‘The Fact of the Matter. 29.3.17’ by Randall Stephen Hall

As we sit at this point of impasse in Northern Ireland, once more the two leading parties at the Assembly refuse to budge.They get their bullish hard masks on to play the wee game for a further round of talks.

The public look on and the majority of reasonable everyday folk  shake their heads

like cows in the field, unable to do or say anything that will move things along.

But if the public really new the fact of the matter how would they feel ? Would they believe it

and would it make many of them wind there necks in?

How can I put this simply, in a way that is easy to digest? Well, here goes.

As a community in Northern Ireland we share space with each other. Due to an inherited and agreed sense of difference we have been in conflict for hundreds of years with one layer of confusion upon another.

Much of what we believe in, at its core, is not true. Did you hear that? Much of what we have accepted about ourselves is a lie, an untruth, a mental toxin that keeps us apart.

At its most simple we see ourselves as either Irish or British. A broad brush but simplistic version of our shared history. It sets most of the detail and historic narrative aside and brings the story down to a level of picking two football teams. Even primary school children would grasp that concept.

In other words it reveals the nub of the problem in 2017. It’s all about land, domination, winning and who can stick the most goals in the net (YES!).

Let’s go back to the beginning and talk about the island we live on. We call it Ireland now but it had no name then, around 8,000 BC at the end of the Ice Age. Around that time people came to live on an island (part of a group of related islands) off the shores of Europe.

No one owned this island and the first people to arrive lived and moved about as hunter gatherers. What language did they speak? No one knows but some of the names for our rivers and mountains come from that time.

Over time, around 4,000 BC, other people came bringing farming skills, introducing ways of living in a more settled way, cultivating fields, introducing field walls, land divisions, seasonal rituals and a greater sense of ownership. A sense of hierarchy that has not really changed.

Now if we jump quite far ahead to 700 AD (the time of the rath) this land dependant society had evolved into a much more distinct entity with a language (sounding different throughout the island) with the ordinary people looking for leadership from their local kings (an rí).

If we look at the Annals of the Four Masters we can see that, even in the early Christian era, Ireland was a deeply troubled place with war as a constant fixture in the seasonal calendar. If you think we only recently have had “The Troubles” I suggest you should check out early Irish history, when jealousy, war, death, betrayal, destruction and enslavement was, very much, part of the fabric of society.

If we regard early Ireland then as divided into 5 divisions, centred on the Hill of Uisneach (ISHNAK) (not to be confused with Tara /Teamhair) with MIDE or Meath at its centre, some esoteric experts regard the North, even then as the area with a character given over to war.

Different waves of people continued to come to dominate the Island of Ireland. It was always about land, money and the potential to make money. Rarely about religion. Religion was an easy way to divide folk.

So with the coming of the Vikings around 795 AD the early Irish Church (often physically fighting amongst itself) was looted for gold, for money, for power, by people who were also great traders and the city builders of Dublin, Carlingford, Wexford, Limerick and others, giving the modern name of Ulaid-Ster to old Ulaid to give us Ulster.

Following the Vikings about 300 years later came the Normans (Northmen/Viking mercenaries who had settled in this area of Northern France) via Wales, bringing with them the language of the court, French. Their echo can still be found around the old Dublin Pale with names like De Lacy, Fitzgerald, Fitzgibbon, Fitzhenry and Fitzherbert. (There are still some “Herberts” to be found to this day, in politics).

Now the Vikings, (with Irish mercenaries) supposedly defeated by Brian Boru (and an army full of Viking mercenaries), didn’t leave Ireland. Just like the Normans, they became quite a well heeled part of Irish society.

“They didn’t go away you know.”

If we rush on ahead in time to the conflicts between Ireland and the court of King Henry the 8th we encounter what seems to be a religious conflict. But it’s really more about access to monastic land and wealth and a war chest, to go fight the Spanish.

Can you see a theme developing here?

The Nine Years War in Ireland left the North of Ireland deeply scared and divided by the genocide the “Essex Strategy” and the actions of Queen Elizabeth the 1st. The events of 1603 have never been fully addressed and the many locals who died from the sword and a man made famine have yet to be accounted for.

These events have never really reached the consciousness of the side of our community that sees itself as British due to lack of education. Like the Armenian massacres in Turkey, at the beginning of its creation as a state, these events would be a hard thing to accept.

Yet the unaddressed genocide at the end of the Nine Years War has effectively contaminated the foundations of the modern 6 County Ulster by never being discussed by young people then or now.

I won’t go much further, but I just want to say this. That with the coming of the Ulster Plantation the North of Ireland was already, very much, a collection of “mixed stock”, not even accounting for the thousands upon thousands of European, Scandinavian, Arctic and some African slaves, brought to Ireland from early times.

From the beginnings of the Plantation on, it is easy to see that the Irish found love and companionship with the Scottish, the English, the Reiver (what’s a Reiver now?), the Huguenot, the Chinese and more recently, the African, the Polish and more. The process is ongoing.

You cannot stop Love. it moves like clean water through the cracks of immoveable rock.

The truth is that there is undeniable evidence that the story our politicians give us and the historical realty, created by love and attraction are at odds with each other.

But can you, as an individual, accept the fact of the matter. For the fact of the matter is that we are a ragbag mixture of genetic and cultural influences, living on an island, cajoled by a political elite who want to shoe horn us into an imagined view of either being merely Irish or merely British, like factory owners. They have to turn us into a product in a box to put on shelves to maintain their reason for being.

The fact of the matter is that there is another truth out there about ourselves. Waiting to be discovered. It sits amongst us like an old friend. We have so much to offer each other if we can only see who we really are. As diverse and mongrel as the wild flowers in the fields and pastureland, once more being given space to grow along our roadsides and on the edge of things.

One day I hope we will accept this and evolve our ancient truth into something wonderful.