Survival and assimilation: loyalism in the interwar Irish Free State (Pre-published version)

Abstract

In 1997, historian R. B. McDowell suggested that when “compared to the thorough methods for dealing with unpopular minorities … in eastern and central Europe and elsewhere, the harassment of loyalists was not notably severe” in Southern Ireland. When measured in lethal violence (a crude and sometimes unreliable metric), there is much truth in this. Between 1919 and 1921, during an Irish War of Independence which was followed by a short, sharp civil war and part of a longer “Irish Revolution,” just over 2,300 people were killed in ways that can be directly linked to the conflict. The separatist Irish Republican Army (IRA) killed 184 alleged civilian “spies” and informers, out of a total of just under 1,000 civilian casualties. Elsewhere, the “Posen Uprising” claimed twice as many lives in seven weeks as the Irish War of Independence did in three years. There were over 36,000 fatalities in less than five months during the Finnish Civil War, 3,000 or so in a few days in Bulgaria in September 1918, and another 1,500–3,000 over five days in September 1923. The shorter Estonian and Latvian Wars of Independence saw 11,750 and 13,246 fatalities, respectively. And as Charles Townshend has written, the significant reduction of the non-Catholic minority in Southern Ireland between 1911 and 1926 “may appear trivial in comparison with the massive dislocation of peoples in Europe, starting with the Greek-Turkish conflict in the early 1920s.