As often is the case there is an interesting parallel between Irish unionism and the GOP (the Republican Party) in America.
Like an American Jim Allister, Donald Trump has electrified the fringes and shunted the conservative debate rightward, just as Allister has done to unionism. On both sides of the Atlantic we have seen the right try to out-do the right. We have heard hyperbole and seen wildly non-PC statements - sentiments that outrage the metropolitan elite but get the core voters nodding in agreement.
In recent unionist flexing we have heard the immortal soundbites “curry my yoghurt” and “rogues and renegades”, and more latterly Mr Edwin Poots spoke about the “stench” of Sinn Fein.
Alex Kane said Edwin Poots’ view is widely held in unionism.
My colleague Colm Dore spoke on Talk Back with Mr Poots. Dore took the chance to congratulate the former farmer for his candour, adding that many core voters simply think the same thing.
And so we have the emerging narrative that protestant-unionists are afflicted by prejudice and bigotry in a way catholic-nationalists aren’t.
In America the question of religious faith is a major point of contest, but not along the traditional Christian axis. In America it isn’t a Catholic-Protestant standoff, but a Christian-Muslim (and other ethnic minorities) one.
The mercurial writer at the Atlantic Magazine Ta-Nahisi Coates has been composing explosive an powerful polemics in recent years, rocking the White Protestant-Catholic ascendency and questioning the validity of the American Dream.
Recently he wrote about the Republican presidential candidate and African-American Ben Carson. Mr Carson was recently asked if he would ever support a Muslim president. Coates explained what happened next:
“Carson, channeling a significant portion of the American electorate, said that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” This proclamation is presently receiving the rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only because of its ugly sanctimony… Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.”
The parallel between here and there is stark. To use Alasdair McDonnell’s famous dictum, it seems many white Christian Americans “wouldn’t have a Muslim about cthe place.”
This tells us few things:
Firstly - there will always be fear of “the other”.
Secondly - adversaries within a geography can ally if a third external force appears. We have seen this recently with the alliance of the DUP and the Catholic Church coming together to oppose same-sex marriage. Unfathomable just a few years ago.
Thirdly, the narrative in Northern Ireland is that bigotry is a trait more aligned to protestant-unionists.
America would disprove this. It isn’t Protestants alone but Protestants and Catholics who are hostile to a Muslim US president. W.B. Yeats wrote, “the beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”
In America today Catholics not discriminated against, but as part of the religious right they have discriminated minorities.
On this question, Ed Moloney wrote:
“American Whites are like the Prods in the North [Northern Ireland]. The Blacks and Hispanics are the Catholics. Well, almost.”
Bernadette Devlin said on her return from America:
“My people’—the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce– were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who knew about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honor not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.”
So if Irish Catholics are like the Blacks in America, what are the American and Irish American Catholics? Maybe they’re just the same as Irish protestants.
Round the house and mind the dresser