unionism

unionism. As a political tradition, Irish unionism can be traced back to that strand of late 17th‐ and early 18th‐century patriotism which held that full political integration with Great Britain was preferable to a flawed or unattainable legislative independence. By 1801, when the Act of Union passed into law, unionism, whether in Ulster or the rest of Ireland, still lacked a significant political base. As a popular political war‐cry, therefore, unionism developed only in the first half of the 19th century; Unionism as an organized movement dates from the home rule crisis of 1885–6. Demotic unionism was thus in no sense automatic or predetermined: it was made possible by the emergence of a newly unified Protestantism and a newly distinctive British identity in 19th‐century Ireland. These in turn depended on the economic development of Ulster, and—indirectly—on the political and institutional consolidation of Irish Catholicism.

Formal Irish Unionist organization emerged in 1885–6 in the wake of a revitalized Orangeism and Conservatism which, in turn, represented a reaction to the Land War. Electoral reform in 1884–5 (see franchise) created a more representative, and therefore a more Catholic, electorate, and threatened to annihilate a still divided loyalism. It was in response to this combined electoral and constitutional challenge that a group of Orange Conservatives, including Edward Saunderson, sought to create a coalition stretching beyond the traditional, Tory, bounds of loyalism. In February 1885 the first, short‐lived, Irish loyalist parliamentary party was created, while in the summer of 1885 a popular base was being added in both Belfast and Dublin. By March 1886, when Gladstone introduced the home rule bill, a coherent unionist organization was in place both inside and outside the House of Commons. The strength of this organization lay in the fact that it was not merely an immediate or improvised response to Gladstone's challenge.

Southern Irish unionism was initially an important element of this political strength. Southern Irish unionists (numbering at most 250,000) were primarily landed and Anglican, and provided considerable financial and organizational direction to unionists in all parts of Ireland. In common with other economic elites, southern unionists were over‐represented in both houses of the British parliament. Unionists claimed in the 1880s and 1890s to be a movement which embraced the entire island, and southern unionists, though numerically slight, were important in lending credibility to this claim.

Southern unionist decline (during and after the Edwardian period), occurred partly because of the rapid erosion of the economic and political position of Irish landlords, and partly because of the gradual development of popular unionist organization in Ulster. In 1904–5, moved by English Conservative neglect, and by the internal challenges of T. W. Russell and of the Independent Orange Order, a group of young, middle‐class unionists (including James Craig) created the Ulster Unionist Council. This spearheaded a more militant localized unionism, based in Belfast, and reflecting narrowly northern concerns. It was the UUC which directed the unionist campaign during the passage of the third home rule bill (1912–14), and which lent this campaign its popular and threatening tone.

Ulster unionist domination of the movement led to a modification of its rhetoric and strategy. Under the charismatic Edward Carson a unique mass mobilization of northern unionists was achieved. Potentially explosive popular emotions were cultivated by Carson and by his lieutenant Craig, and guided into the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, and into regimented protest demonstrations. Unionist claims to repudiate home rule for all of Ireland were now more qualified, while emphasis was given to the rights of the by now more coherent Protestant community in Ulster. By July 1914 Ulster unionists had abandoned the all‐Ireland unionism of 1886 and 1893, and were prepared to negotiate for a partition settlement. Equally, by July 1914 Ulster unionists had abandoned the essentially constitutional strategies of 1886 and 1893, and were importing large quantities of weapons (most spectacularly in the Larne gun‐running of April 1914).

Superficially the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 defused the constitutional crisis, for the operation of home rule was suspended for the duration of the war. Yet the war helped to further the geographical polarization of Irish politics, indirectly promoting the division of Irish unionism, and broadening the distance between unionism and nationalism. The UVF was transformed into the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British army, and was decimated on the Somme in July 1916: this sacrifice served to reinforce a peculiarly northern sense of identity. While Ulster unionists grew more particularist, southern unionists, weakened by immense wartime losses, and horrified by the development of Sinn Féin, grew more pragmatic: southern unionist representatives at the Irish Convention of 1917 were prepared to endorse home rule. This apostasy helped to confirm the partitionist sympathies of Ulster unionists.

In 1920 the UUC accepted the creation, under the Government of Ireland Act, of a six‐county Northern Ireland. Unionism, which had emerged as a coalition demanding the maintenance of a united parliament in London, became the majority party in a devolved parliament, and the guarantor of a home rule and partition settlement. This rapid change of function would soon promote further ideological shifts inside unionism, turning it into a primarily devolutionist movement. By 1972, when they reacted with dismay to the reintroduction of direct rule, unionists had rediscovered the priorities of the colonial patriots, for whom a true union had been less desirable than local autonomy.

Bibliography

Jackson, Alvin , The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (1989)

Alvin Jackson