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| All that talk of Scottish independence gave a man from Belfast the jitters | All that talk of Scottish independence gave a man from Belfast the jitters |
| (about 1 month later) | |
| Some time in the course of the afternoon of 18 September I started to experience shortness of breath and dizzy spells. By late evening, when the tremors set in, I was pretty sure I was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. I recognised the symptoms, having wound up, early last year, attached to a heart monitor in the Ulster Hospital midway through the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. My wife recognised the symptoms too (it was she who phoned the taxi that took me to the hospital that night; I mean, she could hardly leave the children, and there was still half an episode to go). She not only recognised them, but was able to put her finger on the cause. “It’s the referendum,” she said. “You’ve been getting more and more worked up as the week’s gone on.” | |
| My wife wasn’t in Belfast, scarcely yet in the world, in March 1973 for the Northern Ireland sovereignty referendum, aka the border poll, which presented voters with the choice of a Northern Ireland within the UK and a reunited, fully independent Ireland. Time may have coloured my memories (as it is already hand-tinting Thursday last: dizzy spells? Tosh), but I close my eyes and I clearly see a scaled-down version of me, with scaled-up trouser bottoms, shaking like a leaf in the school playground ahead of the vote. No one in my increasingly loyalist area had bothered to tell me that nationalists were boycotting the poll and that the outcome – UK OK – was a foregone conclusion. I really thought this could be it, the end of the world as I knew it, with its constitutional guarantees and its irrefutable mathematics: six (counties) into 32 won’t go. | My wife wasn’t in Belfast, scarcely yet in the world, in March 1973 for the Northern Ireland sovereignty referendum, aka the border poll, which presented voters with the choice of a Northern Ireland within the UK and a reunited, fully independent Ireland. Time may have coloured my memories (as it is already hand-tinting Thursday last: dizzy spells? Tosh), but I close my eyes and I clearly see a scaled-down version of me, with scaled-up trouser bottoms, shaking like a leaf in the school playground ahead of the vote. No one in my increasingly loyalist area had bothered to tell me that nationalists were boycotting the poll and that the outcome – UK OK – was a foregone conclusion. I really thought this could be it, the end of the world as I knew it, with its constitutional guarantees and its irrefutable mathematics: six (counties) into 32 won’t go. |
| That was then. I have spent a large part of the 40 years since refuting the notion that because I am Protestant by birth I am unionist by political inclination. If I might be forgiven a grandson-of-Sam moment (“Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?”), “au contraire”. | That was then. I have spent a large part of the 40 years since refuting the notion that because I am Protestant by birth I am unionist by political inclination. If I might be forgiven a grandson-of-Sam moment (“Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?”), “au contraire”. |
| And yet, my wife was right: the Scottish referendum and the prospect of a yes vote had shaken me. And this despite the fact that, in Edinburgh the month before for the International Book festival, I had realised that almost all my Scottish friends – writers whom I greatly admired and been inspired by – were pro-independence. One of the highlights of the festival for me was William McIlvanney reading from his superb Dreaming Scotland pamphlet, an NHS-centred call to vote yes. And I have to say, sitting in my hotel room later, waiting until the end of the evening news, from London, for the two-minute round-up of “regional” Scottish happenings, it all looked pretty yes to me. | And yet, my wife was right: the Scottish referendum and the prospect of a yes vote had shaken me. And this despite the fact that, in Edinburgh the month before for the International Book festival, I had realised that almost all my Scottish friends – writers whom I greatly admired and been inspired by – were pro-independence. One of the highlights of the festival for me was William McIlvanney reading from his superb Dreaming Scotland pamphlet, an NHS-centred call to vote yes. And I have to say, sitting in my hotel room later, waiting until the end of the evening news, from London, for the two-minute round-up of “regional” Scottish happenings, it all looked pretty yes to me. |
| Then I came home. There’s no getting away from it, it skews the way you see things, living here. There has always been a special connection between Northern Ireland – or the north-easternmost part of the island, to be historically accurate – and Scotland. Their coastlines at the closest are only 12 miles apart. I grew up with stories of Presbyterians in times past rowing from one to the other to attend Sunday services. For the less zealous, Scotland has long been our point of entry to the Other Island: we have come at England through the west of Scotland ferry ports: Campbeltown, Ardrossan, Stranraer, Cairnryan. | Then I came home. There’s no getting away from it, it skews the way you see things, living here. There has always been a special connection between Northern Ireland – or the north-easternmost part of the island, to be historically accurate – and Scotland. Their coastlines at the closest are only 12 miles apart. I grew up with stories of Presbyterians in times past rowing from one to the other to attend Sunday services. For the less zealous, Scotland has long been our point of entry to the Other Island: we have come at England through the west of Scotland ferry ports: Campbeltown, Ardrossan, Stranraer, Cairnryan. |
| Northern Ireland with an independent eurozone state to the south and an independent eurozone state across a short stretch of water to the east could not but have looked – and felt – a little squeezed. More immediately, a significant amount of the colour would have drained from the union flags in which the city, or certain sections of it, abounds. Hence, the members of the Orange Order from here showing their solidarity by joining with 15,000 of their Scottish brethren and sistren (it’s not all boys, you know) in a march through Edinburgh the Saturday before the referendum. | Northern Ireland with an independent eurozone state to the south and an independent eurozone state across a short stretch of water to the east could not but have looked – and felt – a little squeezed. More immediately, a significant amount of the colour would have drained from the union flags in which the city, or certain sections of it, abounds. Hence, the members of the Orange Order from here showing their solidarity by joining with 15,000 of their Scottish brethren and sistren (it’s not all boys, you know) in a march through Edinburgh the Saturday before the referendum. |
