Unionism in Ireland facts for kids

Hazards of separation from Great Britain. Unionist postcard (1912)

Unionism in Ireland is a political tradition that favouring union with Great Britain professes loyalty to the crown and constitution of the United Kingdom. The overwhelming sentiment of Ireland's Protestant minority, unionism mobilised in the decades following Catholic Emancipation in 1829 to oppose restoration of a separate Irish parliament. Since Partition in 1921, as Ulster Unionism its goal has been to retain Northern Ireland as a devolved region within the United Kingdom and to resist the prospect of an all-Ireland republic. Within the framework of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which concluded three decades of political violence, unionists have shared office with Irish nationalists in a reformed Northern Ireland legislature and executive. Currently, they are refusing cooperation in this consociational arrangement to protest what they see as an attempt to distance Northern Ireland from Great Britain through post-Brexit trade rules.

Unionism became an overarching partisan affiliation in Ireland in response to what were seen as Liberal government concessions to Irish nationalists. Typically Presbyterian agrarian-reform Liberals coalesced with traditionally Anglican Orange Order Conservatives in opposition to the Irish Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. Joined by loyalist labour, on the eve of World War I this broad opposition to Irish self-government concentrated in Belfast and its hinterlands as Ulster Unionism, and prepared an armed resistance—the Ulster Volunteers.

Within the partition settlement of 1921 by which the rest of Ireland attained separate statehood, Ulster Unionists accepted a home-rule dispensation for the six north-east counties remaining in the United Kingdom. For the next 50 years the Ulster Unionist Party exercised the devolved powers of the Northern Ireland Parliament with little domestic opposition and outside of the governing party-political system of the United Kingdom.

In 1972, the British government suspended this arrangement. Against a background of growing political violence, and citing the need to consider how Catholics in Northern Ireland could be integrated into its civic and political life, it prorogued the parliament in Belfast.

Over the ensuing three decades of The Troubles, Unionists divided in their responses to power-sharing proposals presented, in consultation with the Republic of Ireland, by successive British governments. Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement, under which both republican and loyalist paramilitaries committed to permanent ceasefires, unionists accepted principles of joint office and parallel consent in a new Northern Ireland legislature and executive.

Renegotiated in 2006, relations within this consociational arrangement remain fraught. Unionists, with diminished electoral strength, charge their nationalist partners in government with pursuing an anti-British cultural agenda and, post-Brexit, with supporting a trade regime (the Northern Ireland Protocol) incompatible with both the Act of Union and the Belfast Agreement.

Unionist demographics

Detail from 2015 Sinn Féin election flyer, North Belfast

Asked to account for the 2019 loss to Sinn Féin's John Finucane of North Belfast, a seat her deputy Nigel Dodds had held for nineteen years and which never previously returned a nationalist MP, Arlene Foster replied "The demography just wasn't there. We worked very hard to get the vote out... but the demography was against us". A Sinn Féin election flyer used in the previous 2015 run against Dodds advertised the changed ratio of Catholics to Protestants in the constituency (46.94 per cent to 45.67 per cent). It had a simple message for Catholic voters, "Make the change".

Demography, in this sense, has been a long term concern for unionists. The proportion of people across Northern Ireland identifying as Protestant, or raised Protestant, has fallen from 60% in the 1960s to 48%, while those raised Catholic has increased from 35 to 45%. Only two of the six counties, Antrim and Down, now have "significant Protestant majorities", and only one – Lisburn – of its five official cities. A majority Protestant Northern Ireland "is now restricted to the suburban area surrounding Belfast". Unionist representation has declined. The combined unionist vote, trailing below 50% in elections since 2014, fell to a new low of just 42.3% in the 2019 Westminster poll.

Unionism losing, however, has not necessarily meant nationalism winning: overall there has been "no comparable increase in the nationalist vote mirroring the decline in the unionist bloc". Despite symbolic triumphs over unionism—returning the larger number of Westminster MPs in 2019, and Sinn Féin as the largest party to Stormont in 2022—at 38% the combined nationalist vote remains below the 41.8% secured in 2005.

