5 books about our conflict...

Was surprised and delighted when Prof Ian McBride’s email arrived, asking me to contribute to a series where historians, social scientists, journalists and writers pick five books about our conflict that influenced them most.

I wrote a short piece on voice and story. Choosing Joan Lingard, Susan McKay, Fionnuala O’Connor, Madeline Leonard - my favourite story seekers and tellers from recent generations. And also Guy Beiner, excavating 1798, showing us how to find hidden voices.

The full piece is at www.irishhistoriansinbritain.org

Northern Protestants' Irish Ghost Limb

If you’re looking for the 2022 book The Ghost Limb: Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798, you’ll find it here.

This is an earlier essay I wrote for the Honest Ulsterman about northern Protestants and the Irish language. It’s a personal piece about family history and lost heritage.

Northern Protestants’ Irish Ghost Limb.

"What is this Irish-shaped space in me?" Asked the northern Prod, of the northern Prod.

It's like a ghost limb. A hidden compartment that I can't quite access.

I never felt that way in Dublin though. The dislocation happened when I moved back to Belfast. To the land of Lundy and binary choice. Where you can mix and be merry, but where you just are what you are. And by default you cannot be what you are not.

****

As a trained sociologist I know that identities are constructed. A Gaeilgeoir baby and and an Ulster-Scots baby, if abandoned at birth in a chicken coop, would not be able to distinguish Liam Clancy from Willie Drennan. They would peck like chickens in equal measure. 

Which is to say that cultural identity is not carried in the blood. It's just stories that we tell about the past to make sense of the present. Stories rooted in our families' journeys, and in social and political inequalities. But invented traditions. Imagined communities. I've read the books and taught the courses.

So It feels stupid to have an Irish-shaped space that I feel in my heart. A ghost limb whose itch I can't scratch. But I have it, I feel it, sin é.

****

Linda Ervine teaches an Irish class for Protestants and others in Turas in East Belfast, to help people reconnect with their lost heritage. My friend Lisa and I think that between this and Duolingo, we can make some progress. An east Belfast Protestant, as yet with little Irish, Lisa says she somehow feels the language in her bones. I know what she means.

She types into messenger late one night,

"English seems insufficient to tell our stories. I think that's why Ulster-Scots does what it does. It's trying to find an authentic way of explaining who we are, because we know English is lacking to tell our heart's story. But even that's not enough."

She just dashes that off and falls asleep. And I've been turning it around ever since.

****

A friend comes to visit. Gemma grew up in the same charismatic evangelical church as me, and our paths intertwine. Born-again Christians who lost our faith. Troubles kids, Protestant trappings, with an Irish inner world. Embryonic as teenagers, teased into life as adults. Made official by Irish passports, made meaningful by researching our histories and feeling our way through.

I ask her the question, what is this Irish-shaped space? Am I making it up? How can you feel sore for the absence of something you've not quite known?

Gemma says, for her, it comes from loving this place. From being a home-bird, feeling rooted in the landscape and the natural world. From finding out the names of things so she could name them. By willows and wells and the lay of the land.

That made sense. I looked up my house. Town-land of the holly. I grew up in Lisnasharragh, the fort of the foals.

As a twenty-first century Green, some cogs slowly start to move into place. Irish language as future tense, not just past. Connection with an island we must protect. Not from foreign invaders but from ourselves as a species.

We will need to know where that low-lying stream is some day soon. The thirty two different words for field. What will grow where. We may need Irish as a map. Ulster-Scots too for that matter.

But I'm jumping to the future now. What of the past?

****

It's in Guy Beiner's book, Forgetful Remembrace: Social Forgetting the Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster, that I find tools. 

Beiner talks about the 1798 United Irish Rebellion as an historical moment which our binary northern politics has been unable to deal with. We have struggled to compute how Protestants and Catholics could fight side by side for French Revolution style freedom and equality.

So the story of 1798 became hushed. Officially and unofficially repressed. We feared to speak of it. It was dismissed as an anomaly.

But it's not an anomaly. Relationships between Catholics and Protestants have always existed, expanding and contracting according to political circumstances. 

Similarly, northern Protestants' Irishness has expanded and contracted over time. It has been paused and revised, sometimes erased. Or in Beiner's terms, "disremembered." 

Because after partition, and during the Troubles, people started to define as one thing or the other. Identities became packaged up. It became complicated for Protestants to identify as Irish. What was unproblematic for Carson, became difficult for us.

