Rundale

Stephen O’Neil

‘defining what needs to be known’

In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph’s Sam McBride in April 2025, Mícheal Martin gave a wide-ranging criticism of the current state of debates around a United Ireland. Taking aim in particular at what he called the ‘contrived approach’ of the ARINS project, the Taoiseach claimed that ‘we [Fianna Fáil] know the history of the northern state and all of that’. This clearly impressed McBride, who described Martin as someone ‘with deep personal knowledge of Northern Ireland… He knows [it] well enough to know the counter arguments. He’s rejected them not from a position of ignorance, but from one of knowledge’. This last word – knowledge – is one that Martin has repeatedly tried to associate himself with. More recently addressing the calls to prepare for an Irish Unity referendum, the Taoiseach suggested that the twenty-six county state should set about ‘defining what needs to be known… a rigorous, independent and dispassionate base of knowledge on which you can have a credible discussion about constitutional futures’. On such terms this ‘knowledge’ can only be accessed on a need to know basis, in its design disqualifying anyone who actually wants a United Ireland.

Across the Irish Sea, this kind of gatekeeping has long been at work, its most recent manifestation being the British government’s ‘official history’ project which has empowered their selected and vetted historians – none of them republican – to produce an ‘understanding’ of the conflict with special access to evidence that those seeking justice have been denied. As Rory Rowan noted in a previous issue, the production of this ‘history’ is essentially ‘sustaining centuries of epistemic violence suffered as a result of colonialism’ in Ireland and elsewhere. Where the British state is maintaining a hierarchy of victimhood in regards to the conflict, both states are currently reinforcing a hierarchy of knowledge that has defined contemporary commentaries on the north of Ireland.

Martin has certainly not been alone in claiming knowledge, personal or otherwise, of the six counties. This was most recently demonstrated by the absurd decision to allow the Orange parade at Drumcree, and the inevitable and wholly justified resistance to it. Fintan O’Toole, in his own contribution to the manufactured establishment media furore, railed against a banner which claimed that ‘From Gaza to Garvaghy Rd, Resist Occupation & Fascism’. For him, this comparison was unacceptable because it had failed his own knowledge test:

Anyone with a knowledge either of history or of the contemporary world should know what occupation and fascism look like. Northern Ireland is not occupied – its sovereignty is entirely a matter to be decided by a majority of its population in a democratic vote.

The links between the Orange Order, the six-county government, and the origins of fascism are also available to people with a ‘knowledge of history’, as is the British military’s continuing role in the ‘democratically’ gerrymandered six counties. In any case O’Toole has been happy enough to season his own analyses with such comparisons when, for example, calling the Catholic Church’s control of education a system of apartheid. No such parallels are allowed for the petty squabbles north of the border.

I am less concerned with O’Toole’s efficacy as an historian or memoirist than I am with the ways in which this ‘knowledge’ has now become produced and controlled for the popular imagination. For many of the disinterested experts on the current crisis, their claim towards knowledge is usually staked to appeal to a liberal-conservative agenda, usually coming to a conclusion where people who have never been interested in a 32 county republic, socialist or otherwise, tell northern nationalists that they have ruined their last chance for unity, once again, because of their historical ignorance.

For those like Martin and O’Toole, the only ‘knowledge’ that can bring about unity is an institutional respect for the complexities of unionism and the electoral regress of what they see as the simplicities of republicanism, or what Eoin O’Malley called in his own strutting and fretting as Mercutio a ‘Ladybird-book telling of history’. Many are only outraged about the histories of ‘both sides’, though, when northern republicans disobediently assert their opposition to unionism and Orangeism.

For her part, Heather Humphreys recently reflected on her own disastrous Presidential campaign – in which she suffered sectarian abuse – suggesting that a ‘so called United Ireland’ would struggle to be born because ‘[t]here is a lack of awareness and understanding when it comes to the nuances of unionism, loyalism, orange lodges and marching bands’. In the wake of the past few weeks, most people can now be clear-eyed about exactly how nuanced this triumvirate is.

What has never been acknowledged, though, is that in both the conversations about the Garvaghy Road and the wider discourses about a United Ireland, there has been an utter failure to consider the views let alone the nuances of Irish republicanism or nationalism in the six counties. That is, unless these views are considered as an obstacle to what are constructed as these equally implacable yet respect-worthy unionists. The only grounds upon which republicans are permitted to speak and to be understood are in relation to the people that have opposed their existence for over a century. Conversely, northern unionism is allowed the virtue of complexity, the Orange Order simply explained as a benign cultural practise that nobody – and certainly nobody in Portadown – should oppose.

Difficult to know?

Colonial as it is, this hierarchy of ‘knowledge’ is often facilitated by a widespread admission of ignorance about the six counties. Even when Leo Varadkar recently expressed his opinion that the twenty-six county state should ‘acknowledge forgetting northern nationalists’, he still included the caveat that ‘A lot of people south of the Border don’t really understand Northern Ireland’. This partitionist construction of the north as intractable pervades everything from such reactionary newspaper columns to its representation in culture and its criticism, usually as an inscrutable addendum to the ‘real’ Ireland, and quite frequently under the description ‘Ireland and Northern Ireland’.

On Valentine’s Day 2021, for example, the Little Museum of Dublin launched an exhibition entitled You Say You Love Me But You Don’t Even Know Me, which was supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs Reconciliation Fund. The Museum’s Deputy Director, Sarah Costigan, claimed that the title and curation of the exhibition of carefully selected objects from the north had been motivated by the contention that ‘many people in the Republic of Ireland know little about the customs, culture and history of Northern Ireland’. Even the Chief Executive of the six county Museum body, complicit in the obscurity, presented the territory as an epistemological difficulty: ‘Northern Ireland can be difficult to know’.

