I EXPERIENCED some strange emotions during the recent Frontline leaders’ debate on RTÉ 1. They began to manifest shortly before the debate started, when RTÉ showed each party leader arriving at the studios. Or, rather, when they showed all of them arriving except Gerry Adams.
To my surprise, I was a bit indignant he was not included. No doubt it was an instinctive Northern solidarity thing, yet not so long ago I would have been miffed that he had even been invited.
It was the same during much of the programme. I resented how Gerry was patronised and subtly cast as an outsider. That you could drive a fleet of buses through the holes in Sinn Féin’s policies is largely irrelevant, there was a sub-text that read: “This sort of emotive nonsense might sell up North, Gerry, where you belong, but not down here.” So there was I, a unionist, empathising with Adams and resenting the partitionist attitudes of RTÉ and Southern politicians. How strange is that?
Well, not as strange as what happened next. As the debate wore on, I became increasingly irritated with Gerry myself. It wasn’t the waffle (we Northerners have become inured to it) or his history (the Belfast Agreement was supposed to wipe that slate clean) – it was the Northern accent, of all things. The more I listened to him, the more it grated with me. Yet his accent and mine are almost identical.
Am I beginning to suffer from a form of “self-hatred”, such as is said to afflict some members of guilt-ridden communities such as the Israelis/Jews or white South Africans? Possibly, but I doubt it.
The fact is, I feel entirely comfortable with my community background. Still, something is going on. One minute I’m aligning myself with a fellow Northerner and the next, I’m resenting him because he is a Northerner. Actually, I think I have an idea what is happening.
For more than a year now, I’ve been working in the greater Dublin area, only travelling home at weekends. I am working and living for five days every week with people from all over the Republic and am constantly exposed to the newspapers, radio and television. Pat Kenny and Joe Duffy are daily companions.
It’s at the point where I’m following the electoral arm- wrestling and awaiting the outcome with almost as much concern as a local. I’ve become quite immersed in the Southern way of life, and I love it.
In many respects, the Republic is way ahead of Northern Ireland. The people are more outward looking and there is less of a herd instinct in the news and current affairs media. In one crucial sense though, the Republic lags behind: it retains some old-fashioned attitudes which the North discarded years ago.
It reminds me a lot of the Northern Ireland I grew up in, where people minded everyone else’s business, but looked out for one another.
In the South, there is a helpful friendliness toward strangers and, for want of a better term, a far broader sense of community than in the North.
These things all but evaporated as the Troubles took their toll, and people retreated into single- identity enclaves. The previous openness and friendliness were reduced to a veneer, under which lurked suspicion and truculence.
None of this is to try to deny the problems that existed in the Northern Ireland of my childhood and youth, but merely to draw attention to some less obvious casualties of the Troubles.
As regards my present relationship with the Republic, it may be down to nostalgia, but I suspect I’m beginning to go a little native. I don’t mind this in the slightest – it’s quite pleasant – but if I’m somewhere in a process of transformation, it would go a long way towards explaining my contradictory feelings towards Gerry Adams on the leaders’ debate programme.
On the one hand, solidarity with a Northerner and indignation at his being treated as an outsider; on the other, resentment of the hard Belfast accent (it didn’t necessarily have to be Gerry’s) that dragged me out of a warm nostalgic bubble and back to the recent and contemporary North.
One might have expected the home ties to be a little more binding in someone of my age. But then again, as Dylan said, “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.”