Fifteen Eighty Four

In the midst of the Anglo-Irish War, on 21 August 1920, fourteen IRA volunteers attacked a farm owned by the Corscadden family at Carricknahorna in the hills of South Donegal. This was later the family home of Hazel Corscadden, the mother of future British prime minister Tony Blair. James Corscadden, the owner of the farm, was Blair’s granduncle.

The attack was part of a general raid for arms by the South Donegal brigade of the IRA. Those targeted were principally local leaders of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had recruited well in the county and acquired a large amount of arms thanks to the patronage of their commander Lord Leitrim.

Three months previously Donegal’s loyalists, like those in Counties Cavan and Monaghan, had been jettisoned from the Ulster Unionist Council in order to create a six-county Northern Ireland with a larger unionist, Protestant majority under the Government of Ireland Act – the ejected counties’ unionist populations were deemed too small, numbering just over 20 per cent of their respective county’s populations. Many unionist delegates from neighbouring counties objected but were outvoted at the Ulster Unionist Council in the spring of 1920.

The IRA in Donegal rightly presumed that loyalists were demoralised. But they were not an easy target. On entering the farmyard sixty-one-year-old James Corscadden and his family opened fire, wounding one of the IRA volunteers, John O’Donnell, in both legs. Shots were exchanged for some minutes, before the IRA left the farm, taking O’Donnell with them. O’Donnell, a neighbour of the Corscaddens, claimed that eight “Ulster volunteers … must have seen us and were gathered there to attack us.”

There are repeated examples of organised, armed loyalist resistance to the IRA in all three “lost Ulster” counties during the Anglo-Irish War. Despite being excluded from what became Northern Ireland, in June 1920 Donegal loyalists had sent help to Derry, when it looked to some like the city was going to fall to the IRA.

The city commandant of the Ulster Special Constabulary later stated that “Londonderry and Donegal are one. They are our own people … Where would we have been in years gone without their help?” Monaghan’s loyalists had also organised defence networks to resist the IRA. By May 1921, some parts of the county were effectively “no go” areas for IRA volunteers who risked being shot by loyalist sentries posted on drumlins.

At a time when there is much speculation about what the integration of unionists into a united Ireland might look like, Ulster’s Lost Counties suggests that learning from the experiences of Ulster loyalists who found themselves on the “wrong side” of the border is more important than ever.

Ulster loyalists living in the Irish state may have found themselves bewildered and apprehensive in the aftermath of partition, but they also enjoyed considerable agency. Some chose to discard their parents and grandparents’ Ulster and British identities, fully embracing their citizenship of a new republic.

However, “Ulsterism” continued to be articulated through sustained membership of the largely provincial Orange order. And the sacrifices of loyalists in the three counties were not forgotten by many living on the other side of the border  in Northern Ireland.

During the first two decades after partition, three county loyalists – perhaps naively – believed that Ireland’s status as a dominion meant that they could recognise and engage with the Free State government while also celebrating wider British and imperial connections. Ireland’s exit from the Commonwealth in 1949 was seen by many as an unforgivable act of “treaty-breaking”.

The declaration of a republic did not break Ulster connections. In 1962, eight hundred people attended a service to celebrate the Ulster Covenant in Bailieborough in Cavan, during which the presiding presbyterian minister proclaimed the solidarity of Cavan with Northern Ireland to visitors from Northern Ireland (including a future leading unionist, Reverend Martin Smyth): “They [the Cavan Orangemen] were not shamed to rejoice with them in privileges which they enjoyed in Northern Ireland. The men who signed the Covenant in 1912 had true convictions.”

Ties to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) also endured. In the years after partition, recruitment rates among three-county Protestants to the RUC remained at similar levels to that of the force’s disbanded all-island predecessor. During the Troubles the journalist Fergal Keane wrote that twelve men from a single Donegal parish were serving officers in the RUC. By contrast only eighteen of more than 7,000 gardaí in 1972 were Protestant – the number should have been closer to 300 given population size.

