ANOTHER VOICE

Ulster isn't 'ours' — it's another country

MATTHEW PARRIS

Every year or two I write a Spectator article suggesting that Orangemen might grow up if in the backs of their minds they did not have the security of knowing Moth- er England will always step in if it gets too rough, and pull the combatants apart. A couple of loyalists then write me obscene scrawls; a decent retired colonel or two sends a thoughtful letter protesting that men of violence must never be allowed to triumph and besides, don't I realise that angry loyalists could be dangerous? (a two- part argument whose second part stands in awkward relation to its first) — and, beyond that, silence. Other readers, I sus- pect, quietly nod; for my point of view com- mands overwhelming assent in the England beyond Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street, though our democratic process seems incapable of giving it voice. I reply to these letters and then withdraw from the fray until the season seems ripe for another go. It looks like that time of year again.

What clinched this for me was Bruce Anderson's article (Politics, 4 July) setting out in Bruce's lucid way the reasons why we would see the question of the Orangemen's marching rights differently if we only understood their history better. I have no doubt he is right; we would indeed. We would see the troubles in Rwanda and Burundi differently if we could get inside the mind and folk memory of a Hutu tribesman, and differently again if we knew how to empathise with a Tutsi. Bruce would say that the Hutu question is not compara- ble, because, unlike the unfortunate Hutu, the people of Northern Ireland are our people, our responsibility.

Curious, this term 'our'. It can be used in two senses, juridical or emotional. In the first sense 'our' is a simple possessive, indi- cating that Westminster holds sovereign sway over a land and its people. In another, speaking as we might of 'our cousins', the possessive connotes co-identification: a claim of kinship. Neither use of 'our' pro- vides the semantic fair wind to the Union- ists' cause for which they hope. If juridical — if Ulster is 'ours' as Cyprus was ours then it must be ours to relinquish as well as keep. Calais was ours too, not really so long ago.

But what of the second use? What if the Northern Irish are 'ours' as kith and kin are ours? Fellow-feeling cannot be extin- guished by the stroke of a politician's pen. This use of the possessive makes a powerful claim but not a juridical one. It implies real feelings which flesh-and-blood people may have. Or may not, of course. So do we have them? I do not. I do not feel the warring tribes of Ulster are 'my' people. More important, I suggest (and this is capable of demonstration through opinion-polling) that the emotional void in my breast is pre- sent in the breasts of most of my country- men.

Yes, 'my' countrymen, Bruce. I mean the English. I am giving up the increasingly strained attempt to include in my commen- tary on 'our' political scene the unspoken implication that this includes Scotland. In these twilight days of the Britain we were born to, we English must learn to let go. Scotland is another country. So it is in the sense of 'our' that I say the Northern Irish are not English, do not feel to us like 'our' people.

Now this may not go for Scotland at all, and I suspect it doesn't. There may well be a sense in which many Scotsmen feel many Ulstermen are 'their' people, and I wonder whether, Bruce being a Scot — one of the last generation for whom Scottishness could embrace a feeling of untroubled identification with the other peoples of these islands — he has generously extended his own sense of the `ourness' of Ulster to the English among whom he has (happily) come to live.

But we don't feel it, Bruce, we don't feel Ulster is ours; and if you insist that we accept ownership of this particular piece of real estate, then our instinct is to put it on the market at once. Perhaps you Scots would like to take over the responsibilities of ownership or kinship for, with your regrettable intensities in matters of religion you have some claim to parenthood of these sectarian troubles not far over the water from your western shores. Perhaps England could secede from the United Kingdom, leaving Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in some kind of Celtic union together? Ha.

Why should I, as an Englishman, try to `understand' what motivates these unlovely people? How patronising is the assumption that it is for the English to 'understand' the Orangemen, understand that they simply must march — and therefore spend a for- tune arranging for them to do so. When is Bruce going to write a column helping us to get inside the mind, the historical hinter- land, of a republican, and 'understand' why he simply cannot be forced to tolerate Orangemen marching down his street?

Were there an Ulster version of the Spec- tator, might its political editor advise the Orange Order that they should try to `understand' the English, understand that with our own very different history we are psychologically incapable of witnessing reli- gious sectarian marches with anything but an ungovernable loathing, and therefore the Order should cancel its march lest it trigger in us a dangerous antipathy?

No, Bruce. Understanding is the province either of a colonial governor confronting a savage people, half devil and half child; or else a relationship of empathy between equals: the mutual respect which may exist between two peoples freely associated in a voluntary union. The first — the imperial — kind of understanding died with the Empire. The second — the Unionist ideal — is dying with the Union. As the Union fades, England will begin to ask whether the Orangemen really are ours, and whether they should be. Our answer to that leaps from our unalterable natures as reflexively as an Orangeman's answer leaps from his. Our answer is, how much? at what cost? We are a mercantile people with a mercantile history and a disinclination to pay the bills of zealots.

`Spare me, your Honour!' a convict sen- tenced to hang begged the judge sentencing him. 'Spare me because I'm a prisoner of my upbringing!'

`So am I,' said the judge. 'Send him down.'

Understand us, Bruce. We're English the prisoners of our upbringing. Orange marches make us sick. Paying for them with our taxes and with the lives of our soldiers makes us sicker. We can't help it.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.