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.