Letters: Unfortunate what mainstream historians have ‘missed’

I agree with Professor Thomas Hennessey (“Securing a balanced and proportionate view of the past”) that studying the archives can produce a more balanced account of our history.

Unfortunately, so much of what would counter the claim that unionists did terrible things in the first fifty years of the Northern Ireland state has simply been “missed” by mainstream historians. Here are some examples.

For decades, almost all historians believed that the old Londonderry Corporation did not use a points scheme for the allocation of houses.

I finally discovered the points scheme in the PRONI records and also a minute from an early meeting of the council’s successor, the unelected Londonderry Development Commission, stating that it was going to use the Londonderry Corporation points scheme for the allocation of houses in the short term.

Both documents can be found on my analogical website at http://analogical.org.uk/historical-research/

Part of the slanderous campaign against historical unionism alleges that council boundaries were gerrymandered.

Some of those allegations relate to rural district councils whose boundaries were revised in the 1920s.

The Stormont Unionist MP for Fermanagh and Tyrone from 1921-1929, James Cooper, carried out meticulous research, pointing out that boundaries had not been revised since the 1830s and this had resulted in huge differences in ward population.

He demonstrated that the Catholic population of Fermanagh rural districts was naturally concentrated in a few areas.

In modern terminology, this lacked “electoral efficiency” and meant that unionists quite fairly came first in more wards under the new boundaries.

The documentation sits in PRONI gathering dust. It was also published in the now defunct Fermanagh Times.

The records of the Derry Catholic Registration Association are little referred to.

They demonstrate things which are inconvenient to critics of unionism. They help us track increases

in the local government ratepayers vote in Londonderry from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Votes under this system only increased if a group’s occupation of houses increased.

The fact that 80% of the additional voters added to the register between 1936 and 1967 were Catholics indicates that around 80% of the net increase in housing went to Catholics.

This gives the lie to the allegation that an alliance of the Londonderry Corporation and Protestant landlords conspired to deprive Catholics of houses.

Study of the archives can result in a more balanced view of history, but usually it has not.

Dr Paul Kingsley, Belfast