Catherine Pollock (no relation – different spelling) from Derry is an unusual and remarkable woman. From a working class unionist background, she now works for the Irish language and cultural organisation Cultúrlann. She says of herself: “I’m not a unionist, but I’m not a nationalist or a republican either. I am British, and also Irish. My politics are left of centre – very left of centre for some people. I’m a socialist.”
Is the British element in her culture and identity important to her? Yes. “It’s the culture I grew up understanding. I understand how the place works. English is my first language. I went to university in England and lived in England. I feel comfortable getting off a train in Glasgow, Birmingham or Swansea. I like the secularism of Britain – they’re not rooted in a religious identity. I love its trade union history and can identify strongly with working class communities right across the UK. I love a lot of its music. If I’m watching the Olympics I feel that wee beast in my stomach whenever there’s a British athlete competing. I have an emotional reaction which is maybe not rational but it’s there.”
On the other hand she is passionate about Irish language and culture. She lives in the Fountain, the last Protestant and unionist enclave in the overwhelmingly Catholic and nationalist City Side of Derry. Very unusually for somebody of her background, 15 years ago she got a job in the adjoining Catholic working class area of the Bogside as a community development worker. “And one day I walked into a Gaelscoil, into a roomful of nine-year-olds who spoke fluent Irish. I was blown away! I lived three or four hundred yards from that school and I had no idea of what was happening there, that you could raise children in this place bilingually – that they could be fluent in two languages by the age of seven or eight. I had quite an emotional reaction to that school.” Now she sends both her children – aged eight and ten – to a Gaelscoil and runs a project which makes the Irish language accessible to people in all the city’s communities, and particularly its unionist communities. She is Derry’s answer to the East Belfast Protestant language activist, Linda Ervine (with whom she works from time to time).
Pollock goes on: “I feel a sense of responsibility to be really restorative and generous to the Irish language because of the history of its suppression. I feel a responsibility to change perceptions and to get people to think more empathetically about the value of the language and how important it is to this place, and to this island as a whole.”
She quotes Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister’s remark that “we’re kowtowing to a foreign language” as evidence of the antipathy to Irish in much of the unionist community. “There’s definitely a huge fear, and it’s a fear that is stoked, and it comes from not understanding why English is the main language spoken on this island and in many other places around the world, the world of the former British empire. Irish was violently and institutionally eradicated. English became the language of the State, of law, of business, of education – primary schooling through the medium of English was compulsory in Ireland before it was compulsory in Britain, and that was in order to eradicate the language. The response to Irish from a lot of unionist people in the North is quite dismissive and arrogant, and lacks any empathy or understanding of what the loss of their language would have had for a whole nation.”
Her championing of the Irish language has led to some challenging conversations with people in her unionist family and community. However she feels particularly supported by a 20-25 strong group of women friends, who are “as politically diverse as you have ever seen. I, as a socialist, can have a conversation with someone in that group who thinks Trump is the best thing to happen to American politics.” Most of this group are Protestant (and mostly still believers, although few go to church any more) and most of them describe themselves as unionist. “If something goes wrong with my life, they’re the first people at the door, the first people to support me.”
She acknowledges that, despite differences of political opinion and her very different cultural endeavours, her family have never shunned or excluded her. “The door is always open, and there is a security and type of freedom that comes with that. Not everyone is so lucky.” The same with the working class unionist community where she lives: “people just let me get on with life.”
When I ask her about how the big ‘soft power’ of Irish culture – the language, the music and dance, the gaelic sport – can be made less threatening to unionists, she responds: “When an immigrant community comes to Britain, we expect them to assimilate. The British came here as colonial settlers, yet now it’s as if Irish culture has to become less threatening in order to make the British people in Northern Ireland feel OK about being here. Irish culture has to be contained and softened: it’s almost ‘put your culture in a box because it’s making us feel unsettled’. We do live on the island of Ireland after all.”
I point out that it was rather undemocratic for Belfast City Council to pass a by-law allowing 15% of people in a street to vote to have a bilingual street sign. Her response is “calling somewhere Victoria Road is not very democratic either” (Victoria Road in Derry is the road to Dublin!) and “the original ‘English’ names of many streets in the North are actually a transliteration from the Irish. I wonder if you went to any other country in the world where English is now the first language and the indigenous population say we would like to have our indigenous language included on the street signs, would the reaction be the same?”
She is unsure about unionist identity and culture. “I think unionism is really grappling with what its identity is. Because marching bands are a military culture and bonfires are global. Then there’s this idea that we’re not Irish so we can’t connect with anything Irish – and if you do, it’s as though you’re a traitor to your identity. And I wonder if putting culture in a biscuit tin and sticking a label on it and painting it red, white and blue and saying to people ‘this belongs to you’ amounts to the cultural identity of a whole community of people.” Most things are more complex and nuanced than that, she insists, pointing out that adopting Ulster-Scots as a NI linguistic counterweight to Irish is not helpful – there’s a whole community of Ulster-Scots people in Donegal, for example, many of them Presbyterian.
