Protestantism in Ireland in the context of "Ulster"

Unionism in Ireland is a political tradition that professes loyalty to the crown of the United Kingdom and to the union it represents with England, Scotland and Wales. 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 Assembly. As of February 2024, they no longer do so as the larger faction: they serve in an executive with an Irish republican (Sinn Féin) First Minister.

Unionism became an overarching partisan affiliation in Ireland late in the nineteenth century. Typically Presbyterian agrarian-reform Liberals coalesced with traditionally Anglican, Orange Order allied, Conservatives against 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.

Ulster Protestants are an ethnoreligious group in the Irish province of Ulster, where they make up about 43.5% of the population. Most Ulster Protestants are descendants of settlers who arrived from Great Britain in the early 17th century Ulster Plantation. This was the settlement of the Gaelic, Catholic province of Ulster by Scots and English speaking Protestants, mostly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. Many more Scottish Protestant migrants arrived in Ulster in the late 17th century. Those who came from Scotland were mostly Presbyterians, while those from England were mostly Anglicans (see Church of Ireland). There is also a small Methodist community and the Methodist Church in Ireland dates to John Wesley's visit to Ulster in 1752. Although most Ulster Protestants descend from Lowland Scottish people (some of whose descendants consider themselves Ulster Scots), many descend from English, and to a lesser extent, from Irish, Welsh and Huguenots.

Since the 17th century, sectarian and political divisions between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics have played a major role in the history of Ulster, and of Ireland as a whole. It has led to bouts of violence and political upheaval, notably in the Irish Confederate Wars, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the Williamite War, the Armagh disturbances, Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Irish revolutionary period, and the Troubles. Today, the vast majority of Ulster Protestants live in Northern Ireland, which was created in 1921 to have an Ulster Protestant majority, and in the east of County Donegal. Politically, most are unionists, who have an Ulster British identity and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The culture of Ireland includes the art, music, dance, folklore, theatre, traditional clothing, language, literature, cuisine and sport associated with Ireland and the Irish people. For most of its recorded history, the country’s culture has been primarily Gaelic (see Gaelic Ireland). Strong family values, wit and an appreciation for tradition are commonly associated with Irish culture.

Irish culture has been greatly influenced by Christianity, most notably by the Roman Catholic Church, and religion plays a significant role in the lives of many Irish people. Today, there are often notable cultural differences between those of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox background. References to God can be found in spoken Irish, notably exemplified by the Irish equivalent of “Hello” — “Dia dhuit” (literally: "God be with you").

The Irish Army or Irish establishment, in practice called the monarch's "army in Ireland" or "army of Ireland", was the standing army of the Kingdom of Ireland, a client state of England and subsequently (from 1707) of Great Britain. It existed from the early 1660s until merged into the British Army in 1801, and for much of the period was the largest force available to the British Crown, being substantially larger than the English and Scottish establishments. Initially solely under the monarch's control, from 1699 the army was jointly controlled by the monarch and by the Parliament of England. The Parliament of Ireland took over some responsibilities in 1769, extended after 1782 when it began passing its own Mutiny Acts. The army, funded by Irish crown revenues, had its own Commander-in-Chief.

For much of its history, only members of the Anglo-Irish Anglican Protestant minority could join the army, while both the Catholic majority in Ireland and Protestant Nonconformists were barred from enlistment. During the reign of the Catholic king James II (r. 1685–1688), Catholics were actively recruited into the army and quickly became a majority within it. When James was overthrown by in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, most Irish Army troops stayed loyal to him and fought on his side as Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland. Following James's defeat, many of these troops went into exile in France, where they became the core of the Irish Brigade.

The Official Irish Republican Army or Official IRA (OIRA; Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann) was an Irish republican paramilitary group whose goal was to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and create a "workers' republic" encompassing all of Ireland. It emerged in December 1969, shortly after the beginning of the Troubles, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) split into two factions. The other was the Provisional IRA. Each continued to call itself simply "the IRA" and rejected the other's legitimacy.

Unlike the "Provisionals", the "Officials" did not think that Ireland could be unified until the Protestant majority and Catholic minority of Northern Ireland were at peace. The Officials were Marxist–Leninists and worked to form a united front with other Irish communist groups, named the Irish National Liberation Front (NLF). The Officials were called the NLF by the Provisionals and "stickies" by nationalists in Belfast (apparently in reference to members who would glue Easter lilies to their uniforms), and they were sometimes nicknamed the "Red IRA" by others.

The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC, Irish: Constáblacht Ríoga na hÉireann; simply called the Irish Constabulary 1836–67) was the police force in Ireland between 1822 and 1922, when all of the island was part of the United Kingdom. A separate civic police force, the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), patrolled the capital, while the cities of Derry and Belfast, originally with their own police forces, later had special divisions within the RIC. For most of its history, the ethnic and religious makeup of the RIC broadly matched that of the Irish population, although Anglo-Irish Protestants were overrepresented among its senior officers.

The RIC was under the authority of the British administration in Ireland. It was a quasi-military police force. Unlike police elsewhere in the United Kingdom, RIC constables were routinely armed (including with carbines) and billeted in barracks, and the force had a militaristic structure. It policed Ireland during a period of agrarian unrest and Irish nationalist activity. It was used to quell civil unrest during the Tithe War, the Young Irelander Rebellion, the Fenian Rising, the Land War, and the Irish revolutionary period.