We are a land of storytelling, myths, and legends, across the geography of the island. Giants and warriors, queens, and princesses. All told from age to age, and with each telling, the magic grows.
But in 2021if we are going to move forward we need to move past myths and legends. We need to work harder to understand the history of the people and the politics of the last 100 years, not the last 1000.
Nationalists need to look a bit harder at the simple attacks on Unionists wanting Northern Ireland simply so they could gerrymander and discriminate on sectarian grounds. I am fully aware that that happened. That people were unable to get houses, jobs or votes because of their religion. But the state was not created to enable discrimination. It was a by-product of the dominance of Protestantism.
The reality of history is that amazing as it may now seem, Northern Ireland, or the North of Ireland, take your pick, was the liberal part of the island. It was wealthier too. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Ireland made it unrecognisable to the European state that is now liberal and modern.
From being the Free State through total independence in 1947, right up to the early 1990’s, Ireland was a place that the Irish left, for economic and cultural reasons. Freedom had been attained from the British, and immediately handed over to the Catholic Church. It was the power of the Church that affected every part of Irish life, from what movies and books could be enjoyed, to the economic damage that De Valera’s attempts at self-sufficiency delivered, in conjunction with Cardinal McQuaid. 1.8% of the total population left in 1957. To go to England, to live among the very people that Ireland had freed itself from only 35 years previously. British investment in Ireland was rejected. The EU didn’t even reply to an attempt to join in 1961 because the economy was so stagnant. Women in the rural areas spent a third of their lives collecting water from pumps. Television was seen as a threat, and local programming showed life as it should be lived, in cottages with spinning wheels and open fires, with the West being the symbol of what Ireland should be like, not Dublin.
This was the Ireland that Nationalists wanted to join. The one that Irish people were leaving in droves, a place where freedom was non-existent, where the local priest was the power in the land, where laws were made to reflect Catholicism and the rules made in Rome. An Ireland that would make them less well off, with no NHS, no welfare state, and poverty levels six times greater than the UK.
That is the Ireland that Unionists rejected. For all its faults, Northern Ireland benefitted from the lack of a monolithic Protestant Church, the multiple dominations diluting the power.
Nationalists can now point to a new Ireland that has been at the forefront of modernising the culture for gay people and women. But the IRA border campaign of the 1950s. and the violence of the Troubles, demanding that the British leave Ireland, was to unite us with that state. It is post rationalisation that is used to justify republican demands. Had the UK upped and left in 1975, Ireland was not the dynamic country it is now. The church domination was still in place. There is a real argument to be made that the Church treatment of citizens was as bad as anything perpetrated by the state in NI.
The modernising of Ireland grew from the membership of the EU, the realisation of what the Catholic Church had been perpetrating on the people of Ireland. Really horrific real-life stories of abuse and violence carried out by the very people that stood on Sunday preaching morals. A young population that rejected the idea that the country should aspire to be like Mayo and to be an economic powerhouse hubbed around Dublin.
The North has seen the opposite happen, as a direct result of protestants becoming more sectarian, using religion as the weapon to keep us back in the first 50 years of NI, rejecting social policies that are the norm in the rest of the Western Democracies. Pushing an outdated concept of identity that revolves around a United Kingdom that disappeared in the 1950s.
The North is no longer the liberal part of Ireland. It is not liberal at all. The middle classes and non-churchgoers have abdicated from politics. Liberal unionist views are common, but not represented by any party, apart from Alliance. The UUP gets dragged right every day.
But the simplistic notion that Northern Ireland exists because of imperialism or so that Protestants could discriminate does both North and South a disservice. We need to be honest about our history if we are to move forward.
Thinking about Things... 