Sir, – I was saddened to read Heather Humphreys’ piece about how her standing for the presidency seems to have awakened a latent sectarianism in Irish public life (I don’t regret running for president, Opinion, September 5th).
I have the highest respect and regard for Humphreys and she stands in a noble tradition of the minority participation in independent Ireland from the foundation of the State to present times. From Lord Mayo and Horace Plunkett in the first Senate to current public representatives, the Protestant and formerly unionist minority joined in State-building despite, in Edna Longley’s phrase, having to work their passage to Irishness, as distinct from just being, like Catholics, born Irish.
The story of the Protestant minority in the Free State and the Republic in the early years is one of largely living within stockades, with occasional forays out into the wider world. But it is a positive story. If a sort of closet royalism continued into the second half of the last century, it was combined with an acceptance of, and even allegiance to, the new regime.
As Nora Robertson wrote in 1960: “In respecting new loyalties it had not seemed incumbent upon us to throw our old ones overboard.” Exactly. The southern Protestant journey from independence to now has been one of the “gradualness of inevitability”. Its gentle pace allowed the minority to come to terms with changes that were often distasteful and distressing. But eventually things bedded down.
RM Block
There is a lesson here for the current debate on the political unity of the island. Leaving aside the economic hurdles, based on the southern minority’s experiences since 1922, two conditions need to be satisfied before unity has a snowball’s chance in hell. Forget a headlong, sudden rush into a 32-county socialist republic. As in the Irish Free State, there will have to be some sort of British belonging that northern Protestants and erstwhile unionists can still identify with. Cultural colonisation of the new minority will have to be avoided – a trivial but everyday example would be traffic light sequencing. The second condition is compromise on symbols, with a tacit, if tactfully undeclared, acceptance that things may develop in the future. Just as the Free State morphed into the Republic.
Heather Humphreys ends her article with a plea that we should be “brave enough to make room for every tradition on this island”. I would finesse that slightly, to make rooms for every tradition on this island. – Yours, etc.,
IAN D’ALTON,
Co-editor, with Ida Milne, of Protestant and Irish: the Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland (2019).
Naas,
Co Kildare.
Sir, – I was deeply moved to read such a powerful account by Heather Humphreys of her toxic abuse by fellow Irish citizens in her bid for the presidency of Ireland.
I so get how she must have felt trying to make sense of being Irish, but then not if you do not fit the so-called criteria!
As the daughter of a Rector of the Church of Ireland from a line going back five generations of rectors in the South of Ireland and both sides of the family going back 1,000 years on the land – I am still referred to as a “Brit” or a “prod”, but when it comes to honouring Yeats or Oscar Wilde or even Wolfe Tone an enormous amount of people can be so proud of them being Irish and overlook the fact they were prods.
Heather Humphreys, by all accounts, was a wonderful TD and was put forward for the job out of honour and respect for her many skills and talents.
I do so hope she will continue to contribute to public life in Ireland for the benefit of us all. – Yours, etc
SALLY HARPUR O’DOWD,
Wexford.
