AS THE Iris Robinson affair unfolded in the media, not for the first time it struck me that Rabbie Burns got it only half right, writes DAVID ADAMS
The power to see ourselves as others see us would undoubtedly save a lot of bother all around, but there is another side to it. It is equally regrettable that some people are unable or unwilling to see others as they actually are, and not simply as they want or imagine them to be.
The travails of Iris represented to many media pundits an ideal opportunity to cast a critical eye over the Northern Protestant population. Nothing wrong with that, of course, if insight was genuinely the purpose. For some though, it clearly wasn’t. Robinson merely provided the excuse to dust down lazy old stereotypes or personal prejudices, to be masqueraded as insightful commentary.
Frankly, I have hardly recognised my own community from the pen portraits drawn by some supposedly well-informed Northern media types over the past couple of weeks (Southern journalists tend to be far more balanced in their reporting of Northern Protestants).
A few did make pretence at research, but the method employed was hardly likely to unearth anything contrary to their expectations. It usually involved a chat with two or three fundamentalist types – ideally following a fire-and-brimstone service at a cultish church – to record their views on adultery, homosexuality and fraud. Followed by a commentary piece constructed to infer that, give or take a blind prejudice or two, such people are largely representative of all Northern Protestants.
Using the same method, anyone able to string together a few legible paragraphs could quite easily paint every Muslim in Britain and Ireland as a potential security risk, or every Irish Catholic as a backward worshipper of tree stumps and apparitions.
For a couple of decades now, only a small minority of those who support Robinson’s DUP have been Bible-thumping killjoys who judge the world by Old Testament standards. This is becoming progressively more the case since that party, like Sinn Féin before it, had to moderate to broaden its appeal (which in itself should have signalled something to a discerning observer). No one with the slightest insight could possibly believe that the Amish-like time warp of a few DUP supporters is even close to representative of Ulster Protestants as a whole.
I read the other day that the Ulster-Scots have a “surprisingly radical history”. This could only be surprising to someone who hasn’t the faintest notion of Irish history and the central role that Northern Presbyterians played in the formation of the United Irishmen and the ill-fated rising of 1798. The writer clearly believed the Scots-Irish to be a people incapable of radicalism, or of much else for that matter, going by another ill-informed declaration from the same source last year.
Then we were told that the unionist (code for Protestant) working class are deeply suspicious of anyone within their midst who shows a flair for the arts. In truth, the Northern Protestant working class – like their counterparts in every other part of the world, I suspect – are embarrassingly proud of any of their number who achieves a measure of success in whatever field. If you know anything about these people then you surely know this.
Ignorance is one thing, prejudice is quite another.
Some commentators are determined to project Northern Protestants as well nigh bereft of any redeeming feature, presumably because it fits with their own political or religious bias.
Again quite recently, I read a claim that unionists have little in the way of a sense of community. A substantial part of the supposed supporting evidence was a sharp decline in numbers over the past few decades of people living on or around the Shankill Road in Belfast. This was more than just a woefully daft premise.
A redevelopment scheme during the late 1960s and 1970s reduced housing capacity in the greater Shankill by about two-thirds. The writer has been around long enough to know this, so one has to wonder about motive as much as powers of reasoning.
It will shock some and disappoint others to learn that the Protestant community in Northern Ireland does not consist of the guilt-ridden, self-loathing, fun-hating philistines of popular mythology. It is much like any other, with similar faults, roughly the same dispersal of exceptional talent scattered across it, and the same humdrum interests, hopes and fears. Indeed, it is not one community at all, but several.
In many respects, the working class Protestant is as foreign to his middle-class co-religionist as he is to his opposite number on the other side of the political and religious fence. Indeed, alive to the zeitgeist, and the chance to make a healthy living off it, a few of the middle-class variety have taken to a relentless criticism of all things unionist. Perhaps they are displaying the entrepreneurial instinct for which Protestants were once famed – or maybe they are just pragmatists, in the absolute sense.