The Other View

Some Thoughts on Protestant Cultural Identities

‘The struggle is about nationality: Irish out’

By John Nixon

The mural cliché above, not to mention the current battle for cultural ownership of Cuchulainn and St Patrick must surely sow the deepest confusion among many Loyalists/Unionists who see it flaunted on walls, postcards and at rallies. Political murals and cultural representations have developed a symbiosis that requires a thesis on it’s own. ‘Whenever I hear the word culture I go for my gun’. The Nazi leaders Goebbels understood very well the value in exploiting culture to attain social, ethnical and political hegemony; a lesson not at all lost today on elitist groups and individuals working off ethno-political agendas.

A timely publication then is Paddy Logue’s book Being Irish in which 100 people from a very broad spectrum in all walks of life throughout this island outline what Irish means to them. Definitions and perceptions of ‘Irishness’ have changed. It’s like religion in a way, collectively we identify with ‘one true church’, but we interpret what that means to us in a unique and individual way.

Cultural identity for David Trimble means "Ulster British" and he is thus an integral part of a larger group of people whose identity is borne out of their unique historical experience. Sammy Douglas, a community development worker, grew up in Sandy Row where he experience no sense of ‘Irishness’ until he went to England where he discovered just how Irish his fellow British subjects perceived him to be: another ‘Paddy’. Into the equation comes religion. Jack Boothman, former president of the GAA, a southern Protestant thus claims a different cultural historicity.

Racial identity, as the Duke of Wellington remarked, is not determined by whether you were born in a stable but that ultimately you are what your life experience makes you. So what is race? Joyce’s Leopold Bloom defines it: "A group of people living in the same place at the same time".

When young working class loyalists from the lower Shankill or Ulsterville Park proclaim that their ‘struggle’ is about nationality, Irish out; they can do no other.

Cultural/racial identity frames have been determined, extended and transformed by events of the past thirty years. So are commonalities diminishing: they is they and us is us?

To add to galloping confusion into the equation comes nomenclature: Ulster-British, Ulster-Scots, Scots-Irish, Royal Irish, and Anglo-Irish. Any of them have become a convenient prefixes to suit political and cultural orientation.

Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers shared a common faith with the indigenous peoples of south Leinster. By the 15^th century Anglo-Irish. In the 18^th century an Anglo-Irishman was a ‘Protestant on horseback’. The late Dougie Hutchinson, a former DUP councillor in Armagh, was highly instrumental in preserving the future of Navan Fort/Eamhain Mhacha. He declared to Sam McAughtry he was Anglo-Irish. It was an elegant anachronism. Dougie’s origins ‘like my own’ surely stem back to the Scottish migrants of Elizabethan or Cromwellian plantations. If Sam queried my cultural identity I might pronounce: "I am an Irishman; a member of four hybrid nations that are guests to an archipelago on the rim of the world that is Western Europe’. Sounds Joycean.

The trouble with language is that it can be costly business. Recently over £4 million was allocated to Ulster-Scots culture and language. A linguistic analysis carried out by Queen’s University has shown that Ulster-Scots amounts to simply an imperial dialect; so does the dialect of the Cotswolds. How many speak it in East Belfast? Ulster-Scots street signs erected in loyalist areas in Dundonald overnight were wrenched down the same day because somebody thought they were in Irish!

Extravagant amounts of Peace and Reconciliation money could have been better deployed to promote awareness of the unique relationship and centuries shared culture between Scotland and Ireland. Are we not the same people? Lord Laird of Artigarvan knows he is a good thing when he claims that ‘parity of esteem means parity of funding’. More a case of ‘parody of extreme’. It’s a bit rich, indeed, putting Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson and the American Declaration of Independence into the Ulster-Scots cultural fast track to strengthen the case for identity … or funding.

Ulster Protestants today are making up a serious deficit in awareness of their own unique history, especially working class communities who are recording and writing their histories, more so for it’s intrinsic value than hegemonic. It’s their story whether Shankill/Lurgan or Shankill/Belfast. There are still a few head bangers though, who subscribe to fanciful notions that Ulster Protestants are the lost tribe of Benjamin.

It’s time now to separate the silver from the dross, for sincere Loyalists to assess the true value of their history and define their cultural identity in this fast changing dot com world.

In the wake of the cease-fires one thing has become clear; both communities have become increasingly introspective. We are looking for new ways to look at old ways and vice versa.

Being Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster-British, etc, may simply be a ‘choice of allegiance’ and that a vision for the new millennium would be, as one contributor put it; "To raise the issue of identity from the bloodlines of ethnicity to the lifelines of human rights". Sounds Joycean.

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