Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

The ‘Cultural Stuff’ 117

primary schools, the institutional social worlds within which a good deal of formal and informal primary socialization takes place, in ethnic terms and from ethnic points of view.

At which point it is pertinent to ask about integrated schools. These began to appear in the 1980s, initially as local initiatives of concerned parents; by 2000–1, 4 per cent of school pupils were in integrated schooling (Gallagher 2003: 62). If for no other reason, the small number of young people involved makes it difficult to say much about the impact of integrated education on the conflict. Although psychological research suggests that the experience of integrated education encourages greater inter-group tolerance (McGlynn et al. 2004) and there is no shortage of generally encouraging commentary by educationalists (e.g. Smith 2001), the politics of integrated education have, so far, proved to be anything but straightforward (Morgan and Fraser 1999). Perhaps the wisest conclusion, for the moment, is that the jury remains out.

Religion also appears to contribute to conflict in Northern Ireland if we look at the regulation of sexual relations and marriage (which, mediated through friendship networks and courtship, is also related to education). One striking aspect of this problem concerns marriage between Catholic and Protestant (Lee 1981). In the wake of the papal Ne Temere decree of 1908, and the McCann case of 1911, intermarriage was firmly discouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, and, even though there was some relaxation of the official Catholic position in 1970, considerable pains may still be taken, both inside and outside the family, to ensure that the children of a ‘mixed marriage’ are brought up as Catholics. This is an issue on which the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland appeared in the 1990s to adopt a firmer line than in other countries. Given the sensitive demography of Northern Ireland, the Church’s policy in this respect is widely interpreted by Protestants – although this interpretation ignores the fact that the Church actively and publicly discourages intermarriage – as a stratagem designed eventually to tip the electoral balance in favour of the reunification of Ireland.

Nor does pressure against the mixed marriage come from only one side. Although there may not be the same kind of institutionalized barriers to intermarriage on the part of the Protestant churches, many Protestant clergy and laymembers also strongly disapprove of religious exogamy, possibly because, as a result of the local view of Roman Catholic policy discussed above, the traffic is largely seen to be one-way. Indeed, survey evidence suggests that, for precisely this reason, Protestant lay-people are actually more disapproving of mixed marriages than their Catholic counterparts (Boal et al. 1997: 159–60; Gallagher and Dunn 1991: 12; Mitchell 2006: 62). The consequences are informal, although frequently effective, measures to discourage such unions (McFarlane, 1979).

However, ethnic closure – especially in the face of the emotions – can never, thank goodness, be absolute. Of the 61 per cent of respondents who reported the religious composition of their own marriage to the 1991 Northern Ireland Social Attitudes Survey, 9 per cent were in a Catholic–Protestant ‘mixed marriage’, which may underestimate the global percentage of inter-ethnic unions (Bruce and Alderdice 1993: 14); broadly comparable results have been produced by recent data from the Northern Ireland Life and Times surveys (Mitchell 2006: 61; Niens et al. 2003: 130).

A third sense in which religion, or religious issues, can be said to influence the Northern Irish conflict is with respect to the position of the Roman Catholic Church

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in the Republic of Ireland. As the 1978 Northern Ireland Attitude Survey found, ‘a principal reason for unionist antipathy towards a united Ireland is the position of the Catholic Church in the Republic’ (Moxon-Browne 1983: 39). The relationship between church and state in the Republic is a complex matter (Clarke 1984; Inglis 1998; O’Reilly 1992; Whyte 1980). The issue is not whether Catholicism in the Republic does in fact exercise an overweening, or even a significant, influence upon state policy and legislation. Indeed, the fact that contraception has been legalized in the Republic – in the face of a campaign of stiff opposition from the Church – suggests that this influence may be on the wane, and other indications of this trend could be suggested (Hug 1999; Inglis 1998). The problem is, rather, that many Protestants in Northern Ireland persist in the belief that the Roman Catholic Church has considerable – or even total – sinister power in the Republic (Heskin 1980: 28–30; Mitchell 2006: 122). They fear for their civil and religious liberties accordingly.

