We’re getting reports that someone or other is up in arms about The Late Late Show (again). “A pattern is emerging where there seems to be a higher quota of guests from the North than the rest of the country,” Mr (or Ms) AN Inside-Source told the Irish Mail on Sunday. “It’s not going down well with staff.” Poor old Patrick Kielty has only been hosting for 10 minutes and he’s already being accused of infiltrating bloody foreigners such as the former uachtarán na hÉireann Mary McAleese on to the national airwaves. I hope he’s proud of himself.
Never mind the particulars of that story. What is interesting here is the perception that “too many northerners” could be a problem for a largely southern audience. No doubt some smart arse will, after a volley of supposedly hilarious remarks about the latitude of Malin Head, pretend not to know what is meant by “North” or “South” here. The supposed rift is between those emanating from the jurisdiction still known as Northern Ireland and those from the rest of the island. It’s not about the good people of Cavan or Monaghan.
We all know how the Northern Irish unionist of crass cliche views what bores insist on calling “the 26″. Congenitally lazy, red-haired IRA supporters, their bogus economy flimsily supported by handouts from the “Common Market”, spend their days smoking fags on drystone walls and scattering soiled nappies about other people’s gardens. “Where do the terrorists operate from?” Ian Paisley, in the days before he turned into Derek Nimmo, famously thundered. “From the Irish Republic, that’s where they come from!”
You will meet many from the Republic who have never been to Northern Ireland. You will meet still more who have never knowingly encountered an Irish unionist
You don’t have to look too far to find a few northern nationalists working through a contradictory bestiary. In this version, abhorred “Free Staters” (that dated construction is popular with sceptics from both “communities” at the top of the island) have spent the past 100 years tacitly collaborating with the British state while ignoring the plight of their northern brothers and sisters. You know the sort of thing. They waste days wandering about famously idyllic Xanadus such as Limerick, its “gardens bright with sinuous rills”, before settling down to write Zombie and persuading stadiums to play it at every Munster match. Bloody partitionist Free Staters!
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All dissenting northerners agree on one thing. Southerners are a bit squashy. A bit pallid. A bit spineless. They don’t have the necessary grain of sand in the blood. We know who takes the role of Sparta in this Peloponnesian War.
The hostility presumed to exist in the other direction is, insofar as we can analyse something so nebulous, complicated by the sectarian divide. The northern unionist is, to his average hater on the other side of the Border, as exotic and strange as the leopard people of Northern Volumnia. You will meet many from the Republic who have never been to Northern Ireland. You will meet still more who have never knowingly encountered an Irish unionist. They say “no” a lot and they enjoy chaining up the swings on Sundays. Will this do?
Northern nationalists tend to be more familiar, but that won’t halt the perception that they are troublemakers who, given half the chance, will argue their way to the front of any visible queue. If northerners see southerners as soft, then southerners see northerners as abrasive. Right? The great victory of partition is this hardening of a prejudice into something that has no equal across any other geographical axis on the island. Still right?
Well, no. Not really. As someone who did his formative growing up in Belfast, did some more in Limerick and then spent the greatest portion of his adult life in Dublin, I can’t say I have ever encountered any sincere chauvinism of the sort listed above. Joking, yes. Genuine hostility, no. It was interesting to note that, at the time of Kielty’s courting, a great deal of the social-media chatter was defending him against imagined objectors to someone with that accent taking over the Late Late. It was much harder to find anyone actually expressing such small-minded views. Did they really exist? Do Liam Neeson’s Antrim vowels inhibit his popularity in any way? Not that I can see.
A great deal of bigotry is still out there. Some of it racial. Some still to do with religion. A lot to do with class. But the stereotyping around compass points seems largely the stuff of comedy. Still, such stories won’t go away. The Late Late gossip recalls a legend about Michael Parkinson’s brief tenure on Desert Island Discs. The late broadcaster, proud to be from England’s most populous county, claimed that, after just his sixth show, the BBC bigwigs complained that “all the guests who had so far appeared ... had been born in Yorkshire”.
Bloody northerners!
