The Great Divide

Will Hanafin goes back to Dublin relieved that there’s no prospect of a united Ireland any time in the near future.

Where did it all go wrong? Twelve years ago the Belfast Agreement was signed, and referenda North and South endorsed it strongly. But beneath the fancy talk of reconciliation and North-South cooperation there's an unavoidable truth: we just don't get each other.

The guns have mostly fallen silent, so now we've a chance to get better acquainted, but there's a problem: we don't like what we see in each other.

As we head south from a Newry shopping trip laden with half of Sainsbury's, or as Northern GAA fans drive home from Croker, both sides are thinking the same thing: “See ya, don't want to be ya!”

We're just different. I flicked open the Belfast Telegraph during one of my trips north to be greeted by a man in a straw hat burning a wicker man. Apparently, the mock sacrifice by Aughakillymaude Community Mummers in Fermanagh symbolically returns the ashes of last year's corn to the fields and marks the spring equinox, ensuring a good harvest in 2010. The journalist jokily wrote: “Happily no one was burned alive inside the terrifying effigy — unlike in the 1973 cult film The Wicker Man.” Ah, Northern humour!

Then I recently heard a story about someone living near Croke Park who sold their house rather than put up with “people from Tyrone eating sandwiches from the boot of their car outside the front door all summer”.

Like any doomed relationship, it's the little things that are starting to grate. Northies and Free Staters are that couple from hell. Northies don't like our high prices and funny money, can't fathom our crap health service and distrust the flashy consumerism.

We scream “just f**king get on with it” after every political pantomime and seize on the northern fascination with car rallying or odd sex scandals as a chance to be culturally superior.

You can wheel in Hillary Clinton or get George Bush on the phone all you like, but the big issue is the blindingly obvious one: north and south are polar opposites. Just look what's happening with increasing regularity to Gerry Adams during his cross-border incursions.

Some of Adams's recent media maulings would almost make you feel sorry for Old Grizzly.

His grasp of economics in the Republic is so tenuous I wonder does he still ask for Irish pounds when changing his sterling.

During a recent interview with Richard Crowley on the This Week radio programme, Adams was asked how much his new idea of a tax band for people earning more than €100,000 would bring in each year. “Well, I don't know precisely how much that would bring in . . .” he replied.

Adams was similarly vague about his own solidarity tax, which plans to tax assets of more than €1m, and got into an awful muddle when asked if that included the family home.

Once again, it sounded as if Sinn Fein's policies for the Republic were being worked out on the back of a Bass beer mat deep in West Belfast.

It's not just Adams that's in vogue; Northern Ireland itself has become an elixir of youth for ageing statesmen fretting about their legacies. They turn up hoping that NI will be the monkey-gland treatment they've been looking for to prolong their vigour.

Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen jumped on the bandwagon recently to finalise an agreement on the devolution of policing and justice. During that bun fight, George Bush even came out of his self-imposed retirement to phone David Cameron, urging him to pressure his pals in the Ulster Unionist Party to support the policing deal.

The political machinations in Northern Ireland were the big indulgence during the Celtic Tiger years, so it's no surprise that Bertie Ahern still dines out on his role, frequently using it as subject matter in his speeches-for-hire.

As an innocent southerner watching televised proceedings of the Northern Ireland Assembly, I've always thought it so dull it made the Oireachtas Report look like Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Until recently, the only way someone from the South would use the words “Northern Ireland” and “assembly” animatedly in the same sentence was if they were regaling you about a trip to the Belfast Ikea. But with all those distinguished politicians flocking to the Assembly, I had to check it out myself.

My expectations didn't warm up much as I chatted to Assembly staff in the Great Hall.

I ask one if anything interesting was happening there today. “Well it's not a ‘pig farming in Fermanagh' day as I'd call the normal type of business of the Assembly,” said the staffer unenthusiastically, adding: “The Finance Minister, Sammy Wilson, is always worth a look and there are First Minister and Deputy First Minister’s questions as well.”

Finance Minister Sammy Wilson is a bit of a star turn alright, a cross between Jim Davidson and a darts player past his peak. His one-liners were the only thing that broke the tedium. “I'm sure we'll have an environmentally recycled debate with many points recycled,” was a typical one. Boom!

Sammy has form as he was part of a memorable Ali G skit on The Eleven O'Clock Show. Ali G asked him: “Is you Irish?”, “I'm British,” Sammy said. “So is you here on holidays?” Ali G responded.

Sammy got into the spirit of the interview by telling Ali G a risque joke about Ian Paisley and the Pope involving crocodiles.

The undoubted highlight of the day is the First Minister and Deputy First Minister’s questions with Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness.

The contrast between the body language of the Sinn Feiners north and south is striking. There's a cheeky saying in my neck of the woods that a super-confident individual is like a dog with two mickies and that sums up the Sinn Fein Stormont MLAs.

Alex Maskey nearly runs me over in the Great Hall, striding confidently by in an immaculate suit. McGuinness takes his seat for the questions as if he's ambling into his sitting room to watch telly. Gerry Adams follows in such a relaxed manner that he really should have brought some popcorn and a soft drink.

Peter Robinson gets to his feet. The events of the past few months have clearly taken their toll as he looks grey and pinched. His pastiness is highlighted even more by that peculiar gangster-chic fashion sense that Unionist politicians tend to favour: a monotone suit with black shirt and white collar.

His wife Iris’s affair with 19-year-old Kirk McCambley shook apart many of the old certainties about the North. Suddenly, the party of Bible-bashing Ian Paisley was involved in a spectacular sex scandal involving a young man and a much older woman.

