Religious apartheid in 1940s southern Ireland

As has been a recent theme on this blog, I've been a little alarmed at the growing narrative that only protestants and unionists are bigoted, something Sinn Fein and republicans appear to be promoting.

As Jenny McCartney wrote in 2004 following the complete exit of protestants from a catholic estate in Belfast:

"Mr Eoin O'Broin - steeped so long in Sinn Fein’s myth that Northern Ireland’s Catholics must always be oppressed and Protestants the oppressors - simply cannot bear to admit the truth about the intense anti-Protestant bigotry in many working-class Catholic areas... It is pure dishonesty, however, for anyone to pretend that the sectarianism flows in only one direction."

Northern Ireland's Dance, Ctd

Mandan tribal dance - George Catlin (c. 1835)

I previously wrote about the Northern Ireland dance here. MCB alumnus now in Washington Niall Stanage wrote in the New York Times:

Catholic bigotry

An anonymous Irishman is reported to have said via ‘Is Ulster Right?’ (1913):

"Roman Catholics who fled from the tyranny of the penal laws at home [in Ireland] had no scruple, when they reached the Continent, in taking part in persecutions far more terrible than anything they had seen in Ireland. During the dragonnades in Languedoc, Louis XIV’s Irish brigade joined eagerly in the butchery of old men, women and children and the burning of whole villages. The same heroes distinguished themselves by destroying everything they could find in remote Alpine valleys so that the unfortunate Waldenses might die of starvation."

The 2nd Vatican council of 1965 changed protestants from "heretics" to "separated brethren".

Rev. Michael Kennedy, Roman Catholic curate, said in April 1898:

"They are not born from our race… the Irish Unionists have no country…"

The remarkability of Irish Rugby

The tricolour and provincial Ulster flag fly as Ireland play Canada at the 2015 Rugby World Cup

In 1986 The New York Times wrote:

"From a social and political perspective, every game the Irish team plays is remarkable indeed.

Arlene Foster said on the Nolan Show, November 5 2015:

"Yes [I consider myself Irish when watching Irish Rugby,] because we have some fantastic Ulster Rugby players playing for them."

The Irish Rugby Football Union was formed in its present form in 1879, so it pre-dates partition by 41 years. Edmund van Esbeck is the veteran and highly respected rugby correspondent of the Dublin-based Irish Times. Speaking in 1997 he shed some light on the great healing and congealing force that the game of rugby has exerted on Ireland: 

Apartheid education in Northern Ireland

The patriots on each side matriculate hate. In Northern Ireland we inherit from our parents bigotry and hate, and to our children we bequeath bigotry. But the cause of division and mistrust goes beyond the familial and includes the educational apparatus with their curriculums of difference and confirmation bias.

Religious and political allegiance in Northern Ireland is singular. The two words are interchangeable. History isn't taught, it's inherited. We are bequeathed myths, biased and bigotries from a toxic matrix of parents, teachers and clergy. Edmund Burke wrote in 1792:

"[There were] thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen… I remember a great, and in many respects a good, man, who advertised for a blacksmith, but at the same time added he must have a Protestant blacksmith."  

Christopher Hitchens on Northern Ireland, Ctd

A generation of journalists cut their teeth in Northern Ireland covering the Troubles: Robert Fisk, Max Hastings, Jeremy Paxman, John Simpson and Kevin Myers. You can add Christopher Hitchens to that incomplete list.

Irish teachers must be Catholic missionaries

Eamonn de Valera genuflecting at the feet of Bishop John Charles McQuaid

Michael Nugent wrote following the publication of the report, 'Irish school teachers must be Catholic missionaries,' that religious discrimination against the irreligious and non-Catholic is accepted as part of the Irish way of life, adding that "Irish school teachers must be Catholic missionaries." He wrote:

"Religious discrimination, like all discrimination, undermines the dignity of the human person. In this case religious discrimination in our education system has undermined the human rights of parents and their children. It also denies atheists and religious minorities from their right to access the teaching profession in a democratic Republic without religious discrimination.

Conor Cruise O'Brien - The church and school helps to encourage, exalt and extend tribal-sectarian self-righteousness

Cartoon of Conor Cruise O'Brien

[UPDATE - John Hume wrote in The Irish Times, May 18 1964, "Bigotry and a fixation about religious divisions are the first thing that strike any visitor to the North."]

Our parents are patrons of prejudice, bequeathers of bigotry. Churches and chapels inculcate hate. 

He was that Irish essayist and polemicist so "sorely deficient in Anglophobia". Conor Cruise O'Brien (who was satirised in the 'Gentle Black and Tans'), drew across the grain on so many issues. He was the arch-"revisionist", a charge he countered here. A controversialist and a man of irrepressible energies, we sorely lack his type today.

The Calvinist Ulsterman is more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised

Cartoon by Ian Knox

G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book 'Irish Inpressions':

"The Calvinist Ulsterman may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised, especially by himself."

