Introduction

The Protestants of Ireland are a complex community, made so by social, denominational, political, economic and geographical factors. Since the early seventeenth century, there have been tensions between, on the one hand, Church of Ireland Protestants in the south, the self-styled natural leaders of Ireland with their ties to the land and the state, and, on the other, Presbyterian-dominated Ulster with its tenant farmers, industrial character and often cantankerous disposition. Of course, this simplistic dichotomy obscures social and economic divisions within both communities and the numerically small but dynamic subculture of Protestant churches and sects that have contributed much to the development of the island. Given its often bewildering variety, historians have struggled to describe the complexity of this group.

Confessional State, Enlightenment and Rebellion, 1740–1800

Ireland in the 1740s, according to S. J. Connolly, was an ancien régime society in which religious inequalities were inseparable from social hierarchy and landownership. The dominance of the members of the established episcopal Church of Ireland was predicated on the rights of landed property, not the rights of numbers. The religious allegiance of the Irish population had been determined in the previous century by population movements rather than conversion. Three-quarters to four-fifths of the population were Catholic and though various Protestants were at certain times compelled to make common cause, Irish religious divisions were not simply binary – tensions between Protestants were as important and contributed to the remarkable events of 1798 when Presbyterian rebels in Ulster joined with Catholic insurgents in the south to overthrow in part the political, social and economic ascendancy of episcopal Protestants. The confessional divisions expressed during the Williamite wars had largely subsided by the 1740s. The Age of Reason had cooled somewhat the religious temperature of the previous century, though it was the ‘good behaviour’ of Irish Catholics during the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 that is perhaps more important. The penal laws played their part, but those against Catholic religious practice quickly entered abeyance whereas those concerned with landownership were rigorously enforced.

Introduction

Daniel O'Connell and the Gaelic revival helped to embed the myth that Ireland was a religiously and ethnically homogenous society with a monocultural and unchanging identity. As in other countries, this process involved social exclusion, ‘the marking out of some groups of people and places as marginal in relation to the nation's core groups and places’. When accompanied by poverty, marginality was explicitly associated with subalternity; when associated with privilege, it encouraged social envy. So, minorities are deeply intertwined with questions of class and national identity.

Ironically, while such issues were not uniquely Irish, some Irish minorities were actually ‘imported’ as a consequence of other countries adopting even more rigorous exclusionary policies at various stages in their history. This is the case with the religious refugees who arrived from the end of the seventeenth century. Likewise, the stimulus for the liberalisation of Irish attitudes often came from abroad, particularly through the international organisations of which Ireland was part. Thus, Jewish toleration was decided by London in 1656. Three hundred years later the Republic was a proud member of the United Nations and ratified the Convention on the Status of Refugees. However, this had little effect on the monoculturalism which inspired both government practice and social responses. The emphasis remained on control, containment and assimilation, as the Hungarian refugees from the 1956 USSR invasion discovered to their cost. Further change came later, when, under EEC/EU law, new standards began to be incorporated into Irish law.

The Protestant Refugees

Derisively called Huguenots – a term of uncertain etymology – by their persecutors, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), French Protestants had to choose between submission and exile. About half a million opted for the latter, seeking sanctuary in other European countries. Denmark, Poland, Prussia, the Netherlands and England received substantial numbers. They comprised a cross-section of French society, from the nobility and the clergy to merchants and artisans. About five thousand eventually moved to Ireland, settling in Birr, Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny, Portarlington, Waterford and Youghal.

What is social history? In this introduction we refrain from offering an analytical and systematic concept of the discipline for two main reasons. The first is that this book is a collective endeavour and the authors whom we have gathered here reflect a variety of approaches and methods. We affirm and celebrate such plurality of voices, believing that there is much to learn from listening to one another, for the age of the ‘grand theories’ is happily over. The second reason is that, for us, social history – and particularly this book – is not a point of arrival, but a point of departure. It is open-ended, it is a programme, a springboard for the rewriting of the history of the Irish. It is methodologically eclectic, open to cognate disciplines (geography, sociology, demographics, economics), and, if not histoire totale, it is at least interested in grasping the totality of human experience in society. Its totalising quest of meaning is a project, rather than a narrative.

Why do we start with the central decades of the eighteenth century? Though any chronological starting point would be more or less arbitrary, 1740 is significant for Ireland's social and economic history because it marked the beginning of a devastating famine. It was a catastrophe. It is not as well remembered as the one which started in 1845, partly because it did not have any immediate or long-term political consequences and was never incorporated into the grand narrative of national struggle. However, it deeply affected large numbers of people in a more direct and drastic way than political events such as the 1800 Act of Union.

Irish historiography, whether ‘nationalist’, ‘revisionist’ or ‘post-revisionist’, has traditionally been dominated by a concern for political history, with a focus on the national question. To an extent, the latter has affected also the way historians have explored social and economic topics, for example by stimulating excellent research on the Great Famine, emigration and the Land Wars. While there has long been a parallel scholarly interest in less obviously ‘political’ issues – a tradition spearheaded by historians such as Connell, Cullen and Akenson – it is only in recent decades that there has been a substantial development in the study of a wider range of social and economic formations and phenomena.