James Dingley: Republicans are attacking unionists' sense of security - and they're winning

This sense of security is important for our emotional, psychological and physical, wellbeing and welfare, vital for our mental health.

We derive it from living with people ‘like us’, reflecting us back to us, reconfirming who we are.

It involves familiar surroundings, with recognisable landmarks, normal sights, easy conversations with neighbours, exchanging views and understandings that are common to all.

This reconfirms our sense of ‘being’, of who and what we are, where we come from and where we are going.

Consequently, it provides that sense of stability and security necessary for any ‘normal’ healthy life - things we often don’t think about because they are so normal and natural. That’s ontological security (from ontology, science of ‘being’).

The obverse is ‘ontological insecurity’, where the normal, natural order of things - landmarks, signs, symbols, patterns and routines - are rudely interrupted, causing emotional or psychological upset and harm.

This, in turn, often leads to violence, disruptive and anti-social behaviour as people seek to restore their normal sense of being by lashing out at threats, or signs of them. Most likely, republicans are well versed in this, better than unionists.

My personal experience of such ‘insecurity’ occurred a couple of weeks ago, when the local council informed me that enough residents in my ‘secure’ leafy, south Belfast, middle class residential area (50-50 mixed religion) had signed a petition to erect Gaelic street signs.

Horror! But why? Surely, it’s such a small thing, after the Belfast Agreement and ‘parity of esteem’ and ‘education for mutual understanding’, part of the ‘peace process’.

But republicans know better – Gaelic street signs attack unionist ‘ontological security’. It’s as sectarian as painting your kerb-stones. But, of course, smartly camouflaged as culture as against unionist ‘lack of’.

In my research I often heard the phrase - ‘Catholics move in and Protestants move out’. Gaelic signs strike at the unionist ontological security, by introducing the overtly political signs of republicans’ culture war that undermine unionists’ ontological security.

They feel threatened with an ‘abnormal’ that is socially and psychologically uncomfortable by an aggressive and intolerant nationalism that aims to impose its abnormal on unionists’ daily lives by changing the character of a neighbourhood.

Previously integrated areas, like mine, remained so because no one erected overt signs (Gaelic or painted kerbstones).

Part of the problem lies in unionist tolerance. They don’t wish to impose artificial abnormalities on others, just use English in every-day life and public spaces – the norm that unites us all (Gaelic doesn’t) because it is used by all.

Yet when unionists object to inherently sectarian place-naming, they are dismissed as ‘bigots’, ‘prejudiced’, ‘anti-peace’, ‘intolerant’.

But it is not they who are seeking to impose on others, they just wish not to be imposed upon by others’ sectarian intolerance – ah, but that’s (Gaelic-nationalist) multi-culturalism they are rejecting!

So, what is the unionist response? As usual, nothing: they are caught flat-footed, just like the contested (manipulated) marching band routes.

Peacefully integrated areas quickly become ghettos for republican domination. They set the mood, make unionists feel ‘ontologically insecure’, force them out. Republican intolerance triumphs once again.

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James Dingley is a former NATO instructor and university lecturer on terrorism