Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has told voters that the election on 5 May will be a “battle for Northern Ireland”.
But elections aren’t battles. Indeed, that’s rather the point, is it not?
Of course, Sir Jeffrey is speaking metaphorically here, and moreover, it is admittedly unfair to single out his remark when Northern Irish politics is full of these sorts of references, and has been for decades, if not centuries. And that not just from unionist politicians: I write this a couple of days after members of a dissident Irish Republican organisation – the one that shot Lyra McKee – took it upon themselves to parade around with masks and guns, and attack the PSNI with petrol bombs.
Yet there is a pointedness, a force to the metaphor of the election as ‘battle’ that calls for consideration.
There’s a line in a book by René Girard that keeps coming back to me:
“Once aroused, the urge to violence triggers certain physical changes that prepare men’s bodies for battle. This set toward violence lingers on; it should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus”.
Men’s and women’s bodies, one should add. This ‘set toward violence’ is also a ‘set toward each other’, of course. And boy has it ‘lingered on’ in Northern Ireland, in the form of the obsessive repetition of the ‘two-communities-in-conflict’ model.
It’s a zero-sum, binary reduction machine; it sets you towards one neighbour in one way, and another neighbour in another, depending on how you denominate them.
And it is more to do with denomination than democracy.
We have let the ‘set toward violence’ linger long enough. It’s time to move beyond a politics of denomination toward a democracy that is about combination, about coming together with others to get on with solving the myriad problems we face – whatever our denomination (or nation, or orientation, for that matter). Problems such as fixing the health service; making sure our children get the best possible education; addressing fuel poverty; tackling the cost of living and the housing crisis; achieving social justice for those still facing systemic discrimination; finally implementing the long-discussed Green New Deal.
But to achieve that, we’re going to need to build a green new democracy.
Democracy shouldn’t be, can’t be reduced to a ‘battle for (or against) Northern Ireland’, where ‘Northern Ireland’ is some abstraction, the only significant feature of which is where the border lies. We don’t live in an abstraction; we live in a neighbourhood.
And it’s time we got our heads together with our neighbours and got on with the hard, patient, laborious work of rising to the challenges we face in common.
MM
20 April 2022
Community of Others 