page_title: Unionism in Ireland
section_title: Catholic emancipation and "Protestant unity"
hierarchical_section_title: Unionism in Ireland / Irish Unionism 1800–1904 / Catholic emancipation and "Protestant unity"
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of "Protestant Unity," Henry Cooke's "Reply to O'Connell 1842
context_page_description: Unionism in Ireland is a political tradition on the island that professes loyalty to the Crown and Constitution of the United Kingdom. The overwhelming sentiment of a once ascendant minority Protestant population, in the decades following Catholic Emancipation it mobilised to oppose the restoration of an Irish parliament. As "Ulster unionism," in the century since Partition, its commitment has been to the retention within the United Kingdom of the six Ulster counties of Northern Ireland. Within the framework of a peace settlement for Northern Ireland, since 1998 unionists have reconciled to sharing office with Irish nationalists in a devolved administration, while continuing to rely on the connection with Great Britain to secure their cultural and economic interests.
context_section_description: It took the Union thirty years to deliver on the promise of Catholic emancipation (1829)—to admit Catholics to Parliament—and permit an erosion of the Protestant monopoly on position and influence. An opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as "a dilute minority" within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O’Connell, invited Protestants to join in a campaign to "repeal" the Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782.
  In the North, resistance to the call was stiffened by a religious revival. With its emphasis upon "personal witness", the "New Reformation" appeared to transcend the ecclesiastical differences between the different Protestant denominations The leading Presbyterian evangelist, Henry Cooke took the occasion to preach "Protestant Unity". In 1834, at a mass demonstration hosted upon his estate by the 3rd Marquess of Downshire, a disillusioned "Emancipationist", Cooke proposed a "Christian marriage" between the two main Protestant denominations. Setting their remaining differences aside, they would cooperate on all "matters of common safety". 
  Presbyterian voters tended to favour reform-minded Whigs or, as they later emerged, tenant-rights Liberals over the Conservative and Orange-Order candidates of the landed Ascendancy. But as the Irish party-political successors to O'Connell's Repeal movement gained representation and influence in Westminster, Cooke's call for unity was to be heeded in the progressive emergence of a pan-Protestant "Unionism".
caption: 1899 penny print of Henry Cooke's 1841 speech in "reply to Daniel O'Connell"
exif: {}