Irish Sneetches
John Bambenek, an academic professional for the University of Illinois and a columnist for the Daily Illini, makes an interesting point about the recent/current Irish conflict, in a Blogger News Network article today considering whether Islam is violent. It’s essentially a point Dr Seuss made in The Sneetches.
Bambenek doesn’t accept that is is religion that breeds violence, but before giving him credit I’m going to nit-pick:
Take North Ireland (sic) which is often described as suffering from sectarian violence. On one hand, you have the Catholics who want to claim North Ireland as their own, and on the other, you have the Protestants (Anglicans) who want to claim North Ireland as theirs
By ‘North Ireland’, he means “Northern Ireland”. Euphemistically many Irish refer to “Northern Ireland” as, “The North”, “The Six Counties”, or when trying to be funny, “Norn Iron”, but nobody calls it “North Ireland”. Nationalists including myself may not like it, but its official name is “Northern Ireland”. Pedantic maybe, but people in conflict over labels die for less.
Neither demographic, Catholics, or Protestants, necessarily want to claim the North as their own - it’s more that they don’t want the other side to claim it as their own. Typically about three quarters of the Protestant population want Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom (UK) of Great Britain and Northen Ireland, and about half of the Catholic population want Northern Ireland to be part of a united Ireland. These figures are not fixed.
Also, by ‘Anglicans’ he really means “Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Methodists” (if you’re listing in order of size) - so he should have left it at ‘Protestants’.
The problem is the fighting has nothing to do with religion. Belfast holds no particular weight for the Papacy, and unless Belfast figures into Henry VIII’s problems with his Y chromosome, it has nothing to do with Anglicanism either
Putting aside the Anglican thing again, this is a good point.
The fighting over North Ireland is a political fight based on two nation’s claims that the land belongs to them. The Irish (a predominantly Catholic people) claim that Belfast rightfully belongs to them. The English (predominantly Anglican) claim it is theirs. Religion isn’t the area of contention. Anyone who describes this as a sectarian fight largely misses the point or is intentionally trying to find a tendency of violence in religion where it does not exist.
By ‘English’ he means “British”. And he overlooks the fact that a sizeable number of British Protestants in Northern Ireland also call themselves Irish - though not in a political sense. This is similar to people in Wales being both Welsh and British. You may not like or understand that they call themselves ‘British’ but they might not understand that you call yourself American while excluding every other nationality in North and South America.
This is of course all very mean of me, because Bambenek’s point is about religion not being the specific area of contention - and this point is missed by so many people in the US who ask me, while they are in the middle of a jumbo hotdog in somebody’s back garden, why Protestants and Catholics in Ireland are killing each other when in the US Protestants and Catholics are eating hotdogs together, and he or she doesn’t care what anybody’s religion is.
At this point I tell them my religion is that of Islam, and I watch their hotdog.
See Also:
• Ban the Irish Language
• Prosperous, Cosmopolitan, and not very Catholic
• Ireland and/or Eire
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