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culture, originally on these islands and now spread over much of the world.
And here lies an opportunity for the Unionists. David Trimble has lately begun to talk of jettisoning the old No Surrender mentality and embracing inclusivity and multi-culturalism. He could go further and offer to rescue the soi-disant Irish from their self-imposed Gaelic ghetto by invoking his own Irish dimension and asserting that Unionists are Irish in every sense of the word. No ifs or buts and certainly no hyphenations - not the twee, demeaning 'Anglo-Irish', still less the frankly insulting
American term for Ulster Protestants, 'Scotch-Irish'; as though they were a mixture of whiskies. Irish and British that is, just as those in the Republic are Irish, pure and simple. British is not an ethnic nationalism, simply a civic description. You can be British and virtually anything else you like.
On my count, Irish Unionists are the seventh largest element of the British population, after the English, Scots, Welsh, Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and, ironically, Irish Catholics.
Liberating the idea of Irishness would enable Unionists to claim their part of the literary heritage. Not because so many Irish writers were Protestants. That would be a mere squabble over baptismal certificates, as crass as nationalist claims to them because they were born in Ireland.
Rather they do so as heirs to that tradition which sees Irish literature in terms far wider than the psycho-geography of the island. Far fetched? Perhaps. Certainly it requires a sea-changeto the Unionist mindset. But every journey starts with a first step, so I would like to make a modest proposal, or rather to revive a proposal of Jonathan Swift's. He wanted to set up an academy on the lines of the Academie Francaise. A
fully fledged British version may be neither feasible nor desirable. However, the Good Friday Agreement contained clauses promising support for the Irish language and Ulster Scots but nothing on English. I would like to rectify the omission and propose an Academy of Irish English, to record and celebrate the most distinctive of all variants of English, one which contains some of the greatest works in this or any
other language, and one which is common to every single person on the island.
Pat Coyne. The author was previously Chief Executive of the New
Statesman and is a member of New Dialogue.
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