Glenn Patterson's Backstop Land was written to answer a question posed in various stupefied forms in Britain at the conclusion of Theresa May's 'confidence and supply' arrangement with the DUP following the Conservatives' loss of their majority in the 2017 UK general election: "who the f**k are these people?"
It certainly reviews the profile and personnel of the DUP in a manner designed to delight and instruct. The party’s paramilitary “flirtations” down the years can be described as such only if “your definition of flirtation extends to taking off all your clothes, getting under the covers together, and well, it’s dark, nobody else can see….” DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson, whose abusive hectoring at Westminster (and everywhere) may have provoked MPs into imposing on Northern Ireland the very marriage equality and abortion rights reforms he abhors, is “the wee lad with the bigger mates who slabbered at you from the back of the bus”.
The book has a serious point. It is that Northern Ireland confronts difficulties that were not caused by Brexit or by the DUP’s “flirtation” with English nationalism, and which urgently need to be addressed, however (and indeed whether or not) the UK’s departure from the EU comes about. Denunciations of the DUP’s recent (as it now seems, short-lived) influence on grounds that it opposed the Good Friday Agreement ignore the internal realities of Northern Ireland since 1998.
In Patterson’s view, subsequent agreements (St Andrews, Stormont House, ‘Fresh Start’) enshrined a DUP-Sinn Féin “duopoly” at the heart of the devolved administration which squeezed out other parties, encouraged obstructionism (through the “Petition of Concern”), corruption, and ultimately, a shared interest in non-cooperation. He cites the range of issues that have been neglected as a result of the absence of a functioning government for a combined total of seven of the last 20 years, among them the proposed dismantling of ‘peace walls,’ and the overhaul of Northern Ireland’s religiously and socially segregated school system.
Outside parliament buildings, that “good tearoom disturbed - though not often - by politics”, the aftershocks of conflict persist, with a high incidence of suicide and trauma-related illness. Features of the Troubles endure (more than 160 paramilitary murders and 4,000 ‘punishment attacks’ since the official peace settlement). The economic position is ambiguous: Patterson, gallantly not mentioning Dublin in this connection, is rightly sceptical of the benefits of any future investment boom that would make it a struggle for ordinary citizens to live in the centre of their own capital city. At the same time, the stark fact that 57 per cent of Northern Irish school-leavers move south or elsewhere needs to be faced.
Readers from all parts of Britain and Ireland will find insights here that challenge the platitudes circulating in the current crisis, and bring them to a nearer acquaintance with the world's "administrative-region-sized version of Dorian Gray". A sensibility takes shape which points the path to progress in the spirit of liberal-minded pragmatism. In addition, Backstop Land is an entertaining drama about the whole conundrum of political representation.
Patterson writes "in real time" during the summer of 2019, enacting the efforts of all of us to follow events as they hurtled toward an eventually postponed deadline. He incorporates the views of people he talks to alongside (and often in contrast with) the opinions of experts and commentators. His appearance as a character in his own text, affected by the material he is engaged in gathering, reflects its central motif: absurdity. The 'backstop' prepares the ground. Though denoting an assurance, this term was always close to farce. (Each chapter contains the word or the letters 'up'.) Developments post-publication have only underlined that aspect. On October 21st, the backstop simultaneously disappeared and became an immediate prospect. All the while, Brexit itself remains phantasmal, since it has not so far happened.
Sometimes Patterson draws out what is already bizarre, as when he dubs Boris Johnson the PM-MU in honour of the latter's self-assumed role as Minster for the Union, an acronym to rival in awkwardness Northern Ireland's OFMdFM. Nice as well as nasty ironies are uncovered from the past, for instance a photograph of one of the earliest Belfast Pride marches with a billboard poster for a Tom Cruise movie in the background, bearing the tagline "expect the impossible". The vibrant local arts scene into which he invites us seems devoted to pastiching politics: Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill as Thelma and Louise; the DUP's recorded utterances on homosexuality the text for the opera Abomination.
Comedy converges here on an important lesson. Absurdity becomes obscenity when politicians behave in ways more appropriate for a stage, rehearsing over and over a script written for them by tribal atavism. Patterson recalls Ian Paisley and David Trimble's triumphal jig as an Orange march was forced down the Catholic Garvaghy road in 1995, and the reactions to Sinn Féin MEP Martina Anderson's dance, wrapped in a tricolour, prior to a "Tiocfaidh ár lá" screed, at a hunger strike commemoration parade in August. Outrage at the irresponsibility of such ransoming of the future coexists with a sense of helplessness. Following a tentative optimism when NI politicians returned to talks in the wake of Lyra McKee's murder, Patterson now feels "a bit like Charlie Brown, lying on the grass wondering where the ball went, again."
Repudiating perspectives which treat Northern Ireland as a pawn or a pathology, he is adamant that ‘no-deal’ conditions shouldn’t ever be seen as making the return of violence “inevitable.” Amid the mockery and insult that today mingle with and distract from the real consequences of political decision-making, his book articulates a plea to remember the human level. Ending with a memorial gathering in honour of McKee, the last chapter reveals Arlene Foster to be “a pleasant person to talk to,” able to make fun of herself. The postscript is a tribute to Lyra, and doubtfully cleaves, as do we all, to the promise in those lines from her letter to her younger self: “it won’t always be like this. It’s going to get better.”
Prof Catherine Toal is Dean of Bard College Berlin
