Was Simon Harris right about attitudes to north? – Pat McArt

People can opt for Kerry, Connemara, Mayo or Dublin, but how many people go to Longford for their summer holidays? Not too many, I would think. But we did.

It was, to quote the wife, somewhere different. It sure was.

Why I remember this holiday so well is that after we booked into a quiet wee hotel in Longford Town, I went down to the bar to avail of a much-needed pint of Guinness and it soon became clear to me, after engaging with a few locals, that they had rarely, if ever, met a hybrid like me – a half-Derry/half-Donegal man. I felt like an alien species. Indeed, on a couple of occasions an interpreter would have come in handy.

And even more memorable was the fact that of all the people I talked to that night and over the next few days, not one – not a single one – had ever been up north. I thought that amazing.

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But, maybe, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have. After all I know a newspaper man from Derry who told me he never met a Protestant until he got a job with a certain paper. We live in a very strange place, of that there is no doubt.

However, let’s move on.

Last Monday, when speaking at the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly in his home constituency of Wicklow, the taoiseach, Simon Harris, was obliquely referencing the increasing debate about the possibility of Irish unity when he suggested we really don’t know each other that well.

And then he stated something that has caused quite a bit of a furore since: “I’m also, if I’m being very honest, of a generation where people are more familiar now with London and Berlin and Paris than they might be with Belfast or Derry.”

Sinn Féin described the taoiseach’s remark as “clumsy and ill-informed”. It certainly has raised a lot of comment on mainstream and social media. Indeed, I was invited onto Donegal’s Highland Radio on Tuesday to air some opinions on the issue.

So, to make it clear, while I understand that Harris’s words were clumsy and came across as exclusionary to many people north of the border, I find myself having trouble disagreeing with him.

There’s a lot of history at play here.

I remember the legendary broadcaster Gay Byrne engaging in several discussions about this very topic. One day on the radio he asked a Dubliner why he went to Kerry, not to Donegal, for his holidays. “Because,” replied our man, “you don’t have to go through the north or go through two British army checkpoints to get to Kerry.”

Okay, that was during the Troubles, but that attitude clearly hasn’t gone away.

Some years later Gay got involved with another guy, an American tourist, who I recall said that driving out of Shannon airport he always “turned left”. That was shorthand for saying he always went south.

Of course the fact Bord Fáilte around then was promoting a map of Ireland in the US with the top half – a line across from Dublin to Galway – omitted might have had something to do with that. The north spelt trouble, it was a bad place, and it needed to be ignored as it was bad for the tourism business.

The reality is that even today many people in places like Laois, Longford, Carlow, Clare etc have never been up here.

If they are going on holidays they’ll opt for the Costa del Sol or the Algarve before Bangor or Bundoran. The weather, obviously, has quite a lot to do with that decision. But there is another chill factor that’s also very obvious but rarely highlighted.

The reality is that even today many people in places like Laois, Longford, Carlow, Clare etc have never been up here

Driving around in a southern-registered vehicle in, for example, the Coleraine, Bushmills, Ballymena and Portadown areas and seeing loyalist territory marked out with red/white/blue is far from welcoming, The black actor Sidney Poitier feeling uncomfortable driving through Mississippi in the 1960s film In the Heat of the Night comes to mind, for some very odd reason.

Just days into his new role, the taoiseach knows the language was clumsy and he was clearly irritated that he had got it wrong. He immediately sought to rectify the tone on Tuesday morning when he stated: “You don’t unite an island without uniting a people and without people getting to know each other better.”

You can’t really argue with that. And, maybe, as taoiseach, he might take it upon himself to lead by example on building friendships across the island for however long he stays in office.