Evangelical Protestantism's conversion crusade and the Great Hunger

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh reviews Soupers Jumpers. The Protestant Missions in Connemara 1848-1937 By Miriam Moffitt

Gearóid Ó Tuathaighreviews Soupers Jumpers. The Protestant Missions in Connemara 1848-1937 By Miriam Moffitt. Nonsuch Publishing. 2008. 288pp. €27.99

RELIGIOUS "conversion" in modern Ireland has rarely been a straightforward matter of individuals changing their theological beliefs or religious convictions.

Historical circumstances have determined that wider, and more divisive, communal emotions, loyalties and identities become disturbed when somebody "turns" (the Irish verb, "d'iompaigh", which gives us the Anglicised pejorative "Jumper").

The fact that the Reformation was experienced in Ireland as part of a more complex shift in the power structure - military and political conquest, plantation and a new economic and social order - resulted in the episcopal Protestant Church of Ireland becoming the church of power and privilege in all domains of Irish life for several centuries, while Catholicism was the church of "the defeated". Moreover, its later history of "survival and revival" left it with a determination to resist the later missions of evangelical Protestants.

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The evangelical activities of Protestant missionary societies in pre-Famine Ireland have already received scholarly attention from, among others, Desmond Bowen and Irene Whelan.

Miriam Moffitt's richly documented and absorbing book is the first comprehensive study of the mission of the Irish Church Missions to the poor in west Connemara, launched at the height of the Famine in 1848. At its apogee the mission encompassed 12 churches, four orphanages and 64 mission schools, widely dispersed across Connemara. It peaked (in terms of numbers of converts) in the mid-1850s, continued to attract a small number of new converts and to maintain a network of institutions into the twentieth century, but eventually withered, as new converts dried up and successive waves of "reversions" occurred, not least through an aggressive Catholic reversion crusade during 1874-1884.

The founder of the Connemara mission, the Rev Alexander Dallas, was an English clergyman. Financial support for his endeavour, likewise, came largely from English contributors who were regularly assured, in the mission's newsletters, that the mission was making good progress, long after such optimistic reports had ceased to have any relation to reality.

The style of the Irish Church Missions was confrontational, with direct and aggressive denunciation of the errors and evils of popery. The schools were the vital battleground, and the provision of relief to a famished peasantry was the decisive factor in the early wave of conversions during the Famine and immediate post-Famine years.

Though the mission was not without support among a cohort of local evangelical Protestants, many of the native Protestant community of west Connemara were uneasy with the confrontational, and socially divisive, methods of the Irish Church Mission.

The Catholic reaction was predictably fierce and focused. Aggressive missionary activity, a targeted building blitz of new schools, social ostracisation and relentless communal pressure on those who had "jumped", all combined to turn the tide and secure high numbers of "reversions".

The story of this struggle in west Connemara is told by Miriam Moffitt with sensitivity and a judicious care for the motives of all the parties.

In offering a verdict on why the mission ultimately failed, it is difficult to quibble with the sharply prescient comment of one observer of earlier missions, writing in 1828:

"The converts are like birds, which visit milder climates at intervals - but their coming is a proof of a great severity in their native country, and they return when the iron days are passed, and the sun cheers them from home."

The Irish Church Mission Society was active on two fronts. In the Connemara mission and in the congested urban enclaves of the Catholic poor of Dublin.

Miriam Moffitt has promised a second book on the experience of the Dublin mission. The well-documented and culturally-suggestive story told in this study of the Connemara mission will certainly ensure an eager readership for the sequel.

• Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is a professor of history at the National University of Ireland, Galway.