"At The Same Time"

Having been elected to the House of Commons and thus necessarily acquired a residence in London, why didn’t David Trimble simply join the Tories, or Robert McCartney simply join Labour, at that London address?

It comes as no surprise that between a quarter and a third of people in Northern Ireland, drawn from both main communities, now define themselves as “Northern Irish”, nor that that number is growing, and growing rapidly.

Have you ever met anyone from Northern Ireland who did not really identify as Northern Irish? They may call the place anything from Ulster, through Northern Ireland, through the North of Ireland, to the Six Counties. But they always mean the same place, and everyone knows which place that is. It is to that place and to its culture that they are loyal. And why not?

As much as anything else, this is a key reason why no one in the Republic now really wants a United Ireland any more, the real message of the heavy vote to remove from the Constitution the territorial claim to Northern Ireland. When even Mary McAleese, born and raised in Northern Ireland, can stand in an Orange Hall in Cavan and declare, as she did this week, that “you can be British and Irish at the same time”, then everyone knows that she is not exclusively, or even primarily, addressing her hosts among the Scots-Irish of the Republic’s three Ulster counties.

Indeed, as an upholder of many traditional Catholic values, President McAleese is quite possibly signalling to her Northern Irish relatives that, as is certainly the case, their Catholic schools and their freedom from abortion are, in the medium to long term (and increasingly even in the short term), a very great deal safer in the United Kingdom than they would be in a United Ireland. If a haven for a certain Catholic culture is your definition of Irishness, then, to say the least, you can indeed be Irish and British at the same time. You might very well have to be.

The Irish Republic is an English-speaking country in the British Isles, a major and fast-growing source of recruits to the British Armed Forces, a place where as good as everyone has near relatives in Great Britain, and the state that blew the latest round of European federalism out of the water in response to a campaign fronted and funded by a man with an Irish name but a broad English accent.

Only about twenty years after independence, the then Free State provided more British Forces personnel in the Second World War than did the smaller Northern Ireland (where there was no conscription). The young Ian Paisley saw out the War as an air raid warden.

If there were a word that more or less meant “British” but wasn’t, then that is what the people of the Irish Republic would be. Any suggestions?

In the meantime, they have no doubts about what to call themselves in Northern Ireland. They are “Northern Irish”. Or, as the Northern Irish President of the Republic puts it, “British and Irish at the same time”. Culturally Irish, whether Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant (at least as distinctive as Irish Catholic), or just Irish. And civically British, which can be culturally English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, all of the above, or whatever.

In that Orange Hall in Cavan, it is presumably the other way round.