ANDREW FINLAY,
Sir, - The caption to Dan Keenan's article (Opinion, January 11th) about events in North Belfast reads: "Depressing truth is that intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence." An even more depressing truth is that since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 legislation and policy in Northern Ireland have fostered intolerance.
Martyn Turner's cartoon of January 5th graphically makes the connection between the most recent Anglo-Irish agreement and events on the streets of Belfast. The agreement reached at Easter 1998 recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose".
The recognition that identity is a matter of choice is full of promise, but this promise is undermined by the use of the word "birthright", and, in effect, the only choice that matters is to be British or Irish, unionist or nationalist. In the local assembly set-up under the agreement, the votes of those members or potential members who refuse this choice - liberals, socialists, feminists - do not count. Successive Anglo-Irish agreements have boosted those who define themselves in terms of ethnic or cultural identity, and, as Turner's cartoon suggests, this is sectarianism, or tribalism - the zero sum game - by another name.
Mr Keenan refers to the defeatist sensibility palpable among some Northern Protestants. He follows the conventional wisdom by implying that defeatism is the flip-side of a pathological, supremacist mentality, supposedly inherent to Protestant identity, that misinterprets sharing as losing. As is usually the case, the conventional wisdom masks vested interest and misrepresents reality.
As I argue in the most recent issue of the Global Review of Ethnopolitics (www.ethnopolitics.org), the roots of Northern Protestant defeatism are more complex than the conventional wisdom allows. Pathos and loss are central to the logic of identity politics. With this in mind, defeatism can be seen for what it is: less the expression of a pre-existing Northern Protestant cultural identity than a symptom of the fact that they never developed one (there was no Northern Protestant cultural revival or cultural nationalism) and that they are now trying to make up for lost time in a situation where, after successive Anglo-Irish agreements, identity politics are, sadly, the only game in town. - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW FINLAY,
Department of Sociology,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.