‘I’m proud to be from Northern Ireland’: reflections on a contested centenary

The centenary of the founding of Northern Ireland is to be marked on Monday – albeit overshadowed by political turmoil and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Eight figures from Northern Ireland reflect on a contested centenary and the nuances of identity.

‘I would identify as Irish’

Jenn Murray, 35, is an actor from Belfast who has appeared in Brooklyn, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

I’ve been reluctant to talk about identity but as I’ve got older I’ve realised you can. So, I feel proud to be from Northern Ireland. I would identify as Irish.

It’s a place where people are incredibly soulful and multifaceted. The education system is fantastic and there’s a fantastic sense of humour.

There’s also underlying resilience that people from Northern Ireland have, and you don’t realise that that exists until you go somewhere else.

When I went to drama school in Dublin and was auditioning, the feedback I would get sometimes was that “she’s not really Irish enough” and then when I moved to London, the feedback was sometimes: “She doesn’t have an English rose face.”

Yet when I came to America, Whit Stillman cast me in the Jane Austen adaptation Love and Friendship because it was a work ethic that mattered.

But there are communities that are not represented in politics, or culture. When you don’t see yourself in art, or music – you feel ignored. There’s been so many recent positives but we also have to address questions like “why are suicide rates so high?” and the horror of 12-year-olds throwing petrol bombs.

‘You feel more pressure to declare your allegiances’

Rosemary Jenkinson is an award-winning writer from Belfast. She has a play about loyalist bonfires, Billy Boy, and a short story collection called Marching Season due out this year.

Northern Ireland is my home. I feel it’s good to celebrate the centenary. But of course you have to be aware there’s another side of people who don’t like it. It’s complicated. Culturally it should be celebrated. We have an amazing roster of writers. The most important thing is to celebrate the present and not the divisiveness in the past.

I call myself British-Irish to acknowledge that I have two sides and two passports. I have Irish publishers so I’m different to many Protestants in that I do have that link to the south. I would say British is my first identity – it’s been my longest identity, the one I’m most comfortable with. I grew up watching British TV, reading British history.

I have felt more Irish as time has passed. Returning in 2002 (after many years abroad) I met a lot of republicans and learnt more about their culture. Traditional music sessions make you slide more into that culture and change your identity a bit. I’m very happy to go to a loyalist bonfire one day and an Irish language play the next.

The constitutional question has become so much bigger. You now feel more pressure to declare your allegiances. In a (hypothetical referendum) I would probably vote for Northern Ireland to stay in the union. But that may change. A united Ireland is not going to harm me personally.

‘I’m dead greedy. I’ll take all the labels I can get’

Jan Carson is a writer from Ballymena, county Antrim, who won the 2019 EU literature prize for her novel The Fire Starters.

What does the centenary mean to me? Not a lot to be honest. If anything it makes me a little afraid because things are quite tense at the moment. I’m a little afraid about how we handle the conversations around the centenary. It’s such a loaded term.

The flipside is the potential for good, open dialogue where we can learn about each other. When I have my artist’s hat on I feel incredibly optimistic. Art creates this space where you can approach these loaded topics with objectivity and nuance.

As far as identity, I’m dead greedy. I’ll take all the labels I can get. I have Irish and British passports. Most frequently I’ll say I’m from Belfast but I’m happy to be classified as Irish, British, Northern Irish, European. It allows me to have a different voice in different times.

I’ve been using The Fire Starters to discuss underlying issues in (marginalised) communities. We can’t just paper over the cracks: we have to tackle poverty and mental health.

I’m from an apolitical Protestant background. I don’t have huge concepts of what national identity looks like. I want to live in a place that’s peaceful, where kids have hope and prospects to go on to good lives.”

‘Celebrating 100 years … of what?’

Paul Connolly, 31, from Derry, is vocalist with Wood Burning Savages.

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Paul Connolly is a vocalist/guitarist. Photograph: Darron Mark/Alamy

The [centenary] means very little to me. It’s a distraction from fundamental problems that we really should all throw our weight behind.

The pageantry and the heraldry of celebrating 100 years … of what? We’re a population of 1.8 million people and 55,000 are registered as homeless, abortion laws were only repealed here in October 2019 … there’s still that rub of church and state.

Sinn Féin and the DUP are so similar. But they can’t realise that because they have their backs to one another like they are standing inside some sort of Hadron collider.

There’s a brain drain. And we need smart people to stick around. We need people not to be tribal.

We also need people to realise it isn’t just the union jack or tricolour. We have a huge migrant population and we are failing these people. Racist attacks are up and it feels like the politicians are ignoring that.

