During the years when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I extended English control over most of Ireland, the northern counties of Ulster were regarded as the most “savage” part of the island. In the early 1600s, King James I (of King James Bible fame) decided to cure Ulster of its Catholicism by displacing the Irish and settling English and Scottish Protestants there. This settlement became known as the Ulster Plantation.

Different Paths

As a result, the northern and southern regions of the island developed along different lines. While the predominantly Catholic population in the rest of Ireland continued in the traditional Irish jobs of farming and animal husbandry, the largely Protestant population in Ulster embraced the industrial revolution. Belfast became a center of the shipbuilding and linen textile industries. By the nineteenth century, the average person in Ulster was considerably wealthier than his southern counterparts. When the Great Famine struck, the wealthier northern counties showed lower rates of eviction, emigration, and starvation than did Ireland as a whole.

The prosperity of the north, however, was mostly prosperity for Protestants. The Scots and English who had settled there were keenly aware that their land had been seized from the Irish, and they never lost their anxiety that the previous inhabitants might try to take it back. As in the Protestant Ascendancy, they enforced a social and legal code designed to repress Catholics. Even after O'Connell's reforms had begun to liberate Ireland's Catholics, the people of Ulster dutifully maintained an unofficial system of repression.

Northern Ireland — Protestant State

Ulster Protestant anxieties rose as the Irish Nationalist movement grew. As described in Chapter 14, Unionists in the north blocked the passage of a series of home rule bills, and they formed a variety of organizations, such as the United Orangemen and the Ulster Volunteers, to resist any change that might harm their position of social and economic dominance. The havoc of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War further polarized the Protestant stance — they felt that the north was their country, and they didn't want to budge.

Northern Ireland was created in 1921 as a semiautonomous state, still tied to the British Empire — this was part of the agreement that Michael Collins and other Irish Nationalists made with the British. Northern Ireland ruled itself through an independent administration at Stormont, outside Belfast. The north's economic development continued to outpace the Republic of Ireland's. For nearly fifty years the region remained largely peaceful, but just beneath the orderly veneer smoldered the coals of deep-seated resentment.

Northern Ireland's approximately 550,000 Catholics never shared equally in the state's prosperity. They officially had all the rights guaranteed by the British Constitution, but unspoken rules kept them a distinct underclass — many companies wouldn't hire Catholics, and many landlords wouldn't rent to them. Most of them worked in low-paying, unskilled jobs. Although Catholics made up 31 percent of the labor force, they only accounted for 6 percent of mechanical engineers, 8 percent of university teachers, and 19 percent of doctors.

Protestants dominated the local government and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) — the police. Northern Ireland received millions of pounds a year from the British government to invest in infrastructure, but a disproportionate amount of this money went to Protestant areas. It was a civil rights movement waiting to happen.