52 The New York Review
Blood and Brexit
Nick Laird
If I dream, it invariably takes the form
of being hunted by men with guns—in
a house, in a forest, on a street. Some-
times these dreams end with me being
shot, sometimes with me stabbing some-
one. I only ever stab someone, even
though, growing up, we had a gun, ille-
gally, in the house—a double-barreled
shotgun that my father kept beneath
his bed and that we’d use occasionally
for shooting rabbits. In my dreams I
never see the face of the man I’m stab-
bing. I’ve had these dreams all my adult
life. Maybe they’re common among
people like me, maybe they’re not. By
“people like me,” I mean
people who grew up in
Ulster, who from our ear-
liest moments were wary,
were used to watching
everything for some sign,
however small, that things
were not quite right.
We lived in Tyrone in
Mid Ulster during the
spate of tit-for-tat killings,
as they were called. We re-
member all the bombs and
evacuations and fear. We
remember all the shoot-
ings. We remember being
turned back from going to
school at a checkpoint by
masked men with base-
ball bats. We remember
driving around a hijacked
burning car we were terri-
fied would explode. Each
evening the new scores of
dead and injured were re-
ported on the news. The
hijackings, the evacua-
tions, the bomb scares.
Relatives shot or forced
to flee their homes at
night. We took an hour
to travel the two miles to
school every day so the squaddies could
stop each car at the sangers—concrete
bunkers at either end of town, manned
by British soldiers—and check the
trunk and look in our schoolbags. The
usual checklist of Ulster strife, cata-
logs of close scrapes and witnessings
and griefs. When men tried to break
into the house one evening I took and
loaded the shotgun, and propped it up
on cushions and aimed it at the living
room door, sitting terrified in the dark
until my parents came home.
In 2018 with the director Brian Hill
I made a BBC documentary, The Life
After, which simply allowed a few of
those who had suffered the loss of
loved ones in the Troubles—partners
or children or siblings—to speak about
their experiences (we got funding for
it by making it into an arts show, so I
wrote some linking lyrics and little
poems based on their testimonies for
them to read to the camera). No one
ever recovers from the kinds of losses
these people have suffered: a daughter
going out dancing and never coming
home, a brother abducted in a pub and
tortured and murdered and dumped
on a hillside, a son stabbed on his way
home.
According to a 2012 study, North-
ern Ireland has the highest levels of
mental illness in the UK. In 2008 39
percent of the population of Northern
Ireland reported experiencing a trau-
matic event relating to the Troubles.
As with all such public admissions,
the real figure can be presumed to be
substantially higher. A 2015 analysis
showed that childhood trauma stem-
ming from the conflict has been a
major factor in the development of
psychopathology in Northern Ireland.^1
Related to these factors are extremely
high rates of suicide, by far the highest
in the UK. Northern Ireland is also a
world leader in the use of antidepres-
sants (at almost three times, say, the
rate of England).^2 Corresponding tothat are high rates of abuse of all kinds,
and addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The Northern Irish are world-class
drinkers.
Much of our lives in the Troubles
was spent in a defensive crouch, being
wrong by just existing. We were liable
to be anxious. An old friend of mine,
a Catholic and a fellow poet from Bel-
fast, was in New York City recently and
described being told once to “check
her privilege.” She had replied that the
privilege her identity had given her was
a mild form of PTSD. The phrase “iden-
tity politics” has a darker resonance in
Northern Ireland.
Every evil act I’ve ever seen com-
mitted was done in the name of iden-
tity. The IRA killed my friend D. in a
bomb that shook the windows of the
living room I was sitting in because
he was a Protestant. The IRA shot my
girlfriend’s uncle as he was delivering
bread because he was a Protestant.
