Building a New Heritage (RLE Tourism) by Ashworth Gregory;Larkham Peter;

Author:Ashworth, Gregory;Larkham, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Figure 8.1 Lord Carson, Irish Unionist Party leader from 1910 to 1920, gesticulates defiantly southwards from his plinth in front of Stormont

Source: Photograph by the author

It is precisely this Unionist failure to recognize that a claim to territory is not in itself sufficient to create a feeling of belonging to the place claimed which is addressed in the second argument that Ulster is a separate cultural entity with its own distinct cultural and material heritage and communal sense of identity. This can be regarded as a conscious attempt to lay siege to that moral high ground. We can see the converse of the Unionist stance on heritage in the development of this perspective, the essentials of which rest upon the creation of an Ulster origin-myth which establishes both a separate identity and legitimation of the claim of Ulster Protestants to their territory within the island of Ireland. In the most developed justification of this viewpoint, Adamson (1991: 104) argues that Ulster's historical and cultural heritage contains within it ‘the proof of the common identity of northerners’. Somewhat ironically, he uses precisely the same sort of heritage sources and artefacts as did traditional Gaelic nationalism. Thus, his arguments are also characterized by time-collapse, the origins of Ulster identity resting in a long-past age (Adamson 1978). In this origin-myth, the earliest inhabitants of what is now Ulster were the Cruthin, who controlled a Scots-Irish cultural province prior to the arrival in Ireland of the Celts (Gaels). In this interpretation, Cú Chulainn, the hero of the Ulster Cycle, the pseudo-histories of the province, the most famous of which is the Táin bó Cúailgne (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), is reincarnated as the leader of the Ulster resistance against the invading Gaels who eventually pushed the Cruthin back to the extreme north-east of the region. As Buckley (1991: 269) points out, there is a wonderful irony in this, as a statue of Cú Chulainn stands in Dublin's Central Post Office to commemorate the revolutionaries of the 1916 uprising, central figures in the pantheon of martyred heroes of the new Irish nation state. But even the Gaels of Ulster, it is argued, had more in common with those of Scotland than the remainder of Ireland. Thus the Plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the colonization of oppressors in the Gaelic myth, can be depicted as a reconquest by a Scots-Irish people who had once been expelled from their rightful territory by the invading Gaels. Adamson (1982: 108) sets out to ‘create a deeper sense of belonging to the country of our ancestors. For this Land of the Cruthin is our Homeland and we are her children.’ Clearly, this is historiography to underpin an Ulster independence, which – as Aughey (1989: 14) observes – is tantamount to accepting the nationalist case that Ulster is not part of a United Kingdom.

Third, there is the argument which rejects this notion of communal Ulster separateness, in turn seeking to define a nine-county Ulster as but one region in a diversified pluralistic Ireland.

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