David Trimble last weekend compared Northern Ireland's position within the UK, "a vibrant multi-ethnic multinational liberal democracy - the fourth largest economy in the world", with "the pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural state to our south". Oh how tears of nostalgia sprang to my eyes when I heard such fighting words! How much have we lost in all this namby-pamby peace process stuff, with all these sickly murmurings about respecting our two traditions, celebrating our differences; et bloody cetera.
To be sure, all this tolerance is grand for a while, rather like going to Old Trafford for a European Championship match between Manchester United and Bayern Munich, only to find instead the Altrincham Ladies Choral Society singing a selection of Much Loved Hymns New and Old. Excellent indeed. But one can take only so many verses of "Angels of Heaven, Sweet Seraphs So Bright," and "Oh Lambkins of Jesus on Hillsides so Green" before one begins to hanker for stronger, bloodier meat.
Mutual respect
And that's the way of Northern Ireland. All these anthems about mutual respect and common cultural regard, nicely warbled by a cross-community choir taken from boys' and girls' schools FROM ALL SECTIONS OF OUR COMMUNITY; however lovely the singing, one still finds oneself calling for the gladiators.
Northern Ireland's essence is defined by conflict. It doesn't matter whether Great Britain has the calamitous misfortune to govern the place, or we do; the heart of the matter is that two tribes inhabit the same space and inherit the same mutual disdain. This latter is usually masked by grotesque, almost gothic levels of dissimulation, disingenuousness and outright hypocrisy, but it is there, nonetheless. In the pious blather of peace-processland the disdain seldom finds full public expression, save in the glorious month of July - or less usually, whenever a unionist leader feels insecure, as David Trimble clearly did last weekend.
It's not difficult to deal with David Trimble's criticisms one by one. Northern Ireland's neighbours to the south don't, as it does, belong to the fourth largest economy in the world; they belong to the largest, the EU, which is also the most multiethnic, multinational liberal democracy of them all. It's hardly worth mentioning that the Republic has for the past decade had the fastest growing economy of any democracy in the world. We can dilate at length about cultural self-confidence: music, film, theatre, literature. And do, by God. Endlessly.
David Trimble enumerated the joys of belonging to a multi-ethnic, multicultural UK society. This is rather like a hill farmer in the Sperrins explaining why he is proud to be British - because of the brilliance of London theatre, the outstanding cuisine of the West End, the opera at Glyndebourne, the beautiful villages of the Cotswolds and the Mediterranean weather in Cornwall.
Moral cudgel
Aside from the sheer fatuity of defining Britishness as it is on another island, David Trimble was using the term "multicultural" in a rather fashionable way, as a moral cudgel with which to belabour the monocultural hillbillies down south. It's not as if the Ulster Unionist Party - which gives special voting rights to the Orange Order - were the Afro-Shakespearean Dance, Drama and Noh Theatre Company of Spanish Harlem.
Never mind that a meeting of Ulster Unionists is as multicultural as a North Kerry Fianna Fáil cumann. The implication in David Trimble" speech is that there's something intrinsically delinquent about mono-culturalism, and that the UK is superior because of its multi-ethnicity, and multiculturalism. Yet long before Britain became ethically diverse, Ulster was; and will remain so, indefinitely.
The province should serve as the model for those witless fools who see politicised ethnic diversity within the same confined area as a desirable end in itself.
Other examples of such fascinating diversity come to mind - East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Smyrna, Thessalonica. Where else, now? Bosnia, perhaps, and Kosovo also. You like? You want more? Rwanda? Kashmir? Anatolia? Israel? Bradford? It's a question of critical mass. Most societies can tolerate unassimilated minorities which remain culturally and ethnically distinct down the generations, and often enough to their mutual benefit, provided the position of the prevalent community is not challenged, locally or nationally.
But when that happens, sooner or later, you will get conflict; and so certainly that sociologists could probably predict mathematically when it will arise.
Multi-ethnicity
Ideological multi-ethnicity has been the chimera and the heresy of Western culture for a full generation, and its brainless vapourings are finally beginning to infest Irish political life, both north and south. Yet what a time for David Trimble to vaunt the multi-ethnicity of Britain, just as many British-born, British-educated Al-Qaeda terrorists are fighting US and British soldiers in Afghanistan (which is itself, as you know, a very model of multi-ethnic harmony).
Since this island, most especially that part remaining in gloriously multicultural Britain, has had centuries of cultural and ethnic diversity, we of all people should beware of regarding such diversity as being of itself a sign of superiority; for might not North Belfast then be our role model? Not that there is intrinsic virtue in ethnic or tribal purity; because then one's ideal society is that gay and tolerant paradise known as South Armagh.
But really, David Trimble's remarks are less about the reality of life in the Republic, which is altogether more racially and culturally varied than anything in the North, than proof that at bottom, politics in Northern Ireland is still all about tribal adversity. The Irish Republic is the State constructed by the other tribe on this island. Therefore, of necessity, it has to be pathetic. QED.