Episode 6 - Panel 2a -'Seeking a congenial citizenship: the loyalist reimagination of southern Ireland after 1922' - Dr. Ian D'Alton

Southern Irish Loyalism in Context

This paper rests conceptually on a borrowing from sociology, principally a 2011 article by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, 'Constructing citizenship: exclusion, subordination and resistance'. The talk examines examines how, in post-1922 Ireland, southern Irish Protestants approached acquiring a sense of citizenship in the new Ireland. In this, they had to bridge a potentially disastrous disconnection with Ireland, complicated by a genuine geographical patriotism, an inherent uneasiness with an ascendant 'National Catholicism', and a strong sense of otherness. It is argued, though, that, culturally, Protestants had a rather generous a la carte menu of 'belongingness' to draw upon. This allowed them to construct a sense of congenial citizenship through a mixture of 'real' and 'imagined' communities in appropriate and acceptable proportions as circumstances demanded. In this, it will also be argued that this facility to construct a 'mix-and-match' notion of Irishness gave Protestants a much greater flexibility in determining their own sense of citizenship than those who had perforce to exist within a straitjacket of rigid Catholic-nationalist orthodoxy. The overspill from this has been a somewhat surprising ability for Protestants to come to a relatively comfortable accommodation with Irishness, and a sense of civitas that has been better able to adapt to the modern world. Ian d’Alton, MA (NUI), PhD (Cambridge), FRHistS, FRNS is a historian who has been researching southern Irish Protestantism for over forty years, latterly through the medium of the literary. He has given numerous papers to learned bodies He is the author of Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812-1844 (Cork UP, 1980). His latest attempt to synthesise the southern Protestant experience is ‘A first voice: Henry Windsor Villiers Stuart and the agricultural labourers’ in Brian Casey (ed.), Defying the law of the land: agrarian radicals in Irish history (Dublin, The History Press, 2013). He is working on a book about the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize, and its influence on British historiography, 1897-2005 (he was a recipient of the Prize in 1972). He was a contributor and editorial advisor to the Royal Irish Academy/Cambridge University Press Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009), and wrote the entries, amongst others, for Thomas Lipton (he of the tea), the ‘Ponsonby estate’ landlord A.H. Smith Barry, and the writers Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch and Molly Keane. In 2011-12 he was an honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool; in 2014 a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and in 2014-15, a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Dublin. At end-February 2012, he retired from the positon of Chief Executive Officer of the Housing Finance Agency, an Irish state-owned company.