Tuesday, January 06, 2009

[northern ireland] middle-east parallels

Wiki says that the population of Northern Ireland, at the UK Census in April 2001, was 1,685,000. Not many people for a province which has caused enormous headaches over a long period of time.

It's not necessary for me to have Irish blood, I contend, to write on Northern Ireland but as I do have Irish blood, then perhaps I can just feel what I write all the more in this matter. There's no doubting that the Irish can feel ... oh, they can feel and that's reflected in the Eurovision wins they've had, for one.

Agatha Christie put it well in N or M though when she said that the Irish have this knack of turning a dispute into the martyrdom of a national hero and weaving legend and song around it so that the slight is ne'er forgotten. The vehemence and provocation of the Orange marches, the Apprentice Boys or the Royal Black, the Ancient Order of Hibernian, Irish National Foresters or Republican parades are statements of intransigent positions and they raise issues.

The outside world

Just as with Israel and its legion of would-be-destroyers, it's fine for the world to say "ceasefire" but you have to be inside there to know the true nature of the conflict through their eyes. This is life and death for both sides. Also, you have to have grown up with the "hatred fed with their morning milk", as a journo whose name escapes me put it some years back, to understand and feel the issues deeply.


The Fields Of Athenry - Brian Kennedy

On the other hand, the outsider can see the forest away from the trees and provided he's not representing one side or the other, he can be an arbiter. Trouble is, especially in the middle-east and in Ireland, there doesn't seem to be an unpolarized position. I've had unpleasant experiences with both over-loud protestants and soft-spoken yet stubborn fenians over the years and from both sides, this word crops up again - intransigence.

The Irish will leap to say: "Well what about British intransigence?" True but this post is about the Irish.

Inside

My partner and I were "caught" in a restaurant in Germany with a party of Northern Irish protestants at our long table and I tried to strike up a conversation on non-Irish issues, which was fine at first but inevitably it came back round to The Troubles and there were two or three Paisleys at the table who made the whole experience of the meal unpleasant.

I've already mentioned that when I was a head teacher in London, our kids went to a basketball match near Canary Wharf and there was an IRA bomb scare. The kids were terrified, the police action was swift and we were kept in touch by mobile phone but what shocked everyone was when the geography teacher, named Brendan, said to the parents of the kids that the English had brought it all on themselves, they have, they have. Of particular interest to me was his term "they".



What can be done with such people? The dispute has become so deep that it's affected day to day life, even thinking on seemingly unrelated issues. A ceasefire is fine but then one of the parties does not respect it and the other does. One side is "just" trying to grab a little more land, a little more power before the heavy hand of reason descends.


And it's never as the arbiters portray it, a dispute between little boys. That's only to trivialize the issue and make the arbiters look like annoying lightweights in the eyes of the combatants.

On the other hand, do we all need constant supervision, a contention you could make after watching Lord of the Flies? Do we all need arbiters at hand the whole time?

Do we need apartheid with agreed, internationally acceptable boundaries?

Personally, I'd like to see a process whereby we could circumvent the lawyers and have travelling arbiters paid by the state, [along with the state's only other functions of defence, social security in a reduced form, education and representing the country internationally].

1 comment:

  1. Many accounts of Irish mythistory are much enlivened by anti-English racism intended, presumably, to foment hatred and murder.

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