Rebel Protestants: unearthing the story of radical nationalists

“I’ve found another one!” My mother is delighted, full of excitement, cup of tea in hand at our small kitchen table in Dublin, overloaded with notes and books. She has long had a passionate interest in Irish history but this is her biggest project yet – an investigation into Irish Protestant nationalists who contributed to the Easter Rising.

She has a hunch that there were more of them than anyone has realised. I know she is writing a book for the centenary. It has become all-consuming: for several years she has scoured archives, libraries, interviewed descendants of Protestant rebels, including Garret FitzGerald, whose rebel mother was Presbyterian. Each document seam uncovers a new lead, a fresh name. She feels a need to reinsert these lives that she believes have been overlooked into the history of the Rising, especially the working-class Protestants of Dublin, long neglected.

The long years of training as an academic historian kick in. It cannot remain a sacred text. Where minor cuts are needed to avoid repetition, they are made. Each time, I agonise; I fear reducing her

I don’t dare ask her to what extent it is a search for self. From a practising Church of Ireland family, of very humble Dublin and Wicklow origins, my mother was a scholarship girl, educated through Irish in Coláiste Moibhí, the training college established by the State to produce Gaelic-speaking, nationalist teachers for Protestant primary schools. Devout and liberal, patriotic and pacifist, she defies easy stereotypes, just like the lives she is researching.

Five months later she is dying. Our warm family home of late night discussions is a place of tiptoes, a hollowing-out. My beautiful, elegant mother has become a wraith, confused and disorientated by the cancer that has silently threaded itself through her mind and body. She struggles from bed to her computer, in a last effort to see the book through. Her memory goes: there are days she does not know my name. But somewhere still in her, the book echoes, like an old dream. “I’ll publish your book Mammy,” I promise her.

We had long had a plan that if she was unable to continue, we, her children, both academic historians, would step in and make sure her research was not wasted. But the landscape of grief is a furiously unfamiliar, barren steppe. Everything is upended by her absence. My brother, devastated, cannot bear to read her work. I stand in her office, overwhelmed. Her archive is vast, her flickering handwriting difficult to decipher. The thought of never seeing a new word written by her stuns. I save the manuscript files from her computer onto my memory stick and close the door.

Our father wilts visibly from age and loss. Within six months, he is hospitalised and dies after 10 days. “You’ve had a very bad year,” people say. Expecting my first child, I will do anything to protect the pregnancy from grief. I leave the book aside until the baby is safely here. I still have not read the full manuscript. I dread how I will feel if I discover it is not publishable.

George Irvine fought at the South Dublin Union where the British troops opposing him were led by Alan Ramsay, a former student at St Andrew's College, where Irvine had taught. Ramsay was killed in the fighting and buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, where, years later, Irvine too would be buried

It is May in London. My newborn breastfeeds for hours, snuggled into me, warm and blissful, while I read and type. I have finally started into the work. The book astonishes me. It is fluently argued; it is a fresh perspective, suggesting that support for the Easter Rising at the time spanned the religious divisions in Ireland to a greater extent than previously realised: while the majority of Protestants were unionist, a significant minority, often young and rebelling against their own parents, were attracted by the revolutionary excitement of radical nationalism and their participation welcomed.

The famous Protestants who took part, such as Casement or Markievicz, were far from unusual: the book explores 45 individuals in detail. One of them, George Irvine, was sentenced to death, later commuted. He fought at the South Dublin Union where the British troops opposing him were led by Alan Ramsay, a former student at St Andrew’s College, where Irvine had taught. Ramsay was killed in the fighting and buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, where, years later, Irvine too would be buried.

The book sets out how most Protestant radical nationalists in the south continued to be tolerated by their unionist communities. Indeed many, particularly the women, were steadfastly conformist in their religious practice, almost as a way of balancing their radical politics; in contrast, in the north they were ostracised.

The book is at pains to emphasise that the Easter Rising was a majority Catholic event: under fire, many participants relied visibly upon their Catholic faith, but the minority religious involvement was more substantial than previously known. It was after the Rising that this history was forgotten, with only those famous Protestants who converted to Catholicism, such as Casement and Markievicz, being remembered in popular culture, skewing the focus towards aristocrats, when, in fact, most radical “rebel Prods” were middle- or working-class.

The centenary arrives but editing the text is difficult. Reading it brings my mother’s voice back vividly, a reliving of all those thousands of discussions we had about her work. New to motherhood, I miss her desperately. The sight of grandparents in the street makes me terribly distressed. Apart from my incredibly supportive husband, there are no friends or family near in London who remember my parents; everyone is in Ireland. The book brings me home.

The long years of training as an academic historian kick in. It cannot remain a sacred text. Where minor cuts are needed to avoid repetition, they are made. Each time, I agonise; I fear reducing her. There are parts of the manuscript that I would not have written the way that she has. I leave those alone; it is her interpretation. I have taught students about the ideas of the literary philosopher Roland Barthes and his theory of the death of the author – that all texts escape from their author’s intentions and meaning. It reassures. It lifts some of the responsibility.

The Church of Ireland Historical Commemorations Working Group get in touch to provide crucial assistance with publication. We organise a book launch at Christ Church Cathedral in November 2016. I wake at night in panic; will anyone turn up? Will anyone at home remember us?

To a man and woman, everyone she knew, they all came.
Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Rising by Valerie Jones is published by Ashfield Press. All author royalties will go to the Irish Cancer Society. Heather Jones is Associate Professor in International History, London School of Economics