WI United Ireland

Even my catholic gran from Sligo says this....Along with N.Connacht...And Dublin...Hell the whole island :p

By what I meant: It was halfway between the two. Not a Britain totally cuts and runs and certainly not they help the catholics take over the whole place. More that they say Ireland must remain intact and the Dominion of Ireland will consist of both parts with equal links to London.
Not totally thought out, just thinking theoretically- what if Britain avoided the troubles whilst Ireland was landed with them x 10.

so like the island united but with the north autonomous form Dublin?
 
FWIW, at the moment out of 147,000 people in Donegal, 127,000 are RC so it is indeed a large majority Catholic. http://beyond2020.cso.ie/Census/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=19676

That's now, not then. Southern Ireland / The Irish Free State had a larger Protestant population at the time of the Better Gov't of Ireland Act / Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Protestant population has steadily eroded since. The Donegal Progressive Party (a Protestant organization) has reflected this decline by electing fewer and fewer local councillors over time, until today I believe it is unrepresented. I believe Sligo also had a sizable Protestant population. As an aside, the continued consolidation of C of I dioceses (except in Northern Ireland where The Diocese of Connor was separated from Down and Dromore in the 1940s due to the growth of the Anglican population) is also reflective of the attrition of the Protestant population in the 26 counties.
 
That's now, not then. Southern Ireland / The Irish Free State had a larger Protestant population at the time of the Better Gov't of Ireland Act / Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Protestant population has steadily eroded since. The Donegal Progressive Party (a Protestant organization) has reflected this decline by electing fewer and fewer local councillors over time, until today I believe it is unrepresented. I believe Sligo also had a sizable Protestant population. As an aside, the continued consolidation of C of I dioceses (except in Northern Ireland where The Diocese of Connor was separated from Down and Dromore in the 1940s due to the growth of the Anglican population) is also reflective of the attrition of the Protestant population in the 26 counties.

Yes, I understand all that (I was responding to him saying that Donegal was by no means exclusively Catholic nowadays), but the point is its extremely hard to see how (or why), at any stage, donegal would have been included in a seperate Protestant state in Ulster, as some people have contended would happen. Even the UK govt knew that would be unworkable IRL; its hard to see why a hypothetical Belfast Protestant govt would want to take in Donegal after a civil war which would already have worn them down, I would think they would want to deliberately limit the amount of Catholics within their borders, and taking Donegal in would hardly be the best way to do that. I'm quite familliar with Protestants in Ireland, having gone to two Protestants schools.
 
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Perhaps population exchanges could be on the cards.
The North takes all of Ulster and deports a lot of its republicans (forget the catholic stuff!) south and in turn gets a lot of unionists deported its way.
Lets make things even messier :p
 
Perhaps population exchanges could be on the cards.
The North takes all of Ulster and deports a lot of its republicans (forget the catholic stuff!) south and in turn gets a lot of unionists deported its way.
Lets make things even messier :p

If you want to make things even messier, Ireland could encourage immigration for Jews, Muslims, Serbs, Bosnians, Armenians, Turks, communists and menshevieks... why not go the whole hog?;)
 
Ethnic cleansing is quite unlikely IMO. As stated ethnic cleansing of Donegal etc. would be pretty impracticable.

The Unionists seemed happy enough with gerrymandering to maintain their hold on power. Perhaps more extreme gerrymandering?
 
Ethnic cleansing is quite unlikely IMO. As stated ethnic cleansing of Donegal etc. would be pretty impracticable.

The Unionists seemed happy enough with gerrymandering to maintain their hold on power. Perhaps more extreme gerrymandering?

I wouldnt put it past them, but wouldnt it just be so much easier to let Dublin hang on to Donegal? I know it has a fairly decent fisheries indiustry etc, but would it be worth it? also what do you think of the suggestion some people have made that Dublin would have ended up being part of a Unionist state?
 

Ak-84

Banned
Ethnic cleansing is quite unlikely IMO. As stated ethnic cleansing of Donegal etc. would be pretty impracticable.

