Unionism in Ireland
Unionism in Ireland is a political tradition that professes loyalty to the crown of the United Kingdom and to the union it represents with England, Scotland and Wales. The overwhelming sentiment of Ireland's Protestant minority, unionism mobilised in the decades following Catholic Emancipation in 1829 to oppose restoration of a separate Irish parliament. Since Partition in 1921, as Ulster unionism its goal has been to retain Northern Ireland as a devolved region within the United Kingdom and to resist the prospect of an all-Ireland republic. Within the framework of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which concluded three decades of political violence, unionists have shared office with Irish nationalists in a reformed Northern Ireland Assembly. Since February 2024, they no longer do so as the larger faction: they serve in an executive with an Irish republican First Minister.
Unionism became an overarching partisan affiliation in Ireland late in the nineteenth century. Typically Presbyterian agrarian-reform Liberals coalesced with traditionally Anglican, Orange Order allied, Conservatives against the Irish Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. Joined by loyalist labour, on the eve of World War I this broad opposition to Irish self-government concentrated in Belfast and its hinterlands as Ulster unionism and prepared an armed resistance—the Ulster Volunteers.
Within the partition settlement of 1921 by which the rest of Ireland attained separate statehood, Ulster unionists accepted a home rule dispensation for the six north-east counties remaining in the United Kingdom. For the next 50 years, the Ulster Unionist Party exercised the devolved powers of the Northern Ireland Parliament with little domestic opposition and outside of the governing party-political system at Westminster.
In 1972, the British government suspended this arrangement. Against a background of growing political violence, and citing the need to consider how Catholics in Northern Ireland could be integrated into its civic and political life, it prorogued the parliament in Belfast.
Over the ensuing three decades of The Troubles, unionists divided in their responses to power-sharing proposals presented, in consultation with the Republic of Ireland, by successive British governments. Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement, under which both republican and loyalist paramilitaries committed to permanent ceasefires, unionists accepted principles of joint office and parallel consent in a new Northern Ireland legislative Assembly and executive.
Renegotiated in 2006, relations within this consociational arrangement remained fraught. Unionists, with diminishing electoral strength, charged their nationalist partners in government with pursuing an anti-British cultural agenda and, post-Brexit, with supporting a trade regime, the Northern Ireland Protocol, that advances an all-Ireland agenda. In February 2024, two years after their withdrawal collapsed the devolved institutions, on the basis of new British government assurances they returned to the Assembly to form the first Northern Ireland government in which unionists are a minority.
Irish Unionism 1800–1904
The Act of Union 1800
In the last decades of the Kingdom of Ireland, Protestants in public life advanced themselves as Irish Patriots.The focus of their patriotism was the Parliament in Dublin. Confined on a narrow franchise to landed members of the established Anglican communion, the parliament denied equal protection and public office to Dissenters and to the Kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority. The high point of this parliamentary patriotism was the formation during the American War of Independence of the Irish Volunteers and, as that militia paraded in Dublin, the securing in 1782 of the parliament's legislative independence from the British government in London.In the north-east, combinations of Presbyterian tradesmen, merchants, and tenant farmers protested against the unrepresentative parliament and against an executive in Dublin Castle still appointed, through the office of the Lord Lieutenant, by English ministers. Seeing little prospect of further reform and in the hope that they might be assisted by republican France, these United Irishmen sought a revolutionary union of "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter". Their resolve was broken with the defeat of their uprising in 1798, and by reports of rebel outrages against Protestant Loyalists in the south.
The British government, which had had to deploy its own forces to suppress the rebellion in Ireland and to turn back and defeat French intervention, decided on a union with Great Britain. Provision for Catholic emancipation was dropped from the Act of Union pushed with difficulty through the parliament in Dublin. While a separate Irish executive in Dublin was retained, representation, still wholly Protestant, was transferred to Westminster.
In the Presbyterian north east, the Irish Parliament was unlamented. Having refused calls for reform—to broaden representation and curb corruption—few saw cause to regret its passing.
