(This review was reproduced on Kenny's bookshop website, Oct 29 1999.)

CIVIL WAR IN ULSTER by JOSEPH JOHNSTON

This book was first published in 1913 and was written by a Northern Protestant who was educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford. It is now forgotten that there were (and still are) Northern Protestants who do not fit the media stereotype of thoughtless anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigots.

This book was written by a man who gave considerable thought to the political issues of his day and is a topical reminder that such stereotyping is dangerous. The author's purpose was polemical. He wished to make a logical case in response to the whipping up of emotion against the Home Rule Bill which was then progressing through Parliament and which was vehemently opposed by the Tories.

It is very interesting to see this man's ideas and expectations, before they were all brutally swept aside by World War One. In this respect it is reminiscent of William Shirer's "Berlin Diary", written just before World War Two. Both remind us that, when we look back, we should not assume that people of their time had any more ability to foresee the future than we have. To have such a contemporary view of affairs as they appeared at the time is very valuable.

Naturally, the language is not modern but to some eyes that is no bad thing. It is still pleasing (at least to this reviewer) to see the allusions of a classical scholar used to illustrate very clearly some contemporary issue. And this is not to say that a classical education is necessary to understand the references; they appear in situations where their appropriateness brings abundant clarity.

It is a great pity that to read the book is to confirm that logic is no answer to mischievous and rabble-rousing politicians. The author's logic is impeccable and his scathing presentation of facts lay bare the unfounded arguments of the Tory and Unionist establishment. He warns that the Tories have no real interest in anything other than the recovery of power. Certainly they have no interest in the ordinary man of Northern Ireland. He takes us through all the issues of the time and in every case he clearly illustrates that the approach of the Tories was purely tactical. Randolph Churchill's remark about "playing the Orange card" is the perfect example.

Yet the Tories got away with their high treason. And Johnston is very clear that this was exactly what they were doing. If this was "loyalism" what was treason? He gives the answer; treason is the actions of those opposed to the Tories. It is particularly poignant to note Johnston's mis-reading of the attitude of the army top brass. He could not conceive of a situation where they would actually rebel or resign. He sets out how such a scenario might be handled but it is clear that he does not really contemplate the occurrence.

This book might be read with benefit in our present situation. However it would be a mistake to simply take it as confirmation that the Unionists have always been wrong and, therefore, should now be ignored. The situation is not now that of 1913. Then the Unionists were being fed propaganda about the terrible fate which they faced if they were subjected to the rule of the majority in Ireland. Today the Unionists object, not to an unreasonable fear of the unknown, but to their having to accept those who have spent thirty years actually murdering them. This book is a valuable and well-written aid to our appreciation of the situation early this century. It is not a prescription for dealing with the present position.

(Reviewed by John McAvoy)
(UCD Press, ISBN 1-900621-30-4, pp200, IR13.95)

Another in the Classics of Irish History series of neat paperbacks. Johnston (1890-1972) was an Ulster protestant Liberal, in favour of Home Rule, and published this in 1913 to persuade the majority of Ulstermen that the dangers they saw were imaginary, and that avoiding Home Rule was not worth a civil war. Subsequently Johnston was professor of Applied Economics and a Fellow of TCD, and served in the Senate; he was the father of Roy Johnston, who has edited this for the press. What a good idea, this series, and how very well done.

In the September 2000 issue John Kirkaldy reviewed it along with a selection of other books relating to Northern Ireland:

'...Joseph Johnston's book reads exactly as it was when it was published first in 1913. This is a contemporary defence of Home Rule written by a very bright young man (Johnston went on to become Professor of Applied Economics in Trinity College, Dublin). It was passionate, committed and wrong and right in equal parts. Tight inasmuch as it recognises the growing divire between Ireland and Britain. Wrong inasmuch as it completely underestimates the determination of Ulster proteatants to fight. As Johnston's son, Roy, concedes in an interesting introduction, the Larne gun-running turned much of what was written here upside down.

Today's news talks of paramilitary eyeballing paramilitary across the peace line in Belfast. Already there have been a number of incidents, all engineered to undermine and put in jeopardy the peace process. Pray God that in fifty years time some reviewer is not writing of the Good Friday Agreement as 'yet another failure'....'

Civil War in Ulster aus der feder von Joseph Johnston (1890-1972) erschien erstmals 1913 und wurde jetzt mit einem Vorwart von Tom Garvin von der University College Dublin Press neu aufgelegt...(publisher contact data).

Johnston, ein Protestant und liberaler Befurworter von Home Rule, analysiert die Ereignisse, die zur massiven Bewaffnung der Protestanten (der Ulster Volunteer Force) in den Jahren 1912/13 fuhrten, rucht die vermeintliche Gefahr fur Ulster ins rechte licht und warnt vor einem Burgerkrieg. Die Bewaffnung der Protestanten - so Gervin in seinem Vorward - habe die Mobilisierung in ganz Irland beschleunigt und schliesslich das Ende britischer Herrschaft jenseits des Nordostens von Irland und reichlich Blutvergiessen gebracht.

