The Border Region as a microcosm of opinion across the island

Posted on Monday, 21 August, 2023 by andypollak

I have a particular fondness for the border town of Clones; it was a place I visited frequently during my 14 years running the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. It was in the news earlier this month for all the wrong reasons. Two lovely teenage girls (one of them the daughter of Syrian refugees) were killed in a road accident at a notorious local blackspot on their way to their school’s ‘debs’ ball.

Clones is a pretty place. Anyone who has sat in the Diamond on a summer’s day and looked out over the small green hillsides of County Monaghan stretching away to the south and east will attest to that. It is also a town that has picked itself up off the floor several times in its recent history. In the 19th century it had been the hub of the railway network in Ulster – ‘the Crewe of the North’ – with over 40 trains passing through every day on lines linking it with Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Dundalk, Sligo, Bundoran, Enniskillen, Armagh and points in-between. In the early 1920s, before the newly drawn border started to destroy its economy, Clones was described by the Boundary Commission as the most prosperous town in the region.

But then came the border, and Clones became a deserted and neglected frontier outpost, forgotten by the new government in faraway Dublin, cut off from its natural hinterland in Fermanagh, with most of its people crossing into Northern Ireland to work and shop. The final blow was the onset of the Northern ‘Troubles’ at the beginning of the 1970s: three of the four roads leading out of the town went into Northern Ireland and were cratered by the British Army; 45 businesses closed in the course of the conflict; the town was twice bombed.

“Clones became, in effect, a microcosm of the conflict, exhibiting in sharp relief the experience of the Southern Border communities as a whole: loss of hinterland; waves of economic decline; disinvestment by the state; the effects of physical violence and tension arising from the militarization of the surrounding area; the fractured social connections arising from the road closures; a Protestant exodus”, wrote the authors of a 2005 study of the Southern border region, The Emerald Curtain.1

But since 1998 it has bounced back. The EU-funded cross-border Clones-Erne East Partnership invested in several innovative projects: notably the Peace Link, a multi-disciplinary sports complex aiming to build better relationships between people in the Monaghan-Fermanagh cross-border region using sport as the medium. The Upper Lough Erne to Clones section of the Ulster Canal was re-opened. The extremely hard-working Clones Family Resource Centre, headed by local woman Angela Graham – a model of its kind – was set up to address poverty and social exclusion, running everything from family support and mediation services to baby and toddlers groups, from ‘peace dialogues’ to women’s groups, from a men’s shed to a ‘hens’ shed. There is even a Clones Film Festival, now 22 years old (put the date in your diary: the bank holiday weekend, 26th-29th October).

Now the Clones Family Resource Centre have published a fascinating little book called Our Shared Way of Life: Listening to Border People (written by that excellent journalist, Denzil McDaniel, former editor of the Impartial Reporter in Enniskillen). It features the views of over 40 people from the border region on a range of issues including unionism, nationalism, religion, sport, history, politics, major contemporary issues, the ‘border question’, new communities and the future of Ireland and the region.

As the book itself points out, this represents a microcosm of views across the whole island of Ireland, although with a border region slant. It brings out the complexity of views in a region that is viewed as peripheral to – and usually forgotten by – the centres of power and influence in London, Dublin and Belfast. And despite what outsiders might think of an area that has been traditionally deeply – even fiercely – divided between ‘green’ and ‘orange’, these views are not always along the expected binary lines.

In a short article like this, I am going to have to be selective. One thing that struck me was the difference between unionist and nationalist views on the state of morale of the two communities. Elizabeth, a young Fermanagh Protestant with an Orangeman father who doesn’t know how she would vote in a Border poll (although since Brexit she has carried an Irish passport), said: “Nationalists seem much more savvy. At the election count parties like Sinn Fein had young nationalist women topping the poll. They were very well turned-out, although that may not seem that important. But they were all immaculately dressed, and all came from an educated background and showed real authority. By comparison, unionists looked pale, male and stale.” In the west of Northern Ireland some Ulster Unionist candidates had anti-gay and anti-GAA attitudes (much less so in the east). She believed many young people “see unionism as a hopeless case.”

In contrast, Brenda, a Fermanagh Catholic, talked about how hopeless and helpless her community used to feel in the past, but now they have “total access to expressing who you are.” “We were a community, Kinawley, very united in our Irishness and nationality. It was just such a massive cohesiveness of togetherness – even though that was outwardly suppressed, you had such a kind of strength.”

Brian, a Protestant from the Fermanagh border area, admitted to feeling “a little bit jealous, especially [of] the GAA, the way they have communities and their parishes. I think the Protestant communities, we don’t really have that relationship as much. They have great camaraderie between them, and I feel a bit envious of that at times.”

Gerard, a Catholic nationalist with a small ‘n’ from County Derry, said he knows border region Catholics who would call themselves conservative on the basis of their “economic view of the world” and were happy to be part of the UK. But Brexit and the behaviour of the British government and the DUP have meant they would now “countenance a united Ireland – they wouldn’t have done that before. Some are actually being active supporters of it now.” He is “shocked at the DUP’s lack of strategy. The Sinn Fein thing is always to prove the North doesn’t work as an entity. The DUP is doing it for them, and it’s the lack of strategic vision to see they they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

However he doesn’t think much of Sinn Fein’s strategy either. “Sinn Fein go out and do these memorials to IRA people. Is that supposed to make any single Protestant feel any more likely to want to join a united Ireland – particularly now when they are becoming the biggest party down there [in the Republic]?

There were relatively few comments about the 1971-1997 IRA border campaign, which took such a toll on local members of the RUC and UDR. John, a Protestant from Monaghan now living in Fermanagh, believes the legacy of the conflict is one-sided against Protestants. “A lot of men were murdered and forgot about. We have to forget and move on, whereas a lot of communities [he obviously means the Catholic community] want answers and want justice. They want compensation and they want to blame someone; whereas I have to live every day and meet the man (at the shop) that perpetrated those deeds.”

Derek is an unusual Fermanagh man, christened in the Church of Ireland but now an atheist with “a disdain for all religions equally”. His uncle, who was in the UDR, was shot dead by the IRA before he was born, and he grew up the shadow of that murder. A businessman, he believes the Protocol gives Northern Ireland a great opportunity: “All I see is opportunity. Why are none of our political leaders shouting about this opportunity? If we have to deal with this bullshit that is Brexit that was forced upon us – let’s make some lemonade with the lemons we’ve been given.”

Michelle is an unusually empathetic Fermanagh woman: as a northern Catholic who has worked on both sides of the border, she said “the people I most identified with were the Southern Protestants. Somebody said I understand their situation because I experienced the same, being a minority community.”

Sarah, a Fermanagh teacher who calls herself a humanist (she says the Republic is “streets ahead” of the North in terms of womens’ and gay rights), described the views of young people: “They want to talk about anxiety, about mental health, about their sexuality. They want to talk about politics, about poverty and being more progressive in this society and more accepting. And the environment. Those are the things that matter to them.”

There are differing views from Northern Protestants about the prospect of Irish unity. Robert and Tom, both from south Armagh, said, respectively, that it is not being discussed in their community and it won’t happen “in my lifetime.”

On the other hand Dougie, also from south Armagh and a member of the Ulster Unionist party (who has been involved in high-level meetings with politicians in Dublin) said: “We’ve a lot of learning to do. People are implying that constitutional change is coming, but from a unionist/loyalist perspective they don’t want constitutional change. If you demonstrate to me that my children would be healthier, wealthier and better off, then I have an open mind. But nobody has done that.” He said nobody has addressed the question: “What do we do the day after a Border poll with the losing side?”

Pamela, a Protestant from the Fermanagh border who works in the Church of Ireland, says in her network people are talking more about the potential of a united Ireland. “Me personally, I have no fear of a united Ireland. I’ve worked cross-border all my life. But the fear is what becomes of the Protestant community in a united Ireland. How are they catered for? How are their traditions and cultures respected?”

Pamela talked about the “cognitive dissonance” of community relations, particularly in farming communities. “People of one side who generalise and criticise the other’s political affiliation also see the value of friendships, human connections and working with each other on a daily basis.” There are probably more cross-border contacts now than at any time since partition, the book’s author believes.

Eddie, a former IRA man whose family moved from Belfast to the Clones area when he was in his early teens, believes “there’s no need for armed struggle” any more, even though he has “big problems” with the Sinn Fein leadership’s strategy in “legitimising the Six County state.” Having come into contact with Protestants for the first time, he said: “I have a lot more understanding of why the other tradition was fearful, and hopefully they understand why we were fearful as well.”

One of the most interesting things about Monaghan is that it is one of the counties with the largest proportions of immigrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) in the whole island, and for the most part they seem to have settled in well. Amazingly, estimates in Clones put the proportion of such ‘new communities’ in that small town at a third to a half of the population. They have come from Ukraine, Syria, Brazil (to work in the local meat factory), Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and East Timor, among other countries. “I was very heartened by the fact that young Syrian lads were saying they loved Clones; they feel welcome,” said Shauna, who works for an organisation in Monaghan helping new communities. Largy College, the town’s secondary school, was the first School of Sanctuary – a school pledged to offer welcome and integration to immigrant children – in the Republic.

Immigration is a sign that a country is on the right tracks. Despite the rather ignorant populism of some of the remarks of border people about the Republic’s politicians, with unemployment at a level lower than at any time in its history (4%) and government coffers groaning with tax income (with a €65 billion budget surplus forecast over the next four years), that optimism seems well-founded. Our Shared Way of Life ends on a firmly upbeat note: “When asked directly about their hopes for the future, virtually everyone interviewed expressed optimism, even if some slightly tempered it with concern.” The return to the area of younger families and the influx of new communities leads to “a belief that the area’s people are ready to leave a difficult and dark past behind and grasp new opportunities.”

1 The Emerald Curtain: The Social Impact of the Irish Border, Brian Harvey, Assumpta Kelly, Sean McGearty, Sonya Murray, 2005.



Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Why not a loyalist woman as the symbol of the ‘new Ireland’? Why not Bessie Burgess?

Posted on Thursday, 3 August, 2023 by andypollak

I was in Galway last month to see the brilliant production by the Druid theatre company of Sean O’Casey’s classic play set during the 1916 Rising: The Plough and the Stars. This is the tragic story of Jack Clitheroe, who abandons his young wife Nora to fight with the Irish Citizen Army: he is killed and she goes mad with grief. But it is also a fabulous comedy performed by the inhabitants of a poverty-stricken Dublin tenement, led by a raucous, drunken carpenter, Fluther Good, and a loyalist street fruit-vendor, Bessie Burgess.

This is a pacifist and socialist play in its portrayal of the pointlessness of nationalist violence and the effects of that violence on poor people. The author of the definitive O’Casey biography, Christopher Murray, says that without a doubt it is his greatest play. “It is the one with the greatest intensity, the one which most ambitiously addresses the human comedy at the point where violent public events suddenly transform it into tragedy.” It is no coincidence that it has been performed all over the world, in dozens of languages.

Born a Protestant, O’Casey was formerly a fierce nationalist: a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic League and secretary of the workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army. But the great Dublin lock-out of 1913, led by Jim Larkin, convinced him that that the cause of labour took precedence over the cause of Irish freedom, and he was bitterly critical of Larkin’s successor, James Connolly, for bringing the Citizen Army out to fight alongside Padraic Pearse’s rump Irish Volunteers in Easter Week 1916. O’Casey believed that (in Professor Murray’s words) the Rising was “the root of a succession of wars and acts of terror succeeded by the civil war of 1922-23” I would add that the succession continued into the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ of 1968-1998. He also believed – and wasn’t he right? – that it laid the foundations for the conservative, bourgeois Free State six years later.

In Galway, for the first time (and I must have seen The Plough and the Stars three or four times), I was struck by a new thought: the centrality to the play (along with Nora Clitheroe and Fluther Good) of the working-class Protestant woman, Bessie Burgess (beautifully played by Hilda Fay). She is an unashamed loyalist, singing ‘Rule Britannia’, bemoaning her soldier son coming back from the Western Front with a shattered arm, and taunting the women of the house for “cuddlin their boys into th’ sheddin’ of blood. Fillin’ their minds with fairy tales that had no beginnin’, but, please God, ‘ll have a bloody quick endin’!

