Irish rebellion and the historical facts
PROFESSOR Guy Beiner (Comment, November 2) refers to ATQ Stewart (whose books disgracefully are out of print) but omits to mention that Professor Stewart did not see one ’98 rebellion in Ireland with one objective, but three each with a different objective.
The Wexford rebellion was nakedly sectarian with Protestants herded into a barn that was then set alight; the rebellion in the West — piously Catholic — welcomed the landing of French troops thinking they were equally pious. Only in Antrim and Down did we have a rebellion that was nearer in sentiment to that of the French Revolution.
And so the singing of the Marseillaise was popular in Belfast. But as Alec Vidler, the Anglican scholar priest, in his book on Catholic modernists noted, the Marseillaise was anathema to the Church in France and it was only after many years that the Church acquiesced in it being sung.
The United Irishmen, however, in the North believed that if the French could overthrow the tyranny of Crown and Altar, so could the Irish Catholic and saw in them potential allies in overthrowing the then Irish Establishment.
A member of the Irish Parliament and of that Establishment, the later Lord Castlereagh, initially sympathetic to the United Irishmen, came to see the choice for Ireland was either a union with Great Britain or absorption by the French Empire. It has a ring about it that resonates today. He went on to become Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
As for commemorations, not all is negative.
Years ago a group of Young Unionists laid a commemorative wreath in an Antrim graveyard on the grave of a young participant in the ’98 Antrim and Down rebellion, seeing in him a Northern patriot.
And as for the acceptance of the Union by United Irishmen and their descendants returning Liberal MPs from what is now Northern Ireland to Parliament, Guy Beiner omits to mention John Bew’s substantial study ‘The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast’.
WA MILLER Belfast