Ulster Unionism and Loyalty to the Crown of the United Kingdom, 1912–74

Abstract

Traditional interpretations of Ulster unionist hostility to Irish nationalism have focused upon factors such as religion and economic considerations. Steve Bruce, for example, has argued that the Northern Ireland conflict is a ‘religious conflict’, and that it was the fact that the competing populations in Ireland adhered, and still adhere, to competing religious traditions which ‘has given the conflict its enduring and intractable quality’.¹ When scholars have focused upon the role of religion in the independent Irish state, and its impact upon Ulster Protestants, they have usually concentrated on how successive Irish governments have proclaimed Ireland to be a ‘Catholic nation’, and enshrined Catholic social teaching within the 1937 Constitution.² The economic case against Ulster unionist incorporation within an Irish unitary state has been a constant element, from the Home Rule era, with unionist fears that they would be separated from British imperial markets,³ to the acknowledgment of the dependency of Northern Ireland upon the massive subsidies supplied by Britain since the 1970s.⁴ Only relatively recently has the nature of British national identity within Ulster unionism been explored academically.⁵ Indeed, studies concentrating upon the relevance of British nationalism within Ulster unionism have tended to dilute the influential argument of David Miller that Ulster unionism has had as its central political ideology a theory of social contract, which reduces political obligation to a simple matter of ethics.⁶