Protestant Irish nationalists

Protestant Irish nationalists are people of Protestant persuasion or background in Ireland who have joined their Catholic-majority fellow countrymen in campaigning for Ireland's independence and the dissolution of her union with Great Britain. Through the nineteenth century, they attained positions of leadership in a succession nationalist movements, but they did so without the support of the broader Protestant community. Content with representation in the United Kingdom parliament, Protestant opinion remained overwhelmingly unionist.

In the former, separate but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland, in which Catholics were excluded from public office, Irish Protestants readily identified as patriots. The focus of their patriotism was the parliament in Dublin. Its high-point was the armed Volunteer movement which in 1782 secured from the British Crown recognition of the parliament's exclusive right to legislate for Ireland. The movement subsequently split on the question of Catholic emancipation. In 1798, the more radical faction, concentrated in the Presbyterian north-east, broke into open rebellion in an effort, as "United Irishmen", to abolish confessional privilege and establish a representative republic.

Reconciled after 1800 to the union, Protestants were broadly hostile to political and cultural movements that, in arguing a new case for Irish nationality and statehood, celebrated Ireland's fealty to the Catholic Church and her Gaelic heritage, and depreciated the ties by which Protestants in particular felt bound to Britain and to her empire. The nationalist tradition nonetheless honours the contribution of individual Protestants, among them: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel as dissenters from the compromising leadership of "the Emancipator" Daniel O'Connell; Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell as leaders of the Home Rule movement; Douglas Hyde and Alice Milligan as promoters of a linguistically and culturally "Irish Ireland"; and, in the early twentieth century, Roger Casement, and Constance Markievicz as "physical-force" republicans.

Following the partition settlement of 1921, in the six Ulster counties retained as Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, Protestants in labour and socialist circles continued to be drawn to James Connolly's vision of an all-Ireland workers' republic. In the 1940s, a number of northern Protestants formed a "squad" within a reactivated Irish Republican Army. From the late 1960s, a stricter sectarian division was imposed by the onset of "the Troubles". It is reflected in the exclusively Catholic background of the present leadership in Sinn Féin, and of the SDLP, as it is in the exclusively Protestant background of unionist party leadership.