Belfast Blues, II

Worldview ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. 35-41
Author(s):  
Richard J. Neuhaus

Among Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially Presbyterians, there is a stronger tradition of individual clerics involved in politics than among Catholics. The tradition is traced over the last hundred years by Andrew Boyd in his Holy War in Belfast and is represented today by, for example, Ian Paisley and the Reverend Martin Smyth, head of the Orange Order, vice president of the Unionist Party and an important factor in the "loyalist" opposition to the White Paper. The three major Protestant groups are the Church of Ireland, which is in communion with the Church of England, the Presbyterians and the Methodists.

2019 ◽  
pp. 168-193
Author(s):  
Thomas Hennessey ◽  
Máire Braniff ◽  
James W. McAuley ◽  
Jonathan Tonge ◽  
Sophie A. Whiting

This chapter examines the importance of the Protestant Faith and Church and of the Orange Order to UUP members. Whilst overwhelmingly Protestant, the UUP has always rejected the overtly fundamentalist, Free Presbyterian brand with which the DUP was associated for many years. The chapter analyses whether the Church of Ireland or Presbyterian Church provide most UUP members. The chapter then discusses the religiously conservative attitudes of members, assessing the extent of support for, or opposition to, the legalization of same-sex marriage and abortion, currently still prohibited (other than in exceptional cases for abortion) in Northern Ireland. The extent to which members offer support for ‘mixed’ (Protestant–Catholic) marriages and for unfettered marching rights for the Orange Order, will also be examined. Are older members, politically socialized in an era of fraternal Orange–UUP relations, still more sympathetic to the Orange Order? The survey data allow direct comparisons with the DUP.


Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (292) ◽  
pp. 493-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Brannon

The Environment and Heritage Service (EHS), an agency within the Department of the Environment, aims ‘to protect and conserve the natural and built environment and to promote its appreciation for the benefit of present and future generations‘ (EHS 1996: 7). EHS has a central statutory, regulatory, management and participatory role in Northern Ireland archaeology.Official care of archaeological sites and monuments in what is now Northern Ireland goes back to the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and the Irish Church Act of 1869. This made provision for the upkeep of certain irnportant ecclesiastical sites; 137 ruined churches and crosses were vested in the Commissioners of Public Works, to be maintained as National Monuments. Of these, 17 were in what was to become Northern Ireland. This precedent was noted in Parliamentary debates on the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882, which applied to Britain and Ireland, and of the 18 Irish sites, 3 were in what is now Northern Ireland. The Ancient Monuments Protection (Ireland) Act 1892 increased the scope for protection of sites in the earlier schedule.


2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (29) ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Frank Cranmer

In any discussion of church-state relations in the United Kingdom, it should be remembered that there are four national Churches: the Church of England, the (Reformed) Church of Scotland, the Church in Wales (disestablished in 1920 as a result of the Welsh Church Act 1914) and the Church of Ireland (disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869). The result is that two Churches are established by law (the Church of England and the Church of Scotland) and enjoy a particular constitutional relationship with the state, while the other Churches and faith-communities (the Roman Catholics, the Free Churches, the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others) have particular rights and privileges in particular circumstances.


1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
J. M. Barkley

In Irish Presbyterianism Henry Cooke is commonly regarded as the champion of orthodoxy. Was it not he who drove the Arians out of the Synod of Ulster in 1830? The purpose of this paper is not to examine the theological issues involved, but rather to try to discover the real cause of the schism.The Reverend J. Smethurst (Moreton Hampstead) visited the North of Ireland during the autumn of 1821. The traditional picture is that of Cooke routing the Unitarian Smethurst in Killyleagh (where Cooke was minister) and pursuing him from place to place in his zeal for orthodoxy. This, however, fails to take into account an important aspect of Smethurst’s campaign. He writes,I feel persuaded that there is considerable inquiry on religious subjects amongst the Dissenters in the North of Ireland, and that liberal opinions are fast gaining ground amongst them... One of the greatest obstacles in the way of their doing so, is the view they have been accustomed to take of the Christian religion, as being a system upheld solely by its union with the secular power. If they could see it free from this connexion, they would view it in a far more favourable light, and the most formidable of their prejudices would be removed. Even amongst the Dissenters the natural tendency of the most remote connexion of this kind is too obvious to escape notice. The Presbyterian Church of Ireland has long been considered as a sort of demi-establishment. And though its connexion with the civil power is not so close as that of the Church of England, yet the union, as far as it goes, is no less injurious.


1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 369-376
Author(s):  
Fergus O’Ferrall

The ‘United Church of England and Ireland’, established by the Act of Union ‘for ever’ as ‘an essential and fundamental part of the Union’, survived less than seventy years. N. D. Emerson, in his 1933 essay on the church in this period, presented the history of the church in the first half of the nineteenth century as ‘the history of many separate interests and movements’; he suggested a thesis of fundamental importance in the historiography of the Church of Ireland: Beneath the externals of a worldly Establishment, and behind the pomp of a Protestant ascendancy, was the real Church of Ireland, possessed of a pure and reformed faith more consciously grasped as the century advanced and labouring to present its message in the face of apathy and discouragement, as well as of more active and hostile opposition.Recent historical work has begun to trace the ‘many separate interests and movements’ and to explore in detail both the ‘worldly Establishment’ and the increasingly predominant evangelical influence of the Church of Ireland during the post-union period. The main topics investigated have been the structure of the church, the political relationships of the church, the evangelical movement, the mentalities of various social groups (drawing upon literary sources), and local or regional studies. The numerous gaps in the research and in our knowledge which exist seem now all the starker given the high quality of so many recent studies concerning the Church of Ireland in this period.


1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 465-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Robbins

‘The Church of England’ declared a leading article in The Times on 8 July 1980 ‘is the British national church’. Such a novel declaration produced apoplexy at the presidential breakfast-table. My topic is an impossibly wide one, only tackled previously, in his distinctive fashion, by Dr Daniel Jenkins. I cannot hope to cover every aspect of it. That apparently innocent sentence in the newspaper does, however, provide me with my text. Its context was an article concerning itself with the possibility that the Prince of Wales might marry a Roman Catholic. Not even a president of the Ecclesiastical History Society can offer comment as to probabilities in this matter and, like The Times, we are only concerned with principles. Concluding, perhaps not surprisingly, that it would seem intolerable to the ‘broad public’ that an excellent heir to the throne should be excluded because of his wife’s religion it added that ‘any sensible person’ would hope that the matter would not be raised. There were still what it called ‘anti-Catholic prejudices’ among a relatively small minority in England and Wales, a rather larger minority in Scotland and a considerable proportion of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. A constitutional issue ‘which would bring all these birds flapping down out of the rafters’ was not desirable.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-94
Author(s):  
Michael Davey

This year's General Synod, the first meeting of the triennium, was held in the now familiar surroundings of the City Hotel, Armagh. Over the past few years there has been a heavy emphasis on finance in the legislative programme, principally with regard to pensions. This year there was one Pensions Bill. It merely formalised the arrangements governing the separate Defined Contributions Schemes that have operated for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland since 2013. The Bill duly passed.


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