Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

The Rise of Northern Stars

There was an interesting editorial in a Mayo newspaper last week which was, regrettably, a bit of a cheap throw-back to the type of anti-Northern prejudice once prevalent at the height of the Troubles.

"Accepting that it is never safe to generalise on any issue, how many of our readers," preached the editorial, "have noted the rudeness of some - and we stress 'some' - of our visitors from the Six Counties?…

"It does not give us any particular satisfaction to report that three cases of oafish northern behaviour has been brought to our attention in recent weeks, coinciding with the welcome influx of visitors from the North."

It then goes on to quote the outrages: a northern-registered car pulled up in the Main Street of Enniscrone and caused a traffic jam; four northern visitors took the table in a restaurant and refused to move when a local man, who had gone to place his order, returned; and an elderly northern man dropped litter in the street, despite there being a litter bin nearby.

Well, now, we've had it just about up-to-here: bring back internment!

Despite the qualification that it is never safe to generalise, the last paragraph of the silly editorial does just that: "Are all these instances symptomatic of the disregard for authority or a breakdown in civilised behaviour in the Six Counties?"

There is no doubt that partition as well as creating a physical border threw up psychological divides as well, which widened over time. Northerners developed along different cultural and political lines to people in the South. Certainly in Belfast few nationalists could receive RTE television, which mean reliance on the pro-union BBC and UTV. At the same time we grew up to 'Coronation Street' and to The Beatles. In that sense, we are hybrids, though we desperately clung to our sense of Irishness and our dream of being free of injustice, discrimination and sectarian dominance.

Official celebrations in the South in 1966 of the golden jubilee of the Easter Rising led to an upsurge in nationalist and republican sentiment. Whilst much of it was sheer pageantry, layered with a romanticised view of a new, safe construction called 'the old IRA', it did create a public receptiveness to the plight of the nationalist community, two years later when the Civil Rights Movement was attacked by the RUC and then, in 1969, when nationalists were burnt out of their homes.

Refugees went South. Money, arms and volunteers came North. The public mood remained sympathetic throughout the curfew, internment and Bloody Sunday: in fact, for a long time even after those who consist the establishment resented the way the North impinged on the politics and stability of the South. The intensified IRA bombing campaign and IRA activity in the twenty-six counties also played a major part in disillusioning the southern audience. But the role of British intelligence in manipulating anti-republican sentiment has yet to fully emerge. There was certainly penetration of the Garda Siochana at senior levels. Bank robberies and the Dublin bombings of 1972 - for which the IRA was wrongly blamed - played their part in influencing the passage of the Offences Against the State Act, followed by the implementation of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.

The latter censorship deprived the electorate of vital information were it to reach a fair and reasoned view and distorted the situation to such an extent that the British army, the RUC and the unionist community were presented (and, thus, perceived) as the victims, and republicans as the principal aggressors. When Owen Carron (a member of Sinn Fein but running as an anti-H-Block candidate) was elected MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone in 1981, succeeding the late Bobby Sands, RTE treated its audience only to the views of the loser, Ken Maginnis of the Ulster Unionist Party.

This benign presentation of unionism was mirrored in the likes of the 'Irish Times' and other newspapers which gave three- and four-page spreads to sympathetic coverage of Orange parades, with little reference to the smouldering resentment of entire nationalist communities under curfew in their homes throughout the 'Glorious' Twelfth. Yet another small example of the partisan way RTE affected public perception was when DUP Councillor Rhonda Paisley was made the guest presenter of 'Saturday Live', at a time when Rhonda was better known for her contribution to free speech by using a toy trumpet to drown out Sinn Fein Councillor Alex Maskey every time he got up to address Belfast Council.

But nationalists and republicans persevered against the way they were either ignored or, when attended to, demonised throughout those black periods when a British secretary of state could casually refer to them as 'the terrorist community'. Yes, it has been a long, slow, and truly remarkable turnaround from then to now when in a recent opinion poll the President of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, received the highest satisfaction rating for any party leader in the South.

Finally, I must refer to the violence which broke out at Keel in County Mayo last weekend. The action resulted in the arrest of 30 people for drunkenness and unruly behaviour. At one stage, bottles and stones were hurled at gardai, who were forced to call in reinforcements. Most of those arrested were male and from the general Mayo area!

"Accepting that it is never safe to generalise on any issue, how many of our readers…etc., etc…"

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