Opinion

Fionnuala O'Connor: A united Ireland has always existed in the mind

Fionnuala O'Connor

For most of the past century a swathe of the Irish in the Northern Ireland state have arguably, in their heads and hearts, lived somewhere else. ‘I’m coming to it late,’ says a citizen born into the other main community. ‘But I’ve begun to realise that in their heads a lot of people live in a united Ireland.’

Unnoticed by the would-be monocultural and often tone-deaf state around them, many live out their lives through GAA and traditional music and RTE, through Irish, Catholic schools and the Church with a capital C, believers or not. They pay their taxes. Their official documents are all in order. Facts on the ground cannot be avoided. But this is not identification.

Some listen to Radio Ulster almost as a form of penance, to annoy themselves. Older people still say the station’s name with a faint bristle of annoyance. British television is something else, part of the wider world and where many have English, Scots and Welsh in-laws, children, long-gone emigrant relatives.

Unionists are given to asking angrily why ‘nationalists’ avoid using the title of the state they live in. Passive aggression; the question wouldn’t be asked if the questioners were not irked by knowing the Irish in their midst have different loyalties. Northern Ireland a country? Come on. A construct of the bad-minded, nothing natural about it. The state’s title is not to be acknowledged except for form sake or accidentally, never with a whole heart and certainly not to oblige someone with assimilation in their heart.

Writing ‘In Search of a State’ about ‘Northern Catholic identity’ thirty years ago (long out of print, no doubt out-dated), it wasn’t hard to find people with sharp if second-hand recall of Northern Ireland’s birth. Mostly they remembered terror, their elders talking about the Duffin brothers, the McMahon family,‘reprisals’ by men in police uniforms only partly concealed.

Assassination squads that IRA attacks brought down on vulnerable Catholics? That was not the folk memory. The IRA-man I was allowed to interview recited the party line but with a nightmare turn of phrase, from his granny. They were down in the hole, she said, ‘we’re not going back in the hole again.’

Those who woke up in a hostile new state on the 3rd of May 1921, many in painful poverty, had been battered and demoralised by boundary-drawing against their interests. They had little to cling to.

Two of the oldest I interviewed recalled the parish priest ‘at the centre of every important gathering’. The parish became the main civic unit, the Church by default the chief source of authority and social coherence in a ‘state within a state’.

Irish News-reading relatives (and the seven younger siblings who never see the paper) probably wouldn’t contest the earliest memories of parents born in 1918 and 1920, in north Belfast and south Derry. In Ardilea Street, in the Bone, it was a mess of red stuff (the witness was a toddler) and a man not moving on the floor. South Derry family lore had a Protestant neighbour saying ‘you’re going to be hit tonight - put it out the priest’s coming, the child is very sick.’ And they weren’t burned out.

After almost 90 years of life in Northern Ireland and not long before he died, my father said one day as though talking to himself; ‘We went into the music and the language, we turned away from the politics. Maybe that was wrong? But what else had we.’

An imagined state was better than none. It was a confession of inner exile, though a community once shut-in had long since transformed itself.