Rite and Reason: Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, February 4th) pointed out that during 50 years of Stormont rule, the Catholic population grew in Northern Ireland while "the Protestant population of the southern State almost vanished".The Protestant population of the Republic is rising for the first timesince the State was founded. Robin Bury looks at the reasons for its decline.
Today Protestant numbers are rising, mainly because of immigration, but they have more than halved since 1911 (Protestants in the 1911 census being defined as Church of Ireland, Presbyterians and Methodists). In contrast, since 1911 Roman Catholic numbers have increased by 24 per cent.
This decline meant that Protestants became increasingly banished to the margins of Irish society and culture.
Why the decline? The reasons are varied. Between the censuses of 1911 and 1926, numbers fell by 34 per cent, or by 106,000. Following discussions with Dr David Fitzpatrick of Trinity College Dublin, I conclude that about 3,000 fell in the Great War, around 24,000 left when the British forces and administration withdrew from 1922, and some 26,000 emigrated voluntarily. This left about 53,000 - 50 per cent of the total decline - who emigrated involuntarily.
They left largely because of widespread selective intimidation, something that is not fully understood nor accepted. In West Cork, as the historian Peter Hart* recounts, there was a large Protestant exodus after 1920, fuelled by panic caused by selective intimidation and murder in 1922. There was "a sudden, massive upheaval" between 1921 and 1924 in Tipperary, Clare, Mayo, Sligo, Leitrim, Offaly, Laois, Westmeath and the Border counties when Hart concluded there was "what might be called ethnic cleansing".
Those who left were mainly lower-middle class. But the Protestant Ascendancy also collapsed when over 270 of their houses were burnt by insurgents. This rejection left their spirit and confidence shaken, if not broken. They increasingly retreated into a ghetto of the mind, typified by social, intellectual and cultural isolation.
From 1926 to 2002, Protestant numbers dropped by a further 30 per cent, or 61,085. The reasons varied. Many Protestants (and Roman Catholics) became alienated by the State that de Valera's 1937 constitution created, a State built on the myth of a unique nation descended from the Celts.
In 1984 Noel Browne said that the Constitution "would ensure all laws passed by the Oireachtas would be in accord with Catholic teaching effectively it was a case that 'No Protestant need apply'". A Roman Catholic, Gaelic State was created based on narrow nationalism which placed anglophobia centrefold.
Add to this the joblessness caused by a stagnant economy which was based on Arthur Griffith's protectionist economic dogmas and you get a recipe for emigration.
The central factor in the decline in numbers after 1950 was the strict enforcement of the Ne Temere decree. This ensured that in mixed religion marriages the Protestant partner had to promise in writing that all the children would be raised as Roman Catholics.
"I would go almost so far as to suggest that it is contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the basic human rights," Dr Kenneth Milne of the Church of Ireland said at that time. In 1961 about a quarter of Protestants entered mixed marriages. By 1971, it was about a third.
Motu Proprio replaced the Ne Temere in 1970, requiring the Roman Catholic partner to promise "to do everything possible ... to have all the children of our marriage baptised and brought up in the Catholic Church". John Greer, Church of Ireland chaplain to the University of Coleraine, said that these Catholic regulations force the Protestant partner to violate his conscience and his religious liberty.
A spokesman for the Church of Ireland commented that, "a Roman Catholic may only be validly married in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church if the marriage takes place in their church building, or in a Protestant church provided that the dispensations have been granted". These two dispensations may prove difficult to get. Today almost 50 per cent of Protestants enter mixed marriages.
Protestants, once an established group, have become an outsider one. They once brought to "Ireland a greater concentration of civil gifts than any previous, or later colonisers ... the Anglo-Irish were to create modern Ireland," as Seán Ó Faoláin put it in The Irish. Few countries can boast of a minority that produced so many talented writers, claimed today by a Catholic State that Shaw and O'Casey left. After independence WB Yeats, famously said, "We are no petty people". Protestants are today.
Protestant leadership today is characterised by the pursuit of ecumenism, searching, mostly in vain, for mutually exclusive religious beliefs to be resolved through a superior synthesis.
True pluralism is about a tapestry of cultures where no one absolute truth is allowed to predominate, whether religious or cultural. Surely it is time at last for by far the largest minority in this country to get up off its knees and celebrate its liberal, individualistic tradition in its own country. Is that not what the Belfast Agreement is about?
*The Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland
Robin Bury is chairman of the Reform Movement