Ironically the 1998 Agreement embedded this pattern. The labels CNR (Catholic, Nationalist, Republican) and PUL (Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist) were invented. Leaving little room for nuance, for identities that would not fit in a box.

And so, these radical northern Protestant traditions contracted. Dissenters dropped out of mainstream narratives.

But their ideas lived on. Beiner found that many northern Protestants still have relics and stories of 1798. You'll find this radicalism too, if you look in the right places. Amongst Protestant poets and playwrights; Labour Protestants, socialist loyalists, trade unions and workers; the Christian left and the evangelical reconciliation movement; Protestant LGBTQ+ people, feminist and environmental activists.

In a similar way, the erasure of Irish did not fully take. A small number of northern Protestants continued to identify as Irish. For others again, the feeling of the stories never went away, even when the words fell silent. Social memory persisted, was transmitted, encoded, embedded in the stories Protestants told about their lives and about this island.

****

Lisa sends me a message. She's researching her genealogy. She's found some Protestant relatives who were speaking Irish as a first language in the 1901 census. Her grandmother remembers Irish being spoken. Other northern Protestants tell me similar things.

I needed to find out if this was my story too. Was the ghost limb real?

For a week I traced back family tree through four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two generations. For a week I was astonished at the purity of my Protestant line, the lack of religious inter-marriage, the brick wall of English language, my many, many Scottish antecedents. 

Lisa laughed. "You can share my Irish," she says.

It was looking like I was 100% Planter with Celtic mist notions.

But my ghost limb still ached a little. So I tried to dig deeper. To make it make sense. 

My maternal grandmother - a Protestant - was a champion Irish festival dancer. I found her music books from the Gaelic Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language in an old suitcase. There's part of a story. (It had an original copy of Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant inside - there's another).

On my mum's side of the family, there was a religiously mixed wing. A few months into my ancestry quest, I traced people who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, and vice versa, ping ponging around over generations. People who refused to fall out with the mixed marriage families. Cultures blended. There's another part.

My parents made a break with unionist politics when the Troubles came. We grew up identifying as Irish. There was a flirtation with the SDLP. We alternated between Christy Moore and Graham Kendrick cassettes in the car. We read Austen in school, but Heaney at home. It wasn't a traditional package of Irishness - I'd still have to google the Children of Lir. But we opted in to that radical Protestant history.

And then I thought about the modern Irish. All those new citizens sworn in. If a Syrian woman gains Irish citizenship, she may feel Syrian and also Irish. If she has a child, they may feel Syrian-Irish. Rinse and repeat for ten generations. All roads lead to some kind of diversified Irish dimension of identity. So of course this applies to northern Prods.

 ****

On a beach walk, my friend Richard - a Cork man - informs me that we both speak the same Hiberno-English, where Irish and English, and Scots in the north, weave together. He reminds me that Ulster was one of the last places to be planted. About the mixing of Scottish newcomers with Irish natives, through work and life and often love. He tells me how language became melded and mingled.

"The way we both speak English today," he says, "is underpinned by Irish. Our sentence structures, word order, our sense of drama, the rhythm, the intonation. You understand all of these," he said, "you just don't have the vocabulary." And he sent me on my way with a stack of books under my arm.

So that's it, I thought, I'm Scotch-Irish, Ulster-Scots, northern Irish. Made out of Presbyterian prayer books and bleached linen. A dissenting Prod. As Irish as I want to be, just in my own way.

****

And then, after having made my peace, I found the language. 

In the most unexpected of places.

I'd left researching my fraternal grandmother's line until last. Granny never spoke about her life before marriage, and nobody seemed to know anything.

Now I think I know why.

The Gibbney family lived on Belfast's Shankill Road in the 1900s. Protestants. House painters and linen weavers. Dora, my great-grandmother, is a Gibbney. In the 1901 census, her big brother Archie and his whole family speak Irish as their first language. Archie's brother James, his wife and kids are recorded as speaking Irish and English the same year. Another brother Samuel marries RoseAnn. RoseAnn's family in Co. Antrim speak Irish only. And so it goes on.

Gibbney. O'Gibne. Gibne. A lock of hair? A family keepsake.

In the 1911 census, as many people are recorded speaking Irish in the Shankill as in the Falls. Up to 17% in some streets.

But by 1911, the Irish language has gone from my family's official records.

