Unionism culturally unified?

Patrick Murphy uses the representation of three Ulster teams in the All Ireland Gaelic football semi finals to argue that, in cultural terms at least, Northern Ireland’s nationalism has bigger impacts in the rest of the island than unionism has managed in terms of the rest of the UK.

For the Good Friday Agreement to work, unionism requires strong politicians, a consistent political ideology and a coherent cultural identity.

Clearly there is little argument to be had with his first two points. In fact, despite appearances to the contrary, that is what the main protagonists in the current struggle within the UUP believe the in-fighting is all about.

But is the third issue, that of cultural identity, simply a projection of real and legimiate Nationalist concerns on to a people who do not share the same pressing need for local cultural expression?

It has certainly been important to Northern Irish nationalists; increasingly so within a state that until very recently rarely reflected the cultural markings of their own internal and communal lives. But, there does not seem to be the same demand for a unifying cultural revival within the Unionist community. If anything there is a continuing demand to simply be allowed to dissent.

Earlier this year, I asked a focus group of Unionists whether any of them consider jumping ship and joining a nationalist party – the SDLP for instance. ‘I might’ said one ‘But if you went to meetings, you’d find everybody else went to the same church, and had many more things in common than politics. Whereas in the Unionist parties you find people from lots of churches and no church.’

It is this diversity that seems to me to lie at the very heart of unionism’s protestant/dissenter identity and which is deeply averse to being unified or codified in the way nationalism has perhaps had to be in order to achieve its goals.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty