Mick Clifford Defines Nationalism’s Invidious “Disneyfication Trap”

Brian Feeney wants Sinn Féin to walk out of Stormont (although, like St Augustine he didn’t mean just yet). Matthew O’Toole thinks that would be dangerous. Alex Kane thinks both main parties share equal blame for the Assembly’s dysfunction. They are all, in their different ways, arguing about the wrong thing.

The more important question isn’t whether Stormont survives. It’s whether nationalism (the tradition that now leads Northern Ireland) has the political courage to be honest with its own constituency about what the future actually requires.

Mick Clifford put his finger on it recently on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show. Among a younger generation, he observed, there is a Disneyfication of the conflict — a smoothing over of the fact that 3,000 [sic] people died, and that the violence didn’t bring about a united Ireland.

Demographic shifts may be real but slow and incremental. According to Clifford the question that matters isn’t 50% plus one — it’s whether you can build the kind of broad agreement that makes transition genuinely stable. Done without a large majority in favour, he warned, there are going to be problems.

This is another illustration of the trap nationalism finds itself in post the Belfast Agreement. The generation that should be the natural constituency for constitutional change is also the generation most at risk of being sold a romanticised version of both the past and the path forward.

Jaron Lanier has spent years warning that social media’s attention economy rewards outrage and grievance over nuance. It is also the perfect incubator for Disneyfication — the algorithm rewards emotional intensity, and in that environment, honest political leadership that says transition requires consent rather than momentum is almost impossible to sustain.

O’Toole is right that walking out of Stormont would make things worse. Collapsing devolution wouldn’t create pressure for a border poll — it might do the opposite. It wouldn’t enthuse wavering voters in the south or persuade open-minded types in the north. But that argument only holds if staying in government means actually governing — and the evidence on that is troubling.

Take the NI Place-Name Project — a Queen’s University initiative mapping over 30,000 Irish place names, feeding directly into dual-language street signs and the Irish Language Act. It nearly collapsed recently because two government departments couldn’t agree who should fund it, with talks only beginning weeks before the money ran out.

Decades of public investment at risk of being written off, not because of unionist obstruction, but because of administrative drift between nationalist-led departments. The Irish Language Commissioner, Pól de Barra, was meanwhile hauled before the Executive Office scrutiny committee over a simple information request. As one MLA put it: “Let’s be the grown-ups.”

If the nationalist political class can’t handle scrutiny and accountability of the normal democratic process, what exactly is the constitutional project being sold to the younger generation (not all of whom are part of the so called kneecap generation) built on? The deeper irony is that the society beneath Stormont’s dysfunction has already moved further and faster than our politics.

Northern Ireland’s economy has been transformed. Its creative culture crosses community lines in ways unthinkable thirty years ago. The expansion of third-level education has produced a graduate generation whose shared daily experience — campuses, careers, cities — is structurally incompatible with zero-sum politics.

Kane concedes that the middle ground sits at around 15%, but that is a floor suppressed by the very architecture designed to keep the binary contest alive, not a ceiling. It is precisely this generation that needs honest leadership most. They are the potential constituency for genuinely transformative politics. They are also the most exposed to the Disneyfication trap.

Politically engaged, emotionally connected to a tradition, but insulated by their screens from the complexity of what actually happened and what real change would require.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance argues that Western democracies have forgotten how to build things. That failure is visible In Northern Ireland too — but compounded by the Disneyfication of political ambition itself, where the destination is romanticised precisely to avoid confronting the difficulty of the journey.

Three questions, then, for the political class (of both traditions):

• If the institutions you lead nearly let six million pounds of Irish language investment collapse through administrative drift, what does that say about your readiness to steward a constitutional transition of infinitely greater complexity?
• The graduate generation is more open to change than any before them — and more alert, as Clifford notes, to the gap between romance and reality. What honest account are you prepared to give them of what transition actually requires?
• And if building real consent — the kind Clifford is describing, not a statistical threshold — is the actual task, who in current political life is doing it?

Northern Irish society is ahead of its politics. Transience and change are key element in the current zeitgeist, particularly amongst the young who are willing to lift tents and move in the most unexpected ways.  The question is whether our politics can catch up — and whether it can do so without hiding behind a story that flatters everyone and prepares nobody?

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