Were Protestants forced out of southern Ireland?

Posted by Jim on August 12, 2026

SLUGGER O’TOOLE:

By Soapbox on 12 August 2026

Terraformer is a learning designer from Offaly, residing in Dublin.

Headlines in recent months concerning the digitisation of the 1926 Irish census records painted a stark portrait of Protestant decline during the revolutionary period. The Protestant population of the 26 counties declined from about 311,000 in 1911 to 207,000 in 1926 – 104,000 people, about a third.

The marked drop is routinely cited by unionists and revisionists as evidence that Protestant were forced during this time. Peter Hart in the 1990s claimed 53,000 Protestants left the south in the period 1920-1923, a movement he labelled an involuntary exodus and which has given rise to allegations of ethnic cleansing.

Later evidence has called Hart’s claim into question, with Barry Keane and David Fitzpatrick establishing a longer pattern of emigration with only a slight increase during the years in question and pointing out flaws in Hart’s subset and methodology.

Notwithstanding Hart’s oft-repeated error, relying on the numbers alone is insufficient. It’s a form of circular reasoning: the decline prompts the allegation, but the proof offered is also the decline. The old adage of correlation not being causation comes into play.

When other elements are factored in, the headline-grabbing figure of 104,000 plummets drastically. Emigration was a major part of Irish life at the time. Between 1911 and 1923 180,000 people emigrated from Ireland. Of these, over half (93,000) left before Easter 1916. After being interrupted by WW1, emigration resumed at a similar rate to before the war. Emigration did not spike significantly during the revolutionary years, and the period 1911-1926 fits in with an established pattern of Protestant economic emigration.

In the 18th century, 125,000 Ulster Protestants left Ireland for America. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants also left in the 1820s and 1830s. Between the famine and 1911 about 450,000 Protestants left Ireland.

Martin Maguire paints a picture of a Dublin Protestant working class in this period that was highly mobile: “The 1911 census reveals that In Inchicore, one of the few areas where the Protestant population was growing, only 23 per cent of the Protestant households that had featured in the 1901 census were still in the area. Many of those working in Inchicore were employed in the railway engineering works. It is unlikely that in depressed Dublin very many of these skilled workers moved elsewhere in Dublin. It is likely that many moved to pursue more attractive employment opportunities on the “mainland”.”

Maguire points out that “unlike the Catholic working class, which was almost wholly comprised of migrants from the countryside, the Protestant working class as a class had little organic connection with rural Ireland. Indeed the evidence suggests that the Protestant working class was substantially comprised of migrants from Britain and their descendants.”

Barry Keane notes the proportion of Protestants in Ireland that were foreign-born increased decade on decade from 1861 to 1911. For the 26-county area, 62,000 Protestants were foreign-born (predominantly Britain) compared with 406,000 Irish-born in 1861 (13%). By 1911, there were 100,000 foreign-born Protestants compared with 227,000 Irish-born 1911 (30%).

Between 1911 and 1926 the Protestant population of Westmeath fell by 49%. Of the Protestants who left the county in the period, more than half had been born outside of Ireland.

Andy Bielenberg estimates routine Protestant emigration – emigration that would have been predicted regardless of any political upheaval – for the period at 45,000. Robin Bury and Don Wood give a lower estimate of about 25,000.

Another significant reason for Protestant decline was the departure of the military garrison. The 1911 census includes 21,400 British soldiers who were stationed in Ireland. With the British army’s rotation system, the majority would have been British regiments and predominantly Protestant. Only between a quarter and third were Irish.

By the time of the British withdrawal in 1922, troop numbers had swelled to 51,000, along with several thousand nursing and administrative staff.

It was a well attested Protestant tradition to marry into the military. Between 1871 and 1911, in surveyed Dublin Protestant working class parishes over a third of marriages involved a groom who was in the military.

Likewise, in County Cork in 1919 the marriages of 38% of Protestant women were to members of the British army or navy. Other samples around the country confirm disproportionate marriage to military personnel by Protestant women, supporting the thesis that the British withdrawal significantly affected Protestant numbers and fertility in Ireland.

Bielenberg attributes 30,000 to the garrison withdrawal, including dependants, while Bury and Woods also give figures close to that. British soldiers outcompeting local Protestant males for brides would also have the knock-on effect of spurring male Protestants to marry Catholics or to emigrate.

