A People Under Siege is Aaron Edwards’s intimate history of unionism in Northern Ireland from partition to its current minority predicament. There are many histories of the North in general, and the author’s attention to unionism proceeds from the idea that, since the Belfast Agreement, nationalist accounts of the past have come to dominate, so obscuring the lived realities of a state that might have otherwise flourished, had it only been given the chance.
Unheard, in this telling, are the hopes and fears of an enlightened, civic unionism. It is a hard narrative to maintain. With a still segregated educational system future-proofing community separation, the National Health Service under severe pressure, the rate of suicide in the most deprived areas almost twice that of the least, and nearly a third of children living in poverty, it seems fair to ask of everyone in Northern Ireland if the current and historical state is a structure fit to represent its citizens.
Answering this question creates different dilemmas for both major blocs. For nationalist politicians, making Northern Ireland work might finish the unionist state by securing partition. For their unionist counterparts, offshoring the issue to Westminster reinforces their irrelevance in the communities they represent, fatally splintering that essential fiction of a singular unionist people. Edwards’s book details the electoral, constitutional and paramilitary contexts that have led to this moment, and offers his perspective on how unionism might shape its own future.
Edwards sees the North’s statehood as a given necessity that acquires the aura of natural right
Devolution is in the detail, however, and this is where a people under siege seem caught in their own devices. The book begins with a pen-sketch of Edwards’s family background, which is not very far from my own, but leads a different way. The correspondence between the spectrum of Protestant experience and an attachment to Orangeism is not given, and the book’s engagement with a minority fraternity committed to exclusion seems a strange analogue for the confident and inclusive unionism that Edwards hopes for.
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There appear to be two grounds for the Order’s inclusion. One is that an emotional audit of its membership speaks to the fear, anxiety and betrayal that Edwards often invokes as motives for Protestant action (although as I read, I wondered that if you felt you had been stabbed in the back so frequently, might you not begin to think you were facing the wrong way?). The other is to explain the need for community, which invites the question of what energies there are here that cannot be admitted into the functions of a democratic state (and as I write this, a lodge is reported to have on display an image of the mass-murderer Michael Stone on its property).
None of this seems a compelling foundation of ideas on which to build the future. Instead, each represents a part of Northern Ireland’s greatest common legacy, which is trauma. The word appears once in A People Under Siege in relation to unionist upset at the fall of Stormont and yet it seems key to understanding a social and political culture so curtailed by distrust and anger.
Edwards sees the North’s statehood as a given necessity that acquires the aura of natural right (and so Francis Hutcheson, whom Edwards quotes liberally, is “Ulster born” in a kind of pre-partition premonition). The history of Northern Ireland as the exercise of special powers is related to the history of violence associated with the state’s formation, practice and management. The sum total of these operations has been long suffering for everyone, which only goes to make the unionist case for Brexit, if it can be described as such, all the more grotesque.
The fictions of kith, kin and kindred are a suffocating comfort that so many of the younger generations escape by leaving
It is instructive to read Edwards’s account of a part of northern unionism’s approach to the Belfast Agreement as preparation for a support of leave, on which he is an authority. There is a retrospective trend among some unionist politicians to connect the constitutional disturbances caused by Brexit to apparent compromises ceded by the peace agreement. It is a false equation, which masks an intergenerational failure of strategic vision with the old glower of betrayal, a failure Edwards charts with clarity and persistence.
This leads to the key question that Edwards ends with, which is leadership. His optimism for unionism resides in the emergence of independent-minded community leaders. How this would scale up into regional, national or transnational politics remains to be seen, as does engagement with the world beyond the Border. From the evidence of this study, a deep deficit of northern unionism is its lack of a comparative sense, in particular in relation to contemporary Irish or European society. The fictions of kith, kin and kindred are a suffocating comfort that so many of the younger generations escape by leaving. They are an enclosure too for any expansive social or political thought, the abiding irony of partition that it is a prison first for those who most believe in its necessity.
Nicholas Allen is Baldwin Professor in the Humanities at the University of Georgia. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press
