ANOTHER VOICE

Why does everyone hate the Unionists so?

CHARLES MOORE

You have read plenty, and perhaps skipped more, about how to bring 'peace' to Northern Ireland, so I shall not add to it this week. Instead I want to ask a more psy- chological question: why do the English hate the Ulster Protestants? (I mean the English. The Scots, being historically closer to Ulstermen, see the matter differently.)

I leave aside here all those Englishmen who simply hate what they call 'the Irish'. They do not distinguish between Prod and Mick, Unionist and Nationalist. They just say things like, 'Why can't they be left alone to shoot one another?', and they illustrate a theory I have that every Englishman despis- es at least one of the Celtic races.

No, I am talking about the rest, particu- larly the educated ones. Almost regardless of their political views, they give their per- sonal sympathies to Irish Roman Catholics. They think characters- like John Hume or Dick Spring are the sort of people with whom it would be interesting to discuss serious subjects, and that it would be fun to have a drink with men like Charlie Haugh- eY, but when they see Jim Molyneaux or the Revd Martin Smyth they feel only boredom and disdain, and they would no more let Ian Paisley into their drawing-rooms than they would play the National Anthem on the Queen's birthday or say grace at a din- ner party. Even Gerry Adams is more their sort of person than the average Democratic Unionist councillor from Ballycastle.

It is as if the English cannot bear to enter imaginatively into the feelings of Ulster, whereas they can happily, if intermittently, do so with those of the South. Any English reader of poetry is moved by 'Easter 1916', especially by the end:

I write it out in verse —

MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats is a great poet, but surely he could not have got away with it if he had been writing on the other side. If he had tried a Poem called '28 September 1912' celebrat- ing the proclamation of the Ulster Covenant, and worked in names like Car- son and Craig, Abercorn and Smith, and mused about 'wherever orange is worn', everyone would have fallen about laughing. Why is this? The Easter Rising was, after all, a rather ludicrous affair, whereas the

Ulster Covenant was a huge, successful, impressive occasion. The former involved 1,600 rebels, whereas the latter was signed by 471,414 people. J.L. Garvin, the editor of the Observer, recorded the scene at the Belfast City Hall:

Through the mass, with drums and fifes, sash- es and banners, the clubs marched all day. The streets surged with cheering, but still no disorder, still no policemen, still no shouts of rage or insult. Yet no one for a moment could have mistaken the concentrated will and courage of these people. They do not know what fear and flinching mean in this business, and they are not going to know. They do not, indeed, believe it possible that they can be beaten, but no extremity, the worst, will ever see them ashamed. .

Ulster's self-defence, whether one approves of it or not, is a great romantic tale, one that is added to in each generation. There is the siege of Derry, the Battle of the Boyne and the Mutiny on the Curragh and the Ulster Workers' Strike, but although there are supposed to have been 13 Ameri- can presidents of Ulster descent, you won't see any of this celebrated on the streets of Chicago or New York. It is the shamrock, not the Red Hand, that engages the senti- mental attention of the outside world. And that is true too in England itself.

Ulster Protestants have a series of quali- ties which could have been designed to put the outside world off. In fact, they probably were designed to do exactly that, because the Ulsterman's experience is that the out- side world will always let him down. The Ulsterman is the man who will always say No. No surrender, no popery, no alcohol (though this last, I can testify, is much exag- gerated). It is not an immediately appealing stance and it is a sharp contrast to the cari- cature of the Southern Irishman, who is the person it is impossible to say no to. How much more fun, for example, to be seduced by Dr Eamon Casey, sometime Bishop of Galway, than damned by Dr Paisley.

Which leads to the important point that Ulster Protestants are collectively unsexy. The main reason why students used to pin posters of Che Guevara on their walls was because of that flowing hair, the dark, mes- merising eyes. Those bowler hats and sash- es and fat white faces and harsh accents do not have the same allure; nor do the neat, dreary, Mormon-style suits and glinting spectacles of the Peter Robinsons. The Ulster Protestant idea of religion or, rather, its caricature, contains everything most depressing to the modern English mind. When James Callaghan was Harold Wil- son's Home Secretary he met 'the Big Man' and said, 'After all, Dr Paisley, we are all children of God.' No we are not,' came the answering bellow, 'we are all children of wrath.' So we may be, but who wants to be reminded of it?

The overriding problem for the Ulster Protestant is that he thinks of himself as British and is proud of it. This is interna- tionally recognised as a crime. It can have mitigating factors. For example, if you are black and pro-British, that is thought to be quite touching. Or if you are English and pro-British, that is regarded as being at least understandable. But the Ulsterman is pro-British and thinks he is British, and the Englishman, who assumes that he alone defines what is British, is confident that the Ulsterman is not 'really' British at all. This makes the Ulsterman, in English eyes, either absurd — like the Polynesian tribe who worship the Duke of Edinburgh — or presumptuous, plundering the British copy- right to pirate his own crude, distorted ver- sions of it for sectarian purposes, or both. `We' wear poppies, if at all, to commemo- rate the dead of two world wars. 'They' wear poppies, in vast numbers, to rub Catholic noses in their power. Such are the thoughts in an Englishman's mind when he sees an Ulster display of British patriotism. It is very sad. Dr Paisley is an appalling man, but not because he is a Unionist or a Presbyterian or an Ulsterman. He is appalling because he is an opportunist and a bully and a propagandist. He speaks for something in Ulster, but he is no more rep- resentative of the province than is Arthur Scargill of Yorkshiremen. The Ulsterman has qualities that we admire — courage, steadiness, loyalty, a lack of pretentious- ness, a capacity for hard work. You might prefer to go out for a drink with a South- erner, but you would want an Ulsterman to guard your house while you did so.

The crucial point is that Britishness is not merely ethnic. It is historical and political and so it is irrelevant whether Ulstermen are 'like us'. They prove their Britishness in blood and allegiance again and again. The United Kingdom is like T.S. Eliot's defini- tion of Metaphysical poetry — 'heteroge- neous images yoked by violence together'. The result is creative, and we should be grateful for it, and try to preserve it.