The ascendancy of southern Irish Protestants subsides like a slow puncture from the end of the eighteenth century. One disaster followed another – the 1798 rebellion, the Union, Catholic Emancipation, the disestablishment of their church, the loss of land and ‘big houses’, the slaughter of the Great War, the 1916 Rising and finally Irish independence. They had to come to terms with living in not just an Irish Catholic state but from 1949 in a republic shorn of its link to the British monarchy. In these scintillating essays Ian d’Alton captures dashed hopes, anguish and suffering. Through a series of themes – iconic Protestant lives; how their history might be explained; identity explored through Anglo-Irish writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Iris Murdoch; Protestant reactions to war and rebellion; the trauma of Partition and regime change; and the place of religion in forming the Irish Protestant world-view – the author illuminates the Protestant community’s journey through perilous times.

And yet … for all the gloom and despondency, out of the ashes of ascendancy a new sense of connection and engagement emerged. Southern Protestants through the careful exercise of ‘soft power’, maintaining their social and economic privileges, moved – again slowly – from a sense of Britishness to one where they were a ‘confident minority’ in Ireland, proud – like Ian d’Alton – to be Protestant and Irish.