Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (review)

A memorable Punch cartoon published during the Northern Ireland "Troubles," depicts a scene of lions and Christians in the Roman Coliseum. Rather than fighting the lions, the Christians are fighting each other. Two lions, off to one side, look on at the great melee and comment: "Oh dear, not the Irish Christians again" (qtd. in Akenson, Small Differences:Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 [McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988], i). Sectarian violence in Ireland is not as old as Roman times; it can just seem that way.

Mark Doyle's engaging study of sectarian conflict in mid-nineteenth-century Belfast seeks to explain the modern tradition of violence that shaped Protestant-Catholic relations in that city. Doyle argues that Belfast's tradition of sectarian violence emerged during the 1850s and 1860s, a period of tumultuous change shaped by the forces of urbanization, industrialization, Catholic migration, and Protestant evangelicalism. That there were so many sectarian riots in Belfast, lasting from days to weeks in duration, suggests that violence had become endemic, embedded in the city's social fabric.

Previous studies of Belfast violence have focused primarily on the ideological and structural forces that shaped relations between Catholics and Protestants—disagreements over religion and politics coupled with the structural inequalities in power and employment. While these explanations are foundational to understanding sectarian conflict, they do not adequately account for why the violence became endemic rather than sporadic. Other analyses, Doyle asserts, do not explain why sectarian hostility was expressed through violence rather than by some other means, although he does not suggest what other non-violent means might have been utilized to vent or channel sectarian antagonism. For all of the stereotypes and caricatures of the Irish in Victorian popular culture, there was more interpersonal violence in Ireland than in the rest of the United Kingdom, and recreational violence (in the form of faction fights) was a cultural tradition still alive in the 1850s and 1860s. Given a tradition of communal justice and recreational violence, an urban society with structural inequalities, and significantly, a large minority population, it would be rather more surprising than Doyle hypothesizes to imagine "a society in which people holding conflicting religious or political views coexist peacefully" (8).

The great strength of Doyle's analysis of Belfast violence is his emphasis on and elucidation of the key networks or relationships that shaped and gave meaning to communal rivalries and were thus instrumental in embedding the violent traditions of sectarian conflict. For confessional groups, fraternal organizations, political alliances, religious bodies, and kinship ties were instrumental in shaping attitudes and identity—but more importantly to help understand the pattern of sectarian violence, they were also highly influential in fanning or (far less commonly) extinguishing initial sectarian sparks. A small, localized incident might reverberate across these webs of social networks and trigger a massive, sustained, violent reaction, linking neighbourhoods across the city.

Institutional Catholicism was not a particularly moderating influence in Belfast during this time because of its weak presence. In 1857 Belfast had only nine priests for a congregation of forty thousand Catholics; had it been stronger, the Catholic Church might have been a restraining influence on sectarian violence. Its very weakness allowed Ribbonism to take root in working-class neighborhoods, and secret societies were clearly not moderating influences on sectarianism. The Orange Order was a widespread, influential social network cutting across Protestant class divisions; by promoting anti-Catholicism and defending Protestant identity, it could enflame sectarian antagonism and violence.

In addition to these social networks within Belfast, Doyle examines the relations between community and state: Catholics and the city government, and Protestants and Dublin Castle. At the local level, the economic, social, and political powerlessness of Catholics alienated them from the local government at...