Did Britain miss an opportunity to resettle Protestants in Britain in need of a new home in the west of Northern Ireland to change demographics in favor of Unionists?

Out of the Foxholes Questions
1

With so many people in Britain having lost their homen in the Blitz, did Britain miss an opportunity to resettle Protestant people in Britain in need of a new home in the western part of Northern Ireland to change the demographics in favor of the Unionists?

2 Likes
2

You would have had an insurrection if you had tried to force bombed out english families to settle in N. Ireland.
N. Irish protestants are of mostly Scottish Calvinist decent and have very little in common with Church of England protestants.
Also you would still have needed to build temporary housing; and the local branch of the URA would probably have burned them down before they were finished.
I guess you’re not British as I can’t imagine any Briton thinking that such a policy would be anything other than a recipe for disaster.

2 Likes
3

Ofcourse, I did mean voluntary resettlement of English Protestants in Northern Ireland. After the start of Barbarossa, Northern Ireland was safer from German bombing than the south of England. I also did not mean large scale, but just enough to change the demographics. The IRA was no longer very active in 1941, because Britain was quite succesfull in hunting the IRA down after the Birmingham bombing of 25 August 1939 and De Valera was also ruthless against the IRA, because the IRA threatened Irish neutrality.

4

I’m guessing from Henk that you might be dutch. Expecting English people to voluntarily relocate to NI would be like asking bombed out dutch people to relocate to Wallonia to expand the flemish vote. The general sentiment would probably go along the lines of ‘Better being bombed that move to NI.’

1 Like
5

Was the image of Northern Ireland really that bad in the 1940’s?
Why? The troubles began in 1968 and in the 1940’s the IRA was languishing.

6

Right up until the sixties there was significant anti-irish prejudice which didn’t discriminate between North and South.
A common sign on English boarding houses in the post war period was ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’.
The same xenophobia that that comes out as anti EU immigrants and anti coloured still sometimes manifests in anti-irish.