W.J. McCormack
(Irish Academic Press, £27.50)
The Dublin Paper War is the latest statement of over a decade’s work, building on the ideas of the author’s earlier book, Ascendancy and Tradition (1985). It sparked a debate on the origin of the concept ‘Protestant Ascencancy’: the latest book attempts to answer that question definitively. The mixing of the techniques of literary ctiticism, bibliography and ‘concept history’ produces a strong argument but hardly an easy read, given the amount of jargon used, particularly in the introductory chapters.
The centrepiece is a closely-argued bibliographical investigation of the ninety-two pamphlets that make up the paper war: seventy-seven of them do not use the term ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ at all. McCormack also casts doubts on the reputation of the central pamphlet, Woodward’s ‘The Present State of the Church of Ireland’, as a runaway bestseller. He attempts to demolish the thesis of historians, like James Kelly, who argue that ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ becomes an established concept by the mid-1780s and that its origins are tied into the Rightboy agrarian disturbances. McCormack, on the other hand, argues (convincingly) that the French Revolution and the discussion of abstract rights (in this case those of Irish Catholics) open up a qualitatively different period and debate, that the early 1790s ‘will be the moment—not a pre-revolutionary one—when an explicit ideology of Protestant Ascendancy can be said to have been conceived’.
He is excellent on the role of class and loyalism in the wake of 1789 in hardening Irish Anglican attitudes in the direction of political conservatism. The concept of Protestant Ascendancy ‘can be seen as a part of a wider mobilisation of loyalist ideology in the early 1790s and even as a precursor to that movement’s formal organisation’. This portrayal of the Orange Order as part of the loyalist offensive is an important point and should stir further debate. Paradoxically one of the ideologues of that loyalism, Edmund Burke, was also a vocal opponent of Protestant Ascendancy as a concept.
Some general doubts remain about the book. How does it fit into the prevailing historiography of eighteenth-century Ireland? It seems to bolster the argument that there was a lessening of religious tensions from the middle of the century until the convulsions of the 1780s and 1790s. This picture of lessening tensions may more closely reflect the experience of the English rather than the Irish elite. This raises the question whether the novelty of the concept of Protestant Ascendancy lies not in its meaning but in its widespread use after 1792, a question which lies outside the scope of this book and awaits the sort of research that produced Colin Haydon’s book on English anti-Catholicism.
Eoin Magennis