I was consciously waiting to read the advertisement from the Referendum Commission setting out the reasons for voting No on the Belfast Agreement next Friday. I wanted to see whether it would mention feelings at all, whether it would refer to the past, and the sense of the past within us, and the difficulty of letting the past go. But of course the advertisement was about the objective facts, and was couched in terms of law.
We need such imaginary passionless realms in our governance. We'd never get anywhere if we went by feelings. Yet it is feelings that are threatening the progress of an agreement which is, on paper, a triumph of the passionless intelligence. Feelings about the past. I was sure from the moment it was arrived at that the Belfast Agreement would be endorsed by an overwhelming majority, North and South. I forgot that I'm a Southerner, limited by the South exactly to the extent that I understand it.
In the North, although I hear from Northerners themselves how sectarian a place Northern Ireland is, and how wounded its people are by the last quarter of a century of overt civil hostility on top of preceding centuries of covert hostility, I can't feel along with what I hear. I thought that Northerners must be sick and tired of their present situation.
I thought that the huge effort put into the detail of the agreement by brilliant civil servants, and the once-in-a-lifetime conjunction of energy and commitment on the parts of a British, an Irish and an American government, would be irresistibly attractive. I thought the agreement would be passed in the North. It won't be in the mood of relief and optimism I foolishly imagined. The past is too powerful.
Stay out of the decorated urban ghettos and the occupied landscape of south Armagh and anywhere in Northern Ireland you seem to be in a particularly sound and orderly part of the modern world. But I've been travelling all around it in the past week. And if to be modern involves being forward-looking, it isn't a modern place.
It is full of people who are not forward-looking, who do not, or cannot, wish to be unshackled from the past. On the contrary: they define themselves by where they come from. They know who they are by who they are not. They judge each other on the historical record, itself warped as it is shaped and bent to fit one perspective or the other.
I've been very lucky in getting to know a little, over the last half-year, some Northern Protestant people in ordinary occupations, outside the media. I should have realised that the desire for peace, which outsiders keep attributing to them, is not in reality a powerful motive. On the whole, their lives are peaceful, anyway. They have to consciously bring to mind their children and grandchildren to work up any enthusiasm for change.
The real momentum inside them carries them back: to standing by their own people, and holding out against the enemies of their people. They will not be heroes in the future envisaged for them by outsider peace-planners, but they can point to the places and times where they were heroic in the past.
We in the South have a past, too, which we will be repositioning next Friday. But what we will be doing gets short shrift from the few who even bother to mention it, north of the Border. Like so much else that we do, our proffering of Articles 2 and 3 is casually denigrated by all sides in Northern Ireland.
I've tried to bring it up in conversation. I've pointed out that we are abandoning the goal of finishing with Britain and of taking the island into a condition where the people who make their lives here might work out an entity called "Ireland", based on a genuine and radical pluralism. This goal has at least the distinction of being both old and persistently aspired to, which is all that can be said for many of the goals of unionism, too.
Yet no one thinks anything of our formally abjuring this goal. As far as unionists are concerned, we shouldn't have had any designs on them in the first place, and it is no thanks to us to give them up. Secondly, insulting as the territorial claim is, we are simultaneously so insincere and frivolous that we never really meant it. And thirdly, the future of Northern Ireland is none of our business anyway, and us having a referendum at the same time as they're having a referendum is a typical bit of pushy and self-important interference.
Nationalists are not quite as contemptuous. It has mattered a great deal to several Catholic people who spoke to me that Articles 2 and 3 formally expressed community with them. And perhaps the more common sneering at us is another way of expressing disappointment.
Certainly I've been told that our Yes vote is just further truckling to West Britain and further betrayal of what ideals we have left and further evidence of our sleeveen readiness to sell ourselves to practically anybody to get prosperity for ourselves.
"Of course, the South doesn't want the economic burden of the North anyway," the reporter from CNN said.
The Republic of Ireland is, however, itself. Within that self, the aspiration to a united Ireland has been a privileged ideal. Until the IRA came and dirtied it, it was an ideal still clothed in nobility by all the men and women who lived and died for it.
Try looking at the names scratched into the plaster of the walls of the cells in Kilmainham Gaol and laughing at it. Try reading the poems collected in An Duanaire and laughing at it. Try listening to Ian Paisley, without wishing that an all-island Ireland had been accomplished back at the Treaty.
The feelings governing Northern Ireland now might not have festered. Even still, if Britain had chosen the path of announcing a withdrawal, the commitment that goes into all the sectarianisms on the island might have been diverted into inventing co-existence.
In the real world I'll be voting Yes, of course. What other gesture have I ever had the opportunity to make towards a whole new start in Irish political life? But I'll be voting Yes with a pang. The pang will be worth it, probably. I want an escape from the demeaning and unintelligent repetitions on the island. What we're doing with our Constitution will help set up the escape.
It won't be the same Republic after we vote Yes on Friday. But that will be tolerable, because it won't be the same Ireland, either. So I think, anyway, Though I'm not sure in this extraordinary area, where every bit of the sense of oneself as "Irish" is involved, whether thoughts are feelings or feelings are thoughts.