Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

NATIONAL IDENTITY, HOME RULE AND ULSTER 17
execute a group of natives, the Imperial Government at
Westminster interfered, resulting in the resignation of the Natal
Government. The Imperial Government was forced to back down
and the News-Letter concluded that if the supremacy of the
Imperial Parliament could not save the Natal natives’ lives, what
reason was there to suppose that it could save Irish Protestant
lives, on the grounds that a legal supremacy that could not be
enforced was no protection at all. 46
Irish Unionists further feared that a home rule parliament would
produce a confessional, Roman Catholic state. Again, the role of
the Crown was central. The Act of Settlement 1700 provided that
the holder of the Crown had to be a Protestant and could not
marry a Catholic. Presbyterianism—the denomination of the
majority of Ulster Protestants—and Roman Catholicism
represented an ideological schism within Christianity of
fundamental proportions. In particular, the sacramental role of the
priest was seen by Presbyterians as hindering the right of
individuals to approach God directly, by controlling access to
religious knowledge, and exerting a powerful influence over
political institutions on the society in which it operated. 47 For Irish
Unionists this fear was confirmed by the considerable involvement
of Catholic priests in local Nationalist politics before the 1912–14
home rule crisis. 48 As James Craig wrote ‘At every stage in life from
the cradle to the grave the Roman Catholic Church intervenes,
exhorting and commanding her adherents to have no intercourse
with Protestants…. Ireland was the most priest-ridden country in
the world’. 49 The Reverend Samuel Prenter, a former Moderator of
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, argued
in 1912 that:
The contention of the Irish Protestants is that neither their
will nor their religious liberties would be safe in the custody of
Rome. In an Irish Parliament civil allegiance to the Holy See
would be the test of membership, and would make every
Roman Catholic member a civil servant of the Vatican. That
Parliament would be compelled to carry out the behests of the
Church. The Church…claims to be above Civil Law, and the
right to enforce Canon Law whenever she is able. 50
This theological controversy manifested itself in the realm of home
rule politics with the pronouncement of the Papal decree Ne
temere in 1908, which declared that mixed Protestant-Catholic
marriages not celebrated before a Catholic priest were invalid.
There was a public outcry in Ireland when, in 1910, Alexander