Did they lose their Irish by accident? Or was it disremembered?

Of course the erasure of Irish started much further back. With the Penal Laws. And National schools. English was promoted as the proper way to speak and get ahead. It seems no coincidence that many of us are finding our Irish in working class Protestant areas. It was something that needed 'civilised' out of people - an experience we share with many Catholics.

There were of course carrots as well as sticks - being socially astute and politically expedient to Anglicise in a time of Home Rule, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, partition.

My own granny, half Gibbney, never talked about her upbringing. She presented as middle-class, a devout Presbyterian, strongly unionist. There were no hearthside stories. No trace of the Irish.

But, somehow, the new identity did not take. It seems my dad, her son, unconsciously picked up the intergenerational thread.

Was it Dora's stories? What was transmitted through the wider family circle? Were fragments of code passed on by accident? A trail of breadcrumbs. Did our Hiberno-English contain the social memories for us? Leaving just enough to decipher later?

And that’s the Irish ghost limb, I think. Some kind of intergenerational code. A cultural reservoir that lies off the beaten track. A thread that can connect us to our heart's stories.

And for those of us who feel no connection, it's nonetheless woven into the linen of our family histories. To be left or taken.

****

I've joined the bunrang at Turas again this year. As my love for Irish is not matched by my linguistic ability.

But, in a way, I think that's where I'm meant to be. With people who are on a similar journey. Feeling these little jolts of recognition and rediscovery together. Getting under the bonnet of our own histories. Piecing together how the Scots and the Ulsterness and the Irish intertwine.

And this is how to ease the ghost limb, I've found. By connecting withthese cultural disrememberings. Gently pulling back the undergrowth of our broken northern politics. Allowing the secrets and skeletons space in our lives. If only that we might more fully know ourselves, and how we fit on this island.

Fortnight at 50

Fortnight magazine is back! A staple of the local political scene since 1970, Fortnight went on hiatus in 2012. But it’s back with a 50th anniversary issue, ready to do battle with 2020.

I have a piece in there, ‘Divided Politics, Blended Lives.’ It’s about social mixing and friendships in everyday life in Northern Ireland. And how these are at a much more advanced stage than our politics suggests. Half of the piece reflects on how the pandemic has affected social and political dynamics in the north.

Analogue copies are available in No Alibis bookstore in Botanic, Belfast.

Digital magazine is available here.

Book Review: William Drennan, a Misunderstood Radical

Reviewed Fergus Whelan’s book, May Tyrants Tremble: The Life of William Drennan, 1754-1820, for the Irish Times. An ode to late 18th century Belfast and a slightly awkward but trail blazing United Irishman.

The full review is available in the Irish Times.

In a devastating election, is Northern Ireland the crack where the light gets in?

I spent last night watching the election with my da. As is customary, we allowed ourselves to hope for a decent Labour result, and were then crushed by the 10pm exit poll. We’ve been doing this on and off since Kinnock. We know how it goes. But the scale of defeat this time was breathtaking.

Rather than going to bed in despair, we decided to wait up for North Down – Northern Ireland’s first result. Stephen Farry was close they said. It turned out he was more than close. He won a majority of nearly 3,000 over the DUP, exceeding that of Sylvia Hermon.

That was the first spike of adrenaline. It was soon followed by reports of stonking majorities for Claire Hanna in South Belfast, Colum Eastwood in Foyle and the chance that John Finucane would flip North Belfast. All came to pass.

Alliance were making breakthroughs left, right and centre. Pun intended. Not quite enough for Naomi Long in East Belfast, who narrowly missed out, probably because the DUP’s Gavin Robinson is a pretty nice guy.

This election sent a very clear message to the DUP. Their Brexit strategy, such as it was, has spectacularly misfired. While they only lost two seats, huge majorities across Northern Ireland plummeted. The red white and blue wall is now seriously under pressure.

Despite retaining seven seats, Sinn Féin will not be feeling comfortable either. Abstentionism, while ideologically understandable, has become awkward to sell in practice.

For both parties, the lack of Stormont has become untenable. The public’s apathy at our stasis has now turned into desperation, anger and a genuine willingness to think and vote differently.

This is where the crack of light comes in. This election campaign was down and dirty in parts. It got personal. Some tried to harness fear to get the vote out. It was, on occasion, tinged with the vague threat of future violence. Directed against whom, god only knows.

