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."
