Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins
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politics, and as a recognition of the historical role of the party as the defender, by whatever means, of the Catholic community. Nor has local violence stopped altogether: ‘interface’ friction (Byrne 2005; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 81–100) and ‘community punishments’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 52) continue. There are other unresolved conflicts and issues, too, not least how to come to terms with decades of loss and conflict, internal as well as external, and how to memorialize local and national struggles in a new and changing context (Ardoyne Commemoration Project 2002; Rolston 2003).
In rural communities, the research literature – which is typically social anthropological – suggests a rather different picture: of Catholics and Protestants continuing to interact as well as possible despite the ‘troubles’, of an implicit rejection of violence, of a degree of harmony and coexistence (e.g. Buckley 1982; Bufwack 1982; Donnan and McFarlane 1983; Glassie 1982). Given that some of the most violent areas of the province are rural – near the border with the Republic – and that the IRA for a long time now has been waging an intermittent campaign in rural areas against part-time members of the security forces (who are, almost by definition, Protestant and who live ‘in the community’), this may seem somewhat surprising. It is in part a reflection of the locations chosen for anthropological field studies; in part a reflection of the period during which most of them were undertaken, relatively early on in ‘the troubles’; in part the product of face-to-face fieldwork, which, perhaps, overexposes the researcher to the civilities of everyday life; and in part a testimony to the enduring residual power of a consensual model of the social world in much anthropological thinking.
It is also, of course, in part an accurate reflection of a dimension of rural life in Northern Ireland. My concern here is not to deny that there is an important truth in this comforting picture of country folk living their everyday lives as uneventfully as they can manage. But it does seem likely that the picture – particularly in the current climate – is more complex. Certainly, research during the late 1980s in County Tyrone, in a community near the border (Hamilton et al. 1990: 39–56), suggests a situation closer to that which exists in Belfast or Derry: conditional support among Catholics for the Provisional IRA’s campaign and conflict between this support and Catholicism and ‘moderate’ constitutional nationalism (see also Kelleher 2003). More recent research focusing on the specifics of the borderlands (Donnan 2005), paints a picture of communities that have not been able to manage the ‘troubles’ by withdrawing into residential segregation, in which local social relationships and livelihoods have been ravaged by violence, and for whom the intimately familiar local countryside has been redrawn as a landscape of loss and pain, defeat and victory, and obstinately difficult memory.
Finally, with respect to nationalist opinion in both urban and rural areas of Northern Ireland it cannot be emphasized too strongly that support for, or rejection of, the ‘armed struggle’ has been, and is, related to enthusiasm for Irish unity in complex ways that shortage of space precludes me from exploring here. Irish nationalism does not necessarily translate into either acceptance of, or support for, violence (in much the same way that support for the union with Britain does not necessarily translate into sectarianism). Nor should it be forgotten that waxing and waning Catholic support for violence can only be understood in the context of the violence of the state security forces and Protestant paramilitary organizations. With the benefit of hindsight, the present ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland had their
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immediate historical roots in the violent and inept repression of the (largely Catholic) Civil Rights Movement by the (Protestant) Stormont regime in the late 1960s. And one popular image of the conflict that must be rejected is that of the British Army and security forces as disinterested mediators or referees, standing between two ‘tribal’ factions: it has been a three-cornered struggle, with, as revealed by the 2007 Police Ombudsman’s Report on collusion between members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary – as it then was – and loyalist paramilitaries, an ambiguous relationship between the state security forces and loyalist Protestants.
Moving across the water to Wales, one of the most obvious features of Welsh nationalism is the more or less complete rejection of violence against persons. There is a sporadic history of extra-parliamentary activity in support of the nationalist political agenda, particularly by Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC, Movement for the Defence of Wales) and the Free Wales Army in the 1960s (Clews 1980), and there were three deaths as a result of explosions at the time of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. However, violence against English people or their representatives – as opposed to their property – quickly vanished as even a fringe element in the tactics of Welsh nationalism. Meibion Glyndwˆ r (The Sons of Glyndwˆ r) continued the tradition of direct action during the 1980s, and into the 1990s, with an incendiary campaign focused on absentee-owned second homes and the estate agents who sold them. The explicit focus – although it was a fine line, given that letter bombs were sometimes used – was on attacks on property. Within this framework of direct action, public debate was aroused, for example, by the remarks of the Anglican cleric and poet R.S. Thomas in 1990, to a meeting of Cyfamodwyr y Cymry Rhydd (The Covenanters of the Free Welsh), calling for a campaign of ‘non-violent night attacks’ on the homes of English people in Welshspeaking districts.1 The constant quest seemed to be for a rhetoric and a method to legitimize direct action.