In the end she is one of the few heroes of the piece (albeit a flawed, human hero). She dies courageously, after being shot trying to pull Nora away from a dangerously exposed window. But she also shows generosity, tenderness and extraordinary love and kindness (as well as being an aggressive harridan when she’s roused). She is the one who gives the dying consumptive girl Mollser a mug of milk. She mothers, nurses and protects Nora, taking her into her own cramped apartment when the young deserted wife is on the verge of madness.

So here is my unlikely proposal. Bessie Burgess should be held up as a symbol for the ‘new Ireland’: a Protestant loyalist woman who embodies the heroic values of courage, fortitude and kindness that we will badly need if we are going to forge a harmonious and peaceful Ireland in the years ahead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful and amazing if the ‘new Ireland’ were to have a unionist woman as one of its symbolic figures? There could be a Bessie Burgess stamp and a Bessie Burgess festival. And a Bessie Burgess playwriting competition: is it totally outlandish to suggest that one of our talented young woman playwrights might even write a play around a Belfast Protestant version of Betty who might represent a vision of reconciliation in Northern Ireland and Ireland? I can think of a few possible models: the Shankill Road community worker, the late May Blood; the East Belfast Irish language activist, Linda Ervine; or even that great, pro-Irish moderating force on her extremist husband, Eileen Paisley.

Because the ‘new Ireland’ will need some new reconciling symbols if any element of Ulster unionism is going to feel any smidgen of loyalty to it. Some traditional symbols are clearly too embedded in Irish nationalist iconography to be changed. The tricolour, with its white ‘peace line’ between the Green and the Orange, has come to be seen as an entirely hostile banner by most unionists because of its expropriation by the IRA. However, very few people in the present Republic will be prepared to give it up.

But what about pledging a referendum to insert into the Irish Constitution a clause recognising the loyalty to the British monarchy of a significant minority of people on the island? Will Irish people be prepared to make such a generous gesture of inclusion to the monarchy-loving unionists – to make the ‘new Ireland’ a tiny bit more British in order to make it a warmer house for them? Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy understands the need for this. He wrote last month: “The question of a new united Ireland that is, in order to reflect and accommodate the allegiances of Northern Ireland’s unionist/loyalist community, a bit more British than the current Republic is, you might think, an important part of any discussion about that subject. But it is one that many enthusiasts for national reunification with the fourth green field seem unwilling to contemplate.”1

And what about adopting the unifying rugby anthem, ‘Ireland’s Call’, as our national song, given that it is already sung enthusiastically by followers of that all-island game from the Protestant and unionist North? It’s an artless little jingle, but even so, it’s surely more appropriate to our times than the militaristic early 20th century dirge that we all sing at the moment.

Here’s a better idea. Let’s have an all-Ireland competition to compose a new anthem alongside the Betty Burgess playwriting contest. Let’s encourage writers and composers to look to the anthems of some of the other small European republics which are the same vintage as ourselves, countries like the Czech Republic and Finland. The Czech anthem is full of lines glorying in the peace and beauty of its countryside: “Midst the rocks sigh fragrant pine groves/Orchards decked in spring’s array/Scenes of paradise display.”

The Finns proclaim: “No hidden vale, no wavewashed strand/is loved, as is our native North/Our own forefathers’ earth.” In sharp contrast, what do we in Ireland have to offer in the third decade of the 21st century, with bloody war again in the East and climate catastrophe threatening the marvellous planet that is our common home? “Mid cannon’s roar and rifle’s peal/We’ll chant a soldier’s song”, we sing mindlessly (me along with everyone else) in Croke Park and the Aviva. It’s not as though those two countries haven’t also suffered from war and oppression: shortly after independence in 1918, Finland went through a horrific six-month civil war in which 36,000 people were killed (1,600 died in our equivalent); and what was then Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis and later invaded by the Soviet Union.

What I’m proposing is that the leaders and people of the Republic should make a couple of large, unilateral gestures of welcome and generosity to the beleaguered unionist people of the North to begin to show that we really want them as part of a new all-Ireland polity and society. We should not leave such gestures to be part of the hard-nosed negotiations that will inevitably have to accompany an eventual Border Poll, but offer them some open-hearted assurance in the near future that they need have no fear of joining with us to build that new society on the island.

My friend Frank Schnittger believes such gestures would be pointless, not impressing the unionists and giving the unfortunate impression that we want to return to becoming more like Britain (and the kind of old-fashioned, imperialist Britain that too many unionists hanker after).2 He may be right about the first point, although I hope not – I believe a small but increasing number of people of Ulster unionist stock are beginning to look at closer relations with the confident, prosperous Republic with new eyes since Brexit. They are already impressed by the practical, mutually beneficial cross-border projects set in motion by Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative.

He is certainly not right about the second. Trying to understand and accommodate unionists in order to help them move towards a peaceful, harmonious future in Ireland does not have to dilute our Irishness in any way. My wise friend, Bob Collins, who knows Northern Ireland well from his time as head of the Equality Commission there, put it well at a British-Irish Association conference a few years ago.  “For those nationalists in the Republic (and not everyone in the Republic is a 32 county nationalist) who desire a united Ireland, the first step on any road that may conceivably lead to the achievement of their goal is to get to know unionists, to come to understand their Britishness, to recognise and value their traditions and, gradually, to seek to persuade them, by their words and by their deeds, that they have in mind a future democracy that would respect and protect Britishness with the same fervour and commitment as they would respect and protect Irishness. That is not the work of a referendum campaign, nor of five years leading up to a referendum. It is the work of at least a generation. And that is only the beginning. Not to realise that is not to want a united Ireland that would be worth having.” 

1 ‘A united Ireland would have to be a bit more British’, Irish Times, 15 July

2 Recent Comment on blog: ‘A United Ireland will have to include unionists – so let’s get on with the difficult task of including them’, 16 January 2023

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

What has really changed in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years?

Posted on Monday, 10 July, 2023 by andypollak

Last week I attended a reception in the Irish government’s splendid house in Notting Hill in Belfast to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Opsahl Report.1 This landmark report, based on the views of around 3,000 people in over 550 written submissions and the opinions expressed at 19 public hearings about ways forward for Northern Ireland during a period of particular deadlock and despair, has been seen as one of the early seeds of the NI peace process. It was chaired by an internationally eminent human rights lawyer from Norway, Torkel Opsahl, and I was its coordinator. However, it has been almost completely forgotten and, until now, unmarked.

The 1992-1993 Opsahl Commission’s uniqueness was that it collected and highlighted the views of civil society in Northern Ireland: community and voluntary sector groups, women’s groups, churches, business groups and trade unions, cross-community dialogue groups and a wide range of individuals from prelates to paramilitaries, taxi drivers to bankers, prisoners to schoolchildren to academics. It was itself a venture that came out of the idealism of a group of 200 people active in civil society who called themselves Initiative ’92. Many prominent people contributed submissions: people like the 20th century’s most influential Irish civil servant, T.K.Whitaker; distinguished former senior British civil servants Sir Kenneth Bloomfield and Sir Oliver Wright; the Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Robin Eames, the poet Michael Longley and the broadcaster Robin Day.

There is no room here to detail its many conclusions and recommendations. Among the latter were at least four that would find their way in some form into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement: an equal voice for the two communities in the government of Northern Ireland; the legal recognition of such ‘parity of esteem’; the necessary involvement of Sinn Fein in any settlement (although it would have to renounce its justification of the use of violence first); and a Bill of Rights (still to be implemented).

The Opsahl Commission’s distinctiveness was in the fact that it gathered the views of ‘ordinary’ people rather than politicians (although the political parties, with the exception of the DUP, were persuaded to take part). What I want to do in this blog is to take a few submissions from those ‘ordinary’ people which particularly impressed the Opsahl Commissioners and ask if in the past 30 years there have been any significant improvements that represent real progress in Northern Ireland on the issues they raised.

Dr Brian Gaffney, a GP from Downpatrick, started his 1992 submission by saying: “I feel, as a Catholic, no sense of belonging to the fabric of society that makes up the official state of Northern Ireland”. He said that “as a person of liberal and left-wing political leanings, I have no means of expressing my views and feelings in a public forum”. He stressed that he abhorred violence.

He noted that the British government insisted that it was perfectly legitimate for someone like him to aspire to a united Ireland, “so long as this is deferred to the far distant future and not pursued by violent means.” Also that “such unity could come about if a majority in Northern Ireland so wishes. This indeed makes this issue a respectable political aim for anyone to hold.” However, he felt that many of the important structures of NI society (the RUC, the district councils, Queen’s University) “discriminate against this viewpoint by emphasising the relative ‘superiority’ of holding the similarly legitimate wish to maintain the link to Britain.”

“I would like to play a role in our society. I would like to feel at home in the city hall of my home city. I would like to assume that my local police constable had my safety and security as high on his or her agenda as my Protestant neighbour’s. Indeed, why should I not feel these things are so? I am a respectable member of the community, I wish no one ill, I pay my taxes and so on. But I would like to do all these things and still hold my ‘legitimate’ aspiration, still feel my Irish identity. Yet if I express these feelings, am I not assumed to be a closet ‘Provo’? Am I not forbidden open access to officialdom? These are feelings which I believe prevent a sizeable proportion of the Catholic community from playing a proper role in Northern Irish life. It is my belief also that both sides lose in this situation: we are frustrated in our wish to take part; Northern Ireland is denied the benefit of using our talents and diverse abilities.”

I met Dr Gaffney at last week’s reception and he was pessimistic. He said some things had changed for the better in the North: violence is now an “anomaly” and nationalists like him can support Irish unity without harm to their job or education prospects. “However, no one could argue that the North has become a normal European society whose concerns are the typical bread and butter issues of political and civic life. Yes, of course, we too are facing the consequences of economic austerity, globalisation and climate change. We too have issues around gender identity and ethnic discrimination. But always in the background and frequently in the foreground our political leadership and priorities are still based on orange and green. Sectarianism would appear to be the only effective way to engage the wider population, young and old.”

Raymond Ferguson is a former Enniskillen solicitor and liberal Ulster Unionist councillor in Fermanagh. He wrote in his submission that since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, British policy had been “to try to weary unionists, in particular, into a state of mind where they eventually accept what Whitehall policy-makers conceive to be the inevitable – that their political future lies on this island and not on the British mainland, and that they really have to make the best of it.”

He also looked at the inevitable consequences of Northern Irish business expanding into the all-Ireland market as part of the removal of European Community trade barriers: “to the vast majority of Northern Ireland businessmen, this market is much more readily accessible and understood than the markets of Britain and the rest of Europe.” [Remember that this was just before the 1993 Single European Market opened and six years before the Good Friday Agreement].

“It is to this new commercial situation that unionist politicians must address their minds…Because of the greater facility with which business can be transacted on the same land mass rather than over sea journeys of 30-300 miles and longer, it is entirely foreseeable that, regardless of what attitude is adopted by politicians North and South, commerce will develop and grow between the North and South of Ireland. This will inevitably give rise to the need for political direction and structures to deal with the demands and problems created. It is difficult to see how the Unionist Party [this was before the DUP became a power in the land] could sensibly ignore these developments. Of necessity, political representatives of the North will become involved in dealing with representatives of the government of the Republic. To date unionists have fought shy of acknowledging any entitlement of the Republic’s government to input into Northern Ireland affairs…but as time passes it will become clear that this position is no longer tenable.”

Paul Sweeney (who was then director of the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, and would go onto head several Northern Irish government departments) agreed. He believed it was only a matter of time before the political structures on the island of Ireland would give greater expression to its “economic and social coherence”. He went on: “I am convinced that terms such as ‘united Ireland’ are redundant and delay any sophisticated discussion of pan-Ireland issues.” He urged that “the maximisation of cross-border co-operation in the island of Ireland and between the island of Ireland and Britain should be a central plank of British government policy.” Parallel with this, “every effort should be made in the Republic of Ireland to convince a besieged unionist community in Northern Ireland that their welfare can be advanced by the forging of closer relationships with the South.”

He also emphasised the direct correlation between deprivation and political violence in both Northern communities: “to remain indifferent to these levels of deprivation is to remain indifferent to peace”. In particular, he said a major anti-poverty programme would have to be aimed at young people: “Our young people, whose lives have been blighted by the sins of their fathers, need major compensatory programmes and life opportunities if they are to become the leaders, parents and citizens of tomorrow.”

