Denis Ireland, who died 50 years ago on September 23rd, 1974, was a soldier, a businessman, a journalist, an author and a senator. Unusually, although from an Ulster Protestant background, he became an avowed Irish nationalist who encouraged his co-religionists to explore their Irish identity.
He was born in Malone Park in Belfast on July 29th, 1894, the son of Adam Ireland, a linen manufacturer, and Isabella McHinch. Following attendance at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Perse School (a private school in Cambridge), he studied medicine at Queen’s University Belfast until the outbreak of the first World War led to his enlisting in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and seeing action as a captain in France, Flanders and Macedonia, where he was wounded and invalided home. He was sent to recover to Glengarriff, Co Cork, where, according to Frances Clarke and Marie Coleman, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, a chance reading of PW Joyce’s Irish Names of Places caused him to convert to Irish nationalism.
Giving up his studies at Queen’s soon after resuming them at war’s end, he worked for a while in the family’s linen business, travelling to represent the firm in London, Europe and North America. His travels provoked an interest in writing in him and in his mid-thirties, he gave up business to devote himself to journalism.
He worked as a freelance writer for the BBC and contributed to periodicals such as The Bell, Envoy, the Dublin Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Capuchin Annual, Hibernia and Ulsterman, as well as to newspapers.
Identity and politics – Brian Maye on Ulster Protestant and avowed Irish nationalist Denis Ireland
Paws for thought – Alison Healy on writers and their pets
‘Buses are for losers’: A short history of traffic congestion in Dublin
Variety is the spice of life – Oliver O’Hanlon on Cork’s Everyman Theatre
In his 1936 book, From the Irish Shore: Notes on My Life and Times, he wrote that while it might be “easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a son of the Ulster Protestant industrial ascendancy to orient himself in relation to his country’s history”, he believed that for his fellow-Ulster Protestants to try to do so could lead to a “renaissance” for them.
He founded the anti-partitionist Ulster Union Club in 1941 to try to “recapture for Ulster Protestants their true tradition as Irishmen”. It held talks on economics, history and the Irish language, classes on dancing and music, and published pamphlets. There was possible IRA infiltration into the club and it was suppressed in 1944 under the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act.
Proud of Presbyterian involvement in the 1798 Rising, Ireland was a member of the Belfast 1798 Commemoration Committee set up in 1948 to mark the 150th anniversary of the rising.
The north-south division wasn’t the only limitation on Irish independence as far as he was concerned. His book Eamon de Valera Doesn’t See It Through (1941) argued that the Bank of England continued to control Irish monetary policy and he advocated breaking the link with sterling.
In his call for governments to control national credit and currency, he showed himself a disciple of Social Credit, the distributive philosophy of CH Douglas.
His first foray into direct politics was as an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in East Belfast in the 1929 general election.
When the first Inter-Party Government won power in Dublin in 1948, taoiseach John A Costello nominated him to the Seanad. According to Clarke and Coleman, this was at the instigation of Clann na Poblachta leader Seán MacBride, “who was supposedly keen to use his Ulster background as a means of symbolically uniting north and south, Protestant and Catholic”.
During his three years as a senator (de Valera did not renominate him on returning to power in 1951), he spoke mainly on partition and was an Irish representative at the Council of Europe, where he supported MacBride in the leading role he played in securing ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Retiring from formal politics in 1951, he’d been a prolific writer for many years. Some of his main publications were: An Ulster Protestant Looks at His World (1930), Ulster Today and Tomorrow (1931), Portraits and Sketches (1935), Patriot Adventurer (1936 – a study of Wolfe Tone), Statues Round the City Hall (1939), The Age of Unreason (1944), Six Counties in Search of a Nation (1947), Ireland and North Atlantic Defence (1950) and From the Jungle of Belfast (1973). He married Mary Hawthorne late in life (in October 1957) at Elwood Presbyterian Church, Belfast, passing all of his life at various addresses in that city.
He lived long enough to see the early years of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland and it was fortunate for him that he didn’t have to witness that full tragedy unfold.
If there had been more like him, especially in the upper echelons of Unionist politics, with his humane, pragmatic, principled and accommodating outlook, the story of Northern Ireland in the closing decades of the 20th century might have been very different.