In 2021, Fine Gael presidential candidate Heather Humphreys delivered an address at the annual commemoration of Michael Collins in west Cork. She remarked upon her own heritage – her paternal grandfather Robert Stewart, from the village of Drum in Co Monaghan, had signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912. She and Collins were both republicans, but they had started from very different places. The complex history of Ireland, she told the gathered Fine Gael party faithful, “challenges us, it provokes us, and it sometimes inspires us”.
Provocation through the medium of history reared its head during the presidential election campaign last week when the Irish Mail on Sunday ran a front page exclusive where it claimed to have revealed Heather Humphreys’ husband Eric’s “secret Orange Order past”. Humphreys, the Mail said, “admitted” that she attended Orange parades in Monaghan as a child. This was the moment “the wheels came off” her media appearance in her native county, it added. The Fine Gael candidate then tried “to evade” questions about when precisely her husband may have been a member of the Orange Order. Eric Humphreys reportedly left the Monaghan Peace Campus press conference after refusing to answer the Mail’s questions about his possible association with the Orange Order five decades ago.
The fact that Heather Humphreys comes from a background with strong connections to the Orange Order for much of the last century is not a surprise. Exceptionally within the 26 counties of the State, Monaghan also experienced intense loyalist resistance to the IRA during the early 1920s.
As a historian of loyalism, I learned that in June 1920 during the War of Independence, volunteers from the Ballybay Battalion of the IRA had raided the Stewart family in Drum looking for weapons. Thomas Humphreys, Eric’s grandfather, was raided two months later in nearby Aghabog, during the early morning of September 1st, 1920. In 1914, Thomas had served as a section leader of Newbliss in the 2nd Battalion of Monaghan’s Ulster Volunteer Force regiment. One of the leaders of the IRA attack on Humphreys’ home was First Lieut Thomas Gavan. As he tried to gain entry to the house, Gavan recalled that he was shot in the face by Thomas Humphreys, who opened fire at close range with a shotgun from a window.
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Humphreys lived with his elderly mother, his wife and his young son. Protestants in the area were often reluctant to give up arms, lest they be used to inflict violence on their neighbours. By 1920, they had been excluded by the Ulster Unionist movement to guarantee a larger Protestant majority (presumed to be unionist) in a new, six-county Northern Ireland. But Thomas Humphreys and many other Monaghan Protestants, still overwhelmingly loyalists, were determined to protect their property and, as sometimes proved necessary, their lives.
Remarkably, Thomas Humphreys spent the rest of his life living within a mile or so of the man he had shot, Thomas Gavan. The latter claimed compensation from the State for his injuries sustained while on active service – he suffered increasing blindness in his right eye, and metal fragments remained lodged in his skull until his death in 1991.
So what? One may of course sympathise with Thomas Gavan and Thomas Humphreys. But what can associations a century or a half century ago tell us about a presidential candidate in 2025? Firstly, if we are to live in a “shared island” that respects “green”, “orange” and many other traditions and cultures, then so-called “gotcha” moments in a Border county over alleged membership of the Orange Order decades ago should be self-evidently inappropriate.
The Irish Government has provided funds to the Orange Order in recent years. And the location of Humphreys’ press conference was in a “peace campus” that offers a window into one of the State’s unique counties, a place that, for all its past experiences of political violence and intercommunal tensions, also has a strong vein of tolerance and resilience within, and towards, its Protestant minority.
During his fieldwork in the southern Border counties in the 1970s, the American political scientist Paul Martin Sacks observed the concerted pressure put on Protestants to testify to “the moral superiority of the Catholic majority in the Republic over the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland”. An example of this tendency occurred in Monaghan, where a republican councillor, Frank McCaughey, proposed that they should set about “placing the minority in front of the majority” in order to advocate for Irish unity. McCaughey proposed the Protestant candidate James Mealiff (the future father-in-law of boxer Barry McGuigan), who served as the chair of Clones urban district council in the early 1970s.
When Mealiff refused to support a motion condemning the government of Northern Ireland, McCaughey rounded on him, “Those that are not with you are against you ... The Protestants here would still rather pay their taxes to the queen.” When Protestant councillors in Monaghan previously complained about sectarian discrimination with respect to local council employment, they were reminded by a Fine Gael councillor that “this is a Catholic country”. A Fianna Fáil representative said it would be inappropriate to employ Protestant hospital porters since they might be called upon to fetch a Catholic priest.
Malicious rumours about the loyalties of Monaghan families led to attacks during the Troubles, including the burning of the Coulson family home near Clones and the killing of Fine Gael senator Billy Fox, engaged to be married to Marjorie Coulson, on March 11th, 1974. The catalyst for the IRA raid on the Coulsons (and the death of Fox) was a false allegation that the Coulsons were collaborating with loyalist paramilitaries. Billy Fox had been repeatedly slandered in the Oireachtas, including being called a B-Special – a member of the Ulster Special Constabulary – by Fianna Fáil minister Brian Lenihan after he criticised the government for failing to prevent Border road closures by the British Army.
[ ‘Heather gets things done’: Pride in Drum as Humphreys begins Áras campaignOpens in new window ]
Reconciliation in Ireland also requires deeper reflection south of the Border about our recent past, avoiding narratives that brush aside or simplify complex, painful periods in our history. We must stop pretending that the Protestant minority experience in the southern Border region has been one of seamless integration and contentment. Rather than assuming that the Humphreys family should be embarrassed about, or even apologise for, their historical connections with the Orange tradition, we should welcome it as an opportunity to have a long-overdue conversation about our past and future.
Edward Burke is a historian at UCD and the author of Ulster’s Lost Counties (Cambridge, 2024)
