Sectarianism
By 1920 growing unemployment in the linen industries and engineering sector were creating tension within the “Protestant bloc.” Large numbers of well organised ex-servicemen were still out of work and a cause of concern to the local middle class. It was the local middle class who alleged that ‘peaceful penetration’ of Belfast industry during the war by thousands of Catholics created the unemployment problem, especially that of the ex-servicemen. It would be the local middle class who succeeded in giving the conflict its sectarian twist.
In the spring and summer of 1920 ‘indignation’ meetings were held in Belfast by working-class members of Carson’s “Old Town Hall circle” to attack the British unions for their ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘pro- republicanism’. Leading Unionists and employers went along in these events and even justified them, as they perceiving themselves to be vulnerable. After one meeting held in the shipyards in July, attacks began on workers identified as Belfast Labour members, socialists and Catholics. This then spread to some sections of the linen industry and the engineering industry resulting in over “8,000 expulsions within a week.”
Paul Collins suggests that the expulsions were partly the result of a speech made by Carson on the 12 July Orange Order celebrations linking Labour with Sinn Féin: “…These men who come forward as the friends of Labour care no more about Labour than does the man in the moon. Their real object, and the real insidious nature of their propaganda is that they mislead and bring about disunity amongst our own people and in the end before we know where we are, we may find ourselves in the same bondage and slavery as is the rest of Ireland in the South and West.”
Collins however suggests that the direct cause of the expulsions was the killing of Banbridge RIC man Colonel Smyth on 7 July in Cork. Rail Union members in the south of Ireland refused to allow his body travel home by train, leading many Loyalists to then identify the Labour movement with his assassins. It was on the day of his funeral Collins says that the expulsions began resulting in ten thousand Catholics and so called “Rotten Prods” with connections to Labour.
Most Protestant employers looked on with tacit approval as “Vigilance Committees” were established to prevent ‘disloyalist’ workers from being re-employed. Protestant domination of the Belfast industries was celebrated with Union Jack unfurlings and addressed by members of the UULA.
Read more about this topic: Ulster Unionist Labour Association
Famous quotes containing the word sectarianism:
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)