by Padraig O’Malley, John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation
This is the transcript of an invited lecture at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, held at the Bank of Ireland House of Lords Chamber, College Green, Dublin.
Majorities in both communities in Northern Ireland agree that life is better than 20 years ago. Overall some 71 percent think so, Catholics more so than Protestants.
My talk, however, will not run through a slew of metrics to try to measure the agreement’s social, economic and political impacts, both positive and negative. It will address some of the more collateral psychological impacts the conflict left that should lead one to the conclusion that Northern Ireland (NI) is one sick society and the underpinnings of the trauma that still envelops it are neither fully understood nor sufficiently treated.
Suffice to say that in the absence of dealing with the legacy of the past, NI will always remain a society in recovery, trapped in a vice-like grip between the permanency that comes with a full transition to normalcy and a permanency that stalls all efforts to progress.
The current imbroglio, the impasse since May over a small number of issues, that should have been resolved months ago, the haggling that precludes the resumption of the provisions under the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and the St. Andrews agreement for a power sharing devolved government is a symptom of the partition of minds, as pervasive now, as it was 20 years ago, of an underlying divisiveness that has not yet been addressed, of a certain convenient dishonesty — and undoubtedly on the Unionist side, the subconscious fear of losing its status as Northern Ireland’s largest political party with all the prerequisites that come with the office and status of First Minister – an arrangement of majoritarianism that was the hallmark of the Northern Ireland statelet established in 1920.
NI will never develop the cohesiveness to integrate the disparate parts of its asymmetrical narratives of history, bridge the socio/economic faultiness or agree to a common accepted polity without an acknowledgement on all sides that post-conflict trauma is of epidemic proportions with negative impacts on political discourse as well as being the wellspring of debilitating mental health problems, for which NI does not have the resources to adequately address.
I will address four elements of the era that are interrelated but not in an obvious way:
- The fallacy of a united Ireland
- Changing identities
- Trauma and mental health
- The crisis of Protestant existentialism
As regards the prospects of a united Ireland any time soon: the short answer is that there are none and that those who are advocating for a border poll are encouraging behaviors that can only stimulate the divisions that are still abundant and raw, and give an ugly voice to the residual grievances that people on both sides of the divide still nurture.
However, I will address these items in reverse, starting with mental health, which will be followed by the crisis of Protestantism.
A report published by World Mental Health in 2012 shows Northern Ireland as having the highest recorded rate of post-traumatic stress disorder when compared with 28 conflict-ridden countries across the world, including war-torn territories such as Lebanon and Israel.
NI is enveloped in a mental time warp. Not only are accounts of the conflict handed down from one generation to the next, but traumas associated with the conflict distort the attributes of the narrative as they are transmitted in the same way, a phenomenon known as “intergenerational transmission of trauma.”
According to the BBC in 2014, one in five people from Northern Ireland showed signs of possible mental health problems, whilst the numbers of middle-aged people dying by suicide was particularly high.
In 2016, 80 percent of students in Northern Ireland experienced mental health anxieties.
During the conflict between 1969 and 1998, it is estimated that around 3,600 people were killed during the conflict. Since the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) went into effect over 4,000 people have committed suicide, three quarters of them male. In 2016 alone there was a spike in the number, up 19 percent from 2015.
The 3,600 killed in the conflict approximates that 1 in every 200 households suffered a fatal loss. Adding the number of families where a member committed suicide and assuming the two are exclusive, the estimate is that 1 in every 100 households experienced a death either due to war or suicide.
There were also a recorded 107,000 non-fatal casualties, which translates approximately into 1 in every 6/7 households with a family member injured due to conflict.
In these tight territorial enclaves, neighbor knows neighbor; for every casualty there is at least one close relative who is grievously affected; families are close knit; a murder of one leaves a stain on all.
It has been estimated that 39 percent of Northern Ireland’s population suffered a traumatic event related to conflict.
In the 32 years from 1965 (four years before the Troubles began) to 1997, 3,983 deaths by suicide were recorded. In the 16 years after the 1998 peace agreement, through the end of 2014, 3,090 people died by suicide—roughly the same number over half the amount of time.
Northern Ireland used to have the lowest rate of suicide in the UK; since 2012 it has had the highest. Suicides in the most deprived area were three times higher than in the most affluent.
My own work in tangential fields leads me to venture that the sense of social cohesion that conflict ensures, was far tighter during the conflict era. The University of Ulster alludes to research showing ‘the Troubles’ may be a key factor in rising suicide rates. For example, children caught up in difficult or violent situations, it postulates, may be less ‘psychologically resilient’ in later life. This risk factor has not been addressed in current suicide prevention strategies.
