W2A-001 Unionist myths-0.txt
UNIONIST MYTHS 1912-1985

Alvin Jackson I

The events of 1912-14 in Ireland have served as a creation myth for Unionism in the twentieth century - as a kind of Orange Genesis. Shaped and strengthened by the patriarchs Edward Carson and James Craig, Unionism survived political challenge from a serpentine H. H. Asquith and reappeared, with the steeples of Tyrone and Fermanagh, from the deluge of the Great War. The Unionist rulers of Northern Ireland saw in the issues and personalities of 1912-14 an important moral prop in the same way as varieties of nationalist have sought to cultivate the legacies of Wolfe Tone or Padraig Pearse, and varieties of English commentator have sought retroactive definitions of the Glorious Revolution.

Carson has emerged as an Orange icon, a fact recognised in a literal sense in the diptych painted by Joseph McWilliams; he has emerged as an Orange Daniel O'Connell, "the saviour of his tribe" - protecting the least of his people from British betrayal, unifying and mobilizing his community in a uniquely thorough manner. The emotional bond between this latter-day Counsellor and his following, a bond well captured in Gerald Dawe's poem "A Question of Covenants", was of a peculiarly intense quality: mill-women kissed his hand; country squires treated him with an exaggerated reverence. The emotional charge of Ulster Day, 28 September 1912, when thousands gathered at Belfast city hall to oppose Home Rule, long persisted in the northern folk memory. It is an ironic testimony to the potency of this image that contemporary Unionists, in organising their first major demonstration against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, should have chosen precisely the same location as their forefathers, opposing an earlier act of ministerial "treachery", did in 1912. Photographs taken from the dome of the city hall in 1985 consciously mimic the sepia images of 1912. Ian Paisley plays Carson to James Molyneaux's Craig: both invoke the men of 1912 in legitimizing their creed. The mythology of 1912-14 is therefore a central feature of latter-day Unionism, with memories of Edwardian derring-do remaining alive and relevant, and with the actions of the Edwardian leadership generating a still complete respect and reverence.

Nevertheless, just as the reputation of O'Connell was illuminated in different ways, depending on the needs of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism, so Carson and the men of 1912 have been examined from different perspectives, and exploited in different forms. Successive generations of Unionist, and successive forms of Unionism, embrace different aspects of the myth, even if all tacitly agree in looking back to 1912-14 for whatever form of legitimization they seek. Unionist chroniclers and propagandists, beginning with Ronald Mc Neill in 1922, accepted that this was a period of unique internal unity within northern Unionism, a period when the cohesion of Unionism and between Unionism and its allies was pretty well complete. The Protestant clergy, women and children were politicized, and were bound into organized or active Unionism as never before: the young C. S. Lewis, cocooned in suburban loyalism, was writing essays on the Home Rule question from the age of ten, on the eve of the constitutional crisis. An Ulster Women's Unionist Council was first formed in 1911, and was quickly followed by local offspring. Generally the numbers of men and women responding to their leaders were unprecedented: just under 500,000 signed the Ulster Covenant; some 100,000 were (nominally) recruited to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.).

English Conservative sanction was as apparently thorough as it was astonishing: when Andrew Bonar Law made his fiery Blenheim pledge in July 1912, Craig was as startled as English commentators with a rather more vigorous sense of political morality. English Conservatives of the second rank, like Sir William Bull, actively promoted Ulster Unionist gunrunning; first-rank Tories such as Walter Long, even possibly Bonar Law himself, approve the mass importation of weapons into Larne, Country Antrim, at a preliminary stage.

Here, then, was a period apparently characterized by organizational and strategic success - a period when the Unionist leadership was as unequivocal as its following. There was no perception of moral greyness, no reprehensible ambiguity. Moreover Unionists did not, ultimately, have to follow through the implications of their own behaviour: in August 1914, with the outbreak of the Great War, they could back away from the precipice in a more credible fashion than marked their later retreats from vulgar bluster. The chasm was reached only with the first battle of the Somme, when fears of annihilation, of race death, came close to fulfilment - though in circumstances very different to those envisioned before the war. Set against the carnage of the Great War, and against the more modest brutalities of the Troubles, the struggle against Home Rule appeared as heroic without being bloody. And, in retrospect, the combination of threatened militancy at Larne, and the actual immolation at the Somme, had served to prepare the way for partition and for a Unionist heimat: the Government of Ireland Act, the foundation of Northern Ireland, could be credibly interpreted as a tangible reward for their political investment before and during the Great War. Kenneth Pyper, the protagonist of Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster, was not alone in seeing, even in his despair, a logical progression between the U.V.F., their role on the Somme and the later struggles of Unionism.

