If You Ask Me
by Fionnuala O Connor

While loyalists fired on police, and the IRA decommissioned, it was a bit of a pressure-cooker there for a while, political temperature rising fast. Now the whole stew has been turned out into a nice heavy casserole, which will simmer away until we’ve worked through all the implications.

Or at least until some have worked their way through. It’s almost hackneyed already to say that formerly heartland loyalist districts have been destroyed from within, and that unionism generally is in a bad way. You’d think – given that degree of recognition – that there’d be a push for a genuine, community-wide effort to figure out how to regain direction and self-respect.

Instead some make the startling suggestion that the only remedy is in the gift of nationalists. What is it? Simple – they should stop being nationalists.

North and south, they should just abandon the desire to see Ireland united. so that unionists can relax and move on. Indeed, it’s a moral imperative. Nationalists must give up nationalism – or be responsible for indefinite unionist instability, and loyalist violence that will just go on and on.

Unionists can’t help themselves, this theory goes. But since nationalists are so clever politically, they’ll do the decent thing. Which is also the smart thing, because if unionists stay in their current state it won’t be nice for anybody.

The strange thing about this argument is that it generally comes from unionists of one shade or another – strange because it is so insulting about unionists. It’s also unrealistic beyond belief: a bit like dispirited rivals telling unbeaten Chelsea that they will have to give up soccer in favour of sudoku.

And it mirrors the generations of republicans and nationalists who behaved as if unionism was a problem to be wished away, as if unionists were irrelevant or not serious: a light people, ready to switch sides when the scales fell from their eyes.

To some of this way of thinking, there were indeed good Protestants. They all happened to be born-again republicans, devotedly Irish, keen on the language, hostile to the beliefs they were born into – converts, in fact.

That was when a “convert” was a Protestant who became a Catholic – and a “pervert” was a Catholic who became a Protestant.

The increasing dominance of the DUP and Sinn Fein reflects the reality that unionists aren’t going to stop being unionist and nationalists aren’t going to stop being nationalist.

It took northern Catholics long enough to find a way out of the Troubles. Decency and sense should urge the nationalist world not to sneer at the collapse of unionism.

But unionists need to speak truth unto unionists, not ask nationalists to turn themselves inside out. Republicans wrecked their own districts until they learned how futile that was. The wisest unionists say out loud that loyalist paramilitaries wrecked the Shankill, not the IRA.

If You Ask Me Archive