A timely conference

Here in Ireland, we are coming to the end of what has been styled “the decade of centenaries”.

The ten years that spanned the Dublin Lockout to the Civil War essentially set in place what Ireland would be like for the rest of the 20^th century.

One hundred years ago, the fratricide of the war of the brothers was tragically played out.

The killing could be in a back street in Dublin or a bóithrín in Contae Chiarraí.

It left a wound that would take generations to heal. 

That same year, the God-fearing men on the Church and Nation Committee of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland examined what they considered a serious social problem in Fair Caledonia.

The Irish.

They produced a shameful document that was framed in a eugenicist narrative.

In my book Minority Reporter. Modern Scotland’s Bad Attitude Towards Her Own Irish I included the entire report as an appendix.

It would take until this century before the Kirk could face up to their racist past and apologise.

I contacted the Church of Scotland Press Office yesterday to ask if they would send a representative to the conference next month.

I received a polite non-committal reply.

As a journalist, I’ve never seen the point in hectoring anyone who works in a press office. They’re just doing a job. You get the reply, and therefore the organisation is on the record.

Personally, I think that the Church of Scotland SHOULD send a representative if, for nothing else, to be there for the plenary session if there is one.

Of course, that is a matter for them.

In the year that the Kirk finally apologised for the racism of the 1923 report, I found myself in the Kingdom accompanying Martin Ferris on what would be a victorious campaign to get him to Dáil Éireann as a TD.

I recall canvassing one part of the constituency where two auld fellas, brothers, lived together in the homeplace.

It was a classic Irish rural moment that has now largely passed.

Sitting at their fireside, the elder of the two wanted to relate to Ferris and myself what the Free State Army had done to their relative in the next field.

It was like it had happened the week before.

It was like listening to my grandmother in Westport telling me what the Tans had done to a local lad fifty years after it had happened.

Trauma can be intergenerational.

My maternal grandparents, who reared me, were young adults in Scotland when the 1923 report was published.

They knew that they were in a country that barely tolerated them.

The Irish in Scotland found that they were part of an openly disregarded  Gastarbeiter class.

Their labour was needed, but they dared not ask for any cultural space to be themselves as Irish people.

The final section of Minority Reporter is entitled “an illicit ethnicity?”

Looking back at my childhood in Fair Caledonia and the lived experience of my grandparents and my mother, it certainly looked like the answer to that question was affirmative.

It is clear to me that the 1923  Report screamed out to the indigenous population that the Irish among them were other.

Or, to put it another way, somehow illicit.

In a bit of recent synchronicity, my friend and neighbour in Donegal Roy Greenslade (ex-professor of Journalism at the City University in London) asked me for a copy of Minority Reporter.

He produced this excellent review for the Andersonstown News in Béal Feirste.

Míle Buíochas mo chara!

Minority Reporter was expertly edited, and Madam Editor weighed in on Twitter when she saw the review.

Sadly, I think that Angela is correct that the book remains relevant in 2023 as it was when it was first published a decade ago.

There is still much left to do in the city that gave the world the Famine Song.

This conference on the 1923 Church and Nation Committee Report is an important event, and  I’m sure it will be a success on the day.

The organisers are to be applauded.

Tickets are available here.