Northern Ireland is not an aberration
I remember being slightly flummoxed. Mrs Black was explaining to her class of nine and ten-year-olds — myself among them — that to fulfil the curriculum requirement that we learn about a new country we would study Pakistan and not Northern Ireland.
“People say, ‘Sure why not look at Northern Ireland?’”, she told us — in my mind I picture her looking out of the window as though to choose her words carefully — “But I thought, sure you’ve your whole lives to hear about all that.”
My confusion wasn’t about the euphemistic “all that” — this was 92 or 93 in Northern Ireland and “all that” was on the TV news every night. My confusion was how Northern Ireland could be new. And indeed how it could be a country at all if it was part of the United Kingdom, which was also a country.
Northern Ireland was the only home I’d known and it was disorientating to think that it could be described as new or that it had been created any more than England had been created.
My thoughts returned to Mrs Black’s classroom amid the fuss over President Michael D. Higgins’s refusal to attend a church-led event marking Northern Ireland’s centenary. That followed a wave of articles noting Northern Ireland’s “one hundred years of trouble” and its “uneasy centenary”. No cause for celebration here: Northern Ireland was unwanted from its advent; a disaster from the onset.
Kevin Meagher, a former adviser to one of the more underwhelming Northern Ireland secretaries, was asked “if Northern Ireland will still be here” in ten or twenty years time and replied, “No, I think it’ll be gone in ten.”
It would have melted my ten-year-old head to hear talk of the place I called home being erased from the map, but it is par for the course nowadays. Many of us are inured to hearing our homeplace breezily dismissed as an “artificial statelet” in progressive circles, a relic of empire pickled in bigotry and past its use-by.
Yet jaundiced as I may be, there are two corrective points that I feel ought to be raised on behalf of my “bloody awful country”. One concerns the past, the other the future.
Past
All countries have foundation myths — comforting narratives that owe more to the contours of the national psyche than they do hard facts — but Northern Ireland is perhaps unusual in having at least two. The origin story that has been aired around the centenary in the (UK) national press, is that Northern Ireland was a tragic of accident of birth, “wanted by nobody” in the words of historian Marianne Elliott writing in the FT.
Or, as Leo McKinstry put it in the New Statesman: “The creation of the statelet of Northern Ireland was a calamitous error that placed a powder keg in the middle of the British Isles.”
The argument is familiar. In response to the moderate demand for Home Rule — granting Ireland a degree of self-rule within the United Kingdom — Ulster’s unionists threatened civil war in 1912. Their over-reaction to constitutional nationalism’s legitimate demands stoked the revolutionary sentiment that burst into flames with the 1916 Rising and led to the rise of Sinn Fein in the 1918 elections, the War of Independence and the bodged, supposedly temporary partition of Ireland in 1921. Partition itself led to a bloody civil war between pro- and anti-treaty republicans and the discriminatory state built by unionists in the north laid the kindling for outbreak of the Troubles in 1968.
Each port of call in the argument looks sound; it is only when you consider those that were bypassed that you realise how incomplete the journey is.
The half a million Ulstermen and women who signed the 1912 Ulster League and Covenant feared rule by Dublin. Home Rule would be deemed a stepping stone to leaving the United Kingdom. They also feared for the future as a Protestant minority under a Catholic, God-fearing parliament. And, as the most economically developed part of Ireland, they also feared for their standard of living.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to argue that the covenanters, my ancestors among them, were wrong. Home Rule would have been used by a stepping stone for full independence. Catholicism was eventually given a privileged position in the 1937 constitution of Ireland. And the Free State and the Republic remained poorer than Northern Ireland for the next half-century.
These then are the building blocks of the unionist foundation myth of Northern Ireland: a last, resolute stand to secure a foothold in the United Kingdom.
That origin story earned an unlikely endorsement from Mary Lou McDonald, the president of Sinn Fein, in 2018 when she said: “Let me say to our unionist brothers and sisters — the promise of a Republic of equal citizens was betrayed. You were right. Home Rule became Rome Rule.”
So we have two foundation myths: Northern Ireland as powder keg and Northern Ireland as redoubt. The former focusing on the gerrymandered, arbitrary six-county solution; the latter on the organic and deeply-held differences between the north east of Ireland and the rest of the island.
The two versions of history, evidently, are to an extent borne in fact even if they skirt inconvenient truths. Yet the two stories aren’t as irreconcilable as the casual observer might believe.
David Trimble famously described Northern Ireland as a “solid house but… a cold house for Catholics” in his conciliatory Nobel acceptance speech. Elsewhere in the speech he put his finger on the dialectic of fear that governed Irish politics in the 20th century.
