No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: What Is to Be (Un) Done about Ulster Protestant Identity?

Abstract

My title begs the question of who ‘we’ are. This question is neatly framed by two perspectives: ‘we’ might be ‘Billy Boys’¹ singing the ‘famine song’; but ‘we’ might equally be Van Morrison singing ‘Astral Weeks’.² We are a population defined — sometimes by ourselves and sometimes by others — as ‘Ulster Protestant’. Broadly this population is defined by two relationships. First it is Irish — or at least defined in relation to its place in Ireland. Second, it is amorphous and ambiguous. It resists the tendency to neat categorisation. Thus the Northern Ireland census has at times been at pains to insist that people cannot be ‘Protestant’. There was nothing new in this. As far back at 1861, the Irish census indicated, ‘Members of Protestant Denominations are requested not to describe themselves by the vague term “Protestant”, but to enter the name of the Particular Church, Denomination, or Body to which they belong’. Back in 1861 they also helpfully re-aggregated this disparate bunch as ‘Total Protestants’. Then, as now, it was understood in this way by everybody interested in the sectarian zero sum game. At this point, its key meaning is ‘not Catholic’.³

We are, we are, we are the Billy boys, we’re up to our necks in Fenian blood, surrender or you die …

(‘Billy Boys’, Billy Fullerton)

Could you find me? Would you kiss-a my eyes? To lay me down, in silence easy, to be born again, to be born again …

(‘Astral Weeks’, Van Morrison)