The IRA kidnapped my friend N.’sfamily and made him drive a bomb to
a police station because he was a Prot-
estant. And the reverse is true. The
loyalist atrocities were just as bad. In
a tiny country of a million and a half
people, over 3,500 were killed in the
Troubles. Almost 50,000 were seri-
ously injured. We already did identity
politics in Northern Ireland: it didn’t
work out so well. And while we were
waiting around for Northern Ireland to
become more like the rest of the world,
the rest of the world turned into North-
ern Ireland: partisan, oppositional,
identity-focused.Northern Ireland is now a differ-
ent place from the place I spent my
childhood wanting out of. I attended
Cookstown High School, a large com-
prehensive with a big rural catchment,
and my teacher filled out my form for
Cambridge, including choosing the
college I’d eventually go to. I’d never
been there. No one I knew had been
to Oxbridge or anywhere near it. No
one I knew had gone to university in
En gland. My father was a grocer’s son
from Donegal and didn’t go to univer-
sity. My mother’s family were farm-
ers from Armagh, and having gotten
a scholarship to Trinity, Dublin, she
dropped out after one term when she
met my father. She did an Open Uni-
versity course when I was growing up.
Cambridge was a culture shock. I
was the only Northern Irishman in
my year at the college, and I discov-
ered that Englishmen who had gone
to public school (that is, paradoxically,
private school) possessed a boundless
self- confidence often only loosely con-
nected to their talents or intelligence.
Seven percent of British children at-
tend public school, though when I at-
tended Cambridge they made up more
than half of the students. Class privi-
lege is pervasive at Cambridge, as it is
in all British public life, particularly
among those who attended the loftier
schools, like David Cameron and BorisJohnson’s alma mater, Eton. Confi-
dence, founded or not, and its tone of
authority will take you far.
In the college bar in which I worked
I can remember having to regularly
usher out a certain old Etonian, a nasty
drunk, who, when I told him that he
had to leave, would scream some varia-
tion on Bogtrotter, why don’t you fuck
off? or Go back to where you came
from, Paddy. He didn’t worry that he’d
offended me. It was his privilege not to
have to.
Boris Johnson, that quintessential
old Etonian, now has the largest Con-
servative majority since
the days of Thatcher; his
landslide is being hailed
as a mandate for a hard
Brexit. It seems certain
the UK will leave the EU
at the end of January, and
that will have severe con-
sequences for Northern
Ireland. Johnson’s with-
drawal agreement will, by
most estimates, devastate
the Northern Irish econ-
omy: it will bring back the
border between Northern
Ireland and the Republic,
introduce a new border
in the Irish Sea between
Northern Ireland and the
rest of the UK, revitalize
the continuing dissident
Republican terrorism,
precipitate civil disor-
der and unrest from the
Loyalist community, and
destroy the brittle peace
established with the Good
Friday Agreement in 1998.
Watching Johnson in-
terviewed on the BBC just
before the election got me
thinking again about the
Etonian I knew at Cambridge, and his
arrogance and racism toward Northern
Ireland and the Northern Irish. To hear
Johnson lie repeatedly, to witness his
bluster and ranting, and his real rage
when he was challenged, reminded me
that there is a certain type of English
public schoolboy who feels entitled
enough to act, with impunity, in any
way he likes. Johnson is our version
of Trump, except that Trump’s entitle-
ment comes from money and white-
ness and Johnson’s comes from class.
And now Johnson has been given carte
blanche by the electorate to enact his
far-right agendas.
The British have spent three and a
half years discussing Brexit, taking no
meaningful action on climate change
or poverty or violent crime during that
time; and we’re here because Cameron
decided to have a referendum to pacify
a tiny impotent section of the Conser-
vatives’ Euroskeptic wing, without set-
ting proper parameters, or clarifying
what it meant, or even setting a major-
ity threshold to be reached before its
result would be acted upon. Ironically,
if the referendum had actually been
binding and not advisory, they would
have been forced to rerun it by now,
since the Brexiteers broke electoral
laws and campaigned on lies. The chief
special adviser to the prime minister,
Dominic Cummings—who worked forLondonderry, Northern Ireland, 1971DonMcCullin/ContactPressImages(^1) See Siobhan O’Neill and Nichola
Rooney, “Mental Health in Northern
Ireland: An Urgent Situation,” The
Lancet, November 8, 2018.
(^2) See Jon McClure, “New Data Shows
Northern Ireland Is a World Leader
in Prescription Drug Use,” The Detail,
November 17, 2014.