In a paper published in 2013, Michael Tomlinson wrote: “Since 1998 the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has almost doubled, following a decade during which the rate declined from a low level of 10 per 100,000 of the population to 8.6.”
A situation such as this is without parallel in a western country and research that will probe the attitudes and beliefs that leads one to take one’s life has to be understood in both a social context and a political one.
In global terms, this places Northern Ireland in the top tier of the international table of suicide rates.
The small body of research that has been conducted identifies adults whose childhoods had coincided with the worst period of Troubles-related violence (from 1970 to 1977) as the age group most susceptible to suicide in the decade after 1998.
In other words, the cohort of children and young people who experienced the worst of the violence in the 1970s has the highest and most rapidly increasing suicide rates in the decade after 1998.
Research conducted by Siobhan O Neill at the University of Ulster has established that there is a direct link between suicidal behavior and having experienced a traumatic event, including those related to conflict.
What could account for the death of young people who’d never experienced war?
We don’t know, but one route of inquiry leads to the role of biology.
We usually think of PTSD as a psychological disorder.
Recent studies, however, suggest that traumatic events may change people on a molecular level, and it could be these molecular changes that lead to the symptoms of PTSD.
PSTD may be as much a biological as a psychological one.
A ground breaking study shows that people who experience traumatic events are more likely to have these molecular epigenetic changes, which can of course be biologically transmitted.
(The term epigenetic changes refer to particular molecules that stick to particular parts of the DNA. So they’re not genetic changes, they’re not changes in the gene encoding that we all have within us, but they are changes around the DNA.)
Calling NI a sick society may be stretching the extent of the problem, but it is one that should be put on the political front burner.
PTSD is not the only disorder significant numbers of Northern Ireland’s population experience. Another, is a phenomenon called Continuous Traumatic Stress (CTS).
During a conflict an “ethos of conflict” emerges. This ethos reflects a community’s shared experience of a remembered past is defined by eight interrelated themes of social beliefs: beliefs about the justness of one cause; beliefs about security, beliefs about positive self-image, beliefs about the justness of the ingroups’ beliefs of victimization, beliefs that delegitimize the opponent, beliefs of patriotism, beliefs about unity and beliefs about peace.
An ethos of conflict cements social cohesion.
While citizens on both sides of the divide are equally exposed to PTSD, both, but to a far larger extent, the Protestant community is also exposed to Continuous Traumatic Stress (CTS), which ensures that their attitudes and behaviors on political issues will rarely align with Catholics.
CTS is defined as a situation where “danger and threat are largely faceless and unpredictable, something constant and internal that colors the whole web of relations across the society and the daily life of its citizens… The mental life of the person experiencing CTS is characterized by preoccupation with thoughts about potential, future traumatic events, rather than with the details of a previous unprocessed event.
The absence of protection from threat and danger is perhaps of equal significance as actual risk of exposure” One characteristic of CTS is that “the anticipatory anxiety” that from worrying if a threatening will occur, whether that fear is realistic or not, can permanently transform how people respond to threats. ”The lens of the imagined is more fear driven than the lens of the real. Large parts of the Protestant community, especially in Loyalist areas, are enveloped in CTS.
Both PSTD and CTS feed voraciously on a sense of victimization and communities that feel they are victimized act in ways that reinforce their convictions they are victims.
That said, a catalyst for CTS is the most significant statistic of the last 20 years — that of inexorable Protestant population decline and the seeds of Catholic ascendancy.
The population breakdown by community background and age for 2011 census indicated Catholics outnumbering Protestants in all age cohorts below 40. Six years on they are or are in the process of becoming members of the new majority.
Protestants, a majority since the creation of the statelet in 1920, with borders agreed on the Boundary Commission’s recommendations in 1925 to adjustments that would ensure a permanent Protestant majority have not come to terms with a new emerging inexorable reality.
A state of CTS perfectly aligns itself with the core of the Protestant psyche. The Protestant community is grappling with an existential crisis. It is not for political reasons that you see Israeli flags flying in Loyalist enclaves, but psychological identification, as Israelis too are living in CTS.
After 20 years of nonviolence, and peace sufficient to preclude a return to wholesale violence but with the occasional retail shooting or bombing, these characteristics begin to wane; the social cohesion which the interconnection of experiences and behaviors the ethos of conflict provided and the sense of loss that accompanied the peace agreement in both communities wane, but at different rates thus producing different psychological and sociological profiles.
The social psychologist Peter Marris, a pioneer in this field, wrote that “The ideology of conflict, has a very powerful appeal for those who have lost their sense of belonging; it relieves the threat of personal disintegration because the structure of conflict offers a side to take, a reference for behavior, a meaning to the experience of loss: and with this reassurance life becomes manageable again, Protestants are losing their sense of belonging.