Organizations such as these have always represented, in terms of the numbers of people involved, a tiny fraction of the broad church of opinion that is Welsh nationalism. Nor were they representative of a wider strand of opinion, although there can be little doubt that the issue of second homes remains one about which many people hold strong views, leading to some ambiguity about the Meibion Glyndwˆ r campaign. Although both have a history of resort to extra-parliamentary direct action, Plaid Cymru (the parliamentary political party of Welsh nationalism) and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), the two main institutional expressions of Welsh nationalism, are unequivocal in their rejection of the use of violence of any kind. In an anthropological study of nationalism in north Wales, the absence of any debate about the legitimacy of violence is striking (C.A. Davies 1989).
Nor is it just that violence hardly represents an option. It is explicitly rejected both on pragmatic grounds, as a likely obstruction to the movement’s goals, and on moral grounds, in reflection of the strong thread of Christian pacifism which has always existed within Welsh nationalism (Evans 1973; Rees 1975). The furore aroused by R. S. Thomas’s advocacy of non-violent direct action, referred to above, is a good indication of the depth of feeling on the issue. The overwhelming majority of the nationalist political constituency in Wales do not regard violence, particularly where life and limb are concerned, as either a sensible or a proper means to achieve their goals. It is not an ‘armed struggle’, and it probably isn’t going
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to become one. However, as already mentioned, at different times there has been considerable ambiguity about the ‘second homes’ arson campaign, reflecting an increasing shortage of homes for local young people, due to distortions in the housing market caused by affluent – and non-Welsh – absentee home owners. I will return to this in more detail below. While there was some evidence in the early 1990s to suggest that, due to the ‘second homes’ issue and concern about demographic threats to rural Welsh culture, opinion in Welsh-speaking areas might have been becoming more equivocal about increasingly violent direct action,2 and some rhetoric to this effect (N. Thomas 1991: 18), it did not materialise. A long prison
ˆ
sentence for a Meibion Glyndwr activist in 1993 and, probably much more to the point, the final success of the campaign for legislative devolution, combined to shift the focus of Welsh nationalism elsewhere.
The politics of language
The previous section offers a clue about where to begin any comparison of the relationship between nationalism and language in Wales and Ireland. Most of the nationalist organizations in Wales have Welsh names; this is not the case in Northern Ireland, where, of the above-ground organizations, only Sinn Féin adopts an Irish name (and even that derives from an earlier, all-Ireland historical context). The plain fact is that, whereas in Wales the Welsh language, despite a long-term trend of decline, remains a first language of daily use for a substantial proportion of the population, in Northern Ireland Irish is, effectively, dead (and it couldn’t be called healthy in the Republic).
To look at Wales first, a number of indicators can be used to illustrate the contemporary status of the language (Aitchison and Carter 1999; Coupland and Ball 1989). Census figures, for example, suggest a decline in the number of Welsh speakers from about 930,000 in 1901 (50 per cent of the total population of Wales) to a little over half a million (19 per cent of the population) in 1991. At the 2001 census, the percentage of Welsh-speakers had risen slightly, to 21 per cent (Bryant 2006: 116). Since the 1970s, as a result of the work of language activists and the impact of the 1967 and 1993 Welsh Language Acts, Welsh as an everyday presence in the public domain – in official and other documents, on television and radio, and on public displays and signs of various kinds – has, however, increased in salience. All routine public interaction in Wales now takes place in an environment in which Welsh is to some extent – and no matter how superficially – obviously and unavoidably here-and-now. In terms of its distribution, while the language remains more important in everyday conversational use in y fro Gymraeg – the rural heartland of the north and west – in absolute numbers the majority of Welsh speakers now live in south Wales (Aitchison and Carter 1999; C.A. Davies 1990; C.H. Williams 1989). And in the south there is also everyday use: in a town like Swansea, for example, if you keep your ears open in the market on a Saturday morning you will hear Welsh spoken. It is anything but exotic.
Until 2001, the Northern Ireland census did not collect data about the Irish language (which is telling enough in itself). In 2001, 167,490 people claimed some knowledge of Irish, 9.9 per cent of the total population; 75,125 claimed to be able
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to speak, read and write Irish, 4.5 per cent of the population. The last native Irish speakers passed away during the 1960s and the language now survives solely by dint of formal education and activism. Surveying the then available statistics and research, the most recent and comprehensive account has concluded that:
the death of native Irish in its last refuges in Northern Ireland in Rathlin, the Glens of Antrim and the Sperrin Mountains has not been balanced by any substantial accretion of effective second-language learners who have proved their ability to transmit Irish naturally or semi-naturally to their own offspring. (Hindley 1990: 40)
On this account, and the 2001 census statistics do not contradict it, widespread Irish speaking in Northern Ireland has probably become a lost cause. Something similar, if perhaps less emphatic, is also true for the practical, everyday status of Irish in the Republic (ibid.: 159–60).