By his own recollection, Tony Blair’s mother’s Donegal family were “fiercely Protestant”. During the Troubles, he received letters from Protestant friends in Donegal. Old fears had returned. The letters, Blair recalled, “described with increasing venom the gradual deterioration of their relations with, and then their view of, their Catholic neighbours.”

In his memoirs Blair wrote bluntly about the legacies of intercommunal violence and reawakened suspicions during the troubles in Donegal. For those who remained in the county, a polite or careful public silence was a much safer choice to avoid unnecessary discord or offence caused to neighbours.

Paul Martin Sacks, an American political scientist who worked in Donegal during the Troubles, observed that Protestants faced pressure to publicly testify to “the moral superiority of the Catholic majority in the Republic over the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland.”

In 1971, as the republican campaign gained momentum, Provisional IRA leader Dáithí Ó Conaill claimed that the endurance of Protestant communities in the three counties – which made up over a fifth of the population pre-partition – was proof that their co-religionists in Northern Ireland would ultimately accept a united Ireland: “70,000 Unionists in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan were forced out of the United Kingdom in 1921 and though they protested and said they would never live under a Dublin government, they did so.”

Despite Ó Conaill’s optimism, others within the wider republican movement accused some Protestants in the three counties of acting as “fifth columnists”. Rumours spread through the three counties about individuals who were alleged to cross the border to serve in Northern Ireland’s hated, almost exclusively Protestant, Ulster Special Constabulary. Such rumours could have dangerous and even lethal consequences.

In the early 1970s the Provisional IRA suspected that the grandson of a Monaghan loyalist leader from five decades earlier was providing intelligence to the terrorist UVF. Another native of Monaghan from a well-known loyalist family, Ross Hearst, was abducted near Glaslough in 1980 and murdered as an alleged spy.

Six years earlier, republicans had targeted George Coulson, a Protestant farmer who lived outside Clones, who they wrongly believed was keeping stockpiles of weapons for loyalist terrorists to use south the border. The subsequent IRA raid on the Coulson farm resulted in the murder of a protestant Fine Gael senator, Billy Fox, the fiancé of George’s sister Marjorie, and the burning of the Coulsons’ home.

In Donegal gardaí received a tip-off that a youth club was in fact a front for a unit of the Ulster Defence Association – a number of local Protestants were wrongly arrested following the murders of Breege Porter and Oliver Boyce in Inishowen on New Year’s Day 1973. Some Protestant homes were attacked during this period, including during the St. Johnston riots of July 1972 which began when members of the local Orange lodge returned to their hall after participating in a demonstration across the border.

Local Orangemen were subsequently placed in the awkward position of being offered protection from both the Provisional IRA and the UDA – the West Ulster brigade of the latter was commanded by Andy Robinson, a native of Donegal.

The halving of the Protestant population in the three counties within a single lifetime – from the census figures of 1911 to 2002 – is a stark record, even relative to overall population decline in the three counties for much of the twentieth century.

A considerable number of those from the three counties who moved across the border and entered unionist politics favoured hard-line positions. Ernest Baird, a native of Malin in Donegal, was the deputy leader of the Vanguard movement that helped to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement during the Ulster’s Workers’ Council strike in 1974. The family of Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister moved across the border from Monaghan in 1953. The DUP’s Willie Hay, Baron Hay of Ballyore, is originally from Milford in County Donegal. Hay currently leads a campaign in the House of Lords for British passports to be awarded to those in in the Republic of Ireland who identify as British.

Rather than serving as Dáithí Ó Conaill’s instructive example of success, the experiences of three-county loyalists are a warning to those who believe that the Irish state could simply absorb a much larger population of unionists without making fundamental changes to its constitution and its relationship with Britain. As the historian Eunan O’Halpin observed during a recent lecture hosted by President Michael D. Higgins to mark the centenary of Irish independence: “The reality is that there may be people in this state who still look across the border, who still, like many northern nationalists, feel that partition has been cruel to them.”