A Note about Northern Ireland

The environmental degradation of the six counties of Northern Ireland is probably even worse than in the rest of Ireland. But Northern Ireland's notoriety does not derive from the contempt its people have for Nature, the landscape and environment, but from the evident distrust its people have for each other. The local enunciation of the statelet as Norn Iron (with pronounced R s) nicely conveys the clenched teeth of its inhabitants.

The people may not really be worse than others in the world, not worse than the characters in Balzac, Zola, Céline or Genet, but their off-handedness, their utter lack of courtesy, charm and sense of ceremony removes any possibility of gaiety.

This distrust is not just a matter of religion. Almost all Northern Irish people distrust almost all other Northern Irish people. They hate excellence in others, and fear any kind of originality. To "put your head above the parapet" is to invite envy, ostracism or worse. You will rarely hear one Northern Irish person praise or admire another one - unless there's a sting in the tail. Thus all creative people leave Northern Ireland with the non-stop hæmorrhage of sensibility and talent which has continued since 1919 at least.

Those who are left must conform to the uneasy blandness born of a kind of low-level autism which attracts the least local attention. Everything in Northern Ireland is, of course, low-level, from violence to Radio Ulster.

It can be dangerous to employ constructive criticism in any Northern Irish situation - because every little critical observation becomes a casus belli for this drab and charmless, combative - yet also bizarrely smug - population, or at least an opportunity for grievance and sulk.

The endemic mutual distrust means also that Northern Irish people touch each other even less than the English. They do not shake hands, except, awkwardly, at the first meeting with a stranger. The visitor may notice the little semi-autistic concentration-camps of Don't-Touch-Me territory that Northern Irish people carry round with them. This requires a great effort - as do the inculcated truculence and resentment that are so near the surface of most of the population. Thus they haven't the energy to look outwards to the wide world from which they have isolated themselves, but are constantly, simmeringly looking inward all the time, obsessed with money and goods and the most vulgar definition of success. For them, success can really only be a function of conformity within the bleak little sub-cultural bubble that is north-eastern Ireland.

Like all Irish people, they are very good at complaining about their predicament and in making sure that it is trumpeted abroad. Thus a very low-level, low-intensity communal conflict which has claimed fewer than 4,000 lives since 1968 continually grabs world headlines, while in other, more pleasant parts of the world, millions die without any comment. Two million people died, almost unreported, in Congo-Zaïre in the year 2000, while appalling civil wars have been raging in both Colombia and Sudan for the past 30 years. One of the most vicious European wars - that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims - is going on in Chechenya, while in Afghanistan a whole huge country is living under a reign of terror. Gypsies are being hounded in many countries of Europe, while the US-financed Turkish genocide of Kurds has gone on unreported since 1947. It is a crime in Turkey to speak Kurdish or play Kurdish music. But European newspapers continue to report ad nauseam the very minor 'conflict' in Northern Ireland - where I have managed to live for the past 20 years without ever locking my house.

What Northern Ireland sorely needs, of course, is an input from exotic immigrants to its anti-convivial society. Britain became a less stifling place to live as a result of post-war immigration not just from the Indian sub-continent and West Indies, but from Greece and Cyprus, Spain and Portugal, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. None of these groups ever percolated to Northern Ireland - where my black-bearded partner has had Dirty Jew! shouted at him.

When I went to Albania in 1994, 'the poorest country in Europe', with ethnic divisions and virtually no modern 'infrastructure', I thought it compared very favourably with Northern Ireland. The food was edible, for a start (okra, beans, tomatoes, peppers). Almost every family distilled its own raki , from grapes or plums, some of it of a quality that any French maker of alcool blanc would envy. People were very friendly and curious. I was enthusiastically directed or taken to places that interested me. I could get by very well with a mixture of Italian, German and French as well as English and a few words of Albanian - aided by Albanian curiosity and desire to help a stranger.

God help the Balkan tourist who comes to monoglot (and sometimes incomprehensible) Northern Ireland, whose only other language is an unprettily-pronounced and politically-learned version of Irish. There have been reliable reports of 'exotic' tourists being jeered at in Derry and Belfast. Goodwill is almost unknown here, as indeed is good faith.

