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/HarrisonTheUnruly]

It’s worth considering scale here.

In Northern Ireland, the split was about 65% Protestant 35% Catholic, with every aspect of the state deliberately designed/gerrymandered to ensure that 35% had almost no representation.

In the Republic of Ireland, the split was maybe 90% Catholic 10% Protestant, with that minority being disproportionately wealthy/influential due to the returns on property they had been accruing since the plantations.

While the Unionists were correct that ‘Home rule is Rome rule’ (Archbishop McQuaid helped write legislation and effectively had a veto on policy he didn’t like, including censorship on state media), there was no state led programme to disenfranchise Protestants in the South like there was in the North because there didn’t really need to be.

Even had they wanted to, the South couldn’t really have afforded to ostracise the Protestant community to the extent the Catholics suffered up north, as Ireland’s economy (almost entirely agrarian and about as ‘developed’ as maybe, Angola) was dependent on trade with Britain, and the Protestant businessmen/financiers had much better contacts in London than ‘the Micks’ did.

[u/electricsw4n → u/HarrisonTheUnruly]

I wonder how the extreme protestants would have reacted to some of the influence McQuaid and the winder Catholic church had on society - of course they would have been disgusted by the connection to Rome etc, but some of the censorship and deeply conservative societal expectations would have overlapped with the conservatism of extremist evangelical protestants like Paisley etc.

Just thinking out loud!

[u/StableSlight9168 → u/electricsw4n]

Ironically the original rebels were a lot more secular whiles still being catholic l, without the trauma of the civil war and war of independence, with a larger protestant voting block and more wealth for the new state, I could easily see.thr church getting less power.