The dilemma of Northern Ireland

Today, Northern Ireland will have been without a government for 593 days because Protestants and Catholics can't agree on the terms of cooperation

It’s back to square one. If Ireland with its overwhelming Roman Catholic majority is Hindu India, British-ruled Northern Ireland where this is being written — the six counties of Ulster to be exact — is the contrived Protestant homeland resembling Pakistan. On Saturday, Northern Ireland will have been without a government for 593 days because Protestants and Catholics can’t agree any longer on the terms of cooperation.

That they should have cooperated at all seemed a miracle to me for the two religions were fighting a nasty battle when I was last here in 1969. There’s been a pitched battle in the Catholic dominated Falls Road of Belfast, the capital city, when it was invaded by a Protestant mob from Shanklin Road. When I went down there knots of black robed priests stood around chatting on a road that was littered with bricks and stones. The priest I approached immediately assumed I had come to confess and took me into a little box. When I explained my calling and asked where he was the night before, he at once retorted, “And where I be but at the barricades with my flock?”

Across the religious divide, the messianic firebrand ultra Protestant leader and self-styled “doctor” and “Reverend”, Ian Paisley received me with the grim warning that India’s problems were all due to “Papa” (meaning Pope Paul VI) visiting Mumbai four years earlier. He called Pope John Paul II the anti-Christ when he addressed the European Parliament in 1988. “The good doctor fascinates me, doesn’t he you?” hissed Malcolm Muggeridge, a one-time leader-writer on The Statesman in Kolkata. “No,” I said referring to his rabble-rousing demagoguery. “He terrifies me!” 

When Paislety was about to introduce us, Muggeridge cut in smoothly, “Of course I know Mr Datta-Ray. I was his deputy editor!” He was nothing of the sort. He was one of several assistant editors. More to the point, he left the paper before I was born!

Returning to Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics came sufficiently close together as a result of high-powered international persuasion to sign the power-sharing Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement, called Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta or Comhaontú Bhéal Feirste in Irish. Sinn Féin, the Catholic party which had previously been seen as a militant rebel group, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Paisley founded agreed to work together in Stormont, the stately legislative building in Belfast.

But alas, the agreement broke down over a series of petty differences. The only real point of dispute is Sinn Féin’s demand for explicit legal recognition of Gaelic, which only about 1.5 million people speak, as the national language. Although Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, does occasionally utter a few words in Gaelic on public occasions, she can’t and won’t make a speech in it like Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s half-Indian, openly gay prime minister. Nor would Foster accept Varadkar’s invitation to attend his reception at Dublin Castle last week for Pope Francis.
 

Varadkar tried to make his reception for Pope Francis as wide-based as possible, inviting leaders of other Christian sects, members of the Council of State and European Parliament, lawyers and judges. Her ungracious refusal drew attention to the minority fanaticism that — shades of India — partitioned the island. It reflected generations of Protestant militancy. It was also perhaps dictated to some extent by her desire to placate Ulster’s substantial working class Scottish settler population who have no Gaelic. 

There’s a political angle too. Having lost her majority in the House of Commons, Theresa May needs the votes of the handful of DUP members of parliament to remain in office. It is assumed that she and the DUP are too closely linked for one never to act without consulting the other.

The silver lining to this dismal cloud is that about 30 per cent of Ireland’s population is aged under 30. These young men and women have barely heard of the dreadful potato famine of 1841-46 when millions of Irish either died or emigrated. They remember nothing of The Troubles, as the Irish called their periodic bouts of religious warring. They see the South living in harmony with its 4 per cent Protestant minority. And they wonder how Brexit will affect trade, jobs and investment across Britain’s only land border with the European Union, the now open frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic. 

It’s an economic issue but it’s more than that. The open border keeps alive the hope (as do joint games and a shared trade union movement) that the two halves of divided Ireland will one day be one.