I now turn to examine other significant influences upon events in Northern Ireland, beginning with the role of Irish parties, Governments and interests before moving on to the record of the domestic Northern Ireland institutions and communities. If the reader finds the chapters which follow relatively brief compared with the very comprehensive examination of British policy and behaviour, it is because many of the events already described involved other participants or ‘players’, and in discussing the interaction of Britain with others involved, much of the relevant ground has already been covered. As far as possible, I am determined to avoid tedious repetition. My objective, however, will be the same as in my analysis of the British role. To paraphrase the wording of the Book of Common Prayer, I shall seek to identify occasions when the Irish have left undone things which they ought to have done, or done things that they ought not to have done.

One must begin by emphasising the very close relationship which developed between the infant Irish state and the Roman Catholic Church. There had not always been such a close affinity between the Church and Irish nationalism, or such reliance by nationalism upon the support of Catholic adherents. It is important to note that powerful Church interests had been favourably disposed to the Union (albeit on the mistaken assumption that Catholic emancipation would rapidly follow). Deep into the nineteenth century eminent clerics remained, in many cases, comfortable members of the establishment and deeply antipathetic to agrarian and other violence. On the other hand, it has to be remembered that the numerous Presbyterian community in the north of Ireland were as affronted as their Catholic neighbours by the privileges extended to the established Anglican Episcopal Church. Wolfe Tone had memorably spoken not just of Protestant and Catholic, but of Protestant, Catholic and dissenter. There had been substantial Protestant involvement in the Rebellion of 1798. One of the founding fathers of my old school, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, had been William Drennan, an advocate of Irish self-Government and a very early user of the phrase ‘the Emerald Isle’.