Will the future be British and/or Irish federalism?

Posted on Tuesday, 26 May, 2015 by andypollak

The big story about the British general election – alongside the surprise overall majority for the Tories – was the extraordinary spectacle of all but three seats in Scotland being won by the Scottish National Party. If anybody thought after last September’s referendum result that the independence issue had been put to bed for a decade or more, they were proved dramatically wrong.

According to Ben Wray of the excellent online Scottish news site, commonspace.scot, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s strategy is now a gradualist one: to build up power until the party’s hegemony is unquestionable, and then cruise to a referendum win. He believes the Scottish first minister would prefer to leave the independence question until the 2021 Holyrood parliamentary election, but has not ruled out putting a referendum into the SNP’s 2016 election manifesto, as most of the 110,000 members of her fast-growing party would expect her to do.

So unionists of all stripes have reason to lose their sleep again, not least the Ulster unionists. Labour backbenchers at Westminster are lining up to echo what Jonathan Freedland wrote on the front page of the Guardian after the result: “The question now is not so much whether Scotland will break away from the UK, but rather what would happen to make a country that has voted en masse for a nationalist party not leave the union…It will require the greatest possible ingenuity and generosity on the part of those who still believe in the union – perhaps an entirely new, federal design entrenched in a written constitution – to persuade Scotland to stay.”

Ingenuity and generosity are not characteristics one associates with Ulster unionism. The DUP were hoping for a return to the old Jim Molyneaux-John Major days of a unionist party propping up a minority British government in return for goodies from the cabinet table for Northern Ireland. That hope is truly dashed.

Could I suggest a really daring way in which the DUP and Ulster Unionists might regain a bit of the initiative?  Instead of uniting around the hoary old sectarian issues of election pacts and Orange parades, why don’t they put their heads together and start the process of coming up with some ideas for a new, federal Britain which a radically autonomous Scotland might be prepared to remain a part of.  Ulster Unionists starting a debate about the future of the United Kingdom – now there’s a novel idea!

There could be something in it for Nationalists as well. In a genuinely federal UK Northern Ireland would have as much autonomy as Scotland and Wales, to the extent that – apart from things like the monarchy, currency union, defence and foreign affairs – it could attain most of the powers of a largely independent state. It would be free to negotiate – perhaps under a future Sinn Fein first minister – an even closer relationship with the Republic of Ireland. A new written British federal constitution could even include a clause reflecting the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and Ireland, and between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The potential for pleasing both sides in the North without actually breaking the constitutional link with London (or ending the £10 billion British subsidy) could be surprising! [Firstly, of course, both sides have to resolve the current impasse over welfare reform – i.e. cuts – which could bring down the Stormont institutions within weeks].

Anyway the people of the Republic will also have a say in whether that constitutional link should ultimately be broken – something often overlooked by Northern Nationalists. Constitutional change through a Border Poll must be approved by the Southern as well as the Northern electorate. And my judgement is that the people of the South currently have zero interest in a reactionary, troublesome and hugely expensive North becoming part of their still fragile but economically recovering and now outstandingly liberal society. In particular, the smart, newly politically conscious young people who turned out in their tens of thousands to make Ireland the world’s first state to bring in same sex marriage by popular vote are totally switched off by the North’s ancient quarrels (and don’t let Sinn Fein tell you otherwise).

Someone should advise Gerry Adams and his colleagues that a united Irish state is nearly as old-fashioned and tired a concept as a United Kingdom within a British empire. In this age of climate challenges, multinational capital, cross-border cooperation, the European Union and even (alarmingly) Islamic State smashing through the old empire-imposed national frontiers of the Middle East, federalism is a much more exciting and relevant idea: a federal Europe, a federal Britain, even a federal Ireland. Could, for example, the Good Friday Agreement be stretched into a kind of overlapping federal-type arrangement in which an autonomous Northern Ireland could have close relationships with both London and Dublin (with, for example, representation in the Westminster parliament and the Oireachtas)?

The liberal unionist commentator Dennis Kennedy wrote in the Irish Times last November that perhaps it was time to revisit one of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s final interventions in Northern affairs in 1998. Warning of an imminent deal between the British government and Sinn Fein/IRA, O’Brien suggested that Unionists should instead reach agreement with Dublin to unite under a federal arrangement that would guarantee all existing rights to residents of the North. The Unionist community, he maintained, would be better able to defend its interests as an important political block in a federal Ireland than it would as “despised hangers-on” and a tiny minority in the UK.

His words, scornfully dismissed at the time, may again become relevant if Britain votes in a referendum to leave the European Union – which will be the over-riding issue for British politics during the next two years  – and Scotland votes to stay in. That would be an utter disaster for Northern Ireland, which would then exist precariously on the edge of a United Kingdom even more dominated by the 90% of the population living in England, which would, in turn, become more English nationalist and in thrall to London and the south-east.

A lot of this will depend on Southern willingness to accommodate the North in some way, either in a united Ireland or – much more likely – some arrangement short of unity. As a wise friend who knows both Irish jurisdictions well said to me recently:

“One of the crucial things that needs to happen if there is ever going to be a united Ireland is that the South has to develop an interest in and understanding of (I won’t say an affection for) unionism. I don’t see the remotest evidence that this is likely to engage the interest of other than a very few people there. And that’s the one essential sine qua non of any consideration of a united Ireland.”

PS  There is an interesting conference taking place at Trinity College Dublin on Saturday 20 June which readers might want to put in their diaries. It is called ‘The North Began? Ulster and the Irish Revolution 1900-25’ and will examine the particular role of Northerners during that tumultuous period.

 

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

A constructive Sinn Fein proposal to begin healing and reconciliation?

Posted on Monday, 27 April, 2015 by andypollak

I have been reading Uncomfortable Conversations, an interesting little book on reconciliation published by Sinn Fein earlier this month. It contains one rather good idea, but is also notable for what it leaves out.

The booklet is largely based on a series of articles in An Phoblacht initiated by Sinn Fein national chairperson Declan Kearney, who seems to be a key player in its outreach to unionism. There are a number of responses from Protestant, unionist and other figures, including Heather Morris, former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland; Dawn Purvis, former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party; Lord John Alderdice, the former Alliance leader; Baroness May Blood, chair of the Integrated Education Fund, and Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist ministers.

Unfortunately the opening line of Gerry Adams’ introduction makes it clear that the context here is an ironclad nationalist and republican one: “Sinn Fein is an Irish republican party. Our strategy to achieve a united, independent Ireland marks us out from other Irish political parties.” So there’s clearly not going to be a smidgin of compromise on that in pursuit of reconciliation within Northern Ireland.

