Don't get me started about the British
by Michael Maiello

"Don't get me started about the BritishŠ" she said, finishing the last gulp of a vodka and coke, and then stamping out a Marlboro Light in the ashtray. She'd lived in Northern Ireland. She'd had family involved in the IRA. Once in Belfast, police told her to "get out of here" when she'd unknowingly lit up a cigarette on a park bench near where a car had exploded hours before. She'd been in the north to witness the IRA in action, she'd heard the rebel rhetoric in the Irish Republic. She remains convinced that 95 percent of Irish people just want to get on with their lives, that bombs, guns, and rhetoric are minor concerns compared to good jobs, falling in love, and travel. This is a girl I met in Ireland.

Another Irish memory--Irish students singing while riding through Dublin in a bus full of recent college graduates celebrating the confirmation of their degrees with a ritzy black tie ball and copious amounts of drink. They sang five long songs with confusing lyrics about whiskey, beer, and infidelity. The songs lacked political content, with the exception of "fuck the Queen"--a line jammed into every verse at every opportunity.

In a Dublin pub I struck up a conversation with a guy who looked to be in his mid-twenties. "You're American," he observed. "Well, you'll have a good time in Ireland. Because we love Americans." He drunkenly slapped my shoulder. "Because you're not fuckin' British." He continued, "That's why we love the Germans, and the French, and the Italians, and the JapaneseŠ"

"Fuck the Queen!"

Ireland founded its free state in 1922, and completely removed royal influence with the foundation of the Irish Republic in 1937. But the revolution which liberated Ireland in the early twentieth century left the British in control of six counties in the north. Those counties have since been separate from the Irish Republic, and considered a part of the United Kingdom.

This has led to continued conflict, and a terrorist war throughout Northern Ireland and London. The Irish Republican Army, the military arm of the Sinn Fein, fight for Irish unity. The Ulster Unionists, who represent militant Protestants, fight for continued allegiance with Britain. There are other parties, all with their own acronyms, forming an alphabet soup of paramilitary organizations on all sides of the conflict.

Ireland is not a dangerous place. It's certainly not a place at war, and buildings don't often blow up outside of Belfast. Nothing has exploded since I arrived, due to a cease fire and peace talks which involve more parties and interests than I can possibly keep track of. Modern Ireland sports a "Celtic Tiger" economy which has attracted the interest of global investors. Intel manufactures chips here, in plants much like the one which dominates Rio Rancho. Every time I turn on the radio I hear that another American technology company wants to open a plant in Cork or Dublin.

There are no guns in the streets, and the police foot patrols are armed only with knight sticks. Drive-by shootings are unheard of in Galway or Cork (cities smaller than Albuquerque) or Dublin (which is about the size of Denver.) Though people do talk about "bad areas" in all the major population centers, getting shot is not an issue. Bad areas in Ireland are places where purses get snatched, beggars are plentiful, and the occasional knife-point mugging occurs. Some restaurants sport signs on the walls reading: LADIES WATCH YOUR HANDBAGS. That's as bad as I've seen it get in Ireland.

The poor are better cared for in Ireland, though the number of beggars, old drunks and young drifters from throughout Europe, are still pretty noticeable. A young person attending a public university in Ireland can expect decent support from the government--in the form of grants, rather than loans. Mature students, over the age of twenty-five, are encouraged to go back to college with free tuition and even an allotment for living expenses. These benefits are means-tested to help the poor. Ireland is an advanced western culture, and probably due to their small size and manageable population (you could fit two or three Irelands in New Mexico's land mass and maybe half the population of New York inhabit it) they have solved problems which have been deemed unsolvable in the States.

Fuck the Queen.

It takes a few pints before people start giving opinions about northern occupation, the IRA, the Loyalists, the Unionists, the Republicans, Catholics, and Protestants. Most in the Irish Republic are Catholic, though Protestants are spread throughout. A girl I met once dated a Protestant and her parents reacted like white middle class parents in the sixties whose daughter brought a black man home.

People tend to get along when they're not threatening to marry each other's daughters, at least in the Irish Republic. Belfast is more ghettoized, and any Belfast native could tell you which are the Catholic and which are the Protestant neighborhoods. I've heard people claim the Catholics have a slight majority, and I've heard them claim the Catholics are a significant minority in the north. According to newspapers and encyclopedias, the Catholics are a slight minority with a growing population.

Those who have claimed the Catholic minority also support more active defiance of the British and promise that there would be no real end to the troubles until Northern Ireland takes its place as part of the Irish Republic. Those who claim the split is about even, are less likely to care, or to point out that Ireland has never been a fully unified country, and probably never will be.

