“Be yourself, because all other identities are already taken”, said Oscar Wilde. Northern Ireland, more than a century after its creation, remains divided between its British soul and its Irish soul, its unionist and nationalist soul, its European and its insular spirit, its loyalty to the Union Jack or the tricolor flag. But things are changing very quickly, thanks to inexorable demographics.
Since the Good Friday Agreements were signed in 1998, 600,000 people have been born in Ulster, the oldest of whom have just turned 25 and have only known peace. For them, in general, IRA bombs and killings by loyalist paramilitaries with the connivance of the UK military and intelligence services are just battles their parents and grandparents recount.
The results of a survey are revealing. While 41% of those over the age of 65 feel “British” and 43% declare themselves unionists, among the Northern Irish aged between 18 and 24 (the so-called peace babies) the figures change completely: 40% feel “Irish” and only 15% are unionists. 57% are in favor of reunification, which would seem to indicate that the island is going that way, even if the leader of the DUP (the party with the most votes for the Protestants), Jeffrey Donaldson, has just said that he will not “see it while live” (he has lived sixty).
In any case, both on one side and on the other of the invisible border, more and more forums, conferences and symposia are being held on what a united Ireland would look like and the constitutional changes that would need to be addressed. Although there is no official campaign, the Senate of the Republic has created a commission to study it, and it is an issue that is on the agenda of the unionist organization UK Together (chaired by the former Prime Minister Arlene Foster) and the nationalist Ireland’s Future.
“For our generation – comments Dina Greaves, 19 years old, born in a Protestant family in East Belfast -, the identity that matters is feminist, environmentalist, transgender. What interests us is equality, human rights, climate change, mental health, the construction of affordable housing, not what happened fifty years ago.” Mary O’Grady – 20 years old and a republican – is sure that “Ulster will be more prosperous within the European Union, and for that there is no other way than reunification”. He says that it is not just a matter of identity, but an exercise in pragmatism and common sense, “the adventure of creating a new country”.
Previous generations of Northern Irish people have grown up in a universe of bombs, blood, hatred and revenge, a binary world, black and white, good and bad, ours and others. But the pages of history pass inexorably, and most young people who have not yet reached a quarter of a century do not think about partition and the legacy of the Irish Civil War, the discrimination against Catholics and the atrocities of the IRA and unionist paramilitaries, but in what suits them best in order to prosper, have a good job, eventually form a family.
While the politicians are still engaged in their skirmishes, the children of peace are amazed that the Unionists have blocked the Stormont Assembly (the autonomous Government) 70% of the time during the last six and a half years, that there is no there is more devolution of powers to the province, that public services are a disaster, and that there is a lack of a strategy to combat poverty and an operational government (decisions are made in London, where Ulster has very little interest).
Northern Ireland’s landscape and politics are still dominated by the embers of the Troubles (a conflict that left 3,600 dead), with Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods separated by peace walls (steel barriers topped with bramble wire ), murals that praise the heroes and remember the victims of both communities, taxis and pubs that only serve some, and others. It is the world of the old, but not of the young, who think, like George Bernard Shaw, that life does not consist of finding oneself but of creating oneself. And that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats was right: the world is full of wonderful things, waiting for us to discover them, instead of obsessing over the past.
