Department of Finance and eventually came to head the Irish Housing Finance Agency.
D’Alton is also a deeply reflective Cork (and Dublin) Protestant, for whom history-writing is partly about the exploration and conceptualisation of “his” community as well as self-understanding. Indeed, these diverse essays and investigations are bound together by the overarching theme of southern Protestantism; they are topped and tailed by a mix of autobiographical reflection and appreciation, the latter undertaken by some of the author’s scholarly friends.
In different hands this overall endeavour might have become bogged down in antiquarian or chauvinist mires, but d’Alton is too judicious and self-aware to succumb in these ways. As an accomplished historian, he can connect his particular concerns, often focused on Cork Protestantism, with wider debates and frameworks; as someone secure in his own identity, he can rise above any religious or political defensiveness to dwell on the bleaker aspects of his community (its occasional anti-Catholicism, for example). Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung rub shoulders in this collection with local worthies such as the Rev Ralph Harvey, scourge of Cork Grammar School in the Edwardian era, or Lady Mary Aldworth, stalwart of the Cork Primrose League.
Modern Irish historians have long recognised d’Alton as one of a pioneering group of researchers (Patrick Buckland was another) who opened up the serious study of southern Irish Protestantism and unionism in the 1970s. Those for whom d’Alton’s doctoral monograph, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812-44 (1980) was a revelation in an otherwise apparently well-mapped historiographical landscape will not be disappointed by this new work. While there is much on the Big House and the Irish (never Anglo-Irish) gentry class, the great originality of d’Alton’s scholarship surely continues to rest with his evocation of the richly diverse cultures of urban Protestantism in the south – and especially those of his adopted Cork City. The civil society of Protestant Corkonians in the 18th century is strikingly invoked; while the character of the city and county’s Protestants in the century between 1820 and 1920 is intricately constructed through a sequence of biographical case studies.
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This is not an overly tendentious work; nonetheless, d’Alton is drawn to pragmatists rather than political fundamentalists. He is careful to highlight the profitable adaptability of (for example) Sir John Harley Scott, a Cork city unionist who dexterously navigated the politics of the Parnell Split, playing off Parnellite and anti-Parnellite within Cork Corporation, and bagging for himself both the roles of high sheriff (1892) and lord mayor (1896). D’Alton is also compelled by the steely realism of Arthur Smith-Barry, Lord Barrymore, former scourge of the Plan of Campaign, but by 1913 pragmatically reconciled to working under home rule.
More generally, d’Alton makes the important and striking claim that the assimilationist journey of some Cork Protestants had begun well before the creation of the Free State – evidenced by these shifting alliances of the Split era, and later by ex-unionist engagement within William O’Brien’s All for Ireland League. He suggests, convincingly, that the assimilation of southern Protestants within the conservative and clericalist structures of the Free State may have been assisted by the fact that southern Protestants were (in their particular ways) no less conservative and clericalist. In this last respect, one of the most striking of the later essays in the collection reintroduces us to the flinty and formidable Church of Ireland cleric John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg, who ruled his clergy as Archbishop of Dublin and later Armagh with a discipline scarcely less muscular than that exercised by John Charles McQuaid, his Catholic archiepiscopal contemporary.
D’Alton, who reflects at length on the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Iris Murdoch, is also (it should be said) an accomplished literary stylist. These essays are beautifully written, and enlivened throughout with wit and wordplay (for example, he offers a gentle riff, in considering Murdoch’s Dublin and Northern roots, on the tension between her “Irisness” and her “Irishness”). He is, moreover, a companionable guide to all his chosen subjects and communities – at once knowledgeable, informed, but also modest and self-deprecating.
This is indeed both a very substantial collection – and one which (to the author’s credit) leaves an appetite for yet more. D’Alton writes (with characteristic reticence) that “it may be presumptuous and utopian to offer the southern Protestant journey as possibly, in the fullness of time, one for consideration by my northern co-religionists and unionist friends. They’re welcome to the template”. The theme is echoed in the foreword to the collection, supplied by d’Alton’s friend, the distinguished civil servant and historian, Felix Larkin: “In the event of reunification, the history of southern Irish Protestantism as elucidated by Ian d’Alton – the glass half-full rather than half-empty – may provide some comfort to northern Protestants as they ‘search for place in independent Ireland’”. Some aspects of this “southern Protestant journey” were strikingly addressed in an earlier collection, invoked in Larkin’s comment, and co-edited by d’Alton and Ida Milne (Protestant and Irish: the Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland (2019)). But a detailed exploration of the ways in which the southern “template” may (or may not) be relevant to the North remains desperately necessary: this lyrical, original and stimulating collection is a very welcome start.
In fact, the history of southern unionism in the decade before 1921 often reads like a premonition of the current state of northern unionism: a sequence of cussed stands in indefensible “last ditches”, pursued by leaders addicted to brinkmanship, and followed by internal division, recrimination and chaotic retreat. But of course, it remains to be seen what sort of glass, half-filled or otherwise, beckons at the end of this latest bumpy ride.
- Alvin Jackson is the Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh
