“Let ambition fire thy mind”
Those words, allegedly spoken by William of Orange to his troops on the eve of the Battle of the Boyne, are painted on a gable wall that greets you on entering the Sandy Row area of Belfast. I see those words often: my parents park the car near that gable wall as they drop me off to board the bus that, for almost all of the 10 years of my adult life, has taken me away from Belfast and (via Dublin Airport) on to Cambridge, London and now to Dublin. As the bus pulls out from the station, I often ponder William’s words and how Northern Ireland measures up to them. Alas, for me and many other young people from Northern Ireland today, the price of ambition is emigration.
It was not always so. The restless ambition of a class of 18th- and 19th-century industrialists and entrepreneurs raised Belfast from the Lagan mudflats into a city that was defined by superlatives: the highest quality linen; the biggest ships; the most talented engineers. The abandoned site of the former Mackies factory is visible in the distance as the bus gathers speed on the way out of west Belfast, one of many silent testimonies to this era still standing sentinel over the city.
It is doubtful the businesses that made Belfast could have survived the sweeping global forces of deindustrialisation, but the Troubles sharpened this decline as Belfast traded its industrial prowess for a different set of superlatives: the most bombed hotel; the highest peace walls; the deadliest square miles.
There is peace now, and we are to be grateful for it. Yet the old divisions on which Northern Ireland was founded remain. The bus turns off the motorway to join the A1 to Dublin; the second order status of the road to Dublin compared with the motorway through the old unionist heartlands of the Lagan Valley and north Armagh is a reminder of the extent to which these old divisions continue to inform Northern Ireland’s structure today.
Had the bus somehow missed the turn-off on to the A1 – as some of my Dublin contemporaries, unaware of the North’s infrastructural idiosyncrasies, have been known to do – it would eventually have reached the end of the motorway at Dungannon. I am a son of Belfast but a grandson of Tyrone, and Dungannon has been the hinterland of my dad’s side of the family for as long as anyone can remember or research. Growing up, it was Dungannon and not Dublin that was more often the destination when setting off on the motorway.
The family home in Dungannon was a grey terraced house layered with gently accumulating history within. The history was that of the generation of Ulster Protestants that built Northern Ireland into the solid house, but cold house, that David Trimble famously spoke of. Among my family there were Orange Order officials, select vestry members and unionist councillors – all the hallmarks of solid, upstanding Northern Protestantism. There was ambition in these men and women too, but it was an ambition to defend what they had rather than looking outwards to the fast-changing world beyond.
Those ancestors are gone now, and I regret that I did not get the chance to record their voices before they fell silent. I am seeking to remedy this by recording the recollections of my parents and their generation. This is all the more important as so many of my parents’ generation quietly kept their heads down while the Troubles raged around them, their ambitions confined by Seamus Heaney’s maxim that “whatever you say, say nothing”. But their silence should not be mistaken for inaction: they held together families, communities and the very fabric of society itself; they voted for the Belfast Agreement and hoped for better days, but have seen many of their children make their lives elsewhere.
These people were peacemakers before former combatants began trademarking the term. In Northern Ireland, the questions so often asked – directly or more often indirectly – are: who are your people? What is your tribe? Well I proudly call these quiet peacemakers my people and my tribe.
Anyhow, my mind wanders but the bus does not. Before long Banbridge is bypassed and Newry safely navigated. The Border comes into view; except it doesn’t really. Thankfully the warnings that Brexit would herald a return to physical infrastructure on the Border have not come to pass, but borders are more insidious than that. As John Hume knew, they exist in the mind as much as on the ground. This means they can travel with you.
When outside of Northern Ireland I often struggle to articulate what (if anything) it means to be “Northern Irish”, but I know that I feel Northern Irish when I meet someone else from this place and find myself subconsciously playing that delicate game of ascertaining on which side of Northern Ireland’s ethno-religious border line they lie. One does not think any more or less of a person upon ascertaining the answer, but one knows the phraseology to use, cultural references to play upon, conversational topics to avoid. I smile ruefully as I recall the times my antennae have failed me: selecting the wrong nomenclature for Derry-Londonderry; the sporting references that fell flat; and the subtle attempts at conversational engineering to attempt to rectify my errors. Smoke-signals are indeed loudmouth compared with us.
The bus crosses the Boyne Valley Bridge, named in honour of Mary McAleese for her contribution to bridge-building between North and South. It is an easy metaphor, but the road between the North and the South rarely runs in such straight lines. For there is another Boyne Bridge on this bus route, one that connects the Belfast bus centre to Sandy Row and the aforementioned mural of King William. This latter Boyne Bridge is due to be demolished to make way for the next stage of Belfast’s Grand Central Station development, but its demolition is currently the subject of protests from local loyalists that have included the daubing of threatening graffiti on the closed entrance to the bridge.
The Boyne Bridge protests fit a familiar pattern of loyalist rearguard action against developments perceived as threatening their cultural identity and heritage, albeit there are also long-standing economic grievances being expressed in the current protests. Paradoxically, it also prompts me to muse that the Boyne is not really the right site for understanding the Northern Protestant psyche, rather it is the old siege mentality forged in Derry that continues to hold sway. It was, after all, from Derry’s walls in 1689 that the cry of “No Surrender” was first heard. I long for my fellow Northern Protestants to step out from behind Derry’s walls and to forge a new, confident identity that can take its place as a part of the rich and growing tapestry of identities that make up Ireland today. However, that particular bridge must be built from both sides: those who desire to see more Northern Protestants comfortably call themselves Irish must recognise that in order for them to do so, what it means to be Irish must change also.
After a lap of Dublin Airport to deposit those whose ambitions have taken them to farther shores, Dublin draws into view. The lines of office blocks along the Liffey quays are monuments to present success, not past glories. This feels like a grown-up state that has learned, through long and often painful experience, to stand on its own two feet. Northern Ireland, by contrast, remains dependent on the formula milk of the Westminster subvention. Yet on an individual level, the economies can look very different. My Belfast contemporaries can buy a house and start a family more easily than their Dublin counterparts. It is the Northerners who may feel more like grown-ups in their daily lives.
Yet while Dublin has its problems, these are largely problems of success and not of backwardness. Moreover, they are problems that Belfast could help to solve. Dublin is bursting at the seams, whereas Belfast has the capacity to absorb much of this pressure if only their economies could work more closely together. I hope that in time the Belfast-Dublin bus, and the new hourly train service, will be populated by more people doing business between the two cities and forging an economic corridor that can rebalance North-South economic development to allow both parts of this island reach their full potential.
I arrive at my house in the Dublin docklands. A portrait of Hume sits on the wall above my desk, his stressed and slightly contemptuous look reminding me that whatever problems we may face in the North and South today, we have overcome more intractable problems before. I then cast a glance at the Keith Drury artwork that I have placed above the sofa. The artwork depicts Stormont in the rain, with Edward Carson’s statue beckoning the sons and daughters of Ulster towards him. Beneath Carson, there is a line of umbrella-clad people boarding a bus to an unspecified destination. Therein lies the quixotism of Northern Ireland, a place that draws you in and pulls you away in equal measure. Physically and professionally, I have pulled away from Northern Ireland; mentally I am not sure I ever will.
A final, straightforward, thought: the Belfast bus goes both ways. Whether staring from Belfast, Dublin or elsewhere, all of us on this island could learn a lot from taking a few more return journeys. I believe we would find new friendships, shared values and bigger ambitions to fire our broadened minds.
Ross Neill is a solicitor practising in Dublin
