I

The reader will notice a relentless affectation on the part of the present writer: referring to the settler colonisation of Ireland. Now there is no secret to the fact that such a phenomenon took place. The settlers themselves know it, the natives know it, though the word Plantation is preferred. Making use of an explicit discourse of settler colonisation allows us to make comparisons with similar acts of violence elsewhere, and invites us to look forward to the dissolution of the Occupation as a contingent act, which is to say temporary, reliant on conditions of Empire that civilised people are meant to deplore. The dreamtime of the Occupation is a nightmare from which we must try to awaken ourselves. In fact we do wake, we are waking, but we find ourselves forced to feign sleep, so that the situation in the north east of the country can remain undisturbed, a Truman Show corner of Ireland where nothing must ever change. This is why everyone has resource to a compulsory terminology that occludes more than it reveals; the approved words have an ideological function to disguise, to cover up, to lull.

The Troubles is the exemplar here: of a piece with the idea of Irish people generating cute euphemisms for miserable things—like the mistaken claim that we call the Great Famine the Great Hunger, a claim that Irish people have of course fallen for, in the way that Irish people always fall for foreign ideas about themselves—it also powerfully removes the war of colonisation and decolonisation in that part of our country from any possibility of examination. It is an area that is just troubled; the people are troubled (both sides are at it, of course, fair-minded observers in South Dublin tell each other); like a blight, a mist, a natural and therefore unavoidable event, Trouble extends itself across the territory, at times rolling beyond the natural border of “Northern Ireland” into the completely separate space of the rest of Ireland. We must note that at times the Troubles were introduced into England, where the results were experienced as an aberration, despite Thatcher’s claim that Occupied Ireland was as British as Finchley. 

II

Let us avoid the cod-religious terminology of Catholic and Protestant, since this is a matter of politics, not religion; if religion provides any sort of a guide here it is only as the shadow cast by politics. People who refer to religion are avoiding using political terminology, another attempt to confuse, to becalm.

What then of Republican and Loyalist? The latter term is easy enough, Loyalists are those loyal to Britain, or the Crown, perhaps; though they fight—including with arms—any force in actually existing English politics that threatens to cut them off, showing their loyalty to an idea of Britain that may preclude everything that is not themselves. As for Republican, it is similarly taken to mean that fighting part of the nationalist grouping. But here something slips, because Republican is a word with a richer lexical history than Loyalist; certainly it has greater currency in the world of political thought. A Republican is one who believes in equality of citizenship within a state stripped of the structural inequality of monarchy and inherited privilege. And while one can criticise Republicans who betray this ideal, for example by engaging in sectarian violence, saying that they are therefore not Republicans, Loyalists, as armed settler supremacists, are committed to inequality, and while they are therefore immune to charges of hypocrisy for their violence and spite, we must accept that the ongoing crimes of colonisation amount to more than that.

III

The compulsory vocabulary, when not referring to Catholics and Protestants, usually makes use of Nationalists and Unionists, meaning Irish people and settler colonists (or at least those of settler colonist descent who discern in their history their destiny, and maintain support for the policies and parties of colonisation; there have always been significant Irish nationalists who are of colonist descent). Examining this further, it is clear that we have nationalists on both sides: the English mindset has made the slightest concession to Celtic nationalisms by using the drag name of Britain; so it is that those aligned with the principles of English imperialism can dress up as British and—they imagine—thereby avoid being described as anything so crass as nationalistic. Nationalism is separatism, atavism, really more embarrassing than reprehensible; excusable one or two days a year, Burns night et cetera—during which all can join in—but a characteristic marking one as not at all clubbable. This is why the Irish in the north east of Ireland must be Nationalists, and the Unionists something else. But whereas Irish nationalists are of a nation that is easily defined, British nationalists in Ireland, not being English, and being no longer Scottish, are nationalists of no nation. 

The settlers have in the very recent past started to redesignate themselves as Ulster British, presumably feeling that it will help them to pose as an ethnic minority deserving of protection, as opposed to invaders who want to maintain their privilege. Though most will fit in in a United Ireland, with all the ease of Unionists who found themselves living in the Free State decades ago, and ceased to remain a separate community, we might expect that the last representatives of the British nation will be found in Ireland later in this century, when the English have—unilaterally or otherwise—discarded the motley, leaving the peoples of the island of Britain separate in their refounded states: two republics and a kingdom, or whatever the arrangement may be. Ireland will then play host to the dregs of the British Empire: a people who can never go home, for their home is not only across the sea but in the past.