[LINK] "Ireland and Britain, a hundred years later"

[rfmcdonald]

Open Democracy's Mark Perryman looks at the complexities of Irish national identity in relation to Britain on St. Patrick's Day.

St Patrick’s Day across England has always been more of a party than our own St George’s Day. Down the local, one of the best night outs of the year, a non-stop evening drenched in all things Irish. A celebration of Ireland’s freedom, which can never be entirely separated from its place in English, and British, history either.

For decades it was Ireland that defined first the British right (the 'Conservative and Unionist party', remember) and then latterly the street-fighting far right too with their links to loyalist paramilitaries and hatred of all things otherwise from Ireland. Today such connections are broken, the last remnants being the unofficial insertion of ‘no surrender’ into the national anthem (sic) by a section of the football crowd at England internationals. No surrender? To what exactly?

Meantime Britain is breaking-up. Scotland has effectively already gone native. The Welsh aren’t that far behind. Northern Ireland has been an entirely different polity to the mainland for decades. making the niceties of the union no more than a constitutional detail this side of the Irish Sea. Brutal, but true.

But the framing of our Britishness via its relationship to Ireland has to be accounted for by a range of factors beyond the narrowly political. St Patrick’s Day is emblematic of the complexity and contradictions. To give us our due Britishness is far more accommodating and porous than it is often credited for. Any raising of St George in the cause of England has to account for the changes resulting from becoming the most multicultural of the four ‘home’ nations. This makes race a central issue, both the racialisation of Englishness but a popular and potent English anti-racism too.

St Patrick’s Day is a moment to reflect on the open-ness at its best Englishness encourages, this most mongrel of nations, the clue is in the hyphen, anglo-saxon. Beyond the body politic music, literature, film and sport are spaces where a particular version of Irishness has been embraced. From punk icons Stiff Little Fingers to the Pogues, Sinead O’Connor and the Corrs via the Hothouse Flowers and Sawdoctors to the mega-success of U2 this is a cultural insurgency that cannot be lightly discounted. Not so long ago, North London’s Finsbury Park would be packed out for the two-day Fleadh festival with an extraordinary range of artists parading their Irish heritage. Glasgow’s Celtic Connections celebration today does something similar.