| A bar on the Falls Road meanwhile paid for a pro-independence billboard. Graffiti artists on the eve of the poll climbed halfway up Black Mountain – visible from almost anywhere in Belfast – and painted “Yes Scotland”. | A bar on the Falls Road meanwhile paid for a pro-independence billboard. Graffiti artists on the eve of the poll climbed halfway up Black Mountain – visible from almost anywhere in Belfast – and painted “Yes Scotland”. |
| So we had people who believe in the political unity of the island of Ireland supporting the political partition of the island of Britain, while people who supported the continuing partition of Ireland tramped the streets in defence of the unity of Britain. “But it’s not the same,” they would both say, in much the same way as pro-independence Scots have distinguished between their “civic” nationalism and other forms of nationalism. (I’m humming the Smiths here: “Hand in Glove … no it’s not like any other love, this one’s different because it’s us.” But, then, nationalism … Morrissey … Moving swiftly on.) | |
| In my own house the referendum was discussed more or less daily. Would we need different money, and would there be an actual border, or just different road markings as there were here, my younger daughter wanted to know, displaying a knowledge of Irish political geography sadly lacking in the three young women who boarded the bus I was on recently from Belfast to Dublin airport. They drank the carry-outs they had brought with them so fast that they had to ask the driver to let them off to pee behind a decorative wall at the “border”, which was actually the toll bridge at Drogheda, about 40 miles inside the Republic of Ireland. | In my own house the referendum was discussed more or less daily. Would we need different money, and would there be an actual border, or just different road markings as there were here, my younger daughter wanted to know, displaying a knowledge of Irish political geography sadly lacking in the three young women who boarded the bus I was on recently from Belfast to Dublin airport. They drank the carry-outs they had brought with them so fast that they had to ask the driver to let them off to pee behind a decorative wall at the “border”, which was actually the toll bridge at Drogheda, about 40 miles inside the Republic of Ireland. |
| Earlier this week I was at Belfast’s Lyric theatre for a new production of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, first staged in 1987, but set in May 1974, a year after the border poll, during the loyalist workers’ strike that brought down the previous attempt at power-sharing here. As a reminder of how absurd, as well as tragic, things were then in this small corner of the world (“Lilliput”, one character calls it), Pentecost is without equal. A couple of friends I was chatting to afterwards told me they’d better go before their car was clamped. At least, I said – referencing a line from the play – you don’t have to worry any more about it ending up as the centrepiece of a barricade. And they both stopped and looked at me. “Don’t jinx it,” they said. | Earlier this week I was at Belfast’s Lyric theatre for a new production of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, first staged in 1987, but set in May 1974, a year after the border poll, during the loyalist workers’ strike that brought down the previous attempt at power-sharing here. As a reminder of how absurd, as well as tragic, things were then in this small corner of the world (“Lilliput”, one character calls it), Pentecost is without equal. A couple of friends I was chatting to afterwards told me they’d better go before their car was clamped. At least, I said – referencing a line from the play – you don’t have to worry any more about it ending up as the centrepiece of a barricade. And they both stopped and looked at me. “Don’t jinx it,” they said. |
| In its ruefulness their reaction reminded me of conversations I had last Friday, abroad in the town with three friends from, as we say, “different backgrounds”, each of whom volunteered the opinion that a yes vote could have meant “things kicking off here again”. As it is, Sinn Fein has, since last week, turned up the volume on its calls for a new Irish border poll. Martin McGuinness, our deputy first minister, thinks a debate as “exciting and enthralling” as the Scottish one is possible here. | In its ruefulness their reaction reminded me of conversations I had last Friday, abroad in the town with three friends from, as we say, “different backgrounds”, each of whom volunteered the opinion that a yes vote could have meant “things kicking off here again”. As it is, Sinn Fein has, since last week, turned up the volume on its calls for a new Irish border poll. Martin McGuinness, our deputy first minister, thinks a debate as “exciting and enthralling” as the Scottish one is possible here. |
| Well, that’s one way of putting it. | Well, that’s one way of putting it. |
| I ought to say my thoughts on the referendum were not entirely Northern-Irish-centred. I lived in England in the 1980s, and always thought it was the better for its being conjoined with Scotland, Wales too; that Britain at its idealistic best, was greater than the sum of its equal nation parts. And it is, of course, not the people of Scotland’s concern what we in our immoderation might do to one another now or in the future; but I blush to say that all that shaking the night of the vote was pure Belfast dread. | I ought to say my thoughts on the referendum were not entirely Northern-Irish-centred. I lived in England in the 1980s, and always thought it was the better for its being conjoined with Scotland, Wales too; that Britain at its idealistic best, was greater than the sum of its equal nation parts. And it is, of course, not the people of Scotland’s concern what we in our immoderation might do to one another now or in the future; but I blush to say that all that shaking the night of the vote was pure Belfast dread. |
| Until the result came in from Clackmannanshire. If only every episode of Breaking Bad had a moment like that. | Until the result came in from Clackmannanshire. If only every episode of Breaking Bad had a moment like that. |
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