However Declan Kearney is more interesting than his leader. In his address to the 2015 Sinn Fein ard fheis in Derry last month (reprinted here), he said: “Healing our society needs to be placed above (my italics) the challenges of the political process. A shared future should be about respect and equality for political, cultural and religious difference. We do share a common humanity. And there is no hierarchy of victimhood.”

He went on to call for “an initiative of common acknowledgement from all sides for the pain caused by and to each other” which “could powerfully contribute to forgiveness and healing. Doing so would require grace and generosity from all sides.”

He continued: “All hurt is the same and warrants acknowledgement with sincere remorse. Expressing remorse and regret for death and injury during the conflict could help deepen mutual respect and understanding, and move us all closer to a healing process”.  In my experience, such language of remorse, forgiveness and healing is highly unusual from a republican spokesman. It is also language understood by Northern Protestants.

24 hours after this speech realpolitik replaced remorse when the Sinn Fein leadership, afraid to be painted as a party of government cuts south of the border, all but torpedoed last December’s Stormont House Agreement by going back on its commitment to welfare reform as part of that accord.

But let us take Declan Kearney’s constructive proposal in good faith.  It is not the first time he has said such things, but previously they have gone largely unreported. They are the nearest the republican movement has come to echoing Gusty Spence’s memorable 1994 UVF ceasefire expression of “abject and true remorse” for the nearly 1,800 IRA killings during the ‘Troubles’. Before this, the closest the IRA ever came to saying sorry was a stilted and unconvincing statement in 2002 that “the future will not be found in denying collective failures and mistakes or closing minds to the plight of those who have been hurt. That includes all the victims of the conflict, combatants and non-combatants.”

Kearney now goes further. He says: “Sinn Fein believes that, with good faith, remorse should be embraced.” He says republicans should “recognise the healing influence of being able to say sorry for the human effects of all actions caused during the armed struggle.” He says: “The political reality is those actions cannot be undone or disowned. It would be better they had never happened.”

Could a campaign – led by a coalition of reconciliation and other civil society groups – provide the drive for Kearney’s idea of an ‘across the society’ acknowledgement of the pain inflicted by all sides which would kick some life into the frozen inter-party talks aimed at finding a formula to deal with the painful past in Northern Ireland? This, in many people’s eyes, is one of the last great blockages to the beginning of mutual understanding there. Writing in An Phoblacht last summer, Kearney appealed for “sustained positive leadership from within civic society on the need for grace, generosity, remorse and acknowledgement”, suggesting this “would introduce an entirely new dynamic. Civic society must challenge politics, make demands of political leaders and set tests for all political parties to do better.”

Could every key figure to do with the North be persuaded to sign such a declaration? Could the British prime minister, the Irish taoiseach, the head of the PSNI and the British Army, and every Northern political, paramilitary, church and community leader, including recognisable former IRA leaders, sign up? It might be difficult for some on the unionist side, but I believe it could be done. It would be a kind of reconciling Ulster Covenant for the 21st century, a major statement that would begin to heal the wounds opened by the original Ulster Covenant and its militant (and military) nationalist response in the 20th.

Sinn Fein is making this proposal from a position of some considerable strength: it may soon become the largest party in Northern Ireland; it may in the not too distant future become the largest opposition party in the Dail; it knows that as long as austerity exists in the South people will vote for it in numbers; it knows that the growth of the Catholic population and the weakness of the SDLP in the North means that it can only get stronger there.[The tensions it will increasingly experience as a party of government in the North and a party of protest in the South are already apparent and can only grow, but that is a topic for another day.]

But a position of strength can also be a position of generosity – something that is always in short supply on the North’s ‘narrow ground.’ Would it be a good idea for leaders of reconciliation groups and groups dealing with the difficult legacy of the past – Corrymeela, Glencree, Cooperation Ireland, Healing through Remembering and so on – to arrange a meeting with Kearney and other Sinn Fein leaders and interrogate them on this very interesting proposal?

Or maybe, given the deep suspicion that continues to exist in the unionist community about Sinn Fein’s actions and motives, it would be better if these peace and reconciliation groups were to take Kearney’s idea and run with it entirely on their own.

What is missing from this little book is any evidence that republicans are ready to consider compromises on their most fundamental beliefs for the sake of a more reconciled North. Is it mainly the unionists who are going to be discomfited by these ‘uncomfortable conversations’? Or will republicans also have to converse about compromising even marginally on their non-negotiable demand for a united Ireland? Should they also be made to consider whether their recourse to violence in 1969 was plain wrong, as Presbyterian minister Steve Stockman and Catholic priest Martin Magill suggest in their joint contribution?

There is other interesting evidence of republican rethinking about the past in this book, notably from Mitchel McLaughlin, one of the Sinn Fein leadership’s most thoughtful members, on the impossibility of denying “the courage or the suffering and sacrifice of the men who fought in the First World War.”

However Declan Kearney’s proposal is what matters: it seems to me to be a real and rare opportunity for all sides to begin to act together. “Moulds need to be broken and initiatives taken,” he concludes. “Unambiguous unity of purpose between republicans and unionists, and significant shared gestures, are more important than ever. These will rebuild confidence and inspire hope. The Peace Process belongs to everyone. It is time to make reconciliation the new phase of the Peace Process.”

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

Why Northern loyalists are running scared of a shared future

Posted on Thursday, 26 March, 2015 by andypollak

Returning to the fearfulness and narrowness of loyalist Belfast after a trip through the magnificent landscapes and massive social contradictions of South America is to come back to earth with a bump. But I had promised myself back in January that I would comment on the (then) recently published report¹ by a group of Queen’s University researchers on the flags protest in Northern Ireland in late 2012-early 2013 because of what it tells us about the current mood in the Protestant, unionist and loyalist community there (and because it went almost totally unreported in the Southern media).

The report does not make for happy reading for those of us who wish to see the North moving towards a more harmonious, less sectarian society. A striking feature of the interviews conducted with loyalists for the research was a common belief that there is a republican agenda to dilute Protestant and unionist culture, and the December 2012 decision by Belfast City Council (proposed by the Alliance Party) to fly the union flag only on specially ‘designated days’ was only the final straw which drove them onto the streets to protest and riot. Although only a tiny section of the overall unionist population actually took to the streets, and despite the violence accompanying many of the protests (and a policing bill of nearly £22 million), there was significant tacit support for them, with 46% of unionists polled six weeks after they started thinking they should continue.

The protesting loyalists saw the relationship between the two communities as “a hierarchical pairing, with unionists now playing the underdog and the Catholic community top dog.”  This perceived reversal of the traditional roles in Northern Ireland (despite statistics showing  that unemployment and poverty remain higher in many Catholic working class areas) makes  them newly resistant to any cross-community exchange. “In the interviews we conducted the issue of Protestant/Catholic reconciliation did not arise unless raised by us,”said the researchers.

