Saturday 29 August 2009

Identity Crisis

Jason Walsh writes:

Unlike Irish republicanism, which has more obviously abandoned its traditional claims, Ulster unionism is apparently in the ascendant. After all, the Belfast and St Andrews agreements have guaranteed Northern Ireland's place in the union for the foreseeable future and, apart from a few fringe groupsicles, most republicans are happy to purse a united Ireland through political means alone. Surely, then, the triumph of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) must be seen as the triumph of the unionist cause?

Perhaps so, but it has come at the cost of reducing unionism to a mere cultural project – an undignified and ignominious final chapter for a group of people who once revelled in the "glories" of empire. Stripped of its political meaning, unwanted and certainly unloved by the British, unionists have nowhere left to turn to except inward.

By sitting in Stormont, republicans have parked their historic mission to unite Ireland but, ironically, it looks as if the future belongs to them, and Sinn Féin remains upbeat about its prospects. They have cause to: should the current settlement in Northern Ireland falter again joint sovereignty with the Republic of Ireland is more likely than another agreement. Unionists, meanwhile, have become increasingly divorced from mainstream British culture, never mind British polity.

In his book, Ringside Seats: An Insider's View of the Crisis in Northern Ireland, former civil servant Robert Ramsay supports manufacturing an "Ulster Scots" ethnicity that would be "fashionably in harmony with the zeitgeist of today's European Union". Ramsay is correct that the identity politics-obsessed EU would welcome just such a development, but such a move wouldn't be without problems for unionism.

For a start, it would be a tacit admission that the union was, as a political force, completely moribund. Creating a backward-looking, cod-aboriginal Ulsterish identity is a long way from Margaret Thatcher's 1981 declaration that "Northern Ireland was as British as Finchley," or, indeed, the Ulster Unionist party's former campaign slogan, "Simply British."

In this sense it is an odd project for a liberal, British establishment figure such as Ramsay. Hitherto the Ulster Scots movement was associated largely with the fringes of loyalism, something Ramsay and his ilk have little time for.

Liberal nationalists have long claimed that the EU would make the Irish border an irrelevance. There was more than a little bit of wishful thinking in this – neither the ballot box nor the bullet had delivered Irish unity, so perhaps the EU could act as some kind of deus ex machina. However, even if the Irish public is dragooned into voting "yes" to the Lisbon treaty this October, sovereignty will remain with the member states, not pass to the EU.

Even if it did, unionists now face a similar wait for Godot – replacing a distant colonial master in London with a dull and even more distant one in Brussels neither makes the Ulster Scots an actual nation, nor does it point to a self-confident and forward-looking culture. So horrified is Ramsay at reintegration with the rest of Ireland he would prefer his countrymen became subjects of an EU superstate – but surely distaste for Ireland isn't all there is to unionism, is it?

Whether in Northern Ireland and in relation to the English (or the Anglo-Irish) themselves, or in the United States and in relation to the anglophile WASP elite, there is an old Scots-Irish ambivalence.

It saw them with the English (and thus with the Anglo-Irish) during the Plantation, against them during the Civil War, with them during the Glorious Revolution (as I do not hesitate to call it, given the Papal Blessing sent to William of Orange when he set out for Ireland), against them during the American Revolution, and half in and half out of the 1798 Rebellion (the Jacobin, and thus anti-Catholic, foundation of Irish Republicanism).

The Scots-Irish in Northern Ireland are for ever "betrayed from London". And the Scots-Irish the American South and West are for ever the victims of "Northern aggression" or "East Coast elitism". But no one fights harder for either Union, British or American.

As one "Paddy From Ireland" writes in response to Walsh's article:


The reality is that most people from the Republic do not, deep down, want unity with Northern Ireland. They are happy with partition for many reasons, most notably because prices are far lower in the North, so armies of shoppers drive up weekly to Newry, Belfast and Enniskillen.

Moreover, people avail of cheaper cars, cheaper dental treatment, and the like. The people of the Republic know that their taxes would rise sky high if they had to integrate Northern Ireland, whose people enjoy immense benefits not available in the Republic e.g. the National Health Service and free school books.

As one who has returned to the Republic from England and now bitterly regrets doing so, I certainly am glad of partition, glad to travel northwards and avail of lower prices.

It does seem to me, moreover, that most nationalists deep down don't want unity as such, but are glad to have their Irish identity recognised in the post-Good Friday agreement climate.

When I visited Belfast earlier this year, I saw some areas festooned with tricolours and signs in Irish, far more "Irish" than the south, and I saw other areas full of Union Jacks to a degree one rarely sees in England, except in a few part of Dagenham and some of the old north of England mill towns.

The real challenge for Northern Ireland is to integrate the two communities, to move away from the idea of Catholic and Protestant areas, and to have people living side by side. As Sir Hugh Orde said on his departure from the PSNI, the challenges of sectarianism and racism are the issues to be tackled now.

Most Northern Irish, deep down, have far more in common with each other than with the peoples of the Republic or Great Britain.