Die Krise der Jahre 1906-1912 habe der Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) Auftrieb gegeben. Die IRB infiltrierte nationalistiche Organisationen, wie etwa die Gaelic League oder die Gaelic Athletic Association und hatte auch Einfluss auf das Entstehen der Irish Volunteers im Jahre 1913, woraus sich spater die Irish Republican Army (IRA) entwikkeln sollte.

...from the pen of JJ... first published in 1913 has been now reprinted with a forword by Tom Garvin, newly edited by UCD Press...

Johnston, a Protestant liberal supporter of Home rule, analyses the events which led to the massive arming of the Protestants...in the years 1912-13, taking a critical view ('putting it in the right light') of the supposed danger to Ulster, and warns of civil war. According to Garvin in his Forward, the arming of the Protestants hastened the mobilising of the whole of Ireland and finally the ending of British rule, outside the north-east of Ireland, bringing about copious bloodshed.

The crisis of the years 1906-1912 gave rise to the IRB, which inflitrated the nationalistic organisations like the Gaelic League and the GAA, and influenced the foundation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913, from which later developed the IRA.

Joseph Johnston was a Fellow of Trinity College, who served in the Seanad on several occasions. Born in Tyrone, Johnston was also a Presbyterian but was nevertheless a supporter of Home Rule. This book, first published in 1913, was aimed at unionists in an attempt to persuade them in favour of home rule by undermining the perceived dangers to Protestantism. This edition features an introduction by Roy Johnston, son of the author.

Civil War in Ulster is an astonishing book. Written in 1913 by Joseph Johnston who was then 23 years old. It was an attempt to persuade Ulster Protestants that their fears of and rejection of Home Rule were unwise and unwarranted. The depth of learning, of history and the arrangement of the argument is breathtaking. Johnston even understood the power of the sound bite, writing that Lord Randolph Churchill's famous phrase "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right" would be considered a full answer by many in Ulster.

A great service has been done by University College Press in reprinting this erudite and readable book which is as relevant today as when written. Would that his logical advice had been followed!

OF PROTESTANT background from Castlecaulfield, Co. Tyrone, Joseph Johnston wrote this book in 1913, aged 23, mainly for the benefit of his co-religionists who were being swept up into, or coerced into, Carson and Craig's crusade against the Liberal government's Home Rule Bill. It is a remarkable achievement.

With considerable foresight he realised that if the British Tories and their Ulster Unionist appendage succeeded in their threatened armed revolt against the constitutionally-elected Liberal government the consequences would be disastrous for those who were most ardently in support of it - the Protestant working-people of the North. There were to be grievous costs for the British people too.

The aristocrats, landlords and most reactionary elements of the legal profession succeeded without having to actually carry out their threat - the Home Rule Bill was truncated and Ireland partitioned. What they bequeathed to successive generations was 70 years of 'troubles' which have not, as yet, been finally resolved.

JJ's son, Roy, has done everyone a service because, in many of its insights, this book enables a clearer understanding of present-day problems. For instance, after the signing of the Good Friday accord, a great many members of the Protestant family in the North have been thrown into confusion and perplexity. Had they been able to peruse JJ's book at the time when it was written, this would probably not have happened. They would have had a better understanding of what their rabble-rousing leaders, under the Orange banner of anti-Catholicism, really were on about.

Carson's 'tearing-up of the British constitution' had three main aims: to protect landlord interest in Ireland, to preserve the British Empire and to remove the Liberals from governmental office. Although JJ himself was of a left-leaning Liberal inclination his analysis runs along much the same lines as Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader.

In the early part of his book JJ scoffs at the emptiness of the Tory bluster about rebellion, but footnotes provided by his son Roy Johnston explain that the plot to employ the UVF to import guns from the Kaiser at Larne in 1914 was not then known to JJ.

Some 'British' patriots were those boys, introducing the gun into modern Irish politics and triggering a reactive response from the Irish Volunteers. While the Tory threat of insurrection in Ulster now appeared credible, Lenin, for one, saw it as a bluff that ought to have been called: "March 21, 1914, (will be) an epoch-making turning point, the day when the noble landlords of Britain smashed the British Constitution and British Law to bits and gave an excellent lesson in class struggle", he noted.

The Tories had suborned the King and the landlord-linked top brass of the military and, being only half-hearted in rectifying Ireland's grievances and fearful of calling upon the British people for support, the Liberals capitulated to Toryism and, in so doing, eclipsed themselves, leaving a political space in which the Labour Party could emerge.

Dealing with other topics JJ's book shows, using unionist sources, that the Act of Union, 1801 was a disaster for Ireland and of limited benefit to England herself. Drawing on European and Irish examples, he also demonstrates that in the conditions of the early 20th century the mere fact of a predominantly Catholic population did not automatically translate into a Rome-led theocracy.