Instead, all the emphasis was on building unionist unity and imbuing young people with a deeper awareness of their unionist identity and history, with not a scintilla of understanding that a harmonious future for Northern Ireland must involve seeking some common identity with their nationalist neighbours. One cannot overstate the insecurity and fearfulness of these working class loyalists. In another, smaller study of the impact of the flags protest in the small mixed-religion town of Garvagh in County Londonderry², authors Will Glendinning and James Wilson concluded that the young protesting loyalists “see no purpose in conflict transformation as their cultural identity is built on a glorification of sectarian conflict, and they reject democratic politics as ‘it did not stop the flag from being ripped down.”

The view of a group of  female flag protesters quoted in a third study³, this time of the impact of the protest in north Belfast, seemed to sum up the new depth of the community divide: “The idea of a shared future is one which doesn’t include unionists and loyalists. It is more about protecting their (republican) identity and one that will only see us (loyalists) as continuing to lose out.” Irish unity is no longer the principal threat, it seems, but republican determination to achieve equality within Northern Ireland.

The impact on community relations has been damaging. The Corrymeela Community’s director of development, Susan McEwen, noted that the UVF in Belfast had banned young people in some loyalist areas from going away to a Corrymeela-organised cross-community event over the 12th July Orange parades period, on the grounds that “it was sectarian to take young people away over the Twelfth because we were denying them their culture.” Debbie Watters, assistant director of AlternativesNI, a restorative justice project in the loyalist Greater Shankill area, said that cross-community work, if it takes place, was now much more difficult.  Up to the time of the flags protest the young people she worked with didn’t see things “through the lens of the past” – now they do.

The Queen’s researchers point out that “within the loyalist community the most frequently voiced concern – or at least the most anguished – is the sense that ‘noone listens to us’. Any long-term planning of community relations must attend to this key reality.”

However the desire to be heard is not accompanied by any desire to listen to the nationalist community, or any willingness to acknowledge that nationalism has also had to make compromises during the peace process. The loyalist story is one of unending, one-sided loss for their people. “We have found nothing to challenge the analysis put forward by [Orange leader] Rev. Mervyn Gibson, that the peace accord was never sold to the loyalist community by the main unionist parties, and instead they are constantly warned of the dangers they face.”  This is what unionism has been preaching for the past century and more: that they are surrounded by enemies who are constantly encroaching on their embattled northern fortress (or, more recently, their shrinking strongholds within that fortress). It is not a message that lends itself easily to the concepts of partnership and equality, let alone reconciliation.

The Queen’s researchers finish with two ‘modest recommendations’: firstly, they want a re-assessment of so-called ‘single identity work’ in Protestant and unionist areas – the kind of work that builds on unionist identity to give those communities the confidence eventually to engage with their neighbouring Catholic communities. They want a review of the efficacy of this work to see to what extent it is “moving people towards a reconciliation with those of the other tradition.”  They stress that Northern Ireland will remain within a “power-sharing dispensation” and all communities (including the loyalists) must recognise and learn to live with this reality.

The second recommendation is much more ambitious. It is for the creation of a ‘shared vision, a people’s peace plan’ under which people who work in community relations, peace building, cross-border, ecumenical and reconciliation work take ownership of building a new, non-sectarian society in the North from the ‘tribal’ political parties, notably the DUP and Sinn Fein, who are for different reasons less than interested in this kind of extremely difficult but absolutely vital work. The most uphill part will be with the loyalists, but “without their involvement the passions that ignited the flag protests are likely to flare again.”

The Queen’s team end on a positive note. They point to two success stories in dealing with divisive symbols in the North’s recent history: the successful implementation of the Fair Employment Act’s 1989 code of practice prohibiting the display of flags, emblems or graffiti in the workplace; and the inter-party agreement on the six-flowered flax plant (one flower for each northern county) as the symbol for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Even in the beleagured North history can move, albeit in infinitesimal steps, towards a more harmonious future.

¹ The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest. Paul Nolan, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyer, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford, Peter Shirlow,  Queen’s University Belfast.

² Flagging it Up. Will Glendinning and James Wilson, Church of Ireland St Paul’s Parish of Errigal and Desertoghill

³ Flag and Protests. Jonny Byrne, INTERCOMM

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 1 Comment

Writers, ranchers and revolutionaries: tales of the Irish in Argentina

Posted on Sunday, 22 February, 2015 by andypollak

How many people know that the man who raised the Irish flag over the GPO at Easter 1916 was from Argentina?  I didn’t know this until I was told it earlier this month in Buenos Aires by Guillermo MacLoughlin, one of the leading members of the Irish community in Argentina and editor of its newspaper, the Southern Cross. The Southern Cross, founded 140 years ago – making it the oldest Irish newspaper in the world outside Ireland – has a particular resonance for me:  on the day I started my first journalistic job in the old Hibernia magazine in Dublin in September 1972 I found it lying on my desk.

That 1916 rebel’s name was Eamon Bulfin, and he was the son of William Bulfin, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1884, and was to become a close friend of Arthur Griffith, the best-selling author of Rambles in Eirinn and an early editor of the Southern Cross.  The Bulfins were quite a family. Eamon’s uncle was Lord Mayor of Dublin and his cousin was Sir Edward Bulfin, a First World War general. His sister Catalina would go on to marry Sean MacBride, old IRA leader, co-founder of Amnesty International and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Irish-Argentines are the forgotten people of the Irish diaspora, even though more than half a million Argentines now claim some Irish ancestry. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but it is believed that around 40,000 Irish people emigrated to Argentina from the 1820s to the end of the 19th century. The largest number came from Westmeath, Longford and Wexford,  largely because the pioneers of this movement were three entrepreneurial farmers from those counties.  These were not the destitute Irish who fled from famine and poverty to the cities of North America. They were often the younger, non-inheriting sons of strong farmers, keen to make their fortunes on the broad pampas where the indigenous people had been cleared (in wars described as genocidal by some contemporary historians) and huge tracts of fertile land were going cheap as a result.

And make their fortunes some of them did. Many went as shepherds and took full advantage of the extraordinary ‘halves’ system under which they could look after large flocks of sheep and after a few years, when they had increased their number four and fivefold, divide the flock 50-50 between shepherd and owner. An interesting picture of the Irish community appeared in one of the earliest editions of the Southern Cross in January 1875. “In no part of the world is the Irishman more esteemed and respected than in the province of Buenos Aires, and in no part of the world have Irish settlers made such large fortunes. They possess 1,500,000 acres of the best quality land. They own about 5,000,000 sheep. This vast fortune has been acquired in just a few years.”

