White hats v black hats

The cracks among the hyphenated Irish - between America and Ireland; and within Ireland - were predictable, even if their jaggedness…

The cracks among the hyphenated Irish - between America and Ireland; and within Ireland - were predictable, even if their jaggedness is alarming.

It's curious how the hyphenated Irish have been so prominent in the Dublin media this past month. Across the Atlantic, New York's American-Irish have been angered by what most of them see as the Republic's hypocritical, self-serving neutrality, its allegedly lefty media pundits and any Irish misgivings about George Bush's "war on terrorism". Across the border, north Belfast's British-Irish have again been violently angry. Murdering Daniel McColgan, attacking schools and intimidating postal workers and teachers, some of them seem hopelessly consumed by a very ancient hatred of Catholic Ireland.

Historically, the Catholic American-Irish and the Protestant British-Irish have occupied the polar extremities of definitions of Irishness. The fact that elements of the latter still contemptuously refer to all Irish nationalists as "Fenians" - the name the IRB took in America - makes the point. To the Catholic Irish in America, their root perspective petrified by the horrors of the Famine, the Republic often appears excessively Anglicised. To the Protestant Irish in Belfast, their root perspective petrified by the twin horrors of Rome and violent Irish nationalism, the place is beyond being Anglicised.

Both groups, of course, celebrate their connections to and support for mighty empires - the US economic empire having replaced the British territorial one. It was no doubt especially galling to the American-Irish to witness Tony Blair's fulsome support for George Bush's campaign: the perfidious Brits were showing themselves to be more American than the Irish! Conversely, suggestions that Blair was acting as no more than Bush's lap-dog angered people still painfully coming to terms with the loss of the British empire and Britain's reduced role on the world stage.

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Given their connections to world power for the past couple of centuries and, since the second World War, the marginalised Republic's invoking of neutrality in search of (among other considerations) an identity, it may seem bizarre to term the angers of the hyphenated Irish as cries from the margins. Yet, in a sense, though it may be unrecognisable in New York or Belfast, that is what they are. Having severed - with sustained help from the Catholic American-Irish - ties to the British empire, anything less than total Irish support for the wounded US empire has appeared, across the Atlantic, as practically traitorous and thoroughly ungrateful.

Certainly, the language on the letters page of this newspaper, responding in support and in condemnation of the blunt and scathing invective of Niall O'Dowd's op-ed barrage of December 19th, has been telling. The undiluted intensity of the language of the ensuing debate clearly shows that an ultra-sensitive complex has been hit as bluntly as those planes hit the World Trade Centre. O'Dowd insists that his arguments reflected mainstream New York Irish feelings, and they probably did. With wounds so raw and temperatures so high, debate on the US response was never going to be rational.

Conflicting world-views, with all the personal, political and moral complexities implicit in the term, collided. It was clear, from the moment the towers began to crumble, that a major fault-line had been opened.

Equally clear, though it took more time to manifest itself, was the fact that myriads of capillary cracks - between countries, ideologies and people (and even within individuals) - would follow. The cracks that opened between Irish-America and Ireland and those within Ireland were predictable, even if their jaggedness has sometimes been alarming.

Historical ironies abound, too. Insofar as the American Revolution was a revolution by Protestants, it enjoyed greater support in the North than in the more Catholic rest of Ireland. Certainly, many Catholics felt warmly about a successful revolution against British power. But ties of blood between Northern Protestants and the American revolutionaries compromised Irish Catholic sympathies and support. In the way that, say, an English victory might conceivably be to Ireland's benefit in a football tournament, odd allegiances and hopes can occasionally predominate.

Anyway, the kind of pincer movement on the Dublin media, generated by angers in New York and Belfast, at least provides us with an opportunity to reassess the view from the Republic. Unlikely, ad hoc alliances have sprung up (Eoghan Harris praising O'Dowd and vice versa is perhaps the most unpredictable). It may prove to be ultimately unstable - we'll see - but in the jumble of displacements resulting from the crumbling towers, it is a salutary example. Presumably, such unprecedented alliances exist for everybody, regardless of positions believed to be thoroughly thought through.

THIS brings us back to George Bush's insistence that, in the world today, there are only two possibilities: you are either for the US or for terrorism. From his point of view and for his purposes, such a perspective has obvious political advantages and, for those who side with him, a clear "white hats and black hats" realpolitik. But in a world in which flux, not permanence, is demonstrably the ordering principle, it is unsustainable. In isolation, the attacks on the US might be construed to fit Bush's view but, especially in a globalising world, they did not take place in isolation.

Consider how the Protestant working-class of Belfast has been served by capital chasing cheaper labour forces to maximise profits. In the 1960s and 1970s, traditional industries - linen, shipbuilding and heavy engineering - which once seemed as permanent and timeless as the Giant's Causeway, collapsed. Believing that such industries would always be there to absorb, or service, unionist manual workers, few of them placed much premium on formal education. That was for a more effete unionist middle-class and to ape them was a form of class betrayal.

Now we can see the results, and globalisation is deepening the difficulties for many of the descendants of the old unionist working-class. Reduced to spitting hatred at Catholic schoolgirls and their parents, clearly most of their anger is prompted by religious sectarianism (of which, of course, they can be victims too). But you'd have to wonder if just a little of the spit is for schooling itself. If so, there is arguably an integrity, albeit a perverse kind of integrity, in their bigotry. Certainly, too many of them are left as a disaffected community, easily manipulated by the paramilitaries among them.

So, from op-ed articles, columns and letters bristling with indignation about the rights and wrongs of the US bombing of Afghanistan to features and comment about the disaffected unionists of north Belfast, the Dublin media has been curiously alive to extremities of Irishness this past month.

American-Irish prejudice, British-Irish prejudice, Dublin media prejudice - it all depends on where you're standing, I suppose.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned from it all is that prejudices are bad things to have, no matter how much fun they seem when they appear to be confirmed. Then again, perhaps that's a typically smug summation in an organ of the Dublin media. But New York and old Belfast have smugness too - the smugness that inevitably results from being or having been sure of their imperial might. It's ironic that the most devastating human disaster in Irish history, the Famine, led to the establishment of a nationalist Ireland-in-exile, beyond the range of British military power, beloved by the unionist North.

It's ironic, too, that the most devastating terrorist attack (though, as ever, it's a matter of defining "terrorism") in world history should cleave away so many of the descendants of that nationalist Ireland-in-exile, which itself helped to cleave most of nationalist Ireland away from Britain. New York's Catholic American-Irish and Belfast's Protestant British-Irish have their own perspectives on the Republic. In large measure, one has historically been sentimental and supportive, the other spiteful and snide.

Implacably opposed over nationalist Ireland, they can still, on the world stage, often accommodate each other. The task for the Republic is to accommodate both of them, without losing our own voice - small and insignificant as that may be. History rolls on, placing the hyphens as it sees fit . . .