The Ascendancy

The Ascendancy

Reflecting on the Irish problem as I often do, it seems to me that the existence of the protestant ascendancy in Ireland is at the root of this historic problem. The protestant ascendancy in Ireland rose to prominence and power in Ireland at the battle of the Boyne where the protestant King William defeated the catholic King James. In Ireland the protestant minority community became the ruling class as of right and ruled a defeated penalized catholic majority. This convention was retained in the 1801 Act of Union and thereafter the will of the protestant minority was what mattered while the will of the catholic majority was of little consequence.

With the setting up of the Northern Ireland six county statelet whose constitution was the unwritten imposed 1801 constitution, protestant ascendancy rule continued in the six counties and the state was kept constitutionally stable by the suppression of the catholic minority identity. I can recall living in West Belfast prior to the upsurge of the civil rights campaign in a new housing development whose inhabitants were 50/50 catholic/protestant. Relationships in the estate were excellent even though a few Union Jacks appeared on the Twelfth of July at the marching season but a display of the Irish Tricolour couldn’t be considered, as the police wouldn’t tolerate it. Indeed there are those who date the beginning of the troubles to a protestant protest led by Ian Paisley, against the display of an Irish Tricolour in a shop window in the catholic Lower Falls. My reading of the civil Rights Movement is that historically it mounted a challenge to Protestant ascendancy rule in the six counties and had the reforms envisaged by Terence O Neill been implemented with the backing of Ian Paisley there wouldn’t have been violence in the six county state. In later times Ian has made the magnanimous concession that in Northern Ireland Catholics can have anything they want and so they can, provided they don’t want rid of an unwritten imposed undemocratic U.K. constitution and don’t demand a catholic as first minister. However The Civil Rights Movement was hijacked by Republicans and corrupted by Republican violence and atrocity.

While there is now a bogus peace in the six counties since the Assembly was set up yet there remains an under-belly of violent discord in sectarian clashes in the streets of Derry between Catholic and Protestant youths, in the defacing of Orange and G.A.A. halls and in the continued existence of dissident Republican groups, namely the Real and Continuity I.R.A. to say northing of the peace walls in Belfast. Still in this analysis, this violence and discord will persist as long as an imposed unwritten undemocratic constitution remains in place in the six counties. The impact of this constitutional set-up is a clash of wills between the marginal Protestant majority and a significant Catholic minority. This clash of wills is expressed in the painting of kerbstones red, white and blue, and green, white and orange and in the flying of disparate conflicting flags. In this dichotomy the two communities sulk in mutual resentment behind peace walls in Belfast and in Derry in a bogus peace.. In the Assembly defeated Republicans sit in collaboration with a diametrically opposed Party, Right Wing Union Jack Unionism who have still to come to terms with the new reality that the days of the ascendancy are now over, but these are being propped up by Late Sinn Fein who are the arch enemies of and the implacable foes of the Union and are out to destroy it. Late Sinn Fein first used brute force but that effort was defeated; now they resort to political stealth but the destruction of the union remains their sole aim. But Late Sinn Fein must accept the cold reality that the only strategic rout to an all Ireland Republic is by the Protestant minority in Ireland converting en masse to Republicanism, a conversion that will not happen now or never since the central plank of Protestant culture is loyalty to the Crown. That said the Protestant loyalist community must also face the cold reality that since the days of the protestant ascendancy are over, the unwritten imposed U.K. constitution that goes with the ascendancy notion, has collapsed and is finished. There was a strong whiff of ascendancy rule about Ian Paisley and this whiff lingers with the D.U.P. and as long as this remains there will be Republicans to oppose it. There is also a strong whiff of ascendancy in the mentality of the Orange Order in the clash of communal wills at Garvaghey Road. The British cut the Provisional head off the I.R.A. monster but like the Lernean Hydra of old, the decapitated I.R.A. monster sprouted two new heads, The Real and Continuity I.R.A.

If this horror scenario is to be avoided in the six county state, then the people there will have to think again and anew about their constitutional future. New thinking will need a new party, which should be a united Ireland friendly, and the union and Kingdom friendly party. Such a party can be Federal Unionism-Early Sinn Fein, which should promote a new concept of a Federal Kingdom of the Sovereign Nation of Ireland and Great Britain in a National Government of Ireland Act. This Act should synthesise Unionism and Nationalism and in so doing draw up institutions and symbols, in a written constitution, which is acceptable to all, be they Catholic Protestant or Dissenter. In this way a genuinely peaceful united Ireland can be realized within a Federal Kingdom dimension.

Michael Gillespie Federal Unionist-Early Sinn Fein