`Comfortable recollections of Catholics and Dissenters fighting side by side for liberty in 1798 have been severely corroded by scholars in recent Elliott has more vitriol to apply. Only an elite genuinely subscribed to the United Irish ideal of bringing together Catholic, Protestant and Disenter'
Long recognised as one of the leading experts on late 18th-century Irish history, Marianne Elliott has now chosen a vast canvas stretching from the earliest human settlements to the present day, and the outcome is an impressive and unique panorama.
This is a book, she explains at the outset, not on the Catholic Church, but about the "people who have called themselves Catholics, about their culture and sense of identity". Why, then, does she not begin with the Reformation and the collapse of the Gaelic order in the North in 1603-7? As she embarked on her formidable task she came to realise that she had to go back to the beginning because Irish Christianity developed its own distinctive insular characteristics, including the incorporation of Christianised pagan survivals. She has surely been right to do this, particularly as later the Church in Ulster was especially resistant to drives towards change and standardisation emanating from Rome.
The Normans never succeeded in conquering much more than the Antrim and Down coastlands, and by the 15th century their descendants in Ulster were clinging on precariously only in Lecale, the Lower Ards and the Dufferin. As a result the Church and its adherents there were but slightly affected by reforming impulses coming from the more anglicised south. Here in the North clerical marriage continued and little social stigma was attached to illegitimacy, concubinage and marriage to near-relatives.
The Church was popular with the people of Ulster as the Tudor conquest got under way. Regular religious practice and a proper parochial structure may have been all but absent, but mendicant orders of friars had found widespread favour. In the wake of the Elizabethan-Jacobean conquest, the role of the friars was crucial. Elliott shows that they empathised with ancient traditions, valued local devotional rituals and saints, and mediated the strictness of the decrees issued by the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563. The Franciscans led the way in anchoring the Gaelic past to Catholicism in the traumatic period of defeat and dispossession, and developed Louvain as a Counter Reformation power house supported by Ulster Catholics and particularly geared to Ulster's rural and conservative Catholicism.
Elliott's survey of the 17th century is extremely comprehensive and enlightening: during this time the old Gaelic elite suffered the most obvious reduction in status - as much from its inability to adapt to the new money economy as from the outright confiscation of estates. Humble native Irish, on the other hand, benefited for a time by the planters' need for tenants. This slowly changed after the Williamite Wars when tens of thousands more Scots and English came over to Ulster: Catholics were steadily eased off the fertile lands in the valleys and forced on to marginal land.
As might be expected from her previous work, Elliott is at her best in her analysis of the 18th century. Though there is no record of serious sectarian disturbance in Ulster before the 1780s, she shows how tensions built up as the population rose and as the descendants of natives and newcomers competed for scraps of land to rent in the linen triangle of south-central Ulster. As relations soured, fidelity to the Catholic faith was constantly linked to the sufferings of ancestors and Elliott draws judiciously on the poetic tradition to reinforce her conclusions.
Comfortable recollections of Catholics and Dissenters fighting side by side for liberty in 1798 have been severely corroded by scholars in recent years, and Elliott has more vitriol to apply. Only an elite genuinely subscribed to the United Irish ideal of bringing together Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. In 1798 the Catholics of Ulster felt they had been misled and let down by Protestant radicals. Alienation of Northern Catholics from the state was reinforced by the way the British government had sanctioned and financed the Orange takeover of counter-insurgency.
IN DEMONSTRATING how that alienation was perpetuated in the 19th and 20th centuries Elliott is traversing a ground examined by many others, but she always has some fresh material to add (including an intriguing British government internal investigation into de Valera's charges of discrimination and gerrymandering in 1938). She is not an apologist; she acknowledges naked sectarianism on the Catholic side as well as on the Protestant one, and she presents much depressing evidence to illustrate the "terrible circularity of argument in Northern Ireland's political rhetoric".
Four-fifths of the book covers the period before the formation of Northern Ireland. Northern Catholics - less anti-clericalist, more conservative and more accepting of authority than their southern counterparts - were not natural revolutionaries, she believes, and after the suppression of the Boundary Commission report in 1925, they generally chose - as in the previous century - to be represented by constitutional Nationalists. They seemed eager to see Terence O'Neill convert his conciliatory gestures into real change and, she observes, "Catholic restiveness at the slowness of reform took far longer to materialise than the Protestant backlash". Northern Catholics not only faced rejection at home: they were "treated as troublesome and embarrassing by the south, at best lumped together with all the other `black northerners', at worst treated as more problematic than the Unionists (the latter tendency predominant after the onset of the Troubles)".
In 1992-3 Marianne Elliott was a member of the Opsahl Commission, an early landmark in the peace process, and so at a particularly grim time she heard at first hand a cascade of evidence which quite clearly has enhanced her understanding. The Troubles shattered many of the old certainties and she concludes by finding Ulster Catholic identity in rapid transition. As in medieval times the Church in the North has remained remarkably in tune with the laity. Clergy have dropped out of direct involvement in party politics and only in their opposition to integrated and mixed schooling do they show themselves to be out of step with lay Catholic opinion.
This book has been more than 10 years in the writing and it is plain to see why. In her assiduous search for evidence and insights Marianne Elliott has tracked down every study, every publication, and every article - not only in scholarly journals but also in the humblest local history magazines - which could be considered remotely relevant to her subject. In addition to scouring all the standard archives she has consulted those held by the Irish Folklore Commission and listened to tape recordings in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Yet at no stage does her narrative become too weighed down; rather the detail is enlightening, fascinating and often moving. Few other modern historians have used bardic verse, more modern work in Irish, and the poetry and fiction of twentieth-century Ulster writers, to enrich a text with such telling effect. This is an authoritative, fair-minded and compelling work. There have been some fine books published on Irish history over the past couple of years, but The Catholics of Ulster must surely be one of the most distinguished.
Jonathan Bardon is a lecturer and writer. He is author of A History of Ulster published by the Blackstaff Press in 1992