Of course, this promotion of a lack of knowledge has had a longer and deeper history than The Little Museum of Dublin. In January 1998, Nuala O’Faolain declared that she had decided to move across the border, beginning a series of columns in the Irish Times with the declaration that ‘I know almost nothing about it…. North and South are worlds still largely unknown to each other’. Adopting the collective pronoun, Elaine Byrne opened her own Irish Times column ten years later quoting O’Faoláin and asking ‘Have we in the South made any attempt to understand our Northern neighbours or are we content in indifference?’.

If the six counties is to be so routinely presented with all the clarity of a crossword puzzle, then perhaps the problem is not with the answer but with the question itself.  Only last month Pat Leahy wrote in the same newspaper about ‘the general disinterest in the North among many people in the South’, in doing so suggesting that a United Ireland was now more likely to fail, as if this was an unavoidable consequence of Drumcree rather than their only reaction to any and all developments beyond the cordon sanitaire.

If there is a test to be an opinion columnist or otherwise expert on a topic, then possessing ‘knowledge’ of the subject that you are addressing would perhaps be the third most important qualification, after being alive and being able to communicate. Yet all of these columnists would appear to revel in their failure. There are certainly no lack of commentators from either jurisdiction who would pass this test: but in platforming people who refuse to understand the six counties beyond ‘Orange’ and ‘Green’, or who speak about it with a distinct lack of interest, a different motivation is clearly at work.

This fascination with acquiring ‘knowledge’ of ‘the north’, and carefully selected parts of its violent past, clearly helps to make it stranger; to continue to imagine an ‘Ireland’ that moves forward aloof of it. In such analyses, social class, regional disparity, or structural violence must never appear as an object of analysis. Gary Murphy, in his own comments on Drumcree, claimed that the north was ‘identity-obsessed’. He was half-right: in the culture and society of the twenty-six counties, there is a repeated obsession with framing every issue in and about the six counties as exposing its intractable, unknowable identity politics. This is to the point that any argument which somebody from the north makes can only be understood as an expression of their identity and/or victimhood, whatever ‘knowledge’ they have tainted by these affiliations. The only exceptions are for those who have crossed the barricades. Conversely, Mícheál Martin can claim to have experienced the ‘troubles’ from a television set in his living room, and to know the situation better than our homebrewed ‘Ladybird’ polemics.

‘they had no idea’

This mass fetishisation of ‘knowledge’ was clearly at work after the ‘Celtic Symphony’ outrage in 2022, when a correspondent from the Guardian interviewed ‘12 randomly selected Trinity undergraduates about the Troubles…. Asked to estimate the total death toll, most declined, saying they had no idea’. Even those history students that did get it right were presumed to have failed the Guardian’s vox pop quiz because, in the words of the same correspondent, they ‘assumed security forces, rather than loyalist paramilitaries, accounted for most of the rest’. To be fair to those students, plenty of the security forces also had trouble distinguishing between themselves and loyalist paramilitaries. But the implication is clearly that knowing history by numbers leads to the kind of liberal, stable politics that would paradoxically make the status quo more appealing and a United Ireland more likely. Nobody should believe this.

These kinds of ‘gotcha’ moments have been a recurring trope in many reflections on the post-conflict six counties. In a recent book about the literature of the Good Friday Agreement, for example, the US-based literary critic Marilyn Richtarik even went as far as to confess to be surprised that she, as an expert in ‘northern’ literature, ‘knew more about the Troubles than my students did’. Her students, by implication, knew too little to understand who they should be voting for:

They had been toddlers when the Agreement was signed and had heard little about the conflict from their elders. It was obvious that class members were deeply divided along the old sectarian/political lines yet also extremely reluctant to discuss their different experiences and assumptions. My older friends in Belfast were voting for the more moderate nationalist and unionist parties or for unaligned parties, but my students could not seem to imagine any alternative to the hardline parties (Sinn Féin and the DUP) that had dominated politics in the North for over a decade.

When I read this, I wondered what it was like to become an object of knowledge in the process of your education, thought about what it meant to be collected as data and mined for the purposes of a double-blind, peer-reviewed monograph with a leading academic press or used as anecdote for an article in the Irish Times. To be produced and consumed as an object lesson.

In some ways, I have no need to guess: maybe this excerpt particularly annoyed me because I remember myself being asked a similar question in my own first weeks as an undergraduate. In an ‘Introduction to Poetry’ tutorial, of all things, I was asked, since I was from ‘Northern Ireland’, – the tutor’s designation, not mine  – what I thought about ‘the troubles’ – their designation, still not mine – after we read Michael Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’. I was not asked if the poem was a Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet, nor was I called upon to explain its basis in The Iliad: the question was clearly not for my benefit, just as much as asking a student who they vote for isn’t for theirs either.

Years later, a friend from a different class recalled the time when I had to leave another class early to practise my identity politics by playing gaelic football. In my absence, and without my knowledge, the tutor had told the rest of my classmates that they could never understand a word that I said because of my accent. In one of these classes the same tutor had asked me if ‘Casualty’ by Seamus Heaney was a ‘political poem’. I don’t remember if they had trouble understanding my response.

This is how we are shown and told as objects rather than subjects of ‘knowledge’. In these ways of knowing the north, most of those who are from there are too ignorant to see beyond their ‘tribal’ affiliations. Obscured by our accents and our entrenched opinions, the six counties can then simply be presented as a puzzle which is only truly perceptible to those whose ‘dispassionate’ knowledge is untainted by affiliation, for whom we are gathered as evidence and intelligence, useful to the extent of an example. We are only ever allowed to know our place.