Catholic emancipation and "Protestant unity"
It took the Union thirty years to deliver on the promise of Catholic emancipation —to admit Catholics to the Westminster Parliament—and permit an erosion of the Protestant monopoly on position and influence. An opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O'Connell, invited Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782.At the same time, the security in Ireland for emancipation was a fivefold increase in the threshold for the property franchise, cutting the Irish electorate from 215,000 to 40,000. O'Connell's Protestant ally in the north, George Ensor, observed that this broke the link between Catholic inclusion and democratic reform.
In Ulster, resistance to O'Connell's appeal was stiffened by a religious revival. With its emphasis upon "personal witness", the New Reformation appeared to transcend the ecclesiastical differences between the Protestant denominations. while launching them into "a far more conscious sense of separateness from the Church of Rome", then undergoing its own devotional revolution. The leading Presbyterian evangelist, Henry Cooke took the occasion to preach Protestant Unity. In 1834, at a Conservative demonstration called by Lord Roden at Hillsborough, Cooke proposed a "Christian marriage" between the two main Protestant denominations. Setting their remaining differences aside, they would cooperate on all "matters of common safety".
Presbyterian voters tended to favour reform-minded Whigs or, as they later emerged, tenant-right and free-trade Liberals, over the Conservative and Orange-Order candidates of the landed Ascendancy. But as the Irish party-political successors to O'Connell's Repeal movement gained representation and influence in Westminster, Cooke's call for unity was to be heeded in the progressive emergence of a pan-Protestant unionism.
The Irish party challenge at Westminster and the Land War
Up to, and through, the Great Famine of the 1840s, successive governments, Whig and Tory, had refused political responsibility for agrarian conditions in Ireland. The issues of a low-level tenant-landlord war came to Westminster in 1852 when the all-Ireland Tenant Right League helped return 48 MPs to Westminster where they sat as the Independent Irish Party. What the Young Irelander Gavan Duffy called the League of North and South soon fell apart. In the south the Church approved the Catholic MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting government positions. In the north, the Protestant tenant-righters, William Sharman Crawford and James MacKnight had their election meetings broken up by Orangemen.For unionism the more momentous challenge lay in the wake of the Reform Act 1867. In England and Wales it produced an electorate that no longer identified instinctively with the conservative interest in Ireland and was more open to the "home-rule" compromise that nationalists now presented. Ireland would remain within the United Kingdom but with a parliament in Dublin exercising powers devolved from Westminster. Meanwhile, in Ireland, a combination of the secret ballot and increased representation for the towns, reduced the electoral influence of land owners and their agents, and contributed to the triumph, in 1874, of the Home Rule League. Fifty-nine members were returned to Westminster where they sat as the Irish Parliamentary Party.
In his first ministry, the Liberal premier William Ewart Gladstone had attempted conciliation. In 1869, he disestablished the Church of Ireland, and in 1870 introduced the Landlord and Tenant Act. In both measures conservative jurists identified threats to the integrity of the union. Disestablishment reneged on the promise of "one Protestant Episcopal Church" for both Britain and Ireland under Article V of the Act of Union, and weak as they were, provisions for tenant compensation and purchase created a separate agrarian regime for Ireland at odds with the prevailing English conception of property rights.
In the Long Depression of the 1870s the Land War intensified. From 1879 it was organised by the direct-action Irish National Land League, led by the southern Protestant Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1881, in a further Land Act, Gladstone conceded the three F's—fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure. Recognising that "the land grievance had been a bond of discontent between Ulster and the rest of Ireland and in that sense a danger to the union", Irish Conservatives did not oppose the measure. Protestants in the eastern counties had admitted to the leadership of the tenant-right movement men, like the Rev. James Armour of Ballymoney, who were at best agnostic on the union, while in the west of the province even Orangemen had started joining the Land League.
The final and decisive shift in favour of constitutional concessions came in the wake of the Representation of the People Act 1884. The near-universal admission to the suffrage of male heads of household tripled the electorate in Ireland. The 1885 election returned an IPP, now under the leadership of Parnell, of 85 Members.Gladstone, whose Liberals lost all 15 of their Irish seats, was able to form his second ministry only with their Commons support.