A few weeks ago, nationalist parties who raised procedural issues regarding the decision to fund a sports pitch for a controlled college were accused by the DUP of being ‘sectarian.’ Now the DUP, on procedural and squandering money grounds relating to the decision to fund Irish Language signage in the new Belfast transport hub, is calling foul.
Is it also, in its expression of limited cultural democracy, open to the charge of adopting a prejudicial position with regard to the language?
Often, it’s not what you say but what people hear as unionism displays yet again flawed adjustment not just to the future but the present. It struggles not merely to turn a corner but to identify which corner to turn.
Gavin Robinson, MP and leader of the DUP may say that members of the party speak Irish but the party is hardly seen as champions of the cause and the debacle of the Irish Language ‘no it was only a draft and not agreed’ Bill remains a point of reference.
Jamie Bryson is doing what a Jamie Bryson does.
UUP leader Michael Nesbitt MLA, in his usual more measured way, on the same page as the DUP, identifies as part of the problem the ‘weaponisation of the Irish language’ and offers a qualified endorsement of incremental recognition of the Irish Language.
When you put this together, political unionism continues to see the use and advocacy of the Irish Language as ‘significant and controversial’; sitting uncomfortably within the cultural orbit of Northern Ireland, 2025.
Would it not be better served by informing itself and reflecting on this ‘issue’ on which its positioning is becoming increasingly isolated; exhibiting all the vulnerability of a movement experiencing decline.
The internal re-structuring and re-building of relationships clearly adjudged to have damaged his party and referred to by the DUP leader recently, will not address a deeper cultural malaise; evident in an at best condescending, at worst hostile, attitude to culture regarded as ‘not unionist or protestant.’
A small glass of change is being offered to a community with a major thirst.
We do not live in a cultural home where you can opt to close off some of the rooms. This simply does not sit with making Northern Ireland work for all and cannot be a slave to the fortunes and intensity of DUP/TUV/UUP electoral posturing to which a growing demography, of all backgrounds, is growing indifferent and finds tiresome.
Mike Nesbitt MLA may be accurate in referring to the weaponization of the Irish Language in that some have embraced it as an act of resistance and de-colonisation. However, this is not one-sided as prejudice towards the language is motivated by those who live culture in a narrow way and interpret it as diminishing their identity and preferred future.
These values remain deeply embedded within some sections of the community but are being gradually ‘de-commissioned’ as knowledge grows of the Protestant Gaelic tradition, Presbyterians and the Irish Language, the Celtic languages and the intertwined cultural and familial hybridity of Northern Ireland.
This sits alongside the educational benefits seen in bi-lingual education in Irish-speaking schools, the Turas project and the requirements of statutory requirements for the protection and esteem of minority languages, not least in the Good Friday Agreement.
It has also to be said there are many pre-occupied with other pressing social and economic issues which render them indifferent to any imagined and out-dated cultural and political tug of war; for whom culture and identity are not one and the same. Their experiences are synonymous with a pluralist environment and exposure to global media and trends; beyond binary bonfires, banners and politically loaded sporting allegiances and interests.
This is not out of keeping with a shared cultural history which has always been more diverse in music, writing, dramatic and visual arts than portrayed; now enriched by a broadening cross-fertilization of ethnicity, values and beliefs within both jurisdictions on the island and Great Britain.
Cultural hybridity is a like a river with many tributaries which eventually come together to reach the sea; a meeting of the streams or coming together of the waters as coined in the Scottish Gaelic Comar nan Alt.
The prevailing dispute over the transport hub is an opportunity for unionism and republicanism to abandon their King Canute-like tendencies and get with the flow; to find resolution and ensure that the pending decision to promote two cultural commissioners and cultural acts do not serve to dam the streams.
It will require both to design a cultural framework that celebrates diversity and modify cultural strategies aimed at promoting political agendas and homogeneity otherwise the omens from the current self-serving squabble do not look promising.