[9] Home Rule and the Protestant mind 1860–90

The geographical distribution of Irish Protestantism was shaped initially not by a complex process of religious change, but by settlement patterns dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, the migration of Scottish Presbyterians to the northeast of Ireland ensured that the province of Ulster had a higher density of Protestants than any other part of Ireland. The general effect of the evangelical revival, pioneered in the 1740s by the Methodists and the Moravians, was to reinforce that geographical pattern, despite repeated attempts to convert Roman Catholics in the south and west of the country. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century the growth of evangelicalism in all the major Protestant denominations had not only confirmed the geographical concentration of Protestantism in Ulster, but had contributed much to the distinctive religious, political and social ethos of the province. Ulster had also emerged as the most developed industrial and commercial part of the country and had experienced less population decline as a result of the famine. This cultural differentiation of Ulster from the rest of the island, though by no means complete, was a stumbling-block in the way of establishing political and religious structures

acceptable to an increasingly potent Irish Catholic nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.