Can Ireland Be One? by Malachi O'Doherty

Author:Malachi O'Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785373527
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
Published: 2022-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

9

NATIONALISM

NEARLY HALF THE people in Northern Ireland are loosely described as nationalists. They are not really nationalists. A few are perhaps. The mistake has been made before that all of these people, at least those of voting age and above, want a united Ireland.

In the early days of the Northern Ireland Troubles, then Taoiseach Jack Lynch argued in a summit with the British Prime Minister Ted Heath that all of ‘the minority’ in Northern Ireland wanted out of the UK and rid of the border. He didn’t use the word ‘nationalists’. It had not come into common currency yet but was settled on later by general agreement as an adequate descriptor of people who previously have been called the minority or the Catholics.

Heath doubted Lynch’s claim and called a border poll, which was inconclusive because the people called ‘the minority’ declined to vote. The more republican-minded among their leaders probably did not want the embarrassment of an outcome that did not affirm their claims and thereby diminished their influence. As it turned out, after another twenty-six years, the main political leadership of these people – whatever we are to call them – settled for the compromise of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which put unity where they wanted it, in the future.

We call them nationalists, not because they necessarily evince the characteristics of nationalists in other parts of the world, as observed or defined by academics who have written on the subject, but because we can’t call them Catholics any more. Even unionists and the British were wary of calling them Catholics when the Troubles started. Most of those, in fact nearly all of those, who vote for parties which say they want a united Ireland, were indeed baptised Catholic or were born of parents who were baptised Catholic. But if they are not actually practising Catholic worship or expressing any theological convictions through their politics, their being of Catholic extraction could not be the most pertinent fact about them.

That it may be a predictor of how they will vote is inconvenient. That fact nudges us back into recognising what a handy term Catholic is. We can substitute it for person who is unlikely to vote for any unionist party and more likely to vote Sinn Féin, SDLP, Alliance or for the Green Party. It is never going to be an exact label. It is essentially code or shorthand, a generalisation which can sometimes help clarify things and at other times obscures reality.

Is it not unfair to actual believing Catholics to retain their designation beyond its appropriateness just because it is a handy label for a bunch of people we would like to lump together as not-unionist? What should we then call actual believing Catholics to distinguish them from the others we have chosen to call Catholic for convenience?

Using labels beyond their literal meaning can lead us to preserve in language the myth of coherence in a community which is actually fragmenting. At what point would we give up

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