Irish ganaderos (ranchers) were thick on the ground in that province. Here is a list of names from a district with the wonderful name Exaltacion de la Cruz, taken from the 1869 census and reprinted in the Southern Cross: Patricio Kelly, Miguel Mally,  Cristian Lynch, Juan Lennon, Guillermo Maguire, Diego Gaynor, Eufrasio Kenny, Tomás Dowling, Santiago Scully and nearly 50 others. As the names suggest, they integrated relatively quickly with their Spanish-speaking neighbours, so that today many Irish-Argentines speak little English and are only vaguely aware of their ancestry.  Their strong Catholicism remains, cemented in particular by Father Anthony Fahy from Loughrea, Co Galway,  who arrived in 1844 and was to become one of those formidable 19th century priests who built powerful Irish Catholic communities in so many parts of the world. Interestingly, his work was supported by a Protestant banker and merchant, Thomas Armstrong, from Offaly, who would become a member of Argentina’s wealthy upper class.

Fahy and Armstrong were among many people from Irish backgrounds who were to make their mark in Argentine society  over the next 170 years. The list is a long one and makes for impressive reading (see the biography section of the excellent Society for Irish Latin American Studies website for a preliminary taster). I have room here to single out only a few particularly fascinating examples.

Probably the most famous Argentine in recent world history was the revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. His grandmother was Ana Lynch, born in San Francisco to an Irish-Argentine family whose roots went back to a clan of  17th century Irish ‘Wild Geese’ merchants from Seville and Cadiz. The most famous Irish-Argentine of the 19th century was the founder of its navy during the 1810-1818 war of independence against Spain, William Brown from Foxford, Co Mayo.

In the fractured and often violent world of Argentine politics there have been people of Irish ancestry on every side. Dalmacio Velez Sarsfield was the 19th century lawyer and politician who drew up the new nation’s civil code, much of which is still in use today (he has also given his name to one of Buenos Aires’ top football clubs). The only Irish-Argentine President was General Edelmiro Julian Farrell, a military appointee in the mid-1940s,  whose Vice-President was Colonel Juan Peron, soon to become a benevolent dictator of international renown. Rodolfo Walsh was a left-wing revolutionary, investigative journalist and outspoken critic of the 1976-1983 military regime which murdered or violently ‘disappeared’ an estimated 13,000 leftist guerrillas and other political opponents in the so-called ‘dirty war’ during that period: he was shot down in the street in a military ambush in 1977. José (Joe) Baxter, from an Anglo-Irish Protestant family background, was another revolutionary: his almost unbelievable trajectory led from a far right nationalist organisation in the 1950s to Cuba, the Tupamaros urban guerrillas in Uruguay, training in North Vietnam, various armed Trotskyist groups and death under an assumed name in a plane crash outside Paris in 1973.

People of Irish ancestry have also distinguished themselves in more benign sectors of society. Juan P. Garrahan (died 1965) was one of modern Argentina’s most distinguished physicians and paediatricians, and its National Children’s Hospital is named after him. Maria Elena Walsh (1930-2011) was an internationally-known singer, poet and children’s writer who has been compared with Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen.  Carlos McAllister is the latest in a long line of celebrated sports stars of Irish background: he was formerly a star footballer with Argentina and Boca Juniors and now represents La Pampa province in the national parliament. Did you know that Argentina also have a cricket team? In 2007 they reached the final of the World Cricket League Division 3 tournament in Australia under the captaincy of a handsome young man called Esteban ‘Billy’ McDermott. [In 2013 Argentina sent a gaelic football team to their first ever international tournament, coming second, and are now looking forward to the GAA world championships in Abu Dhabi next month].

The contribution of the Irish to Britain, the US and Australia is well known. But let’s not forget the high achievements of the world’s fifth largest Irish community in the huge, complex and sophisticated country that is Argentina.

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Views from abroad | 2 Comments

Notes from another great little country

Posted on Thursday, 29 January, 2015 by andypollak

We in Ireland (or rather the Republic of Ireland) have a lazy, solipsistic tendency to think we are the greatest little country in the world (and not just to do business in). I have spent most of the past fortnight in another small country on the far side of the world which, I would contend, can lay far better claim to that title.

Chile is a long thin snake of a country squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean and running from the Atacama desert (the driest place on earth) in the north, through the Mediterranean climes and cool rain forest of the centre, to the sub-Antarctic tundra of Tierra del Fuego in the south. It contains the oldest inhabited site in the Americas (12,500 years); the finest wine in the Southern hemisphere; breathtaking mountain and lake scenery that surpass anything in the Alps or the Rockies, and sophisticated seaside resorts that are on a par with many in the Mediterranean.

Chile is a modern social democracy with a socialist single mother as president that has an enviable record of economic expansion in recent years, boosted by record prices for its key export, copper.  It continues to have many problems – it remains a deeply unequal society, with more than 600,000 of its 17 million people living in extreme poverty; its education system is unfair and under-funded;  it is periodically torn apart by earthquakes (the last one in 2010 killed over 500 people and caused US$30 billion in damage) – and the plumbing is dreadful. But it is a country that pulses with youth, pride and energy.

Chile has  suffered to get to its present state of political and economic well-being. On 11 September 1973 (a date Chileans remember for different reasons to the rest of the world) the government of the radically socialist – but passionately constitutionalist  – president, Salvador Allende, was violently overthrown by a CIA-backed military junta led by army chief General Augusto Pinochet (Allende died, probably by suicide, as the air force bombed his presidential palace). During the brutal 17 year military dictatorship that followed, an estimated 3,000 people were killed or violently ‘disappeared’ and over 200,000 fled into exile, including a small group to Ireland, where they did not receive a particularly warm welcome (I was secretary of the Chile Solidarity Committee in Dublin at the time).

However Chile has reason to be grateful to Ireland for another reason. The principal ‘liberator’ of Chile from Spanish rule during the Latin American wars of independence between 1810 and 1818 was Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegimate son of the Sligo-born Spanish Viceroy of Peru. The British were also strong supporters of the Chilean independence struggle (for their own imperial reasons) and there are as many statues in towns throughout the country to Admiral Thomas Cochrane, the Scottish royal navy officer who founded the Chilean navy (and the Brazilian and Greek navies – he was Patrick O’Brian’s model for the swashbuckling Jack Aubrey in his series of seafaring novels) as there are to O’Higgins. In Valparaiso, the wonderfully picturesque and ramshackle main port, the monument in the main square commemorates two Irishmen (O’Higgins and naval officer George O’Brien), one Scotsman (Cochrane) and one Englishman (naval officer Robert Simpson). General Juan McKenna from Monaghan was also prominent on the Chilean side, notably as founder of its army’s engineer corps.

