It’s time to reclaim our flag from lunatic fringe
BRYAN MCMAHON once suggested that ‘integration is a twoway process’.
He should know: the retired High Court judge became closely associated with citizenship ceremonies over several years.
These occasions are among the most heart-warming of the year, as hundreds of people become Irish citizens and many speak of what it means to them, of the stories that have taken them from often traumatic beginnings to new starts on this modest rock on Europe’s west coast.
McMahon’s observation about integration was wise recognition of the need for generosity from both parties to citizenship, the State and the individual.
Joyous
Thousands attend these ceremonies every year, with 6,000 people from 131 countries becoming citizens over the course of six days last December.
These occasions are joyous ones, and guarantee truly touching interviews with people from a dazzling spectrum of backgrounds, united in their desire to become Irish citizens.
And that, in tumultuous times, is recognition of Ireland’s success as a State, despite doom-laden claims to the contrary that are cynically made, ad nauseam.
Taking pride in a nation’s success is increasingly confined to the sporting fields; feeling proud to be Irish in any other context brings you precariously close to nationalism, a concept now widely reviled as toxic.
Trump, Brexit, and the rise of extremism across Europe have all been attributed, at least in part, to nationalistic fervours.
And the poison infecting the immigration debate in this country now is undoubtedly a consequence of a grotesque form of nationalism. A protest through O’Connell Street on Monday saw many anti-immigrant marchers waving Tricolours. The national flag has also been sullied by its deployment in a nationalism that breeds online, where the Troubles are reimagined and the depravities of the IRA are explained away, and where the profiles of those spreading these lies are invariably adorned with Tricolours.
But the national flag, and nationalism in general, can be reclaimed from the lunatic fringes.
Those citizenship ceremonies capture the positivity of immigration – but also tell us something about Ireland’s worth.
Thousands travel from all over the world to make their homes here, and not because of social welfare rates, or because of a global plot.
It’s because for all of its problems – and they are real, and substantial, and they must be detailed tirelessly – this is a stable, successful country. Those who will loudly wave the national flag decry it as a failed state, but in doing so they denigrate both the Tricolour and nationalism.
Both were seized for years by apologists for terrorism, but an ever-evolving Ireland should see them reclaimed, and celebrated.
There is pride to be taken in both of them, and it’s instructive that this is often more purely distilled at a ceremony for new citizens than in any other aspect of Irish life.
Nationalism need not be a rigid idea, a concept frozen in definition by the terrors of the past, or the noxiousness of a small minority today.
Evolving
Instead, it must be an organic, evolving idea. This should seem obvious in the context of designs in some quarters on a united Ireland.
There was crowing from many about its inevitability in light of the return of the Stormont Assembly at the weekend.
If those predicting it really are true to what they say, then an urgent priority for them will surely be updating the concept of nationalism, and widening it to include the unionist tradition.
It’s easier to taunt unionism about a 32-county republic, as if reunification is simply about the sums. If it is ever to be realised, it will be much more complicated than that, and more fraught, too.
Central to all of this is generosity. It’s about a desire to accommodate conflicting, lawful opinions, all for the purpose of the greater good.
Irishness is not the preserve of any one tradition, or party, or movement. It is not defined in Stormont, or the Dáil, or in the danker corners of the online world.
It is in the daily experience of millions of people, who are safe to live the lives they see fit.
Nationalism was not what we saw in central Dublin on Monday. It is a brighter, truer reality, that should be reclaimed and celebrated by us all.