The "weirdness" and "freak show" of apartheid education in Northern Ireland

Cartoon by Ian Knox (@IanKnoxcartoon)

Ninety-three per cent of children in Northern Ireland attend segregated elementary schools. Causing what the New Yorker's Patrick Redden Keefe called, "sheer weirdness." Jude Whyte said:

"Politics has replaced the gun and the bomb yet in many ways I feel that we live in a more segregated society than ever. We live apart, educate our children apart... while sport (the source of such unity in the world) remains sectarian, poisoned and divisive."

Andrew Sullivan and the conscience clause

My illustrated tribute to Andrew Sullivan I drew for the Huffington Post.

Paul Givan, theo-unionism and the ecumenical religious right regard gay people as the greatest threat to religion.

Jack Kyle on Ian Paisley

Jack Kyle, rugby player and surgeon, born on February 10 1926. Aged 88 he passed away on November 28 2014.

[UPDATE - Read my essay on Jack Kyle and free speech in Northern Ireland published by Eamonn Mallie here]

We know him as the rugby great and for his work as a doctor. But Jack Kyle was also a man of letters and ideas. Throughout his life he shared comments on the Irish Question that were lucid, forceful and profound. 

On rugby in Ireland he said, "There was never any religious business about rugby. That was the wonderful thing about it." At more length, he said about Irish rugby:

"That was the wonderful thing about [Irish rugby, the absence of religion]. When the various unions were splitting up, the Irish Rugby Union said: “we play as one country”. Those of us from Ulster were very fortunate that happened. It was also a much greater honour for us to play for the whole country. I think it says a lot that during all the Troubles, never once did a southern side fail to come north or a northern side fail to go south."

Irish Americans looked and sounded like Orangemen



Cartoon of Bernadette Devlin by Aislin (Terry Mosher)

The words in title are the words of Bernadette Devlin, the youngest person ever to be elected to Westminster, and the figure in the cartoon. You can read her Maiden Speech in the Commons, April 22 1969, here. On her rise to the London parliament and prolific profile her face was seen around the world and she travelled widely, including to America. She was the figurehead of Ireland's discriminated-against and the disposed and had the sympathies of Irish-Americans. A hearing from Irish-America was as natural so as to breath, since animosity based on "England's historic wrongs" were closely and long held. As the Spectator wrote in 1882:

"The hatred of England is cultivated by the American branch of the Irish race “as a sort of religion,” we can well believe. The history of the last two or three years shows it to be so."

The forever problem of racism

Racism is nothing new but a perennial tension that exists as cycles of immigrants assimilate and they transition from foreigner to indigenous population. Yesterday's foreigner is today's native. Here's two examples: 

Evil May Day is the name of a riot which took place in 1517 as a protest against foreigners living in London.

The Gordon Riots of 1780 began as an anti-Catholic protest in London against the Papists Act of 1778, which intended to reduce official discrimination against British Catholics. The protest evolved into riots and looting.

Christopher Hitchens - Encouraging signs of polarisation

In his book, 'Letters to a Young Contrarian', Christopher Hitchens said (here and here):

"I have a dear friend in Jerusalem, that home of rectitude and certainty that is so often presented to us as “holy” for no better reason than its unenviable position as “home” to three (highly schismatic but self-described) “mono”theisms. His name is Dr. Israel Shahak; for many years he did exemplary service as chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. Nothing in his life, as a Jewish youth in pre-1940 Poland and subsequent survivor of indescribable privations and losses, might be expected to have conditioned him to welcome the disruptive. Yet on some occasions when I have asked him for his impression of events, he has calmly and deliberately replied: “There are some encouraging signs of polarisation.” Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich."

Thomas Nast - No Sect Can Rule this School

Carlos Velazquez wrote a commentary on the cartoon done by Thomas Nast, the father of the American editorial cartoonist tradition, which accompanied an article from a 1875 edition of Harper’s Weekly.  On page 385 of that publication is an articleed titled 'The Public Schools and its Foes.' Directly above the article was another political cartoon by Nast. The Thomas Nast cartoon, 'No Church need apply' depicts a Catholic bishop passing out Vatican decrees to young school children. These children are placed in a doorway of the school, besides which appeared a sign which read, 'No Sect can rule this school,' This was the theme of the companion article. Carlos explained the cartoon and the companion article here:

"The companion article written by Eugene Lawrence highlighted the greatest enemy of the common schools as being the Roman Catholic Church and its leader Pope Pius IX as well as other religious/political institutions that did not promote American common schools. The article favored the condition of the common schools and emphasized what we consider today to be the separation of church and state: 

“Their people have become conscious that the common school is the source of ease, comfort, wealth; that it doubles the value of their lands, build towns, factories, railroads; and hence all over the south there is a plain advance toward a new condition of society.” (p.386)

Furthermore, Lawrence cited the common schools as places for “repression of violence” and “cultivation of knowledge” and expresses the notion that the enemies of the common school, which included, “a foreign pope, democratic politicians and a foreign sect” as being responsible for “the decreed destruction of the common school…” (p.386)

Northern Ireland's social and economic emigrant, Ctd

Susan Hattis Rolef wrote a piece in The Jerusalem Post here by the title, 'Think About It: Why Israelis moved to Europe'. She said of why young Israelis leave Israel:

"The reasons for their decision to leave are varied, and include besides the economic reasons (usually the straw that breaks the camel’s back) loss of hope that peace will ever prevail between Israel and its neighbors, for which they believe Israel is as much to blame as the Arabs; discomfort with the lack of determination of Israel’s leaders to make a serious effort to separate religion and state, and enable seculars to enjoy nonreligious marriages and burial services, public transportation on Saturday etc.; and the feeling that life in Israel frequently feels like life in a pressure cooker, where too many people are nervous, intolerant and violent."