The Catholic religion in Chile remains important, although (as in Ireland) its iron grip on many aspects of social and personal life has loosened in recent years.  Divorce was only legalised in 2004. It remains one of the very few countries in the world where abortion is illegal in all circumstances and where the right to life of the unborn is enshrined in the Constitution.

In the extraordinarily beautiful southern lake and volcano region around Puerto Varas live the descendants of German settlers whose diligence and industry have turned this area into something close to a rural Arcadia. Our local guide related how their ancestors came to lands which had been vacated by Huilliche Indians fleeing the marauding, slave seizing  Spanish conquistadores. The envoy sent by the Chilean government in the 1850s to Germany to recruit them was told to bring back Catholics – instead he returned with Lutherans. Undeterred, the government sent in the Jesuits to educate their children. As a result, the great majority of their descendants are now Catholic, although some of their lovely churches are national monuments.

The next time we are tempted to boast about Ireland being the greatest little country in the world, we should think of Chile.  The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda – winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 – once asked a Soviet cosmonaut whether he had seen Chile while he was out in space. The cosmonaut said he did remember seeing some ‘yellow mountain ranges in South America.’  We don’t even have serious mountains to show to people in the stratosphere, even if there is a Canadian astronaut out there with a fondness for us!

We should think not only about Chile but also about other small, internationally ignored South American countries like Uruguay and Bolivia, where huge numbers of poorer people are being provided with jobs, housing and education for the first time under left-wing governments. Our version of free enterprise plus austerity is not the only model for early 21st century democracies. We need to be less full of ourselves in the little island of Ireland (and the insignificant province of Northern Ireland) and learn more about the small countries of Latin America that are doing great things to improve the lives of their people.

PS  This is very much a sympathetic tourist’s eye view. If any Chilean (or other) reader thinks I’ve got anything badly wrong in this blog, I would welcome a correction.

 

 

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Views from abroad | 2 Comments

To the Christmas miracle workers of the Stormont House Agreement – thank you

Posted on Friday, 26 December, 2014 by andypollak

Those of us who still believe that the Northern Ireland peace process, for all its faults and frustrations, is an extraordinary work in progress, received a surprise present two days before Christmas: another last minute, crisis-defusing, expert-defying, all-night final session agreement between the five main parties and the two governments.

Its broad outlines are well-known: nearly £2 billion in new British government cash and loans to cover a range of things like reforming the public sector and paying off thousands of civil servants, ‘shared education’ and other cross-community projects, supporting victims and survivors and dealing with ‘Troubles’-related killings; reducing the future size of the Stormont Assembly and the number of NI Executive departments; a new Historical Investigations Unit to inquire into ‘Troubles’ killings; a commission to enable people privately to learn how their loved ones were killed; an oral history archive; a commission to report on flags and identity within 18 months of being established; devolving responsibility for parades from the Parades Commission to the Assembly. These last five proposals owe a great deal to the recommendations of US diplomat Richard Haass 12 months ago.

Some of this may work, some of it may not. The important thing is that the widening cracks in the institutions of the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements have been papered over for the present. The parties of Protestant unionism and Republican nationalism are pledged to work for another period in government together in a province where peace without reconciliation has now become normal. The astonishing, if sometimes deeply uneasy, alliance between those two extremely shrewd (and extremely different) political leaders, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, will continue. Democratic power-sharing lives to fight another day. And the forces of darkness and violence, never far below the surface in Northern Ireland, are kept at bay once again.

Not for the first time in the past two decades, one reaches for words like ‘miraculous’. However in the eyes of secular liberals like this writer, miracles are not created by divine intervention but by the sheer bloody hard work of politicians and civil servants: the exhausting and seemingly endless hours of negotiation; the trying to put yourself in your adversary’s position; the writing, parsing, finding the right phrase that all sides can live with, the minute wording of the compromise text, the rewriting; the return to the negotiating table, the writing again, the meeting again, the compromising again. If there was ever a graphic illustration of Samuel Beckett’s saying – “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – it is the Northern peace negotiations over more than two decades. So let me pay tribute to some of the leading participants, many of whom I, like so many ‘hurler on the ditch’ commentators, spend a lot of time criticising.

I pay tribute to Peter Robinson, Nigel Dodds, Jeffrey Donaldson and the other DUP negotiators for their courage in facing down the backwoodsmen (and Jim Allister) who are still too numerous on their party’s back benches. These people would still much prefer that Ian Paisley had never taken the unheard of step of going into office with the loathed and feared party of the Provisional IRA and that they were back in their comfortable cots of Protestant supremacy and victimhood.

I pay tribute to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness, Gerry Kelly and the other Sinn Fein negotiators for their willingness finally to compromise on their deep reluctance to accept British-style welfare cuts which will particularly affect the poorer Catholics who are a core part of their constituency (and make their position as the leading anti-austerity party in the South more difficult). It is all too easy to see Adams as a brilliant and sinister modern-day Irish Machiavelli, moving the pieces on the Irish political chessboard to fit with his vision of a united Ireland ruled by Sinn Fein and its allies. However he has also been hugely influential in persuading both the IRA to give up violence for democratic politics and ordinary Catholics to begin to cast off their age-old addiction to self-definition as victims of injustice and oppression.

I pay tribute to Mike Nesbitt, Alasdair McDonnell and David Ford for pointing out where the Stormont House Agreement falls short but continuing in government to work it. As the agreement itself points out, the time may not be far distant when one or more of their parties will go into opposition and turn Stormont into a more normal political assembly.

I pay tribute to Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan and and British Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers. These two neophytes came out of their first dip into the cauldron of Northern political negotiations surprisingly well. The former’s personal commitment to peace was shown by the extraordinary 90 meetings he came to Belfast to chair and participate in during the 11 weeks of these latest negotiations. The latter showed real mental toughness and determination after she was ridiculed – not for the first time – and accused of ineptitude and lack of preparation in allowing David Cameron walk out of the talks two weeks ago.

I pay tribute to the civil servants: to Adrian O’Neill, Niall Burgess, Emer Deane, Shane O’Neill and their colleagues in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, whose patient, tireless commitment to the hard legwork of peace and stability in the North I have always greatly admired. And to Malcolm McKibbin and all the OFMDFM,  Northern Ireland Office and British Foreign Office officials whose names I don’t know for their equal contribution. They had every right to go home exhausted to their families at Christmas happy with a job well done. The great indifferent public in Ireland and Britain hasn’t an inkling about the vast amount of thankless work they have put into this latest push for peace.

And finally to Tommie Gorman of RTE and Gerry Moriarty of the Irish Times – the two main Southern media representatives at Stormont – who insisted on believing that the latest phase of the process would reach a happy conclusion, and kept an almost totally uninterested Irish public informed of this latest crucial development in contemporary Irish history. I will come back to the role – or rather lack of role – of a ‘switched off’ population in the Republic of Ireland in a future blog.

