Neither Ireland was a good place post Partition…

100 Years since partition. Since Ireland was separated from the United Kingdom, or Northern Ireland was separated from the rest of the island. Since one Protestant State was created and another Catholic one came into being.

Looking at my two previous posts, about needing to look at the reality of history, not the mythology, has left me in no doubt. The me of today would be running for the hills.

In Ireland (as I will call the Republic) the stringent, controlling, patronising, monolithic, scrutinising, censoring nature of the control by the Catholic Church is almost beyond belief. Reading “We Don’t Know Ourselves” by Fintan O’Toole is both an eye-opener and a reminder.

I grew up in middle-class Malone Road, with a cross-section of people with different religions and ethnic backgrounds. It was hearing boys the same age returning from a Catholic boarding experience in Newry that was I was pricked to recall, telling of beatings by priests with belts and other weapons. While at our school, corporal punishment was not allowed.

The eye-opening was that, despite having heard short snippets from my wife, from Dublin, I had never read in detail the nature of life in 60’s Ireland. Books being banned, television controlled, the priests being the power in the land with Cardinal McDaid at the top of the pole. Who would choose to live in such conditions? The accepted corruption of the state by the ruling class, as if nothing had changed at all. A country that as Fintan says, lives with the known unknown in every walk of life. A lot choose not to and left, to England, the US and around the world.

Meanwhile, I was growing up with privilege. The privilege of being Protestant by birth and church attendance until I hit 15. Of course, I didn’t know that I would get preferred treatment in Northern Ireland, I was a child. Like those that benefit from white privilege, it is invisible because you are not seeing or experiencing the discrimination. I had all the advantages. The school, Inst, the network, the total lack of any realisation that any job in a back, the civil service or anywhere else was there to be chosen by me but not for everyone. And a sense of superiority that becomes ingrained, until you decide that it is wrong, and you need to change.

The detail of the levels of discrimination and sectarian political power was unknown to me, and most likely my father and mother. The natural reaction to claims that things were sectarian was to dismiss them. That lot should head down South if they were not happy in Northern Ireland.

When I got involved in Rag at Queens, I met a lot of people from backgrounds that I had not previously encountered. My cosy self satisfied understanding of Northern Ireland was disrupted by hearing new voices, about the experiences of people my age from across NI, and both religions. It was the real education that I got while there, it was the reason I am writing this blog. Stories of everyday discrimination that had just become part of life because of where they lived. Of the regular mistreatment by the security forces told without rancour, just as a fact. I hadn’t a clue about the place I lived. So since then, I have tried to find out.

Here we had on this beautiful island, two basket case countries. One riven by religious fervour that bordered on being a cult, the other with religion as an identity to enable economic and political control.

And still to this day we are riven by the division of the two tribes that each want theirs to be sacrosanct. The people of Northern Ireland claim that one or the other will be the best future for the people of this part of the world.

But I beg to differ. I believe that our shared experience is unique and that we would find that none of us fit in properly, or will be welcome in an Ireland that does not really know us at all.