Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914

6. The Land Question and Elections in Ulster, 1868-86

6 Brian M. Walker The Land Question and Elections in Ulster, 1868-86 Many commentators on nineteenth-century Ulster drew attention to the divisions between Protestants and Catholics in the province. Some, such as William Sharman Crawford, argued that political differences between the denominations were unnecessary and wrong, and that the question of agrarian reform provided a common ground on which they could unite. l Political events of the 1870s and 1880s were in fact to bring about a substantial realization of this argument. By 1881 there was a greater degree of interdenominational voting at elections in the northern counties than there had ever been before, thanks to the land question. Yet by the general elections of 1885-6, this cooperation had largely vanished , and never again has there been such a close political alliance between Protestant and Catholic in the Ulster countryside. This study of county elections in Ulster from 1868 to 1886 examines the impact of the land question on electoral politics, assesses the shifting pattern of denominational voting, and evaluates some of the striking social changes of these years. Characteristics of the Electoral System For a proper understanding of these subjects, however, certain preliminary comments are in order concerning the electoral system in 1. B. A. Kennedy, "Sharman Crawford, 1780-1861" (Ph.D. dissertation, Queen's University , Belfast, 1953). 230 WALKER: Land Question and Elections in Ulster 231 the period under review.2 Prior to the general election of 1885 each of the nine Ulster counties returned two M.P.s; from 1885 these counties were arranged into divisions, roughly equal in population, with one M.P. being returned for each of the twenty-seven divisions. There were also eleven borough seats before 1885 and six afterward. Between 1850 and 1885 the county franchise was confined to adult males occupying property with a ratable valuation of at least £12 and to some categories of leaseholders and freeholders. Beginning in 1885 all adult male householders were entitled to the vote. In practice, the electoral qualifications meant that in 1881 the vote in the Ulster counties was restricted to 18 percent of the adult males, most of whom were tenant farmers. Some county electors lived in towns within the county, but such voters were not numerous, except in Down and Antrim.3 We can therefore say that roughly 40 percent of those adult males classified as farmers in the 1881 census were electors.4 There was, however, some variation among counties in the proportion of farmers possessing the vote. As a result of the franchise changes of 1884-5, all constituencies witnessed an increase in the proportion of males having the vote; the average was now sixty-four electors for every hundred adult males in the population. In social terms the electorate was expanded to include small farmers and agricultural laborers (cottagers only). These franchise changes affected the religious composition of the electorate , as also did variations in denominational distribution between counties and differences in the social and economic positions of the denominations . Of all male farmers in 1881, 56 percent were Catholic and the remainder were Protestant, but Protestants, especially Presbyterians, tended to own the larger farms.5 Agricultural laborers (cottagers) were 2. See B. M. Walker (ed.), Parliamentary election results in Ireland, 1801-1922 (Dublin , 1978); idem, "The Irish electorate, 1868-1915" in I.H.S., xviii, no. 71 (Mar. 1973), pp. 359-406. All the election results cited in this essay have come from the above volume, hereafter cited as Election results. 3. In Down and Antrim they were around 5 percent in 1874. County Antrim also contained many voters belonging to the Belfast district; in 1880 the figure was put at 1,472 out of 11,701 electors (B.N.L., 6 Apr. 1880). 4. Information on the social and religious composition of the Ulster population has come from the county tables in Census Ire., 1881, pt. i, vol. iii, province of Ulster [C 3204], H.C. 1882, lxxviii, 1. 5. See J. D. R. Johnston, "The Clogher valley as a social and economic region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (M.Litt. thesis, University of Dublin, 1974), pp. 15162 ; Stephen Gwynn, Experiences of a literary man (London, 1926), p. 19; T. W. Freeman, Ireland: its physical, historical, social, and economic geography (London and New York, 1950), p. 173. 232 LAND AND RELIGION IN ULSTER divided in the same year in similar proportions...