For all Northern Ireland's problems, we vote with our feet and love to come home

There is a famous passage in the classic American novel, The Great Gatsby, in which the narrator reflects on his origins in the West, something he shares with other key characters in the story.
People arriving at Belfast City Airport before Christmas, on Friday December 21 2018. The dash back to Northern Ireland for the festive season even happened during the Troubles. Pics taken by PressEyePeople arriving at Belfast City Airport before Christmas, on Friday December 21 2018. The dash back to Northern Ireland for the festive season even happened during the Troubles. Pics taken by PressEye
People arriving at Belfast City Airport before Christmas, on Friday December 21 2018. The dash back to Northern Ireland for the festive season even happened during the Troubles. Pics taken by PressEye

The action in the book takes place over a summer on the wealthy US east coast in the ‘roaring’ 1920s, but Nick Carraway, the fictional figure who describes the tragic events (parties, thwarted love, ending in a death), reflects on his earlier, simpler life in the Mid West.

Nick writes: “One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.

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“Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances ...

“That’s my middle-west — not the wheat or prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters.”

I was in sixth form when I read that short but vivid novel by F Scott Fitzgerald, and Carraway’s use of the phrase “that’s my middle-west”.

The sense of excitement he describes at returning home is one of the few passages of literature that I remember well, decades later. It was only when I got older that I realised that it had struck a chord with people in places around the world, of returning from a big, anonymous, glamorous city to a smaller, cosier community miles away.

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But I think such thoughts are particularly resonant in Northern Ireland. We often say that “everyone knows everyone” in NI, and at times it can seem almost claustrophobic: when, say, you dash to a large supermarket and bump into people you know, and so feel you have to say hello when you would prefer to nip in and anonymously.

Yet I often look round such a vast store on a busy day, perhaps a few miles from where I grew up, and think of the reverse: not the handful of people I do know but the hundreds of people about whom I know nothing, and will never know anything, despite us living parallel lives near each other.

Northern Ireland is both a large enough community, approaching two million people, to be a significant UK region, and also small enough that we feel a sense of solidarity and community and pride when, for example, someone achieves great sporting things, such as Dennis Taylor or Rory McIlroy.

And, like Nick Carraway in Great Gatsby, you really see that affection for ‘home’ at Christmas. People who have moved to London or Dublin or further afield hurry back for the festive break. Until late on Christmas Eve, planes fly into our airports crammed with returnees.

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This is how it was even during the Troubles. I do not recall 1972, the most violent year, because I was aged one and living in America. But I do begin to remember Christmases after 1974, when my parents had returned here after living abroad.

Back then, in the turbulent 70s, my Jewish American uncle, who had no connections to Ulster prior to marrying my late aunt in Boston, would travel with her and their kids to south Belfast each December to visit my grandparents. He recalls the darkness, the checkpoints and the lack of city nightspots other than Skandia restaurant.

Even during the Troubles, NI exerted a homeward pull on its expats. When I reached adulthood, I became curious as to why my parents had returned from a quiet life in a house overlooking America’s northeast coast to NI, as the Troubles raged. It had, they replied, seemed in 1974 as if the discord was about to be resolved (Sunningdale).

The brain drain from Northern Ireland is real, but mitigated by the many people who ultimately return here after years away.

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In my early teens I moved from one school to another that began at age 13, so I have the good fortune to be linked to two different schools, and recently attended two reunions. Many contemporaries from both now live faraway, yet I was struck by how powerfully people want to attend such events, often including those who disliked school, and how some of them will travel great distances to do so.

I am also struck by the way that even people who could not wait to get out of Northern Ireland, people who profess to despise it and who happily resettle elsewhere in the world, often find that a large part of them misses NI when they do leave.

I have heard many stories about such people, from a wealthy doctor in California who, when he got older, increasingly missed NI and, after drink, got sentimental about his dream of returning to buy a pub, to a teacher of mine who lived happily in the hot Middle East, yet felt a great joy when he returned to the damp of his native west Belfast.

The local political situation is now as bad as it has been in years, yet I draw hope from the way most of us love NI. It is, at some deep level, an intuitive vote of confidence.

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Like Carraway’s memories of the train trips past Chicago, countless people will recall the Christmas dash home by ferry and plane, and think: “That’s my Northern Ireland.”

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor