The stridently apathetic, the silently zealous

It’s an intriguing read any time a foreign journalist looks in and writes about Northern Ireland. Even the New York Times can print in error when reporting on the weird DUP/Sinn Fein Ireland.

Three years on and top paper-men and women still write of the “Union jack” as though every Union flag in Northern Ireland flies from a boat. Save for that vexillological mistake, the analysis of East Belfast by may2015.com, the blog progeny of the News Statesman covering the 2015 General Election, was a rigorous read bedded in research and real experience.

The feature piece, ‘East Belfast: Can the DUP win a critical ninth seat in a city where sectarianism still rules?’, by Rebecca Choong Wilkins and Harry Lambert didn’t mention Gavin Robinson once, but they cheered loudly for his adversary and incumbent, Naomi Long. Would you expect any less from metro-liberal-London?

For someone grown from the soil of Northern Ireland, there were a few aspects of the article that need reaffirmed and other aspects that need rebutted.

Firstly, the analysis of the immutable menace of East Belfast and wider paramilitarism was lucid, plain and piercing. The law is dissolved for Belfast crime lords for fear of extreme violence, and this is unpardonable (and literally unspeakable). Nothing is ever said about this de facto indemnity from the rule of law granted to ready-to-riot gangs. Little is it explored or scrutinised by the local press. Much applause for the outsider looking in pouring light on the cruel and cynical criminal oligarchs.

Secondly, Anna Lo was quoted generously and approvingly in the story; one quip was, “the level of segregation is hidden because we all look the same.” I ask: Is Anna saying that we insiders in Northern Ireland don’t realise the degree of segregation, or that that we do and outsiders don’t, and that we don’t care? I think it’s the latter, the more nefarious kind.

It’s an important question because it touches on the new scourge: Ethnic profiling irrespective of postcode or social gradient; the effect of our Apartheid cause. The 1998 armistice has done away with the violence but left us suspicious as ever of “the other”. Protestants and Catholics to the non-resident are the same, but for the natives, Protestants and Catholics are as green and orange in face and habit to each other as the history books. This colour differential is imperceptible to the outsider, acute and alarming to the insider.

Tribal markers like flags, emblems and mural may indicate Protestant or catholic to the outsider, but we indigenous Irish can tell planter from Gael with only a glance; failing that, with a flick of the tongue.

“What school did you go to?”

“Saint Brides PS.”

The internal monologue: “Ah a Catholic.”

“Stranmillis PS.”

“Ah a Protestant.”

If it’s a school more neutral, the classic “What’s your name?” usually does the trick. If that doesn’t work worry not as there’s plenty more trigger questions that’ll do the job.

It’s surreptitiously subtle; “Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us” as Heaney said; but it’s there and loud in a protean, subconscious, automatic function. A perverse state of social affairs. Christopher Hitchens called it out (again an outsider speaking the unspeakable and doing the job we insiders should be doing):

“I lived in Northern Ireland for a while, after a bit I thought I could tell a Protestant from a Catholic by looking. They know immediately, it’s all that matters to them.”

Yes that’s what he said: It is all that matters to us, you, people of Northern Ireland. Terence O’Neill said:

“[Northern Ireland is] a country where you can tell whether a person is a ‘Gael’ or a ‘planter’ by his name.”

While segregation is not everywhere openly marked, men and women’s minds are everywhere markedly segregated. So no Anna, segregation is not hidden: It’s out in the open and we play by its rules and customs everyday. We just pretend it’s OK.

Thirdly, [and these are the facilitators of point two]I say No to Ulster’s perennial Panglossians and pollyanna metro-modish boutique coffee bar lurking middle-class coasters. John Hewitt did it in the 70s, I’m doing it now.

Within a heavily divided and unsettled Northern Ireland there exists a community that is totally in sync with every leading thought and every leading technology and every leading metropolitan centre of the modern world; yet they have totally opted out of the political conversation, as much willingly self-orphaned as they are abandoned. In spite of this you find them very content, even smug in their normality cocoon with an non-nornal Northern Ireland.

The avowed moderates may suffer from ‘Belfast blush’ each time their city features on CNN, but they chronically and habitually do nothing. They avert their gaze and leave the most brutish behaviour and shameful rhetoric to stand unchallenged.

Then they come off with the most pathetic slogans you’ve heard across the decades from Hewitt’s era and before to today. Like Peter Edgar and Neil Hutcheson who said to Rebecca and Harry, “There’s generally a lot of people in NI who could not give a you-know-what about it.”

Then there’s 23 year old Joseph who was more direct, “Our generation do not give a fuck about religion.” Rory McIlroy himself said it, “You know my generation, we don’t care about any of that stuff.”

Bovine excrement. I wish they were right, but they’re wrong. These slogans are meaningless thumping fictions. Place these statements beside recent events – they’re incontrovertibly false.

At the end of the day people vote green or orange, hard-line dissolves moderation every time. Call this the Alex Kane doctrine if you will.

It makes me shudder and my head spin when I think of those propagandised people who parrot phrases like “Chipping away at my identity” but they do and they have huge effect, influence and drown out all the optimistic, smiley do-gooders. Why do moderates never say their culture is being chipped away as plane loads of would-be doctors, lawyers and professional exile themselves from John Bull’s backward pene-exclave?

The assiduously and unvaryingly apathetic may chirp away about the normalcy of Northern Ireland as though it compensates for their inaction, but the news and self-appointed gatekeepers tell another story.

Fourthly, and as an adjunct to point three, religion does matter, absolutely. Yes 23 year old Joseph, religion does matter to people and to young people especially.

Look at the bizarre Christian youth community that can simultaneously blend the hyper-modish in fashion and culture with rigid social conservatism. Peter Lynas is an example. He looks like a man from a boy-band but is fairly, even very extreme in his religious convictions. The same for Ashers Bakery: owned by a young looking man who is rather more olden and Christian in his views.

Conor Cruise O’Brien was told by a Queen’s student in 1969 that religion was irrelevant to this latest stage of the Irish question. What a naive and regretful statement, then and now, as it is still said.