Matters are not always clear-cut in these respects, however. For example, abortion – illegal in the Republic, and so strictly limited as to be, for most practical purposes, illegal in the north – is not an issue of major controversy between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland (Porter 1996: 288–9). Much Northern Irish Protestant opinion opposes abortion in principle, if with less collective consistency and in smaller numbers than their Catholic fellow travellers on this issue (Cairns 1992: 157). It is no less interesting, however, that a study of Catholic and Protestant churchgoers suggests that, when it comes to abortion in practice, in real world situations, there is also considerable convergence with respect to the circumstances in which abortion might be acceptable (Boal et al. 1997: 150–2). Allowing for that, Ian Paisley has publicly expressed his horror of abortion and roundly condemned the practice on the basis of scripture, and members of his church – including his daughter – have shared public anti-abortion platforms with members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He, and many other Protestants, would support moves to restrict even further the minimal local availability of abortion, or prohibit it altogether as against the laws of God and nature. The security of their conviction being what it is, however, such a position is not seen as either an unwarranted religious intrusion into the business of the secular state, or a restriction on the freedoms of the individual citizen. At issue for many religiously enthusiastic Protestants, rather than the maintenance of some general constitutional separation between church and state, is opposition to any extension of the power or influence – as they perceive it – of the Roman Catholic Church.

So far, I have been discussing aspects of religion that may create social distance between Catholics and Protestants, or increase Protestant fears about the consequences of the reunification of Ireland, but probably contribute only indirectly to violence between Catholics and Protestants. Religion is in this sense:

a basis for segregating the population into two communities, largely ignorant of each other and susceptible therefore to prejudice and stereotyping. (Whyte 1990: 51)

Religion may, however, provide more immediate, and in their contribution to the ‘troubles’, more consequential factors. With respect to the informal regulation of routine public interaction, for example, religion-related items are an integral feature of the set of culturally specified markers by means of which actors ‘tell the

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Cohen has argued convincingly (1985) that communal identities are, in his words, ‘symbolically constructed’: symbols can be shared without necessarily meaning the same thing to community members. This allows considerable diversity to shelter, and to knit together, behind a symbolic mask of collective religious identity. The supporter of physical-force republicanism and the pacifist can, for example, both be devout and practising Catholics and identify with each other in the practice of their faith. Furthermore, since the Catholic Church is less fragmented, and Catholicism much more elaborately symbolized in terms of ritual and belief, it has a greater potential than the Protestant Churches to function – very visibly – as a ‘communal umbrella’ (Mitchell 2006: 72–81). Hence further impetus to the categorization of Catholicism as monolithic. To return to the theoretical point of departure, this is a further indication of the importance of content – the ‘cultural stuff’ – to relationships across ethnic boundaries.

The other sense in which religion is directly implicated in the conflict is perhaps more straightforward. Religion often concerns itself with issues that are apparently political, and politics may equally be self-consciously religious. An example of this elision of the two domains of discourse may be found ready to hand in the Orange Order’s Twelfth of July processions (Bryan 2000a; Cecil 1993; Larsen 1982). An important feature of these events, the purpose of which is the commemoration of King William’s victory over King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, is the meeting at ‘the field’ at the end of the march; among other things, this is an opportunity for speechifying by local Unionist politicians and Protestant clergymen. A recurrent theme of such speeches is the need for vigilance in defence of the Protestant heritage of the Reformation, and the importance of the Orange Order and the Northern Ireland state to that defence. Similarly, a well-worn theme at the Reverend Ian Paisley’s religious meetings, although he was an active Member of the European Parliament between 1979 and 2004, is denunciation of the European Union as a papist plot, foreseen, what is more, by the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. Returning to Handelman’s point about ‘social biographies’, for Catholics as well as Protestants, religion and religious readings of history contribute in no small manner to the weaving of oppositional mythical charters that legitimate the present impasse (Irvine 1991: 172–212). Religion contributes in a similarly mythic way to the construction of the future, as a historicist teleology of collective destiny.

