I upset and perhaps offended some Catholic friends in my hometown of Newry recently when I wrote in CEIDE that Newry is a town in which Protestants no longer build or buy houses. Many have felt the chill factor so deeply that they have moved away from the town, and Newry has become, more than ever, a predominantly republican, Roman Catholic and nationalist town in which many Protestants feel they no longer matter. It's a microcosm of a larger problem.
A report to this week's General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland says: "The ideologies of Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism failed to provide everyone with a sense of belonging, while militant republicanism and militant loyalism visited untold damage on thousands of people."
The partitioning of Ireland resulted in the creation of two quasi-confessional states, each of them unsatisfactory. We pursued exclusive and excluding ideological systems and strategies which excluded rather than embraced. Neither ideology managed to enhance the quality of self-esteem or the sense of belonging of all parts of the community. The majorities in each place had inadequate consciousness of the problems of the minorities.
It is not that a majority intentionally discriminates against a minority. Minorities are often simply overlooked.
Those who are big do not know what they do to those who are small. Those who are powerful do not know what they do to those who are weak. Those who are rich do not know what they do to those who are poor. Those who are numerous do not know what they do to those who are in a minority.
Majorities tend to be insensitive to what a local minority may feel. The only way to find out what is happening is to go and ask, and then listen to what is being said. Majorities in any locality or town or in the country as a whole need to look out for minorities, asking how they are and how they feel and then being attentive to the answers given.
Sometimes majorities don't do this because they don't think of themselves as majorities. We can operate in unhelpful ways out of a sense of being a part of a minority and forget that in a different context we, with others, constitute a majority. Protestants are a minority in Newry, but when the issue is reframed, they simultaneously belong to a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland.
Nationalists of the Garvaghy Road are a minority in Portadown, but they belong simultaneously to the nationalist majority in Ireland. The Orangemen of Portadown are part of a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, but a minority in Ireland. To operate out of an obsessional, threatened minority complex does not lead to constructive engagement with the rest of the community.
Belfast was a largely Presbyterian city in 1798. It is not so any longer. It is increasingly a Catholic/nationalist/republican city. The trend whereby Presbyterians, as well as Anglicans and Methodists, no longer try to buy houses in many parts of Belfast is a tragic manifestation of demographic suicide, leaving schools and churches marooned. In the imagery of Isaiah, chapter 1, "The daughter of Zion is left like a cottage in a vineyard, like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers." These schools and church buildings speak of what once was but is no more.
While that is a description of loss from within the community of which I am currently a part, it has been a similar experience in many other sections of our society. The Jewish community in Belfast is now so small that it is no longer a self-sustaining community, as Jewish young people have left to find marriage partners in the larger Jewish communities in England.
The Catholic/nationalist/republican description of loss will include the loss of language, land, church buildings, belonging, security and power.
When a minority community suffers further decline, one of the consequences is that it is difficult to sustain church and community life. In my own hometown of Newry, just north of the Border, the Protestant population has fallen consistently over the last 30 years of violence.
My home Presbyterian congregation is half the size it was when I was growing up in the town. There were two viable "Protestant" primary schools in my schooldays. My old school is now closed. Where it was once possible to organise enthusiastic youth work with significant numbers of young people, this is now much more difficult, as the numbers are no longer there.
One Presbyterian friend said to me the other day in a mood of deep depression that in her town "we no longer matter". A community in decline can suffer acute depression when its community life ceases to be viable. These painful stories of decline need to be told and listened to by people outside the grieving group.
Maybe in the future there will be more space for minorities than has obtained in the past. Ireland is changing from two largely monolithic, exclusive and excluding homogeneous communities to a multiplicity of smaller communities. There is more freedom where there are many minorities, rather than in one where a minority faces a large homogeneous majority.
We need to affirm that everyone, regardless of ethnicity or race, is made in the image of God and therefore significant and valuable. The rights which people have are founded on the fact that they are made in the image of God, a reality of prior significance to religious affiliation, race, gender or political allegiance.
The opportunity may now exist for us to get beyond these exclusive and excluding ideologies of unionism and nationalism to arrangements which will provide us all with a sense of being accepted and honoured. Both parts of this island ought to be places where people from different backgrounds feel at home; where we provide each other with a sense of belonging; where no one feels like a stranger and where responsibilities and opportunities are shared.
The Rev Dr John Dunlop is minister of Rosemary Presbyterian Church in Belfast and a former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
