#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney is 44 and was born in Belfast. She was Educated at Methodist College, Belfast and later Keble College, Oxford. Jenny is currently living and working as a journalist in London.

Revolution and perpetual oppression

George Orwell wrote:

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

Andrew Sullivan observed:

"Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup."

Revolution is a mentality, not an actuality. W.B. Yeats wrote:

"Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again, The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on."

It was explained like this:

"Yeats cynically dismisses armed revolutions as merely perpetuating cycles of oppression. The new ruling class then oppresses the others with the same vehemence with which it was once oppressed."

Yeats also said:

"Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: Ireland shall get her freedom and you will still break stone."

Kevin O’Higgins the Irish Minister for Justice was assassinated by IRA for signing death warrants of 77 republicans during the Civil War. An Phoblacht described O’Higgins as “one of the most blood-guilty Irishmen of our generation”.

Ian Paisley said in 1993:

"We often hear from republicans about the treatment meted out to Irish people by the United Kingdom, but we are apt to forget that the bloodiest deeds ever carried out in Ireland took place when Irishman fought Irishman in the civil war, led by De Valera. De Valera was however defeated, and the settlement was established and stood."

Examples of revolutions include the French Revolution — largely orchestrated by the bourgeoisie (middle class professionals) against the nobility, and the Russian Revolution — in which socialist urban workers ultimately triumphed. In both cases, the winners viciously persecuted the vanquished, and ruthlessly dominated.

The Algerian FLN went on to impose a military dictatorship on Algeria vastly more repressive and blood thirsty than the French colonial regime ever was. It continued to persecute ethnic minorities like the Berbers. And more to the point, it ethnically cleansed Algeria of Jews – the vast majority of whom were not only indigenous but belonged to a community that pre-dated Islam in Algeria.

Read about Fethardism, the religious boycott, in Ireland here.

Oliver Cromwell when dissolving parliament in January 1655 exclaimed:

"What greater hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, so soon as their yoke was removed."

Patrick Kavanagh wrote in 'The Green Fool':

"The Black and Tans were gentlemen when compared with the Free Staters."

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."

Sean T O'Kelly said in Geneva in 1933:

"The Free State Government was inspired in its every administrative action by Catholic principles and doctrine."

Kevin Myers speaks to the #NorthernIreland2016 Interview Project

Kevin Myers is a veteran journalist of the Troubles and Irish politics. He is a respected polemicist and historian. He was heavily responsible for bringing  the Irishmen who fought in the First World War back into the consciousness of modern Ireland. He writes a fortnightly column for the Sunday Times.

William Brodrick, Leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance, responds in the House of Lords to the Easter Rising

Viscount Midleton (William Brodrick), Leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance (1910-1919)

William O'Brien wrote about Lord Midleton in ‘The Irish Revolution and how it came about’ (1923), writing:

"Lord Midleton and the Irish nobles and country gentlemen, who were afterwards to follow him into the Anti-Partition League were not yet heard of."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Kathryn Johnston

Kathryn Johnston is a freelance journalist and researcher. She was born in Ballymena. Together with her late husband Liam Clarke she wrote the unauthorised biography of 'Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government'.  She is also the outgoing Women’s Officer of the Labour Party in Northern Ireland.

True Irish republicanism is anti-imperialist and anti-EU

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh speaking into a microphone

Ed Moloney wrote:

"The peace process was… A massive ideological compromise by Provisional leaders which would, inevitably, lead to IRA decommissioning and the transformation of Sinn Fein into a constitutional Nationalist party, not terribly different from the SDLP."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Doug Beattie

Doug Beattie MC is a soldier and UUP councillor aged 50. His father served in the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Ulster Defence Regiment. He grew up in a working class community in Edgarstown, Portadown. He left school at the age of 16 with no academic qualifications and joined the military - The Royal Irish Rangers. In his own words, his career:

The Good Old Provisional IRA

In 1991, on the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, Gerry Adams pointed to the Proclamation in the Sinn Fein Press centre, and declared to journalist Suzanne Breen: 

"Would any of the men who signed that document have signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement? Would Tom Clarke have extradited Dessie Ellis?

