Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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enthusiasm, that amounts to something altogether greater than the sum of its parts. This is likely to be another religious factor contributing to the strength of ethnic attachments in Northern Ireland.

The second, much more tentative, thought is about the implications of all this for the current ‘peace process’ and the future likelihood of a working political settlement in the six counties of Northern Ireland. Local ‘interests’ – collective desires for an end to violence, an acceptable solution to the national question, and an equalization of economic disadvantage, which have become more apparent recently – may to some extent be hostages to the ongoing potential of institutions and culture to generate continued ethnic difference, distance and enmity. Despite the establishment of a power-sharing administration, led by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party in partnership with Sinn Féin, in May 2007, optimism remains an awkward and uncomfortable position. Just because the ‘cultural stuff’ is imagined doesn’t mean that is imaginary. Far from it. And that the ‘troubles’ have not been about religion cannot be taken to mean that religious differences are insignificant.

9 Violence, Language and Politics

In this chapter I want to revisit, from a different direction, the different contexts of identification and analysis first discussed in Chapter 4. Ethnicity is one of the most significant of identities with respect to the relationship between localities and their regional or national arenas and institutions. In the contemporary world, one of the most important ideological manifestations of ethnicity is nationalism, conventionally defined as the expression and organization of political claims to territory and self-determination. I am going to focus on the question of how to understand the differences between nationalism in two regions – Northern Ireland and Wales, one a ‘Province’, the other a ‘Principality’ – of the same nation-state, the United Kingdom. In doing so, I will also take another oblique look at one of the themes raised in the previous couple of chapters, the matter of the ‘cultural stuff’, in this case language rather than religion.

Northern Ireland and Wales

The two territories have many things in common. Culturally, they are part of the ‘Celtic fringe’ of the United Kingdom. Each is small enough to be a locality and big enough to be a region, and each has a relatively low population density. They have mixed urban-industrial and rural-agricultural economies, although the industrial area of south Wales is larger and more populous than the equivalent greater Belfast area of Northern Ireland. Each has recently experienced a shift of its industrial profile, in favour of the service sector. Where Northern Ireland was for many years significantly more economically disadvantaged than Wales, their unemployment rates are now approximately the same, with Northern Ireland actually having lower unemployment on some measures.

The most obvious difference between them is that, although Wales is part of the British mainland, sharing a land border with England, Northern Ireland is separated from the bigger island by sea, sharing a land border with the Republic of Ireland. This is not simply a geographical difference: it symbolizes a significant political reality. Even allowing for recent limited legislative devolution, Wales forms a political unity with England. England and Wales remains a single jurisdiction with respect to law and the administration of the justice system, and constitutes, with Scotland, the (relatively) ancient kingdom of Great Britain. Northern Ireland, however, as a consequence of the political settlement of the ‘Irish problem’ in 1921, lies outside this structure; with Great Britain, it constitutes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is the state arena that deals with foreign, defence and macro-economic policies.

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Compared to Wales, Northern Ireland’s constitutional position is more ambiguous in at least two respects. First, although successive British governments have reiterated their support for the Province’s place within the UK, this support is explicitly conditional on a majority of the Northern Ireland population wishing to maintain this status quo. Second, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 allowed the government of the Republic of Ireland a formal consultative role in the internal affairs and administration of the Province, This arrangement was subsequently strengthened by the role of the Dublin government in brokering the 1998 Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement, and by the institutions of North–South cooperation put in place by that agreement. Northern Ireland is, therefore, more loosely incorporated into the federal United Kingdom state than Wales; this is nicely summed up in the fact that Bryant’s useful sociological overview of the post-devolution state of the nations (2006) leaves out Northern Ireland altogether.

The two territories differ further in the ways that their populations are constituted with respect to ethnicity. The six counties of Northern Ireland are shared by two relatively clear-cut ethnic populations, Catholics and Protestants, who have a long history of violent conflict, the origins of which go back nearly four centuries to English subjugation of the native northern Irish and the colonization of their lands. The population of recent migrants is still relatively small.

In Wales, the situation is more complex, and less conflictual. In terms of recent history, major immigration began in earnest in the nineteenth century, as a consequence of the industrialization of the south Wales coal valleys. As discussed in Chapter 3, labour was drawn in from elsewhere in Britain, from Ireland, and from as far away as the Mediterranean. Partly because many people from rural Wales shared in the experience of migration to the Valleys, partly because of the role of the organized labour movement in forging a new, distinctly working-class, communal life in south Wales, and partly because the new migrants had to assimilate culturally in order to work underground and in the metal works (many, for example, learned to speak Welsh), sharp and conflictual ethnic differentiation did not occur – although the resultant distance between North and South Walians should not be underestimated. Over successive generations, an authentically Welsh population of sorts – about which more later – has been formed in south Wales, a population with a diversity of antecedents. The most recent waves of immigration have occurred in the last three decades or so: first, an influx of relatively affluent outsiders – typically monoglot English speakers – into rural, Welsh-speaking areas of north and west Wales (Day, 1989; Symonds, 1990), and second, a diversity of other migrants, from asylum seekers to citizens of the expanding European Union. Although this inmigration has sown the seeds of some conflict, to which I shall return, it is unlikely to produce anything resembling the Northern Irish situation in terms of substantial, mutually hostile ethnic blocs.

