The Rising

I leave tomorrow for London so I will miss the final five days of the arts festival. Tonight was my last event. It was a play that explored the role of Belfast in the Easter Rising, which is usually associated with Dublin. But many of the leaders and foot soldiers had connections to Belfast. At the Q&A afterward, a historian said how unlikely that was. Belfast’s population was around 20,000 in 1800, whereas Dublin, Cork and other southern cities had been large cities dating back centuries. Belfast’s population shot up to 365,000 in 1900, of whom about 24% were Catholic “blow ins,” i.e. they moved to the city when they lost their land or their crops failed.

One of the reasons Belfast supplied so much support for the 1916 rising was the misery of the linen mills. Union organisers (men and women, Catholic and Presbyterian) transferred their skills to organising against the British. It wasn’t much of a leap. Ireland was run on behalf of the landed English aristocracy, the Anglo Irish members of the Church of Ireland. Presbyterians were second class citizens. However Anglicans proved adept at turning Catholics and Presbyterians against each other to defeat their self interest. Kind of like how poor whites were groomed to turn on blacks in the American south, the better to protect the interests of those in power.
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