Few families have as successfully bridged the political and religious divide over the centuries as the Butlers. A young historian, David Butler, who plays the organ in the beautiful Nash-designed St Paul's, Cahir, on Sundays, has written an important study, South Tipperary 1570-1841: Religion, Land and Rivalry (Four Courts Press).
It tells with frankness and bleak honesty how a political and religious minority established and extended its hold in a particular area, and how the majority community maintained its cohesion, and eventually prised open that hegemony. It illuminates the chronic insecurities of privileged minority rule, and some root causes of later troubles.
Other recent books throw light on the subsequent course of interdenominational relations. Cesca's Diary 1913-1916: Where Art and Nationalism Meet by Hilary Pyle (Woodfield Press), reviewed by PJ Mathews (January 14th), is the story of a granddaughter of Archbishop Chenevix Trench, who as an artist became involved in the national movement till her untimely death from influenza in 1918, shortly after marrying a future clerk assistant to the Senate, Diarmuid Coffey.
She was adept at crossing boundaries and is the subject of a forthcoming Tuesday lunchtime lecture in Christ Church crypt, in a series on Church of Ireland rebels in 1916 and the War of Independence.
Cesca admired Pearse's writings, joined Cumann na mBan and was contemptuous of Home Rule ("a species of little parochial council which the English want to give us in the hope of making us satisfied"). Where Redmond's Woodenbridge recruiting speech filled her "with sorrow and shame", listening to a Pearse lecture in October 1914 filled her with "enthusiastic doubt".
She visited him in the GPO in 1916. She thought the Rising was mad. "Our idea was to win Irish freedom," said he, with a glow in his voice. Soon she began to agree with her future mother-in-law Mrs Coffey's oxymoron, that, if an Irish government emerged, "Mr Pearse will feel he hadn't died in vain".
The Rev Norman Ruddock, latterly rector of Wexford and of the extraordinarily shaped St Iberius Church, which hosts often stunning lunchtime recitals during the opera festival, has written an outspoken memoir called The Rambling Rector (Columba Press).
He began ministry at a time when the Catholic Church enjoyed its turn at being (de facto) the established church and when Protestant ministers were largely excluded from civic events. He had a baptism of fire in Fethard-on-Sea in 1957, when he was asked to reopen the school. Shortly afterwards, he was posted to Belfast beside the Shankill Road. He was not cut out to live in the unionist culture and gladly headed for the Border, reciting Charles Wesley's hymn:
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
Ruddock had some political controversy with parishioners, when pictured in the local paper with Brendan Corish attending a Labour Party dinner, and when he put an "Erskine Childers for President" sticker on his car. His daughter Karen won the Young Scientist of the Year award. He enjoyed a warm relationship with Bishop Brendan Comiskey.
Glimpses into the Past: Memoir of an Irish Anglican by Roddy Evans is a short, cheerful autobiography by a committed Christian. Brought up on a farm in Meath, he trained as a doctor and travelled a great deal, but lived in Belfast for the past 30 years. He is closely associated with the mission of Clonard Monastery, and was a friend of Dr George Dallas, who believed that Protestants also had to repent. Evans has sharp comments about medical autocracy at the Adelaide in the 1940s.
He had contact with many political figures here and abroad. Paddy Little, minister for posts and telegraphs, told him the Vatican had been appalled by the change of government in 1932, but the part played by de Valera and his colleagues in the Eucharistic Congress allayed their fears. Much later President de Valera told him: "Including a small Protestant community in this State was not a difficult problem. In the North, a large Protestant community is a different matter."
Evans witnessed in Brazil the shift of capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia and remarks: "If we think we have a problem moving Irish civil servants into the Irish countryside, think of the Brazilian civil servants moving out of the delights of Rio into the back of beyond."
He recounts how de Gaulle refused to partition Algeria, dismissing the notion it had worked in Northern Ireland: "Northern Ireland may be quiet now, but the British will pay for that folly with a generation of woe."
Evans regrets lasting damage done to the Christian faith by the sectarianism inherent in the way Northern Ireland was established. He comments, on the Short Strand, that the Catholics living there could not obtain employment in heavy industries just beside them.
One Protestant old lady told Dessie O'Malley: "I understand that Limerick had a siege like Derry, except that the wrong people were on the inside." Tommy Little conveyed a message to Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith that 20,000 UDA men stood ready to support him, embarrassingly misquoted in the Rhodesian press as 20,000 IRA men.
The common thread running through all four books is the desirability of escaping from hegemony of any kind, and of contributing to Ireland on a basis of mutual respect, tolerance and equality.
The Rev Brian Kennaway ( March 2nd) incorrectly attributes to the Church of Ireland today a philosophy similar to the Orange Order. A Synod resolution of 1999 distanced itself from historic formularies like the Thirty-Nine Articles, particularly negative and antagonistic statements towards other Christians, as not representing the spirit of this church today.
The purpose of the Orange Order is to uphold in Northern Ireland the residue of Protestant hegemony via the British connection. There have long been very different principles among Protestants in Ireland as to whether minority status can be willingly accepted or must be resisted.