From the North to Gaza to Obama's US, minority communities have shared certain characteristics, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
EVEN NOW that rights for both are set in legal concrete, the North's two big minorities blaze with passion on the theme of identity. Protestants for whom the very idea of an Irish Ireland is a threat take scant comfort in their Northern numbers. Catholics who never thought unifying the island worth a life are offended that "Ireland" denotes the Republic alone. While Israel invades Gaza and kills hundreds in the name of self-protection, there are some here who bristle at a suspected slight on their heritage.
The bulk of those who fought in the recent past for "their country" may have downed weapons: minds and hearts are still torn. President McAleese said on Sunday that thousands of young Irishmen joined the British army in the first World War so "their families could eat". Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson said she was trying to rewrite history by suggesting poverty had determined recruitment rather than willingness "to fight for what was their country at that time and to serve the crown". Donaldson knows how few of his voters share his sense of a lost British Ireland. As possessor of the largest unionist vote, he also knows many like to hear Irish Ireland reminded of its limits.
Minority communities are not happily assimilated by a "norm" that flays their self-esteem, if not their lives. Gaza waited in vain for comfort this past week from an unusually sensitive senior US political figure, who explored racial divisions and his own mixed heritage so persuasively that he built a platform which captured the presidency. But Barack Obama declared for traditional US Middle Eastern policy early in his campaign: Israel scarcely needed to mark his card in advance of his inauguration.
Dreams from My Fatheris still a fine book. Reading Obama in Belfast, in a society dragged by violence from a past where resentments were tamped down to the present sullen peace and statutory even-handedness, familiar themes leap out. He considers the limitations of black separatism, the dominance of white America and how "people of colour" - a phrase he rarely uses - are damaged by the white norm. He builds his own self-esteem in part by rejecting the option of economic success as a black token in white business. He encourages people in poor black Chicago to organise in ways that build a sense of themselves in relation to whites in officialdom and elsewhere, and he brings his legal training back to community work.
The "white flight" joined by upwardly mobile blacks that has left US cities impoverished at the core, and that Obama set his face against before heading for the White House, has happened in both main communities in the North. Protestants left earlier and feel less torn than their Catholic counterparts about those stranded in Sandy Row and the Shankill. Bonds of church, sport and family remain between Catholics who go and stay, stronger than between Protestants - or in black America.
Catholic nationalists believed that they could not improve their lot in a majoritarian state for a half-century. Protestant unionists thought they must keep it that way or become underdogs in a Catholic Ireland. The young John Hume and fellow spirits urged engagement and organisation, against a will to shun the unionist state. Rejectionism was sharpest among republicans who saw all politics as corrupt and believed themselves vindicated when the backlash against civil rights sent the state into a tailspin, exposing poor Catholics disproportionately to attack.
Decades later, Martin McGuinness complains about the stinginess of the British exchequer to the Northern Ireland Executive - necessary reparations, he would doubtless say. No point pulling republicans up on their inconsistencies. People who belong to minorities inside alien or semi-alien cultures have to find a fit, the answers changing as they age and society changes. In 1960 his gold medal from Rome couldn't get Cassius Clay coffee at a "whites-only" lunch-counter in his Kentucky hometown. That helped make him into the black Islamist Muhammad Ali.
The Troubles and their outcome have shaped sense of identity and changed protagonists. In the recent Stepping Stones- another gleaming book about identity - Seamus Heaney jokes that his passport "wasn't actually green" until he moved South to live in 1972. The man who became the golden voice of Northern Catholic consciousness chose the queen's protection 50 years ago. When he needed a passport in a hurry, Dublin "wasn't even thought about". Getting forms to Belfast was a "sufficiently testing bureaucratic achievement", though the postal service worked well in those days. As for the much-quoted insistence in 1983 that he no longer be labelled a British poet - No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast the queen- he thought by then he "badly needed to serve notice that the British term was a misnomer".
Someone from Heaney's background today would as unthinkingly want their first passport to be Irish.