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Monday, July 27, 2009
THE history – or fate – of the Anglo-Irish in the 26 counties is well known. But what of that class’s experience in the North?
As Olwen Purdue of Queen’s University explains, like the history of the two states themselves, there are as almost as many differences as similarities.
Across Ireland, taxation – not least that levied in Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909 – as well as the cost of labour, made the running of vast country houses increasingly difficult long before partition.
Land reform, too, had long been on the agenda, but devolution for the North and home rule for the South allowed the two polities to complete the process in subtly contrasting ways.
In the South, the Hogan Act of 1923 had land confiscation in mind. For the North, the Percy committee brought forward recommendations to favour dispersal of estates by common consent. The North’s landed class’s wealth diminished little as a result.
Those who had once been a landed elite were now simply country gentlemen who, without the acres to maintain their mansions, had to find other means of generating income.
The threat of physical attack, though, which claimed a significant number of big houses in the South during the War of Independence and the Civil War, also extended to the north-east, if only briefly. Purdue quotes the recollections of Lady Mabel Annesley who lived alone in Castlewellan Castle, Co Down: "Every night ... in tweed skirt and thick shoes, with valuables packed in suitcases ready to throw out of the window, I lay awake ... When dawn came, I slept."
In May 1922, the attacks on the northern big houses began in earnest, not only on the border, but in Down and Antrim, too. On the night of May 19 alone, four, including Shane’s Castle, home to Lord O’Neill, were burned to the ground; two others were only narrowly saved by the quick action of servants. By 1923, that form of threat had largely passed, only to resume during the modern Troubles.
The land having disappeared by legal means, though, many Anglo-Irish proved rather adept in the worlds of business and finance and made fortuitous marriages outside the landowning class.
The fact that, by and large, they shared a common religious and political outlook with Belfast’s mercantile families greatly increased their opportunities for social intercourse above those enjoyed by the remaining landed families in the Free State. Gradually, too, the number of industrialists that acquired titles and became assimilated into the ranks of the landed class injected Northern big house society with new vigour.
Politically, though, the dominance of the Anglo-Irish had begun to erode even before Northern Ireland was created.
They had managed to retain influence during the early Home Rule crises through their connections in high places in Britain and through increased involvement in the Orange Order, but after the creation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1905 in response to fissiparous tendencies, the former became less crucial to the unionist project.
Nevertheless, in a conservative society, landed families still had a role to play while their counterparts in the rest of Ireland moved into political oblivion. While Dáil Éireann was populated by shopkeepers and farmers, Stormont still had its fair share of gentry.
Only in the 1960s did the vicious combination of militant republicanism and fundamentalist loyalism finally destroy the landed political bastion but they continued to exert symbolic influence in other ways.
Ultimately, Purdue argues, the fact their form of Irishness was not ignored, at best, or besmirched, at worst, gave them the confidence and crucial sense of purpose to survive.
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