This article explores the historical perspectives of modern Unionism, and the bond between this vision of the past and contemporary Unionist action. The argument is divided into three principal sections. First, the resonance of Unionist actions in 1912-14 is charted: the ways in which the popular memory of 1912-14 was cultivated and the importance of Unionist imagery from the period are both examined. Secondly, one episode in the period - the gunrunning coup of April 1914 - is isolated in order both to illustrate some of the broader themes of the article, and to compare popular and official memories with available historical evidence. The article closes with a variety of reflections on the interrelationship between the loyalist past and the loyalist present, and on the ways in which contemporary Unionism is illuminated through an exploration of its historical consciousness.

II

Little wonder that Unionists should have returned to 1912 in piety, and with a sense of nostalgia for what, for them, was a more vital and coherent political faith. The increasingly confident governors of Northern Ireland saw Carson and Craig as statebuilders, and perceived themselves as the sole legatees of these men. Their reputations were bitterly guarded. Carson chose a judicial career in England rather than office in Northern Ireland, but his contribution to Unionism, and to the North, did not go unattested. His occasional visits won lavish press coverage. A reverential literature was consolidated, culminating in Edward Marjoribanks and Ian Colvin's triple-decker "life" of 1932-6. Carson was actively involved in the manufacture of his own mythology, supplying forewords to Unionist publications and co-operating in the Marjoribanks and Colvin project: indeed he was so pleased with this biography that he was prepared to distribute inscribed copies of the first two volumes to his intimates. When he died in 1935 there was a state funeral in Belfast, and an ornate memorial in St. Anne's Church of Ireland cathedral. He was given a statue, cast in an appropriately defiant pose and placed in front of the Stormont parliament building. He was in competition with Queen Elizabeth II when the Belfast city fathers were considering how to name their new bridge across the Lagan in 1965 Craig gained lapidary immortality in the form of a bridge - in this case over the Foyle in Derry - and through the name of the new town linking Portadown and Lurgan in North Armagh. He, too, had successive literary apologists: Hugh Shearman in 1942, and St. John Ervine in 1949.

Generations of Unionist politicians have vindicated themselves through genuflecting to the men of 1912. In the later 1960s this became less a matter of celebrating the Northern Irish state through celebrating its founders and more thoroughly a matter of seeking legitimacy within Unionism. With the movement threatening to disintegrate, to revert to its constituent parts, rival Unionist sects sought to annex the Carson mystique and thereby to consolidate their claims over the tradition as a whole. This is partly why Terence O'Neill's experimental Unionism in the 1960s was marketed as much by reference to the perceived legacy of the men of 1912 as by reference to any more universal principle: in arguing for a progressive Unionism in 1965 O'Neill warned that "no one anywhere [should] make the mistake of thinking that because there is talk of a new Ulster that the Ulster of Carson and Craig is dead."

Yet, surprising as it seems, and despite O'Neill's repeated references to the Unionist patriarchs, this mistake was made. It was precisely because O'Neill deviated from the familiar in other respects that Ian Paisley could appeal with increasing persuasiveness to fundamentalist Unionism, and could credibly invoke the achievement of Carson. Paisley courted Carson's son, the bewildered Edward Carson Junior, deploying him in election campaigns in February 1965. When Paisley opened his Free Presbyterian cathedral, the Martyrs'Memorial Church in east Belfast, a monument to Carson was erected in a conspicuous position at the front of the building. In a nicely symbolic incident in 1967 Paisley used the cover of Carson's statue at Stormont to snowball the car of the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, then paying a courtesy visit to O'Neill. In November 1985 Paisley, opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, concluded his peroration at Belfast city hall with Carson's view of the rights of citizenship.