Three women active in deprived Catholic and Protestant areas of west Belfast – May Blood (later Baroness Blood), Kathleen Kelly and Geraldine O’Regan – called for the establishment of Community Development Trusts in local neighbourhoods. These would help to eliminate the sense of powerlessness felt by local working class people and offer a focus for “new and emerging leadership which ultimately could bring new energy to Northern Ireland’s political structures.”.

They went on: “In our experience many local people in west Belfast work long hours, all day, every day, to provide the basic care that supports the needs of their neighbourhood. This activity is often in support of young people, unemployed, disabled, women and children. In all these areas of activity local leadership and activity has developed. Those of us who have experienced this growth of confidence feel buoyant and confident about the future of our communities.” Yet these people felt that their involvement was of “peripheral interest” to officialdom. “They have little opportunity to effect change and there is no local accountability concerning the aspects of government policy and resources which are directed towards their communities.”

From commerce and community development to culture: Dr Bob Curran, a teacher and folklorist from Portrush in north Antrim (and from a Presbyterian family), believed that the Northern Ireland problem lay not with politics, but with something more fundamental: “our perception of ourselves as having two distinct cultures and traditions.” He argued that “there may be more to unite both cultures than to separate them”, and much of this could be discovered in a common musical and folklore tradition. “Rather than there being two cultures to be accommodated, there is a single tradition – that of Northern Irishness – from which certain sections of the community, either by accident or design, choose to exclude themselves.”

In his studies, Dr Curran had found stories, tunes and traditions in Northern Protestant communities with counterparts in Catholic communities in the Republic, even though most Northern Protestants dismissed these common traditions as ‘nonsense’ and not worth passing on. He believed this could be overcome by educating children to value their culture and traditions. He did not see this as a cultural process of ‘Irishisation’ in a narrow sectarian/religious sense, but a “a celebration of our common heritage – both as Catholics and Protestants – within our respective communities and upon the island of Ireland.”

He proposed a Northern Irish version of a schools-based 1950s folklore collection project in the Republic, in which children were encouraged to collect from their parents, grandparents and relatives. Such a project could “provide the basis for a shared community experience and could open the eyes of those who are going to form the next generation in Northern Ireland to the wide and rich spread of tradition which exists in Ireland.”

He went on: “Protestants have constantly struggled with (or have been hostile to) any concept of an ‘Irish identity’ because they perceive it as being different and alien to their own. It was almost as if Ulster was not a province of Ireland, but rather one of the English shires. All talk of ancient Irish heroes and study of localised folk tales has been heretofore viewed (by Protestants and Catholics alike) as exclusively Catholic in tone. Such a view must be effectively challenged within the classroom. Such a perspective must also be challenged within the Catholic population – folklore, Irish myths and legends must not simply be seen by Catholics as their exclusive province, but rather as having roots within the Protestant tradition as well.”

So what has really changed in the Northern Ireland economy, culture and society over the past 30 years? Have we moved towards a more rational all-Ireland market? Probably. Have we moved towards a more sophisticated discussion of pan-Ireland issues? Probably not. Have we tried to bring the teaching of a common Northern Irish culture and history into the classroom? Not to my knowledge. Have we seen a comprehensive programme to overcome poverty in the areas most affected by the ‘Troubles’? Certainly not. Above all, have we seen any significant efforts to combat Northern Ireland’s most defining evil – sectarianism? Absolutely not: in their drive for power, tackling sectarianism is low on Sinn Fein’s priority list, while the DUP is steeped in it.

Let me finish with a comment in a submission from an extraordinary group of people, rural dwellers, none of them well-off, from the Fermanagh village of Tempo. They had been meeting across the communal divide in the Tempo Historical Society, to explore issues of local and common history, for decades. Their best known event – a day of lectures, drama and music – was called ‘A Brotherhood of Affection.’ “The United Irishmen are very attractive from a cross-community viewpoint because that was a time when Presbyterians and Catholics united against the establishment. It proves that our divisions are not of immemorial origin and the idealism of that time is inspiring. These are also the roots of republicanism. Can someone not discover common ground here and produce an ideological breakthrough?” they wrote in their submission to the Commission.

They concluded their submission by saying that Northern Ireland’s problems “need the application of the very best minds to suggest a way forward. We do not think that these are our politicians.”

1 A Citizens’ Inquiry: The Opsahl Report on Northern Ireland. Andy Pollak (editor), The Lilliput Press, 1993

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments

Refugee crisis reveals the racism in our smug republic

Posted on Monday, 19 June, 2023 by andypollak

I don’t usually write about contentious issues in the Republic of Ireland, because – although I have lived here for many years – I feel I have little to add to the hundreds of thousands of words on television, radio and in the newspapers. I prefer to write about the North because I know it better and because it is less written about here.

But this month I am going to write about the refugee crisis that has been hitting the headlines in recent weeks and months. It is a issue close to my heart because I am the son of a refugee. Last month, for the first time, it became a headline-making issue in this country, as groups of local people in the townland of Inch in County Clare and the suburb of Santry in Dublin blockaded a disused hotel and a commercial building where asylum-seekers had been moved (or were about to be moved). Homeless asylum-seekers camped out near the office handling their international protection applications in central Dublin had their tents and other possessions burned by right-wing thugs. The Garda Siochana reported that there had been 125 anti-refugee/asylum-seeker street protests since the start of the year (one banner I saw at a Dublin demonstration read: “Our children are in danger from these immigrants. Fight back”). Members of far-right groups were extremely active on social media and were touring the country to stir up ignorant, fearful people in small places like Inch.

At the same time hundreds of Ukrainians were arriving in the country every week. Ireland has been among the most welcoming countries in Europe to people fleeing the brutal Russian invasion of that country (more than 83,000 received so far). Rosita Boland, who had covered the Inch protest for the Irish Times, wrote about the hostility she encountered from locals when reporting on the arrival of 34 young male asylum seekers (‘international protection applicants’ is the more politically correct appellation) from Africa and Asia to be housed in bungalows on the grounds of a disused hotel there. She remembered covering a similar protest in Achill in 2019, when 150 locals protested around the clock for six midwinter weeks at the imminent arrival of 38 asylum seekers, women and families – with the result that those unfortunate people never turned up.

She concluded her article: “For whatever reason, to my knowledge, there were no round-the-clock protests over the arrival of Ukrainians into our communities, some of them as small and remote as Inch and Achill. Why is this?”1

I would have thought the answer was obvious (as, clearly, she does): the Ukrainians don’t have black and brown faces. We in Ireland have an extraordinary capacity for denial and doublethink: what Fintan O’Toole calls our “larger capacity for being in two minds simultaneously.” I remember the shocked, almost unbelieving reaction of letter writers to the Irish Times when I wrote an article in that paper back in 1999 about racism in Dublin. Refugees, asylum-seekers, solicitors, campaigning groups and black Irish people all agreed then that around two years earlier, when the number of asylum-seekers in Ireland for the first time had started to rise above miniscule levels, there was a perceptible change in racial attitudes here.2

The Rough Guide to Ireland of that year reported that “if you are black you may well experience a peculiarly naive brand of ignorant racism,” and this was particularly so in Irish cities. A survey of 157 asylum seekers by a Catholic campaigning organisation, Pilgrim House Community, found that 95% of African asylum-seekers interviewed had been verbally abused, while more than one in five had been assaulted. A study from the Irish Council for Overseas Students found that 89% of non-white students had experienced racial discrimination and over 40% racist abuse.

I quoted one the first political refugees to arrive here from Zaire (now Congo) who found people here friendly at first. However his attitude to Ireland changed when he was beaten up by a group of youths in broad daylight in a street in Dublin’s Temple Bar, with passers-by failing to intervene. “Older people are usually nice, ” he said. “But younger people are often nasty and become particularly aggressive when they are drunk.”

If this was happening when Ireland had infinitesimal numbers of refugees with coloured faces – among the 424 people seeking asylum in 1995, 3,883 in 1997 – how much more must it be the case when we now have over 20,000 asylum-seekers in the country?

It is not that we are more racist than other white, European people. It is that we are just as self-protective and xenophobic when it comes to welcoming (or not welcoming) to this peaceful and prosperous country our luckless black and brown fellow human beings fleeing war and persecution in countries like Congo, Somalia, Syria and Afghanistan. We have plenty of room in this (by European standards) under-populated country and we are now one of the richest countries in the world, and one with serious labour shortages in areas like construction and the health service which could be partially filled by refugees who are extremely anxious to work. Yet it took many years for an asylum seeker to get the right to work here until a 2017 Supreme Court decision finally forced a reluctant government to open the labour market to these usually skilled and well-educated people (because it is largely skilled, well-educated and extremely determined people who manage to overcome the massive obstacles to reach this far corner of Europe).

One thing I find objectionable is the smug belief among many Irish people that we are somehow more righteous than British (in particular) and other European peoples because we never had an empire and thus never – almost uniquely in Western Europe – oppressed people in Africa, Asia and Latin America (and indeed had our own, pioneering anti-imperialist war of independence against the British empire). We feel morally superior because we are ‘neutral’ with no attachment to any nasty military bloc. We love to think that we are the most friendly, open, welcoming people in the world – “global darlings” in the words of a recent Irish Times letter-writer – who are universally loved by everyone. Maybe that’s true for tourists, and to a lesser extent white Ukrainians, but it’s not true for people with black and brown skins.

In a previous era Jews were seen as a problem. Successive Irish governments refused – along with most Western governments – to take in Jewish refugees from Nazism in the years up to the Second World War. In the late 1940s the Department of Justice refused to allow 100 orphaned children, survivors of Belsen, a temporary refuge in Ireland, calling Jews “a potential irritant in the body politic.”

Of course, most Irish people are not racist, and there are good and bad people everywhere. I have an African friend who was so badly bullied during her placement at a major Irish hospital that she completely lost her confidence and was forced to give up her heart’s desire to become a nurse. On the other hand, the daughters of another African family I know well have gone on to have successful careers in industry and the media with the support of helpful colleagues.

In a small place, good people can make a real difference. In Lisdoonvarna, at the other end of Clare from Inch, 130 asylum-seekers first arrived to stay in a local hotel in 2018. They have since been joined by many more asylum-seekers and Ukrainians, so that in this community of 800 there are now around 1,200 refugees and asylum-seekers from 23 countries. There is the inevitable grumbling that the town is being taken over by outsiders, and local services are being stretched to the limit. But there have been no protests, no marches, no fights, no graffiti. The schools have played a huge role here, welcoming and integrating the newcomer children. “It has evolved, become a fait accompli, we just got on with it,” says one local woman. She also notes that some asylum-seekers have gained healthcare qualifications and are now working as carers for elderly and other vulnerable local people. Wexford and Waterford are other places where the schools – through the Schools of Sanctuary movement – have taken a leading role in welcoming refugee families.

Meanwhile in the Mediterranean 78 people died and hundreds more – including children – are missing after an overloaded fishing boat full of Egyptian, Syrian and Pakistani refugees sank off the Greek coast last week. Can we even begin to imagine the terror of those children trapped in the hold as that boat went down? An estimated 51,000 people have died trying to reach Europe in this and other ways since 1993. As the brilliant and courageous Africa-based Irish journalist Sally Hayden says, these dead people are “victims of the world’s inequality. They are the victims of the fact that the privileged people on this planet have freedom of movement due to the luck of where they were born, while much of the rest must risk their lives in the hope of accessing a secure, dignified life.”3 We Irish are right up there among those privileged people. As Almut Schlepper, a Dublin friend who spends many months every year working with refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, points out: “We can fly to Egypt for a fraction of the price these unfortunate people paid for a passage in an overloaded coffin ship.”

I do not underestimate the problems facing politicians dealing with this extremely difficult humanitarian issue (I recognise, for example, that Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman has had to move mountains to get hundreds of homeless asylum seekers off Dublin’s streets over the past month). I also recognise that there are some economic refugees from Eastern European countries like Georgia and Albania misusing the asylum process. But weren’t hundreds of thousands of Irish people economic refugees not so long ago? Is it beyond the ability of this now rich country to accommodate a few thousand people who only want to get jobs and thus contribute to the Irish economy? Is it beyond the capacity of the resource-rich super-state that is the EU (and the 10,000 staff of its border agency Frontex) to deal with a relatively small group of people smugglers without bringing down the shutters on the hopes for a better life of a few million desperate people in the Middle East and Africa? Should we not be following the urging of the International Organisation for Migration and the UN refugee agency UNHCR by increasing safe migration pathways to Europe and boosting search and rescue capability in the Mediterranean? I believe future historians will judge this episode in European history to be a shameful one.

