EVERYTHING a president says when he’s in another country is scripted. Even the ‘casual’ events are scripted. He’ll never get a curve ball from an invited audience or be asked a question that is likely to embarrass him or his hosts.
He trots out answers that have been prepared for him—often months in advance of the visit. Indeed, what Obama said last week about a Northern Ireland ‘identity’ and integrated education was much the same as the blah blah, yada yada, keep-on-smiling platitude he showered across the hand picked, carefully vetted school audience at the Waterfront Hall back in June 2013.
The flag matters in the United States. It is treated with respect. It is their flag and recognised by all Americans as their flag. When the opening bars of the Star-Spangled Banner are played Americans rise to their feet and place their hand on their hearts. They know and love their flag and their national anthem. They know and love their country. Whether they’re republican, democrat, white, black, straight, gay, rich or poor they are, first and foremost, American. They know their identity.
That’s not the case here. Play the national anthem or raise a flag and you’ll have an ‘incident’ on your hands. Ask people to name their identity or where they live and you’ll get British, Irish, Northern Ireland, the North, the Six Counties, Ulster, the Province, Occupied Ireland or even, ‘our wee country.’ Ask them to state their constitutional preference and, in the vast majority of cases, you’ll be told a united Ireland or the United Kingdom.
So President Obama must have known he was talking nonsense when he said: “It is about forging a new identity that is about being from Northern Ireland as opposed to being unionist or Sinn Féin.” And he must have known it was nonsense because he knows that unionists and nationalists are not going to suspend their belief in unionism or republicanism; and, as well he knows, our political institutions are built upon a clear recognition and accommodation of those mutually contradictory positions.
Ironically, the person who asked him the question about Northern Ireland is a member of the SDLP. Her party leader said on Tuesday: “We will set up a new Northern Ireland Commission and make Northern Ireland work so when we have a referendum on Irish unity we can win.” In other words the idea of a specific, collective Northern Ireland is a non-starter from the SDLP’s point of view. And it is also a non-starter from Sinn Féin’s point of view, because they cannot even bring themselves to use the term Northern Ireland. The blunt reality is that it is not in the long-term political/electoral interests of either Sinn Féin or the SDLP to encourage a Northern Ireland identity because neither of those parties wants Northern Ireland to survive as either a country or an identity.
Obama knows all of this, so why did he say it? He said it because it was anodyne and easy on the ear for a complacent, compliant audience, the sort of audience who wouldn’t come back at him with a follow-up question. His answer said nothing critical about unionism or republicanism. It was the classic ‘say something soft and non-controversial’ answer you would expect from a president who was performing entirely for the optics. The sort of answer you give when you know that the vast majority of the audience isn’t from Northern Ireland and don’t give a damn about Northern Ireland.
His line—or what was interpreted by some as his line—about integrated education was just as anodyne: “If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs—if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.” Fair enough, it may be harder to murder or firebomb or break the windows of someone you’ve been to school with, but it doesn’t mean that there will be a meeting of minds on social/political identity. He only needs to look at his own country to see that the anti-segregation legislation of the mid-1960s is still a huge bone of contention in many, many areas.
I can understand the attraction, particularly to the young, of a Northern Ireland identity. But I would caution them about falling into the trap of believing that it represents some sort of solution. It won’t end political division. It won’t resolve the issue of national/constitutional identity. It won’t end us-and-them politics or see unionist/republican parties disappear. It won’t create a genuine alternative to what we have now.
Because, if it were capable of doing any of those things, then you can bet your bottom dollar that Obama wouldn’t have said a word about it. It was feelgood, join-the-dots nonsense from a president who has much bigger fish to fry in the real world: a world where solutions are actually possible.