Protestants in Northern Ireland have enjoyed more economic and political power throughout the century. Since they are more likely to be British loyalists, they have been more likely to earn political appointments, have helped their fellows in business, and managed to corner the market on good jobs and money. Gerrymandering has given them elected power even in Catholic majority districts.

Equal rights movements during the late 60s have helped even things out in the 90s, and Catholics are no longer excluded from good jobs on the basis of their religion. But, as we have learned in the United States, this can be a slow and uneven process--Catholics still make up the majority of the northern poor, just as minorities are more likely to fall below the U.S. poverty line.

There's as issue of national pride and ethnic identity which can be a bit disconcerting for a traveler from a New Mexico, which has achieved an amazing amount of racial integration. The northern Irish are ethnically Irish and likely have family throughout the republic. There is a real but unspoken desire to unify the Irish homeland.

Northern Ireland symbolizes an unsuccessful revolution. The failure of the Irish to establish an independent Republic throughout the island has caused a great deal of bitterness. The hard line approach of Margaret Thatcher in dealing with Irish terrorists led to false accusations and imprisonment of Irish citizens. People here wonder just how many falsely-accused Irish still occupy British prisons.

Ireland's economic and political role in modern Europe has forced it to denounce its own people as terrorists. In 1987, the Irish government ratified the European Community's European Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, wherein the Republic agreed to police itself to keep weapons from flowing from Ireland to the north. The Republic found itself in the position of calling its own freedom fighters terrorists.

But, there's as much anger towards the IRA and anti-British factions in the North as there is towards Britain in the Irish Republic. Robert McLiam Wilson, a novelist from Belfast whose book Eureka Street should be read by anyone seeking to understand northern Ireland, bitterly accuses the IRA of "shitting in their own nests." Bombs don't discriminate by religion, and a terrorist for either side in Belfast is as likely to kill his own as kill the enemy. When the bombs reach London, the British police respond by making life miserable for everyone in Belfast. It's an ineffective revolution, the type that causes more harm than good.

It's even serving to extend British occupation. It is possible (though difficult to find an Irish person who will let you convince them at this point) that the British fear a Bosnia type situation if they leave. For sixty years, the Soviet Union kept ethnic tensions quiet with their military presence, and millions died when they left. The British fear civil violence if they pull out, which is why the peace talks are so essential.

Even living with these tensions, the Irish feel that the United States is a more dangerous place to live. An Irish friend who had lived in Miami told me about having a gun held to his head while being mugged a few minutes after getting off a bus. An older Irishman I met in a pub told me about having a knife held to his throat at a bar in Oklahoma City. When we walked by a video game which involved shooting machine gun armed attackers, a friend quipped "you must feel at home."

"All the video games?" I asked.

"All the guns."

But, like a young American probably knows people in the mob or a street gang, a young Irish person is likely to claim a cousin in the IRA, or to be maybe two degrees removed from people involved in the violence. Many illegal drugs purchased by people in the club scene are supplied by terrorist groups on both sides in Northern Ireland, so a lot of money from the politically uninvolved eventually purchases weapons for use in the north.

Most people I met see an inevitable political solution as we turn into the new century. Ireland is more about trying to build robust economy to stay influential in the coming European Economic Union than it is about rebel slogans and bombs. Others I've met claim that repressed violence in the North will eventually explode and that the rest of Ireland will get involved to violently expel the British.

But it's unlikely that the people I've met, even those with a more militant viewpoint, would actually get involved. They're a lot like American young people, talking about revolutions but really wanting comfortable and secure lives. Northern conflict is currently fueled by zealots on both sides, while the man on the street has more immediate concerns, especially in the Irish Republic.

It's less a war than a game of simmering tensions. There are more parallels to the L.A. riots than there are to any wars. A group of people are under employed and feel like they have no other options. They tend to destroy their own neighborhoods in acts of rebellion against political and economic forces too intangible to yield to explosions.

The Irish tell me how young a country we have in the United States. But older buildings, stone walls, and ancient tales have not made Ireland much older. Our expulsion of the British was so complete so long ago that it's been forgotten. "Fuck the Queen," said here with venom, has no meaning in our former colony. Ireland, with a booming economy, population of educated and ambitious young people, still struggles to define itself against its history of British occupation.

Michael Maello isn't in exile, though he can see it from where he's standing. He plans to continue staffing the LCN syndicate's Ireland bureau for the foreseeable future.

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