THE ULSTERCONFLICT transformed Hickson's unsuccessful shipbuilding yard into one of the most successful in the world by a combination of skill and brilliant salesmanship. His success paved the way for other firms, and the success of shipbuilding gave rise to new ancillary industries such as rope-making. East Ulster's predominance in the linen trade also gave rise to industries such as the manufacture of textile machinery. The general industrial success of Ulster attracted more and more of the rural population into the towns. The population of Belfast grew from 87,062 in 1851 to 208,122 in 1881 to 386,947 in 1911, far outstripping the percentage increase of Dublin. One extremely salient feature of this transfer of rural population was the introduction of Orangeism into Belfast and the other towns, whereas previously it had been mainly a rural phenomenon, an expression of land rivalry between poor peasants. The Catholic and Protestant workers tended to live in separate areas, a result of the Catholics who were the vast majority of the newcomers clustering together with their coreligionists. In Belfast the boom associated with the cotton industry in the first third of the century had attracted a large Catholic immigration so that Catholics already constituted a third of the population in 1834, a proportion that was to remain fairly constant throughout the 19th and 20th centuries except at times of great sectarian conflict. Belfast experienced interreligious rioting during the 1830s and 1840s at times of elections (where voting was still performed in public) and at the time of Orange parades in July. (Although the Orange Order had been formally dissolved in 1836, the lower class Orangemen continued to parade under slightly different names such a «Loyalist» or simply «Protestants»). Along with the absolute growth in, and increasing concentration of, population in the towns (after Belfast, Derry soon became the second largest town, and due to its situation in the rural, predominantly Catholic west of Ulster, the Catholic component of its population rapidly outstripped the Protestant) Ulster also developed a tradition of fiercely anti-Catholic clergymen of both the Presbyterian and Anglican sects who adhered to the conservative cause in politics. In their sermons these priests tended to associate schemes for Irish political autonomy, such as the Repeal movement, with the power machinations of the Vatican, and to lace these arguments with evangelical fervour. One of the most famous of them, Thomas Drew, also combined this mixture with a social conscience that was advanced for his time, and he 85
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