Nonetheless, following the 1998 Belfast Agreement the situation has changed in limited respects: there are more Irish-medium schools and nurseries, nods in the direction of the public use of Irish by government departments, in official documents etc., and increased Irish-medium broadcasting. The Education (Northern Ireland) Order 1998 places a responsibility on the state ‘to encourage and facilitate the development of Irish-medium education’. Following the Agreement, Foras na Gaeilge was established as an all-Ireland body to promote Irish, replacing the Republic’s Bord na Gaeilge. However, despite the undoubted symbolic political importance of these changes, in terms of the number of people who can speak Irish well and who use it in their daily lives, they are still few in the broad scheme of things, and their opportunities to do so are limited (O’Reilly 1999).
The contrast is striking. Welsh, although in some decline over the last century, remains an important language of everyday life and there are grounds for qualified optimism about its future. Irish in Northern Ireland – and throughout the rest of Ireland, outside Gaeltacht areas (where the situation is not encouraging) – appears to be a language in terminal decline, for which the best that can be hoped is a degree of fringe preservation by enthusiasts. The roots of the different trajectories of these two Celtic languages lie in earlier history, but one of the important points to recognize is that if there are grounds for guarded optimism with respect to Welsh, this is in a large part due to long-standing campaigns of activism in the twentieth century and, indeed, earlier (Jones 1973). This activism is an integral part of the nationalist movement in Wales. It would not be overemphasizing its importance to suggest that the language issue has, in fact, been the central, uniting theme of Welsh nationalism (Morgan 1971: 170–2). Cymdeithas yr Iaith Cymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, is one of the key institutional expressions of nationalist sentiments and ambitions (Davies 1973).
It is not insignificant that the two major nationalist political achievements in Wales have been the first Welsh Language Act, the result in 1967 of a sustained and controversial campaign of non-violent direct action and disruption, and the establishment of the Welsh language television station, S4C, Sianel Pedwar Cymru or Channel Four Wales, the latter in the face of public opposition from no less a person than the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (C.A. Davies 1989: 37–58). The National Assembly, opened in 1999, owed its establishment not to nationalist activism – although electoral threats at the margins may have had some influence – but
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to New Labour’s 1997 manifesto commitment to limited constitutional reform throughout the United Kingdom, and that probably had more to do with Scottish politics than Welsh.
To further underline the centrality of culture and language to the politics of nationalism in Wales, one has only to consider the issues that have been salient during the last two decades. The first of these is the ‘second homes’ problem, which has been an issue for some time, although its salience may be becoming more pointedly local than national (Bollom 1978; Gallent et al. 2003). The concern here is that people living outside rural, Welsh-speaking areas are buying up properties in these areas for use as occasional holiday homes, at what are for them low prices but which are unaffordable for many local people. The nationalist objection to this trend derives from the shortage of affordable rural housing: the price distortions it produces in local housing markets in y fro Gymraeg mean that local young people struggle to afford to live in their home areas. This, together with rural unemployment, produces emigration and a loss to the area of Welsh speakers. Second homes, and the estate agents who sell them, were thus the main targets of Meibion
ˆ
Glyndwr’s arson campaign.
Migration and housing are also at the heart of a second focus of concern: the immigration into y fro Gymraeg of non-Welsh speaking people, whether they be young families seeking a rural idyll and the ‘good life’, or retired people who have sold a house in a more expensive area of the UK and bought a cheap retirement home in rural Wales (Day 1989; Fevre et al. 1999; Symonds 1990). The arrival of relatively affluent, house-buying incomers is a further constraint on local housing markets and the ability of locals to maintain an active presence in them. The demographic structure of whole areas also alters, with the presence of many more elderly people putting pressure on health and social provision. The younger migrants and their children alter the character of school populations (and these kinds of problem are not peculiar to Wales; for a discussion of the Scottish situation, see Jedrej and Nuttall 1996). It is also worth pointing out that the community conflicts that this trend generates may be as much to do with class and relative affluence as with nation, culture and language (Charles and Davies 1997).
It is this which has produced the third significant issue: Welsh language education policies. With the shift during the 1980s in the balance of rural school populations in north and west Wales from mainly Welsh-speaking to, in some areas, mainly English-speaking, the issue of whether education should be in the medium of Welsh has provoked conflict among parents and community members. In Dyfed, for example, this has, in part, found expression in conflict within local government between the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru. While all schoolchildren have to learn Welsh, education in the medium of Welsh can be a step too far. In other places, however, particularly in the south-east, it has been, largely middle-class and often monolingual Anglophone, parent pressure that has led to the establishment of Welsh-medium education. In part, at least, this reflects not nationalist values but a common belief, not necessarily well founded, that Welsh-medium education is better resourced and ‘better’ (Gorard 2000). Since the National Assembly opened for business in May 1999, while language issues have been prominent, not least with respect to the workings of the Assembly itself (Williams 2004), it is true to say, perhaps because much had already been achieved in the two Welsh Language Acts and the 1987 Education