Angliores Anglis Ipsis

Extract

I start with a quotation from the “Point of View” of the Church of Ireland Gazette for August 19th.

“The General Synod of the Church of England ... will consider ‘The Irish Problem and Ourselves’ published on behalf of the Board of Social Responsibility. Since one of its two authors, Canon Eric Elliott, is a prominent member of the (Irish) Committee on the Role of the Church, and since the document itself draws freely from the reports of that Committee, it might be said that the English Synod is being presented with a Church of Ireland viewpoint”.

In this article I shall take the Gazette’s language and speak of the English “document” and the Irish “report” to avoid confusion. The Document appears to agree with Dr. Palley former Professor of Public Law in Queen’s University, Belfast. She contrasts the “majority of Protestants” who are “descendants of as the settlers” with “the majority of Irishmen, for the most part Roman Catholics”. Possibly Professor Beckett, who has recently retired from a history chair in the same university may be rather more reliable. I quote from the Appendix he supplied to the Irish Report of 1975.

“It is often asserted or assumed that Protestants represent a colonial population while the Roman Catholics are the native Irish. This is at best a dangerous half-truth. It is probably the case that most Protestants are descended in the direct line from English or Scottish ancestors, who entered the country at various times from the later sixteenth century onwards. But such families have commonly inter-married with the earlier layers of population. And besides this there is a very substantial number of Protestants whose direct Irish ancestry goes back to Medieval times and earlier. As for the Roman Catholic population, it contains such a very large inter-mixture of English and Scottish, that it cannot possibly be regarded as representing any single strain”.