My Perspective ⚢

Happy National Coming Out Day!

no bro

You don’t if he’s Northern Irish. You don’t know if he’s Catholic. You don’t know if he grew up watching his people get murdered by Loyalist Protestants and British soldiers who carried heavy racial prejudice against Irish Catholics (hellooo, Bloody Sunday anyone?), who had for centuries been characterized as barbaric, racially inferior, lowly people who needed to be wiped out or converted. Attacks by the IRA, and therefore retaliation by the British, didn’t completely cease until 1998, I believe? This film came out in 2002.

You don’t know if he was an Irishman who grew up in England. Bomb attacks carried out by the IRA in England kindled misplaced aggression toward innocent Irish civilians living among the English population and Irish people were verbally and physically attacked and their businesses targeted. Perhaps similar to how ordinary Muslims bear the brunt of aggression after attacks by Muslim extremists…

You can still find yourself threatened and demeaned if you’re a Catholic in Northern Ireland or if you’re a Protestant in Ireland and some older dude in a pub in a smaller town straight up asks you if you’re Catholic or not and you’re afraid what’ll happen if you don’t lie about who you are.

You can still hear casual racism toward Irish people in everyday life and in publicly broadcast media in the UK.

You can still see and hear “Kill All Irish” and other pretty heavy anti-Irish sentiment among Loyalists in Northern Ireland who don’t consider themselves Irish at all.

Just because it now appears that the island of Ireland has been allowed to move on from war and their appearance and culture generally allows them to blend into and reap the benefits of the White European demographic doesn’t mean that this character does not have the background suitable to fully empathize with her. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, we just don’t know his story.

First of all, pretty much yes to everything about Ireland up there. Growing up in Northern Ireland, I saw the violence from all sides - my father is a British Protestant and my mother is a Catholic, so I basically couldn’t win because according to one side I was a dirty taig and according to the other I was a filthy hun. Luckily I managed to make friends with a mix of both Catholics and Protestants who all thought this attitude was just as stupid as I did, but between all of us, we saw our fair share of sectarian violence, and the Catholics, without a doubt, got it worse.

Irish Catholics were robbed of their country by Protestant invaders centuries ago. They fought and fought and eventually got the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland), however, thanks to the deliberate plantation of Protestants to eradicate the Catholic majority in the North, it was left under British rule. Since then, Catholics have been murdered, arrested, terrorised, tortured and driven out of their houses just for being Irish Catholics. 

I moved from Northern Ireland in 2010 and to the day I left, the violence was not over. I couldn’t wear certain colours in certain areas because I would be beaten. I had fake names depending on where I was stopped, as attackers can determine what religion you are from your name alone (and this is a trick I learned, too, for defence). I can recite my rights if I’m arrested because if I was stopped in certain areas I could be, on the assumption I could be Catholic. I know the subtle sectarian geography of the city of Belfast because if I cross the road in the wrong place I’m in enemy territory. I have been chased by a group of forty people, throwing fireworks at me, because they assumed I was a Catholic. Police were parked on nearby streets and didn’t acknowledge the commotion. My friends and I walk past graffiti screamed “Kill All Taigs”. A fifteen year old boy who lived half an hour from me was beaten to death by a group of adults for being Catholic. For fifty years, people have been detained without trial, tortured, beaten and wrongly imprisoned just for being Catholic, because apparently, being Catholic means you must be in the IRA. 

Even now, I can’t escape it. I have a noticeable Northern Irish accent, which is stronger when I’m around people from there and is noticeable as a strong accent whenever I’m not in the country. At airports, I’m always the one stopped and frisked if they hear my accent. At ferry ports, it’s alway my car (which has Northern Irish registration plates) that’s “randomly selected” for a search. All of this just happened to me, a person who got off lightly.

Allegorical depictions of the rivers Elbe (left) and Vltava.