“Each thought it had good reason to fear the other”, he said of unionists and nationalists following partition. “As Namier says, the irrational is not necessarily unreasonable.”
We tend to remember James Craig’s infamous claim that Northern Ireland was a “Protestant state” and Stormont a “Protestant parliament”, but ordinarily ignore the comment from Eamonn de Valera to which it was a rejoinder: “we are a Catholic nation”.
In 1917, de Valera had said unionists — whom he characterised as “not Irish” — would have to succumb to Dublin rule or “they would have to go under”. De Valera later mooted population transfers. From our vantage point in the 21st century we can see with unsettling clarity where this sort of rhetoric ends.
The point here is not to reduce the debate to the habitual tit-for-tat exchange ricocheting through history to the arrival of the Normans in Ireland — a historical version of the he-started-it protestations of the playground. Rather it is to highlight how unionism and nationalism were animated by mutual fear — a fear that was perhaps irrational, to recall Trimble, but certainly not unreasonable.
My grandmother, a Leitrim Protestant born in 1916, used to recall a childhood incident around the time of the War of Independence when Protestant neighbours gathered in her home because of a rumour or threat they were to be rounded up.
In the years before the creation of Northern Ireland, Irish nationalists and unionists were locked in a battle for supremacy — a battle that neither could win without an unthinkable bloodbath.
Partition was necessarily imperfect. How could a border disentangle people who had lived together for centuries in the same townland? But it was also inescapable.
Future
Even if we reject the historical inevitability of the border, it is another thing to argue that Northern Ireland will simply evaporate.
The Good Friday Agreement enshrines the right of Northern Irish citizens to be Irish or British regardless of the constitutional settlement. In the case of a united Ireland, that assurance by necessity carves out Northern Ireland as distinct in a new republic even in the event that it is not formally recognised within a new federal Irish state. As Diarmaid Ferriter pointed out in the Irish Times, this aspect of a hypothetical united Ireland is rarely even discussed.
The glib predictions of Northern Ireland’s demise — and there have been many in the years leading up to the centenary — fail to engage with the Good Friday Agreement.
They also fail to recognise the cultural space that has opened up since 1998 for nationalists to call themselves Northern Irish with a capital “N”. Even by the 2011 census, respondents identifying as British-only and Irish-only represented 40 and 25 per cent respectively. Responses mentioning Northern Irish, either exclusively or in combination with another badge, made up 29%.
Earlier this year there was a row over the use of Seamus Heaney’s image to mark the centenary. Heaney’s neat rhyme — “be advised my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised /To toast the Queen” — was quoted to death. (Less so the dense, layered political meditations of North but there’s no accounting for taste.)
But Heaney was the perfect choice in his own way. After the Agreement he did indeed raise a glass to the Queen at a state dinner at Dublin Castle. “Ted Hughes had just died and the Good Friday Agreement had just come in to force, so at that time I thought — come on now, do the decent thing here”, he told Mark Carruthers later.
He talks in that interview of a specific northern, Ulster identity and adds, “as a concession or realisation of the new times I call it Northern Ireland”.
Heaney’s passport of course was well-used: he died in Dublin having taught at Harvard and Oxford. But for most of us, life is moulded by borders, even arbitrary ones.
A few years ago researchers at Louvain and MIT designed an algorithm that extracted a community or network from mobile phone data. The work proved seminal. A decade ago they found that 85 per cent of French mobile phone calls and texts were within an administrative region — a proportion that changed only modestly, to 75 per cent, at the peripheries. The findings were corroborated beyond France. Far from precipitating the death of distance, the smartphone has revealed how societies are defined by lines on a map, even within a country.
This matters. Temporary bodges become permanent fixtures; over time lives take shape around arbitrary lines on a piece of paper. The border became real. Circumstances helped ossify it: it was hardened by hardline unionism, Free State hostility to the nascent Northern Ireland and republican violence.
Through the tortuous Brexit negotiations, the border’s economic permeability was naturally emphasised. (Including by me). As was the experience of border communities. But the emphasis on the soft border glossed over its cultural profundity. Northern nationalists aren’t thin-skinned when they decry partitionist mindsets they encounter in the south, they’re observing the effect of what for most people on the island has been a century of diverging experiences.
Groups, communities, nations that were once artificial may not remain so. As we learnt in Mrs Black’s class, a century ago even the word Pakistan had not yet been coined.
Its critics are free to think of Northern Ireland as an abomination. But a real conversation is impossible until we accept that Northern Ireland was never an aberration.