PS I will outline a more positive picture of immigration and multiculturalism in Ireland in a forthcoming blog.

1 ‘Ireland is not as welcoming as we would like to believe’, Irish Times, 7 June 2023

2 ‘Welcome to Dublin, unless you’re black, Irish Times, 24 April 1999

3 ‘How have we normalised mass drowning?’ Irish Times, 16 June 2023

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | 4 Comments

Why I am an (Irish) Unitarian

Posted on Tuesday, 6 June, 2023 by andypollak

This is a slightly edited version of an address I gave in the St Stephen’s Green Unitarian Church, Dublin, on 30th April.

I’m going to talk today about why I am a Unitarian. But I am going to start with something about my family background, which is a bit unusual for a Dublin resident. My background on my father’s side is full of ambiguity. My father, whom I loved and admired greatly, although he was often an unhappy person, was born a German-speaking Jew (of Polish extraction) in that part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire which was soon to become the independent republic of Czechoslovakia. As a young man, like so many idealistic young Central Europeans of his background, he became a Communist and fought and was badly wounded in the Spanish Civil War. He then lived a wandering existence – complete with false names, false papers, constant danger and finally imprisonment – in France, the Balkans and India. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, worked as a journalist, met and married my mother, an adventurous young Presbyterian woman from County Antrim, who was teaching in Prague, before falling foul of his erstwhile comrades soon after the Communists took over the country in 1948. His sin was his continuing and passionate belief in freedom of expression as a cornerstone of any civilised and humane society. He was forced to flee with my mother, and me inside her, back to Northern Ireland.

My father died relatively young in the late 1970s, after spending large parts of the rest of his life suffering from physical and psychiatric illness. He has left me with an enduring belief in democratic socialism as the most humane – if not, up to now, the most economically effective – means of governing human society; an empathy with victims of injustice; and a huge admiration for the courage of those who take difficult and dangerous moral stands.

If my father was born to insecurity and rootlessness, I had the great privilege to be born into a family of solid, God-fearing, fair-minded Northern Presbyterians. I sometimes say, only half-jokingly, that the best and luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the near-accident of my birth in Ireland. Or when I’m not feeling so kind about my Ballymena birthplace, I put it differently. I say I was conceived in Prague and born in Ballymena – a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous.

But actually that is not true. The privilege of my Irish birthplace – you’ll notice that privilege is a word that crops up a lot in this talk – has given me a deep security, rooted in a lifelong love of a place and its people that was never allowed to my father. It has put me in what I believe is the privileged position of being both an insider and an outsider in this country: an insider because of my birth, my residence, my family, my choice to try to live as an active and committed citizen of this Republic; an outsider because of my name, my accent, my religion, and my role as a journalist for the first part of my working career, and a developer of cross-border cooperation between the Republic and Northern Ireland for the second part.

And then there is my Unitarian aspect. I am no theologian, so maybe the rather diffuse and often ill-defined theology of Unitarianism suits me. I am a Unitarian and a Christian for the simple reason that these two sets of belief help me, a child of the latter half of the 20th century and a slightly bewildered citizen of the first half of the 21st, in my search for some deeper spiritual meaning amid the increasing complexity, superficiality and injustice of so much of contemporary life. That deeper spiritual meaning has been personified and taught by holy and heroic people since the beginning of time through the concept of a God who creates all things. I believe in that great, beautiful, although incomprehensible coherence in the universe – therefore I think I must believe in God.

Like most Unitarians, I believe in Jesus Christ as one of those inspirational, God-given figures in human history – by far the greatest one in my culture – rather than as the ‘son of God’. Therefore, like most Unitarians, I hold to the belief in Christ as a great and godly man whose teachings are to be followed, rather than one element in the trinitarian Godhead to be worshipped. Christ is a divinely inspired exemplar and inspiration. Had I been born in another culture it might have been Mohammed or the Buddha. From this comes the Unitarian emphasis on tolerance – all systems of belief in a God who preaches love and justice as the highest goods on this earth are worthy of equal respect and reverence.

I am conscious that I haven’t taken Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ and am therefore in danger of becoming trapped in the temptation of my time, the perpetual search. To quote the Irish Catholic theologian Micheal Paul Gallagher: “In this century [he means the 20th century], we seem to know so much that we can decide with confidence about so little – hence our frequent vagueness about concrete truth and concrete commitments. It can seem more honest to remain in a threshold stance, wondering but waiting.”

One thing I do know, however. Whatever the form of the search, I believe this search for some more unselfish, loving, Christian – in its broadest sense – way of life on this earth is essential to human survival and sanity. Tim Winton, the brilliant Australian – and Christian – novelist puts it like this: “At the end of the day the only definition of any importance for me is love and justice. If it doesn’t fit into that, I’m not interested. People are capable of amazing things. I don’t see people as irredeemably corrupt or doomed to viciousness. Not even the great 20th century cul-de-sac of Marxism could make me think that there isn’t any point in people trying to share wealth and power and demand justice in personal and legislative ways.”

When I look around at the contemporary world – the huge inequalities, the unending suffering of poor people in war-torn countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, the refusal to face up to potentially catastrophic climate change, the deep dishonesty and megalomania of so many political leaders – I am often tempted to give up on any belief in a benevolent deity. During the pandemic I re-read the great French existentialist novelist Albert Camus’s classic The Plague. One of his themes is the nobility of “common decency” that doctors, nurses, health, sanitary, retail and other workers show in terrible times like those. It’s a kind of ‘common person’s heroism’ although Camus (who was himself a hero of the French resistance during the Second World War) did not believe in heroism. The ‘heroes’ of this classic novel are ordinary people, full of doubt, trying to do their best against overwhelming odds: Rambert, a journalist who gives up his plan to escape the plague locked-down town to re-join his wife in order to join one of the sanitary teams; Grand, an awkward, low-level but big-hearted municipal clerk who is secretly trying – and failing – to finish a novel; and Doctor Rieux, utterly exhausted and near despairing, who tells his priest friend Paneloux after they both witness the horrific death of a small child (Paneloux has urged him to “love what we cannot understand”, i.e. God): “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

Camus, who witnessed all sorts of horrors, continued to believe that deep down most people were good. He believed that to single out heroism for particular praise implied that “such actions stand out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule”. The narrator in The Plague [i.e. Camus] does not share that view. “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding [I think he is talking about Communism here]. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” I’m not quite sure what he’s saying in this last phrase. It may be something to do with Camus’s ‘existentialism’: his belief that no religious or political dogma can be allowed to stand in the way of the requirement for all human beings clear-sightedly to make their own moral decisions in a turbulent and godless world.

I find that as a left-of-centre person, I fit well into the freethinking, tolerant group of people who make up the Dublin Unitarian congregation. I like the identification with liberal Presbyterians and Unitarians – people like Henry Joy and Mary Ann McCracken, William Drennan, Archibald Hamilton Rowan and Samuel Neilson – who were prominent in the United Irishmen’s struggle for an independent, democratic Irish republic. I recommend the excellent book by my fellow church attender and former senior trade unionist, Fergus Whelan, on 18th century Dublin Unitarianism and revolution, Dissent into Treason.

I have also found Unitarianism’s idea of ‘progressive revelation’ a helpful one in my personal search for the strength to make moral and spiritual decisions in my life. To quote the long-serving early 20th century minister of this church, Ernest Savell Hicks: “Liberal thinkers in religion are not self-conceited enough to believe that they have arrived at final and ultimate truth in any department of life. They believe in a continuous and progressive revelation, and in a continuous and progressive aptitude – a sharpening of our spiritual wits, if one may be allowed the expression – whereby the soul and mind gradually become more delicately adjusted to receive the messages of God.”

I like that. I hope my spiritual wits are still sharp enough to receive messages both from my fellow human beings and from God, if he or she exists. If they’re not, then I’m not much use either as a journalistic observer of society – which I still am in many ways – or as a human being.

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

Irish media’s poor coverage of Northern Ireland not helping understanding in the Republic

Posted on Thursday, 25 May, 2023 by andypollak

Earlier this week I addressed the Belfast dialogue group Compass Points on the coverage of Northern Ireland by the media in the Republic. This is a slightly edited version of my remarks.

The first thing I should say is that what follows are the views of a former Irish Times journalist, a man in his seventies; a long-time resident of Dublin (although born in County Antrim), who was a Northern Ireland reporter for the BBC and that newspaper in the late 1970s and 1980s; who went back to Belfast in the early 1990s as coordinator of the independent Opsahl Commission, and from 1999-2013 set up and ran the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. So mine is a particular and maybe outdated view, and probably one not informed enough by contemporary social and online media. But for what it’s worth, here it is.

The key thing to understand about the Southern media’s coverage of the North is that it is serving a constituency which is largely uninterested in and indifferent to Northern Ireland. The former Director-General of RTE, Bob Collins (who also knows the North well as a former chief commissioner of the NI Equality Commission), used to say that there was interest in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when the main evening news bulletin carried graphic daily footage of killings and bombings in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere, but since the Northern violence largely finished at the end of the 1990s, that interest declined and eventually all but disappeared. That is still the situation today.

I always say that in more than 50 years of living off and on in Dublin, I can’t recall a single well-informed conversation with the journalists, academics, teachers, civil servants, cultural and voluntary sector workers who make up my friendship group about what reunification with the difficult and divided North might mean for the politics, economics and culture of the complacent – and in recent years rather successful – society that is the Republic of Ireland. And all these people are avid newspaper readers and TV news and current affairs watchers.

I’m going to focus today on the two media outlets I know best, the Irish Times and RTE. Perusing the other two main national dailies, the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner, in recent weeks in preparation for this talk, I found almost nothing about Northern Ireland. The Sunday Independent is unusual (apart from its anti-Sinn Fein tone): because of the joint ownership of that paper and the Belfast Telegraph, it carries a weekly column from the excellent Northern journalist Sam McBride.

The Irish Times and RTE do each keep two full-time journalists in Belfast (all, incidentally, from a nationalist background). These are good journalists and I have no criticism of them when it comes to reporting the politics – and it is overwhelmingly the politics they report – of Northern Ireland. I should also say that the coverage of Brexit and its impact on Ireland, North and South, by RTE’s Brussels correspondent Tony Connelly (a Northerner), has been world class. Both the Irish Times and RTE also cover the North’s elections well (although I rely on BBC NI for the granular detail) .

What I am critical of is two things: firstly, there are few if any articles or broadcasts on all the other elements that make up a living, functioning society: the economy and business, health, education, the environment, culture and the arts, local government, community development, the lives of ordinary people, and so on. It is almost as though Northern Ireland isn’t a real society, which significant numbers of Southerners (and not only republicans) probably think anyway. The region is largely seen through the narrow prism of its sectarian politics, and in particular the antics of its two big beasts, the DUP and Sinn Fein. Occasionally the Irish Times carries pieces about past atrocities, most of them at the hands of the security forces.

Secondly, there is little serious analysis and explanation of what is happening in the strange place that is the North. [I should add here that Northern Ireland really is ‘strange’ – i.e. foreign – to most people in the South: a recent tourism survey showed that 50% of the population of the Republic – two and a half million people – had never ever visited the North]. As somebody who is genuinely interested in Northern affairs of all kinds, I have to rely on some of the excellent journalists there are in Belfast for the deeper coverage and analysis that is otherwise lacking: people like Sam McBride, Suzanne Breen, Alex Kane and Allison Morris.

I’m showing my age now, but this is a far cry from when I was in the Irish Times Belfast office in the 1980s. Then – under brilliant Northern editors like David McKittrick and Ed Moloney (and Conor O’Clery before them) – Ireland’s ‘paper of record’ led the world on the big breaking stories: the IRA’s various spectacular atrocities, the Maze Prison hunger strike, the Kincora Boys Home scandal, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and so on. We had a ‘Northern Notebook’ every Saturday to analyse the week’s events; and an ‘Inside Belfast’ column every Tuesday to write about subjects other than politics and violence. Until shortly before I arrived there had even been a Northern business editor to cover the economy (economic stories are now left largely to the Press Association news agency). I have a vivid memory of Belfast Telegraph reporters hanging around our office in Great Victoria Street, waiting for the latest instalment in the Kincora Boys Home saga.

