DAVE MANSELL quickly built up one of the largest congregations in Ireland. During the Famine he was very active in relief work, but dur• ing the 1850s he became increasingly involved with the Orange Order (he is listed as one of its Grand Chaplains in 1852). He established the Christ Church Protestant Association in 1854. Its main aims were to abolish government grants to the Catholic Church and to repeal the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Davis's combination of anti-Catholicism, fundamentalist evangelism and populism forms a pattern that has been repeated in Ulster ever since; its latest incarnation is the Reverend Ian Paisley. It was Drew's street «preaching» (along with that of his colleagues, the Rev. Thomas Mcilwaine - Anglican - and the Rev. Hugh Hanna - Presbyterian) against the wickedness of Romanism throughout the summer that sparked off the most serious sectarian disturbance so far in Belfast in July 1857. The immediate precipitating cause was a triumphalist Orange march through working-class Catholic districts, and the rioting was almost entirely confined to the working-class districts of Sandy Row (Protestant) and The Pound (Catholic). It continued on and off for 56 days with an unknown number of injuries and extensive damage to property. In 1864 a monument to O'Connell was unveiled in Dublin on 5th August. Three days later in the Sandy Row district of Belfast a 4000-strong crowd burnt an effigy of O'Connell, and in the days that followed Protestant mobs attacked Catholic districts, Catholics retaliated and Catholic navvies and Protestant ship's carpenters, armed with the tools of their trade, engaged in sporadic pitched battles for a week until troops and SOO extra police arrived from Dublin. By the end of it all (it had lasted 18 days), there were 12 dead and over 100 injured. Various theories have been advanced to account for the bitterness of the conflict between these two sections of the working class. The simplest economic theory is that the riots were the expression of competition between Catholic and Protestant workers for scarce jobs, but most of the evidence points to the fact that manufacturers were already instituting an «Orange» employment system whereby skilled jobs were given to Protestants and the Catholics were left with the unskilled work, so that the two sects were in different employment markets. But the cause and effect relationship is not so simple since it could be argued that the employers were only succumbing to a practice instituted by the Protestant 86
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