The final difference between the two territories is in the history and nature of their nationalist political movements. As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland and who lived, subsequently, in south Wales, one of the first differences that I noticed was in the rhetorical and actual politics of nationalism. Putting to one side, for the moment, Finlayson’s argument (1996) that the Ulster Protestant cause is a nationalist ideology, and accepting the more limited definition of the situation held by most – if not all – local actors, in Northern Ireland, the nationalist

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objective, despite the de facto acceptance of the present status quo on which the Good Friday Agreement rests, is the reunification of the island. Between the late 1960s and the turn of the millennium, and intermittently before that, the most important means to this end – a situation that the current ‘peace process’ and arms decommissioning appears to have changed – has been armed struggle.

In Wales, by contrast, the promotion and defence of Welsh culture – symbolized most sharply by the Welsh language – and, since the inauguration the National Assembly for Wales following the 1997 referendum, the further development of a distinct devolved administration and distinctly Welsh policies are the dominant items on the nationalist agenda. Outright self-government comes a poor third. The legitimate tactic for achieving these goals in Wales is constitutional democratic politics, a limited degree of direct action and protest having apparently faded out of the picture since legislative devolution. Because means and ends are never easily distinguishable in politics – and this is perhaps peculiarly the case with nationalism – these differences lead me to question the degree to which the two nationalist movements, in Northern Ireland and in Wales, can be regarded, despite recent changes of tactics, as even varieties of the same phenomenon. I will return to the comparison between nationalism in Northern Ireland and Wales in Chapter 10.

The violence of politics

At the level of the strikingly obvious, Northern Ireland differs from Wales in that it has, for approaching forty years, been the site of a complex and bloody struggle among various ethnically organized, armed political movements and the British state. That armed struggle has been one of the defining realities of nationalist politics in Northern Ireland does not, however, mean that the use of violence is a consensual strategy, embraced and supported by all those who might identify themselves as nationalists.

Among the Catholic public élite in Northern Ireland there is a broad spectrum of opinion concerning the role and acceptability of violence. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, the confessional community of the nationalist section of the population, has been unequivocal in its condemnation and rejection of political violence, a stance which was underlined by the incumbency, between 1990 and 1996, of Archbishop Cahal Daly, a vociferous critic of paramilitary organizations, as Catholic Primate of All Ireland. The public pronouncements of individual priests with republican or nationalist sympathies have often complicated this generalization, as has the issue of whether or not the sacraments or a religious funeral should be available to unrepentant ‘terrorists’, but the overall picture has been consistent.

A similar stance with respect to violence is adopted by the, overwhelmingly Catholic, Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). For many years the only political voice of constitutional nationalism, advocating the reunification of Ireland via democratic process – presumably when either the Catholic population becomes a majority in Northern Ireland, enough of the Protestants change their mind, the British parliament has a change of heart, or, more recently, the ongoing process of European unification renders the problem solved through irrelevance – the SDLP has no choice. It must oppose violence, although it has a long tradition

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of association with various forms of non-violent extra-parliamentary action. In purely political terms it also has little choice. To embrace violence would be to render itself indistinguishable in many respects from its main rival for Catholic votes, the republican Sinn Féin.

The other major ‘collective actor’ at this level is the republican movement (a historical identification, deriving from its past advocacy of a particular kind of government in what was then the Irish Free State), specifically the Provisional Republican movement: Sinn Féin – which may be translated from the Irish as ‘Ourselves Alone’ – a political party, and the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army), a paramilitary organization. This dual-pronged strategy was for many years publicly represented in the slogan ‘the ballot box and the Armalite’, the latter being a useful American assault rifle. Here, times have been changing, and rather rapidly. While the Provisional movement was historically clear about the legitimacy of violence, to force British withdrawal from the Province and to protect the Catholic population from the security forces and from Protestant paramilitary organizations, the Belfast Agreement of 1998 signalled a significant new direction. While this has not been uncontroversial – witness the, sometimes exceedingly violent, ‘hold out’ refusal of the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA and Oglaigh na hEireann to accept the situation – Sinn Féin is now committed to democratic politics as the only way forward, decommissioning of the IRA’s weaponry is reportedly complete, the legitimacy of the police has been recognized, and early May 2007 saw the establishment of cooperation in government with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party.

Public political debate within the nationalist community, has, therefore, always been characterized by the interplay of a range of opinions about the legitimacy of violence. What, however, of the ordinary members of that community, the constituency to which nationalist politicians must appeal? In the north Belfast Catholic enclave studied by Frank Burton in the early 1970s (Burton 1978), support from the community for the use of violence by the Provisionals was shifting, situational and conditional. The defensive role – at a time of vicious interpersonal sectarian attacks in this part of Belfast, in effect an organized campaign of civilian assassination on the part of Loyalist paramilitaries – was seen as legitimate. Offensive violence was seen as considerably more problematic. Within the area there was considerable public tension between the Catholic Church and the republican movement. By the early 1980s, when Jeff Sluka undertook field research in Divis Flats, a Catholic area of west Belfast, this tension had increased considerably (Sluka 1989). Public support in the area for the ‘armed struggle’ as the means of securing a united Ireland was substantial; more than half the people surveyed by Sluka expressed views of this kind. The urban nationalist community’s experience of the Northern Irish ‘troubles’, in particular specific episodes such as the H-Blocks hunger strike, appears to have led to increased, consolidated and less equivocal support for violence as a political option (although it must also be remembered that many people in these same communities are still led by their religious faith to a rejection of violence).

The situation in urban Catholic neighbourhoods at the time of writing – with the experience of more than a decade relatively free of serious violence – can only be guessed at. The large votes for Sinn Féin in Catholic west Belfast, in the ‘peace process’ elections held at the end of May 1996 and since, can be interpreted in at least two ways: as an endorsement of the new role of negotiation and constitutional