Protestant Irish nationalists
Protestant nationalists (or patriots, particularly before the mid-19th century)[citation needed] have consistently been influential supporters and leaders of various movements for the political independence of Ireland from Great Britain.
Despite their relatively small numbers, individual Protestants have made important contributions to key events in Irish nationalist history, such as Wolfe Tone during the 1798 rebellion, Charles Stewart Parnell and the Home Rule movement, and Erskine Childers and the 1916 Easter Rising.
The Age of Revolution inspired Protestants such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell, Henry Joy McCracken, William Orr, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the brothers Sheares, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Valentine Lawless, and others who led the United Irishmen movement.
Such people were inspired by Thomas Paine of the American Revolution, who disapproved of organised religions in The Age of Reason (1794–1795) and preferred a deist belief.
Although the United Irish movement was supported by individual priests, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was opposed to it, because of a growing rapprochement between Rome and London (one example of which was the funding of the new seminary in Maynooth by the British government in 1795).
Only in County Mayo, where there were few Protestants, was the rebellion led entirely by Catholics, and it only developed there because of the landing by a French force under General Humbert, who was assisted by Captain Bartholomew Teeling.
Jemmy Hope tried to raise the districts of the north where the Presbyterian spirit of republican resistance had run strongest in the 1790s, but found no response.
In 1845 Davis famously clashed with O'Connell over "the Liberator's" denunciation of the "Queens Colleges", a "mixed" or non-denominational scheme for advanced education in Ireland.
[5][6] In the election of 1852 John Gray, then editor of the Freeman's Journal, at the urging of the Reverend David Bell stood on the platform of Tenant Right League in Monaghan.
These included MPs Jack Beattie, Sam Kyle and William McMullen and labour leaders James Baird and John Hanna.
From 1897 the artist and mystic George Russell (also known as "Æ") helped Horace Plunkett to run the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society.
This was also largely started and run by Protestants such as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O'Casey, Alice Milligan, and JM Synge, who also founded the influential but controversial Abbey Theatre that opened in 1904.
Most of the rifles and ammunition used in the Rising had been imported from Germany in July 1914 by Erskine Childers on his yacht Asgard along with Conor O'Brien, Alice Stopford Green, Mary Spring Rice, Darrell Figgis and the former Quaker Bulmer Hobson.
Dorothy Macardle opposed the 1921 Treaty and was a lifelong supporter of Éamon de Valera, writing his view of history in The Irish Republic (1937), but also refusing his suggestion to convert to Catholicism on her deathbed in 1958.
UUC meetings were being attended by John Graham, a devout member of the Church of Ireland, who, at the time of his arrest in 1942, was leading a "Protestant squad", an intelligence unit, that was preparing the armed organisation for a new "northern campaign.
The club's premises, and the homes of Ireland and other prominent members (among them Presbyterian clergymen, teachers and university lecturers) were raided by RUC Special Branch.
[citation needed] In the North, Protestants participated in the early years of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
Billy Leonard, a former Seventh-day Adventist lay-preacher and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reservist, whose wife and children are Catholics, was elected in 2001 to Coleraine Borough Council as an SDLP representative for the Skerries area.
[22] But citing disagreements "over support arrangements for MLAs' wages and expenses",[23] and complaining that "the tentacles of the [IRA] Army Council still run throughout" the republican party he soon resigned.
[25][26] Also assassinated by the UDA in 1980, John Turnley, scion of a wealthy Protestant family and a former British Army officer, joined in SDLP in 1972.
At the time he was killed, Turnley was chairman of the Irish Independence Party, co-founded with Frank McManus (former Unity MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone) and Fergus McAteer (son of the former Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer).,[27] and a leading member of the National H-Blocks Committee supporting the IRA blanket protest.
Jim Kerr, born into a middle-class Protestant family in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, joined the IRA in the late 1930s and was interned at the Curragh Camp during World War II.
Kerr was employed as a blasting engineer at the Mogul Mines at Silvermines, near Nenagh, County Tipperary and was a shop steward with the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), involved in several industrial disputes in the early 1970s.
Kerr, then a member of the Ard Comhairle of Official Sinn Féin, left with others in late 1974 to help found the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and INLA.
Spence had married a girl from the predominantly Catholic Short Strand area of Belfast when he was seventeen and joined a republican social club.
