Episode 12 - Panel 3b - Building a Southern Loyalism: Cavan and Monaghan Unionists and Ulster 1912-1923 - Dan Purcell

Southern Irish Loyalism in Context

This paper focuses on the loyalist community in Cavan and Monaghan from the signing of the Ulster Covenant through to the establishment of the Irish Free State and the Civil War. In particular, it focuses on the awkward questions of identity faced by the community after the partition of Ireland in 1921 (and by the growing likelihood of this event in the years previous). Cavan and Monaghan, along with Donegal, represented the three Ulster counties with the lowest Protestant populations. Cavan and Monaghan existed on the edges of Ulster itself with loyalist social networks overlapping with the distinctly non-Ulster counties of Meath, Louth, Longford and Leitrim. Despite this, these counties claimed to profess as strong an “Ulster Unionist” identity as their more Northerly neighbours. This was supported in 1912 with their enthusiastic support for the Ulster Covenant. In signing this the Cavan and Monaghan Unionists effectively sundered their own political future from that of their southern coreligionists. However, the three counties were to be similarly cast adrift from the North just a few years later when the Ulster Unionist Council accepted the principle of six county partition. This represented a severe identity crisis for the Unionists of Cavan and Monaghan. This paper examines both how prevalent an “Ulster” identity can be said to be in these two counties before then moving on to explore the ways in which this community successfully and unsuccessfully recast themselves as southern Unionists. In doing so it touches on important questions such as what it the idea of Ulster and an Ulster identity actually mean, how intertwined Southern and Ulster Unionism were in the border region and how the new Northern state functioned as a cultural symbol for southern loyalists. Daniel Purcell is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the History Department of Trinity College, supervised by David Fitzpatrick and Anne Dolan. He completed his undergraduate degree in Somerville College Oxford before returning to Trinity College for his MPhil and PhD. His research focuses on Southern Irish Protestantism in the Irish Revolution. Specifically, he is interested in the Irish border region and how the narrative and understanding of the Revolution is impacted by the overlap of different identities (Protestant, loyalist, Ulsterman) within the community. He has been published in the Breifne Historical Journal and Irish Lives Remembered.