Subtle Presbyterian ministers were laughed at by their neo colonial rulers because of their reluctance to consent to loaded term ‘Irish’

No thoughtful Northern Irish person who was alive during the late twentieth century was ever in any doubt about the arrogance of our neo-colonial rulers.

The surprising thing about your story of December 29 (‘Surreal moment as Irish Presbyterian leader ‘insisted to diplomats that he wasn’t Irish’) is that it shows how this arrogance was combined with ignorance, disrespect and lack of curiosity.

Senior officers of the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly, people whose position demanded respect, received scant consideration. Their reluctance to consent to the loaded term ‘Irish’ — when used in a political context — to describe their identity was regarded as ‘surreal’, ‘contradictory’ and, it seems, as evidence of their stupidity needing no further explanation or consideration.

In fact these senior members of an emphatically all-island institution, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, were men who would in some circumstances certainly have thought of themselves as ‘Irish’ but who declined to allow the term to be used as a political trap.

When I, on the one hand, am asked ‘are you Irish’ in a foreign land then I unhesitatingly answer ‘yes’ because I am a native-born and patriotic inhabitant of the island of Ireland, which is the question that’s being asked.

When, on the other hand, I am asked ‘are you Irish’ by a person from this island, who already knows where I was born and where I live then there are other words hidden in the background. What such a person is often actually asking is ‘are you Irish (and Catholic, and Gaelic, and nationalist, and republican). When I suspect that anything like this is what is really being asked, I will answer ‘no’.

This is not a difficult thing to grasp, it has long been understood by those who care to consider such things that Irish Presbyterians define ourselves in a subtle and complex way. We are, after all, as Christians ‘in the world but not of the world’. Irishness is one dimension, but only one dimension of our identity.

These subtle and intelligent men went to the meeting described and attempted to explain these complexities to their ignorant rulers, expressing very well the almost universal unionist and British self-identity of Presbyterians in Northern Ireland at the time.

As a reward, well, we see it in the note you quote from, they were laughed at behind their backs and then offensively patronised.

The neo-colonial administration was only interested in them so far as it could use them for its own purposes. The ‘John Dunlop syndrome’ indeed!

Rev Mark Wilson, Poyntzpass

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