No way would those people be involved in talks about talks, rolling devolution, Atkins’ round-table conferences and the whole litany of Sunningdale-Darlington."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Catherine Molloy

Catherine Molloy was a primary school principal until she retired in December 2013. Originally from Derry, she was a member of the SDLP until 2012 and represented the Balmoral area of South Belfast as a City Councillor from 1997 to 2005. She has served on several statutory boards and committees and is currently a Trustee of National Museums NI. She is also now enjoying “studying and filling the gaps in her education” i.e. history, the appreciation of Art and the Latin language.

Edwardian Ireland was a religiously apartheid island

Irish politicians and jurists effectively enshrined Roman Catholic canon law into Irish statute and jurisprudence

Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote in his famous book, 'States of Ireland' (p. 109):

"After my father's death, the pressure on my mother to withdraw me from this school must have been strong. Another widow, in a similar position, had withdrawn her boy not long from Sandford. She had been told that by keeping the boy at a Protestant school she was prolonging her late hushand's suffering in purgatory."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Kyle Paisley

Kyle Paisley was born in Belfast in 1966. He was educated at Greenwood and Strandtown Primary schools and Shaftesbury House. Then later educated at Whitefield College of the Bible, Lawrencetown. Kyle now lives in Oulton, Suffolk. He is the minister of Oulton Broad Free Presbyterian Church.

Ireland's social revolution

John Stuart Mill wrote in ‘Chapters and speeches on the Irish land question’ that while Britain ruled cruelly in Ireland, today's generation cannot be held responsible or atone for past misconduct. He wrote in his publication from 1870:

"The Irish were taught that feeling [disaffection] by Englishmen. England has only even professed to treat the Irish people as part of the same nation with ourselves, since 1800. How did we treat them before that time? I will not go into the subject of the penal laws, because it may be said that those laws affected the Irish not as Irish but as Catholics. I will only mention the manner in which they were treated merely as Irish. I grant that, for these things, no man now living has any share of the blame; we are all ashamed of them; but “the evil that men do lives after them”."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - A 57 year old male

Edward Pearse works as an independent consultant. He has lived happily in both jurisdictions. His name is a pseudonym due to the nature of his work, his insights are informative nonetheless.

The two worlds of Northern Ireland, Ctd

Gerald Dawe said:

"I come from a Protestant background, but as a young fellow I had lots of Catholic and Jewish friends, and non-religious friends. We all used to hang out together, and we used to go to dances together, we used to party together, we used to go on holidays together. It was a very mixed group. But by the early ’70s all that changed. I used to walk girls home over to west Belfast and it never was a problem, but when The Troubles really started to dig in, that kind of freedom disappeared. I mean you’d take your life in your hands… Belfast became a very dark and dangerous city. People didn’t go out after 7 or 8 o’clock at night. It was pretty grim … It wasn’t the same city that I had known growing up."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Gerry McCullough

Gerry McCullough considers herself to be Irish, British and Northern Irish. She was born and brought up in Belfast and now lives in Conlig, just outside Bangor. She went to Belfast High School and then to Queen’s University where she took an honours degree in English Literature and Philosophy, followed by an MA in Eng Lit. She is married to singer-songwriter, writer, radio presenter and publisher Raymond McCullough, and has four children.

The south of Ireland is no longer backward

David McWilliams said in 2014 at the Xchange Summer School:

"If you look back 150 years, Northern Ireland was the Silicon Valley of the world."

He wrote in a 2006 article, ‘North a ‘junkie economy’ reliant upon state handouts’:

"Sometime in the past century, [Northern Ireland’s] Protestant majority swapped Max Weber for Karl Marx."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Dr Paul Reilly

Dr Paul Reilly is a Senior Lecturer in Social Media & Digital Society at the University of Sheffield. He was born and spent his child and youth in Northern Ireland.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - 28 year old exile in London

Our latest interviewee is an exile from East Belfast now domiciled in London. He is 28 and works in finance. For the purposes of this interview he will have a synonym, Lewis Strandtown.

Unhappy when working. Unhappy when workless.

Fritz Kreisler by Paolo Garretto, which looks remarkably like George Orwell

George Orwell said in an essay on Oscar Wilde:

"Even in the most highly-mechanised countries, an enormous amount of dull and exhausting work has to be done by unwilling human muscles."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Matt Johnston

Matt is 43 and is a dad among other things. While his parents would have a long history with Northern Ireland they met in England and Matt was born there. They returned to Northern Ireland with little Matt in 1974 believing that the growing Troubles would blow over soon. Matt inherited such optimism.

Matt is confidently Northern Irish, "I don’t pretend to be English or Irish."