English or Irish? Cultural Nationalist Ideology in late 19-th Century Ireland

Abstract

In modern history, Northern Ireland has been home to uneasy community relations. The construction of a collective identity that embraces ethnic and religious diversity, and attracts the politically antagonized protestant and catholic communities seems to be a key to the settlement of conflicts. One of the factors preventing a firmly established inclusive Northern Irish identity is disorientation among protestants concerning their national belonging. Although by now it is only political loyalty to the United Kingdom that most Ulster Protestants share in a sense of Britishness, they also feel distanced from a communion with Irishness. Some academics argue that the present alienation of Northern Protestants from Irish culture results from the policy of the early Irish Free State which in the 1920s restricted the scope of Irishness to the catholic population. A deeper insight into Irish nationalism at the turn of the 20th century will reveal that several leading intellectuals preoccupied with the construction of a liberated identity for a culturally and linguistically colonized Irish nation were, in fact, protestants. Concluding the failure of previous fights for political freedom, these protestant intellectuals attempted to define the Irish nation in a cultural sense thus aiming to shape an independent Irish self-consciousness. The following paper is concerned with approaches to an ethnically and religiously inclusive Irish identity present in protestant writings of a cultural-nationalistic orientation at the dawn of the 20th century, and explores those linguistic identities the authors, in their different nationversions, associate with a culturally sovereign but largely English-speaking Irish population.