Exploring a Protestant experience at the Samuel Beckett Theatre

REFLECTING on the fate of the Anglo-Irish community in post-independence Ireland, Ann Henning Jocelyn’s play, Only Our Own, addresses issues of suppressed histories and cultural belonging. The play centres on three generations of a Protestant family in the West of Ireland.

Their ancestral home — a ‘big house’ — was burned out during the War of Independence, but the family have adapted to the new Ireland around them.

“As a Swedish person, I found it strange coming here in the 1980s and seeing the differences that still existed,” says Henning Jocelyn. “The Protestant community kept very much to themselves and were afraid of reaching out and trying to mix with anybody outside their own camp. But, then, to my delight, I witnessed how all these barriers started to erode.”

A writer and translator of distinction, Henning Jocelyn moved to Connemara in 1982, with Robert John Jocelyn, a friend from London. She later married him. Having suddenly become a member of the Irish Protestant community, she picked up on the pronounced socio-historical divisions that dogged Irish life.

“Our son went to the village school and he was the first Protestant child ever to be educated there,” she says. “Other Protestant friends said to us, ‘Oh, I wish we had your courage’. And, to this day, I cannot understand what courage had to do with it. For me, the village school was just down the road and it was a State school, so why shouldn’t he go there? But, then again, this was in the 1990s, and when I explained that he wasn’t going to make his First Communion and wasn’t going to learn the Catholic catechism, the priest suggested I should take him out of the school. I had to insist that I had every right to have my child educated there.”

It’s hardly surprising that the descendants of longstanding Anglo-Irish families felt uncomfortable. The central trauma haunting the family in Henning Jocelyn’s play — the burning of the ‘big house’ — had marked the lives of many of her friends and associates, none of whom ever mentioned it.

“Very little is spoken about it,” she says. “I have a number of friends who are very well-assimilated into modern Irish life, but only through my research did I discover that their grandfathers had had their houses burned. But they had never ever let on to me that they had this in their background. It’s still very much taboo.”

In the play, Henning Jocelyn details the different perspectives that each generation has on their heritage. “I’m especially interested in the present generation. Because they are so removed from it, and you might even ask ‘Why are they affected by it at all’? But what I try to show, in the play, is that if you try to go forward without a connection to your roots, then you risk losing your identity.”

In addition to social changes, like the waning influence of religion, successive generations of Irish people have adapted to a different Ireland. “People now take it for granted that we don’t have these barriers,” she says.

“But Ireland has come such a long way, when you think about where we were in 1921. And that’s something to be very proud of and something that I, as an outsider, admire as a fantastic achievement. For hundreds of years, you had these divisions and, in less than 100 years, the country has risen above all that.”

Only Our Own runs at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday

DISCOVER MORE CONTENT LIKE THIS