Post by Prof. Martin McKeever, CSsR, published on the Accademia Alfonsiana Blog.
An ideology involves the reductive use of certain ideas on the part of a collectivity in pursuing its own interests, often in the form of a political project.
This was the understanding of ideology proposed at the end of the first post in this series. In this piece we will attempt to apply this definition to “Unionism” in Northern Ireland, taking this term in its widest connotation as indicating the political aspiration to remain in union with the British Crown. Chronologically, we will frame our treatment of this ideology between 1921 when Northern Ireland was created and 1998 when the Belfast Agreement (Good Friday) brought an end to thirty years of violent conflict.
Like most ideologies Unionism has its roots in history. In this case the roots go back to the early 17th century when Scottish, Protestant “settlers” (also known as “planters”) occupied land in Ulster that had been confiscated from Irish, Catholic farmers. When Northern Ireland was created, six of the nine counties that comprised Ulster were separated from the others in order to guarantee a Protestant majority.
It is at this point in history that our study of Unionism as an ideology begins. In what follows we will simply take the main terms present in the above definition of ideology and examine how they apply in this particular case.
It is probably best to begin at the end with the term “political project”. This project was quite clear and explicit: to establish what came to be known in popular parlance as “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”. This was done by maintaining the union with Britain at a time when the rest of Ireland was becoming independent. County borders and electoral colleges were artificially drawn so as to guarantee large Protestant majorities in elections. For more than 50 years the Protestant parliament at Stormont practiced a policy of blatant discrimination against Catholics in housing, employment, education and civil rights. When, in 1969, the Civil Rights Movement challenged this form of domination it met with a violent backlash on the part of Protestant militias and the official police force. This led to the 30 years of violent conflict we know as “the Troubles”, which issued eventually in the so-called Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This agreement put an end to the political project of discriminatory domination which is at the heart of Unionism.
It will already be clear from the above that the “collectivity” referred to in our understanding of ideology is none other than the Protestant people of Northern Ireland, or at least a substantial part of it. It should be noted that the “interests” of this collectivity were essentially political and economic rather than religious. This is an important complication from an ideological point of view: Unionism can be understood as a political ideology that crystalizes around religious identity. So “the Troubles” were not a conflict about religious dogma or practice but about political power and its economic benefits.
As regards the key ideas at the heart of this ideology, the main one is obviously that of “the union”. That this term is used reductively emerges from the incoherence involved in threatening armed uprising against the State (the United Kingdom) to which the Unionists aspired to belong. Its abusive nature further emerges in the fact that it divides artificially geographic and political unities in an instrumental fashion. Finally, all of this was presented to the people (always an important player in ideology) as protection of religious liberty in the face an alleged plan of religious domination by the Roman Catholic Church.
Taken together, these factors fully confirm that Unionism corresponds to our understanding of ideology. It only remains for us to consider the moral dimension of this whole issue.
If every moral issue is an issue about who gets hurt then the more than 3000 deaths (and many more injuries) in this period certainly represent a moral issue. It is not of course that all these deaths can be attributed to Unionism as there were other actors involved in the conflict. But the hurt in question does not begin with the violence that led to these deaths and injuries. It begins with the programme of systematic discrimination against Catholics realized by “the Protestant parliament”. The key moral issue is one of social justice, exacerbated by the promotion of religious and ethnic hatred over decades.
As we will see in the case of other ideologies, the combination of political ambition and religious fanaticism is a particularly potent and dangerous cocktail.