P.S. This column marks a small personal milestone. It is my 100th monthly blog on North-South and Northern Irish issues since September 2006, when, as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, I wrote my first ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 4 Comments

Give us more women in politics, North and South

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2014 by andypollak

In preparation for this blog, I carried out a totally unscientific straw poll of the Irish people on my email address list, asking them who was the person in politics they most admired on the island, North and South, over the past 25 years. Around 50 people responded and – allowing for the left-of-centre, largely non-republican and non-unionist bias of that list – the results were not surprising. Mary Robinson topped the poll in the South and John Hume in the North, with Mary McAleese second in the South and David Ervine and Seamus Mallon joint second in the North. That’s two women in the top five.

Overall, of the 15 politicians nominated, one third were women. The others were all Northerners: Naomi Long, Monica McWilliams and Baroness May Blood.

That’s pretty good when one looks at the proportion of women in the parliaments of the two Irish jurisdictions, which are among the worst in the world. 19% of Northern Ireland Assembly members are women, the lowest in the United Kingdom (it’s 23% in the House of Commons, 35% in the Scottish Parliament and 40% in the Welsh Assembly).

In the South it’s even worse, with only 16% of the Dail’s members being women. This puts Ireland 88th in the world, behind such paragons of democracy and women’s equality as Burkina Faso, Gabon, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates (the US is barely any better at 16.8%). Ireland comes 25th out of 28 EU parliaments. And that woefully low figure – 16% – has never been exceeded in the 96 year history of Dail Eireann, which must have Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to both the House of Commons and the Dail in 1918, turning in her grave.

However change is on the way in the Republic. A report to a parliamentary committee by Labour Senator Ivana Bacik (like me a member of the small Czech-Irish community) in 2009 led to a change in the law in 2012 which laid down that from the 2016 general election any party that does not have at least 30% of its candidates of each gender will see its state funding cut by half. This quota will rise to 40% in 2023.

The Bacik report found that there were five main barriers to women’s greater participation in politics in Ireland: childcare – women are far more likely to have this responsibility; confidence – women are less likely to put themselves forward as candidates; cash – women do not have the same access to finance (including from business) and other resources as men; culture – a culture that discriminates against women is prevalent, even in left-wing parties; and, most importantly, candidate selection procedures, which are secretive and stacked against women.

In its reform, Ireland has gone for ‘electoral gender quotas’, which require that a stated percentage of candidates nominated by parties must be of each gender. These are now in place in over 100 countries. They have led, for example, to the percentage of women in the Spanish parliament rising from 28% to 36% in the eight years up to 2008, and the proportion of women in the Belgian parliament rising from 5-10% before 1990 to over 23% in 1999.

But why do we want more women in our parliaments, apart from the need to tackle the glaring injustice that more than half the population should not have a miserable 16-19% representation in their legislatures? My personal answer is that male-dominated governments and parliaments have made such a mess of politics in recent years, women can’t but do better. It is said that women shy away from the tough, confrontational arena that is contemporary parliamentary politics. But who’s to say that the more holistic, consensual and outcome-focused (and less adversarial) approach that women bring to everything they do, would not also work in politics? The experience of other, more emancipated parliaments shows that vital issues like education and childcare move up the agenda when there are more female members. And women politicians’ skills in conflict resolution certainly contributed – through Mo Mowlam and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition – to the peace process in Northern Ireland. As the former Fine Gael minister Gemma Hussey says: “Women bring different life experiences, priorities, knowledge and a different style of decision-making.” (There are exceptions in the last of these areas, of course: Margaret Thatcher springs to mind!)

Monica McWilliams, former leader of the Women’s Coalition, says that even when the structural barriers are largely removed, the overwhelmingly male culture of politics will probably remain. She recalls the humiliating treatment she and her colleagues received at the hands of many in the traditional parties, notably the Ulster Unionists, during the inter-party talks in the 1990s (barbs about going back to the kitchen, accusations of having affairs, even ‘mooing’ at them as if they were cows). She believes that even today many male politicians in Northern Ireland don’t realise how unacceptable and harmful this kind of behaviour is. And she notes that unlike in the Republic – where, for example, we now have women in all the top justice and security jobs as Minister for Justice, Chief Justice, Attorney General and head of the Garda Siochana – in the North there are now fewer women in key public positions than 10 years ago.

In politics the problem remains a common all-Ireland one. Look at the leadership of some of our political parties. Would we prefer to see Arlene Foster or Nigel Dodds as the next DUP leader? – in a reactionary party like the DUP a talented woman like Arlene doesn’t stand a chance. Or Mary Lou McDonald replacing the old warhorse Gerry Adams as leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic? – there is precious little chance of that happening either. Is Fianna Fail weaker for the way it has relegated a superb politician like Mary Hanafin to the sidelines? Wasn’t Joan Burton a better choice as Labour Party leader than Alex White or any other man in that party?

In the next Irish election I will be voting for candidates who espouse the values of care and compassion, community engagement and climate justice and who try to curb the voracious beast of contemporary finance capitalism as far as is compatible with maintaining a relatively prosperous society. For these reasons I will be looking for women candidates to support.

One final North-South observation. Isn’t it interesting that there are now twice as many Protestant women cabinet ministers (Jan O’Sullivan and Heather Humphreys) in Dublin as there are in Belfast (Arlene Foster)? There’s something for sectarian, sexist and anti-Irish unionists – and there are still plenty of them around – to think about.

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I prefer good art and archaeology to bad politics

Posted on Thursday, 23 October, 2014 by andypollak

Sometimes the sheer badness of politics in Northern Ireland takes my breath away (badness=bad faith, lying, incompetence, being mired in the past). Take the third week of October, for example. Peter Robinson boycotted the opening meetings of the British government initiated all-party talks he had himself called for to deal with the deadlock between the DUP and Sinn Fein on a wide range of issues which has led to the North being largely ungoverned for the past year. The DUP also reneged on an agreement to allow a Sinn Fein MLA to take up the role of Speaker of the Assembly.

Meanwhile Gerry Adams ran into a real storm when he had to defend himself against charges from a young woman from one of the IRA’s ‘first families’, Mairia Cahill, that he had done nothing after she informed him she had been raped by an IRA man and then subjected to an IRA ‘kangeroo court’ at which she was forced to confront her assailant. Adams is a far more adroit politician than Robinson, but because of the constant requirement to defend the IRA as noble freedom fighters whatever evil deeds they have perpetrated, he will continue to get dragged back into the ugly past by bombshells like this.

