NOT for the first time, I'm afraid, Patrick Murphy's political analysis is incomplete and partial.
Comparing the fortunes of Irish and Scottish nationalism, he fails to mention the singularly important difference which, alone, set the path of Irish nationalism and Irish politics generally on a destructive path which still afflicts us. That was the undemocratic and threat-driven decision by the British in 1920 to establish a six county northern state whose only claim to existence and legitimacy was the presence there of a unionist majority who refused to join with the new political entity in the rest of Ireland. The fact that that majority was totally Protestant in composition ensured that sectarianism was not only the foundation stone for the six county state. It also inevitably meant that normal politics could never prevail, unless the nationalist minority was prepared to abandon its will to become part of an all-Ireland nation, if not also convert to Protestantism? The reason why shipyard workers in Belfast behaved differently in Belfast than in Glasgow cannot be ascribed, as Murphy suggests, to Irish conservatism. It was much simpler than that. Nationalists/ Catholics were not in the Belfast shipyards, so didn't have the luxury of practising worker solidarity, as workers in Scotland did. The shipyards were not an isolated example. The same dysfunction and discrimination against nationalists prevailed in public sector employment and in many cases in private sector employment as well.
In the course of his article, Murphy suggests that 'Our political settlement built sectarianism into the political and social fabric of our society'. I'm afraid not, Patrick. That was achieved with the partition of Ireland almost 80 years before the Good Friday Agreement. Had the same happened in Scotland, there is no reason to think that the unwelcome consequences which we endured would have been any less toxic.
PATRICK FAHY
Omagh, Co Tyrone