The DUP's holier-than-thou demeanour was stripped away in public. It was a much more defining moment than any of the protracted negotiations about policing and justice that were always going to get sorted out. The Robinsons were human after all.

Despite his troubles, the First Minister handles his questions with confidence and fluency — an experience we're not that familiar with from observing our own Taoiseach. Then po-faced Reg Empey, the Employment Minister, stands up to give a briefing and several MLAs scarper. So do I. Besides having sex scandals to rival the world's finest, confidence is growing in the North in other ways. There's a vibe I get from visiting the Assembly and from touring around the North recently that says people think they've a good enough thing going at last.

This is borne out by a Belfast Telegraph poll carried out during St Paddy's week. It revealed a majority of people (55%) would vote against a united Ireland in a referendum, even though more Northerners describe themselves as Irish (42%) than British (39%).

The success of the Celtic Tiger meant that many southern politicians assumed until recently that a united Ireland was a case of when, not if. Now, all bets are off.

The economic mismanagement in the Republic in the past two years has turned off many people in Northern Ireland. More than half of those interviewed for the newspaper poll believed that the Republic's economic woes made the prospect of a united Ireland more distant. It's certainly a tricky dilemma for nationalist areas such as Newry where the existence of the border has meant substantial economic growth.

Newry is an odd place to be on St Patrick's Day, a sort of nationalist theme park funded by the British exchequer. Hordes of people flood out of the Catholic church after Mass with old-fashioned bunches of shamrock pinned to lapels. There's a buzz about the place as the parade starts at 11am. Kids in GAA tracksuits head to the centre of town.

Every cliche about border dwellers being GAA-mad petrol heads was coming true. Legions of kiddies kitted out in their GAA gear march past, along with black-clad pipe bands and enough lorries to transport a power station.

Sinn Fein are still talking about a united Ireland happening by 2016 to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising. Yeah, right! As they say up North: catch yourself on.

Will Hanafin is a journalist with the Sunday Independent

Shane Donaghey finds that in spite of the scorn of some in the Republic, we in Northern Ireland differ little from them

It’s almost a rite of passage for Dublin journalists. “We’re sending you to Belfast to do a piece on how different the nordies are to us. Write it with fear and loathing, like you’re the priest who’s about to go over the waterfall in The Mission because the natives didn’t like him.”

The late Nuala O Faolain once spent a few months in Belfast for the Irish Times and wrote as if she was one of those Dr Who companions who finds herself whisked into space just as she’s about to feed the cat.

Our sister paper (as in Marge Simpson’s sisters) The Sunday Independent, traditionally the greatest thing for Ulster Unionism to come out of the south since Edward Carson, sent Will Hanafin up recently.

The introduction to a piece entitled It’s Grim Up North promised to show that “there’s an unavoidable truth about the people at either end of this island: we just don’t get each other”, and that Hanafin came home “glad that there’s no prospect of a united Ireland any time soon”.

It followed the usual paradigm: mild surprise that the natives weren’t still rubbing two sticks together to spark fire, and marveling that the locals had evolved enough not to be eating their young or picking fleas out of each others’ backs.

He bigged up Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister at Stormont, contrasting him with Gerry Adams’ poor attempts at formulating economic policy for the Republic any time he’s on RTE.

To be fair, Gerry’s ramblings on RTE are cheerily rubbish and largely meaningless, but no more rubbish than the total shambles that the Republic’s toxic bank, NAMA, threatens to become.

Thankfully, however, there was an excuse to return to default style, when Hanafin took in the border region on St Patrick’s day.

When in doubt, get stuck into the culchies, calling Newry “a sort of nationalist theme park funded by the British exchequer”.

Look, there’s a bunch of children in GAA tops!

How 20th century!

And there are people coming from Mass wearing shamrock! Quaint or what?

Over there are a bunch of trad musicians. And unless my eyes deceive me there are Bo and Luke Duke, good ol’ boys in souped-up tractors.

Hanafin quoted the probably apocryphal tale of someone who lives near Dublin’s Croke Park selling his house because he’s sick of Tyrone GAA fans eating sandwiches outside it in summer, to which the only reply is, ‘set up a coffee stall you idiot, you’re nearly bankrupt’.

All of this was presented as if it was totally alien.

But there was an underlying sense of probably genuine fear and loathing common to this in every single one of these types of articles that I’ve read over the years.

For the simple reason that the more Hanafin had a go, the more he could have been describing ordinary people south of the border — desperately seeking a party, a brief respite from the economic four horsemen of the apocalypse riding all over the island.

Because really, instead of being different, you often can’t slip an American Express card between north or south.

Despite 90 years of partition, the most visible ways of telling the difference between north and south are the colour of the lines at the sides of roads, and the colour of a bag of Tayto cheese and onion crisps. Hardly a far away country of which we know nothing.

There are plenty of other similarities.

To take just one, any unionist, nationalist, dissenter or masochist who compares RTE’s news programmes presented by the magisterial Anne Doyle, the uncrowned queen of Ireland, to Useless TV Live/Snoozeline's girlie laugh-ins with Noel Thompson will unanimously agree that the Republic’s national broadcaster has the decency to treat anyone watching as adults.

For the writer of this type of article, the thought that the locals might be similar to him is more terrifying than the thought that the locals might send him over a waterfall while nailed to a tree.

Shane Donaghey is a journalist with the Belfast Telegraph

Belfast Telegraph