In that week I came across two extraordinary small books that gave me some reason for hope: a book of satirical paintings launched at the Ulster Museum and a 30 year old pamphlet from an eminent archaeologist pleading for sharing and common ground. I say extraordinary because they were both humorous and open-minded and optimistic, grounded in history in its broadest sense, and emphasising the humanity, complexity and essential Irishness of the North’s divided history.

The book of paintings was by the Belfast artist Rita Duffy (whose studio now straddles the border between Fermanagh and Cavan) and was called ‘Thaw’ – because she believes art can play a role in thawing the great, icy mass of sectarian fear and hatred in her native place. The paintings feature satirical food product labels which poke fun at the folly and pretensions of iconic leaders and movements in recent and contemporary Irish history.

Duffy spares no sacred cows. Here you will find Ulster Vinegar (“100% Matured Vitriol Vinegar…produced through a historical process of slow fermentation of pain, anger and grievance”); a chocolate covered AK 47, “all romantic freedom fighters’ chocolate of choice”; Padraig Pearse Pasta Sauce, made from “tomatoes grown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 coming to their miraculous ripening”; Edward Carson’s Covenanters Marmalade (“What answer from the North? My friends, it’s Marmalade. We perish if we yield.”); B Special Honey to get rid of the bitter taste from the marmalade; and Peace Line clothes pegs as a way of domesticating the horrible ‘peace line’ security fences that tower over the washing lines of houses in many poorer parts of Belfast. These products are soon to be available on tee shirts from www.thawfactory.com or rita@ritaduffystudio.com

Duffy tells us that when politics fail, we always have art, not least to remind us of the unpalatable and absurd ‘narcissisms of small difference’ that are what is left of our ancient Irish quarrel. It is noticeable that in Duffy’s paintings women usually loom large – although women, the rulers of the kitchen and scullery, are largely absent from these posturing male food labels. As Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, points out in her introductory essay: Women have the power “to replace the language of division by an agreed language of commonality.” I hope and pray it will be so (although in next month’s blog I will explore why brilliant Irish women are so poorly represented in our politics).

The second little gem I came across was a 1984 pamphlet – ‘Ulster: The Common Ground’ by the distinguished geographer and archaeologist E. Estyn Evans, a man from the Welsh borders who graced the world of Irish scholarship until his death in 1989. He was a scholar who would be listened to even more closely today, with his emphasis on the whole human environment, including the earth, as the shaper of humankind.

Evans puts our little contemporary squabble into the context of 5,000 years of Irish history. He notes that during the Bronze Age, “this corner of Ireland was among the most advanced, culturally and technically and commercially, of all regions not only in Ireland but in the British Isles.” The archaeological evidence shows that this was because “people of different origins and cultures had learned to live together, to mix, to quicken each other. So Ulster, which is best known to the English today as a place of unrest and civil strife, is thought of by British archaeologists as the place where they had that brilliant Bronze Age.”

Evans, brought up in England by Welsh-speaking parents and who spent most of his adult life in Northern Ireland, urges that we should pay more attention to archaeology. This would show that “the clash of native and newcomer has been repeated over and over again, and we should try to discover how at various times they have not only come to terms with themselves but produced great blossomings of culture. I think you will find that it is precisely this clash of native and newcomer that struck the sparks in Irish culture.”

He also noted the way successive waves of newcomers had become absorbed into Ireland – even though some of them “still obstinately refuse to call themselves Irish.” He stressed that “you cannot send those of planter stock back across the water, any more than you can recall millions of Irishmen from America.” And he pointed to “a very paradoxical figure: an Orangeman from the Bannside, waving a British flag and pouring scorn on the Englishman because he can’t get his tongue around a good Gaelic place name like Ahoghill.”

So when we get depressed about the dismal state of the North’s politics, we should comfort ourselves with the Buddhist thought that all this is impermanent. The violent sectarianism of the northern part of Ireland is a mere two centuries old, the colonisation which gave rise to it is only four centuries old, and in another two, three or four centuries – if the earth survives – they will be remembered as nothing more than a temporary aberration in the six or seven millenia history of people on this island. Isn’t that a comforting thought of a kind?

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Why Sinn Fein preferred a No vote in the Scottish referendum

Posted on Thursday, 25 September, 2014 by andypollak

One of the most thought-provoking (and to an Irish audience, most relevant) articles on the Scottish independence referendum appeared on an inside page of the Irish Times two days before the vote (i). It was an interview by Northern editor Gerry Moriarty with John Brewer, Professor of Post Conflict Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, a distinguished sociologist who has written widely on peacemaking, conflict and religion in Northern Ireland.

Professor Brewer was of the opinion that contrary to the received wisdom – that Sinn Fein would have liked to see a ‘Yes’ vote in the Scottish referendum for all the usual reasons of undermining unionists and reinforcing demands for a Border poll – the republican leadership would be happier with the relatively narrow ‘No’ vote that was the eventual outcome.

His argument is a compelling one. Firstly, “a marginal No vote is going to cause the London-centric, Westminster bubble politicians to devolve greater powers.” Secondly, Sinn Fein’s electoral ‘long game’ involves the party attracting a middle class vote in both parts of Ireland so that eventually it will either be in power or in a position to determine who will be in power in both jurisdictions.

Brewer pointed out that with four out of five jobs in Northern Ireland either in or dependent on the public sector, Catholic civil servants, teachers, lawyers, police officers, social workers and the like – in common with their Protestant counterparts – know who ultimately pays their salaries: the British exchequer. And those salaries go to support a very attractive lifestyle: he points to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the Belfast middle class, with its plethora of theatres and concert halls, riverside apartments and up-market cafes and restaurants. He calls these people the “Catholic economic unionists”.

Brewer noted that Sinn Fein has already mopped up most of the working class nationalist vote in the North and in the May local and European elections made major inroads into working class constituencies in the Republic. Sinn Fein has to keep convincing the Catholic middle class to vote for it in the North, and this means no return to violence and playing down the rhetoric about a united Ireland, with all the risks that might bring to their comfortable livelihoods. “Being so politically astute, Sinn Fein have to realise that a Yes vote in the Scottish referendum will require them to up the stakes on a united Ireland. That runs the risk of alienating middle class Catholics.”

The key task for the party now, he believes, is to persuade the Southern middle class also to vote Sinn Fein, a much harder task. If Sinn Fein can demonstrate it can be a credible party of government in the North, more people in the Republic will start believing it can do the same in Dublin. One of its problems is that middle class Southerners don’t want a united Ireland, whatever they might tell the occasional pollster: they don’t want to take on a dysfunctional economy almost totally dependent on a subsidies from London and they don’t want to inherit the sectarian and often violent mess of loyalist flags, parades and worse.

