I’m in Northern Ireland this week, lookign at issues of truth, reconciliation and how (or if) to memorialize the past. As with any conflict, this one has its volcabulary (nationalist, UVF, the Troubles, etc.) and its touchstone events, like Bloody Sunday or the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which has led to a kind of tense peace and powersharing between the majority Protestant and minority Catholic communities.
Reading is no substitute for travel to a place. For instance, although Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom (the unit of currency is the pound and the flag is the Union Jack), there is absolutely no boundary between it and the Republic of Ireland. which surrounds it on three sides (the fourth is the Irish Sea). So Orin and I drove north from Dublin and only realized that we had switched countries when I saw a billboard advertising “the lowest prices in Northern Ireland.”
In terms of the differences between Protestants and Catholics, they are invisible to the unpracticed eye. As I told one Irish friend today, I could walk the length of Belfast and never be able to tell if the neighborhood was one or the other (with the exception of streets decorated with gigantic pro-Protestant or pro-Catholic murals). In that way, Northern Ireland reminds me of Rwanda. The untutored cannot tell any diffrence between Hutu and Tutsi, derspite the junk science that holds that Tutsis are tall and thin and Hutus are short and wide.
But the differences here are glaring to the trained eye. For instance, only a Catholic would wear the bright green soccer shirt belonging to the Scottish professional team known as the Celtics. A Protestant would wear the shirt of the (equally Scottish) Rangers. Indeed, anything green, the kind of green Americans associate with the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration, is read here as Catholic, meaning pro-Irish Republican Army. Anything red, white and blue is Protestant, meaning pro-Unionism. To wear a Celtics shirt in a Protestant area is an invitation to a rock hitting you (or an outright attack, in earlier days); and the same is true of a Rangers shirt in a Catholic area.
Even the alphabet is a danger area. A-B-C-D are pronounced the same until you reach “H.” Protestants say it as Americans do, but Catholics put a spin on it: “haitch.”
So standing at a bus stop, Belfastians who want to remain neutral leave their sports passions at home and take a care with any word that begins with H.
In important ways, the differences here, centered on religion and a particular history with England, are more real than the articially imposed ones, dating from Belgian colonial rule, in Rwanda. But neither one have to do with race, as in the United States. And to American eyes, they are as invisible as breath. But to locals, they are the every day language that is as ovious as a street sign.