Mistaken Identity

If it's July, then there's marching and burning to be done in northern parts. That, and abusing the police and your fellow citizens, to the toot of the flute and the pop of the bottle. It's what you do. From father to son, from man to man and drum to drum, you learn to huff and quaff and puff.

Well, no change there.
Of course, as I write, the bands are wetting their whistles, as it were, and gathering. It is the morning of the 12th. One can't predict what will happen.
But still, there's a palpable sense of change, that it's dawning on the bowler-hats that you can't keep unleashing the rottweilers indefinitely, because one day they'll turn back on you. And so, 'responsible Unionists' have begun to distance themselves.
There's a long road ahead, and there'll be more of this shit. But maybe, just maybe, things are bottoming out.
This is the context in which the British Government has passed the Police Bill which implements the Patten Report. As a result, the RUC is to be replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
There are complaints on all sides. No change there either. Unionists will complain that young people won't join a compromised service and, well, nationalists will say pretty much the same thing! For the latter, the problem will be the association with the hated RUC. For the former, it will be to do with a dilution of the Ulsterness or Britishness (ie Protestantness) of the new service.
Historically, both sides defined themselves by what they were not. Nationalists were not British, ergo they were Irish. Unionists were not Irish, ergo they were British. And both looked backwards to an idealised past, in the nationalist case to a puritanical and largely mythical Irish Ireland and in the unionist case, to England in the inter-war years.
Northern Ireland is an anachronism in modern Britain. Nowadays a 'Brit' (to use the term beloved of its press) is likely to be of African or Asian extraction and be a practising Muslim, Hindu or an atheist. It's a polycultural and largely secular society.
By contrast, mainstream Northern society is chilly (i.e. not cool), conservative, white, and basically Protestant. Whereas modern Britain is, like it or not, a driving force in the modern world, Northern Ireland is constantly clawing its way back, through the garden party culture of the Empire of the Industrial era, to the 17th century.
But the industrial era is dead. And by defining themselves in terms of that now faded version of Britain, and as being not Irish, they have left themselves high and dry.
The Irish face a different, but no less daunting, dilemma. Their past is dead and buried too. And, as the country accommodates increasing numbers of immigrants, the definition of 'Irish' is equally subject to question.
What is it that defines Irish culture? What makes it different from British culture? Will that difference sustain? And, when you see the degree of attention paid to, say Manchester United or that disgusting mediaeval sectarian confrontation known as 'the Old Firm clash', you would have to wonder. Or check out sales of magazines, or viewers of soaps. Look at the names given to housing estates ridiculous names redolent of the same Home Counties garden party culture by which unionists define their Britishness.
Ya'd wonder. But I have no doubt that some smart young cookie is working on the PhD even as I write.
Meanwhile, real people in the real world are worrying about real problems. Like AIDS in Africa. The figures are frightening. One adult in three is infected in Botswana and South Africa, and one in four in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Lesotho. And to make things immeasurably worse, it now appears likely that it was generated by western medicine.
There are conflicting theories, of course, but the probability is that polio vaccines were made using monkey tissue and HIV jumped species. That's a crude description, but you understand. The prevalence of AIDS in Africa correlates closely with polio vaccination sites.
It's a catastrophe. And, as with so many other matters, the west has left Africa to its fate. Nigeria should be one of the richest countries on earth. Indeed, actually it is. But its wealth is diverted and stolen. So, instead of being renowned for its wealth, it is reviled for its corruption, repression and poverty.
Elsewhere, rescuers have given up hope for more than 100 people who died when a rubbish dump collapsed in the Philippines. The tip was known as the Promised Land. I ask you. And let us not forget the pathetic, horrible deaths suffered by the 58 Chinese found dead in a container truck at Dover. Leaving their world, as do refugees from Nigeria, in the hope of new lives in ours ...
In our world, Denmark and Sweden have been physically linked again after 7000 years by the Oresund Bridge. It is an incredible feat of engineering and construction and wealth. Now you can now drive from Gibraltar to the Arctic Circle.
In our world, we can crack the human genetic code, but we can't be bothered with AIDS in Africa.
Meanwhile in Ireland, it's July. We have our own miserable preoccupations. Like bonfires and marches.