Anyone familiar with the story of language in Elizabethan Ireland can only feel impatience – if not despair – at the latter-day triumphalism of works like Melvyn Bragg’s best-selling The Adventure of English.
Postcolonial nationalism is a strange phenomenon. Brought up to despise everything British (as Jonathan Swift put it two centuries earlier, ‘burn everything English except their coal’), we were also imbued with a sneaking suspicion that British was somehow better.
Complexity needs a voice (this also applies to newer emigrant groups on both islands). Politics and autobiography, politics and culture, can drift too far apart. Gaps in the public discourse of the UK and the Irish Republic allow ethnic assertion to punch above its weight. And then there is poetry
Given a choice, most people prefer a decent life to national or ethnic purity. Given a choice, most people like to get on with their neighbours, to fit in with their communities, to carry on with the business of going to work and raising a family and hoping for the best.
I’ve never met either of my parents and I don’t know my father’s name. She was a Catholic from over the border he was a Protestant from Belfast and they chose to give me up for adoption in Manchester rather than face the respective wrath of their families.
In which we are introduced to excerpts from the transcript of a memorable programme on Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland in May 2011, presented by Joseph O'Connor, produced by Rachel Hooper, for BBC Radio 4.
Laoise, 13, Tarah, 15, and Fionnuala, 15, attend a youth media organisation called Headliners in Belfast. It is not easy for any young person to encapsulate what it means to be who they are but here their views hold a mirror to the rest of us.
One could argue that it has been the ordinary person who has actually best embraced the spirit of the Agreement. While hatred is taught, it can also be untaught.
The springtime honeymoon period is over, the cherry-blossom and confetti has blown away, and we are now living in the day-to-day reality of post-conflict Northern Ireland.
The British government has shamelessly covered its tracks in relation to abuse of its authority in Ireland, and continues to do so. It is time to talk about what happened to us all during those long, dark years of conflict and hatred, when we lived in the same houses, but in different worlds.
