Southern Protestants need safeguards under terms of Anglo-Irish settlement

Dublin, 18 October 1921 – The voice of the minority Protestant community needs to be heard and taken into account in whatever settlement is reached in the forthcoming Anglo-Irish peace talks, John Gregg, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, told a Dublin Diocesan Synod yesterday.

Dr Gregg said that he was praying for a just peace and, while he would prefer to keep silent, he was concerned that silence might be too easily misconstrued. For that reason, he has called for the southern unionist position to be safeguarded under the terms of any new settlement.

He said that it would be a very serious concern if the minority in southern Ireland, which he estimated at being ‘300,000 to 400,000 British citizens’, were to have no voice in shaping a settlement. ‘As a minority, we differ from the majority in religion, in politics, in ethos generally,’ he said. ‘Our conscientious convictions have led us to maintain an attitude of aloofness from the political movement directed against the British connection, in so far as the methods adopted by its supporters seemed to us wrong.’

Dr Gregg made clear that Ireland was their home, and the Protestant community were as ‘truly Irish as were many in the other camp’ yet the differences between this Protestant community and the more ‘extreme’ of their fellow countrymen were such as to lead them to being viewed as alien. ‘Whatever our religious or political outlook may be, here is our home, and we have every right to be here. It is a very good thing for Ireland that we should be here, and it will be a bad day for the new Ireland if any large number of us leaves the country. And yet if we are to stay we must be able to have confidence.’

[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]