More generally, there is a long – and particularly Protestant – tradition of political clerics: many loyalist politicians have been ministers of religion, and clergymen have often found it useful to draw on political rhetoric as part of their evangelizing. By the same token, politicians are also capable of leavening their public message with religion. An apposite – if somewhat extreme – example from the early 1980s concerned Mr George Seabrook, a Northern Ireland Assemblyman, Belfast City Councillor and sometime member of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who was charged, in July 1984, with using threatening or abusive language likely to cause a breach of the peace. His offence was to suggest, at a meeting of Belfast Education and Library Board, that the City Council should buy an incinerator to burn Catholics, whom he described as ‘Fenian scum’. A self-confessed bigot, the specifically religious dimension of Mr Seabrook’s remarks is betrayed by his suggestion that Catholic priests be burned, and his later statement that he would only apologize ‘the day after the Pope marries’.1

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It is tempting to dismiss this kind of venom as the extremism of a lunatic fringe. Before so doing, however, it must be pointed out that in response to Mr Seabrook’s public utterances the DUP stopped short, in the first instance, of disowning him completely, being content to suspend him pending an apology. Such an apology not being forthcoming, his membership of the party eventually lapsed at the end of 1984, to the evident relief of his erstwhile leaders. Rhetoric of this sort is representative of a particular strain of Protestant political discourse, in which are mingled Old Testament savagery, born-again fundamentalist piety, old-fashioned Empire Loyalism, and virulent ethnic chauvinism (Brewer and Higgins 1998; Bruce 1986; Higgins and Brewer 2003). To appropriate a local epithet, this is a tradition of ‘bitter’ Protestant politics. As such, it is the emotional and political bedrock upon which rests the phenomenon of Paisleyism:

Although not all his political supporters would subscribe to his doctrinal view, there seems no doubt that Paisley’s own brand of Protestantism provides an ideology that bears the same relation to the DUP’s political tactics as Marxism does to a Communist party in Eastern Europe. The ideology serves to legitimize political actions, it serves as a unifying force, but it is flexible enough to be adapted to alternative policies in the pursuit of broadly similar goals. (Moxon-Browne 1983: 96)

In emphasizing this particular manifestation of the Protestant churches politically militant, one should not, of course, forget that an important body of Protestant opinion is politically moderate. It was, for example, Protestant clergymen who organized and participated in the Feakle talks with representatives of the Provisional Republican movement in December 1974; this is a strand of dialogue which has continued, on and off, up to the present, contributing to the negotiations which led to the original cease-fires of 1994. However, it is probably true to say that this sort of centrist moderation is not representative of the majority of Northern Irish Protestants.

The relationship of the Catholic Church to politics is different again. Having no major role to play in the Northern Ireland state – apart from its importance in the sphere of education – it has tended to abstain from public or ‘official’ politics. Occasionally individual priests may involve themselves in local-level political issues or even more rarely, as in the case of Father Denis Faul, for example, in issues such as civil liberties, and senior members of the hierarchy do, from time to time, issue statements about specific incidents. This, however, is the sum of public political activity on the part of the Catholic Church. In recent decades, individual Catholic churchmen have also played an ecumenical part in the informal and out-of-the-public-eye network of cross-community discussions that are, in a manner perhaps as yet not fully appreciated, part of the current ‘peace process’.

The Catholic Church’s relationship to republican politics, whether parliamentary or paramilitary, is ambiguous and equivocal. On the one hand, there is a necessary – and genuine – historical affinity with the goals and ideals of republicanism, broadly construed. On the other hand, the inherent conservatism of the Church prevents it from supporting either the violence that characterized the campaign of the Provisional IRA, or the socialism of marginal groups such as the Workers’ Party. The hierarchy’s dilemma in this respect is, effectively, the same as that of successive Dublin governments: how should the Church support the Irish republican