Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

After the EU vote the terms ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’ became effectively meaningless.  More accurately, we now have ‘Brexit realists’, who accept the result, and ‘Brexit deniers’, who are still fighting the referendum campaign, almost 9 months after it officially finished. In Ireland, north and south, ‘denial’ can cause real damage, because it won’t allow the focus of debate to address how both parts of the island can prepare for Brexit.  Article 50 will be triggered, without serious impediment in the House of Commons, and while many of the details are still uncertain, the UK will leave the European Union.  We also know the broad strategy the government intends to pursue after it leaves. Surely even those who would rather Brexit didn’t happen can plan to make the best of the circumstances we’re in?  As yet, there’s little sign of that happening.   Alone among the UK’s devolved institutions, the Northern Ireland Executive is without a document outlining it...

The Irish Times published a series of articles examining relationships between “Ireland and Britain”.  In a typically forthright piece, the paper’s columnist, Newton Emerson, writes that he does “not feel Irish in the slightest” .  He grew up in Northern Ireland at a time when direct rule made it “as British as Finchley”.   I’m a little younger than Newton and my attitudes are slightly different.  I do consider myself Irish, but the Irishness I feel has little to do with the Republic of Ireland and it sits happily alongside my sense of Britishness.  For me, Northern Ireland is “as British as Finchley”, or Stirling, or Caerphilly, it just isn’t the same as Finchley.   I grew up in Ballymena, Ian Paisley’s heartland, where hostility to Irish identity was not  uncommon.  After winning his first international cap, one of the town’s rugby stars, Davy Tweed, was reputed to say, “I’ve played thirty times for my country (Ulster) and once for ...

By itwassammymcnallywhatdoneit As we know well in Northern Ireland, predicting someone’s views on a range of issues doesn't require a crystal ball, just a clue as to their background - their name, the school they attended or their address. Once you have sniffed out those details, you can identify their tribe and you can then have a fair stab at working out what they think. Of course, tribalism is not just confined to Ulster and tribal loyalties are not always that straightforward. Take Monsieur Alain Rolland for example, born and raised in Ireland but with a French father. For many Welsh rugby fans such continental lineage was proof positive of his preference for the land of his father, Wales's opponents in the rugby world cup semi-final and of course explains his 'outrageous' decision to send off the Welsh captain Sam Warburton. When England were knocked out of the world cup, by perhaps the bitterest of their many 'old enemies' France, Wales found the...

The following is a guest post from itwassammymcnallywhatdoneit , who well be well known among Slugger readers.  Thanks to Sammy for a great pre competition analysis.   Coincidentally I'm off to Dublin on Saturday to see the Irish team prepare for the competition with another match against France.   On the 9 th  September the Rugby football world cup kicks off and for a sizeable minority on the island of Ireland this will be the major sporting event of this year – if not the last four. Ireland, share group C with Australia, Italy, Russia and the USA and if the form book proves reliable, we will qualify as runner-ups to Australia and exit at the quarter final stage to South Africa. Rugby, doesn’t tend to do surprises and the winners, on home soil, are likely to be New Zealand, the strong bookies favourites at 8/15. Four years ago in France, Ireland were tipped as the dark horses (and with some encouragement from the Irish camp) and then immediately set abou...

The Independent's brief i ( there I did it) newspaper has been available in Northern Ireland for a couple of weeks now.  It's a decent stab at a quality paper in digestible form.    It must be said though that the Independent sometimes takes the breath away with its lazy and ill-informed coverage of Irish politics, north and south. Compact cousin doesn't look like it's going to be much better.  Take today's 'Opinion Matrix', which compiles comment on selected stories, from 'home and abroad'.  Under a caption, "Ireland's long road to prosperity", the paper notes, "The past few years have been appalling for Ireland's economy.  Could recent elections provide a much needed fillip?".   Now although the paper erroneously refers to the whole of Ireland, we're talking the Republic here.  After all, that's where the election just took place.   So which commentary does i choose to reproduce? "Sustainable ...

Perhaps one year soon Armistice Day will pass without a modest symbol of respect and remembrance inspiring a single display of hatred and intolerance.  Unfortunately 2010 wasn’t that year. First we had the so-called ’Green Brigade’ and its illiterate protest at Celtic’s decision to display a poppy on the club's famous hooped football shirts .  Now the Andersonstown News reports that Relatives for Justice, a republican victims group, has asked BBC Northern Ireland to ban poppies in the interests of ‘neutrality‘ . Last year it was that newspaper’s columnist, ‘the Squinter’, who took anti-poppy bile to a new low, by describing the British Legion’s fundraising campaign as a “three week orgy of ‘up yours fenian face’”.   I posted on that occasion , lamenting the tendency to perceive a simple act of remembering as a hostile political act. There’s no particular need to rehash the same old arguments for the Relatives for Justice campaign.  It’s enough to note that ther...