Upstairs in the RTE office, there was a similar deep seriousness about the coverage of Northern Ireland, with superb journalists like Tommie Gorman, Cathal Mac Coille and Póilín Ní Chiaráin. We all knew that our editors and bosses – men like Douglas Gageby, Conor Brady and Bob Collins – believed fervently that Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’ was an enormously important story which their readers, viewers and listeners absolutely had to pay attention to.

The former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, as a young politician in the 1960s, used to urge RTE to include more unionists in its discussion programmes. That is still not happening except in the most tokenistic way. We don’t understand the North (and particularly the unionist North) because – other than the obvious political leaders – we don’t hear from Northerners. For example, I think I have heard Alliance leader Naomi Long once on RTE in the past 12 months, and have yet to read a decent interview with or profile of her in any Southern paper. I can’t remember the last time I heard a broadcast or read an article about a Northern business or trade union or farmers’ or women’s movement leader. A recent profile of new GAA president Jarlath Burns as a pioneering school principal in south Armagh was only commissioned by the Irish Times after I suggested it.

Of course, in the final three decades of the last century Northern Ireland was often a news-leading world story, as well as a vital Irish one. Today the North’s interminable deadlock is simply boring, and there is no major violence to shock the media-consuming public. Now, with newspapers in particular being under constant threat from social media, much of what serves as analysis and debate is a kind of culture war where an individual commentator’s beliefs – ‘echo chamber’ style – trump the good journalist’s search for truth through gathering facts and evidence. Even I, a lifelong newspaper man, find myself perusing the Slugger O’Toole website (with its multitude of rubbishy ‘threads’, interspersed with some thought-provoking ones) nearly as often as I check with the Irish Times and RTE.

Why would anyone read the Irish Times to find out what is going on in Northern Ireland in any depth these days? Somebody like me, with a continuing deep interest in the place, can get a subscription to the online edition of the Belfast Telegraph to keep up with events there. This is particularly the case when I want to know what is happening in the unionist and loyalist communities, which remain terra incognita to both the Southern media and the people they are supposed to serve.

Unfortunately this leads to an uninformed and indifferent public in the South remaining uninformed and indifferent. Last month the editor of the News Letter, Ben Lowry, unapologetically told a Dublin audience that his pro-unionist paper had scant interest in events south of the border. If they were being honest, the editors of the three national papers in the South would be admitting the same thing: they are nationalist papers serving a readership with little or no interest in the North.

At least the the Irish Times has a weekly opinion columnist with a unionist bent. However, as a relatively knowledgeable Northerner, I often find Newton Emerson’s columns very unsatisfactory. As a satirist-turned-commentator, he doesn’t appear to understand the basic journalistic requirement to back up his statements by referring to confirmatory sources. Thus a good journalist will cite a “government source” or a “source close to Politician A or government department B” when making a claim. Emerson never quotes or cites anyone. As a result I never know whether I am reading something that is actually happening in Northern Ireland or only something that is happening in Emerson’s brain. Once again, it is a very far cry from the columns of the peerless Mary Holland, occasionally flanked by Vincent Browne or Nuala O’Faolain, that I used to rely on in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rory Montgomery, the former top Irish civil servant who was a key player in both the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and the diplomatic manoeuvring following the Brexit disaster, shares my unhappiness with the mixture of delusional thinking and sheer apathy that passes for opinion about Northern Ireland in the South. Agreeing with a recent blog of mine about Sinn Fein rewriting recent Irish history if and when they get into power in the Republic, he wrote: “Far too many people in the South, and elsewhere, are susceptible to cynical republican mythologising. This is not incompatible with, and indeed is only possible, because of enormous levels of ignorance and indifference.” He finds that many members of the younger generation, which is “implacable in its excoriation of manifestations of racism and sexism (with no statute of limitations) seem not to care about, or at best to relativise, the greater sin of murder.” The Sinn Fein narrative of the Northern conflict as “a noble and justified struggle for human rights quietly advances,” writes another astute observer, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy.

All this means that the Southern electorate are extraordinarily ill-informed about the North (and particularly about unionism). The Irish Times did run an excellent series of opinion polls and focus groups on unity and related issues last December and January, which only served to show how little Southerners were prepared to change their comfortable society and traditional symbols in order to accommodate Northerners (and particularly large numbers of alienated and abandoned unionists). It is difficult to overstate how ill-prepared the Southern electorate is for the extremely difficult public debate that will have to start soon here about the huge changes that will be needed to bring about a peaceful and harmonious united Ireland. And the Southern media’s return (for the most part) to its pre-1969 indifference to Northern Ireland is not helping that debate one bit.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 5 Comments

Talking to a cosmopolitan, community-focussed nationalist who is full of good ideas

Posted on Thursday, 4 May, 2023 by andypollak

Conor Patterson emphasises that he is not a politician, political commentator or member of a political party – he is a businessman with a passion for community development in his home town of Newry, in Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland.

To use an old-fashioned and probably politically incorrect phrase, he is a working class boy “made good”. Patterson’s father was a welder (sometimes with his own small company, but often unemployed), his mother a telephonist, originally from Dundalk. A bright boy, he passed the 11 Plus and went to the local Christian Brothers Abbey Grammar School. He says he owes a lot to his mother in particular. In the late 1970s the streets of Newry, with weekly rioting against the British Army, were an exciting and sometimes dangerous place for teenage boys. His mother was determined that her children should see a different world. When he was 17 she organised for the family to go on a camping holiday in Brittany. As far as their neighbours in the Barcroft estate were concerned, they “could have been going to Mongolia.”

In the following year, in the summer of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike, Patterson joined a group of friends on an archaeological dig in northern France. It was a “life changer” to be camping with young people of various nationalities and to have the sense of status that came with being an international volunteer. He went to Coventry Polytechnic to do a degree in planning and then to Trinity College Dublin for a masters in economics.

After a short period back in Coventry lecturing at the polytechnic (now a university), he joined Grampian Council in Aberdeen as a planner. This was the era of powerful regional councils in England and Scotland having wide-ranging responsibilities over social services, housing, roads, policing and economic development – the sort of functions that years later would be devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive. He was soon promoted to the key job of managing EU programmes for the council, in which he had an annual budget of £40 million. It was a formative experience that made him into an internationalist, a champion of European economic cooperation and integration.

Following the 1994 IRA ceasefire, he and his wife – also from Newry – decided they wanted to come home. He got a job running the South Armagh Area-Based Strategy, a new intervention to bring economic and social development to that marginalised and formerly violence-ridden district, which brought together 15 partners ranging from the local community association to government departments, district councils and the International Fund for Ireland. He says it was “an early introduction to the complexity of the public sector in Northern Ireland.”

In 1996 he was successful in his application for the post of chief executive of the Newry and Mourne Cooperative and Enterprise Agency (NMEA), which runs the WIN (‘Work in Newry’) business park, the first community-owned workspace project in Ireland. Over the past 27 years he has turned this into an extraordinary success story – although he is quick to pay tribute to the people in the NMEA who came before him, notably its first manager, Frank Dolaghan, its long-time chair, John McMahon and its current chair, Peter McEvoy. There are now 82 business units employing 500 people on its Newry site, and a further 400 employed at four enterprise centres in the Newry and Mourne area under its management. The most remarkable of these is probably at Flurrybridge, on the border in South Armagh, which now employs nearly 300 people and generates £12 million every year for the local economy. In largely unionist Kilkeel, Binnian business park is another successful centre.

It is difficult to over-estimate the transformation of Newry, in which the NMEA and its WIN business park have been key players. When the WIN site was purchased in 1975 with £60,000 collected from local people (including five pounds from Patterson’s mother), Newry, with an unemployment rate touching 30% and experiencing daily Troubles-related violence, was one of the most deprived towns in the UK. Now, with that rate dramatically down to 2%, it is one of the most dynamic towns in Ireland, with major companies in areas like veterinary pharmaceuticals, engineering, robotics and financial services, as well as being a hub for large British retailers setting up stores to cash in on its lucrative cross-border market.

The WIN model was adopted by the International Fund for Ireland to fund economic development partnerships in local council areas all over Northern Ireland. Patterson believes these council-led partnerships, directly involving the community and business sectors, but largely dismantled by the NI Executive in 2008, represented an important element in the upsurge of community involvement and local enterprise between the late 1980s and early 2000s, and thus a key grassroots development in the years of the peace process.

While running the NMEA, he completed a PhD on ‘the role of social capital in economic development in Northern Ireland’. One of his most interesting findings was that the areas where local economic development was a significant ‘change factor’ were predominantly nationalist – where, for example, credit unions were a key feature. He remembers discussing this with Newry unionist MLA (and former NI Executive minister) Danny Kennedy, who told him Protestants were very private people, and that the idea of their peers discussing their business and deciding whether they were worthy of a loan, was ‘anathema’ to them.

Until 2016 Patterson was just an energetic local business leader with an interest in community development and mediation (he had worked closely with the late Brendan McAllister, founding director of Mediation NI).What politicised and radicalised him was Brexit. He remembers being roundly dismissed by the DUP’s Sammy Wilson on the BBC’s Nolan radio show a few days before that vote, when he said that a hard Irish border would be the inevitable outcome of a vote to leave the EU, with a devastating impact on border towns like Newry. He was Newry Chamber of Commerce’s representative on the Northern Ireland Remain campaign, and became that campaign’s border spokesperson. He believes Brexit radicalised many Catholic middle-class people like himself, pointing to how the South Down Westminster constituency, a much sought after place to live, had gone from being represented by Enoch Powell, succeeded by two SDLP MPs, to having a Sinn Fein majority. He is now the health spokesman for the nationalist lobby group, Ireland’s Future.

Asked to define his nationalism, Patterson uses the rather old-fashioned term “anti-partitionist”. “I believe partition has been bad for Ireland, north and south, and particularly bad for Newry. I’ve seen that myself, I’ve seen the frictions and disharmonies that have affected our ability to develop normal relationships within Northern Ireland and on this island”. He gives the examples of the local Daisy Hill hospital, often threatened with serious service reductions, which only has half a hinterland (and the brand-new hospital in Enniskillen, which cannot provide emergency medical surgery because it doesn’t have enough patients); and Dundalk Institute of Technology, which cannot be designated a Technological University in the Republic because it can’t reach the required student numbers (and has few students from the adjoining jurisdiction a few miles up the road).

He stresses that he is not a “cultural exceptionalist – I don’t think that people who identify as Irish or British or as another national or cultural group are exceptional just because they were born in a particular place. I respect people because they are fellow human beings grappling with life’s challenges.”

In a recent paper read to the Belfast dialogue group, Compass Points, Patterson expanded on these reflections. “I want to end partition because I want to end the enforced separation of people living on this small island where there are no topographical barriers to separate one group from another…I want to end the constraining or the sheer preventing of collaborations in business and the delivery of services and collective working more generally, and the effect of that on personal and social patterns of behaviour.”

He advocates “a new 21st century framework of governance with subsidiarity as its guiding principle, in which decision-making is devolved as close to citizens as possible. This would be a model which envisages multiple tiers of sovereignty, one overlaying another, from the community level up through local government, to regional structures and national competences, through to the international collaborative structures which will have an increasing role to play – in disease management, protection from economic exploitation, climate change, ecosystem protection and resource renewal.

“In this model sovereignties would be layered across the island, unencumbered by an externally imposed, sub-optimal partition boundary, because so doing would bring measurable benefits to people here. This model would also mean that, where it made sense, the sovereignty for some functions or resources would be shared with parts of or all of Britain and others internationally…This would be a multilateral model. There would be a west/east dimension, and there would, for practical, administrative reasons, be a continuing Northern Ireland region dimension.

“But there will have to be a much more significant north-south level of governance, because it makes sense for business and for the delivery of public services. Failing to do that in the last 100 years has stymied the economy of the six counties that make up this region. It has made the public sector bigger by far than it should be – because this tiny jurisdiction has had to retain all the paraphernalia of a state rather than a regional tier of government – and it has made the private sector weaker and smaller than it should be (and that has stymied innovation). The effect is that the productivity of the region is carried on the shoulders of a smaller number of wealth creators per capita than elsewhere in Ireland or Britain.

“The future I want to look to is one in which a constraining border has been removed and there is a new collaborative settlement between peoples, traditions and cultures. I say to those who define themselves as British that this model doesn’t envisage an end to links with Britain. I wouldn’t suppress your Britishness. It envisages communities of common purpose not just spanning this island but also spanning the Irish Sea, including at the sub-regional level, for example between Antrim and Dumfries and Galloway, between Newry and Mourne and the area of Lancashire around Heysham (linked by shipping services with the port of Warrenpoint), between Dun Laoghaire and Anglesey, and so on.

