|
INTERMINGLED ISLANDS BY SIMON PARTRIDGE
The Good Friday Agreement, alas, seems deadlocked over the issue of decommissioning. Now may be a good moment to see whether we cannot draw some encouragement from the wider relationships in these islands. To see whether they might throw light on how to achieve trust and accommodation in the "narrow ground" of Northern Ireland.
For it is fact, surely still too little known, that there are literally millions of people who are of Irish extraction or Irish-born, living in this island in a condition of reasonable amity with their English, Scots, Welsh and now new Commonwealth neighbours. This would seem to give the lie to Gerry Adams' recent assertion at the Labour Party conference, that for Irish Catholics to live within the Union State inevitably means "using repression, denying civil and human rights, and defending inequality and injustice".
But don't take my word for it. The pages of this paper have provided plenty of evidence that the contemporary Irish in Britain do pretty well for themselves (which is not to deny that there are not still problems no society, including that of the Irish Republic. has yet reached perfection), and make an invaluable contribution to wider British society. Proof Richard Kearney of University College Dublin, in the book he edited in 1988 Across the Frontiers Ireland in the I 1990s suggested that the Irish diaspora in Britain amounted to 13 million subsequent research indicates that it is nearer 7-8 million). It is clear that more Irish people now live in Britain than in Ireland, and this does seem to bring into question a whole series of antagonistic assumptions. If Britain was simply the imperialist bogey of physical-force republicans' imaginations, why do so many Irish people continue to live here of their own free ill?
In 1994, a scientific study by another Irishman, Prof. James O'Connell's British Attitudes to Ireland and the Irish: A Special Relationship, reported extensively in this paper, provided many of the answers. Nearly 4,000,000 people in Britain have one Irish parent - a lot of cross-community sex seems to be going on and would qualify automatically as Irish citizens. In addition, some 656,500 people born in the Republic live in Britain. That's getting on for a fifth of the population. Furthermore, a quarter of Britons have an Irish relative. while 60 per cent have Irish friends, acquaintances or fellow workers.
It is hardly surprising in the light of these figures that only 6 per cent consider those
(Continued on page 27)
|
|
