Episode 18 - Panel 5a - One, but not the same? The geography of the signing of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, September 1912 - Dr. Arlene Crampsie and Dr. Jonathan Cherry

Southern Irish Loyalism in Context

On 28th Sept 1912 over 400,000 loyal men and women across the nine counties of Ulster appended their names to either the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant or the Ulster Declaration. In doing so they pledged their loyalty to the King, their allegiance to the United Kingdom and vociferously proclaimed their opposition to the planned creation of a home rule parliament in Dublin. While the majority of historiography focuses on events at the key signing centres in Belfast, the documents were actually signed at over one thousand separate locations across the nine counties of Ulster overseen by 1546 organising agents. Utilising a digital humanities approach we have traced these agents and mapped these locations from the digitised signing sheets and agents folders (made available online by PRONI (Public Records Office of Northern Ireland)) and the 1911 Census Returns. This paper will interrogate this geography of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant / Declaration to chart the differential experience of Ulster Day in the soon to be ‘lost counties’ of Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan. The extent of these differences will be further examined, in order to determine whether or not the minority status of unionism in these counties was sufficiently influential to allow these individuals be identified as southern loyalists as early as 1912. This paper will also argue that the consequences of Ulster Day in relation to the mobilisation of a grassroots unionist movement in these three counties is such that 1912 must be included in the temporal scope of the Irish revolutionary period in order to fully understand the entire spectrum of southern loyalist experiences. Dr Arlene Crampsie is an historical geographer in the School of Geography, UCD. Her research interests lie at the intersection of historical, social and cultural geographies with her main research to date focussing on the social, cultural and political landscapes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Ireland. She is particularly interested in the role of colonial and post-colonial processes in shaping local geographies of power and identity and the operation of governmentality on and in local communities. She is Chairperson of the Oral History Network of Ireland and co-editor with Francis Ludlow of Meath History and Society (2015). Dr Jonathan Cherry is a lecturer in Geography in the School of History and Geography, DCU. His main research interests are in historical and cultural geography, with a particular focus on the role of the landowning elite in Irish society and their influence on the Irish landscape over the past four centuries. As holder of the NLI Studentship in Irish History (2004-05) he catalogued the Farnham Papers held in the Manuscripts Department, NLI. He co-edited Cavan History and Society (Geography Publications, 2014) and is Book Review Editor for Irish Geography since 2016.