The Unionists seemed happy enough with gerrymandering to maintain their hold on power. Perhaps more extreme gerrymandering?

OTL the fact that Donegal was in S Ireland was a source of quite a lot of surprise, it was supposed to be the sop for having Fermanagh in N Ireland. IIRC (I could be wrong don't jump onto me for this), the reason given was that Fermanagh was economically dependent on Belfast, which is pretty spurious considering most of Ireland was.
 
One solution for the unionists here is not to form a independant N.Ireland but to reform the situation from before Ireland joined the UK: The upper class minorities ruling over the lower classes.
It wouldn't be quite so hard for them to do this and remain catholic, it wasn't too long ago that the UK still had property restrictions on voting, if they role those back to the mid 19th century then you cut out the working class vote.
Again though that would be messy and international pressure will remain.
And of course though the rich did tend to be unionists the reverse (that the poor tended to be republicans) did not hold true with there being plenty of poor unionists.

Just thinking aloud. Not saying its in any way a good idea.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Perhaps if the UK had gone through with Home Rule despite the war? Unlikely, but home rule would have the advantage of culling any violent seperatist movement. Also, the general disgust with Ireland and Irish which the government and the people had by 1919 (justified or not) would not have contributed to a situation where the thinking was "lets give the whole sorry place the heave ho!"

Today you read about the efforts of the Ulstermen at Somme, the 10th at Gallopoli and the 16th in Flanders, but contempory picture painted in Britain of Ireland and Irish was of an unreliable people; I think it was French who said to Lloyd George that "irish recruits were less reliable than German ones". perhaps Britain would have shown more patience like they did in the "Troubles" leading to perhaps a better settlement.
 

Churchill

Banned
Lets just say Irish home rule was pushed through before world war 1 prevented it.
I would think the UVF with it's 120,000 armed men could have cleared much if not all the 9 counties of Ulster of Catholics in short order.
100,000 people in London and 100,000 more in Glasgow also signed up to go and fight for Ulster back then.
More Loyalists would have arrived from Liverpool, Manchester and Canada too.
No way could the Southern Irish have won.
 
The union that never was

The British Army was certainly not beaten. However both sides were exhausted by the time of the ceasefire which is why Collins signed the treaty. Effectively the 6 counties weren't as much a divisive issue as the oath of allegiance to the crown when the treaty was signed.

Collins was a realist most people wanted an end to the troubles. The oppenents were in the minority. De Valera absented himself from the negotiations deliberately to avoid signing but didn't actively oppose the free state either, his opposition was opportunism

The argument that civil war would have followed a United Ireland ignores the fact that a civil war followed the signing of the treaty in the south anyway but probably not as nasty as any civil war based on religious lines would have been. Thereagain apart from the Northern Presbytarians the more moderate protestants were not as hostile to Independence several fought for Independence; Erskine Childers, W.B Yeats.

However the Protestants in the North would have resisted and probably held on to maybe 3 and a half counties. The chance for a United Ireland was probably lost before 1914. Niall Fergusson develops the idea in "English Ireland" in his Virtual History. However it deals with home rule rather than independence. Effectively if home rule was enforced then the "loyalists" would have soon lost any sympathy if they had started shooting at the largely catholic Royal Irish Constabulary and the Tories would have had to have stopped egging them on in the hopes of toppling Asquith. Had it all come about maybe much of the troubles wouldn't have happened and seperation would have come peacefully as in the case of Norway and Sweden in 1905 and no doubt Scotland in the not too distant future

After 1914 thousands of people on both sides had gained military experience in the trenches.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Virtual History, not Fergusons best work ever. As far as alt hist is concerned Robert Crowelys What If and More What If were better.

I think militarily a United Ireland was possible if the British granted home rule as was decided in 1914 and sent sufficient forces to force it down. Of course the political will was not there. Hell Collins was surprised to get S Ireland at all, he though he would lose all of Ulster and possibly the odd county here and there as well.
 
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