Leader: Well Done, David
Fortnight June 2000
In her book, McKay makes the point that many protestants are in a state of denial about aspects of the state in particular which are inherently wrong to nationalists, liberals and outsiders, even those well disposed to the Union. The gulf in perceptions about the RUC was well summarised by O'Leary and McGarry, in their recent polemic. Catholics, on the whole, see the RUC as a sectarian force that needs to be reformed. Protestants, they argue, see the police as having reformed itself, or as being over-reformed by the English interventions of Hunt, Scarman, Stalker, Samson et al. Patten, it is felt, was duped by cunning Shinners into believing that the core of the force was rotten, and that sectarianism was institutionalised, not least by its name and symbols. Thus the argument about the inclusive nature of the badge. The mythology of The Crowned Harp is comprehensively punctured in a new book of that name by Graham Ellison and Jim Smyth, but the broader point is that unionism's sense of its own values as universal common sense remains unbroken.
It is not even questioned, at least not safely. McKay, herself a Waterside protestant, is a salutary reminder of what happens to the occasional questioner. Both book and author have been vilified by the very people reflected in the mirror of her writing. The same happened to Norman Porter, who dared to try Rethinking Unionism, and was elbowed out of the UUP for his efforts. Porter has recently moved back to Australia, where he first went as an exile from the desperate gloom of the 'troubles'. He is in exile again due to his temperament, rather than a fiercely held conviction. Emotionally and intellectually unionist, he has given up kicking against the pricks (for the time being, hopefully).
Porter has fallen foul of a mentality scorned by another protesting protestant,
Tom Paulin, another dissenter who dissented, but does his dissenting with
the rest of the brain drain that has sapped the intellectual culture of
unionism. "The root of it all is Calvinism," he told McKay. "The sense of being persecuted and a member of an elect minority, feeding its persecution complex. It takes everything to the limit. When it's crumbling, it has a change of heart." |
