Protestant Ireland - excerpts from a speech - Transcript

People often speak about Ireland as a geographical entity. When they speak about its people, either within the island as a whole, or within Northern Ireland in particular, they often speak as if the people were homogeneous in their cultural and religious identities. The fact that we cannot be thus described has first to be understood, before we start to propose ways of dealing with the issues.

It is easier to speak about uniting territory than it is to address the challenge of uniting diverse people, some of whom do not wish to be united.

These matters run deep as they involve the mythic consciousness of people. They touch deeply upon a people's sense of identity. They invoke deep passions and release deep hatreds and ancient anxieties, deeper than rationality. In the name of these things people are killed, politicians rise and fall, and policies are made, treaties signed, and agreements abrogated.

One recent experience illustrates my conviction that the realities of the people of Ireland are not well understood beyond our shores.

At a conference on the subject of "Beyond Hate" which was held recently in Derry, an American visitor responded to my introduction of myself as a Presbyterian minister and the current Presbyterian moderator with the words, "I didn't know that there were any Presbyterians in Ireland." There are in fact 350,000 Presbyterians in Ireland, constituting about 10 percent of the population of the whole island or 28 percent of the population of Northern Ireland.

Raymond Helmick, S.J., who spent enough time in Ireland talking to Presbyterians to understand how we think, wrote about us in these terms:

The environment of clerical domination of Irish life and the dread of that power, led the Protestant people in the first instance to defend the rights of dissenting nonconformist minorities. Being afraid of Roman rule they did not extend their hands generously to their Catholic neighbors, being afraid that if the dissenting tradition was not protected, it would disappear in an environment which was centralist and authoritarian, or in one in which the dissenting tradition would be consistently outvoted in a democracy intent on imposing policies at variance with dissenting notions of liberty.

It is perfectly possible to make out a reasonable case for unionist resistance to being incorporated in a centrist, Catholic, ultramontane, nationalist Ireland. What you cannot make out a case for is a style of unionism which is itself, in its turn, exclusive, dominating, discriminatory, and unjust. Nationalist distrust of and objection to being incorporated within such a state is as understandable as Unionist resistance to a United Ireland. Both forms of feared subservience will be resisted.

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