We are all bigots. It was Cardinal O Fiaich who pointed out that bigotry in Northern Ireland wasn't confined to Protestants. While they tended more towards religious bigotry, Catholics tended more towards political bigotry.
That, of course, is a relatively recent development. Forty years ago there wouldn't have been much to choose between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland when it came to either religious or political bigotry. But now that Irish Catholicism has become so secular, we have conveniently decided that bigotry is all about religion, not politics: we've awarded Protestants - and Orangemen in particular - the bigotry franchise.
The inconvenient truth is, however, that we are all bigots to a greater or lesser extent. The definition of a bigot is "one who holds, irrespective of reason, and attaches disproportionate weight to, some creed or view". A bigot's vision is clouded by prejudice. I would be surprised if there was anyone in Ireland who didn't have some irrational dislikes leading to an inability to think well of Kerrymen or Fine Gael or nuns or rugby players or vegetarians or informers or Jews or Romanians.
I will freely admit to having had a tough time trying to be fair about Muslims at the height of the Salman Rushdie business and to never having made much effort to overcome my instinctive antipathy to the Welsh. But I have successfully managed to overcome my bigotry about Ulster Protestants, who I grew up thinking of as dour, boring and, yes, bigoted. My life has been much enriched as a result.
I've often discussed bigotry with Ulster Protestants and I've never met one that insisted he was free of it. Almost all Ulster Catholics, however, even if they dislike Protestants intensely, will tell you bigotry is a uniquely Protestant condition. Every week the pages of An Phoblacht/ Republican News spew out hatred of Protestants but cloak it in impeccable non-sectarian rhetoric. Republicans do not hate Protestants, you understand, they hate the bigotry of Orange triumphalists. They do not hate David Trimble. They hate his bigotry.
Reactions to David Trimble are a fascinating test of nationalist bigotry. You might think that someone who has put his life and career on the line to do a deal, not just with nationalism but with republicanism, might be given some benefit of the doubt. You might think that it is a plus that he is content to share power with democratic nationalists and, like most unionists, has no quarrels with the equality provisions of the Belfast Agreement. But in fact Trimble seems to annoy our bigots far more than does Ian Paisley, who has for them the merit of justifying nationalist/Catholic prejudices. That Trimble is the best read and most cultivated party leader in these two islands, whose passion for European art and music is surpassed only by his profound interest in history, politics and philosophy, seems to be an additional affront. And that he wants to make his party welcoming to Catholics drives them mad.
Our more nationalist commentators excelled themselves in their reaction to the thoughtful speech Trimble made in Oslo. It was an honest attempt to explain the virtues and defects of his own tradition, the principles in which he believes and his hope for a future in which diversity will be respected and the two communities will work together in the common interest. I have been moved by his words about the "dark sludge of historical sectarianism" which both communities had to leave behind, since both had created it. "Each thought it had good reason to fear the other," he said. "As Namier says, the irrational is not necessarily unreasonable. Ulster unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And Northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down. None of us are entirely innocent."
So what was the effect on our greener commentators, those who in theory most want a united Ireland and who therefore logically should be trying most to understand and woo unionists. "What a sad little man David Trimble is," wrote Tom McGurk in the Sunday Business Post (aka the Sunday Bigots among unionist chattering classes). The speech containing "xenophobic energy" sounded like "prize day at Portadown tech". "This was proof," said the leader, which the editor, Damien Kiberd, either wrote or approved, "if proof was needed, that he is a dismal little politician, with little or nothing to contribute to the creation of a better future for the people of Ireland."
In Ireland on Sunday the column of Tim Pat Coogan (aka Tim Pat Count-the-Catholics Coogan because of his obsession with Catholic birth-rates) began: "If one appoints a horse a consul, I suppose one can't be surprised if the animal craps all over the hall. But I must say I was genuinely horrified at David Trimble's performance in Oslo." And he ended with: "to paraphrase Yeats, `a most Uncouth Beast has slunk back from Oslo to Belfast'. Its name is David Trimble."
There are unionist journalists who dislike and distrust John Hume. There are none who would write about him in such bigoted and abusive terms: the only unionist organs carrying rhetoric of this kind are rags like Paisley's Protestant Times. I have to assume that the reason allegedly serious commentators feel entitled to write like this is that they are still in the grip of the nationalist inferiority complex that Ireland has grown out of. Coogan and McGurk are victims defiantly shaking their fists at Trimble. They confuse the scholarship boy with the privileged inhabitants of the Big House or the Stormont governments of yesteryear.
In this newspaper Vincent Browne was less vulgar but just as angry. He complained that unlike Hume, Trimble had failed to carry out "acts of good authority" by dealing with the fanatics on his own side. Leaving aside that, unlike Hume, Trimble accepted the Good Friday Agreement against ferocious opposition from his own side, just consider, for example, what happened last July.
Despite the behind-the-scenes pleas of three governments, John Hume refused to ask the Garvaghy Road residents to make a gesture over Drumcree. In a joint act of good authority, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon went respectively to the Portadown Orangemen and the residents to beg for compromise. Mallon was barracked. When Trimble last tried to persuade the Portadown Orangemen to give up the Drumcree protest, his life was threatened by loyalist thugs.
Trimble has faced down Paisley, McCartney, Orange hardliners and loyalist extremists. That Browne can't see that says an awful lot about his own bigotry.