In Ireland, the two nations theory proposes that there are two peoples on the island with national rights to self-determination: an Irish nation substantially formed by the Roman Catholic majority; and, concentrated in the north-east (in parts of Ulster), a Protestant community of Scottish and English origin which chooses to remain in a union with Great Britain. Emerging in response to the drive for Irish self-government, it gained renewed currency from the late 1960s when the onset of Northern Ireland Troubles called the 1921 partition settlement into question. Persuaded that there was a prospect of British withdrawal, paramilitary-associated loyalists considered the possibility of Ulster Protestants constituting the core of a national community independent of both London and Dublin. Broader acceptance was found among unionists for a theory reformulated on purportedly Leninist principles by a small left-wing grouping. While blaming the renewed conflict on British misrule, this rejected Ulster nationalism and accepted unionism as a popular expression of a legitimate British interest and identity.
According to S J Connolly's Oxford Companion to Irish History, the two nations theory first appeared in the book Ulster As It Is (1896) by the Unionist Thomas Macknight. But as early as 1843, while protesting that its readers wished only to preserve the Union, Belfast's leading paper, the Northern Whig, had proposed that if differences in "race" and "interests" argue for Ireland's separation from Great Britain then "the Northern 'aliens', holders of 'foreign heresies' (as [Daniel] O'Connell says they are)" should have their own "distinct kingdom", Belfast as its capital.
In response to the First Home rule Bill in 1886, Radical Unionists (Liberals who proposed federalising the relationship between all countries of the United Kingdom) likewise argued that "the Protestant part of Ulster should receive special treatment . . . on grounds identical with those that support the general contention for Home Rule" Northern unionists expressed no interest in a Belfast parliament, but in summarising The Case Against Home Rule (1912), L. S. Amery insisted that "if Irish Nationalism constitutes a nation, then Ulster is a nation too". The same position was taken by the Tory writer W F Moneypenny in his 1913 book The Two Irish Nations: An Essay on Home Rule, and was later taken up by the British Conservative politician Bonar Law.
Irish nationalists rejected these positions. O'Connell suggested that in Ireland Protestantism was very largely a function of political privileges sustained by the connection with England, so that "If the Union were repealed and the exclusive system abolished, the great mass of the Protestant community would with little delay melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation". This remained the position of constitutional nationalism (John Redmond declared "'the two nation theory' an abomination and a blasphemy") and of the republican movement.
The 1916 Proclamation spoke of "the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority". Michael Collins, writing in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, insisted that had Britain not maintained this policy of divide et impera, "Protestant and Catholic would have learned to live side by side in amity and cooperation" and Ireland would long since have "taken her rightful place in the world". Collins's civil war nemesis, ÃÂamon de Valera, articulated the same conviction, although like Collins he appeared willing to accept some form of partition as a temporary expedient. According to De Valera, "the essence of the persistence of Partition" was that Unionists perceived themselves as a governing group who feared that they would become a minority inside a temperamentally different State.
The Dutch geographer Marcus Willem Heslinga, in a work that was interpreted by some as "an ideological handmaiden for inarticulate Ulster unionists", The Irish Border as a Cultural DivideI (1962), argued that the partition of Ireland reflected realities of life on the island. He noted that "in many respects contacts across the Irish Sea are more numerous and more intensive than those across the land boundary", and that between north and south there was a genuine national divide: "separate political affinities, separate religious affinities and separate traditions and symbols".
A similar view was also put forward by the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO) (later the British and Irish Communist Organisation) in 1969, in response to what was the onset of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Citing the Leninist theory of nationalities, they theorised that Ireland contained two overlapping nations, Irish and British. The contrarian left tendencey formed the Workers' Association for the Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland which called for an ending of the Republic's jurisdictional claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution (a concession later made under the 1998 Belfast Agreement). They also participated in campaigns to integrate Northern Ireland into the party-political democracy of the British state, targeting, in particular, the Labour Party's policy of refusing, in deference to its "sister" party, the nationalist SDLP, to organise and canvas Northern Irish voters.
The B&ICO's two nations argument was taken up in Ireland: Divided Nation, Divided Class (1980) by the Ulster Unionist Austen Morgan and the Anti-Internment League organiser Bob Purdie. Jim Kemmy TD of the Democratic Socialist Party was influenced by these ideas. Writing for the Sunday Press and Irish Times, and in a pamphlet, Towards a Greater Ulster (1973), the Irish nationalist Desmond Fennell also put forward the idea that the Ulster Protestants, while not a nation in themselves, were a separate ethnic group â the Ulster British â that had not been absorbed into the Irish nation. The solution to the conflict lay in a joint administration of Northern Ireland by the UK and Irish governments. The analysis of the Northern Ireland crisis by Conor Cruise O'Brien, especially in his book States of Ireland (1973), were also labelled as "two nations theory" by some commentators. While opposed to any role in Northern Ireland for the Republic, in the mid-1970s, members of the Vanguard Loyalist group also declared support to "the Two Nations Theory".
A variation was discussed in Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (1983) by the American scholar David Miller. He argued that while there was a nation in Ireland, comprising the Catholic majority, the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster are a distinct community bound by an older, "pre-nationalist", constitutional tradition. While the former accepted that it was "natural and inevitable for the nation-state to enjoy the willing adherence of all" its citizens, the latter adhered to a Calvinist/Presbyterian reinforced, contractarian understanding of their relationship to the British Crown and constitution. This has contributed to their political alienation as successive British governments, seeking accommodation with Irish nationalism, failed, in their view, to uphold the provisions of the Acts of Union and of the Government of Ireland Act 1920.
Following the 1972 suspension of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, Glenn Barr, a Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party Assemblyman and Ulster Defence Association leader, advanced the idea of an independent Ulster. After the successful Ulster Workers Council Strike in 1974, which Barr had helped direct, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees concluded that the resistance to the Sunningdale reforms (a power-sharing Northern Ireland executive and a Council of Ireland) demonstrated the existence of an "Ulster protestant nationalism".
The idea that people in Ulster have a national identity that is separate from, but attached to, their British and their Irish, identities, was provided its own origin myth with an historical narrative that invoked "pre-Celtic" Ireland. The Ulster Unionist, Dr Ian Adamson's maintained that Ulster Scots were descendants of the Cruthin, a British people who in the seventh century had been driven across the water to Scotland by Irish Gaels invading Ulster from the south, and who had returned to their ancestral a thousand years later 1,000 years later in the Plantation of Ulster. Disputing evidence for a "Gaelic invasion", and for a distinct Cruthin ethnicity, Adamson's theory has been widely rejected by historians, archaeologists and anthropologists.
The B&ICO, which had lent critical support to the 1974 strike, rejected the idea of an Ulster nationalism out of hand. It was a confection, they suggest, deliberately promoted by Rees and other British policymakers keen to disengage from the troubled province.
Proposals for an independent Ulster were produced in 1976 by the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee., and in 1979 by the UDA's New Ulster Political Research Group in a report, Beyond the Religious Divide. But the idea of independence gained no traction when trialed by the UDA-linked Ulster Loyalist Democratic Party in a 1982 South Belfast by-election. A short-lived Ulster Independence Party also operated, but did not survive the assassination of its leader, John McKeague in 1982. The idea enjoyed a further brief revival in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, with the Ulster Clubs amongst those who considered the notion.