Anna Lo died last month. She was a former Alliance MLA and the first Chinese woman to sit in a legislative assembly in Europe. But it wasn’t for that reason most people remember her. Or certainly not why I remember her.
Some ten years ago she did an interview with The Irish News and in the course of it she said that she was “anti-colonial” and that the partition of Ireland was “artificial.” If she had said that a reliable source had told her that Queen Elizabeth suffered from uncontrollable diarrhea, the impact couldn’t have been more shattering.
Arlene Foster declared `Ms Lo should apologise for using such “deeply insulting language”. And that was only the start of it. “What exactly does her reference to being ‘anti-colonial’ mean? Does Anna Lo believe that Northern Ireland is comparable to a colony and does she view unionists as colonists? Northern Ireland is not a colony; it is a full and equal part of the United Kingdom.” Jim Nicolson MEP also jumped in with claims that this meant the Alliance Party was “a cold house for unionists.” You could say that Anna had definitely touched a unionist nerve.
Why were Arlene and Jim and other unionist politicians left quivering with wrath? Because they knew Ms Lo had been demonstrably accurate in using both phrases.
Of course NEI is a colony. History tells us that it was planted by English and Scottish settlers, who seized the land belonging to the native Irish and declared it theirs. Time and again throughout the centuries, the Irish people have shown that they did not want their land taken from them. As with so many imperial conquests, the indigenous people eventually gave up hope of reclaiming their land and focused instead on wresting back jurisdiction from the invaders. That’s what happened in 1916, which led to the 26-county Free State and eventually today’s Republic of Ireland. This required the construction of a border where there never had been one. Had Britain aimed to retain all of Ulster, they might have been able to make a case for the new northern state being built on some sort of historical foundation. But instead, with painstaking exactness and many squiggling lines on the map, they constructed a totally new statelet in the North-East of Ireland (NEI).
I wouldn’t expect Arlene or Jim to applaud Anna Lo’s analysis, but they really shouldn’t have painted themselves into a corner where they denied that NEI is the tattered remnant of colonial rule in Ireland, and that the border between NEI and the Republic was created with. one objective in mind – the creation of a boundary line that would mark in perpetuity a Protestant state for a Protestant people. Look at the border on a map and you’ll see how eye-strainingly jaggety it is.
The Good Friday Agreement involved a hugely generous gesture by Irish nationalism. Instead of claiming that the Irish people should be allowed to rule themselves from Coleraine to Cork, they agreed that unionists, the descendants of the original land-grabbing colonists,should be permitted to maintain NEI as is, until a majority of people in NEI as well as the RoI voted otherwise.
Did unionists delight in this open-handed gesture? Nah. Instead unionism rose from the GFA table muttering that they still were in charge, what we have we hold. Alas – bad move. The only chance of maintaining a majority of votes as unionist were lost as nationalists digested this mean-spirited unionist myopia.
A border poll is coming – just when we can’t say, but probably sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, if unionist politicians have any savvy, they will acknowledge that they created an artificial border and that they are the descendants of planters put here originally by the British Empire. You really don’t win friends by throwing a hissy-fit because someone speaks the obvious truth. A colony marked by a tortuous border – like it or detest it, that’s what it is.
You got it bang on, Anna.
Historically you could ride a horse and carriage through this. It is just poor Irish history.
Back to basics.
– Ireland has been settled by wave after wave of settlers for at least 10,000 years. Go back further in time and we all probably came out of the canopies of Africa. We are all made from the same stuff across Europe.
– Settlers arrived from Scotland prior to the Plantation, including the MacDonnells in the Glens of Antrim.
– The English wanted to fill Ulster with Anglicans, not troublesome Presbyterians from the Scottish Lowlands.
– Most of the Scots who came to the North of Ireland were economic migrants who became tenant farmers.
– Other Protestant settlers also arrived, including French huguenot refugees escaping a murderous French regime.
– Presbyterians suffered under the Penal Laws and 250,000 of them fled Ireland during the 1700s. They fought against English colonialism in the American Civil War and many turned out in the 1798 Rebellion.
– Adams and Hume are ‘colonial’ names. We are a lot more intertwined than we care to admit. 1 in 3 new relationships in East Ulster are now ‘mixed’.
Those who truly want to unite the Irish people need to embrace history and not polemic. They also need to accept that in the North there are a great many Irish people who are fiercely loyal to Britain, and a great many Irish people who are not. Putting labels on them does not gloss over those realities.
Historically you could ride a horse and carriage through this. It is just poor Irish history.
Back to basics.
– Ireland has been settled by wave after wave of settlers for at least 10,000 years. Go back further in time and we all probably down from the canopies of Africa. We are all made from the same stuff across Europe.
– Settlers arrived from Scotland prior to the Plantation, including the MacDonnells in the Glens of Antrim.
– The English wanted to fill Ulster with Anglicans, not troublesome Presbyterians from the Scottish Lowlands.
– Most of the Scots who came to the North of Ireland were economic migrants who became tenant farmers.
– Other Protestant settlers also arrived, including French huguenot refugees escaping a murderous French regime.
– Presbyterians suffered under the Penal Laws and 250,000 of them fled Ireland during the 1700s. They fought against English colonialism in the American Civil War and many turned out in the 1798 Rebellion.
– Adams and Hume are ‘colonial’ names. We are a lot more intertwined than we care to admit. 1 in 3 new relationships in East Ulster are now ‘mixed’.
Those who truly want to unite the Irish people need to embrace history and not polemic. They also need to accept that in the North there are a great many Irish people who are fiercely loyal to Britain, and a great many Irish people who are not. Putting labels on them does not gloss over those realities.
Thanks for your thoughts, Keith. You have provided a much more detailed historical account, and I”d struggle to disagree with any of it. However, facts should be faced. England planted Ulster and Ireland generally. The partition of Ireland was indeed artificial, and so was the border – as I suggest, just look at it. Facing and articulating these historical developments doesn’t mean a thing in terms of how we now regard each other. You (or I) may be the descendant of a Planter or a Gael, but we’re both Irish. Artificial boundaries and statelets within Ireland cut us off from one another. I hope the border poll happens as soon as possible and that it is won by UIers first time out. And I know that northerners, Planter and Gael, will have a hugely valuable contribution to make in a new Ireland.
Footnote: you’ll notice I haven’t called you or your writing names. It’s a good habit, I think.
Ireland is divided for British Imperial Strategic interests . The Opinions of the Ulster Unionists were a figleaf to obscure that truth. The Brits don’t give a fiddler’s f–ingernail for them as coolly and Brit
Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook wrote in his memo to Attlee when the latter was helping to
set up NATO in 1939, waging a genocidal war in Malaya, under the euphemism “Emergency”
setting up the British Welfare State with the proceeds of the theft of Malayan Rubber and TIN,
not to mention of the theft of oil from Iran ….
A border poll cannot be held unless decided on by a UK Cabinet Minister. Keir Starmer is resolved to
campaign for retention of the Gibraltar of the North.