Hastings on NI: The last writhings of a society left beached by history

[muriel_volestrangler]

Today is a day on which I largely agree with Max Hastyings, though I wonder if his optimism is really justified.

Most British people greet Northern Ireland's reappearance on the front pages as if the local bad character had returned to a village after a long and welcome absence. It seems to dwellers on this side of the water an injustice that we should be obliged to govern, fund and police such a thankless fragment of historical flotsam. A Tory MP, George Walden, once observed that the heaviest price paid for Ulster since 1969 has been a fantastic diversion of government energy and effort, away from the core issues facing this country.
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"Belfast has had its annual week of faction fighting," reported the Daily Telegraph. "Unfortunately, there is no solid ground for believing that what has happened may not happen again. The people will be the same next year ... unless some wholesome measure be taken, we shall again see the mob in mortal combat, with soldiers and police for spectators; houses will be gutted, inoffensive people will be driven from their homes and beaten in the streets, while the mayor and the magistrates will wander about in vague helplessness." That piece appeared in a newspaper of August 1872. I wrote such dispatches as a young reporter in Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards. I remember how stunned we English intruders were to discover what a perversion of society existed beneath the mantle of the crown.
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Not so. The latest riots seem a manifestation not of Protestants' power, but of frustration and impotence. They see their tiny world decaying towards oblivion. The unionists' transfer of allegiance to Paisley and his kind, the extinction of David Trimble, represent a rejection of rational politics, a resort to absurdity such as only desperate people could entertain. Most middle-class Protestants now expect a united Ireland, and are untroubled by the prospect. As so often in modern history, economics is achieving what politics has not. In 1969, Ulster's prosperity and welfare state, viewed against the south's poverty, provided powerful reasons for many Catholics, as well as Protestants, to fear a united Ireland.

Today, the position is transformed. Northern Ireland has nothing to lose but its subsidies, while the south is rich and successful. No constituency which gives its political support to such a leader as Paisley possesses a plausible vision of its own future. We are witnessing the last writhings of a society left beached by the march of history.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1570252,00.html

Does anyone know Northern Ireland well enough to judge the accuracy of his remark about middle-class Protestants? Certainly those I knew at university were well-balanced individuals who didn't have fundamental objections, but extrapolating from a few who have left the melee doesn't get you a true picture.

[fedsron2us]

1. I think its fair comment

Over my life I have met quite a few individuals from both the Protestant and Catholic communities of Northern Ireland. From what they told me it seems that in urban areas the 'troubles' was mainly a working class experience. Things were a little more complicated in rural areas such as South Armagh where Protestant farmers were sometimes targetted by Republican groups. In general the middle classes of both communities were largely untouched by the violence unless they had the misfortune to fall victim to the occasional bomb attacks in the city centres. One individual told me that the IRA had come closer to blowing him up in London than they had in Belfast.