ABSTRACT
The most fundamental challenge to Protestant Unionist British identity in Northern Ireland (the term ‘North of Ireland’ is usually preferred by those advancing the challenge in full awareness of the power that naming confers on place) comes from an Irish republican position which sees this presence and identity in the historical context of centuries of British imperialist involvement in Ireland. More particularly, the descendants of settlers planted by England especially in the 17th century are seen as resisting absorption and integration into Irish society and as a consequence are seen as never having shaken off a defensive settler consciousness. The creation of Northern Ireland through the partition of Ireland in 1921 is seen as the undemocratic British support for an illegitimate unionist statelet, thwarting the will of the Irish people in general for full separation and independence from a colonial power. The creation of Northern Ireland with a deliberately inbuilt Protestantunionist demographic majority is seen as having institutionalized a culture of unionist supremacism with a Catholic nationalist minority deprived of full recognition of its cultural identity and even of equal citizenship. Protestant Unionist identity presented in this way, as characterized by an oppressor mentality, usually proceeds in tandem with a denigration of Protestant Unionist culture in general as the product of a false consciousness, less ‘real’ than nationalist culture, the basic project being to call into question the right of unionist cultural identity to exist. Rather, the ‘invitation’ is extended to unionists to see their future in the political union of Ireland, where they can lay claim to the rich Irish cultural inheritance that awaits them. This process would be speeded up by the removal of the colonial prop of British involvement in the North of Ireland, which blinds workers to their true class interests (Redmond, 1985: 69). The cross-class alliance of Unionism (Adams, 1986: 126) would supposedly fracture and accommodation with a united Ireland would inevitably follow. It is a position which, prosecuted militarily as a noble cause by the armed forces of republicanism in the course of ‘the Troubles’, would most likely be viewed by unionists, in Sandercock’s terms, as delivering the ‘togetherness in difference’ of Cosmopolis at the point of a gun. In a post-GoodFriday-Agreement context, Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, continues to publicly frame the Northern Ireland conflict in colonial terms. Martin McGuinness, MP, Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland devolved administration and chief Sinn Féin negotiator at the political talks leading to the agreement, speaks for many in the North of Ireland in declaring: ‘I was born in a part of the island of Ireland that is occupied by a foreign power’ (McGuinness, quoted in Logue, 2000). Another Sinn Féin Assembly member states bluntly:
As an Irish republican, I want to see a United Ireland, a reunified Ireland
that ends the injustices and conflicts partition created. I believe that the
British government has no right to be in our country either through their
physical presence or through the proxy of their settlers’ descendants
(Kelly, 2002).
