When I arrived in Northern Ireland last July 1, among other reasons
to observe the local "marching season", I bought the Belfast News
Letter and the London Times. The former devoted sixteen of its
thirty-two pages to the pending crisis over the Drumcree Orange
"march" and the threat of local Catholic nationalists to protest by
putting women and children in its path (with, according to this
Protestant newspaper, IRA agitators operating behind this cowardly
cover). The Times on the other hand devoted not a single word to the
march in all fifty-six of its pages (not including the computer
advertising supplement).

One may read too much into such a discrepancy. But, at the least, it
reflects the weary British attitude to all Northern Ireland matters;
a wish that they would all just vanish. The vast majority of the
British (and I here include Scots and Welsh) know little and care
less about Northern Ireland. They have scant understanding of the
IRA's elaborate constitutional, historical, and metaphysical
justifications for its bloody actions, and see only the work of
fanatical madmen who enjoy violence for its own sake. As to the
Ulster Protestants, and especially the extreme voices of the Orange
Order and the Democratic Unionists, the British public is mostly
mystified and obviously irritated. These sectarian fanatics invoke
religious and political agendas that belong properly in the
seventeenth century.

The Catholic nationalists if anything make more sense to most British
observers: They want union with the Republic of Ireland. But do they
really? While paying lip service to a united Ireland, polls have a
majority of Catholics expressing fears of this actually happening,
since they would lose all the social service, pension, unemployment,
and national health benefits they now enjoy under "British rule."

The Protestant Orange loyalists, despite their insistence that
"Ulster is British" (an ideological, not an ethnographic assertion),
do not want "British rule" either. They want local Protestant rule in
the province, restoring things to the simple way they once were:
Protestants on top, Catholics at the bottom--the Orange order of
nature before "British rule" intervened, disbanded their parliament
(Stormont), and imposed direct rule from Westminster in 1972.

Then again, the IRA/Sinn Fein (and do we mean the "official", i.e.,
Marxist, or "provisional", i.e., nationalist?) is not interested in
ending "British rule" so that Northern Ireland can pass into the
hands of "Dublin." What is little understood outside Ireland is that
the IRA (either flavor) is as opposed to the Dublin government (of
whatever party, not that anyone can tell the difference) as it is to
"British rule." It is a banned organization in the Irish Republic
also, and is pledged to unseat the "unconstitutional" government
there and install itself as the legitimate successor to the almost
mystical "first Dail" of the 1916 Easter Rising. The IRA, from Eamon
de Valera onward, has never had much time for the democratic process.
By its holy "blood sacrifice" it established itself to its own
satisfaction as the voice of the "real Ireland", and if a majority of
voters still think otherwise then so much the worse it will be for
them. The Irish are not averse to killing each other (remember Dr.
Johnson's remark: "The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well
of one another"). Indeed, the IRA, under the evil influence of de
Valera, fought a civil war to thwart the wishes of the majority of a
democratic electorate. In the process they treacherously killed
Michael Collins--the man who, with Sir James Craig in the North,
might just have found an early solution to "the problem." (Neil
Jordan and Liam Neeson have given a fair if confusing rendering of
this bloody period in the recent film Michael Collins.)

(Note how in this paragraph and elsewhere virtually everything
pertaining to Northern Ireland has to be put in scare quotes, since
nothing is what it seems to be. Note also that although one tends to
use the terms Protestant, Orange, and loyalist as synonyms, there are
Protestants who are not members of the Orange Order or the Unionists
parties. Equally, Catholics are usually nationalists and republicans,
although some are not, and by no means do all support Sinn Fein or
the IRA. Also, although Ulster is used synonymously with Northern
Ireland, especially by the Protestants, the ancient province of
Ulster included much more of Ireland than the six counties, and it is
therefore used also in this "cultural" sense. Hang in there.)

Even more irritating than the British public's ostrich attitude is
that of the typical American, and especially the typical American
media. In advertisements in video stores for the above-mentioned
film, we are told not only that Sinn Fein was the "military arm" of
the IRA (instead of the other way around), but also that post-World
War I was a time when "the British" were executing patriots by the
score. Actually, "the British"--military courts acting under martial
law--executed only six of the (technically treasonable) leaders of
the Easter Rebellion and gave the others nominal jail sentences. Of
course even that was a huge political blunder--pretty much the story
of British relations with Ireland--but the army acted before the
politicians considered the consequences, and Sinn Fein swept the next
Irish elections.

In other respects, too, the lowest common denominator holds pride of
place. Whenever one picks up an American newspaper (USA Today is a
prime offender) the letters IRA are followed in parentheses by the
mantra, "which is fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland."
That, as I have discovered over thirty years, is about all most
Americans know or care to know about the situation. What it should
read is, "whose official wing is fighting to establish a Marxist
state throughout Ireland, including the overthrow of the legitimate
government of the Irish Republic where it is an outlaw organization;
and whose non-Marxist 'provisional' wing is seeking a similar but
non-Marxist overthrow of governments in Belfast and Dublin; and which
is bitterly opposed by over a million Protestant Irishmen and enjoys
only limited support even among Catholic nationalists in the North."
And that is only the half of it.

Ask even an Irish-American what the relationship is between the
various versions of Sinn Fein and the various IRAs, and confusion
ensues. As I arrived back in the United States after my visit, I was
greeted by a special feature in the Newark Star-Ledger in which the
writer advanced the interesting theory that "sectarian intransigence"
was just "British propaganda" to cover up the "simple truth" that the
only thing really going on in the province was the IRA fight to end
British rule. The writer was brutally honest in admitting that he
chose this answer because it was "simple and I can understand it."
All this stuff about deep-rooted stubborn sectarian intransigence was
just a smoke screen; remove the British troops and British rule and
all would be peaceful. "Would they really kill each other when all
they had was each other?" he eloquently asked.

To which the proper answer is: "Of course they would, you idiot." It
was to stop the Belfast Catholics from being massacred by their
Protestant brethren that the British army came in in the first place,
nearly thirty years ago. But such facts are irrelevant to those for
whom hating "the British" is a way of life, an emotional prop without
which their existence would lack meaning. And this is at the very
heart of the problem in Northern Ireland, too. So many groups and
individuals have such an emotional--nay, paranoid--investment in the
status quo that, despite countless pious statements to the contrary,
they don't want the problem solved.

The Logic of Ulster

But what then is "the Northern Ireland Problem" that so defies
solution? That definitive book of "memorable British history" (as the
authors explain, they mean history we actually remember), 1066 And
All That, turns to "the Irish Problem." As it explains, every
schoolboy remembers that Mr. Gladstone was always on the verge of
solving "the Irish Problem" when "the Irish went back into the bogs
and changed the problem." So poor Gladstone never did pass a Home
Rule Bill. But the British Parliament did in fact pass such a bill on
May 14, 1914. This bill was, with the agreement of the Irish
Parliamentary Party, shelved until the First World War was over,
after which it was to be implemented. The 1914 Home Rule Bill,
according to "revisionist" (i.e., non-partisan and often Welsh)
historians, rendered the Easter Rising of 1916 quite pointless. That
event served only Padraig Pearse's religious desire for a "redemptive
blood sacrifice" to "sanctify" the de facto achievement of Irish
independence. The more cynical might see it as an attempted power
grab by the republican factions. But despite their bloody war, they
ended up in 1921 with what had been in the 1914 bill anyway--except
that, having totally alienated the Ulster Protestants with their
"treason", they ultimately got a border that was not just a temporary
truce line to be overseen by a Council of All Ireland, but a border
that divided Ireland firmly and, for the Northern Protestants,
irrevocably.

Essay Types: Essay