Are Nationalists the only moderate Unionists?

Mike Nesbitt is half-right. In a recent interview, the once-and-future Official Unionist leader outlined his vision for the ‘unionist family’, saying that there should only be two unionist parties: one progressive, and one ‘traditional.’ Laying aside the obvious question of, if he really wants to see the end of the three-way split in this manner, why does he not merely announce his own party is disbanding; of course, to the chagrin of the twelve pensioners in Fermanagh who still vote for them. To take Nesbitt seriously, he is right that without progressive leadership and vision, then unionists are destined to ‘No Surrender!’ themselves onto the backbenches of Dáil Éireann. Take the continued (read: boring) unionist opposition to recognition of the Irish language, as evidence that the ‘traditional’ unionist style is not working, in particular an article last week in the News Letter which warned of a ‘blitz’ of Irish language signs across Belfast; obviously an attempt to drum up a bit of ‘blitz spirit’ for the against.

The only moderate unionists are nationalists. It has always been a fact within the history of the union that the only people advocating for some compromise between the absolute governance of Ireland under the British crown and total separation have been leaders and voices within nationalism. At the beginning of the Act of Union, ‘King’ Daniel O’Connell advocated for its repeal, for the restoration of a Parliament in Dublin, but for Ireland and England to remain joined under the ‘golden link of the crown.’ This is what characterised the Home Rule movement which would have seen a mode of self-government, with fealty to the British monarch, ironically similar to that which governed Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1972. John Redmond was prepared to accept partition, and also favoured the Irish Parliamentary Party maintaining a presence in Westminster (albeit with a reduced number of seats) in order to scrutinise the treatment of northern Catholics. This legacy remains today, as the only moderate unionists around are Leo Varadkar and Mary Lou McDonald, who have each talked about a new Ireland, post-reunification, rejoining the British Commonwealth; combined with various tokenistic guff about Orangemen marching down O’Connell Street. The question that Nesbitt must reckon with is, why are nationalists the only moderate unionists?

In contrast, the avowed unionists are obsessed with maintaining the link with Britain, the sovereignty of Northern Ireland, entirely as it is, and only very, very few exceptions will suggest it is necessary to ‘talk’ about closer cooperation within our own island. This has been predominantly typified in the last decade by the impassioned, yet largely impotent, opposition to the Protocol, yet is further seen in the generational hostility of unionists to the Irish language.

Eight years ago, Jim Allister proposed that the then-proposed Irish Language Act was part of Sinn Féin’s ‘radical republican agenda to de-Britishise Northern Ireland,’ the next year, perhaps as an anniversary kind of thing, he echoed his comments warning of the ‘dark side’ the the Irish language, which was, the Provos spoke it. Yes: it was a shock to everyone who’s ever read a book on Irish history, or so much as listened to The Nolan Show, to learn that the IRA were Irish nationalists.

Resistance to Irish stems straight from the very foundation of Northern Ireland when a loyalist MP William Grant declared that the ‘only people interested in this language are the people who are the avowed enemies of Northern Ireland.’ To his credit, Prime Minister James Craig was not quite so extreme, yet still echoed the hostile language of enemies by asserting it ‘better to keep control by means of regulations over activities of this character than to drive them underground where they tend to germinate and exert a baneful existence.’ In 1948, bilingual street signs were officially banned, and activists in Newry were arrested under the Special Powers Act, with then-Minister for Home Affairs Brian Faulkner stating, ‘we simply cannot tolerate the naming of streets in a language that is not our language.’ This mindless antagonism was always a pre-determined damp squib, which would have been predicted by Edmund Burke.

‘Ireland, after almost a century of persecution, is at this time full of penalties and full of Papists,’ wrote Burke, regarding the penal laws. The eighteenth-century MP for Bristol is today thought of as the ‘father of conservatism,’ yet in many ways his views were radical and put him very much at odds with the British establishment. Foremost here was his opposition to the penal laws: said he, ‘reform there must be, or the half-citizen will become the full Jacobin.’ He recognised that the Penal laws had failed in deterring Catholics from practising their faith and that to further antagonise them unjustly would only be to the detriment of social cohesion. Likewise, a century of unionist aversion to the Irish language, hostility both implicit and explicit, has won them precisely nothing, while at the same time the language has started to grow to a revival, in no small way encouraged by Linda Ervine’s movement in the heart of Protestant East Belfast; to contradict William Grant and Brian Faulkner, no sane person would argue Linda Ervine is an enemy of the state. Every attempt to burn down the bush has only seen it blossom back better.

There is also a case to be made that bilingual street signs are in some way redundant, considering that 95% of all place names in Northern Ireland come directly from the Irish language anyway, and thus, if you do not have an interest in the language, there is an extent to which you have less of a connection to the place. How many residents of Ballyhackamore would be aware that they’re living in the ‘place of the big shite,’ literally Bhaile an caca mór, and how many would be able to explain why? Every time the picturesque ‘Kodak Corner’ in the Mourne Mountains comes up on your social media feed, know that the real name of the place is Ballynagelty, or ‘place of the crazed woman’ named for a woman who killed herself after her two sons drowned in Carlingford Lough and locals buried her up the mountain, facing the spot where they had died.

Furthermore, perhaps it should be emphasised that the name of the state is Northern Ireland, that second word deriving from the name of the goddess Ériu who asked the bard Amergin to give her name to the name of the land; part of a myth cycle which is the oldest system of literature in Europe by a thousand years. The cynical refusal of unionists to recognise the fundamental place of the Irish language has got them nowhere, is getting them nowhere, and ultimately it may turn out that their ‘blitz spirit’ will end up a self-imposed Dresden.