Protestant and Irish

In 1989 Edna Longley remarked that if Catholics were born Irish, Protestants had to 'work their passage to Irishness'. With eighteen essays by scholars with individual perspectives on Irish Protestant history, this book explores a number of those passages. Some were dead ends. Some led nowhere in particular. But others allowed southern Irish Protestants - those living in the Irish Free State and Republic - to make meaningful journeys through their own sense of Irishness. Through the lives and work, rest and play of Protestant participants in the new Ireland - sportsmen, academics, students, working class Protestants, revolutionaries, rural women, landlords, clerics - these essays offer refreshing interpretations as to what it meant to be Protestant and Irish in the changed political dispensation after Irish independence in 1922. While acknowledging that Protestant reactions were complex, ranging from 'keeping the head down' in a ghetto, through a sort of low-level loyalism, to out-and-