But amidst this dirge, something was rising above. Candidates were genuinely thinking about how to appeal beyond their tribe. Unlikely relationships emerged. Parties stood aside. Different issues were prioritised. Primarily Brexit, but also the NHS. Around kitchen tables, conversations started to change. A lot of people questioned boundaries within themselves, and many were surprised by the answers.

The penny was beginning to drop that if we do the same thing, we get the same thing. And there’s barely a soul left in the north who wants to go on like this.

These new dynamics were reflected back to us by the new MPs. Claire Hanna mused on Talkback today that while some might see her win as simply a gain for nationalism, she sees it as an authentically cross-community effort. Stephen Farry noted the impact of the Green Party and others standing aside in North Down. Similarly John Finucane explicitly recognised the diverse nature of his support, and pledged to live up to the challenge.

The DUP have cast this cooperation as a pan-nationalist front. But this is not what it is. Remain, left, liberal and green people were actively casting around for a unionist candidate to root for. Sylvia Hermon could have been that unionist. If David Ervine was still with us, or if Dawn Purvis was still in politics, waves of support would have come their way. But the UUP called Brexit too late. Their liberal left hand didn’t know what the conservative right hand was doing. And in the end, they failed to convince. Nonetheless, liberal, left and Remain type unionists are a vital part of this new progressive turn, albeit forced to seek representation through different parties this time around.

And so, this election may be a turning point for us. I don’t remember a time where people in Northern Ireland have voted so flexibly. There was genuine movement across traditional communal lines, a genuine focus on bigger issues. The construct of orange and green is making less sense by the day.

But we also awakened to some starker realities.

The regions of the UK have fractured. England wants to get Brexit done. It has veered to the right, again. In a time of climate emergency and the breakdown of the welfare state, the English chose Johnson. A fridge-hiding strongman. A representation of everything careless and elitist.

Scotland wants something different. The SNP’s strong performance brings Indy2 right back to the table. Scotland may now choose to reorient its politics to European and Nordic axes rather than Anglo-American.

While discussion about a new Ireland is already happening here, Scottish independence would be an existential crisis for northern unionists and indeed the non-aligned. In Matthew O’Toole‘s words ‘ it is hard to see how Northern Ireland’s union with Britain can survive the end of Scotland’s’.

Of course Johnson may not want to concede another independence referendum. But it seems certain that, one way or another, Scotland will not be able to tolerate indefinite Tories.

And neither can we.

Another crack of light is that there have been many things that unite us lately, across the whole of Northern Ireland.

We do not like land or sea borders. We do not trust the Tories. Most English people are disinterested in us. Many English nationalists would actively like to get rid of Northern Ireland. Brexit is happening. We have been kicked out of bed, and nobody should gloat because this affects us all. But it is what it is, and the fragility of the union can no longer be ignored.

What also emerged in this election is how highly we value our public services. The NHS was one of the most talked about issues in Northern Ireland. We care about our nurses. Everyone now loves someone on a spiralling waiting list. We may not want to follow the path that England is now set to take. We may also want a better system than the Republic of Ireland. Whatever our constitutional preferences, we cannot gloss over this truth.

This election has also confirmed that we are weary with violence. Genuine unionist concerns about Brexit manifested themselves in some unsettling ways throughout the election. Whilst rightly wanting to include loyalists in the conversation, the narrative of a small minority was not challenged rigorously enough. This backfired for the DUP, who seemed uncomfortable at times, but who did not provide a strong counter-narrative. Threatening banners and aggressive literature galvanised people to vote the other way. 

Zooming out, our attitude to climate emergency has also shifted. Parties tripped over themselves to prove their green credentials. As Clare Bailey says, ‘a new Ireland is coming – her name is climate change.’ While the Green Party may have stood aside tactically in some seats for this election, their message was not far from people’s thoughts. And ironically, as we try to cope with the challenges of environmental breakdown over coming years, it may help focus minds on the future. You cannot mop up a flood with a flag.

This is not a Pollyanna hot take on why it’ll all be ok. Nothing is ok, and there will probably be chaos. But it is a statement of fact that the politics of the past here cannot hold. Those who rely on it cannot ultimately succeed. Those who tried new things in this election were rewarded. We need to come to a deep and profound realisation that – because of England’s Brexit – nothing in Northern Ireland can ever be the same again.

Originally published on Slugger O’Toole on Friday 13th December 2019