Identity Politics in Northern Ireland Gerry OShea
Identity
politics was the driving factor when Ireland was partitioned a hundred years
ago. A section of the island in the northeast was set apart from the rest of
the country strictly on the basis of allowing the people living there to
maintain their allegiance to Britain, an entirely legitimate aspiration but one
that was bound to lead to trouble because nationalists on the island weren’t
even consulted about the division.
The 1918
Westminster election ended the power of the Irish Parliamentary Party. They had
fought for Home Rule for Ireland, and indeed a bill was passed in 1912 that
granted a parliament in Dublin with limited power over the whole island. This
was fiercely opposed by unionists in the Belfast area who refused to
contemplate any allegiance to an assembly with a majority of Catholics.
For them,
Home Rule would bring about domination by the Catholic majority on the island,
leading inevitably to the relegation of Protestants to a hind-tit role in all
the legislative business of that proposed parliament.
The Irish
Free State which emerged in 1922, after the War of Independence, was indeed
dominated by the Catholic bishops and clergy, confirming Protestant fears.
Meanwhile,
the six-county statelet followed a course of guaranteed supremacy by the
Protestant leaders. It was a cold place for people of the other persuasion.
How did the
two states perform over the last hundred years? In particular, how did the
minority populations fare out in each jurisdiction?
Significant
numbers of Protestants emigrated from the new southern state because it was not
congenial to their customs and beliefs. The Roman bishops and parish priests
dictated the rigid ethos of the new state. Most Irish people believed the
vacuous story that their Catholic ethos ensured a higher level of morality in Ireland
than in pagan England. This was a neat rationalization, making people feel good
about their group identity but with no basis in reality.
The Roman Ne Temere decree required a
promise from the Protestant partner in a mixed marriage that all children of
the union would be raised as Catholics, and God herself was tribalized by
frequent outrageous assertions that outside of the Vatican belief system there
was no salvation.
Garret
Fitzgerald, the leader of the Irish government during part of the 1970’s, wrote
that he viewed the Protestant population in the south of the country as a
“privileged minority.” This comment recognized that a small Anglo-Irish
population played a disproportionately important role in the commercial and
cultural life of the country.
Their most
famous member was Douglas Hyde, a distinguished Irish language scholar and a
founding member and initial leader of the Gaelic League. He became the first
president of Ireland, serving from 1938 to 1945.
The 1949
funeral service for Dr. Hyde in Dublin’s famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral was not
attended by the Catholic leaders of the government because they weren’t allowed
to pray in the church of a “false” religion. Instead, they were photographed outside
the cathedral, waiting for the cortege to emerge – a powerful symbol of the
subservience of political leaders to claustrophobic Catholic regulations.
All this
began to change in the 1990’s. Today, only a minority of Catholics attend
weekly mass and with few ordinations, the average age of the clergy is close to
60. The passage in referenda of changes allowing divorce, abortion and same-sex
marriage clearly indicates the collapse of the power of the Catholic church in
the public arena.
Ironically, the membership of the three main
Protestant groups in Ireland – Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans – has
shown modest increases in the same time period. Many commentators believe that
much of this growth comes from Catholics abandoning the Roman version of
Christianity.
Overall, the
differences between the various religious groups have eroded over time in the South.
The sense of pride in an Irish identity is strong among all citizens, and in
the new secular order most people look to Brussels rather than to Rome or Canterbury
for inspiration and leadership.
The story in
Belfast is very different – past and present. From the early days of partition,
the nationalist population was discriminated against in employment and housing,
and voting constituencies were gerrymandered to favor the unionist parties. The
justified sense of long-suffering victimhood among nationalists in the North
caused the massive protests in the streets during the civil rights irruption in
the mid-1960’s.
The Troubles
followed with the IRA engaging in a full-scale guerrilla war against the forces
of the state. The arrival of the British army heightened the battle lines. Most
nationalists did not support violence and so the Social Democratic and Labor
Party (SDLP) won more votes in the various elections in that community than
Sinn Fein. That changed after the IRA disowned violence as part of the Good
Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998.
The largest
unionist party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), seems to be in disarray.
They followed the Tory Brexit march out of the European Union (EU) in the 2016
British plebiscite, but 56% of the people in the North opted to remain in Europe.
The controversial “protocol” arrangement
between Britain and the EU reflects another creaking dimension of their
identity crisis. A border on the Irish Sea consigns the loyalist population to
a kind of no-mans-land as they assert their fealty to a constitutional
arrangement from a past era. Their firm allegiance to Westminster is not
reciprocated when it doesn’t suit the government there, and the rest of the
island of Ireland is firmly ensconced in the European project.
The people
in both communities in the North benefited to the tune of 100 million pounds
annually when they were part of the EU. The subvention expected from
Westminster is much less – around 11 million. At the time the country was
divided in 1921 more than 80% of the economic activity on the island was
centered in the Belfast area; today that situation has changed and Dublin generates
an even higher percentage of the whole island’s GDP.
Another
important dimension of life in the North centers on the lack of respect
accorded to Catholics. A late 19th century unionist historian named
Lecky pointed out that the most down-and-out Protestant considered himself
superior to the richest Catholic. This disrespect, which definitely didn’t
apply to the minority of Protestants in the South, poisoned the relationship
between the two northern tribes.
In May 2007,
Ian Paisley, the former firebrand leader, who often preached that the Roman
church was the biblical “whore of Babylon,” was edged aside as the leader of
the power-sharing government in Stormont. He was also demoted by the elders of
the First Presbyterian Church which he started. Amazingly, the bulk of his core
supporters felt he was going soft in his dealings with Martin McGuinness and
the nationalist community.
Arlene
Foster is on the way out for the same reason. She was deemed to be too open to
discussions with the Dublin Government, and she also drew the anger of the DUP
members by abstaining in a vote to ban gay conversion therapy.
The cries of No Surrender and Not an Inch
still represent the mood and belief system of most unionists. They feel that
the nationalist community, especially their bete noire, Sinn Fein, is only
interested in expunging every facet of Protestant culture and heritage.
They still
assert a pre-eminent allegiance to their Britishness, and many still remain
devoted to an out-of-date brand of Reformation Protestantism. That rock-hard sense of identity, combining
religion and politics, remains the biggest obstacle to a united Ireland,
irrespective of the results of a border poll.
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