When the Tories and compliant Liberals partitioned Ireland they set up one state and a segment of another state in which sectarian-religious politics were over-emphasised in one part for a time - only recently receding - while in the UK part they were deliberately installed and are as virulent as ever. If anyone wishes to understand better the complexities, and perplexities, surrounding the issue of 'decommissioning' in Northern Ireland and the wilful politicking of the hypocritical unreformed unionists in respect of it, a reading of this book will perhaps assist.

The defensive psychology of the nationalist community has its deep origin in the history therein described as well as, of course, in more recent events The present phase of nationalist armament happened in 1969 when three Northern MPs had to rush to Dublin in order to supplicate for guns in the face of RUC, B-Special and loyalist pogroms against their community. Ultimately the community had to rely on its own resources.

It is a bit late in the day for Protestants to be reading this book, but not too late. There is no doubt that it would help those of a unionist bent to see their way out of their present predicament. Civil War in Ulster ought to be on the reading list of students from post-primary level upwards. No student of politics, economics, history, sociology or anthropology ought to be without it.

When Patrick Pearse asserted that there was nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation, he spoke truer than he knew. This failure was not so much one of Irish nationalists abandoning their true republican destiny, but, arguably, of all Irishmen to address the question of the Ireland they might inhabit if their dispute over home rule were not resolved by constitutional means.

Roy Johnston's edition of his father's book, Civil War in Ulster, sets out the argument made in 1913 for protestants/unionists to accept home rule within the British empire as the best way forward, and the only way of avoiding civil war in Ulster. Johnston was one of those protestant Irishmen who tried to reconcile the differences between nationalist and unionist, and, after partition, to mitigate the impact of the Partition Act. His treatise breathes the very spirit of the Irish protestant tradition at its most liberal, and, some would say, Irish.

Johnston was prepared to do what the vast majority of protestants were not prepared to do... take it on trust that a Dublin parliament would not act against the best interests, let alone lives and religious freedom, of protestant Ireland. His argument is sincere and, with the benefit of hindsight, persuasive. Yet there is a problem here. When Johnston, acknowledging that unionists had little knowledge of Irish history, tried to fill the gap in their understanding, his chapters focused on how the argument for home rule might be extrapolated from Irish history. Thus, although his authorities were by no means, as he rightly pointed out, of Nationalist hue, yet the quotations and texts in which he set their views all added up a conclusion that might even have been at odds with some of the historians he quoted.

There was another, deeper, motive. Johnston feared that civil war, once unleashed, could/must descend into hooliganism and worse: that for all their professions of discipline, the paramilitary army of the Ulster Volunteer Force could not hide the fact that it was not a regular force, not subject to proper constitutional and military authority, and could not therefore be relied upon to fight a just war in a just way. But, for all its power, Johnston's argument ran into the difficulty of the rational choice theory of politics. There were (to their own satisfaction) many excellent reasons for Ulster unionists to follow Johnston's advice, except the key one: fear, allied in equal amounts, to emotions of superiority and insecurity.

The editor, Roy Johnston, pushes his father's argument too far. To describe the Lame gun-running as the 'most evil and destructive act in Irish history of this century' is to leave out of the reckoning an awful lot of evil and destructive acts. It was certainly a seminal act, from which much flowed. But to go on to allege that, had there been Irish resistance to World War 1, instead of general support, then a united Protestant-Catholic anti-war movement would have emerged, and 'revived the potential of 1798 for national-democratic revolution' raises questions. In the unlikely event of this happening, would not revolution have invited those dangers -- hooliganism, and a descent into sectarian warfare-that Johnston senior feared in 1913? The example of the '98 is hardly encouraging, whatever revisionists say about its pluralistic and gentle doctrines.

In the end, this book is a fine example of an alternative protestant tradition that has too often been forgotten, that is worthy of reprinting as an Irish classic, but which also shows that, as the saying goes, while that tradition had a way of being right, it has a way of being wrong too.

D George Boyce, University of Wales, Swansea

'Civil War in Ulster, Joseph Johnston, UCD Press/Dufour Editions. This book, originally published in 1913, analyses the events leading up to the massive arming of the Orangemen which followed the Larne gun-running. This highly readable book provides fascinating insights into the thoughts and fears of the population of Ulster at a critical time in Irish history.'

The Fall 2000 issue of the Irish Literary Supplement, published by Boston College, gives the following, in its 'Books in Brief' section, p31:

'The University College Dublin Press has been publishing the series titled 'Classics of Irish History' Their latest efforts are Civil War in Ulster, by Joseph Johnston (Dufour Editions, 2000, $18-85). Originally published in 1913, Civil War in Ulster was an argument for Home Rule at a time when many feared supposed dangers to Protestantism. Johnston's son, Roy Johnston, the eminent political writer in the 60s, has supposed (sic) an introduction and notes, and UCC (sic) history professor Tom Garvin has written a foreword...'

(I confess to being somewhat bemused by the varied implied connotations of the word 'supposed', and I trust Tom Garvin will accept his translation! RJ Sept 2000)