Surveys suggest that more people than ever in Northern Ireland, 50%, say they are neither unionist nor nationalist. The electoral impact of eschewing "tribal labels" (upwards of 17% also refuse a religious designation) is limited since those who do so are younger and less likely to turnout in Northern Ireland's still largely polarised elections. It is still the case that few Protestants vote for nationalists, and few Catholics for unionists. But they will vote for others, for parties that decline to make an issue of Northern Ireland's constitutional status.

The principal other party has been the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. In 2019, Alliance more than doubled its vote from 7.1% to 18.5% in the Northern-Ireland wide May European elections and from 7.9% to 16.8% in the December Westminster election. Competing in the 2022 Assembly election with the full range of local parties, Alliance secured 13.5% of first-preference votes and, with vote transfers, close to a fifth of Assembly seats.

According to exit polling in the 2019 Westminster election, the Alliance surge drew both on past unionist and on past nationalist voters. In the Westminster election, 18% of Alliance's new backers said they voted DUP at the previous contest and 3% for the UUP. 12% had voted for Sinn Féin, and 5% for the-SDLP. The party meanwhile gained a quarter of all non-voters from two years earlier. Alliance is neutral on the constitutional issue, but a January 2020 survey indicates that in a border poll, post-Brexit, twice as many of its voters (47%) would opt for Irish unity as for remaining in the United Kingdom (22%).

Since O'Neill, who in the last Stormont parliamentary election personally canvassed Catholic households, there have been calls within unionism for it to break out of its Protestant base. When he was DUP leader, Peter Robinson spoke of not being "prepared to write off over 40 per cent of our population as being out of reach". Surveys had been suggesting that in a border poll between a quarter and a third of Catholics might vote for the Northern Ireland to remain in the UK. While anti-partition sentiment has strengthened post-Brexit, there may be a significant number of Catholics who meet the standard of "functional unionists": voters whose "rejection of the unionist label is more to do with the brand image of unionism than with their constitutional preferences". It remains the case that only one half of one percent of DUP and UUP members identify as Catholics: a handful of individuals.

Defence of unionist culture

The cross of St. Patrick superimposed on the Scottish Saltire with a six-county star, Red Hand of Ulster and no crown: the "Ulster national flag" variously employed by Loyalist groups to represent an independent, or distinctly Ulster-Scot, Northern-Ireland identity.

In disclaiming any "selfish or strategic" British interest, the 1994 Downing Street Declaration, had effectively ruled that "there could no such thing as disloyalty within Northern Ireland". The conflicting ambitions of nationalism and unionism were of "equal validity".

Unionists accused nationalists taking this new "parity of esteem" as a license for a policy of "unrelenting harassment". Trimble spoke of having to reverse an "insidious erosion of the culture and ethnic national identity of the British people of Ulster" systematically pursued by "the Provisional IRA and its fellow travellers"; and Robinson of a "fightback" against the "unrelenting Sinn Féin campaign to promote Irish culture and target British structures and symbols".

Unionists alleged a "pan-nationalist [SDLP-Sinn Féin] front" was manipulating public order powers to ban, re-route or otherwise regulate time-hallowed Orange marches. For Trimble the flashpoint was the conflict at Drumcree (1995-2001), for Robinson and Arlene Foster it was the similarly drawn-out Ardoyne shopfronts standoff (2013-2016) in north Belfast. A decision of the once firmly unionist Belfast City Council in 2012 to reduce the number of days the Union Flag was flown from City Hall, was also interpreted as a step in a wider "cultural war" against "Britishness", triggering protest.

The greater issue in inter-party talks proved to be language rights. On Good Friday, 10 April 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair was surprised by a last minute demand for recognition of a "Scottish dialect spoken in some parts of Northern Ireland" that Unionists regarded their "equivalent to the Irish language". In insisting on parity for Ulster Scots or Ullans, Trimble believed he was taking this "cultural war" onto the nationalists' own ground. Unionists argued that nationalists had "weaponised" the Irish language issue as "a tool" with which to "batter the Protestant people".

