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A Belfast boy who adores his birthplace – but tells his daughter:You must get out

JENNY MCCARTNEY

One useful thing to know about Northern Ireland, as the Belfast writer and resident Glenn Patterson explains, is that you can raise hackles simply with terminology. While Northern Ireland is still the preferred name ‘for the majority [of people] who live in it’, for example, many who back a united Ireland prefer ‘the North of Ireland... or just The North’.

After the words come the numbers: the geographical entity of Island Ireland is divided into 32 counties, of which the Republic of Ireland contains 26, while Northern Ireland has six. The book’s title is a play on the unionist assertion that ‘six into 26 won’t go’. Nonetheless, the author asks: what if it did? And given the existing level of painful sensitivity, what exactly might a united Ireland look like?

For newcomers to the debate, he provides a deftly executed whistle-stop tour of the main events shaping the current situation, gamely starting in 8000BC. Today unionists feel their place in the UK has been eroded by a post-Brexit protocol that places a sea customs border between Northern Ireland and the British mainland. Meanwhile, a number of Irish politicians have become more vocal about the inevitability of a united Ireland. Sinn Féin’s buoyant Mary Lou McDonald recently put the time frame on a referendum ‘within a decade’. Exactly how this new state might construct itself, and at what cost to whom, is much less discussed.

Patterson, one of Northern Ireland’s best-known novelists, makes an admirable attempt to examine it here. The year of writing, 2020, is an eventful one. January brings the resumption of the Northern Ireland Assembly after three years not sitting because of a stand-off among the main parties. February ushers in the tortuous ‘Brexit transition period’ whereby Northern Ireland simultaneously leaves the EU along with the UK while staying in the EU’s single market. Then the Irish general election sees Sinn Féin returned as the largest political party, an event celebrated by one new Sinn Féin TD, David Cullinane, with the exultant cry of ‘Up the ’RA!’

The author, born a Belfast Presbyterian and married to Ali, a Cork Catholic, is steeped in historical nuance and clearly sceptical of all hues of vociferous orthodoxies. Even so, at a panel discussion with ‘contributors from both sides of the border’ he notices ‘glitches, moments when the difference of experience… become apparent’.

In Southern Ireland, history is often viewed through a different lens from the North, and one that is itself changing. Older Irish citizens tended to commemorate the

‘old’ 1920s IRA while condemning the Provisional IRA of the 1970s. That distinction is eroding among a younger age group, or at least Sinn Féin’s perceived radicalism on housing and healthcare is often deemed to render its darker history irrelevant.

This ideological shift leaves Northern Protestants feeling increasingly isolated, something compounded by their freshly precarious position in the UK.

Then one gets to questions such as how a straining Irish healthcare system – where the going rate to see a GP is around £50 – might absorb nearly two million Northerners who currently access the NHS. And a 2018 study by economists from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University, the author writes, ‘found that living standards in the South would drop by something in the region of 15 per cent annually in the event of reunification’.

In the following months, as permitted by the Covid pandemic, Patterson travels south to probe the dream and possible reality of Irish unity. Amicable conversations nonetheless carry a subtle electrical charge. A fellow drinker in Birr, County Offaly, is warmly talkative in the pub but cool on the street the next day. And most people the author interviews – including some wary of reunification – choose not to give their names. Is the careful reticence of Troubles-era Northern Ireland, famously observed by Seamus Heaney – ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’ – taking hold down south?

This book is a pleasure to read, forensically and wittily observed, incisively mixing memoir, reportage and analysis. Some of its best passages lie in the deadpan examination of Northern Ireland’s surreal politics, although I wondered if a first-time reader in the territory might occasionally get lost in some of our denser political thickets.

But it’s also threaded with deep frustration. Patterson’s natural optimism has been dented by Northern Ireland’s dragging sectarian dysfunction and the prospect of a future Ireland in which defensive unionism jostles with triumphalist republicanism.

The ending is starkly poignant. Patterson tells his younger daughter about the birthplace he still ‘helplessly’ loves: ‘The first chance you get, leave, and apart from visiting your mum and me, think long and hard before ever coming back.’

That alone should give politicians north and south of the border, and beyond, serious pause for thought.

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2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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