Add in between 3,000 and 5,000 Protestants who died during WW1 and the established pattern of natural decrease, Bielenberg arrives at a figure of just 16,000 departures in excess of what we might otherwise expect and which might be explained by political violence. Bury and Wood give notably higher figures of 42,000 and 47,000 “excess” departures.

Wherever you feel the dial is most likely to fall on the spectrum, it has to be remembered that excess departures do not in and of themselves prove the case for “forced” departure.

A complicating factor is the question of how much of a pull factor Northern Ireland represented. In 1926, NI had 64,000 Protestants born in the 26 counties (7.7% of NI Protestant population). The number of Protestants in NI in 1926 was close to the 1911 figure. It’s likely Protestant migration to NI from the south offset routine Protestant emigration from NI during the period.

Moving within your own country, or more specifically to stay within your own country, in many cases just a few miles up the road, is arguably less about being pushed out than about being attracted in. We already know the southern Protestant population was highly mobile, and historically Irish Protestants moved in large numbers spurred by economic opportunism.

Considering one of the pillars of unionist objection to Home Rule was that it would be economically ruinous, it seems logical that independence would spur excess out-migration among this cohort. For decades the spectre of an Ireland severed from Britain falling to destitution was drilled into Irish Protestants till it became an article of faith. These Cassandra visions by themselves can plausibly explain the majority of excess departures without recourse to alleged sectarian provocation.

The purpose of this piece is not to downplay incidences of sectarian aggression and intimidation that undoubtedly occurred during this period. Outrages such as Dunmanway, Coolacrease and Altnaveigh display a hard-to-deny sectarian character.

Nevertheless, these instances stand out in particular for their rarity. Such abuses were not widespread or systemic, nor were they a policy of the Provisional Government or later the Free State or Anti-Treaty authorities. Republican forces protected Protestant citizens and businesses as a general rule.

The Free State also spent considerable sums to compensate Protestants and others whose property had been damaged during the troubles. The Undersecretary of State for the Colonies Lord Arnold noted to the House of Lords in 1924: “Looking at these questions of compensation as a whole, probably no Government or no Governments in the course of history have made more continued and more generous provision for those who have suffered in internal strife than the British Government and the Free State Government have made during the past two years in dealing with cases of damage and injury in Ireland. I believe that statement can be tested historically and found to be perfectly true.”

To conclude, I echo John M Regan’s summation of his review of David FitzPatrick’s research into this topic. Reports of a sudden ‘mass exodus’ of Protestants now appear baseless, and hard evidence of ethnic cleansing has not been produced.

Sources:

Protestant decline during Ireland’s revolutionary period 1911-1926: Some observations on Robin Bury’s Buried Lives. Barry Keane. 2018.

Review of Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories Since 1795 by David FitzPatrick. John M Regan. History Ireland. Issue 4, Vol 23. 2015.

Ongoing research: Irish emigrants in 1912-1923 revolutionary period. Mark Holan. 2014.

Where did the Protestants go? Dublin Review of Books. 2015.

UK, Ireland Army Census, 1911. UK Forces War Records.

Ethnic cleansing? Protestant decline in West Cork between 1911 and 1926. Barry Keane. History Ireland. 2012.

Claims Of Irish Loyalists. Hansard. House of Lords. Volume 56: debated on Wednesday 5 March 1924.

Historic 1926 census shows Protestant population drop in Irish Free State. Gabija Gataveckaite. BBC. 18 April 2026.

The British military withdrawal from ‘Southern’ Ireland, 1922. John Gibney. Irish Examiner. 31 January 2022.

Bandon Valley Massacre: The violent week that left 13 Protestants dead. Pat O’Connell. Irish Examiner. 25 April 1922.

A House Built on Sand. Philip O’Connor and Pat Muldowney. Dublin Review of Books. Issue 11, 2009.

Files detail cover-up of 1922 IRA murder of six Protestants. BBC. 12 May 2018.

Anti-Home Rule Postcards (1912-1914) #2. Irish Memory. 16 February 2013.

‘Spies and informers beware!’: IRA executions of alleged civilian spies during the War of Independence 1919 -1921. Padraig Og O’Ruairc. The Irish Story. 4 June 2017.

Northern Ireland: A Century of Change in Statistics. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. April 2026.