My parents used to run a guesthouse on the seafront in Bray, Co. Wicklow from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. The rooms were always full this time of the year as Northern visitors liked to head "down south" to escape from "the twelfth". The latter meant nothing specifically to me as a child, I just knew that there were shootings and bombings on a daily basis and the North must be a terrible place. I used to play with many of the guests of my own age but nothing was ever mentioned. I concluded they probably didn't want to talk about it and their holiday to Bray was an escape from all the badness. I was reminded of all this because I was just outside having a fag and, still living near where I grew up, I could hear plenty of Northern accents.
I then remembered an occasion when I was in the house of a classmate whose entire family had moved from Belfast to Bray a couple of years previously. We were both Arsenal supporters and this lad had a picture of Pat Rice, long serving right back and currently Mr. Wenger's assistant, proudly displayed on his bedroom wall. "We used to live next door to him back home", he'd say. I then mentioned that other Northern Ireland Arsenal defender, Sammy Nelson. "He's from the North too isn't he?". I was met with stony silence. Of course the penny dropped a couple of years later. Sammy Nelson must be a prod. That might have been an early lesson in understanding the extent of the confessional divide in Northern society.
As the years go by you begin to understand much more about the conflict on the island and I read a lot of history and politics. I was never obsessed by the Northern question as one or two of my lefty friends were and I probably had a partitionist mentality. My first trip across the border was to Newry to procure cheap booze for a girlfriend's twenty-first. Intellectually, my main influences would have come from the works of Paul Bew and Henry Patterson. I had read John Whyte's book, Interpreting Northern Ireland, and that convinced me that there were many credible approaches to take. Also influential was Northern Ireland: a Comparative Analysis by Frank Wright.
My overall attitude towards Northern Ireland was coloured by a hostility to bigoted and triumphalist nationalism and I could find that in elements of Fianna Fáil as well as Sinn Féin. This might be typical of someone whose politics by the late 1980s and early 1990s were situated on the sophisticated Gramscian wing of the European left or so I imagined...The point being that I was more critical of the excesses of nationalism than of unionism or loyalism, probably because it connected more with a critique of the dominant ideology in my own Republic.
Then one evening I was watching the news on the Italian channel RAI which was carried by the local cable company. I don't speak a word of Italian but I used to like watching foreign news bulletins to try to discern differences of emphasis in the coverage of world affairs. Besides, RAI had a gorgeous pouting newsreader I seem to remember. Towards the end of the bulletin there was footage of orangemen marching on the twelfth. The reporter was gabbling about "di millitanti protestanti" or something. This just made me crack up with laughter. It was almost like what Russian formalists like Shklovsky called "estrangement" or defamiliarization, where a piece of "art" by presenting the world in a strange and new way, allows us to see things differently. At least that's the effect the Italian coverage of the Orange march had on me.
Pluralism and respect for other traditions are important elements of liberal democracy but after that experience I can't take Orangeism all that seriously. There are some traditions that appear to be not only anachronistic but also bloody silly. I wouldn't want to stop them marching as such but in a really open society I should be able to laugh at these eejits with their bowler hats and sashes. Incidentally, my northern classmate became a barrister. I saw him on the DART the other week and I heard him on his mobile phone. The plummy tones of the Law Library have eliminated all traces of a once strong Belfast accent.
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