Northern Ireland invented identity politics. Nearly 4,000 people were killed as a result
The 2018 novel Milkman details how political strife causes personal oppression
Happy Friday! 🥳
It occurred to me recently — after many years of not thinking about the political catastrophe that is Northern Ireland — that the Troubles were the original identity politics.
Which is a serious warning to anyone still hewing to the idea that identity politics are harmless and all about representation and culture and warm, fuzzy things. Look how well that turned out for us here in NI.
My scrambled national identity being what it is, my connection to the Northern Irish Troubles requires a bit of explaining. My father, who was born and bred in working-class Catholic Belfast, was a well-known journalist and author whose special area of interest was the paramilitaries and their killing spree that lasted from 1968 to 1998. So while I didn’t spend my childhood materially impacted by this grim situation, although we made frequent visits to family in Belfast Republican hot-spots, I did grow up immersed in the internecine intrigue and atrocities that dominated this unfortunate statelet. (As a young woman, especially in university in Dublin, this weird familiarity and insider knowledge that I could claim gave me some street cred — I’m now embarrassed to admit — among the crew of lefty anarchist boys I knocked about with. Being able to converse fluently about the Official IRA - Irish National Liberation Army feud of the mid-1970's definitely made me seem cool to certain type of fella in the mid-1990’s.)
My father was not a Republican, much less an IRA supporter. Quite the opposite, the Provisional IRA was a frequent target for his hypocrisy-piercing columns and analysis, and it was well known that they hated him. But support for Irish nationalism was just sort of an underlying fabric of the milieu I grew up in. Again, I’m not placing this at the foot of my father, who went on to write a very positive book about an officer in the RUC Special Branch which only cemented the hostility many Republicans had for him. But the cause of Irish nationalism was very much conflated with the American civil rights movement and its benign and righteous I Have A Dream social justice campaign.
And that was entirely fair, as anyone familiar with the baked-in sectarianism and discrimination of Northern Ireland’s founding as a state will know. But that only makes the rise of violent paramilitaries operating in the name of protecting identities all the more tragic.
Because unfortunately that righteous cause was hijacked by men with guns. They entered into a dark dance with government security forces who treated the local population like pawns on a chessboard. The British government toyed with the Irish problem like a cat with a half-dead mouse, still alive but its guts all hanging out.
I’ve never read any piece of work that makes the extent of this tragedy clearer than a novel called Milkman by Anna Burns. I’ve read many non-fiction accounts of the deaths and the injuries, watched many a documentary interview of relatives crying over murdered children, I’ve seen first-hand the aftermath of the riots and the shootings. But I’ve never experienced the mental oppression of the tribal us-vs-them mentality in the way Anna Burns writes about it.
Milkman, published in 2018, is about an 18-year-old woman, unnamed and from an unnamed part of Belfast, who is stalked by a local paramilitary bigwig. This despite the fact that she studiously avoids expressing anything about herself, because she knows that is the best way to keep herself safe. Her efforts to say nothing and remain a shadow do not protect her from this unwanted male attention, which causes her grief in her local community.
The book deliberately declines to spell out in name and place the specifics of the characters. That would make identification too easy, which is dangerous. Everything is referred to obliquely. But, at least to someone familiar with the intensely local political grudges of Belfast, it’s very clear to whom Burns is referring. “Our side of the road” are the working class Catholics, and the “renouncers-of-state” are the Republican paramilitaries. The “other side of the road” are the working class Protestants, and the “defenders-of-state” are the Loyalist paramilitaries.
Seamus Heaney made the phrase “whatever you say, say nothing” famous outside Northern Ireland, but it’s long been a phrase to live by here. The culture traditionally sways heavily toward the Do Not Stand Out side of the spectrum, making it vastly different to the sparkle and shine, showy American culture. The “famous Northern reticence/the tight gag of place” which Heaney writes about in his 1975 poem is drawn out in exquisitely painful detail in Milkman.
This extreme circumspection comes from a place of pain and suffering — but it only begets more pain and suffering. The tallest, brightest poppy gets cut down. As Burns writes, about the killing of a local dog:
“They killed it because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with the innocence, frankness, openness, with a defencelessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it…
Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger — well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that.”
While the roots of the anger couldn’t be more different, I do now see similarities in outcomes between the darkest days of the Troubles and the heightened state of rage and discord that currently characterises American culture. Fear has seeped into the American psyche in way that was unknown two decades ago. Fear of expressing one’s opinion, fear of your employer finding out what you think, fear of your neighbour, fear of the children and young people in your care.
Most of all, it all revolves around our identities and the differences we perceive between them. Americans are obsessed with identity. It seems like a good time to remind them, then, of the intensely dark places that obsession can take you to. As bad as things in the US seem right now, they can get infinitely worse.
Of course, the Irish identitarian conflicts came from history: colonialism, religion, exploitation and poverty. The American identitarian present springs from liberalism and its unintended consequences. Liberalism created prosperity. Prosperity created a fat complacency. Complacency, because we don’t have enough real problems to worry about, creates a nihilistic resentment. Resentment drives hatred and suspicion of our fellow man. Which are the antithesis of liberalism.
And here we are. Arrived at the dark place where idealism and activistist’s do-goodery finally disintegrate into rancour and control.
Let me remind liberal Americans where that goes:
“In our district the renouncers-of-state were assumed the good guys, the heroes, the men of honour, the dauntless, legendary warriors, outnumbered, risking their lives, standing up for our rights, guerilla-fashion, against all the odds. They were viewed in this way by most if not all in the district, at least initially, before the idealistic type ended up dead, with growing reservations setting in over the new type, those tending towards the gangster style of renouncer instead. Along with this sea change in personnel came the moral dilemma for the ‘our side of the road’ non-renouncer and not very politicised person. This dilemma consisted of, once again, those inner contraries, the moral ambiguities, the difficulty of entering fully into the truth. Here were the Johns and Marys of this world, trying to live civilian lives as ordinarily as the political problems here would allow them, but becoming uneasy, no longer certain of the moral correctness of the means by which our custodians of honour were fighting for the cause.”