It seems that lmost nobody does anything in Northern Ireland for love. It is a loveless statelet obsessed by rules and rights and procedures - and, of course, violent protest against the rules and procedures. Obsessed, too, by money - which seems to be the only reason (apart from anger) why anyone does anything. Third-rate paintings here are twice as expensive as third-rate paintings in the USA. Art is business, never originality. Everything is quantity, never quality.

The lack of artistic awareness is as striking as Northern Ireland's anti-intellectualism and lack of self-awareness. People here simply do not know how ignorant of the world they are, how culturally backward compared with the average Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian or Kurdish villager. The endemic truculence breeds arrogance - and compassionate understanding of anything is rare.

Few Celtic attitudes survived the onslaught of Christianity: reverence for trees, landscape, water, and dogs disappeared in Ireland long ago. Now the Irish as a whole are in the heartless forefront of the anglophone sub-culture of consumerist alienation that is so aggressively taking over the world. Whereas in large parts of France actual love of the landscape and desire to cherish it are almost palpable, one feels in Ireland that the land and landscape are regarded as enemies to be subdued - or, like one's neighbours, to be bested.

Because of the mutual distrust and miasma of animus there are no such facilities in Northern Ireland as the Village Halls found in much of Europe. The bars (very few could be called pubs) merely cater to the alcohol problem that is common to all Northern European and Celtic Fringe cultures. There are, of course, no European café-bars or plazas where people can freely socialise. Streets are just places to dump litter and escape from. So there is no way for people to meet outside religion or minority-interests such as birdwatching or philately. Friendship itself is a very narrow experience here, because there are so many no-go topics, and abrasiveness (which Northern Irish people call 'being down-to-earth') is the main social glue. Friendship is generally a matter of usefulness, a kind of tool. Violence lurks in the ubiquitous sarcasm and cutting remarks that rarely-praised children are subject to.

Here in Northern Ireland I am have been rendered ineluctably an Outsider, almost an Untouchable. A non-heterosexual wine-drinking, vegetarian philosopher-poet necessarily living in rural seclusion as a hermit, I have few friends - not least because there are so few people here who are not depressing. On the other hand, I, shunned Outsider, have never in 30 years locked my house, and rarely lock my car.

Ulster people often combine the bloody-mindedness of the English and the mean-mindedness of the Scots with the whining intemperance of the Irish. Joie-de-vivre , communality, public spirit, sense of fun and public enjoyment, private encouragement and expression of affection are as rare as hens' teeth. But I am a witness, as I believe it is important to be. A witness to the oozing brain-disease that is called Normality. And, in this short essay, a witness to the petty squalor of Northern Ireland, where minds and palates are like the farms - littered with old junk, fertiliser-bags, rubbish-tips, neglected or tortured dogs, over-grazed fields, cattle-squelched quagmires, and bleak stretches of concrete. The litter spills over into the Republic, for the charming people of South Armagh drive across the border to dump their rubbish.

The social situation of Northern Ireland is neatly encapsulated by the (September-2001) attempts (even as far as bomb-throwing) by Protestants in a ghetto to prevent Catholic children walking through the area to their self-segregated school. (Most schools in Northern Ireland are segregated according to religious background.) It was such a simple and basic matter which started the Unrest Industry in 1968 when peaceful supporters of Civil Rights for Catholics were ambushed with the encouraging connivance of the police on a walk from Belfast to Derry. In 2001 the Catholic children were protected by a living wall of police and British soldiers.

As for the Republic: lest you imagine that it is really more cosmopolitan and less parochial than the North, let me say that two trained female archæologists refused to review the CD-ROM of this site for the prestigious Dublin-based journal Archæology Ireland - on grounds of phallic obscenity! And almost the whole East coast of the Republic is as squalid with litter as the eastern counties of Northern Ireland.

Perhaps the only good non-anthropological reason to visit Ireland is to experience the wealth of splendid megaliths often in denuded, but dramatic - or degraded, but silent - landscapes.

July 2002