Donald Clarke: You pretend to like us Nordies but you don’t

How’s about you?

Here's a true story (some details of which have been tweaked). Two weeks ago, I was in Connolly Station waiting for a train to Occupied Ireland. It seems that a retro-prankster had phoned in a bomb scare.

There was something nostalgic about the delay that followed. I looked forward to chasing a hoop down the cobbled streets while men in stovepipe hats walked the line at Lurgan. If only I still had that fridge-sized TPS-L2 Walkman then I could entertain myself with tunes from the Human League's early avant -garde EPs. I shall wear my jacket sleeves rolled . . .

Not everybody was sunk in the same indulgent reverie. A Northern Irish gentleman muttered about the lack of information. Some others tutted supportively. Hearing this, a Dublin voice sounded tersely just behind my left shoulder. “Well, it’s your countrymen who phoned in the bomb scare,” it said angrily. “Not mine.”

Northophobe

The phrase “audible gasp” risks tautology, but captures a precise class of collective recoil. Somebody muttered something about us “all being Irish”. But the Northophobe had moved on. The moment had passed. We looked at our shoes.

The language used is worth pondering. We do not, it is true, have a term for the inhabitant of a province, but it is still telling that the fellow dragged out the word "countrymen". The country referenced was almost certainly not the United Kingdom. We are, surely, dealing with the demi-nation that this newspaper still occasionally refers to as "the North".

People who aren't from Cork occasionally suggest inhabitants of that great city are a bit chippy (I don't). People who aren't from Galway sometimes argue that its folk spend too much time parading in huge papier mâché heads (I don't).

But, when such remarks are made in Dublin, there is never any suggestion these cities occupy foreign territory. Look within the heart of the most fervent Southern nationalist and you will locate guilty suspicions of Northern otherness.

You pretend to like us, but you don’t really. You think we’re guttural, sour and bellicose. At virtual gatherings of the imagined Irish family, you place us at a distant end of the table where our Gatling-gun accents won’t infect your wee children’s soft consonants.

The rarely-expressed antipathy is partially mutual. Obviously, most unionists see "the South" as no more worthy of everyday consideration than Tuscany or Transylvania. The average Northern nationalist, in contrast, views the prospect of eventual unification as an opportunity for administrative plunder. When the time comes, disciplined, unsentimental Ulstermen will troop southwards and give the new nation a robust, wintery shake.

How often does an extremist receive sighs from people who secretly agree with the opinions expressed? The man at the station spoke for many when he articulated a divide between the six northeastern counties and the rest of the island.

Maeve Binchy

If this sounds exaggerated I would suggest a root around

The Irish Times

archives. The much-missed Maeve Binchy is often misremembered as a cuddly auntie who wrote comfort-food literature for rainy holidays. What’s missing from this unfair caricature is her taste for the jugular and the delicious skill with which she applied the blade.

Back in 1997, Binchy wrote a brilliant piece collecting musings on that year's presidential election.

“I’m not voting for Mary McAleese because I literally can’t stand her accent,” a “man working in an off-licence” is quoted as saying. “I hate the way they say ‘How’s about you?’ up in the North – it makes my flesh creep – and everything is a wee this and a wee that. It doesn’t matter to me which side of the divide they are up there, they all have these expressions that would sicken you.”

There’s more where that came from.

You tell us, pal. The frustrating thing (for a Northerner) about this sly, borderline-racist refrain is that so many of the notes ring so sweetly. I am reminded of a line from Woody Allen's Annie Hall. "The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here."

You’re a nasty piece of work, train station man. But you’re not entirely wrong.