British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly confused a few people last week when, standing in Saintfield Co. Down, he told assembled journalists that he would “be going to Ireland in the near future”, where he would be “meeting Irish politicians”. Did Mr Cleverly not know that he was already in Ireland meeting Irish politicians? Where did he think he was? The comment prompted little more than a few jaded eye-rolls from observers who noticed it, but it served as a reminder of the absurdity of a phraseology that has become increasingly common in Irish life: ‘Ireland and Northern Ireland’.
In Mr Cleverly’s head, it seems, despite being on the island of Ireland, he was not yet in Ireland. Among those at the table meeting Mr Cleverly on his flying visit was Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie, a man who says he is both Irish and British. “I have always viewed myself as Irish,” Mr Beattie told the Irish Times in 2021. “Clearly I’m British as well, but my whole life I’ve identified as Irish.” Yet, the Foreign Secretary’s words suggested he had not met with Irish politicians at that point.
To be fair to Mr Cleverly, he can hardly be expected to have a deep understanding of the intricacies of Ireland and the language that flows subtly through the Irish political landscape. For, while he may be the British Foreign Secretary and this is part of his remit, he is, after all, the MP for Braintree, a constituency of Essex, which is a county in the southeast of England.
Where might he have got the idea into his head that he was not yet in Ireland when he was in Co. Down then? He could very well taking his lead from his counterparts in the Irish government.
The current Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and Tánaiste, Micheál Martin, both routinely use the phrase “Ireland and Northern Ireland”, as do many of their colleagues in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, as well as politicians in other parties such as Labour and the Social Democrats. Television presenters, opinion columnists, radio newsreaders and people across the media use it without giving it a second’s thought. Some of these media voices even take it upon themselves to chide those who avoid using ‘Ireland’ to refer to the 26-county state, demanding northerners in particular to stop using names such as “the 26 Counties” or “the South”.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Usage has gradually increased in the years after Good Friday Agreement and, despite the fact that it has been pointed out that the terminology has an offensive othering effect, casting Irish citizens in the north as ‘not really Irish’, people continue to use it. In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell said, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” This is precisely what is happening. Indeed, it goes some way towards explaining how, for example, Mr Varadkar could casually and erroneously describe Belfast as “overseas” (he subsequently apologised).
In the post-Good Friday Agreement era, when barriers have gradually dissolved and north-south impressions have deepened, it is fascinating that this sort of language persists and even flourishes. Such phraseology serves as a sort of linguistic bulwark against full north-south harmonisation, preserving a sense of partition between north and south in the minds of the people. As the writer Danny Morrison pointed out in the book Free Statism and The Good Old IRA, “the original usage of the word Ireland was to include the Six Counties. Now it is used to exclude them.”
Varadkar, violence & unionist disinformation
For well over a year, opportunistic unionist politicians and disingenuous loyalist agitators have been almost gleefully regurgitating disinformation about Leo Varadkar and a host of other individuals, including Varadkar’s Fine Gael colleague Simon Coveney. The oft-repeated and dangerous lie goes that Varadkar “threatened violence” in order to exert pressure on post-Brexit negotiations between the EU and the UK. In reality, Varadkar merely repeated the publicly stated view of security force figures that physical infrastructure on the border would potentially become symbolic targets for groups already inclined towards violence. Varadkar did not “threaten violence”.
A sustained and poisonous propaganda campaign has oozed from within unionism since then, with relatively mild remarks from the SDLP’s Claire Hanna about non-violent civil disobedience getting clumsily folded into the fantasy too. So the “violence-rewarding, union-subjugating Protocol™” soundbite was born.
In deceitfully framing the Irish government (and their fellow travellers) as an outfit that somehow “threatened violence”, the agitators have recklessly sharpened a false sense of grievance and resentment within their community and pre-emptively justified any actual violence that might then emanate from their ranks. And emanate it did, in the form of rioting in March 2021 and again in March 2022 when Mr Coveney was forced to flee a Belfast event on peace-building out of fear for his safety. Inevitably, it is always implied that ‘nationalists started it’ – referring to the lie about “threatening violence” – and therefore unionism is simply responding in kind or “returning the serve” to use a phrase deployed by some. It is completely mendacious.
In order to advance hardline unionism’s aims (the destruction of the Good Friday Agreement and the reestablishment of a unionist veto), rejectionist, reactionary voices have shamelessly perverted language and actively sought to invert reality. Bogeymen have had to be invented, lies have been peddled and outrageous threats have been issued – did you know that mere discussion of Irish unity has been described as an “act of war”, for example?
What is remarkable is how rarely the disinformation has been challenged and debunked since it first emerged. These lies about threats of violence have been recited by elected representatives and commentators on political programmes, parliaments and in the papers. The lie has somehow managed to endure to the point where Varadkar was asked about it last week and had to spell out the truth of what he actually said. “There’s a very big difference, I think, between warning or expressing concern about violence and threatening it, and I certainly didn’t do that,” Varadkar insisted.
The entire sordid distortion brings to mind the infamous line, attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, that “a lie repeated often enough becomes truth”.
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