It is tempting to imagine Northern Ireland was a colourless, dull place during the Stormont era, the stereotypical dour Ulster Protestant on a grand scale. As Gillian McIntosh demonstrates, that would be a wrong perception. Unionism revelled in pageant, particularly when it involved commemoration of the founding of Northern Ireland or the Crown.
The cultural history of Unionism has long been neglected. It is a shame then that this book, in spite of its subtitle, is not more comprehensive. It deals, in fact only with the 1910s and the period 1932-56. Moreover, it confines itself to a critical - occasionally condemnatory - analysis of civic ritualism, broadcasting and literature. Popular culture escapes McIntosh's purview.
Nevertheless, her treatment of the opening of the Stormont parliament building, the erection of Carson's statue, his funeral, the Festival of Britain, and the coronations and visits of George VI and Elizabeth II, is exhaustive and fascinating in its detail. Other interesting sections deal with the mythologising of the Somme, the early history of the BBC, the official histories of James Craig and Northern Ireland's place in the second World War, and the outputs of more dissonant Protestant voices such as Hewitt and McNeice.
McIntosh's complaint, repeated ad nauseam, is that there was, as Nicholas Mansergh argued, "a Protestant parliament but for more than a Protestant people". There was, undeniably, a projection of Northern Ireland as if it was one community of cheerful, loyal subjects. The superficial appearance belied a society riven with competing nationalisms, which occasionally erupted into street violence.
However, McIntosh overlooks the extent to which unionism was reactive. The absence of a section dealing with the 1920s in Northern Ireland and the extent to which the violence of that period heightened unionist atavism and paranoia is significant in this regard. The exception is her examination of the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. That triumphalist celebration gave unionists even more excuse than normal to fawn over a (visibly reluctant) Prince of Wales when he came to open the grandiose Parliament Building, incorrectly labelled as Stormont Castle on the book-cover.
Better is McIntosh's appreciation of Unionism's dilemma with the BBC. Anglophobia competed with an anxiety to limit expressions of local culture which could be an opening towards Catholic or Southern culture. On the one hand attempts were made to limit the broadcasting of feiseanna. On the other, unionist MP, Oscar Henderson, complained that Broadcasting House in Belfast was like a "foreign country", so prevalent were Oxford accents.
McIntosh sees a "contradiction" where none existed, though, such as in Girl Guides performing Irish country dancing to music from the RUC band as part of the celebrations for George V's jubilee. St John Ervine might have portrayed Eire as full of "bleating Celtic twilighters, sex-starved daughters of the Gael, gangsters and gombeen-men" but he was, after all, a rare convert from Sinn Feinism to loyalism.
As Dame Dehra Parker, Unionist Education Minister, made clear in her criticism of Ervine's biography of Craig, "James was an Irishman, as well as an Ulsterman". It is only the recent Troubles and the murder of 2,000 people in the name of "Ireland" which has provoked a crisis for unionists over self-identification as "Irish".
Steven King is Adviser to David Trimble MP, UUP Leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland