How to Fix Northern Ireland by Malachi O'Doherty

Author:Malachi O'Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

What mental acrobatics persuaded them to hang on to the coat-tails of a party led for twenty years by Lord Brookeborough, who told the world that ‘he would not have one of them about his place’, one can only guess.

Did their da’s [sic] never tell them how it all began?

Brookeborough’s period as prime minister of Northern Ireland ended in 1963, thirty-six years before Kelly wrote his article. He is indeed often quoted as having said that he would not have a catholic about the place and it is on record that he vetoed catholics attaining high office in the civil service. So, no excuses for him.

That someone of Kelly’s intelligence and history was so cynical about unionism, and that the largest catholic community newspaper published that article, augured ill for the success of the Good Friday Agreement. Even at a time when a political system was being put in place to try to end discrimination and injustice he was convinced that the old sectarian blocs were still firmly in place and that someone like me who was trying not to be locked into the old ways was a fool.

This is quintessential sectarianism which always looks to the past and always insists that those others have not changed and never will.

He was accusing me of seeking to represent the whole catholic community, which he assumed had a singular coherent position which I had failed to accord with. In fact, I had made no claim to be representing anyone but myself. The fact that I represented only myself is thrown back at me as an insult as if this was a self-evident failing in me, that I presumed to have an individual perspective, a considered independent thought.

This is what sectarianism does.

Kelly did not stop to consider that I had the right to stand alone and air an opinion of my own without first consulting my ancestors, or him.

I complained to the Press Complaints Commission about this article at the time but my point was not understood, that a catholic writer, Kelly, accusing another catholic, me, of reneging on a communal responsibility is sectarian.

If I, a white man, abuse my white neighbour because he consorted with black people, that is racist, even if no black person ever hears about it.

This article of Kelly’s fits with a seething prejudice and energetic propaganda that insists on defining Irish people as authentic or inauthentic, calling them back to the ‘planter and Gael’ distinction, asserting that their political allegiances are predetermined and holding in contempt those who reject this because they undermine that project.

In a much more recent column in The Irish News, Brian Feeney argued that sectarian coherence was still so strong that even a small step towards simple majority rule democracy in Northern Ireland was impossible. This referred to a suggestion being developed that a form of voluntary coalition in Stormont might replace the current, highly vulnerable system of mandatory coalition. Under that system, the larger party of either sectarian community can bring down the

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