The Ulster Way

Will Ferguson

Last year, I spent two months hiking across Northern Ireland. I was following the Ulster Way, an 800-km route that seemed to exist only in the imagination of local tourist bureaus. A good deal of my time was spent stomping about in the rain, arms flailing wildly as I cursed the quaint lack of signage in Ireland.

I was on one of those ill-advised "ancestral homeland" treks of which we North Americans are so inexplicably fond. My grandfather was a Belfast orphan, you see, and I thought that somehow I could "reconnect with my past" by walking through muddy fields for two months on feet so blistered they had become to resemble bubble-wrap.

My trip took me through every county and region-- Protestant and Catholic, Orange and Green--but my proudest achievement was this: I think I introduced a new joke to the Irish.

Here's how it goes:

An Irishman releases a genie from its bottle and is granted a single wish in return -- but only on the condition that whatever he receives, his neighbour will receive double. The Irishman thinks for a moment and then says, "Can you put out one of me eyes?" The alternate punchline is: "Can you beat me half to death?"

Either way, it was greeted with roaring approval by the people of Ulster, who have a certain affection for their own shortcomings. "Aye, it's true all right," they would say, proudly. I was surprised they hadn't heard the joke before.

Northern Ireland: where spite is a way of life!

In the wake of the current peace accord, I had naively assumed that all would be sunshine and smiles in the Land of Ulster, but no. The tribal allegiances and dark undercurrents were still there, seething just below the surface, festering like a septic wound. Ulster is a land mired in its own past.

"This isn't a country," said one innkeeper. "It's a stalemate."

Two solitudes, mutually antagonistic and nursing old grievances. Sounds familiar, no? So why didn't Canada descend into similar sectarian violence? Why didn't we become the New World's Northern Ireland? After all, we're built upon even deeper fault lines: French, English; Catholic, Protestant; the conquered and the conquering.

The timeline is also similar, with the October Crisis of 1970 paralleling the Bloody Sunday uprisings of Derry in 1972. In both cases, a besieged minority lashed out at the establishment: francophones in Quebec, the Catholics in Derry. Both times, civil rights were suspended and martial law declared.

So why didn't Canada also spiral into a vicious circle of attack and reprisal? I always assumed it was Pierre Trudeau's draconian War Measures Act that did the trick, stopping Quebec's nascent terrorist movement dead in its tracks. But the British took the same approach following Bloody Sunday.

The real difference? In Northern Ireland, the troops have stayed for 30 years. More than 3,000 people died during the Troubles. In Canada, the tally-- including bombing victims and assassinations, from the start of Quebec's Quiet Revolution to the present stands at exactly . . . seven.

On its own, the War Measures Act resolved nothing. It was a counterpunch, not a knockout blow. So what did rescue us? A preliminary report by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. That's what saved us, not the presence of armed troops in the streets.

It was this now-forgotten royal commission that led directly to the Official Languages Act of 1969, the terms of which were being implemented even as the bombs were going off in Montreal.

Canada's Official Languages Act undercut both the power and the appeal of the FLQ message. It became harder and harder for Quebec radicals to portray themselves as being oppressed. In Canada, separatism wasn't outlawed; violence was.

And beginning in 1976, the democratically elected Parti Quebecois was allowed to bring in a series of contentious language laws that restricted English and promoted French. These laws, ironically, took the wind out of the separatist sails. In Canada, we bend so as not to break. Today, the most hardline extremist in the Quebec National Assembly would be considered a moderate in the sectarian world of Northern Ireland.

Following the Bloody Sunday riots, the British were unrelenting and unflinching, and the result was a guerrilla war that spanned three decades. Imagine the October Crisis of 1970 lasting 30 years. Imagine the FLQ still wielding a puppet-master influence on the political agenda. Imagine RCMP stations barricaded behind sandbags and razor wire. Imagine.

On St. Patrick's Day, Canadians have much to celebrate. The least of which is the fact that we are not the Ulster of North America, that we are not the punchline to a particularly pungent joke. Canada: rescued from the brink by a royal commission. How very apt.

Maclean's Magazine
March 18, 2002