“More fundamentally, I want to ask those who are uneasy about change in the role culture plays in society, and any perceived dilution of British culture in Ireland, to think instead about change in the world of technology and business, change in how young people interact with the world, change in the natural world (climate change, loss of species and habitats), change in lifestyle expectations, change in what is demanded of public services, change in how humans communicate, in how we secure and process information, change in how we move between places across this globe.

“Think about these things in the context of this island, these islands, this region of the world. Is it realistic or ethical – might it even be counter-productive – to ignore these strong and powerful change currents? Might it be better to seek to understand the direction in which those currents are flowing, how they interact and how they might affect the wider ecosystem in which we live – rather than try to stop the tide?

“Consider the integration of business on this island to maximise its international competitiveness – do you want to halt that? Consider the interactions between people on this island for whom those interactions make sense – whether it is working or socialising or sport or shopping – do you want to increase the frictions to make those more difficult? What about the ability of people to access effectively public services closest to them and best suited to their needs (for example in healthcare or education) – do you want to make that easier or more difficult?”

Patterson advocates a “utilitarian approach – i.e. the configuration which maximises the benefits for society and the natural environment which hosts our society.” He believes that strong cultures, like the British and Jewish cultures, for example, can thrive irrespective of (or beyond) national boundaries. He asks if isolation, nay-saying and denial are the best ways to ensure that British culture thrives on the island of Ireland.

He believes the three strands of the Good Friday Agreement can be built upon to develop a multiplicity of other strands, and that different local areas in Northern Ireland can have different ‘flavours’ (with protections for minorities built in) depending on their cultural Britishness or Irishness. “My proposition is to vest the bulk of meaningful power in the structures of local government and local civil society institutions. In Switzerland most power is in the hands of the cantons and municipalities. Three, arguably four, different cultural and language groupings live together in peace and harmony in that country because a framework enables it. We tried to do this in a meaningful way here up to 2008 through District and then Local Strategy Partnerships. I contend that those structures played a significant part in embedding the peace and building the transformation. I believe their work threatened interests which were invested in maintaining the status quo, dysfunctional and damaging though it had been, and that’s why the local partnerships were closed down. For me, it is not coincidental that when the ability to shape local change was taken out of the hands of citizens, that’s when progress slowed down, stuttered and eventually stopped.”

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

A wise, insightful examination of the perils and possibilities of Irish unity

Posted on Tuesday, 11 April, 2023 by andypollak

If readers of this blog are looking for a book to read on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, I strongly recommend Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, by my friend Padraig O’Malley, the distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts. If anyone deserves such a grandiose title, it is Dublin-born O’Malley. Not content with producing a raft of books on conflicts and peace processes in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Iraq, he has also been centrally involved in the actual business of peacemaking in those divided countries.

Space only allows a few highlights of his long and varied career as a peacemaker. In 1985 he gathered the protagonists in Northern Ireland for a major conference at Airlie House in Virginia. In 1992-1993 he provided much of the intellectual heft behind the Opsahl Commission’s ‘citizens inquiry’ on ways forward for the deadlocked North (which I coordinated). In 1997 he brought the NI parties painfully negotiating what would become the Good Friday Agreement to South Africa to meet President Nelson Mandela and other key players in bringing about the end of apartheid. And in 2008 he took 15 warring Sunni and Shia groups from Iraq to Helsinki to meet key leaders of the Irish peace process, including Martin McGuinness and former Finnish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari.

His 1983 book, The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, is in my view the best account of the first and most violent decade of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. It is one of two books I recommend to people on the Northern imbroglio, the other being Say Nothing by the American writer, Patrick Radden Keefe – in my humble opinion one of the finest journalists writing in the English-speaking world today – who has penned an endorsement on the front cover of O’Malley’s latest book.

This new book is based largely on around 100 interviews with leading members of Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Progressive Unionist Party, the Alliance Party, the UDA, the UVF, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, the Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the British and Irish civil service, along with leading academics, journalists, psychologists and civil society activists.

It is so rich in insights it is difficult to know where to begin. O’Malley – who among all the analysts of our thorny ‘national question’ is the one who goes out of his way to understand the unionist viewpoint – nevertheless expects to see a border poll by 2032. “This scenario is based on the assumption that Sinn Fein is in government in the South after 2025; that on taking office it immediately calls a Citizens Assembly and the preparatory work takes a minimum of five years; that the [NI] Executive and Assembly remain operative for two election cycles; that the Alliance Party is brought on board following Assembly elections in 2027; that a new Assembly a few years into its term requests the Secretary of State to call a referendum and he or she responds. If all goes as predicted, this will set a referendum date sometime in 2032 – two to three years after the request for one – and, in the event of a vote for reunification, an elaborate and intricate process would thereafter begin, potentially lasting 10 to 15 years, phasing in the transfer of sovereignty and the final pieces of a united Ireland in 2042-47.”

But O’Malley emphasises that everyone uses the word ‘fragile’ to describe this process – “it is easily shattered or broken.” He believes “it is hard to envisage a scenario that would not elicit an angry and hostile unionist reaction once an Irish government takes up the cudgels of unification…All roads to the future are strewn with highly combustible, unknown obstacles.” Warning that seven year border polls are a prescription for instability, he urges the Secretary of State to make it clear that “opinion polls on unity will not be a criterion unless it emerges that they provide unequivocal support for unity, including a significant element in the unionist community, over a sustained period.”

Attitudes in the complacent present-day Republic will be key. “In my view the South isn’t prepared for what Northern Ireland being reunited with the rest of Ireland is going to mean”, says the former head of the NI Community Relations Council (and former Alliance Party chair) Duncan Morrow. He gives the example of “conversations around symbolic issues” [flag, anthem, Commonwealth membership] which he says will be “brutal, difficult, endless and emotive, as they have been for 20 years in Northern Ireland.”

The former unionist Seanad member, Ian Marshall, tells an instructive story about symbols. He said to a couple of republicans: “Look, guys, if you’re serious with this, then if I went and bought a house in Cork and I wanted to put a flagpole up in the rebel county and I wanted to fly a British flag because I still have British identity, would you be comfortable with that? They said: ‘That can never happen, Ian.”

A major problem will be the rise and rise of Sinn Fein. “There is near-unanimity among interviewees that Sinn Fein in government in the South would be a major obstacle to a united Ireland”, says O’Malley. He quotes a range of people of different views on this. The Dublin TD Jim O’Callaghan, who has ambitions to lead Fianna Fail, says “one of the biggest obstacles to unification is the campaign of violence that was carried out by the Provisional IRA…It’s a deciding factor for a lot of unionist people in Northern Ireland who will not engage rationally with the topic [because of what] happened in the past.”

Sinn Fein is still seen as the political wing of the IRA, says Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie. “They still condone and celebrate the murders of the IRA over many years, some of the most heinous crimes imaginable: burning people to death, strapping people to bombs, blowing people up as they attend charity events. There’s a psyche in unionists who will just not give ground to the likes of Sinn Fein. If Sinn Fein became the largest [party in the] government in the Irish Republic, and they are the government, they will be viewed as a hostile government.” With Sinn Fein in government north and south, he believes “the whole balance of the Good Friday Agreement will come unstuck.”

The SDLP MP for South Belfast, Claire Hanna, says: “Sinn Fein’s narrative is that it was appropriate to bomb and kill to get a united Ireland. While that odour is in the air, you can understand people being uncomfortable about moving towards such a united Ireland. Unfortunately the IRA have made a lot of people associate Irish unity and the Irish Republic with death.”

Former SDLP power-sharing minister Alex Attwood fears that “there are people within Sinn Fein whose strategy is to again overwhelm unionism, demoralize them, and thus get Irish unity over the line. And then you’re going to have this hostile conversation, and God knows where hostile conversations go in this part of the world.”

What comes across strongly in his interviews, says O’Malley, is that the present Irish government “would want to see a working Northern Ireland before asking its electorate to partake in a referendum on unification.” That would all change under a Sinn Fein-led government, of course. But that party faces a conundrum. “It is not in its interest to see Northern Ireland working too well, because if too many cultural Catholics are comfortable living there, they might vote for the status quo in a referendum; at the same time, Sinn Fein has to show the electorate in the South that it can govern.”

The Alliance Party agrees with the Irish government. The author frequently quotes its leader Naomi Long on the necessary way forward. “We need all parts of the Good Friday Agreement to be functioning and we need stable government in place, and that is part of the conditions set for a poll on a united Ireland. If we can do that for a sustained period of time successfully, then we are much more likely to be resilient enough to be able to sustain in a peaceful and lawful manner the run-up to any kind of border poll, which will in itself be divisive and contentious. If you layered that on an already volatile political situation, it could be very dangerous.” If the people of Northern Ireland are unable to work together using the structures of the Good Friday Agreement, she goes on, “it is hard to say how we could then as a society actually take a rational and logical look at our long-term future on this island.” She adds that there should be a decisive majority in favour of unity in that poll, and voters should know precisely what a united Ireland entails.

One of the book’s most intriguing sections is O’Malley’s finding that the “across the board” view among those interviewees who ventured an opinion (including from Sinn Fein, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail) was that the Stormont Executive and Assembly should stay as part of any future constitutional dispensation, either as an interim stop on the road to unification or as part of the final destination. He believes that the institutions and ‘strands’ of the Good Friday Agreement (internal power-sharing, and North-South and East-West institutions) “would still have legal force following a referendum in favour of Irish unity.” He quotes Irish High Court judge Richard Humphreys, who has written several thoughtful books on moves towards unity: “Any ultimate realignment of sovereignty within an all-island framework would happen slowly, naturally and almost imperceptibly over a period of time with a stable constitutional context where the rights and identities of all were protected. There would be no jagged or unnatural discontinuities.”

This might seem unrealistically over-optimistic, but another wise northerner, Francis Campbell, Tony Blair’s former private secretary and British ambassador to the Vatican, agrees. “If you have a situation where what’s on offer in a referendum choice is the continuation of Stormont, all the checks and balances of the Belfast Agreement and very limited reserved powers at a federal all-Ireland basis, then in my view that is a lot less intimidating to some people than perhaps their worst fears about being absorbed into a system where there’s no check and balances.” Bertie Ahern is another who foresees Stormont continuing.

Perhaps surprisingly, former DUP First Minister Peter Robinson seems amenable to discussion on this fraught issue. He emphasises the importance of an agreed process. “If the result was to go in the direction of a united Ireland, you will have a long period [between the poll result and the implementation of the outcome], because if the disruption from Brexit was as polarizing as it was, you can imagine how much more polarized in Northern Ireland, and the consequences of that polarization…Going from one nation to another. That’d be absolutely massive. The amount of negotiation that would have to take place to transfer education, health, all the work of departments. Absolutely massive.”

Even more amazingly, Jeffrey Donaldson is open to this discussion too. “We’re not planning for constitutional change, but my view is that the three sets of relationships endure whatever the outcome of any future border poll, and therefore giving institutional expression to those relationships is necessary, whatever the future constitutional arrangements for Northern Ireland.”

Another revealing, although unsurprising, part of the book deals with the current plight of the unionist and loyalist communities. In their own words, says O’Malley, unionism is “unsettled’, ‘has done a poor job at safeguarding the union’, ‘is in decline’, ‘is living in denial’, ‘cannot speak with a collective voice’, ‘needs to talk to itself’ and ‘is always seeing enemies’; ‘its problem is with itself’, ‘its back against the wall’, it is unsure of its place in the United Kingdom.” “Many interviewees said that political unionism is ‘dead’, in the sense of being unable to adapt to changing circumstances.”

“I can think of no period over my fifty years in politics where unionists have felt more alienated than they are now,” says Peter Robinson. They feel “pilloried for not meeting each of the ongoing, incessant and unending demands from republicans to erase everything British and indulge everything Irish…[they] speculate that the laws which will apply here will, in the greater part, be made not in Stormont or at Westminster, but in a Dublin-influenced European Union, without a single elected representative from Northern Ireland having a vote.”

The prominent Belfast priest, Father Tom Bartlett, sees a striking contrast between “incredibly self-confident” young republicans and young loyalists who were once characterised by religious hatred but whose narrative these days is one of “betrayal, risk, threat and insecurity.”