The DUP's first Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Nelson McCausland, argued that privileging Irish through a language act would be an exercise in "ethnic territorial marking". His decision, and that of his party colleagues, to resist Sinn Féin's demand for a stand-alone Irish Language Act, in part by insisting on compensating provisions for Ulster Scots, became one of the principal, publicly acknowledged, sticking points in the three years of on and off again negotiations required to restore the power-sharing executive in 2020. Other unionists object. The "positive ethnic, religious or national special pleading" implicit in the parading, flags and language counteroffensive, they argue, risks defining unionist culture as "subaltern and therefore ripe for absorption into Irish culture as a 'cherished' minor tradition".

The 2020 New Decade New Approach agreement promised both the Irish language and Ulster-Scots new Commissioners to "support" and "enhance" their development but did not accord them equal legal status. While the UK government recognised Scots and Ulster Scots as a regional or minority language for the "encouragement" and "facilitation" purposes of Part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, for Irish it assumed the more stringent Part III obligations in respect of education, media and administration. Yet New Decade, New Approach did take a step with Ulster Scots that it does not take with Irish speakers: the UK government pledged to "recognise Ulster Scots as a national minority under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities". This is a second Council of Europe treaty whose provisions were previously applied in Northern Ireland to non-white groups, to Irish Travellers and to the Roma.

Insofar as unionists are persuaded to identity with Ulster Scots and employ it as a marker (as the reference to "the Ulster Scots / Ulster British tradition in Northern Ireland" in New Decade, New Approach might imply) they define themselves, "in effect", as a scheduled ethnicity.

In 2022, over the objections of unionists who in protest against the Northern Ireland Protocol continued to veto a return to devolved power-sharing, the legislation foreseen in New Decade New Approach was enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act received royal assent on December 6.

Unionist political parties

A flowchart illustrating all the political parties that have existed throughout the history of Northern Ireland and leading up to its formation (1889 onwards). Unionist parties are in orange.

• Irish Conservative Party (1835–1891)
• Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (1885-1891)
• Liberal Unionist Party (1886–1912)
• Irish Unionist Alliance (1891–1922)
• Ulster Unionist Party (1905/1921–present)
• Conservative and Unionist Party (1912–present)
• Commonwealth Labour Party (1942–1947)
• Protestant Unionist Party (1966–1971)
• Democratic Unionist Party (1971–present)
• Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (1973–1978)
• Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (1974–1981)
• Volunteer Political Party (1974–1975)
• United Ulster Unionist Party (1975–1984)
• Progressive Unionist Party (1978–present)
• Ulster Popular Unionist Party (1980–1995)
• Ulster (Loyalist) Democratic Party (1982–2001)
• UK Independence Party (UKIP 1993–present)
• UK Unionist Party (UKUP 1995–2007)
• United Unionist Coalition (1998–2012)
• Northern Ireland Unionist Party (1999–2008)
• Traditional Unionist Voice (2007–present)
• NI21 (2013–2016)

Images for kids

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  Detail of the Battle of Ballynahinch 1798 by Thomas Robinson. Government Yeomanry prepare to hang United Irish insurgent Hugh McCulloch, a grocer.

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  1899 penny print of Henry Cooke's 1841 speech in "reply to Daniel O'Connell"

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  William Gladstone writing legislation under pressure from the Land League. Caricature 1881.

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  God Save the Queen, Erin Go Bragh, Ulster Unionist Convention, Belfast, 1892

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  Flag of the Congested Districts Board for Ireland, 1893–1907

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  Ulster Day, 28 September 1912

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  Signing the Ulster Covenant Declaration, "Ulster Day" 1912

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  An Orange Order banner showing Carson the signing of the Ulster Covenant 1912

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  The 1918 general election result in Ireland. Sinn Féin sweeps the south and west

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  The Coat of Arms of the Government of Northern Ireland (1924-1974). Escutcheon flanked by the Scottish lion and an Irish Elk.

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  The statue of Lord Edward Carson in front of Parliament Buildings, Stormont

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  Anti-Faulkner Unionist election poster

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  Mural for the Red Hand Commando (UVF) which, uniquely, had an Irish-language motto, Lamh Dearg Abu (Victory to the Red Hand)

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  Campaign against the Anglo-Irish Agreement

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  "Conflict to Peace", paramilitaries face the Parliament Buildings at Stormont, mural Kilburn Street, Belfast