Why there’s more to celebrating the centenary of NI than free healthcare and child allowance
John Wilson Foster responds to Malachi O’doherty’s critique of plans to mark the state’s 100th birthday
Of commentators on the Irish quagmire, Malachi O’doherty is among the most candid and reasonable. He makes allowances because he is not in thrall to a narrative and is — I surmise — comfortable in his own skin. So, the best reply to his witty column on Northern Ireland’s centenary celebrations is an equally courteous candour.
He must know that being thankful to Northern Ireland only for the family allowance, the condoms and the free healthcare, while a good line in mock-cynicism, short-changes the truth.
First, because we are learning under siege from the coronavirus the primacy of good health. Had I been born in Belfast even 10 years before I was, I would in all likelihood have died in childhood without the lifesaving new NHS.
Secondly, because behind his trio of benefits lies a whole liberal national culture that took independent Ireland many decades to imitate, before it could truly cherish all its children, as Pearse and company promised to do in 1916.
What Malachi forgot to mention is that social security and healthcare are free throughout the Union: in thanking Northern Ireland (however tongue-in-cheek), he is thanking the whole UK and especially English reformers of the mid-20th century.
We might throw in the Butler Education Act of 1947, too, without which Seamus Heaney would not have become a Queen’s graduate, or Harvard professor.
For to live in Northern Ireland entitles you to live in the whole Union and to avail of its culture, which Malachi does as much as I do. Because of that culture, I am one of those trueBrit unionists whom he sees as faintly comic and wearing crown brooches.
I’m harder, though, to caricature than my namesake (but no relative) Arlene, because I have spent a career engaged with Ireland’s literature and native culture. You can do that and still be a true-brit unionist.
If Malachi is a “provisional unionist” (risky pun), I was, from the 1960s to the 1980s, a provisional nationalist. My experience ranged from my parents’ working-class east Belfast to the Blasket Islands, from the company of the Mcpeakes as a wannabe folk singer to the works of James Joyce as a budding critic.
Two things withered my provisional nationalism. One was the decades-long attempt to sunder unionists violently from Great Britain. The shadow of coercion will last my lifetime.
The other was the growing realisation that the official story of Ireland was too narrow to be my story, which is of the two-island archipelago.
But I also realised something else. Irish Ireland turns out to be only one of several Irelands and the official story is belied by the fact that Ireland is a net contributor to British culture and a gross beneficiary of that culture way beyond Malachi’s condoms and family allowances.
That chapter in the story has yet to be written and it will be a brave Irish historian who will do so. But it is a daily reality so ubiquitous it can be ignored — or disguised — by Brit-bashing.
Many among us do not want to live in the Union, but instead in a united Ireland severed from the UK. Yet, oddly, hundreds of thousands of southern Irish do want to — and have for a very long time. In the 20th century, 1.6 million Irish left for Britain, twice as many as left for the US.
Living in Northern Ireland, you can complain you are held captive in the nets of the Union. Yet the talented, ambitious, or merely restless, southern Irish, free as birds, happily fly not to the EU, but to GB, willingly into the Union nets. They work, vote and prosper, with social security and healthcare on draught if they don’t.
The southern Irish are eager beneficiaries of the extraordinary Common Travel Area, which has survived Leo Varadkar’s anti-brexit hostility. In 1989 alone, 70,600 Irish people crossed the water to work or live. In 2001, a sixth of the Irish population was living in Great Britain.
The many thousands of Irish-born in Great Britain are simply a ready-reckoner of the way in which Ireland and Britain form an identifiable cultural complex — in the trades, professions and media, in entertainment, literature and the arts, in sport.
And never mind the quantity, feel the quality. Siobhan Mcsweeney, Sharon Horgan, Niamh Algar, Paul Mescal, Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott, Laura Whitmore — just the latest in an age-old procession of gifted southern Irish stage and screen actors trooping to Britain, employed, welcomed and acclaimed.
There, the young actors will find their predecessors in front of the cameras and behind the microphones of the BBC — Graham Norton, Des Lynam OBE and his nephew Joe Lynam, Dara O’briain, Fergal Keane, the impressive ex-convent schoolgirl Orla Guerin MBE, Al Ryan, Angela Scanlon, and Declan Harvey — all working at the heart of British culture.
Graham Norton is the third Irish star in the BBC firmament over the past continuous 60 years, after Eamonn Andrews CBE and Sir Terence (Terry) Wogan KBE.
Norton, from Bandon, Co Cork, was the subject of a 2013 Daily Telegraph profile, “The making of a national treasure”. The nation in question was the UK. He’ll be Sir Graham down the line.
Who is arguably the highest-ranking academic in the United Kingdom? Professor Louise Richardson FRSE, a Catholic from Tramore, whose specialty is terrorism. She is the Vice-chancellor of Oxford University. Not to speak of professors Roy Foster FRSL, FBA from Waterford (Hertford College, Oxford), Eamonn Duffy FBA, a “cradle Catholic” (his description) from Dundalk (former President of Magdalene College, Cambridge) and Bernard O’donoghue FRSL from Co Cork (Wadham College, Oxford).
And, most pertinently, who is trying to save us from coronavirus? Professor Adrian Hill FRCP from Dublin who is director of the famed Jenner Institute (“Developing Innovative Vaccines”) at Oxford. And who is knowledgeably at his elbow? Professor Teresa Lambe from Kilcullen, Co Kildare.
Should Malachi cease to be a unionist, however provisional (though I hope he doesn’t), he knows he will not thereby escape the culture of the archipelago. Ending Northern Ireland will not make anyone culturally more Irish or less British, save on paper.
We don’t hear from any but a few of the successful and contented Irish in Britain, because they would contradict the story of ongoing Brit oppression and risk being called West Brits, which the Irish-speaking, Gaa-loving Dara O’briain (a national treasure in the making) has been called.
Rewrite the story, say I. Let Northern Ireland’s centenary celebrations be accompanied by a broader celebration of what connects, and not what disconnects, our two remarkable islands.
A round of Nhs-style claps, perhaps, for what we all have and should enjoy.
Professor John Wilson Foster’s new essays, Fraught Pleasures: Reading Irish Literature and Culture, will be published next year
❝ I am one of those true-brit unionists whom he sees as faintly ironic, wearing crown brooches
❝ Ending Northern Ireland won’t make anyone culturally more Irish or British, save on paper