Sound familiar? I touched on the issue of forced emigration from Northern Ireland on Eamonnmallie.com here. I also wrote a piece on Slugger O'Toole here in response to a question David McCann wrote here on the same site: 'Are Young People Getting a Fair Go Politically in Northern Ireland?'

Previous post in the series here.

Inherited myths, biases and bigotries

Kevin Myers wrote in the Sunday Times of November 10 2013 that Maureen Wall of UCD began her opening history lecture to first arts by asking foreign-educated students to stand. Kevin Myers cited what the famous lady then said to the foreign students:

"You, I have some hopes for. Your minds have not been filled with toxic rubbish that passes for history in our schools. But as for the rest of you, bitter experience has taught me to despair already."

Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote in States of Ireland (p. 89):

"Our school histories do not seriously discuss the ideas and policies of the men of 1916 in relation to the Protestants of Ulster."

The same cuts for Protestant schools, they do not seriously discuss the ideas of the men of 1912, led by Edward Carson, who signed the Ulster Covenant. Malachi O'Doherty suggested a solution to the problem flagged above. He wrote in the Irish Times of November 22 here:

"The further we move on from the Troubles in Northern Ireland the more divergent accounts of that period become... Dr Haass wants to achieve some reconciliation of divergent views of the past to create a basis for co-operation in the future. One approach might be to insist on more teaching of history in schools" 

Fintan O'Toole - Folly of sectarian 'solutions'

The Good Friday Agreement is a dual purpose document that seeks to do two things. One, stop the IRA and other paramilitaries from killing people. Two, it was supposed to be a founding document that would allow Northern Ireland to move from sectarianism into a new world.

In 2005 Fintan O'Toole wrote a fascinating article on the peace agreement on September 13 2005 in the Irish Times under the title, Folly of sectarian 'solutions'. He said on the second plank of the agreement:

"[The agreement is] supposed to be a kind of constitution. It defines Northern Ireland as a political space and seeks to do so in a genuinely radical, exciting way. It is, indeed, perhaps the boldest constitutional document ever agreed between sovereign states. It creates space that is not ultimately claimed by any state, defines national identity as potentially both mutable and multiple, and rests sovereignty, not on history and geography but on that most complex and fluent of things - the collective mind of a majority of the population."

On the first plank of the agreement, Fintan O'Toole explained:

"[The agreement] built the internal architecture of Northern Ireland's governance on a static notion of "two traditions" which were to be appeased and given "parity of esteem". The hope was that even though sectarianism was built in to the power-sharing system by the requirement of simultaneous majorities on the unionist and nationalist sides, the experience of working the new institutions would in fact diminish it. But there has been no momentum, and the division have been formalised, entrenched and deepened."

We need to achieve what the founders intended, diminish sectarianism. This requires a break with the negative feedback loop of mutual hatred, loathing and recrimination. It needs a break from management and towards vision.

Read Fintan O'Toole from 2005 in full here.

The heroine of Hackney - Shall I Not Remonstrate?

Pauline Pearce, "The heroine of Hackney", stood up to street fighting thugs and vandals that were terrorising her community and local businesses during the London riots (see original video here). She stood up and put out against barbarism. This contrasts with people in Northern Ireland who have surrendered, capitulated and prostrated before the most fanatical and riotous thugs. Here's a sample of what she said:

"This is a f****** reality. Low up the f****** burning the property. [Stop] burning people's shop that they work hard to start their business. You understand? The shop up there, she's working hard to make her business work and you lot want to burn it up, for what? So that you can say you're "warring" and you're bad man. 

This is about a f****** man who got shot in Tottenham, this 'aint about having fun and rioting and busting up the place. Get it real black people, get real. Do it for a cause. If we're fighting for a cause let's fight for a f****** cause. You lot p*** me the f*** off. I'm ashamed to be a Hackney person because we're not all gathering together and fighting for a cause we're running down Foot Locker and TV shops. Dirty thief run off."

Asked by Simon Armitage on the broadcast Speeches that Shook the World (watch here) if her speech made a difference, Pauline said:

"I do think to some degree it did. People said to me it was kind of at that point that people started coming out with the brooms and everyone started standing up for the communities a bit more."

Simon Armitage commented, "You were the voice of decency in amongst a lot of chaos for a moment."

Read my previous articles on eamonnmallie.com on the need to protest and challenge extremism on the streets here, here, here, here, here, here and here. See the original video of Pauline Pearce here and by reading further.