Looking at life in a tainted idyll

By Steven King

DAVID Trimble recently (and not for the first time) found himself in some hot water for a few unflattering remarks about the Republic. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the reaction was most certainly, as he said later, Pavlovian - a predictable, learned response. Bertie Ahern was the notable exception.

He said he thought he knew why David said these things and, besides, he didn't really care what David thought of the Republic. The Taoiseach then got a touch in the Irish News for not being suitably offended.

For me, the most interesting aspect of these little flurries is that the first to the ramparts in the defence of the Republic - after the super-Irish who actually live in the UK - are Protestants, usually clerics, in the south.

Northern nationalists then say: "Even the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin says Trimble is a bigot." Case closed. Except I just don't believe that life for anyone anywhere is just quite as wonderful as these professional Protestants make out. Nobody ever had it so good. They protest too much for my liking.

I have to say (in case I should be called a bigot too) that I do think many things in the Republic are, indeed, commendable. For instance, while the south ruthlessly tried to keep out Jewish refugees after the war, in recent years it has generously provided a home to thousands of black, brown and yellow people fleeing persecution. It's just not the idyll some would have us believe. Neither is it a priest-infested rathole.

That came across very clearly in a book published a couple of years ago by the Rev Brian McConnell, a Presbyterian originally from Warrenpoint who spent 45 years ministering in Dublin. Entitled Memoirs of an Unrepentant Liberal, he noted, though, that: "Sometimes one got the impression that nice southern Protestants accepted the dogma that there was never any religious bigotry or discrimination in the Republic. And although there was very little there, compared to that in Northern Ireland, one should not be blind to the fact that it did appear from time to time."

The southern Protestant taboo on raising loving criticism, as opposed to whinging, has, at last, been broken with the publication of a new book, Untold Stories: Protestants in the Republic of Ireland 1922-2002.

Somehow I fear it will not receive the readership and deserved acclaim of Fionnuala O Connor's In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland.

It contains the reflections of more than 50 people, mostly Protestants, on life as part of a minority that has shrunk, unlike that in the north. While a couple fall into the we-never-had-it-so-good category and many more acknowledge things have changed for the better markedly in the last decade, the overall impression is of a tainted idyll.

The Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, for instance, complains that "the possibility of difference" still fails to dawn on many in the south and that government decisions are "predicated still on the assumptions of the prevalent majority religious culture".

Similarly, Carol Coulter notes that the Catholic majority often held a stereotype which failed to take into account working-class southern Protestants who were "despised".

Others say simply that their faces did not, or do not, fit and some still sense "residual sectarianism", the Kevin Barry reburial being cited as an example. One woman says at times she felt "unwelcome and frightened" as a Protestant.

While almost all the contributors said they felt very proud to be Irish, some were unsure Ireland was proud of them. Only as recently as the 1980s a prominent TD called Irish Protestants "enemies of the people".

For lots of reasons - Protestant awareness of their previous superiority and Catholic resentment of the same being just one - "Whatever you say, say nothing" is still sadly something of a motto, it seems.

If Protestants are slighted or ignored by government, they must rely on the good intentions of Catholics to rectify matters. No Protestant in the Dail or Senate since Yeats has ever cried "Foul."

Untold Stories, with its mournful air, makes challenging reading for Protestants and liberal Catholics alike, even if it is not without hope.

Perhaps, as Professor Stephen Mennell prophesies, the desirable outcome in the south is the "Protestantisation" of the majority.

Perhaps, as Dean Victor Griffin hopes: "We can all rejoice in the victory of inclusiveness over exclusiveness, of a common unity not limited but enhanced by diversity" when Irishness is seen as transcending religion and politics and is about a sense of place, of being "at home". Perhaps.

Eighty years after the Free State was inaugurated, though, one of the participants' chilling warning that "things would be a lot less peaceful for us if we constituted 20% per cent" is the one that informs northern consciousnesses still, David Trimble's included.

'Untold Stories: Protestants in the Republic of Ireland 1922-2002" ed. Colin Murphy and Lynne Adair, pub. The Liffey Press, £17.50.