Ulster’s History: Say Nothing

There’s a scene in My Fair Lady, where Eliza Doolittle has had enough and tells off the men surrounding her: Words!
“Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!

Is that all you blighters can do?”

I thought of Eliza yesterday during Talkback. Presenter Crawley was looking at the word ‘Ulster’ and what it meant to people like Mervyn Gibson,the Grand Master of the Orange Order.  It wasn’t totally clear but Gibson seemed to be saying he was an Ulsterman and an Irishman.

Well now. When’s the last time you heard a head honcho from the OO proudly proclaim his Irishness?Sounds like progress to me.

But there were a few gaping holes in the discussion which nobody seemed prepared to fill. In the course of the 40-minute and more discussion, there was virtually NO distinction or explanation offered for just what geographical entity ‘Ulster’ represented. Was it the six counties of the North-East, or was it  the six plus the three remaining counties of Ulster?

When I was at secondary school, our history teacher explained that Unionists talked about ‘Ulster’ so they could pretend there was some historical background, if in name only, to the newly-founded Northern Ireland.

But what really pissed me off was their brief consideration of the Planter. The point emphasised was that those from a planter heritage had as much right to consider themselves Irish as anyone.

That’s true, of course. But no room was given, not so much as a second, to what the Plantation of Ulster involved.

Simples. It involved people from Scotland and from England crossing the Irish Sea and seizing the homes and land of the native Irish.

Of course, history is stuffed with similar occurrences. The United States was built on the slaughter and disempowerment of the original native people . Ditto South Africa, ditto Australia, ditto New Zealand – and so it goes.

For the record – something that Crawley might find the cojones to include next time he gives the topic an airing:

Some 500,000 acres of Ulster land were seized by the planters. Tens of thousands of Irish families were forcibly displaced or marginalized, losing rights to land ownership and often being pushed to poorer, less arable areas or becoming tenants or labourers under new Protestant settlers.

Why did Crawley omit this huge injustice with historic reverberations?  Because it’s the truth Talkback is a programme on the British Broadcasting Corporation.