A fire was in my head
Numb in Northern Ireland
Three years ago, I took my girlfriend to Hebron to walk around the eerie ruins of the old city. It’s not a nice place. Wasteland of barbed wire and broken glass, into which the settlers have copy-pasted a few gaudy apartment buildings. She’d wanted to go to the Dead Sea and bob around in its famously tonic saline waters. I’d insisted on taking her to the heart of the occupied West Bank instead. I think it was, in the end, a piece of very classic Jewish male neuroticism. So you think you like me, do you? So you met my parents, and you like them too? But what about my extended family? What about this bearded freak, goat teeth, spittle-flecked lips, wearing a fur hat for a Polish winter as he totes his assault rifle around the ruins of a hostile city in the Middle East? What about these mobs of cross-eyed children pelting Palestinians with rocks? What about this society of religious maniacs, sacrificing their lives to the whims of a pedantic and sectarian God? Because that’s what you’re getting into when you decide to give it a go with this nice boy from North London. Some people expose themselves on public transport; I take the long way round. But I still need you to know what I am. I am a creature. I am an unclean thing.
Despite being a very English person, she also happens to have a second passport. Hers is Irish. That one comes with a lot less baggage. Everyone likes the Irish. The only armed Irishmen in the Middle East are the UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, and by all accounts the local Lebanese are utterly charmed by all the genial red-faced Patricks and Conors who’ve been posted to their villages. They keep inviting them into their houses and foisting huge plates of kubbeh and fattoush on them. Wrinkled old women in black hijabs kiss them on the cheek. Every Latin American country fondly remembers some charismatic wandering Irishman who came to fight in their independence struggle. All the formerly colonised peoples of the world feel a deep and abiding sympathy with the Irish, who suffered through it first, but who still came out of the experience as the nicest bunch of lads you’ll ever meet, unpretentious and good-natured and always down for the craic. You could wash up on North Sentinel Island and the locals would embrace you like a brother as soon as they saw the harp on that passport. Some people are easy to like, and some people are an acquired taste. I’m not jealous. I’m fine. These are simply the facts.
Anyway, a few months ago I was invited to go over to Ireland for some kind of big family get-together, celebrating the ninetieth birthday of some big family matriarch. I was excited. I’d never been to Ireland before. Which is strange, when you think about it. I have ridden steppe ponies across the plains of Inner Mongolia, I have meditated under the tree where the Buddha first attained enlightenment, I have seen the ruins of Aztec monuments made from human skulls plastered with lime, but I’d still managed to go thirty-five years without once setting foot on the next island over. And this was despite the fact that literally every single woman I’ve ever seriously dated here has been, at most, two generations removed from the Emerald Isle. It’s not like I go out looking for Irish people in particular, things just happened that way. It’s probably not that unusual; aren’t all the goyim in London at least a little bit Irish? The one thing that should have given me pause was the fact that my girlfriend had that Irish passport, even though I happened to know that according to her ancestry.com results she was mixed Scottish and English with a trace of the Iberian peninsula from the Mesolithic migrations but no actual Irish ancestry at all. But I hadn’t put two and two together. Not until I discovered that the big family get-together would be taking place in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and that one of their eminent common ancestors had been a famous Protestant preacher.
If you walk out of Belfast’s shiny modern Grand Central Station and go about a minute south, you’re greeted by an enormous mural of King William of Orange, celebrating his victory over Catholic forces in the Battle of the Boyne, more than three hundred years ago. That mural is a pretty recent development. It only went up in 2012, after years of careful and delicate negotiations with the local community. Before that, there was a different mural on the same site. It said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LOYALIST SANDY ROW—HEARTLAND OF SOUTH BELFAST—ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS. Next to the words was an image of a man in a black balaclava hoisting a Kalashnikov. Your people, I said to my girlfriend. Turns out we’re not so different after all.
Even among terrorist groups, some people are more sympathetic than others. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a nasty, ugly, sectarian slugfest on every side, but at least the IRA were fighting to liberate their homeland from foreign occupation. You might not agree with their methods, but the cause seems just. The Ulster Loyalists, meanwhile, are an entire people living on the wrong side of history. What were the Ulster Freedom Fighters even fighting for? Religious bigotry and not much else. The Republicans are in solidarity with liberation struggles around the world; the Loyalists fly Israeli flags out of sheer pettiness. Republicans have hopeful slogans like ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’ What’s the Loyalist equivalent? ‘Never! Never! Never! Never!’ The Loyalists don’t even have any good songs. Come Out Ye Black and Tans is an undeniable bop. Have you ever tried listening to Loyalist music? Hideous, plodding, tuneless crap. The music of a people who fundamentally do not enjoy life. They play the flute, not because they like it, but as an instrument of ethnic terror.
But I am a contrarian. I’m not going to try to convince you that the Loyalists are in the right. I’m just asking you to spare a thought, if you can, for the luckless, unloveable Prod.