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The organisation and activism of Dublin’s Protestant working class, 1883–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Martin Maguire
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Extract

Protestant working-class loyalists have been found not only in Belfast, behind the painted kerbs and muralled gables of the Shankill Road and Ballysillan. Recent research has found working-class loyalism in the Ulster hinterland of mid-Armagh. However, most of what has been written on southern Protestantism, beyond Belfast and Ulster, has been on the gentry class. Yet Dublin was once the centre of organised Protestant opinion in Ireland and had, in the early nineteenth century, an assertive and exuberantly sectarian Protestant working class. This paper is based on a study of the Protestant working class of Dublin, and examines its organisation and activism as revealed in the City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club (henceforth C.W.C.). The club owned a substantial Georgian house on York Street, off St Stephen’s Green where the modern extension to the Royal College of Surgeons now stands. The club was sustained by a core of activists numbering around three hundred, the usual print-run for the ballot papers at the annual general meeting. The Protestant working class numbered 5,688 in the city in 1881. The county area numbered 4,096, making a total of 9,784 Protestant workingclass men. The city and county total of about 10,000 remained stable up to the census of 1911. Combined with the Protestant lower middle class of clerks and shopkeepers, the potential to be mobilised by the C.W.C. numbered over 20,000. The club records are used to relate the experience of the Dublin Protestant working class firstly to the more familiar working-class loyalism of Ulster, and secondly to working-class Toryism and the concept of the labour aristocracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 113 , May 1994 , pp. 65 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1994

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175 C.W.C. Management Committee Minutes, 23 Nov. 1927.

176 Ibid., 24 Apr. 1935. The City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club survives today as an amiable social venue, the Conservative Club, which forbids any song or discussion of a political nature.

177 My thanks go to Professor Mary Daly, Dr Alvin Jackson and Dr Fergus D’Arcy for their assistance and encouragement, and to the board of the Lord Edward Fitzgerald Memorial Bursary for a generous research grant.