The partition of the mind must end as we start our conversation on the new Ireland DIARY
ILAY in the heat of summer listening to the competing rattles of Orange drums and a British army helicopter. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was after unpacking my slim belongings in the attic room of a house in the Holy Land, the student-dominated enclave of redbrick houses lying between Queen’s University and the Ormeau Road.
University Street, Jerusalem Street, Palestine Street, Damascus Street, Carmel Street, Cairo Street, Fitzroy Avenue, the last immortalised by Van Morrison in Madame George, the best song set in Belfast ever by anyone.
In those days — the middle of the 1980s — the war was still going. There was a pub at the bottom of the road where a man was shot in a republican feud. The Ormeau Road was a place where sectarian tensions rose in the loyalist marching season.
I lived there for several months and then I moved to a house in the Village area. Friends wondered if I was wise. The area is strongly loyalist. But there was never any bother. Maybe I was just lucky. After that I lived in East Belfast and then we bought our first house in Stranmillis.
This was back close to where I had started in Belfast, but middle class and the atmosphere sedate. You could still hear bomb blasts from West Belfast and the choppers rattling afterwards.
For most of my first year, I was overcome with the strangeness of the place. Shootings, bombings, funerals, bodies on border roads. The condemnations, the widows appealing for no vengeance, the preachers who fanned the flames, the look in the eyes of the child at the funeral of Nathaniel Cush, blown up by the IRA at Tomb Street post office on June 15, 1987, the raw sectarian hatred of the man in Portadown telling me that me and all like me should be stuck on a bonfire with our priests.
And also, not in opposition to but alongside the narrative of division: the road down to Coney Island along the Ards Peninsula on a day in autumn when my head was exploding with rage at the politics of death being played out in the city and how that beach and sea connected me to a longer coastline that, if followed south far enough, would take me home to Cork and on to Ardmore. The unity of geography gave me a powerfully consoling connection.
I was still travelling south every weekend across the hard border with its watchtowers and checkpoints. Newry to Dundalk or, if going west, through the smaller roads of Armagh or Fermanagh. But as time went on I began to spend more of my weekends in the North. I made good friends. I went out of my way to know people beyond the circle of journalists with whom I worked day to day.
It was often said that there existed up North a silent majority opposed to the ‘‘men of violence’’. I can’t speak for majorities but I knew there was another reality to that which was reported on the news.
It existed among my Protestant and Catholic friends. They did not all live in comfortable middle class enclaves. But they had in their marrow a rejection of tribalism, even when the events of the day could easily have driven them into the laager.
If you had asked me then about the possibility of a united Ireland, I would have said not in my lifetime. Now I am not so sure. The longerterm effects of Brexit and demographic changes could create the circumstances for what appeared unimaginable.
For three decades, it was a concept associated, wrongly, with the violence of the Provos. The southern parties maintained a rhetorical commitment but thought little about how the south might be made a more attractive proposition to Ulster Protestants.
There is too little discussion of this in the Republic. We have traditionally been skittish about a United Ireland, fearful of what it might unleash, of what might be asked of us. But if it is a real possibility, the south needs to start thinking and debating in earnest.
Of course, it is not simply a question of what the Protestants want. For years, the Catholics of the six counties felt, with considerable justification, that southerners cared little about them. Partition wasn’t simply the Border. It was embedded in our consciousness long before the Government of Ireland Act created the state of Northern Ireland in 1920.
The 19th Century giants of Irish nationalism — O’Connell and Parnell — both failed to engage with the complexities of the North and largely kept away from those places where Catholic and Protestant were in conflict.
When my forebears fought in the War of Independence, they cared little about the politics of Belfast or Ballymena. The Civil War that followed was not fought over partition but the feeling that the struggle for a true Republic had been abandoned. The Oath of Allegiance caused more blood to be spilled between Irish nationalists than any concern about the Northern Catholics or territorial unity.
The Troubles deepened the alienation. The North was bad news. Whatever their religion, they were irredeemably different, we told ourselves. Minds and hearts closed. It was an embarrassment. Our own bloodletting of 47 years before was conveniently forgotten. Our leaders gave us the myth of the old war as a clean war.
But the time has come when we need to mentally prepare for at least the possibility of significant constitutional change in our lifetime. The thinking cannot be left to the politicians and academics alone. There are big questions for everyone. What is the Ireland you would like to see? What changes would you accept or visualise to address Protestant fears of domination?
I wrote recently of the imperative of getting the power-sharing government at Stormont up and running again. Achieving stability and addressing sectarianism are immediate tasks. The row over Brexit and the hard border has complicated an already perilous situation.
Of course, a united Ireland might not happen in my lifetime and it ultimately depends on the will of the people of the North. The principle of unity by consent is sacrosanct. A significant number of Catholics may decide they wish to remain in the United Kingdom. Many Protestants in the North will wish it never happens. But we need to be ready for all possibilities. It is time we started a conversation about a new Ireland. The partition of the mind must end.
These are my last words in these pages. I have enjoyed your company. Travel safe into the future, dear readers, and do it with open hearts and minds. These are what can save us from the failures of the past.
‘There are big questions for us all. What kind of Ireland would you like to see?’
‘Brexit and demographic changes could create the circumstances for what was once seen as unimaginable.’