[AS Peter Flack's letter (SO 119, February 10)…]

Scan page 12

AS Peter Flack's letter (SO 119, February 10)

consists mostly of intemperate abuse it is difficult to find anything in it sufficiently coherent to engage with. Ironically, however, the issue that appears to excite him most is one where there is least dissension amongst those seriously engaged in the study of Irish history.

Whatever their many other differences the liberal Kee, the Stalinist Jackson, the Catholic one-time Unionist Buckland and the modern American historian D.W. Miller all agree the manner and consequences of early 17th Century emigration to Ulster.

Clan.

Following the defeat and flight of the clan chiefs O 'Neill and O'Donnell in 1607 the Government. of James 1 encouraged settlement of their confiscated lands. Land was offered by the Crown to under-takers in lots of 2,000; 1,000 and 500 acres on condition that they let it to English and Scottish tenants only.

Letting to the dispossessed native Irish was prohibited. This condition was not observed. Not recruiting sufficient adventurers from England the new owners let their land for rent to the native Irish. Thus, instead of creating as English policy intended "compact islands of civility' British settlers were scattered throughout a population still predominantly Gaelic and Catholic.

The Corporation of London was given Coleraine to settle by James I. They renamed it Londonderry und by 1624 had 4,000 native tenants when they should have had none. Six fears later a financially hard pressed King Charles I tried to raise money fining the Corporation violating the conditions the settlement.

Lowlands

The free or private immigration that came to Ulster after 1607 was different in quality and quantity. Overwhelmingly recruited from the Western Scottish lowlands, they settled in Antrim and Down and to a much lesser extent in Monaghan.

Unlike the English who were largely content to live off rent, the Scottish farmers sunk their own labour and capital into tillage and created in Antrim and Down a kind of extension of the Scottish lowlands.

Subsequent attempts by the native Irish to recover their lost lands were predictably met by further repression and confiscations. But the uneven distribution of the Protestant population of the North has its roots in these two forms of colonisation. And the pattern persists to this day.

In the areas of Crown directed settlement, Donegal and Cavan, Catholies constitute a huge majority, while in Armagh and Londonderry Protestants have a bare majority and fall a little short of one in Fermanagh and Tyrone.

Pattern

In the areas of free immigration from the Scottish lowlands on the other hand the pattern is quite different. Antrim today is still 80% Protestant and Down 68%.

Flack's sneering and shallow gibe about lan Smith is put in its place when we remember that it was from these Scottish settlers on Ulster's eastern seaboard that the United men, 1798 Irishmen were to find their staunchest supporters.

Yet, as I have already said, none of this is disputed by moderately informed people. What queer theory of Flack's is threatened by exposure to such historical data one can only speculate upon. Ireland Readers of your paper will no doubt draw their own conclusions about une value of a theory based on historical howlers that should make_ a school student blush.

Yours fraternally, JOE QUIGLEY Birmingham SOME people on the Irish and British left have argued that the Protestants in Northern Ireland should be seen as a "colon" population, similar to the European settlers in colonial Algeria.

From this assessment clear conclusions follow. Catholic/Protestant workers' unity on any mass scale is not just difficult to achieve, but utopian. Mass emigration by the Protestants is, if not recommended, at least realistically an acceptable solution to the present conflict.

Peter Flack (letters, no. 119) states no clear general theory, but the drift of his account of Irish history seems to be towards the "colon" view.

In the 1640s, he teils us, the English • conquest 'took place as part of a Protestant crusade against Catholic Ireland"

Flash The next stopping point is 1912, with these same Protestants "holding the pass for the Empire" . Then we flash forward to 1983, and the Protestants much the same people as conducted the 'crusade against Catholic Ireland" in the 1640s, apparently -constitute an "imperialist enclave" Ireland, in short,after all 'two nations only one of these, the Protestant nation, is a bad nation.

The account is so selective as to be completely distorted. 'A Protestant crusade, against Catholic Ireland" is an odd, and not very materialist, explanation of the 1641-49 war. It started with a rising of the (Catholic) native-Irish, and then criss-crossed with English civil war.

The Catholics among the Anglo-Irish, and at times sections of the Protestant Anglo-Irish landowners, sided with the King. The Ulster. Scots generally sided with Parliament. And this conflict was interlaced with the drive of the rising English bourgeoisie to subjugate what they saw as the wild, alien race of the native-Irish, and to make sure that Ireland could not be a base for foreign invasion.

Straight

Peter Flack passes without mention over the birth of Irish nationalism and Republicanism in the late 18th Century - a period which surely shows that we cannot simply read history backwards in a straight line to identify today's Protestant community with Cromwell's soldiers of the 1640s.

Republicanism originated as the democratic left wing of the mainly Protestant/aristocratic Irish nationalism of the late 18th Century "patriot" movement. For a period it was so strong that until June 1797 the Orange Order could not hold meetings in Protestant Belfast.

The most advanced section of the Protestant bourgeoisie formulated the programme, 'To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter" , and linked with the Catholic masses.

rogramme of Catholic-le 1c 80 8 8к tr Irish Republicanism, since in the 1840s it separated itself off from the narrow, conservative 'Catholic nationalism' of O'Connel!.

Such again was the Republican element that the Irish Socialists led by James Connolly integrated into their social programme: "In their movement" they hoped, • the North and South will again clasp hands, again will it be demonstrated, as in '98. that the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united social democracy.

The Republicans and Socialists held these views not because they were infected with "lying, proEnglish rubbish" but because they saw that the Protestants were not a mere clique of exploiters superimposed on the masses of Ireland - that neither Catholic nor Protestant working people could be free unless both could unite in a fight for liberation.

To evade the defence of the present Catholic revolt in the name of these general aims would be shameful. But it is no less shameful to let our thinking be so dominated by the difficulties and limits of that revolt that we dismiss, abandon, or try to define out of existence the problem of conciliating and winning unity with the Protestants.

COLIN FOSTER, Islington.