This week has been enlightening. Following some research I've literally stumbled across the excellent book by John Brewer available on Amazon. The CAIN web service have secured rights to reproduce some of the content and in that context I am republishing it here.
The usual disclaimer: This publication is copyright John D. Brewer 1998 and is included on the CAIN site by permission of Macmillan Press Ltd and the author. You may not edit, adapt, or redistribute changed versions of this for other than your personal use without express written permission. Redistribution for commercial purposes is not permitted.
Northern Ireland was not the invention of a cartographer who quickly scrambled together an incoherent border in a situation of rapid and violent decolonisation. Protestants did not have to artificially construct a sense of nationhood, for they had long defined their identity around two antinomies or opposites; the one religious, the other national. Northern Ireland defined itself by its Protestantism against Catholicism and by its Britishness against Irishness.
The same zero-sum framework was applied to Protestant-Catholic relations in Northern Ireland, by the perpetuation of traditional anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishness, in order to achieve the same ends - protecting the security of Protestants, which simultaneously meant the domination of Catholics.
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| The Birth of a Border |
Supporters of partition were aware of this, for they argued at the time that a smaller area with as large a Protestant majority as possible was preferable to the whole of the ancient province of Ulster, with its unsafe Protestant majority. So Unionist leaders deliberately decided, if reluctantly, to jettison Protestants in Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal in order to protect their dominance in the six counties and Ulster's religious, economic and national-identity interests...ensuring they had majority status in the new territory was the main point.
Further reading of this article can be found here.
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