A friend this morning told me something I’d been thinking for a long time myself. That is that most Northern Irish politicians (and even large players in civil society) are very given to the speaking of gibberish when asked about NI.
Thing is, I don’t think they’re alone in that predicament. Politicians everywhere are struggling to keep up with the rapids of social media platforms like Twitter which drive debate at the break neck speed of emotions. And it is a recycling machine.
Slugger, with its rules of civility and a diverse range contributors tries to stay out of the recycling process, we try to bring fresh perspectives. But political twitter is a hellscape that keeps throwing up the same bleak idols of the tribe.
Accordingly supposedly informed people, north and south, are buying into the stale myth of the inevitability of a United Ireland. Suddenly, in that world, George the Fifth’s framing of partition has attained the status of reliable prophesy.
A hundred years ago it was perceived that way. People on the island had lived so long under the same aegis that to be separate felt strange, foreign even. Carson and Redmond shared the same legal circuit long before they became adversaries.
The monarch was speaking to four decades of a slow painful journey towards a separation between two competing visions of the future on the island that could not be reconciled because they were both resolved to move in opposite directions.
Folks in south Armagh did not panic or feel that some iron curtain was descending because the new customs posts were made of wood and gave the locals a distinct impression that they were only a temporary measure. That was a mistake.
Since the ceasefires, life in Northern Ireland has been transformed. What hasn’t yet caught up with where the people are is its politics. At a cross community dialogue session, Professor Pete Shirlow shared the following:
- In 1997 the membership of locally recruited security forces was 20458 today it is 7820 and since 1990 Catholic membership of the police has grown from a mere 7.7% to 32.1%
- •n 1972 nearly 5000 sustained conflict related injuries this fell last year to less than 100.
- In 1972 1313 firearms were seized compared to 36 last year
- Between 1972 and 2019 the capture of explosive dropped from 18819kgs to 1.1kgs, shooting incidents fell from 10631 to 41 in 2019 and deaths from 480 to 3
- Since 2009 Catholic and Protestant confidence in the PSNI has grown from 55 to 73% and 57 to 76% respectively
Now, that bit won’t come as much of a surprise. There are still paramilitary style punishments but they are mostly related to retaining legacy power over some of the poorest and most socially excluded communities in Northern Ireland.
- In 1999 the median weekly wage was £310 today it is £534 which is a growth of 72%.
- In 1997 585,458 people of working age were in employment compared to 839,000 today.
- That 43% increase in employment has seen the rate of unemployment fall from 8% in 1998 to 2.5% in 2020.
- While London has the highest start-up rate in the country, it is entrepreneurs in Northern Ireland who are the most likely to reach £1m turnover within three years
- Belfast is in the top 10 tech cities of the future ahead of Madrid, Frankfurt, Zurich, Milan and Cambridge
- Belfast is ranked fifth best mid-sized ‘European cities of the future’; and third for economic potential, behind only Zurich and Edinburgh
- Northern Ireland has the highest-achieving primary school pupils in Europe in major international tests in maths. It is also the sixth best at maths in the world
Not bad for a so called ‘failed state’. In many respects Northern Ireland is an asset, not the liability it is often portrayed as. Nor, when you look at real issues, is there as much difference in the two communities as they’re often portrayed:
- Power-sharing is not popular – wrong! Of those who express an opinion 83% support power-sharing
- One community is more supportive of marriage equality – wrong! In fact over 60% of Protestants and Catholics, who state an opinion, support marriage equality
- The communities always disagree- wrong. The majority of both Catholics and Protestants aged under 40, some 72%, would not mind if a close relative was to marry someone from a different religion
- All the communities think about are constitutional issues- wrong! People are 20 times more likely to think about jobs, education, health and welfare than they are about constitutional issues.
What’s interesting to me is how little difference the citing of this data seems to make to the circularising discourse within Nationalism at the moment. However as Francis Bacon noted in his Novum Organum:
…all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe.
And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
The mistake most nationalists mistake is the same one folks on the left in mainstream politics have been making for most of the last 10 years, which is that change is happening anyway, and it is not waiting in the station for them to lead it.
“Change” by Thorsten-Koch is licensed under CC BY-ND
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
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