Between 1999 and 2010 the number of alcohol-related deaths has increased. – related deaths are four times more likely in deprived areas than affluent.
And what is important to stress here is that protracted conflict becomes part of the identity of the protagonists.
Marris again: ‘The ideology of conflict’ “does not press claims or demand rights only for their own sake, but to sustain the conflict itself. Its intransigence wards off the unbearable strain of incorporating the contradictions, and cannot help being identified with both sides”
How are we to interpret that phrase “the unbearable strain?” The loss of one part of one’s identity must be mourned like any other loss. It has to go through the stages of grieving.
In Protestant working-class areas, there is a pervasive belief that they lost the peace agreement game and as they witness their own population’s decline through immigration of the young and a high mortality due to having an older population, their experiences of the present are a precursor to their expectations for the future.
There is a palpable sense of loss, for a retrieval of a past they fought to perpetuate, that is as much now of mythology as of fact, is forever rubbished; Protestant working classes were perhaps a little better off than Catholic working classes but the knowledge they had that they belonged to the ruling class was an expression of their supremacy. The nation was theirs ̶ in the lingo called the narcissism of small differences.
When the symbols of the cultural manifestations of Unionist dominance are dismantled, Loyalists fiercely cling to them. Hence the violence after the Catholic dominated City Council decision to restrict flying the Union Jack over Belfast City Hall to 18 days verged on the sacrilegious; it was a loss. Every time the Parade’s Commission reroutes an Orange parade or prohibits it from flying rational routes is a loss, no greater than restrictions on marching down from Drumcree Church to Portadown Center on 12th July through the Catholic estates on Garvachy Road. Every Sunday four Orangemen march from Drumcree Church to Portadown with a petition for a license to hold the parade.
The bonfires, the venom of what we call “the silly season” underline the new direction of the conflict – from violence over territory to disagreement over symbols that are manifestations of neural time warps negating the sense of belonging, on the Protestant side and the consciousness or sub-consciousness an evolving sense of control. For Loyalists: loss.
The losses accumulate: the 1998 agreement is referred to as the Good Friday Agreement, not the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. A loss. On a comparative basis, fewer Protestant kids’ complete high school; A loss. Catholics get higher grades; A loss. Queen’s University, once synonymous with Ulster’s Protestant elites, now graduates a higher proportion of Catholic students; a loss, and there is nothing that generates hope as they look across the political horizon.
From being a majority in Northern Ireland since its founding and a minority in the Irish state on its borders, it is about to become a minority in both territories. Having once ruled everything, they face an imagined future where they may rule nothing. A loss; Not that they see a united Ireland around the corner, but that they see it as an inevitability. The ultimate loss.
Because they view the future with a lens calibrated by CTS, the fact that they are reassured that a united Ireland will not be the case, power sharing is any one of its many consociation forms.
If we look at voting patterns as far back as the 1830s, through the rest of that century, all of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty first, the one defining, immutable characteristic is that Catholics vote for parties (the Liberal Party), Protestants do not vote for; and Protestants support parties Catholics do not support (the Tories). In other words voting was and continues to be along communal lines. Allegiance is not to what a political party stands for on the constitutional issue but to the community with which one identifies.
There has never been sustained support among Catholics for unification at any point in time since the founding of Northern Ireland in 1920, even during some of the worst years of the conflict in the 1970s.
In other words the IRA conducted a coercive campaign of violence to bring about a united Ireland while the majority of the constituency on whose behalf it purported to speak opposed a united Ireland.
Which begs the question: Was the IRA’s murderous violence on behalf of the cause of Irish unification supported by a minority of the minority in NI when a majority of that minority would opt for a different outcome?
What it illustrates is that a minority dedicated to its cause, organized, disciplined, and committed, with a well-defined strategy will go to any lengths to get its way will always outmatch a passive majority.
Minorities drive change. Minorities drive revolutions. In Catalonia where opinion surveys consistently show that a majority oppose independence, a passionate minority dedicated to the cause of Catalan independence now holds the future of Spain to ransom.
Religion continues to be the best predicator of voting patterns. Since the founding of NI in 1920, almost without exception, Catholic have voted for nationalist or republican parties; majority area Protestant voted for Unionist parties. Today an aggregate of nationalist parties of various leanings now hold more seats in the Assembly than unionist parties.
For decades, the conflict from 1968 to 1998 was posited in terms of Catholics versus Protestants, Catholics being synonymous with standing for unity with the rest of Ireland, Protestants for preservation of the Union. The conflict was perceived in terms of two competing identities, identities antithetical to each other, with two opposing aspirations.