The author repeats the conclusion from his 1983 book, The Uncivil Wars, that Protestant fears then of being incorporated against their will into an economically backward, Catholic Church-dominated all-Ireland republic – despite the fact that those elements of an earlier age have now almost completely disappeared – are “genetically encoded – a mechanism, like anxiety, necessary for the survival of the species…the inner fear of extinction that lies deep within the Protestant psyche.”

There are a very few people south of the border who recognise or try to understand this. Fianna Fail Senator Mark Daly says many submissions to his Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement “referenced a fear of a united Ireland being that of triumphant nationalism. This fear is not without foundation, and that is why we in the South must change not only our vision of a united Ireland but also how we speak about it. Language was a key component of negotiating the Good Friday Agreement and it remains a key component of the peace process. With hard work, we must move from the language of the past such as a ‘united Ireland’ and all the dread and fear which it creates in the minds of our unionist friends and neighbours. We must instead change to the language of the need to protect the peace process, build a vision for a shared island and a united people in a New Agreed Ireland.” But to unionists does this only smack of duplicitous language aimed at reaching the same age-old nationalist goal – political unity?

Are the people of the Republic ready to accommodate unionists’ passionate Britishness in a future ‘new Ireland’, so that it would “stand the test of parity of esteem with the Irish state’s pervasive Irishness?” asks O’Malley. He fears not, and I agree with him. However, he also wonders provocatively whether trying to accommodate Britishness in a united Ireland might be a “fool’s errand” if Britain, minus Scotland, might break up and lose its unifying identity in the foreseeable future.

Unionist paranoia about a united Ireland means that loyalist paramilitary violence is never far from the surface as we move towards that unity. The respected Shankill Road community worker, Jackie Redpath, warns that in the event of a border poll leading to unity “you either get out, suck it up or fight…It would be a recipe for disaster because such a fight, of course, will be bloody but it will be short. It would not be successful, and it would put a desperate shadow over the future in Ireland for another one hundred years.”

O’Malley is scathing about Southern attitudes to the North, and the unthinking belief there that Northern Ireland can be incorporated into an all-Ireland republic without too much difficulty or change. “The South is shockingly ignorant about life north of the border”, he says, and “breathtakingly short of magnanimity.” “The argument that if Northern Ireland cannot work (‘a failed political entity’, to use Charles Haughey’s phrase), the alternative is a united Ireland, brings false equivalence to a new level. It is a form of magical thinking to believe that an entity which fails in one political dispensation partly because one community (the nationalists) wants it to fail, can successfully be transferred into a new dispensation where another community (the unionists) works just as diligently to ensure it fails.”

However the British vote for Brexit – the decision of an electorate utterly indifferent to its impact on Ireland – has put the ‘united Ireland is now in sight’ option firmly on the political agenda. As that excellent analyst, Professor Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, puts it: “The UK and the EU are on different trajectories; Northern Ireland is in the middle…It’s not a place that’s well able to cope with those tensions.” Those tensions have not been eased by the hard-line, anti-EU position taken by its largest unionist party, the DUP, whose strategic judgements have, in the words of Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley, been “among the most consistently witless in recent politics.” The DUP, says O’Malley, seems “genetically incapable of understanding the crucial importance to the survival of Ulster unionism of the ‘warm house’ policy [i.e. treating Catholics with full equality and respect] on key issues like recognition of the Irish language.”

Peter Robinson believes the economy (and those whose decisions are determined by the economy) is “the centre ground which will determine whether we have a united Ireland.” The former Alliance politician Will Glendinning says a vibrant northern economy is not possible until it “fully functions on an all-Ireland basis.” However the economists John Fitzgerald and Edgar Morgenroth warn that upgrading the North’s poor and divided (by class and religion) educational system to deliver comparable productivity and economic performance with the Republic will take up to 30 years.

There are very few comforting conclusions to this book, although it is packed with wise observations. If there is one thing O’Malley believes (and I, along with most knowledgeable Northern Ireland observers, agree with him on), it is that there is a need for a revamped Good Friday Agreement which will allow the middle ground – notably the fast-growing ‘neither’ community represented by the Alliance Party – to fully participate in its governance. Many of the most sensible things said in this fascinating survey of a ferociously complex issue are said by people associated with that party. It is surely time for a bit of common sense moderation to prevail in the squabbling ferret’s hole that passes for normality in Northern Ireland politics.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 9 Comments

Are we afraid of talking about Ireland’s violent past and possibly violent future?

Posted on Thursday, 30 March, 2023 by andypollak

This is a blog about letters to the newspapers. I know it’s dangerous to generalise from the particular, and especially the particular of one’s own tiny experience. But I can’t help seeing a pattern in recent rejections of my letters to the Irish Times, and wondering whether it isn’t part of a general trend in attitudes to Ireland’s violent past and possibly violent future.

In the past two and a half years I have had three letters to that august organ rejected. In that time I calculate I have had 12 letters published (I admit I am a serial letter writer to that paper!) – on subjects ranging from the Opsahl Commission to legacy issues to bicycles on trains to young people’s ignorance of recent Irish history – so I am not at all paranoid about the attitude of the the Irish Times (a former employer of mine) to my views.

But I find it interesting that those three rejected letters all contained elements about two very sensitive subjects which people in this Republic rarely, if ever, want to talk about these days: the 30 year campaign of violence by the Provisional IRA and the possibility of future loyalist violence in the event of a narrow victory in a Border Poll for Irish unity. But first the letters:

In October 2020 I wrote a letter in support of then Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative. It included the following paragraph:

Sinn Fein’s push for a Border Poll so as to achieve the narrowest possible 50.1% vote for unity is madness, running the considerable risk of re-igniting the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. In its policy papers over the past 20 years that party has not outlined a single new idea about how, if and when that happens, we are going to cope with the 49.9% of Northerners who will remain stubbornly – and often bitterly – opposed to such an outcome.

That letter was not published.

In April 2022 I wrote a short letter in response to an article about collusion between the Ulster Defence Regiment and loyalist paramilitaries, asking why the writer had not mentioned the huge discrepancy between the numbers killed by the UDR and those killed by republican paramilitaries. This letter read:

‘UDR Collusion in Britain’s Dirty War’ was an interesting if partial article by Micheál Smith. One extraordinarily revealing fact was omitted: the Ulster Defence Regiment and its successor, the Royal Irish Regiment, killed just eight people in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ between 1970 and 1998, compared to the 2,002 people killed by the Provisional IRA, the Official IRA, the Real IRA and the INLA combined (figures taken from the authoritative ‘Lost Lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles’, by David McKittrick and colleagues).

This letter was not published.

Earlier this month I wrote a letter following Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald’s speech in Kerry about apologising for and forgiving atrocities committed in the Civil War. This letter read:

Mary Lou McDonald is to be congratulated on her speech at Ballyseedy urging the descendants of all sides in the Irish Civil War to apologise for atrocities committed in that conflict (‘All sides in Civil War need to apologise, says Sinn Fein leader’, March 6). 

But she is also guilty of hypocrisy. As leader of the former political wing of the Provisional IRA, she needs to apologise and ask forgiveness for the nearly 1,800 people killed by that organisation much more recently, in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles.’ The IRA killed nearly five times more people than the British Army, the RUC and the UDR combined. Of the 1,771 people they killed, 636 were uninvolved civilians.

Until she stands alongside the families of the victims of Bloody Friday in Belfast, Claudy, Kingsmills, La Mon, Teebane, Enniskillen and the Shankill Road and apologises to them, I for one will not be taking her talk of apology and forgiveness for those who died in our 100-year-old civil war too seriously.

This letter was not published.

I believe that as Sinn Fein move closer to power – and therefore respectability – it is becoming increasingly unfashionable to refer to its past as the political wing of a violent secret army. Up to 2020 a Dail session was hardly complete without a taunt from the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail benches to their Sinn Fein opposite numbers about their support for that violence. Those voices have become stilled in the past few years. Compare the furore over Waterford Sinn Fein TD David Cullinane being filmed singing ‘Ooh, Ah, Up the Ra!’ after the 2020 general election with the widespread belief, voiced by comedian Tommy Tiernan among many others, that such a song was “harmless” when it was sung last October by the Irish women’s soccer team. This change of tone has happened in a surprisingly short time: in fact, in the three years since Sinn Fein did so surprisingly well in that election and started to look like a prospective governing party.

It’s happening in Northern Ireland too. A young Belfast unionist friend (in her thirties) with friends in both communities tells me: “I think it’s become this thing where some people don’t want to talk about the past. It’s impolite to mention it. ‘What about the IRA?’ has become something you can’t say. People feel that if they bring it up they will be viewed as a hard-line unionist like Jim Allister.”

Maybe 26 years after the IRA’s last official killing – I am not including the beating to death of Robert McCartney, Paul Quinn and others by IRA members – it is inevitable that people will forget, and will want to forget, the horrors of the IRA campaign of 1970-1997. For a man in my seventies like me – a working journalist in Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s and coordinator of the Opsahl Commission in the early 1990s – the memories of that murderous violence over three decades remain particularly vivid. It seems a very, very long time since constitutional politicians like John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Garret Fitzgerald and Conor Cruise O’Brien used to criticise IRA violence on a weekly basis.

Probably if I was a Dubliner in my twenties or thirties it would seem like ancient history, irrelevant to my concerns about the cost-of-living, housing and health in this prosperous republic in the third decade of the 21st century, and seeing the now peaceful party of republicanism as just another left-wing electoral option. I have to say that when I look at the total mess the coalition government have made of the housing crisis – most recently in their decision to end the temporary eviction ban before putting in place any new tenant-protecting measures – and if I were a young person with no knowledge of the North, I too would be tempted to vote for the former party of the IRA and its impressive housing spokesman, Eoin O Broin.

And of course the loyalist paramilitaries are terra incognita for the Southern public, largely because they are also terra incognita for the Southern media. People here simply see them as ‘beyond the pale’ bogeymen: inheritors of a sinister tradition of anti-Irish bigotry and violence from the ‘Black and Tans’ and B-Specials of the early and mid 20th and the UDA and UVF of the late 20th century. So who in their right mind wants to conjure up the prospect of such terrifying groups again becoming active? It’s ‘head in the sand’ time when it comes to Ulster loyalism. It’s easier just to write off the DUP and their attitude to the Protocol as just the latest in a long line of examples of ‘stupid unionism’ at its most blinkered, and to consign that party and its hundreds and thousands of supporters to the dustbin of history.

But the paramilitaries and their thousands of members haven’t gone away. Knowledgeable nationalists and unionists agree on the likelihood of violence in the event of a premature Border Poll. As that straight-talking political scientist, Brendan O’Leary (a nationalist), puts it: “Given Irish history, especially in the North, the recurrence of significant violence may happen, whatever action or inaction occurs in the South over the next decade.”1 Former DUP First Minister Peter Robinson says: “Every sensible person recognises that to have a Border Poll with a 50 or 51 or 52% result, on a constitutional issue like the future of Northern Ireland, is certain to be violent. There is no other likely outcome in those circumstances, if the result is tight.”2

I realise that increasingly I am a voice in the wilderness. Will that old unionist-lover not shut up and keep up with the times, younger and more nationalist people will demand. But I will not shut up. I will continue to urge people not to vote Sinn Fein because of their past involvement with and present justification of political violence. It is sometimes forgotten that my kind of moderate, non-violent nationalism comes from a noble tradition which runs from O’Connell to Hume.

PS I haven’t written about the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework this month because I have little or nothing to add to the millions of words the media have already spilled about them. However I recommend (particularly to my unionist readers) a recent letter to the Belfast News Letter by the retired professor of history at Queen’s University, Liam Kennedy (originally from Tipperary), who is one of the few Irish academics who tries to understand the unionist point of view. He wrote on 16th March:

In late 1972 I attended a mass rally in Patrick Street in the city of Cork (the ‘real capital’ of Ireland, according to locals).The protest was against Ireland’s imminent entry to the then European Economic Community. The meeting began with the reading of the 1916 Proclamation, which set the tone. Speaker after speaker, mainly from Irish republican backgrounds, decried the loss of sovereignty involved.

In a way, the purists had a point. There was a loss of sovereignty, particularly in relation to agricultural policy. However, the pooling of sovereignty implied by coming under the aegis of the Common Agricultural Policy opened decades of higher prices and higher farm incomes for generations of Irish farmers. In industry the benefits were even greater as multi-national Ireland caught fire.

