Alternative Ulsters, Alternative Irelands: Planters & Gaels (Pt II)
The townland of Kilmore lies just off the main road between Portadown and Armagh. It has a small Church of Ireland church — which is to say a Protestant one — with a thick-walled square tower. Within it is said to be the stump of a round tower pre-dating the plantation of Ulster by centuries.
It was the church attended by some of the forebears of the poet John Hewitt.
“It is the best symbol I have yet found for the strange textures of my response to this island of which I am a native”, he wrote.
“I may appear Planter’s Gothic, but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter.”
Hewitt has been thrust centre stage in Northern Ireland this week by comments from Richard Neal, a visiting US congressman, that appealed to “Planter and Gael”.
The peculiar place of the Ulster Protestant in the world was one of Hewitt’s fixations. His use of the term Planter — including as part of a double act with the poet John Montague — has been cited in Neal’s defence.
Hewitt’s palimpsestic tower is an indicator that Neal’s apologists are relying on a risibly superficial reading or, less charitably, googling. It is a telling choice of image: one that points to a repression of a sense of Irishness that Hewitt came to understand through poetry and exile.
But Hewitt’s tower also provides a case study in how even those of us who want to smudge the Planter/Gael dichotomy are subjugated to it.
In as far as Hewitt adopted the Planter moniker it was to examine its textures and rough edges. His relationship with the term was a vehicle for him to address, through poetry, his relationship with the land, his neighbours, the rest of Ireland. (Malachi O’Doherty made a similar point in the Belfast Telegraph.)
Hewitt’s poetry is littered with examples, sometimes veiled in metaphor, sometimes bare. The Colony, narrated by a Roman soldier on the fringe of a retreating empire, is apologetic in tone about Rome’s treatment of the barbarian natives, before concluding in a series of assertions, like a boot finding firmness in boggy ground.
We would be strangers in the Capitol;
This is our country also, no-where else;
And we shall not be outcast on the world.
In Seamus Heaney’s Act of Union we have a sort of mirror image from a nationalist perspective. Heaney anthropomorphises Great Britain and Ireland as male and female, rapist and victim.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
Heaney later described how England had left Ireland “pregnant with an independent life called Ulster”. He also suggested, perhaps playfully, that Act of Union could be a “private love poem”. If colonisation is an act of insemination, it follows that we are all its offspring, for better or worse. Heaney had put his finger on the wound in the nationalist imagination.There is no Eden to return to. Brian Friel trod the same path in the 1970s with his elegaic masterpiece Translations, written in English about a prelapsarian Irish-speaking hedge school before the famine and the introduction of the national schools. Nationalists are forever dreaming of the Parthenon untouched by Roman hands; of a temple they’ve never seen and in most cases never could have seen.
Less subtle versions than Heaney’s are out there: in Niamh Campbell’s 2020 novel, This Happy, the narrator writes of herself during a troubled period: “I decided that Ireland, with its wet fields and the surge of the plantation on a distant hill like a pyroclastic flow, was the ugliest shithole in the world.”
The plantation as a pyroclastic flow — an intrusion of alien matter — is I suspect closer to the default setting in the Republic than Heaney’s rendering.
Heaney, like Hewitt, uses a familiar image to suggest that the relationship between coloniser and colonised, between Planter and Gael, is not immutable or static.
Hewitt and Heaney’s visions blur the Planter-Gael, Coloniser-Colonised binary. But a binary it remains.
The trouble is that the binary warps our worldview and leads us into repeated political and cultural cul-de-sacs — even those who are interested in undermining it are operating within its confines.
It leads directly to a view of the “Ulster problem” as a standoff between two unchanging ethnic communities, a model that I looked at in Pt 1.
It leads equally to a compulsion to define and measure ourselves against the old adversary. Specifically in nationalism, it establishes an intellectual rut that ends in a failure to recognise that neither the state of the Republic of Ireland nor nationalist Ireland more broadly have a monopoly on Irishness. In unionism, it sets in train a self-defeating insistence among some that they aren’t Irish at all, as though the word Northern is not an adjective but a prefix.
Not long ago the Irish Times published a comment piece by Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh, two academics, under the headline “Colonialism and Ireland: the choice facing us is between empire and republic”. They are adherents of the axiom, of the social anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, that “invasion is a structure, not an event”. They extrapolate this to conclude that Ireland can only be understood through the prism of colonialism and republicanism.
The argument crashes headlong at the first kink in the road Irish history provides.
“A specific British form of colonialism as it developed in Ireland… was pitched against an Irish version of republicanism that emerged in its fullest form from the United Irish movement onwards”, they write.
The United Irishmen’s intellectual engine room, famously, was in Presbyterian Belfast. The earliest Irish republicans weren’t anti-colonialists: they were the colonists.
This is hardly the anomaly that it now appears as we look back through the distortionary Planter/Gael lens. The earliest nationalist-republican movements were analysed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, his influential work on the origins of nationalism. He makes the point that they were not revolts of native Americans but of literate colonials — the grandsons of settlers who knew that they could never attain the heights of political power in the metropole. In Ireland this strand of republicanism — universalist, inspired by the French Revolution — has been locked in uncomfortable tension with the more ethnically motivated strain (ourselves alone, the flight of the earls, England out of Ireland).
Rolston and McVeigh are not of course bound by ethnicity. They are aware of the traps outlined in Pt 1. But, because of the warping effect of the Planter-Gael myth, they conspire to arrive at just as reductive a conclusion:
“If we are all mestizos and mestizas, all mixed, then we are not determined by our origins but have political choices to make — to follow the ‘settler’ roots of our identity and side with empire or to follow the ‘native’ roots of our identity and side with the republic.”
The trouble, as Anderson’s analysis showed, is that the nationalist republicanism they aspire to is a historical product of colonialism as much as the imaginary empire they reject. The only alternative is the misty-eyed retreat to an ethnically pure and imagined state of nature. The Ireland they know is as much a product of colonialism as the United Kingdom.
Is another way possible? I think so.
A few years ago my friend Matthew O’Toole got his fingers burnt in the same fire as Congressman Neal, by referring to Planter and Gael soon after he became an SDLP Assembly member. In Matthew’s case it was unfair since he was explicitly calling for us to move beyond the stereotypes.
In an earlier Irish Times article, he talked of his sense of loss watching Belfast’s Bank Buildings burn down.
“Set in red Dumfries sandstone more commonly seen in Glasgow than Dublin, it could hardly be more evocative of the Ulster Presbyterian commerce that turned Belfast from a village to this island’s biggest and most prosperous city”, he wrote.
“That people would identify me as a Gael, and this building as of Planter provenance, does not alter my sense of it.”
He went on: “Rather than permanently settling for the formal accommodation of two or more ‘traditions’, we might aspire to Irishness becoming an identity that better encompasses the images and memories of industrial Ulster and Presbyterian Belfast.”
There is, of course, no reason to stop there. It was Walter Scott who first used “the narrow ground” to describe Ireland’s venomous conflicts. We were, he said, like people fighting with daggers in a barrel. Yeats updated it a century later: Great hatred, little room.
We can find new perspectives only if we begin to look at ourselves from a wider angle.
