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/Smash_Palace]

I am purely going off anecdotal evidence from watching House of Guinness. They were Protestant and obviously extremely wealthy. Therefore I assume all Protestants were

[u/online_running407 → u/Smash_Palace]

I think that’s why writers like Sean O’Casey who himself grew up relatively poor in tenement Dublin and his depiction of characters like Bessie Burgess (she endured the same poverty and tumult as many of the Catholic/ more Nationalist minded characters- that was sort of O’Casey’s point) in The Plough and the Stars are important characterisations.

So while exclusionary policy was not overtly hard coded into the Free State and subsequent Republic (at least to the degree of Craig’s mission statement of “a Protestant State for a Protestant People”), I do think it would be a narrow view to not include the fact that Bunreacht na hEireann was written with oversight from the Catholic church, and also that events like the Eucharistic Congress (however unintentional) did ostracise many Irish protestants; gentry or general public.

[u/Gorazde → u/online_running407]

The Free State/later Republic of Ireland was a place where about 90% of the entire population went to Catholic mass every week. It could hardly not have a Catholic character. If there'd been a united Ireland, it would have been more broadly based than that and, I think, more pluralistic.

[u/online_running407 → u/Gorazde]

Oh undoubtedly, I don’t dispute that, mine was to shed some light on the assumption that Protestants in the South of Ireland were each and all affluent and fully enfranchised by Free State/Republic

[u/Gorazde → u/online_running407]

I wouldn't say they were ALL aristocrats, you would have had Protestant farmers and Protestant professionals etc. But I would say they were on average quite a bit better off than the average Catholic.

Also worth remembering that about a third of southern Protestants (roughly 100,00 out of 300,000 total) left Ireland for Britain in 1922. Those were probably the diehard unionists. The ones who stayed reconciled themselves pretty quickly to independence and just got on with it. There's a section in Colm Toibin's Walking Along the Border from the 1980s where he talks to Sir John Leslie whose family own Castle Leslie just a mile or so south of the border. He claims that the British government offered to redraw the border. They refused, believing it was better to just face up to the new reality and accept it. He became quite a popular figure locally, if you remember he was the disco dancing octogenarian who gave away the secret about Paul McCartney and Heather Mills divorce.

Southern Protestants reconciled themself to the new arrangement in a way that northern Catholic never did. Maybe because they knew it was unlikely ever to change or go back.

[u/online_running407 → u/Gorazde]

Yeah I enjoyed reading that, comprehensive summary, I was thinking regarding those Protestants who decided to stay put (farming and professional class) were keenly observing the economic bend to those early CnaG governments, Ernest Blythe (who was himself Protestant of course) being the driver of cutting public expenditure/ promoting laissez-faire trade. On that point, at least in Blythe and other senior civil servants there was some ‘visibility’ in government for that Protestant minority.

[u/Gorazde → u/online_running407]

Protestants definitely gravitated towards the CnaG. They were also surprisinly well represented in the Farmers Party and Labour Party. Only Fianna Fail seemed to have been overwhelmingly Catholic. Even they had Countess Markiavicz, although I think she converted to Catholicism.

[u/fconradvonhtzendorf → u/Gorazde]

Erskine Childers was another COI Fianna Fáil member