Difference in Northern Ireland

P

eople in Northern Ireland have tended,

since the founding of the statelet, to identify

themselves in political and religious terms.

A minority has seen itself as Catholic and Gaelic-

Irish (sometimes called ‘nationalist’), whereas the

majority have identified themselves as Protestant

and unionist – the latter term arising because

they see themselves as loyal to the British Crown

and do not favour unification with the Republic

of Ireland. These divisions led to Northern

Ireland being, in Ian Paisley’s rather chilling

phrase, a ‘Protestant State of the Protestant

People’, and the repression of the Catholics

resulted in the British government in 1972

suspending the local parliament at Stormont

(outside Belfast) and imposing direct rule.

The Good Friday agreement signed in 1998

sought to encourage a new sense of identity

and difference. Protestants were to try and

understand the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of

Catholics, and the nationalist minority were

urged to put themselves in the position of

unionists who were fearful of a united Ireland.

Recent developments have shown the difficulty

of this agreement working. A majority of

the unionists appear to support Ian Paisley’s

Democratic Unionist Party that sees identities in

traditional terms, and was in the past hostile to

any sharing of power with Irish republicans, who

have in the past espoused physical force as a

solution to Northern Ireland’s problems.

Imagine that you are a unionist who has lost

relatives in one of the Provisional Irish

Republican Army’s (IRA) bombing campaigns.

You are understandably suspicious of the fact

that Sinn Fein – generally considered to be the

political wing of the IRA – has signed the Good

Friday Agreement and, as a result, former

members of the IRA have taken part in the

devolved executive that the Agreement set up

and have become ministers.

Can you change your identity so that you are

no longer a ‘loyalist who hates Irish republicans’,

and regard yourself as a ‘loyalist who under-

stands where republicans are coming from’?

Even though you see republicans are ‘different’

Part of the Belfast ‘peace wall’, Northern Ireland

© Cathal McNaughton/Reuters/Corbis