Sir, – The publication of the NI census results will prompt much talk about what unionism must do now to safeguard its position.
The correct starting point for this discussion is the rationale for creating a separate polity in the North.
The partition line did not create a state, a country or a nation but instead delineated the largest area within which Protestant majoritarianism and unionist political hegemony could be enforced. Neither of those positions is now sustainable. The demographic and societal changes confirmed by the latest census ensure that unionists will never again be in a position to dominate others in the six counties.
If unionism is to reinvent itself in any meaningful way, it must therefore accept that privilege can no longer be derived through sectarian supremacism. To do this would, however, entail the rejection of the entire basis on which the polity in the North was created.
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There is, at present, no unionist politician whose career could survive so radical a repositioning.
As a result, unionism will remain trapped within the increasingly hopeless defence of what the first Northern prime minister James Craig described as “the undisturbed position of the citadel”. This in turn requires the rejection of every piece of progressive legislation that would shape an inclusive, rights-based society.
It is thus the continued adherence to its founding principles that renders unionism fundamentally incapable of “making NI work” when the citadel has been irreversibly disturbed. – Yours, etc,
PAUL LAUGHLIN,
Derry.
Sir, – Commenting on the NI census results, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister said: “The fact that the Catholic population in Northern Ireland has flourished presents a telling contrast with the near-extinction of the Protestant population in the Republic.”
There is no denying that the Protestant population in the Free State/Republic declined precipitously after independence – a function of emigration for various reasons (dislike of the new State’s cloying Catholic ethos, economic insecurity, some intimidation), a low marriage and birth rate and, above all, the pernicious effects of the cruel Ne Temere decree that forced the Protestant community in on itself. But this wasn’t genocide or ethnic cleansing. Those who stayed the course did quite well, thank you, and were largely left in undisturbed possession of their separate schools, a university, hospitals, firms and farms. If they wanted to live a quiet “Britishness”, they could do so. They had a lively social support structure.
They occasionally grumbled about the new State’s restrictive laws on liquor, contraception and divorce, but many were as conservative as their Catholic neighbours and had no particular problem with the new rules. Irish language compulsion did grate, however, largely because the time it occupied in school was seen as a brake on their children’s progress in the modern world.
Northern unionists have always taken the opportunity to push TUV leader Jim Allister’s line of the “near-extinction of the Protestant population in the Republic” whenever the odd opportunity presented itself. It presumably offers them comfort and validates their position. But I wonder how many Catholics in Northern Ireland thought they “flourished” in the decades after 1920?
No matter which way Northern unionists spin it, Protestants in the South never suffered the quantum of embedded institutional discrimination, violence and bigotry that Catholics did in Northern Ireland. – Yours, etc,
IAN d’ALTON,
Naas,
Co Kildare.