Today, the Irish Republic has one of the highest incomes per head of any developed country, without any need of subsidies from outside.

If anything, the European Union has enhanced Irish sovereignty. The Irish state and people now have the resources, and hence the power, to implement social and economic programmes that would have been unthinkable as a small, backward agrarian economy circa 1972. This after 50 years of political independence and much patriotic guff.

Fast forward another 50 years and Northern Ireland or, more accurately, Northern unionists are embroiled in a parallel ‘sovereignty’ debate. Should someone invoke a reading of the Ulster Covenant to mirror the Easter Proclamation of 1916? Indeed, should the critics of the Windsor Framework prevail, what glorious future beckons? Political stalemate for a while, another inconclusive election, a boycotting of Stormont, followed by direct rule. By the end of the decade, joint sovereignty?

Victory for the purists and the legally-minded theologians of sovereignty. And to hell with people’s welfare as far as economy, health services and education are concerned.

Oh, and incidentally, a Union mislaid along the way.

1 Making Sense of a United Ireland, p.252

2 Padraig O’Malley, Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, p.81

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Sinn Fein | 4 Comments

Talking to a broad-minded sporting unionist who defies all the Southern stereotypes

Posted on Thursday, 9 March, 2023 by andypollak

Brian Dougherty is a unionist. This Derry community worker says he is more determined in his unionism than he has ever been. Yet in every other way he goes against the narrow stereotype that most people in the South have of unionists: he is a socialist who is hugely committed to his working class community; open to and interested in Irish music and culture; in favour of cross-cultural legislation including promotion of the Irish language; a board member of an all-Ireland sporting body; and a regular participant in meetings to discuss north-south cooperation and the prospects (and perils) of Irish unity.

Dougherty is a small farmer’s son from Creevedonnell, a few miles outside Derry’s Waterside. He comes from a strong unionist background. His father was in the B-Specials, his brothers in the UDR, his great-uncles members of Rev. Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church and his grandfathers Orangemen (one had donated the land for the local Orange Hall). He doesn’t deny that they were hard-line and sectarian in their attitudes, rejoicing in the successes of the security forces and the killing of IRA men, and indifferent to the fate of those who died on Bloody Sunday.

He was a bright boy, and passed the 11-plus exam, meaning he could go to the local state (i.e. 98% Protestant) grammar school, Foyle College. There, although he was all too conscious that he was a working class boy in a largely middle class environment, he did well, partly because he was good at rugby and cricket. But also because he felt that education was his way to get out of Derry: “I couldn’t wait to leave. I thought it was the biggest and most hostile shithole in Northern Ireland.”

His experience as a Protestant from the Waterside going to school on Derry’s overwhelmingly nationalist city side in the 1980s had been a hair-raising one. “Wearing Foyle College’s maroon uniform and cap you might as well have been wearing a union flag. Our buses were regularly stoned. I was physically attacked twice. My sister got beaten up by four girls at one point. All that was really frightening for an 11-year-old.”

Those early experiences shaped much of this thinking. “I went from being proud of my British identity and feeling I was part of a great country, to something a bit more sinister: a feeling we were under attack here, and had to do what we needed to survive. Here we were again in the 1980s under attack and my brothers and uncles were joining the security forces. There was always a sense that there was something to defend. And someone trying to strip away your identity only meant it became more important.”

He ended up at Manchester University doing a master’s degree in town planning. But then he came home again. In the early 1990s he returned to Derry, first to work for the Housing Executive and a few years later to move to become a community worker in Tullyally in the Waterside, a poor Protestant working class area not far from his home. “If there was ever a community that was completely marginalised and isolated with huge levels of deprivation – worse than anywhere in the city but not being recognised – it was Tullyally. There were few facilities, no social interaction apart from a bar and a football club – it was a community turned in on itself. Young people were falling into the trap of paramilitary activity.”

He was the first Protestant community development worker in Derry. Working class Protestants there hadn’t “grasped the concept of self-help”, he says, believing that “as good British citizens who paid their taxes, the government would provide their play parks and social facilities.” In Tullyally he and the local group were successful relatively quickly in building a play park, a youth club and a community centre and forming a public-private partnership to build small business units.

He learned a lot from community workers in the city’s nationalist areas, Creggan and the Bogside, who had adopted the community development self-help ethos 25 years earlier and were very open to sharing their largely successful experience with their Protestant counterparts in the Waterside. “There was a huge sense of generosity from nationalists in the community sector,” says Dougherty. “There’s almost a sense that the community sector resolves the problems and then the politicians use this to their advantage.” He says local unionist politicians in recent years had realised belatedly that “there was merit in engaging with the community sector. When I started in the mid-nineties, you couldn’t have got a unionist politician to engage for love nor money. We were all socialists and communists and a threat to their power base.”

On the other hand he feels the broader nationalist community in Derry, and their politicians – whether Sinn Fein or the SDLP – were “blind and deaf to the concerns of the largely invisible unionist community.” It had become invisible because during the ‘Troubles’ more than 95% of Protestants living on the city side, intimidated by the IRA’s constant bombing of the city centre and by living among an overwhelming majority of nationalists, had moved in their thousands across the Foyle to the Waterside, the poorer among them to peripheral estates on the city’s eastern outskirts. He admits, however, that the city council – “quite pro-active in wanting to show equality” – had provided funding and resources for the Tullyally project.

Around 2005 he was involved with a piece of research on Derry’s deprived Protestant communities with Queen’s University Belfast and University of Ulster, led by the sociologist Peter Shirlow. Out of this came the perhaps surprising idea that one way to combat the marginalisation and low morale of working class Derry Protestants, and to help them get their voices heard, was through the city’s 14 loyalist marching bands. Nobody had ever thought of this before, largely because “the broad assumption was that the bands were a bad thing, they were sectarian, breeding grounds for paramilitary activity – they were the problem, not the solution. If you drive past a bus stop in Derry and see a young person from a Catholic school with a bodhrán, they’re viewed as a musician. If it’s a young Protestant in a band uniform, they’re viewed as a bigot. But their musical skills are comparable,” says Dougherty.

It became quickly obvious to him that “the band leader was the key community figure in each of these areas; far more influential than the community worker or youth worker”. He and a small group of colleagues set up the Londonderry Bands Forum. “Bands are rehearsing and engaging in creative activity for 52 weeks a year. We felt that if we could work with these young people – and with adults like influential band leaders – we could open many doors for so much else in terms of working to improve social conditions in these areas. Because we saw how being in a band improves the confidence levels and self-esteem of young people. A lot of the young people in bands are low academic achievers, but have skills in music. The challenge is how you use that vehicle as an opportunity to help them improve themselves.”

The Bands Forum has certainly broadened many of those young people’s outlooks. In 2013 the all-Ireland traditional music organisation Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann told the Culturlann Centre in Derry that if they wanted the big annual Fleadh Cheoil to come to Derry (and Northern Ireland) for the first time, they would have to show cross-community inclusivity. After failing to get a couple of Waterside community groups interested, Culturlann contacted the Londonderry Bands Forum. “We were approached to get these young people who had been rioting during the flags protest to play at a major Irish traditional music festival. Their first reaction was ‘get the hell out of here’. But we talked it through and asked them: ‘What is it you want as band members? What is your ideal scenario?’ And they said: ‘To get respect in our city again and be able to march the traditional route we used to have prior to the Troubles’. And I said that this was an opportunity to do that, because ‘the genuine and generous people in Comhaltas are saying: this is about music, not politics.”

So five of the bands played at gigs across the city and at the closing ceremony Deputy First Minister (and former IRA leader) Martin McGuinness talked about “the bands’ generosity and that the nationalist citizens of Derry should be reciprocating that generosity to the Apprentice Boys.”

“Also in August 2013 we had the UK City of Culture coming to Derry, and that was genuinely inclusive. The cloud of Bloody Sunday had lifted with the Saville Report and the Peace Bridge had been built around the same time. So not only was there the musical collaboration of the bands at the fleadh, but young people were coming together in concerts to hear the likes of Coldplay, thousands of them mixing and socialising in bars where they wouldn’t have socialised before.” A highlight of UK City of Culture was the dramatic Walled City Tattoo, a cross-community celebration of Scottish highland and Irish musical cultures with singers, dancers and massed ranks of drummers.

And then came Brexit and everything went backwards. “There was the anti-British narrative that evolved out of Brexit – the sense that all forms of unionism should be boxed as right-wing little Englanders, despite the fact that many of us were ‘remainers’. All of a sudden your identity and sovereignty were back in the public domain and you felt you had to kind of re-establish it. All of a sudden kerbstones started to be repainted and bonfires got bigger. Unionists felt under attack again from multiple sources: from academics, social media, the commentariat. All strands of unionism were persistently demonised.” There was also the funeral of Belfast IRA leader Bobby Storey in the middle of the Covid pandemic, and the suspicion in many Protestant minds that there was a new system of ‘two-tiered policing’ that wasn’t to their advantage.

Dougherty feels much of the generosity of the 2013 period has gone now. “In the Fleadh Cheoil both unionist and nationalist culture could be promoted and celebrated. Now we’ve gone back to unionist culture veering between being tolerated and accepted.” He shocked one prominent Derry nationalist recently by suggesting it might be time to forget about a toxic past that saw a 1969 Apprentice Boys march becoming the spark that lit the ‘Troubles’ in Derry and to put a message up on the famous wall at Free Derry Corner in the Bogside: ‘Derry Welcomes the Apprentice Boys.’ “The blood just drained from his face. His reaction showed how far we are from proper inclusivity in this city.” The Apprentice Boys are now allowed to march around the city’s walls again, but Dougherty says “you don’t have to scratch too far under the surface to see the language of ‘these people know where they are – this is a nationalist city.”

He worries that this augurs badly for a possible united Ireland, where Protestants – as they are in Derry – would be a small proportion of the population. Asked whether his experience of being a member of the Protestant minority in nationalist Derry had persuaded him that he could live in a nationalist-ruled united Ireland, he replies: “It’s done the opposite.” He points to things like Derry Council not supporting or providing funding for any celebration of the centenary of Northern Ireland and not joining other councils in issuing a declaration of regret after Queen Elizabeth II’s death. “In fact there were cavalcades driving around Derry, including past my house, celebrating her death. The fans at Derry City were singing ‘Lizzie’s in a box.’

On the other hand he is more optimistic about people in the South learning to accept, promote and even celebrate unionist culture. He points to a collaboration last December when another mainly Protestant organisation he heads, the North West Cultural Partnership, came together with the celebrated Donegal fiddler and singer Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and her band to put on an act to highlight Irish and Northern Irish/Scottish traditional music and dance at a Shared Island event in Dublin Castle. He hopes one day to bring his Derry loyalist bands to march in the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, and to put on a Dublin City Tattoo mass drumming event in Collins Barracks. “I’d look forward to the day when we’d have loyalist bands accepted in Dublin as normal – and because Ireland is becoming so diverse, they might be part of a kind of Dublin-style Notting Hill Carnival.”

“I think if there was a referendum [on unity], there is a recognition in the South that this is not an overnight thing, it’s a generational discussion. My experience of speaking to people in the South is that they listen. Up here, when we’re on a panel, nationalists lose interest because what we say is not what they want to hear. In the South any panels we’ve been on, there has been a genuine interest – because they want to know what the implications are and what the consequences will be of Irish unity. And I would hope that anything that is dear to a British citizen or somebody who feels British in Northern Ireland would be respected in a united Ireland. That’s under current structures. Whether that shifts under Sinn Fein remains to be seen.” He worries about “payback and discrimination and cultural erosion and lack of respect” for unionists in a united Ireland. And he wishes that moderate voices like those of John Hume, Mark Durkan and Micheál Martin (“I have a lot of respect for Micheál Martin”) were the ones leading the debates about unity.

He has reassuring words for unionist young people: “I say to them, it’s OK to be unionist. You can be progressive, you can be socialist, you can still try to improve the quality of your community and your environment. Because other people have characterised unionism as something bad, that doesn’t mean it is.”

However Dougherty prefers to talk about community development, cultural exchange, music and sport than politics. He remains a keen cricketer, representing the north-west (clubs in Derry and Donegal) on the board of Cricket Ireland. “My other great love is the Northern Ireland football team – I’m not quite sure where that would fit into a united Ireland.”

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 2 Comments