Unionists need to realise that to sell the case for the union, they need to stress its benefits for ALL the people of Northern Ireland, rather than appearing to be a sectarian cause.

Quite so. Marching through the streets behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat is enough to get one committed in almost any part of England, Scotland or Wales. Much interest at all in the lore of Irish Nationalism, or in the Gaelic Irish culture, or in public expressions of Catholicism, is increasingly a bar to employment in the Republic, and certainly to being taken seriously politically.

People from it may call the place Ulster, or the Six Counties, or anything else. We all know where they mean. And so do they. From Ian Paisley to Gerry Adams, it is to there that they feel, and fulsomely pay, allegiance. But not, really, to anywhere else.

7 comments:

  1. One of the few things I will genuinely miss about QUB (this time around) is the rather sterile debates between 19 year old committed DUP types and Shinner types.
    Basically one side argues that the GFA copper fastens the UK while the other side argues with equal conviction that a United Ireland is inevitable.
    Now it is possible one side is right.
    It is possible BOTH are wrong.
    But it is not possible that BOTH are right.
    A certain amount of wishful thinking on both sides of course but the die is cast.
    My own belief in 1998 (and I still hold it) is that when Trimble signed up to the "equality agenda" he signed away unionism and my own feeling was "Gotcha". There can be turning back.
    Yet the two sides persist in presenting the GFA as two different things while the two Govts remain silent. It is a con trick. On one side or both?
    Is the GFA a stepping stone to a United Ireland or the very barricade that guarantees it wont happen.

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  2. When I was a young man (1960s 1970s), the Belfast Telegraphs Saturday edition had a column edited by "John Pepper" which featured long disused "country words". all very amusing.
    It is now possible to walk into a bookshop and find a book edited by "Pepper" which purposrts to be an Ulster Scots dictionary.
    Of course other official dictionaries exist. Nelson McCausland our Minister for Culture (incredibly we have a Dept of Culture) edits one.
    On a local news programme he was confronted by some Scottish academics who questioned his methodoly. In St andrews and other Scottish universities documents DO exist which can be used to formulate an Ulster Scots language. mCCauslands method as he admits was to make words up.

    Nevertheless Ulster Scots DOES have a point. The sentence acknowledging it in the GFA is worth the paragraph acknowledging the rights of the "Irish" language and the embryonic Ulster Scots culture WILL bea vital part in the new Ireland.
    Sorry that this is so long for a comment.
    I thought it deserved more than the usual banter we both appear to enjoy.
    Anyone including me who claims that the GFA guarantees a United Ireland (or the opposite) is clearly wrong.
    At the heart of the GFA is a con trick designed to make BOTH sides feel good. One side will be disappointed. Maybe even both sides.
    Oh a depressing last thought. We hosted a young Texan recently (son of a friend) and did the whole open top bus thing "Terror Tourism" in Belfast.
    The "Peace Wall" (sic) is higher than ever. And yet both sides actually want it.
    Behind it people can live British or Irish lives maximising their capacity not to be polluted (as they both see it) by a foreign culture.
    Now 24 miles from the Belfast of my youth, my family live in a leafier gentler village setting. In our case an Irish setting. While three miles away is another village where another family as decent as my own live out their British life.
    Maybe it IS enough.

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  3. The wonder is that people who want to live quite as "British" or as "Irish" a life as that do not move to Northern Ireland. Perhaps they will?

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  4. As I exceeded the limit for a single post, I had to post in two parts last night.
    But I edited badly and left out some key points relating to the Common Market and whetever its called now.
    There are of course no custom queues as there had been prior to both governments being in "Europe" Likewise the removal of the restriction on Southerners living and working in North (without a difficult to obtain permit) changed things.
    Of course Peace itself was the great change.
    There is no visible border as every crossing at say Newry, Derry. Belcoo, Belleek, Strabane, Middletown, Aughnacloy is in a nationalist area.
    In a sense the only visual clue that an international frontier has been crossed is that speed restrictions are in KPH and MPH and of course bilingual signs.
    Of course Newry, Derry, Strabane councils have bi lingual signs.
    There is a sense that "NI" has restricted. Is the border actually at Banbridge?
    I pointed out last night that the two communities live seperately to (more or less peacefully) express their Irishness or Britishness.
    Our Texan friend soon got used to the tribal markings in Crossmaglen and Bushmills.

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  5. Youd be very welcome David.

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  6. Seriously, the BNP and the Southern Shinners alike could move there and live out their fantasies to their hearts' content. I'm not wishing that on you. Very far from it. But it might happen.

    The old NF was in favour of Ulster Independence when it was chaired by Andrew Brons (now an MEP), I suspect for that reason - it saw such a state as somewhere to go, and rather nearer than South Africa or Rhodesia. All three of those causes are examples of how that sort of party is really not very pro-British at all.

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  7. It was also occasionally a UDA "policy" and naturally the UDA were linked to the skinhead fantasists in BNP, NF type parties.

    They used to come over to get photographed with Johnny Adair, now happily resident in Bolton. In a way they are/were a bit like the Noraid fantasists.

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