The idea that John Hume might be our next President has woken up more than a few dogs that were quietly sleeping. One of them is a kind of Southern bigotry about Northerners. Any Northerners. "Don't let that Hume fellow just walk in here," an elderly lady stopped me on the street to say.
There are so many good reasons for holding this point of view that I wasn't ready for what she said next: "And don't let that Dana one in, either. She's another one from the Six Counties."
The use of the phrase six counties is a complicated piece of abuse, but as abuse it is certainly meant. It denies the fact of the autonomous existence of an entity with its own history and complex existence called Northern Ireland, by casually claiming it as a fraction of 32. It is even more scathing a form of words, in its way, than a phrase used by a correspondent to this newspaper recently, about me. Apropos what I'd written about the same John Hume, the correspondent accused me of having "a partitionist mentality".
This has shades of bigotry, too. (The island can seem a cat's cradle of bigotries.) The word "mentality," is meant of course to imply that from one central error the whole of one's thinking has been infected. A "contraceptive mentality," you'll recall, was a phrase much used to smear the liberal side in the social debates of the recent past. The idea was that people with "mentalities" of that kind thought about little else but making the world safe for promiscuity.
A "partitionist mentality," I assume, is similarly one where everything one thinks about Ireland is dominated by acceptance of partition or even enthusiasm for partition. The latter, surely: there can't be more than a handful of people in the business of denying that the partition of the island is a fact.
"Partition" itself is such an old-fashioned word that it is quite rare to hear it used nowadays. It implies that somewhere in our hearts or our minds there is the idea of an Ireland, now divided in two, which was once all one. It is a retrospective, not a progressive, word, as is its corollary, "re-unification".
It hardly seems to fit the contemporary crystal-clear perception that the island is divided at the earnest behest of the million or so of its inhabitants who live roughly speaking in its north-east. These people are the very reverse of, say, the former East Germans, yearning to hurl their Trabants at the equivalent of the Border-post at Aughnacloy. They make it clear that they can't, in fact, be sufficiently sundered from us. All norths look down on all souths, but the likes of John Taylor carry contempt for the mezzogiorno to a ludicrous extreme.
The concept of partition, however, constructively ignores the reality of unionism. It is meant to evoke an all-Ireland identity, nationalist, Gaelic and probably Catholic, which half-a-million people in the North share with the great majority in the South. It is this aggregate of four million people or so who, it is proposed, might still be alive to the pain of being parted.
When someone brings up - as I did, writing about John Hume - the question of differences rather than similarities between North and South, the proposition that we share an aboriginal identity is weakened. And this weakens the cause, so to speak. What cause? Why, the cause of assisting the British to withdraw from the affairs of the island, and persuading the unionists that there are more complex forms of Union than the one they at present cherish, and creating a pluralist island of Irish people . . .
Improbable and all as the cause may sound, I do in fact support it. And I found I didn't like being accused of betraying it. I didn't like being told I have a partitionist mentality. The condemnation has an antique ring to it, like being called an informer. Each IRA atrocity provokes a further depth of cold revulsion, and the ratchet of alienation tightens notch upon notch.
But who can deny our good fortune, here in the South, compared to the misfortune of the Catholic minority who found themselves trapped in the Northern state? Who can with perfect equanimity ignore the continuing plight of Northern nationalists? And it is a plight, no matter how smugly the Northern majority and their unionist allies in the Southern media deny it.
Of course Northern Ireland is not East Timor. Of course the minority have the vote, and are now housed, and - thanks in great part to outside influence - have an increasingly fair chance of employment. But they have the wounds of the sustained insult of the Stormont decades to bear still.
And the wound of daily living with and in the power of a majority who secretly or otherwise incline to consider them an inferior race, and who by weight of numbers deny them expression of their identity. Not many people formed by the culture I belong to could welcome being told that we want to keep it that way - that we actively support partition.
That still doesn't make the Northern nationalist identity, even in its respectable, Humean form, ours. Partition worked. If we were ever very alike, Catholic Northerners and we Southerners, we have developed differently over the last seven decades. By now the North and the South are different kinds of place. An anthropologist could describe the differences. Even the casual observer can see the obvious ones. Newspapers, for instance, in the North take hardly any interest in Southern affairs.
THE big influences on popular culture and entertainment in the North come from England and not from the Republic. Throughout an ordinary day, from breakfast television, to the things the children learn in their schools, to the lottery tickets workers might club together to buy, to the jokes of the comedian that evening in club or pub, everything will be subtly and definitely different, North and South. Not that different, of course. But different enough that in the euphoria after the first ceasefire visitors from the South jammed Northern Ireland, dying to see what that exotic place is like.
Different enough that Northerners in the Republic, and Southerners in the North, are always conscious of being perceived as different. Being Northern or Southern is a primary mark, like being male or female or young or old or rural or urban or black or white.
To pretend that it is blandly possible for John Hume MP to become first citizen of the Republic of Ireland, acclaimed by an unproblematic constituency called "Ireland," is silly. Partition exists. Extremely obdurate power-blocs have built up around it. Nothing much will have changed about it until one of us is invited to accept real and visible establishment power and influence up there. Can you see that happening? When last was there a meaningful gesture from Northern unionism towards us, 60 miles away?
The way we warm ourselves in the face of this cold fact by putting a handful of unpolitical Northerners in the Seanad is pathetic. Thinking that installing John Hume in the Phoenix Park will make the island less bitterly divided is, similarly, pathetic.