I'm currently reading The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards. I'm not reading it all the way through, but skipping over parts I find less interesting.
Ruth Dudley Edwards once "liked" a tweet of mine, but that's the limit of my interaction with her. (I forget what the tweet was.)
The Orange Order were the bogeymen in the Republic when I was growing up. There was much indignation about them marching through "nationalist" areas in Northern Ireland.
In our time, when freedom of assembly and freedom of speech is under such attack, the whole controversy about Orange parades appears in a very different light. To me, at least.
I still consider myself an Irish nationalist in the sense that I would like Ireland to regain its national sovereignty and to revive its national culture. However, it's shocking to see how Irish nationalism (on both sides of the border) has become quite the opposite of what it used to be; secularism, progressivism, globalism, and so forth.
This is an extraordinary change, but it rarely seem to be commented on. Indeed, Irish people today seem to see it as an organic and natural progression. They rarely seem to ponder the fact that their great-grandparents would probably be bitterly disappointed in their beliefs and way of life. This, in itself, doesn't make anything right or wrong; but at least it should cause some reflection.
As a matter of fact, I do think the change was organic and natural in the sense that some elements in Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism (for instance, the emphasis on oppression and victimhood) morphed fairly easily into liberalism. But it didn't have to happen that way.
Unionism has, to a greater degree, remained true to its religious and cultural heritage. Whereas the two main nationalist parties in Northern Ireland now embrace social liberalism and globalism, the DUP are pro-life, pro-family, and pro-nation.
History is full of ironies.
You make a good point.
ReplyDeleteIn general, it surprises me that people want to say things are the same or a continuation when they clearly aren't. How different do things have to be before people will admit that they are different?
Things can change organically and organic change can even be substantial, but a development is different than a divergence. For example, whatever is going on at that Harvard now, it doesn't have anything to do with Puritans. And yet people will try to make that link. But trying to claim that a divergence is a development doesn't give much insight.
It happens all the time! They've had to recast St. Brigid at a pagan feminist New Age goddess to introduce St. Bridget's Day as a public holiday here! Chesterton wrote a good bit about this. And it's a very good point about Harvard.
DeleteIn Ireland, the Fine Gael party is always being called "Blueshirts" because of a semi-fascist element in their history. But really, modern Fine Gael has nothing at all to do with the Blueshirts.
I met RDE at a social event once in London. She told a disparaging Famine joke to get a laugh from her rich English friends. To be fair to the latter, they looked embarrassed.
ReplyDeleteYikes. That's not good. Her visceral reaction to Irish nationalism is obvious in the text but, to be fair to her, she makes an obvious attempt to be fair to both sides and it isn't just a love-fest for the unionists.
DeleteI think, with a lot of those journalists and intellectuals who were anti-Irish nationalist and who had a thing for Ulster unionism or the British military tradition or British aristocracy or whatever...they are now realizing that the same forces they cheered on against Irish nationalism are just as ready to tramp down everything traditional, including the traditions they cherish themselves. It's amazing the alliances woke has created. Religious apologists and New Atheists, Irish nationalists and West Brits, social conservatives and feminists...