1932 marked a decade of the Irish Free State – a British dominion with King George V as head of state (in the Church of Ireland’s perspective); and a fiercely independent Ireland with a President, albeit as the head of government rather than state (in the Catholic frame of reference).  In general this held true for the two primal peoplehoods that together made up about 99% of the Free State’s population. 1932 was a significant year for both.  Catholics used the Eucharistic Congress to emphasise the state’s Catholicity; Anglicans countered that with a presumptuous claim on St Patrick, leapfrogging the inconveniences of Protestant reformation, plantation and penal laws to anchor Irish Protestantism firmly in the contemporary.  This talk will interrogate the differing perceptions of independent Ireland – how the new state was perceived, how each denominational group ‘placed’ the other, how commonalities and conflicts played out to produce a type of modus vivendi between the two communities. 

Dr Ian d’Alton is a graduate of NUI and Cambridge (PhD, 1977). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was an Irish public servant, and since retiring, has been an active history scholar, publishing widely on southern Irish unionism and Protestantism, ‘Big House’ historical and literary themes, and the nature of Irish loyalism. He was a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, and a Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at TCD. He is the author of Protestant society and politics in Cork, 1812-44 (1981) and co-editor, with Dr Ida Milne, of Protestant and Irish: the minority’s search for place in independent Ireland (2019). His most recent book is Southern Irish Protestants (Wordwell, 2024).