Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Unionists strangely quiet on Derry Girls version of history

The cast of Derry Girls pictured on the set of the final episode, which was set during the 1998 Good Friday Agreement referendum.
The cast of Derry Girls pictured on the set of the final episode, which was set during the 1998 Good Friday Agreement referendum. The cast of Derry Girls pictured on the set of the final episode, which was set during the 1998 Good Friday Agreement referendum.

Derry Girls ended last week in a style described variously as genius, a triumph, moving.

As well as typical wit the finale’s double programme crammed in Bloody Sunday, Eddie Daly with the white handkerchief, on top of the high hopes a majority in Ireland had for the Good Friday Agreement. All of this with a foreground-static of Jesus Christ-ing that many Protestants identify as Catholic profanity.

Yet above what may be the subterranean raving of trolls, Protestant indignation stayed quiet. It isn’t like the most prominent unionist voices. It isn’t like them at all.

The two highest-profile recent depictions of the north/the Troubles in popular culture, the film Belfast and Derry Girls, have met untypical unionist reaction. Could it be reluctant recognition that this version of history is a big tourism-draw? And that Derry Girls could make cats laugh? Derry boy Colum Eastwood on the other hand profaned a tweet with ‘Jesus Christ!’ and was damned instantly as a blasphemer.

Blasphemy will stick around, not to be dissed. Eastwood had been coming to the defence of the party’s other MP, Claire Hanna, who drew fire for her burst of incredulous temper when she told DUP MP Carla Lockhart to ‘get John Hume’s name out of your mouth.’ Ignoring the provocation might have been the more appropriately annoying response. Lockhart took the Hume name in vain to chide nationalists for supposedly flouting Hume’s precept of respect for difference - by withholding sympathy from the unionist Stormont boycott, ‘majoritarianism’.

Thin-skinned complaint succeeded a century’s denial that the state was biased from its foundation, that Catholics faced discrimination. Turning nationalist accusations back on them became established unionist practice.

One form of reverse-accusation ranted against drawing any parallels with South African apartheid, the suppression of black Americans. Scornful argument, some from academics, called that typical nationalist exaggeration, whingeing. The democratic underpinning of Northern Ireland supposedly made the difference, Catholics having voted themselves into it and their apparently permanent minority status.

And now look where we are. The Big Whinge is a unionist reflex. Their victimhood is sacred. It has sometimes seemed that an entire community went directly from denying discrimination against a smaller one to claiming the experience for themselves.

Except, of course, that it is not an entire community. The Lundy strain, some more bravely and clearly than others, says different.

On Saturday, thousands peacefully marched for long-promised, long-obstructed legislation to protect Irish language rights - against the tone-deaf bigotry and malice that clearly revolted so many, to which the loudest in unionism cling still. But there is no debating to be had with conspiracists, whose stock in trade is dark supposition and arithmetic that says two and two makes six.

Academic and activist Cornel West wrote sadly but calmly in the Guardian on Saturday, taking last week’s murderous shooting in a black district as example of the hatred fuelled by endemic racism, the ‘replacement’ conspiracists who see people of colour on the rise in the USA, controlling, superior whiteness in retreat. President Biden, Professor West wrote, ‘needs to explain to them what is really going on: that in some places there is replacement in the name of fairness. That sometimes they are seeing visible black folk where they did not previously see them. The racists need to know that they are living in a changing society and we are concerned about them being treated fairly, just as they should be concerned about others being treated fairly. There is a fascist story about replacement and a progressive story about replacement.’

West’s observation on angry whites ‘seeing visible black folk where they did not previously see them’ brought to mind incoherent resentment here; complaints latterly about imbalance in academia, the law, in broadcasting; complaints decades back about names and voices on the air in what had been the unionist enclave of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Old stuff now. Though it took Channel Four to give us Derry Girls.