She uses the example of Irish dancing, “which has been a cultural tradition of every community” in the North. In recent years Scottish highland dancing is being actively promoted in working class Protestant areas. “I can understand that if you come from a community where pipe bands are part of your cultural tradition, there might be a natural inclination towards highland dancing. But if you say to a whole community that Scottish dancing belongs to you and that Irish dancing doesn’t, you’re sectarianising culture and I don’t think that’s helpful.”
“It’s not the people who are dancing who are the problem. Any endeavour like this is a positive way to express yourself. Rather, it is the political, community and ‘peace’ infrastructures we have to operate within that insist on painting things one colour or the other. If you’re not obviously one side or the other, then you will miss out on all sorts of opportunities for performance and funding.”
She goes on: “If we are looking for a new cultural identity for Northern Protestants, let’s be honest and say that as Protestants the only things we have are marching bands and bonfires and the English language and a range of Protestant religious denominations. But have we damaged our relationship with Irishness so much that while my mum went to an Irish dancing school when she was a child with no problems, my daughter or son are unlikely go to an Irish dancing class now?That’s a problem because we are putting ourselves into two very different encampments again. Does everything, including culture, have to have such defined parameters?”
Pollock has an interesting take on how we should approach and prepare for a Border Poll. If there is to be a Border Poll, she would want a genuine choice between two future visions: Northern Ireland as part of a future UK and the North as part of a future united Ireland. “If people are going to be asked to engage in a discussion about a ‘new Ireland’, then the other choice – remaining in the UK – also needs a new vision. People should be asked to decide on two visions for the North. I would like people to contribute to both discussions so that we are presented with a real tangible choice and everyone will understand what that choice is. Because the present situation is not meeting the needs of very many people in Northern Ireland.”
“What will those two things – remaining in the UK or reuniting with the rest of Ireland – look like? I think if you have such a dual process – which all groups in Northern Ireland participate in – then you take much of the sting out of that conversation. You couldn’t be accused of participating in a conversation which was just about advocating for a united Ireland. If we’re going to stay as part of the UK, what will that look like? To me that is as big a process as what will a united Ireland look like.”
“I am constantly struggling with this,” she goes on. “How do I have conversations with unionist people about their response to the Irish language, to a Border Poll, to a united Ireland without getting their backs up, without them being afraid, without them digging their heels in and saying ‘I will never have that conversation’?”
“That’s my challenge to unionism. You can’t keep beating people with a stick, you can’t keep saying ‘I’m entitled to this piece of land.’ You have to be creative, you have to be progressive, you have to envision what a good future here might look like. You have to tell people why they would be better off with the North still in the UK. What would a Northern Ireland that is fair and prosperous for everybody look like? It you can’t do that, you’re going to lose.”
She desperately wants unionists to sit around a table with others to discuss the things that need to be improved to ensure a better future for the people of Northern Ireland. Is it the health system, which has deteriorated dramatically in recent years, or an education system which she calls ‘bonkers’, deeply divided by religion and class? She understands unionists’ need for a “sense of belonging”, but believes “the cultural identity British bit” which many unionists set so much store by is “almost additional to these core things of everyday life.”
She is not convinced by Irish nationalism either: “draping yourself in the flag and everyone living with the one identity. But the idea of redesigning a society that works better for everyone’s needs really does excite me. I would like to say to the people of Northern Ireland: Do you realise that you will have an opportunity to redesign the entire governmental and social infrastructure – the economy, health, education, agriculture, climate change – based on the real needs of the people of this island. Don’t you want to be part of that conversation?”
One problem with both Northern communities, Pollock believes, is “a serious lack of self-reflection – we’re always looking at the other community to do things to make us feel better…So if I identify as British, what parts of British history am I uncomfortable with, which parts require self-reflection and restorativeness and reparation? Equally with Sinn Fein and the IRA and republicanism, they also have to look at their practices, and ask ‘What was wrong about those’? You could talk all day about the treatment of women and young people, and the rough justice they imposed on their own communities. Some of the killings by the IRA – for example of the young census taker Joanne Mathers in Derry in 1981 – were horrific. I think young members of Sinn Fein, and particularly young female members of Sinn Fein, are now challenging the old guard in terms of ‘you need to deal with this. You need to reflect on and own your wrong actions.”
And the same within unionism. “You go into any loyalist working class estate and there will be an honour wall to a paramilitary organisation. Is that OK? And, if so, can people who fought for Irish freedom not do the same?” She gives another example: “Every November there’s a big remembrance service to remember British war dead in the Diamond, 200 yards from where Bloody Sunday happened. Are those two things the same? Both need to be recognised and reckoned with. I don’t think Irish people, including Sinn Fein, are that callous or lacking in empathy that they don’t see this. These are the kind of conversations that have to happen.”
Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.
Discover more from Slugger O’Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
