ON July 21, 2000, the then Tánaiste and leader of the Progressive Democrats party, Mary Harney, addressed the American Bar Association in Dublin. In the course of that speech she made a claim that still resonates decades later: “Geographically we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin."
The PD leader was speaking to Americans, so you can be sure she wasn’t going to say anything nasty about them. But at the time and since, Irish people have been doing some soul-searching: Do we really feel more at home when we visit Boston than when we visit Berlin?
It’s in some ways a silly question. Boston for centuries has been a particularly Irish part of the US, whereas Berlin is full of people speaking a different language from Irish people, not to mention that Germany was The Enemy in two World Wars. So most Irish people would probably feel more at home in Boston, where the citizens are more likely to say, “Gee, I just love your Irish accent!” whereas in Berlin they’re more likely to say, “Can you say that again, and please to speak more slowly?”
Maybe it was from Mary Harney that our mint-new Taoiseach Simon Harris pinched the idea when he spoke to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly earlier this month. Simon said: “Probably people of my generation are more familiar now with London and Berlin and Paris than they might be with Belfast or Derry.”
You can see what Simon was getting at. Young people – in fact people generally in the South – don’t know an awful lot about the North. Why is that?
Well, for one, the party Simon now heads helped create two states in Ireland, leaving the North a place apart. Then, during the period of the Troubles people were frightened at the thought of visiting the North as their TVs and newspapers were full of stories about shootings and killings and explosions. The southern media presented NEI as a crazy place where Protestants attacked Catholics and vice versa. Who would want to visit a place like that? Now that the Troubles have largely ended, people from the South do visit the North more frequently, but such was the length and depth of anti-North propaganda, many people from the South still haven’t shaken this sense of the Wild North.
The Belfast BBC, which for decades ignored all things Irish, decided it would test Simon Harris’s words. They showed a map of the North to young Southerners with the names of the six counties blanked out. Several of the young people got identification hopelessly wrong, one young man mistaking Lough Neagh for County Derry.
But as Chris Donnelly and others have since indicated, a lot depends on what part of the South you come from. If you’re from Donegal or Louth or Cavan, there’s a much better chance you’ll know where various Northern counties are on the map; if you’re from Kerry or Clare, there’s less chance.
Confession time: If I took a similar test, I’d almost certainly fail to identify several Southern counties. I studied Geography for just one year at secondary school and lived in the South for seven years. I continue to be clueless at reading maps, never mind blank maps.
Fortunately, you don’t prove your sense of identification by being a Geography whizz-kid. The fact that you can’t name all the counties in the North on a map doesn’t make you stupid or invalidate your Irish identity in any way. What it does is emphasise is the absurdity of dividing a small island in two. It also suggests Geography teaching is not given a terribly high priority in our schools, North and South. And, most importantly, it shows how lasting the South’s keep-them-at-arms-length policy has been.