‘Dilettante’ is rapidly becoming one of my favourite blogs.  Written by a ‘half Irish’ Conservative, based in Manchester, it takes a keen interest in constitutional issues and is stout in its defence of the Union. In his latest post Dilettante explains that ‘what we have we hold’ is not the limit of his unionist philosophy.  He envisages a United Kingdom which could one day readmit the Republic of Ireland. This aspiration, he notes, is usually filed under the bracket ’neo-unionism’, but it a deeply amenable concept to many secular unionists. Although it is hardly a likelihood in the near to medium future, why not advocate such a possibility, in order to emphasise that ’Irishness’ is not necessarily the preserve of an independent Irish state? The Republic of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom.  I’m proud to be an Irishman from the part of Ireland which did not secede and I’d enthusiastically welcome any popular movement in the south to rejoin. Of course th...

It’s been a while since ‘Three Thousand Versts’ attempted a movie review, but it isn’t every weekend I attend the 'World Premiere' of an Irish flick. Belfast Film Festival’s ’Gala Screening’ of ’ Five Day Shelter ’ got off to an inauspicious start, when the star, John Lynch, introduced it with a cheery reference to Manchester United. With reluctance I decided to set my prejudice aside. I needn’t have bothered. ‘Five Day Shelter’ is an epically dreary and boring film. Imagine a fifteen minute short by film students at the local tech, extended to feature length. It starts wilfully slowly and remains stubbornly one-paced for eighty odd minutes. The characters may as well be cut out of card. There’s no trace of humanity or anything to empathise with here. Yes, it’s grim and urban, but to what end? The film introduces a couple of themes which could be interesting, but they aren’t developed at all. The main characters all have dogs and cats in their lives. They show some f...

Now I don't know whether much of the Northern Bank millions remains unspent by Sinn Féin and the IRA, but if there is a spare $500,000 still lying around republican coffers it could serve as an opening bid for this rather flimsy looking item. The Bloomsbury auction house in New York is charged with selling "the only full-sized tricolour of the 1916 rising extant" . Apparently it was retrieved by British forces from the GPO in Dublin. It might be, as the blurb points out, a flag "of enormous historic importance", but I would suggest, whoever buys this piece of Irish linen has too much money. It's estimated to raise between $500,000 - $700,000 USD!

Over the weekend a helicopter had to be scrambled to the North Coast after a group of students got into trouble during a Duke of Edinburgh Award expedition. If only they had scheduled their trip a week later they might have avoided any problems (and saved the Republic’s coast guard a pound or two) by watching Bear Grylls guide to surviving in Ireland; screened on Channel 4 on Saturday evening. Conquering the harshest conditions our island can muster, according to Bear, involves stripping half naked in a peat bog and grunting a lot with a dead sheep between one’s legs. Particularly as a Ballymena man, I’d say that seems a small price to pay in order to cuddle up in a stinking, shit encrusted ‘sheeping bag’ for the night. Would it seem unduly cynical to suggest that Mr Grylls, with all his Special Forces’ experience, made his task seem just a tad more difficult than an unalloyed imperative to survive strictly merited? Let’s face it, he was in Ireland. At any given moment there mus...

I’m delighted to learn that members of the Ireland rugby team and its coaching staff are to attend a reception at Hillsborough Castle, recognising their Six Nations’ achievements. The Grand Slam winners were welcomed home in style by jubilant crowds in Dublin. However, Northern fans have not yet had the chance to show their appreciation and hopefully an opportunity to do so can be scheduled into the squad’s visit.

Had the citizens of the Republic of Ireland congregated in Dublin to toast the Ireland rugby team's triumph, carrying the flag of their country, of their part of Ireland, one could scarcely have objected. However the squad does represent all thirty two counties and both jurisdictions on the island. It was therefore both heartening and appropriate that the celebrations were marked overwhelmingly by the mass display of a neutral, green IRFU flag. Rugby’s governing body has not always showed as much sensitivity as the organisers and fans at Sunday’s event. I sincerely hope that the team will be invited to Belfast in order to recognise their achievements, representing both parts of Ireland. It would be wonderful to see a similar spectacle in front of the City Hall. Failing that, the Assembly should host a reception, for a team which is rightfully as much ‘at home’ in Belfast, as it is in Dublin (whatever the IRFU might claim ).

If I can take you into my confidence for a moment or two, I would like to make a guilty admission. I am a closet fan of the rock band U2. This pathology from which I suffer was once worse; much, much worse. And what’s more, at one point I wore my status with Pride (even in the name of love?). When I was seventeen or eighteen (merely a Boy), not only did I own every U2 release, but I held in contempt anyone who even so much as suggested that Bono and co were, well, Bad. Additionally I read avidly every book and interview that I could get my hands on which had even a tangential relevance to the group or its music. I had album posters in my room and I greeted as manna from heaven almost every pronouncement which the singer made from behind those ridiculous wraparound shades. Hell, I even paid a dubious character in a pub near Lansdowne Road over one hundred Republic of Ireland pounds to secure a ticket for the band’s Popmart show. Such, at that time, was my Desire (ahem). U2 were ...