It is no longer accurate to describe NI as a case of two competing identities with diametrically opposing aspirations.
This is a misnomer. A more nuanced contextual framework has emerged as a result of a shift in the demographic balance in favor of Catholics, and a growing propensity among Catholics to remain in the Union.
Indeed, what is remarkable is that surveys of Northern Ireland Catholics since the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement have consistently shown that fewer than 50 percent choose the most “workable” or “acceptable” solution was unification in either federal or unitary form.
The 2013 annual Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey found that a united Ireland was the favored long-term option of 15 percent of the population, while 66 per cent preferred to the remain part of the UK.
In 2015, support was 22 percent for a united Ireland. As regards the likelihood of a united Ireland in the next 20 years, the NILT Survey (2016) just 16 percent of Catholics thought one likely.
Since the 2016 Brexit vote, support for reunification has increased, with 22 percent of respondents favorable towards reunification, up from 17 percent in 2013. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey for 2016 found that post Brexit support for a united Ireland among Catholics increased from 31 percent to 34 percent.
The Ipos MORI poll (September 2016) estimated that 43 percent of interviewees with a Catholic background would now back reunification, up from 35 percent in 2013 and the highest number in this decade.
Most recently, the overall support for a united Ireland stands at 22 percent; the proportion of Protestants supporting the union has consistently stood at a solid 70 percent and the trend line for support among Catholics ranges between the high 30s and low 40s.
No matter how you fiddle with survey data since the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, Protestant opposition to a united Ireland is as solid as it was 50 years ago.
(85 percent of Protestants see remaining part of the UK as the best long-term policy; while 28 percent of Catholics see Irish unity as the best long-term policy).
Protestant support for the Union is rock hard. Catholic support for unity is fungible ̶ with more opposing than supporting it.
In fact, both communities in NI and in the Republic agree on two things” “a borderless” Ireland post-Brexit and kicking the can down the road when we talk of the future.
But somehow, the prevailing political sentiment in these parts implicitly suggests that once over 50 percent of Catholics support a united Ireland, the deal is done, the ballgame over. This, of course, is hogwash and the fact that an Oireachtas committee can produce a report postulating that a united Ireland is inevitable is delusionary and its warning that we should be ready for the occasion, unlike the Brexiters, is, at least from where I stand, arguably hubris in the guise of conceit.
As regards to identity, nearly one third of the population describe themselves as being Northern Irish.
Having a border poll that gives voters two options –either remaining in the UK or becoming part of a united Ireland compels nearly one third of the population who perceive their primary identity is Northern Irish to choose between two options neither of which they identify with
Calling for a referendum where the choices are binary for a situation that is no longer binary sets up a false dichotomy.
And again, the belief –because there is no evidence to back it up at all – that Brexit will cause legions of Protestants with a genetic disposition to have anything to do with a united Ireland – to suddenly embrace the concept of one is again the stuff of pub talk not public debate.
It is important to remember as we reflect on this conflict that even during the worst years of the violence in the 1970s support for a united Ireland within the Catholics community ranged from percentiles between the mid-thirties and early forties, hardly a nationalist outpouring of fervor for unification. Certainly the nationalists of NI were not Catalans!! The call for “Brits out” resonated far more than “unification now”; in short the IRA conducted its campaign of violence for a united Ireland over 30 years while support for the community it purported to speak for was underwhelming.
Using three points of reference, the NI Census (2011), the MORI survey (2013) and the BBC survey (September 2016) and the Northern Ireland Life and Times Surveys (between 1989 s and 2016), we are in a position to say that being Catholic does not mean being either nationalist or republican; being Catholic does not mean pro a united Ireland; being nationalist or republican does not necessarily mean being pro a united Ireland.
It is time to take this gibberish of having a border poll or even the near time possibility of a united Ireland off the table. These calls for a border poll, as I said, are destructive, sure to inflame the extremes on both sides and undo much of the progress of the last 20 years. For a society still in the throes of recovery, just calls are irresponsible A b0rder poll would be fatally flawed not only because it relies on the inane formula of 50 percent +1, has no procedural protocols; but by forcing voters to make a binary choice it fails to take account of the evolution of political identities in Northern Ireland.
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Over the last 20 years there has been a seismic shift in the way the people of NI perceive their national identity.
In the 2011 Census 48 percent perceived themselves as British, 28 percent choose Irish, and 29 percent Northern Irish. This trend is accelerating.
