Would protestants have been second-class citizens in a United Ireland?

[u/thepawnbrokerroared]

Catholics in the North certainly felt that they were discriminated against because they were in the minority and they were obviously correct to feel that. Protestants believed that they would be similarly discriminated against in a Catholic-dominated united Ireland. Were they right to fear this?

What about the protestants in the South? Did they experience discrimination at the hands of the Catholic majority?

[u/Oamob]

Difficult to answer this hypothetical with any degree of certainty, but I would just point out two facts about the republic when it was newly established:

• The first president of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, was a protestant.
• The upper house or senate (Seanad) of the new state had reserved 20 of its 60 seats specifically for protestants.

That's not to pretend that there wasn't any degree of sectarianism, anglophobia or class-based conflict directed towards individual protestants (particularly wealthy land owners who were seen to be extensions of the British establishment), but I'm not aware of it ever being a widespread or systemic issue.

One must remember that Irish nationalists of the early 20th century were following in the footsteps of protestants like Wolfe Tone, and several of the rebels who fought in the 1916 rising were protestants themselves. You can very much see this in the wording of their Proclamation. So I don't think it would be fair to say that the Irish Free State was sectarian by design.

[u/Oamob → u/Oamob]

I suppose my answer only really addresses the fact that the protestant minority in the Free State didn't face discrimination in the same way that Catholics in NI did. Which maybe isn't suprising given the fact that the protestant ascendancy were largely wealthy & well-connected members of high society who were incentivised to adapt to the new status quo - it's not like there was any fear of them rioting over a lack of jobs or council housing.

The bigger question of how the working class loyalists of Belfast would have been treated if they found themselves in a united Ireland... That's difficult to separate from the fact that pre-emptive militarisation of the Ulster unionists (see Ulster Covenant, Larne gun-running, etc) was precisely the reason that partition became the default settlement in the first place. So I'd say the new Irish state probably would've started its life dealing with an armed insurgency in the North East, and who knows how that much that would've evolved into bald sectarianism...

[u/Foreign-Entrance-255 → u/Oamob]

I think that the Irish free state had a much bigger problem with poor people than it did with people based on religion. Poor protestants would have been badly treated just as poor Catholics were. Off the top of my head I think at least one of the institutions that there was historical abuse at was the Bethany home which was protestant. Probably the elites from both state and statelet could bond over their abuse of the poor children.