A depressing little story appeared in the Sunday Tribune yesterday illustrating that whilst attitudes may be changing as regards recognising the heritage which we share on these islands, there remains in Ireland, north and south, a deep vein of hatred towards anything which might be associated with the ‘other side’. Students at St Mac Dara’s community college in Dublin have been persuaded to alter a mural depicting historical events of 1916. A parent complained in an anonymous letter that one half of the painting, which portrayed Irish involvement in the First World War, included a ‘loyalist symbol’. The offending item was of course a poppy. No matter that the other half of the mural was dedicated to the Easter Rising which also occurred during that year. No matter that the poppies were painted as part of a wider view of Flanders’ fields. This lone, spineless bigot was determined that no image which he associated with the British tradition would grace a mural at his child’s scho...

Stephen King offers his take on the ‘preferred candidates’ debate in the Irish Examiner, arguing that parties need to bring more talent in from outside in order to remain (become?) representative and relevant. It is a strong case and he conjures a world of dismal halls, cups of tea and idiosyncratic selection choices which will be immediately identifiable to anyone who has attended a party meeting in Northern Ireland. It is understandable that party members who have loyally attended such meetings for many years would be resentful of lists and the ‘blow ins’ they might comprise. Those who have been patiently working their way up the party hierarchy can find themselves sidelined and the prerogative of local members to select their own favoured candidate is circumscribed. But if parties wish to attract the best talent and aspire to represent accurately the electorate they must compete to attract, then an influx of fresh candidates is the quickest way to achieve those ambitions. Con...

In his Our Kingdom review of the book ‘Irish Protestant Identities’ Arthur Aughey quotes Tom Hennessey, writing about Ulster protestant identity and the frequent accusation that Ulster protestants (being mainly unionists) are confused as to their identity, “‘Understanding Protestant identity in Northern Ireland’, he concludes (p256), ‘seems less a case of Ulster Protestants being confused about their identity and more a case of confused academics’. Diversity lies in the fact that there are not ‘one, two, three, or no nations within the Ulster Protestant community, but clusters of regional and national identities’”. Of course the book’s subject matter is specifically Irish protestant identity, but Hennessey’s formulation is true of identity in general and in particular British identity. In the United Kingdom, citizens are able to give expression to a ‘cluster’ of regional and national identities. That is one of the strengths of unionism and Britishness, although nationalists claim th...

Lavish tributes have been paid to Conor Cruise O’Brien following his death last week. O’Brien was a man who succeeded in setting aside the assumptions of his tribe. An achievement which should not be underestimated. Not only was O’Brien steadfast and unambivalent in his opposition to terror, but his realisation that unionism formed a rational and defensible political doctrine was a hugely valuable contribution to a more tolerant discourse in Ireland. Maurice Hayes does not offered unqualified praise for O’Brien, but in his Irish Independent piece he does produce three paragraphs which neatly sum up his political legacy. “CCOB's great contribution to modern Irish political debate -- apart from his implacable hounding of those who would in any way condone the use of violence -- was to force the recognition of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland as Unionists as well as Protestants. He cut through the comfortable myths which had sustained the relatively passive anti-partiti...

I can’t find the actual report on Ark’s website , but both the BBC and Belfast Telegraph carry articles about research into attitudes to identity, carried out by QUB and the University of Limerick. The two pieces are more or less identical, but on this occasion I will leave the lazy journalism exposés to Bobballs. The most striking thing about this survey is that a rising number of people, around 25%, now consider themselves to be primarily Northern Irish, rather than British or Irish. I personally am encouraged by the fact that the number of people who consider themselves both British and Irish is also increasing. A significant majority hold tight to an homogenous identity, but the importance of heterogeneous identities, the ‘nested identities’ which Scottish Unionist describes, is clearly asserting itself. In common with other areas of the United Kingdom, the decline of the term ‘British’ as the primary descriptor by which people define their identity might be a source of some...

This is appropriately named Inaki de Juana Chaos, a convicted Eta terrorist who has come to be resident in Ireland ( how might that have happened I wonder? ). De Juana murdered 25 people by means of a bomb in 1987. He was subsequently released from prison in 2004, having served only 17 years, benefiting from Spain’s notoriously Byzantine sentencing guidelines. On his release De Juana immediately resumed ostentatious support for Basque separatist terrorism, having previously penned threatening letters from his prison cell. Spanish authorities are seeking his extradition from Northern Ireland and he will attend proceedings in Belfast’s Laganside Court on Monday morning, in an attempt to avoid an arrest warrant being issued here. Hopefully a warrant for De Juana’s arrest is issued in Belfast and I wish the Spanish authorities every success in putting him behind bars for a very long time.