Perception across the water of a grim wasteland hasn't gone away you know, writes DONALD CLARKE
EARLIER THIS week, Mike Nesbitt, a recently elected Ulster Unionist MLA, generated laughs in the Northern Irish Assembly with his comments on the Rihanna scandal. Adopting a wry smile, the former UTV news anchor wondered if the incident might have damaged Northern Ireland’s image overseas.
Well, it certainly is a hilarious story. The singer had arrived in Co Down (was Turkmenistan all booked up?) to film a video for her latest ditty. Some way into the shoot, one too many items of clothing was removed and Alan Graham, a farmer and DUP alderman, politely called a halt to proceedings. “From my point of view, it was my land, I have an ethos and I felt it was inappropriate,” he later said.
It should be reiterated that Nesbitt was making a funny. The joke is, however, a little more blackly amusing than he intended. Ponder that locale’s unhappy history for a moment. Peace may have broken out a decade and a half ago, but, for most of the world, Northern Ireland is still most commonly associated with bowler hats, political violence and sectarian discord. We have surely reached a happier place if al fresco censorship of Barbadian RB stars is now the most serious threat to the statelet’s international standing.
Is this writer alone in finding something faintly desperate in those commercials urging punters to holiday in Northern Ireland? It’s all golf and nice walks and Pringle jumpers and shopping for shelving units in Newry. The neurotically cosy advertisements suggest that a stay in the North offers all the fiery excitement you’d expect from an afternoon spent accompanying a decrepit maiden aunt to the gout clinic.
Fret not. There’s nothing to worry about here. Nobody will redirect a noisy parade through your campsite. Petrol bombs will not be thrown anywhere near your caravan. The country is – the commercials argue – every bit as safe and sedate as Chipping Norton in the late 1950s.
You can’t blame the tourism authorities for playing it safe. Northern Ireland has never had a particularly merry reputation among outsiders. The general attitude in England – even before the violence properly set in – held that this part of the neighbouring island was a grim wasteland populated by a quasi-Scottish class of drab misanthrope whose accent suggested a tractor reversing over a goose.
In the seventh volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to The Music of Time, among the greatest of English comic novels, Nick Jenkins, the protagonist, is reluctantly billeted in Northern Ireland during the second World War. He does not find the experience an unalloyed delight. "Everything looked mean and down at heel," Jenkins muses. "There was nothing to make one glad to have arrived in this country." The inhabitants turn out to be surly, unhelpful and humourless.
Jenkins’s view seems, however, relatively positive when set beside the most famous English soundbite on Britain’s most troublesome colony. In the early 1970s, shortly after being appointed home secretary, Reginald Maudling – later victim of a thumping by the then Bernadette Devlin – made his first trip to the plantation. Following robust conversations with the area’s notoriously fractious politicians, the thirsty MP climbed on the plane and issued a patrician sigh. “For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country,” he groaned.
The irony hardly needs to be stated. Throughout the previous half-century nationalists had peddled the myth that British politicians were eagerly holding on to a much-prized piece of verdant real estate. Yes, there were a few English statesmen – Enoch Powell for one – who had a particular affection for the place.
But, when considering Northern Ireland, the prime feelings among the British have been indifference and hostility. The warm tones of Eamonn Holmes make the mornings a little easier to bear. The mystic ditties of Van Morrison continue to find welcoming ears. George Best was a pretty decent footballer. Yet none of these personalities has managed to convince the English that Ulster is any more interesting than Gibraltar. When John Major’s administration stated that Britain had “no strategic interest” in Northern Ireland, it required no great stretch to imagine the grey man reaching for a metaphorical whiskey and praying for as hasty a withdrawal as those pesky loyalists would allow.
It’s all most unfair. Few British citizens are as patriotic as the typical Ulster Unionist. Men from that country have shown a disproportionate eagerness to lose limbs and lives in the mother country’s foreign wars. Northern Irish folk are no grumpier than the Welsh and no more ungrateful than the Scottish.
The Rihanna incident did not enhance the statelet’s standing overseas. Sadly, as we’ve seen, there wasn’t really much of a reputation to damage. Give the Northerners a break.