WHEN Frank Wright died in 1993 at the age of 44 he had already established himself as one of the foremost analysts of Northern Irish politics. His PhD dissertation on 19th century nine county Ulster politics before 1886 has been widely consulted by researchers. He was already revising it for publication before his death: now it has been edited and published as a memorial to him.
The book begins with a discussion of the United Irishmen and pre Famine Ulster society, but its main focus is on post Famine Protestant politics. Wright displays an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Ulster press of the period and the various local peculiarities which shaped the politics of different areas before the full development of modern means of transport. (For example, the large scale sectarian violence which periodically erupted in Portadown was restrained in neighbouring Lurgan by John Hancock, Lord Lurgan's long serving agent, reviled in an Orange ballad as "Papish Hancock".)
There is extensive new material on the Famine, the Ulster response to Fenianism (including the extraordinary and short lived attempt by the Orange populist William Johnston of Ballykilbeg to make the Order a self policing body which could maintain good relations with nationalists without outside interference), the land system and the tenant agitations which culminated in the Land League.
Much of Wright's material is painfully familiar. Orangemen parade at regular intervals to show their ability to maintain order on their terms, and clash with Catholics who object to parades through their territory. Middle class Belfast liberals hope that economic and political modernisation and the decline of Catholic clerical power will heal old divisions, but find themselves forced to take sides when the Home Rule movement renews polarisation. This, like the patterns of riot and expulsion described in the 1860s and 1880s, is ominously reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Wright was not simply a historian but a social scientist as well. One of his central concerns is the conditions which allow a society to be polarised by a violent minority, instead of that minority being isolated and "criminalised" by society. Wright argues that recent scholarship (including some of his own earlier work) has been too ready to reduce the conflict to one of class, and to ignore its colonial roots. He sees Northern Ireland, like other 19th century borders of settlement, as being destabilised by democratisation and decay of the aristocratic structures of control which sustained the original settlement and which could be used to restrain settler sectarianism as Hancock did in Lurgan - or to exploit it, as was done by the large landlords in Fermanagh. (The fact that it could be exploited does not mean that it did not have an independent existence.) In order to maintain their position against the Catholics, the elite threw in its lot with the poorer settlers and gave them leadership.
The fault of the Protestant liberals, Wright argues, was their failure to empathise with the Catholics as they actually were, as distinct from the "enlightened" Catholic as envisaged by liberal wishful thinking. He defends Wolfe Tone against the charge of naivete, arguing that Tone recognised that the Protestants would have to come to terms with the Catholics eventually and that the longer they hesitated the better organised the Catholics would become and the harder it would be to reconcile them on terms acceptable to Protestants. Perhaps this understates the depth of Catholic identity and the difficulty of reaching a settlement; but it is a tribute to Wright's own effort at empathy. As a Christian Socialist he believed it ultimately rested with every individual to fulfil his or her duty of contributing to a better society. He singles out as an emblematic hero George MacMullan, an obscure Protestant who protected his Catholic lodger in a Belfast riot.
This book is a classic; it is painful that its author died when he had so much more to offer. It will be indispensable to future students of Northern Ireland, and puts to shame those who believe scholars should not write without a prior commitment to their own community, right or wrong.
