What is Northern Ireland like today? Ross Kemp takes a look. For me, the seeds of the enmity in Northern Ireland are in the plantation of Ulster. The English, in the 1600s, offered free Ulster land to settlers mainly from Scotland who would remain loyal to the British crown while helping to keep the native Irish at bay. The best land was given to the Scottish loyalists while the native Irish were forced off the land to the surrounding poor and unproductive uplands. Imagine that you are among the Scottish settlers offered an opportunity in this new land. You find yourself occupying the best land but surrounded and threatened by the Irish who had been evicted. Your main source of security is the crown of England and its army. Is it much different today than then? The protestants feel that same psychological insecurity they felt in the 1600s still surrounded by the Catholics of the whole island of Ireland. For a time, up until the end of the 20th century, the protestants controlled and manipulated politics in Northern Ireland to their own advantage, shoring up massive security for anyone with a protestant identity. But the civil rights movement of the 1970s rightly undermined that unjust situation starting a push-back to fairer conditions for Catholics. The protestants now are left feeling vulnerable and hold on to their loyalist identities, still tied to the crown (a reluctant crown) as offering the best security for their situation. Hopefully, continuing dialogue between the sides and growing compromise will bring a lasting solution. When I say protestants, I mean the people who were settlers in the 1600s and their descendants. If you think about it in that way, it is not a religious issue. It just looks that way. It is about people on both sides needing to feel secure in a situation that was politically created hundreds of years ago. https://youtube/watch?v=FE_wHMcv9p8
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 10:36:44 +0000
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