There are communities here who don’t feel they are being afforded the right to flourish, and that’s before we mention the LGBTQ community.

The future? We already feel adrift, whether you’re a Catholic nationalist or Protestant Presbyterian unionist loyalist, we’re cut off from the rest of either country you seek to feel part of.

‘I have a difficult relationship to growing up in the north’

Neil Hannon, 50 is a singer songwriter known for his work as frontman of the Divine Comedy.

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Neil Hannon on stage in Spain in 2016. Photograph: Jordi Vidal/Redferns

As someone who ended up living in the south, it’s become more obvious to me how different the Northerners – the Nordies – are as a tribe. There’s a kind of a slightly austere black humour.

I have a difficult relationship to growing up in the north. I think I’ve got mild trauma from the whole thing, not that it ever actively impinged on my life but you can feel the tension. It was a horrific period of time.

I’m sort of a weird hybrid. My family was much more of the sort of old Anglo Irish residue of sort of huntin’ and shootin’ variety. But then there was my “BBCification”, and I feel like so many of my sort of cultural sort of touchstones are due to watching the Beeb. We didn’t get RTÉ until the early 80s and the first time we sat down to watch The Late Late Show it was a huge cultural watershed moment. It was like, “Oh, my God they exist and they have TV.”

[Today] there are many, many signs of movement on social issues.There is a groundswell of the younger generation who are just not interested in the old tribal politics. And it’s about bloody time.

‘Everything has to be in three letters – UVF, IRA, UDR’

Tim Collins, 60, served in the British army for 23 years. He delivered a much noted eve-of-battle speech to troops during the Iraq war

Being Northern Irish is a unique set of circumstances that’s continually changing. We’re not English, Scottish or Welsh and the first time I was in the Irish Republic as a child I was shocked because I had never seen beggars. It was a deeply miserable place then.

People only understand how Northern Irish they are when you take them out of there. In my battalion you noticed in the barracks. Belfast lads from Poleglass [predominantly Catholic] would be happier sitting with the ones from Highfield [predominantly Protestant] than ones from Tipperary. It’s an unspoken thing, a particular sense of humour.

I don’t know what the centenary celebrations are going to look like. Many are saying it’s not to be celebrated and we also [politically] have a rudderless ship. You’ll have the historians talking about the history, but you’ll have our utterly useless, politicians arguing amongst each other.

The future? Northern Ireland is a place where everything has to be in three letters – UVF, IRA, UDR – but the game changers are NHS and DLA (Disability Living Allowance) which will keep it firmly in the UK.

‘There’s a dense, complicated history’

Bronagh Gallagher, 49, is a singer and actress from Derry. She has starred in films including The Commitments as well as theatre and television productions.

I totally identify as an Irish woman. That has never changed. But there’s obviously a very dense, complicated history and I have a lot of friends who identify as Northern Irish and others who identify as British in Northern Ireland – and I completely respect that.

That’s where we should start, where we turn the page now. If you want to call it different tribes, let’s not let that separate us or stifle the potential that we all know is here.

Looking back on the 49 years I’ve been on this earth, a lot of it is of reflection on how we have moved forward, such as in embracing the LGBT community. I also think of making a film in Derry with my sister that embraced the entire community.

But I also look back on things with a heavy heart – at the fatalities in every part of the community that could have been avoided by more responsible people. I think “what a waste of human life” when the answers were there at the beginning, when we grew up in what was basically a post-colonial structure.

‘There’s a sense of humour that holds people together’

Prof Ciaran Martin, 46, is a former senior civil servant from Omagh. He was constitution director at the Cabinet Office and CEO of Britain’s first National Cyber Security Centre.

Something of the magnitude of 100 years of the state deserves to be commemorated. But we’re going to miss the opportunity, because of the pandemic but also because of a lack of planning.

Without overdoing the current crisis, the centenary is like having a party where the birthday guest is having a bit of turn. It’s also the first time in 100 years where Northern Ireland has been completely destabilised by something from outside of it, Brexit.

The shame is that, in the way 1916 was commemorated in the Irish Republic, it might might have been opportunity for some self examination.

Still, a past reticence to recognise Northern Ireland as a valid construct has been falling away, so it’s unsurprising that there has been a growth in Northern Irish identity.

There are things that people have had in common. I came from a background where education really was valued and there has definitely been a pride in the quality of the system.

There’s also a sense of humour that holds people together having come through difficult times. You notice it when they are together elsewhere, because it’s a unique experience on the two islands.