A shameful centenary

The Government of Ireland Act (1920), which became law 100 years ago today.

It created the two partition states on the island, and it remains one of the most relevant pieces of legislation ever passed in Irish history.

It laid the legal basis for decades of Unionist misrule in the Six Counties.

Although Stormont politicians fetishised the word “Ulsturr”, it was a fiction from the get-go.

These words blink to life in Ulster, but Dún na nGall was never part of the Partitioned statelet.

Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, historically part of the Province of Ulster, were excluded from the new statelet because that would not have ensured an ethnoreligious majority.

When I knew this centenary was coming up, I reached for Michael Farrell’s definitive work on the polity created by the Government of Ireland Act.

By the time he wrote The Orange State in 1976  more than half a century had passed since the Stormont legislature had been created by London fiat.

This was an Apartheid state within the United Kingdom.

The children of ’68 had been born into a state that didn’t want them.

Foreign visitors were appalled at how the nationalist minority were so openly disregarded.

In the public space, it was clear that Northern Ireland was a British monoculture.

Except that it wasn’t.

Derry had electoral boundaries drawn to ensure that the minority on the east side of the Foyle was in permanent power on the Londonderry City Council.

This was even though it was with an overwhelming nationalist city.

As the Bogside burned in 1968, the people of Britain learned a new world “Gerrymandered”.

That term originated in 19^th Century Massachusetts.

It was across the Atlantic that the  Northern Uprising had taken inspiration Doctor King and Rosa Parks had shown the way to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

Ironically, NICRA’s very modest demands were that all of the people in Northern Ireland be afforded the same rights as those enjoyed in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Their peaceful protests were met with a level of state violence that shocked people in Britain.

In the era of Dixon of Dock Green, the RUC had armoured cars and heavy machine guns and their part-time helpers were even worse.

The barely trained “B Specials” were little more than a drunken loyalist militia with government-supplied shooters.

If the Orange State created NICRA  then the RUC and the B men created the Provos.

A socially excluded minority that had been on the receiving end of state violence for generations finally snapped.

The Northern Uprising had its roots in the Government of Ireland Act(1920).

One hundred years on all is changed, changed utterly.

The Belfast Agreement, no matter how it was sold to the majority community in 1998, laid the basis for peaceful reunification.

The 1991 census had shown that the nationalist minority was on the way to becoming a majority at some point in the 21^st century.

Next year the 2021 headcount will almost certainly show that Belfast itself is well past the demographic tipping point and is now a majority nationalist city.

For a statelet set up on a sectarian headcount these numbers matter.

These days there is extraordinarily little majoritarian triumphalism from Unionist politicians.

They might be a historically illiterate subculture, but some of them can count.

Unlike a century ago the political economy of Partition has disappeared.

The contrasting fortunes of Belfast and Dublin in the last one hundred years is night and day.

Moreover, De Valera’s theocracy is as dead as the Orange State that Michael Farrell so forensically examined in his 1976 book.

Our last Taoiseach, now the current Tánaiste, is an openly gay man whose father was an Indian immigrant to Ireland.

Last night I messaged a comrade and said what I was going to write about today:

“Sadly, I have a centenary piece to write about the Six County statelet…”

His reply was as characteristically  to the point:

“The wake.”

He had a tears of laughter emoji in his DM.

For the avoidance of doubt, I  can’t disagree with that analysis.

We first bumped into each other over 40 years ago in the Press Centre in Sevastopol Street in Béal Feirste.

He hasn’t changed at all, and I love him for that.

Over the years, I spotted that he often used humour to reassure people who realised that they were definitely sitting next to the smartest guy in the room.

Yet he was born into a situation that only saw him as a “Taig” and marked him down for poverty and exclusion.

Any society that is built on such discrimination cannot have a sustainable future.

However, even my seriously smart comrade in 1980 could not have envisaged a Stormont politician from the unionist tradition speaking opening in these terms.

When the Bogside burned, it was inconceivable that an elected representative in Northern Ireland would make such a public statement as this.

Of course, a section of society in Northern Ireland views reunification with dread and horror.

In their blighted lives, all they have is flegs, flutes and Sevco.

As their insecurities about the future grow, then so do their bonfires.

The demarcation within the unionist community apropos the prospect of reunification does seem to be mainly around education.

In the new Ireland, the self-identifying PUL community will be a social problem to be managed.

The long-term hope is that a programme of education will ameliorate the effects of the bogus narratives that afflict and retard their outlook.

The tragedy is that many of them are descendants of the first Irish Republicans.

They have become what their 18th-century regicide, republican ancestors in Antrim detested.

The first Republican slogan on the island was “Remember Orr!”

What is required is a unionist Frederik Willem de Klerk.

At the moment we have Snarlene and her creationist buddies.

As the PUL chaps look across the North Channel to Fair Caledonia, to the part of Britain that affirms their Britishness, the vista is appalling.

The opinion poll trends are increasingly pointing to the fact that most Scots have had enough of the United Kingdom.

Moreover, it does not take a degree in clairvoyance to see that an independent Scotland would, in time, likely become a Republic.

When the Brits partitioned this island a century ago, it was still the planet’s preeminent power.

Today the UK is unravelling before our eyes.

In the centenary year of the Easter Rising, Britain scored the own goal of the century.

I wrote then that Brexit would be a “slow moving Suez crisis”.

Well the lorries at Dover certainly are certainly that!

Brexit has dominated everything in these islands since Nigel Farage hilariously declared their “Independence Day”.

Unlike Scotland, the Six Counties has an escape route straight back into the European Union.

Agreed and signed off on in 2017 by our gallant allies in Europe it views the Northern statelet in the same way as East Germany.

Until then there will be a sea border between Britain and the Six Counties.

The English uprising of Brexit has partitioned the UK.

If Northern Ireland was a series on Netflix, we would probably be looking forward to the season finale.