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Northern Ireland |
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Every now and then someone writes something sensible about the situation in Northern Ireland |
| Loyalism's rage
against the fading light of Britishness Northern Ireland's recent riots are a sign of irreversible decline within the Protestant working classes Stephen Howe Monday October 10, 2005 Guardian The murder last week of the former Ulster Defence Association "brigadier" Jim Gray is the latest symptom of militant loyalism's desperate malaise. It is the most recent in a horrifying sequence of killings arising from multi-dimensional feuds and rivalries, and comes on top of riots and paramilitary assaults. The mayhem that swept Northern Ireland in the second week of September was the worst for many years. The events involved, almost exclusively, working-class loyalists battling the police and army. It was hardly the first time that "loyal" organisations had been in violent confrontation with the state. But the depth of hatred and alienation on display still strikes many observers as unprecedented. Much media and political comment has explained it in terms of bigotry and criminality, of archaism and atavism. Defensive unionist politicians speak of Protestant disillusion, even desperation, at a peace process they think has favoured Catholics. None of those labels is entirely wrong. Yet what lies behind the events of recent days engages the whole nature of Britishness in Ireland and beyond, and the very ideas of identity and community, modernity and tradition. And the songs loyalists sing, the pictures they paint, even the tattoos they wear, tell us a lot about what is going on and what might happen next. The riots are part of what happens when the decay of one modern culture - the northern Irish variant of urban, working-class Britishness - clashes with the rise of a globalised popular culture. What formed in Belfast and other northern Irish urban centres in the course of 19th-century industrialisation was a variety of Britishness, not only in its stridently proclaimed nationality claims, but in the texture of everyday life. Belfast, its youth and its working class had a great deal in common with similar cities "across the water". Many of its characteristics were shared with English, Scots and Welsh industrial centres. It was intensely localised, with social networks and loyalties focused on small, usually densely inhabited urban neighbourhoods. It was often seen as an anti-educational culture: even more so than was the norm for English or Scottish working-class communities reliant on heavy industry, where the expected post-school route was not social mobility via education but a secure position within the community through apprenticeship in a skilled manual trade. It has been a profoundly masculinist culture, in ways that decades of violence could only reinforce. Both the partial ending of paramilitary violence (which threatens to deprive "hard men" of their raison d'etre and aggressive youths of their role models) and the precipitous decline in industrial employment must intensify the crisis of masculinity that commentators identify as a more general post-industrial phenomenon. In the later years of the "Troubles" there were signs of hope in those communities. Crucially, some influential ex-gunmen came to feel that they had been manipulated by unionist politicians who had incited their violence, then indignantly disclaimed it. Perhaps that realisation came too late. Working-class loyalist communities are in a probably irreversible retreat. Paramilitary warlords and drug barons fight over the ruins. Deindustrialisation, demographic decline, the tendency of the more enterprising or successful to move out, low rates of educational achievement and very high ones of family breakdown, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse - all these are features that the poorer Protestant districts of Belfast, Portadown or Ballymoney share with those of Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet these are crises also of collective identity. Irish Catholic identity seems more stable, secure and all-embracing than that of loyalists, while affluent Protestants can more readily assimilate to contemporary Britishness. On the Shankill and Sandy Row, in Portadown and Carrickfergus, in the bleak housing estates where grievance festers and violence rarely hides far beneath the surface, the cultural response has been a kind of pastiche. The worlds of paramilitarism and pop culture mingle. Songs, murals, dress adopt fragments from the whole gamut of Atlantic entertainment industries - but most startlingly from black American forms. Politically, loyalist paramilitaries and their political spokesmen adopt scraps of everything from an "old Labour" brand of social democracy to neo-nazism. Political Protestantism is no longer a sustaining force. But nor, increasingly, is Britishness. Indeed, Ulster loyalism seems doomed to imprisonment by a terminally declining form of Britishness. What remains will inevitably seemincreasingly negative. Loyalism is a culture ambivalent about Irishness. Yet, whatever else loyalism is, it is distinctively an Irish culture, one that grew only on the island of Ireland, with off-shoots in Scotland and Canada. The essential cultural difference between loyalism and its foes is indeed that while Republicans conceive of themselves as having an inherited, densely woven tradition, loyalists have to make it up as they go along. These are the fragments they shore up against their ruins. Stephen Howe is professor of history and cultures of colonialism at the University of Bristol. This piece was first published at greater length on www.opendemocracy.org |
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