CONNECT/Eddie Holt: 'If you take away the Catholicism and anti-Britishness, the \ State doesn't have a reason to exist," David Trimble told the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times last week. There's respect, eh? Presuming he believes this bigotry, it's clear that Trimble just doesn't get it. Still, while dissing "Irishness", his remark illuminates his idea of "Britishness".
Despite its history of English domination, exploitation and theft of land, the Republic of Ireland is not rampantly anti-British. Certainly, at times of tension - internment, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, for instance - anti-British feeling can flourish. Likewise, an anti-Irish feeling naturally flourishes in Britain when IRA bombs murder innocents in London, Birmingham or Guildford.
There are, it's true, durable pockets of rabid anti-Britishness in Ireland and rabid anti-Irishness in Britain, but such extremist sentiments are not defining and both are in decline. It's possible, of course, to be excessively thin-skinned about remarks such as Trimble's. However, his refusal to admit defining differences between Ireland and Britain is, quite simply, ignorant and insulting.
At the core of the difference is the fundamental reality that this State is a republic and Britain is a monarchy. That alone, even leaving aside the bitter history - whether exaggerated or downplayed - is sufficient reason for the Irish state to exist. David Trimble may indeed be proud to be a subject of Elizabeth Windsor but the overwhelming majority of people here are happier to be citizens.
Indeed, a significant and growing proportion of British people would rather be citizens than mere subjects of a, by definition, anti-democratic monarch. Even they, though they may be fervently patriotic, have come to realise that the mediaeval fairytale is not only absurd but contemptuous of ordinary people. For many - Irish and British alike - the notion of royalty is just an ancient, worn-out, anti-democratic con trick.
In Trimble-world, it's surely anti-British to say as much. In the sane world, however, it's not. It's merely anti-monarchy. After all, even people born in Britain (the North is part of the United Kingdom not of Britain) are saying it. Are such British people anti-British - crippled by self-loathing and craving a new identity? No - they're fully British and proud of the fact. They just want to be treated as adults.
So, you could take away the Catholicism (indeed, the Catholic Church is clearly doing its utmost in that regard) and the "anti-Britishness", which is not defining and is declining anyway and still this State would have an irrefutable reason to exist. It, like the US, Russia, China, France and Germany, for instance - serious and powerful countries - is a republic.
Sure, this Republic is far from perfect. It has its own self-perpetuating elites infesting certain schools, businesses and professions, strokers enriching themselves by abusing politics, and many other scandals. But at least the principle, if not the practice, of a meritocracy is established. With the "royal" codology, on the other hand, even the principle is anti-meritocratic. That, after all, is its defining purpose.
Few of us (though there are notable exceptions) in this State-with-only-two-reasons-to-exist want to go bowing, curtsying and scraping the ground in front of the cossetted matriarch of a spoiled family even more dysfunctional than our own. We may, to David Trimble, be the "mere Irish", but most of us have renounced abject toadying to foreign royals.
Yet Trimble either refuses or is unable to see why. While people here will grant him the freedom to bow, curtsy, genuflect, kneel, kowtow, nod, scrape, prostrate himself, speak only when he's spoken to, walk backwards, dress up in panto gear and even change his name when he retires (as John Taylor has become "Lord Kilclooney"!), his dismissal of our State suggests he does not see us as equals. In a sense, of course, he's right - we're citizens and he's merely a subject.
More than 90 years ago, another prominent Protestant Irishman contributed to a Chicago newspaper. Writing about bringing English actors to Dublin when, on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish ones couldn't be found, William Butler Yeats told readers of the Chicago Sunday Record-Herald in February 1912, that "English actors lacked the proper feeling for the Irish spirit".
At that time, there wasn't even a separate Irish state. Yeats, however, clearly felt there was a separate Irish spirit and one which, unlike the British monarchy, was truly ancient. He also saw this Irish spirit shaped by more than Catholicism and anti-Britishness. These, though they were undeniable, were just by-products of history.
Anyway, the Trimble perspective is revealing. His remarks might be expected to incite counter questions about the legitimacy of the North and the concept of "Britain" - but what's the point? However, as leader of a Unionist party that's a rump of the Tories, he might, given the Tory record on multi-culturalism, go easy on labelling the Republic "mono-ethnic" and "mono-cultural".
Multi-cultural unionism is not, after all, thoroughly developed. The Orange Order, for instance, of which David Trimble is a member, seems thin on female Asian recruits. In Britain itself, the insistence that the monarch must be a Protestant from a certain family - a reserving of the top job - appears rather mono-ethnic and mono-cultural too.
It's strange how the Trimble world-view appears not to notice such glaring bias. Perhaps he makes his objectionable remarks just for effect - to play to unionists and to insult the rest of the people of Ireland. Then again, perhaps not.
But if he really believes the guff he spun in Chicago, he must be an alarmingly narrow-minded and ignorant man. If you took away his Protestantism and anti-Irishness, what reason would he find to exist? It's sad to think that, among unionists, he's supposed to be well-informed.