Noting that the rise in the Catholic population means that one day Sinn Fein will become the North’s largest party, Brewer went on: “Being in government, perhaps even having a First Minister, will demonstrate to voters in the South that it can be a responsible government, and I think that will have huge implications for the way people in the South view Sinn Fein.”

Meanwhile we have a crisis in Belfast which may bring down the institutions (although you wouldn’t know it from the scant coverage in the Dublin media). Peter Robinson says deadlocked decision making at Stormont is no longer fit for purpose and wants the British (although not the Irish) government to step in again. Sinn Fein seem to agree that power-sharing is no longer working, having refused point blank to accept any English-style welfare cuts despite the likelihood that this will lead to reductions (£87 million this year and rising)  in Stormont’s block grant from London, making the North increasingly hard to govern. The two governments have announced new all-party talks.

The smart thinking is that Sinn Fein and the DUP will stagger on until the Westminster elections next May. If John Brewer’s thesis is correct, it is very much in Sinn Fein’s interest to do so. He argues that the prospect of more devolved powers – for example, the power to reduce corporation tax to the level in the Republic – could be the incentive that persuades the parties to return to a properly functioning Executive. However he concedes that nobody in London is going to give greater powers to dysfunctional politicians who clearly can’t manage the ones they have already.

Sinn Fein, of course, are always thinking long term. They won’t mind too much if the latest imbroglio leads to London becoming even more ‘sickened’ with Northern Ireland, which will certainly be the case if the institutions collapse and with a heavy heart the British Government has to impose Direct Rule on a temporary basis once again. The Unionists, as usual, have more to lose. Will that be enough to persuade them to risk the wrath of their hard-line Orange followers and compromise on their age-old shibboleths of flags and parades? I doubt it.

i. Would a tight No vote in Scotland best suit Sinn Fein? The Irish Times, 16 September

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

Is this the least known historic village in Ireland?

Posted on Sunday, 31 August, 2014 by andypollak

I come from Kells – not Kells in County Meath, nor Kells in County Kerry, but the twin villages of Kells and Connor in County Antrim. The fact that my father was Czech, that I grew up mainly in London and have lived for many years in Dublin probably excludes me from citizenship in the eyes of most of its inhabitants. But I still consider Kells and the nearby town of Ballymena to be my home place.

These two villages have suffered, in the words of one resident, because “they were on the road to nowhere” – deep in the County Antrim countryside, well off the main road from Belfast to Ballymena. In an introduction to a 1989 booklet, local historian Dr Eull Dunlop called them “the forgotten villages.”

It was not always so. Kells and Connor have a proud place in the history of Ulster and Ireland. As its Heritage Trail booklet (beautifully produced by the Kells and Connor Community Improvement Association) outlines in fascinating detail, St MacNissi, a disciple of St Patrick (who is believed to have tended sheep on nearby Slemish mountain during his first period of slavery in Ireland), built a monastery here. By the 11th century Connor boasted a Romanesque cathedral richly decorated with Celtic carving and standing at the centre of a populous settlement led by the Ó Floinn family, part of the Uí Thuirtre confederation, who had successfully resisted the Norman invaders for many years.

Connor continued to thrive under the Normans. An Augustinian abbey was built and in 1178 a Norman, Reginaldus, became Bishop of Connor. Its ‘golden age’ ended when a Scottish army led by Edward Bruce, who had recently declared himself High King of Ireland, defeated an Anglo-Norman army before sacking this then strategically important town in 1315. It was never to recover its previous significance.

In the early 17th century Kells and Connor were part of the Ulster Plantation, and were settled mainly by Scottish Presbyterians. They were to become two of the North’s most predominantly Presbyterian villages (they still have no fewer than four Presbyterian churches of various denominations). The religious revival which was to sweep Protestant Ulster in the late 1850s began in a school hall near Kells.

In 1798, while Henry Joy McCracken was attacking Antrim, 500 men from Kells and Connor successfully attacked and took nearby Randalstown. One source states that “they were almost to a man engaged in the rebellion.” In the aftermath of the defeat of the United Irishmen, a guerrilla campaign was waged in the nearby glens and several local leaders were captured and hanged.

Meanwhile the twin villages were becoming part of the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries numerous woollen and linen mills grew up along the Kellswater River. In 1780 Francis Dinsmore came from Donegal and in 1796 set up what was to become the Old Green Woollen Mill, which would thrive, under successive Dinsmores, liberal and progressive employers, until the mid-1980s. Dinsmore Textile Solutions, with a headquarters and a dyeing and finishing plant in Kells, and factories and offices in England and Russia, is now an internationally successful company in finishing and trading fabrics.

In 1912 Kells and Connor, like so much of Protestant Ulster, came out massively in support of the Ulster Covenant. In 1914 the local Church of Ireland minister’s car was the first to arrive to pick up guns at Larne harbour during the Larne gun running.

Now there is no more British village in Northern Ireland. Last week, nearly two months after the ‘Twelfth’, its streets were festooned with Union flags (or bristling with Union flags? One’s use of words often depends on one’s political viewpoint). It boasts four Orange lodges, the oldest dating back to 1810. Anybody who continues to doubt the existence of two radically different and mutually uncomprehending Irelands (Do such old-fashioned nationalists still exist?) should spend a couple of hours in Kells and Connor. People here, when they think of the South of Ireland at all, consider it to be a foreign country.

Yet if you strip away the politics and turn a blind eye to the flags, Kells looks and feels like scores of suburbanised Irish villages, with its Supervalu supermarket, its Chinese and Indian takeaways (God bless the leavening element brought by the hardworking Chinese, Indians, Poles and other immigrants), its computer shop and its post-1990 housing estates.

As this all-too-brief outline makes clear, Kells’ history is deeply entwined with the story of Ireland. Yet how many people south of the border know or care about its fascinating and multi-faceted history, or that of similar northern villages? Situated as it is in the heartland of Ulster Unionism, is it perhaps the least known historic village in Ireland? For the vast majority of Southerners the beautiful and historic lands of Antrim north of Belfast are terra incognita, an area that they rarely if ever visit and which is ‘beyond the Pale’ in a host of different ways.

All this is a dilemma for those of us who insist on thinking of Ireland as one island and one country, whatever the political and constitutional barriers. A leading Belfast community worker with a loyalist paramilitary background was once described to me as “politically British and culturally Irish.” That’s how I see the forgotten villages of Kells and Connor. It makes me sad because I believe that any non-violent solution to the age-old imbroglio of Ireland and Northern Ireland has to accommodate the ‘British Irishness’ of places like these. And I can’t see how that is going to happen – unless perhaps a new non-sectarian Northern Irish identity can be allowed to emerge.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 8 Comments