September/December 2016 data, probably the most comprehensive since the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, found that 29 percent described themselves as unionist, (down from 33 percent the previous year); 24 percent described themselves as nationalist and 46 percent opted for neither).
In other words, the number describing themselves as neither unionist nor nationalist was greater than the number describing themselves as either unionist or nationalist.
The Ipsos MORI poll found that 23 percent of Sinn Fein supporters said they would vote against a united Ireland in a border poll. And 56 percent of Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) supporters said they would opt to stay in the UK if a poll was held tomorrow.
In the 2016, NILT Survey, 70 percent of SDLP voters voiced opposition to Irish unity even though 79 percent of these voters believed that NI would be worse off post-Brexit.
In other words, support for a nationalist or Republican Party does not necessarily translate into support for a united Ireland.
Support for the Union (either with direct rule or a devolved executive) is slightly down from 70 percent in 2015 to 66 percent in 2016.
One post Brexit poll shows that 43 per cent with a Catholic background would back a United Ireland, up from 35 per cent in 2013, a statistically significant increase; 4 percent of Protestants would, up from 1 percent.
Ipsos MORI (2016) reported a 5-point increase in support for a United Ireland (22 percent), which was just 17 percent in the 2013 survey–a significant increase.
The overwhelming majority of those with a Protestant background (88 percent) would vote to stay in the UK.
More than third of those with a Catholic background (37 percent) would also opt to stay in the UK, similar to the 2013 figure of 38 percent.
When asked what the long-term policy for Northern Ireland should be, support for ending partition has risen from 14 to percent to 19 percent between 2015 and 2016.
Support for removing the border increased most among the young, with an increase of 10 percentage points among the 18 to 24 year-olds (to now stand at 26% in favor of unity).
Both majorities of Catholics and Protestants agree on one thing: they want a “borderless” Ireland, although for Protestant “borderless” and “a united Ireland” are not the same thing.
In fact, a united Ireland is off the table for the lifetime of all in this audience – and certainly off the table for mine. Asked when the likelihood of a united Ireland might emerge as a preferred option, a majority of Catholics did not envisage that as a probability for at least 20 years
Members of the Legislative Assembly, on taking their seats in the assembly, must register as either “unionist,” “nationalist,” or “other,” and concurrent majorities are required for much of the legislation, representation in the assembly does not reflect how citizens of Northern Ireland perceive themselves.
These designations no longer align themselves with how a significant number of Northern Ireland populations identify themselves and pigeonhole their choices into binary options. The number identifying themselves as Northern Irish is actually as great or greater than the number identifying themselves as Irish and a significant number of the self-identified “Irish” do not express support for unification.
And the Republic?
In the Republic, a December 2016 RTE Radio’s Claire Byrne Live/Amárach Research panel asked “Is it time for a united Ireland?” 46 percent of those asked said yes while 32 percent said no and 22 percent said that they didn’t know. Support was highest among those aged 25–34 with 54 percent saying yes.
An October 2015 opinion poll in the Republic commissioned by RTE and the BBC found that 36 percent opted for Irish unity in the short to medium term, but when the question was framed in terms of a preferred long term solution; just 36 percent opted for a united Ireland if it would require higher taxes to foot the bill –hardly a ringing endorsement of the sacrifices southerners would make to achieve unity.
A 2012 study showed almost 70% living in “interface areas” near the walls feared for their safety without them.
Protestants are more likely to have the walls remain than Catholics. The wall as a border: remove the walls and Catholic encroachment will follow.
The walls are not between people who want a united Ireland and those who want to remain part of the union, nor are they between two religions.
They are between two people, two tribes whose communities have been engaged in covert or overt conflict for 400 years; between indigenous and generations of post colonials, suppressed and suppressed a violent conflict over 30 years, where the person on the opposite side is an “other” –that is they are a looming menace, more associated with negative and derisory characteristics than with traits that embody their humanity. Removing the walls changes the spatial configurations that had become their “normalcy,” that is part of the geographic boundaries of their territorial domain and their relational to space.
Fear is the animating factor, perfectly rational after decades of perceiving people on the other side of the wall as ‘The Other.”
Fear, the glue that holds the disparate parts of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement together, compels compromise.
They feel defeated and act in ways that reinforce that belief.
Their imagined beliefs overwhelm factual realities.
Holding the mirror of the last 20 years to the next 20, a futile exercise because we have little idea of what the future holds, would be premised on hypotheses that are just that: hypotheses, especially when the impacts of the Brexit begin to make themselves felt.
Padraig O’Malley is an international expert on topics related to divided societies. Born in Dublin, Ireland, O’Malley is an award-winning author and expert on democratic transitions and divided societies, with special expertise on Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Iraq.