As the dark draws down on June 23rd you can stand on the north Clare shoreline and watch the bonfires glow all along the Galway coast. On a starry, starry night you can’t tell where the sky ends and the land begins. It has parallels all down Europe’s Atlantic edge. In Portugal it’s the Feast of the Three Saints. Here it’s called Saint John’s Eve, but really it’s midsummer. After that, things go downhill…
Two weeks later, give or take, these celebratory western bonfires are mimicked by others much less well meant a mere hundred kilometres to the north as the marching season kicks off. There are many ways to describe what follows, of which sectarian is the most dispassionate. Of course, many people continue to go about their business more or less unencumbered. But thousands up sticks and make for less tribal places, including Donegal, Galway, west Cork and France. You can’t blame them.
It’s a raucous and rancid thing, and has been for more than a century. Otherwise reasonable people celebrate their difference from their neighbours with marching and drumming and bellicose speechifying. Memories and grudges and ancient hatreds are nurtured and renewed. Any opportunity to annoy or to be annoyed is taken, gleefully. Even the merest excuse to throng and rant and spit venom is taken and if there’s a prospect of bottling the Other Side or the police, so much the better. And from a distance it is hard to tell one side from the other, except for the flags and tunes.
Some years ago I tried to explain the whole thing to a middle-aged German academic. He found it hard to take in. “What they need there,” he said, “is to have a third of the community from somewhere else, like the Maghreb (North Africa). That would bring them together.”
In some ways he was right. Sure, there are few Maghrebis in Northern Ireland, and immigration is not in any way comparable to that in the east and south, but in many areas there are enough immigrants to test his theory, for example Lithuanians. And, according to one NI policeman I met recently, in one largely loyalist area near Belfast the locals of both persuasions have come together to face down some argy bargy by the eastern Europeans.
But really, he was wrong. As we keep hearing, Northern Ireland has become the race hate capital of Europe. There have been a lot of attacks on foreigners. Rightly, many fear going out alone. The natural affinity between loyalists and Britain’s National Front has found new targets and ways of expression. And some nationalists aren’t too far behind.
Is it that there’s something there in Northern Ireland that neutralises change? The grievances are endemic, embedded in the very marrow of the society. Or is it, more hopefully, that the time frame is too short?
If there’s hope, then we may find it threaded through the last month’s football. It’s had everything. For fall guys and villains, can we improve on Argentina as a team and Wayne Rooney as an individual? For ballet and synchronised diving we had Portugal. For joy and exuberance, we had Togo and the Ivory Coast.
We Irish had our usual bullshit love-hate relationship with England. So many boo them and yet, theirs are the games we watch the most. In an Irish bar in Rome, believe me, when they scored, everybody cheered. Amongst them was Beckham. Once dismissed in disgrace against Argentina, then scuffing a penalty over the bar, in 2006 he came as captain and as the richest footballer on earth. Too late. The more he craved vindication, the more the light faded. In the end they put him out of his misery…
For some there was redemption: Italy, a country and a team that scuttled into the competition under cover of darkness to escape the bribery and corruption at home. Which they did.
For others there was myth. How else to describe the last hurrah of the great French side with, above them all, the great Zizou, summoned like a great wizard from an ancient legend, once thought lost but now found again, resurrected for one last great campaign then, just as sensationally, banished again?
For Germany there was reconstruction and, at last, self-acceptance. Whatever about the hands that grasped the cup, Germany won too. They put the party into participation. They loosened up and had a good time and the rest of the world followed, even the English.
Remember what happened when we started to feel good about ourselves after Euro 88 and the World Cup in 1990 and 1994? Watch what happens next. For the first time in almost a century, the world thinks well of Germany. Berlin is now the coolest city in Europe by some distance. And the long-dormant German economy, once the great engine of Europe, is taking off too.
But above all, they have started to believe in themselves and to accept who they are. By this I mean the footballers who have Turkish or African names or the two strikers with Polish backgrounds.
It’s not without problems, but it can be done. It takes time, but positive change can happen.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Northern Ireland is different. Even Sunday football is controversial. The more things change the more they remain the same. The marching season will go on forever.
You could be right. But listen, on this one we need more faith and less religion. Relax! Let’s find the common ground! One of these days they (both sides) will learn to accept themselves and in turn to accept others. And otherness.
The Irish have dealt with incredible change in the last ten years. We’ve now got 10% immigrants, the European average – it took us less than a decade, it took others a century. Change we can handle. It’s lack of change that’s the problem. But really, nothing is forever, even the bonfires and slogans and bigotry and hatred.
Sooner or later, both sides will lose the need to march, to commemorate, to rant, to hate. Different drums can be heard. One of these days they’ll stop marching and start parading - a Love Parade in Belfast that really is about dancing the blues away and summer bonfires that are to celebrate, not intimidate.
Imagine what might follow.