Opinion

Denis Bradley: Consequences of partition have cascaded down the decades

Denis Bradley

Denis Bradley

Denis Bradley is a columnist for The Irish News and former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

The ramifications of partition 100 years ago continue to reverberate today
The ramifications of partition 100 years ago continue to reverberate today The ramifications of partition 100 years ago continue to reverberate today

‘The Last of the Name’ is a much-loved book from Donegal. It traces the dying out of a family name in a local area through the interaction of births, deaths and marriages. It is a natural and common occurrence that evokes nostalgia and sympathy.

To lose spontaneity and comfort with your own name is a completely different matter. To think twice, to hesitate in stating or revealing your name is not the result of a natural process but of a man-made bias and intolerance arising out of distorted cultures and religions. It is a distortion that often finds fertile ground in politics.

The partition that happened on this island a hundred years ago has had that awful effect on both sides of this partitioned island. In conversation with a young woman from Donegal in recent days I was allowed some insight as to how the rupturing and its ramifications has cascaded down the decades.

Born into a Protestant family in the late eighties in that part of Donegal most affected by the border. Into a community that had the greatest reason to feel abandoned by an arrangement that opted for greater political security in a six rather than a nine counties entity.

Like most of her generation she had not heard of Ne Temere, that amazingly sectarian decree by the Catholic Church, universally introduced a few years before partition. It required all children of a mixed marriage to be brought up Catholic. She was too young to fully understand, but she knew there were Protestant ‘hops’ and Catholic ‘hops’ in her area. Mostly organised by parents, particularly in those rural areas, to save their children from mixed marriages and to save their religion from extinction. But she was reluctant to let me explain or excuse the narrowness and bitterness that often underpinned those efforts.

She grew up certain of her Irishness and only faced questions of identity in adolescence and sometimes as a curiosity in her school in Derry because she was from Donegal, and how could that be because she was a Protestant! Then university in Dublin and the camaraderie of her flat mates from Kerry and other exotic counties. Only to realise of an evening, in the middle of a political debate, that they didn’t know she was a Protestant and the small but perceptible frisson that followed that revelation.

Her years in cosmopolitan Dublin confirmed that a partitionist mentality was not confined to the north and whilst often more subtle in the capital city the underlying bias that she wasn’t the ‘full Irish’ was non the less hurtful.

She observes and laments the ideological differences in her wider family between those who have remained in Donegal and those who have moved into the north. The spontaneity with her own name is now interrupted. The unwanted irritant is that her name will identify her as Protestant and therefore less Irish than she feels. The hesitation exposes the rupturing that Anglo/Irish history has imposed.

Her hope, nowadays, is that there is greater plurality of identity and a greater number insisting on that plurality. She describes one family where the mother proclaims herself British, the father Irish and the children Northern Irish. She is convinced that these conversations will increase and become more public.

It is a shame that the churches and the cultural institutions of this island never seem to see the need to call out the religious and cultural distortions that were so innate and so widely adopted. Anglo/ Irish politics was certainly the catalyst for the legacy that we inherited. But politics is people and people are politics. All of us have been tainted by these distortions.

Singularly and communally, we can travel into those caverns where insidious bigotry and prejudice grow. There is much that is not nice to see but all the more reason to confront it.