BACK PAGES:A survey by the Economic and Social Research Institute in 1979 ruffled many feathers with its findings that southerners were much more supportive of a united Ireland than Northern Catholics and that the IRA had the support of 21 per cent in the Republic. Only 9 per cent of people in the Republic supported Northern Ireland remaining in the UK while, most controversially, the survey found that 50 per cent of Northern Catholics were in favour of staying in the UK. Conor O'Clery went to Derry to check on Catholic opinion there.
THE GIRL in the kitchen of the Bogside terrace house went to the bookshelf and returned with a paperback.
"There's the answer to your question," she said, pointing to the title. It read How to Lie with Statistics. The question had been: "What is your opinion of the finding by the Economic and Social Research Institute that 50 per cent of Catholics in the North would opt for a solution within the United Kingdom?"
Up and down the quiet Bogside streets and in the Creggan, the responses to the survey finding were couched in similar, sometimes unprintable, terms.
“People here believe in a united Ireland, they do surely.” “A united Ireland will come some day, it’s only a matter of time.” “If you believe that survey you’d believe anything.” “Even the SDLP say they’re working for a united Ireland when you’re talking to them.”
After 10 years of troubles, residents of the Bogside and Creggan do not appear to share the disenchantment of many Belfast Catholics with the ideal of a united Ireland. Disillusion with politics is directed instead against the SDLP and its local leader, John Hume, though people will still vote for what one Bogside woman derided as the “stoop down low party”, “because they’re Catholic, aren’t they?”.
A few remain strongly loyal to Hume, and in Derry’s middle-class Catholic suburbs, there is more support for the SDLP philosophy of powersharing, which has transformed the local council into a citadel of civility. A loyalist motion on security, so bitterly fought over the last week in other councils, was amended in Derry this week to a simple condemnation of violence and passed by 20 votes to one.
But attitudes to unity vary only in degree. "The Derry middle-class may not be prepared to do much about it," said Frank Curran, editor of the Derry Journal, "but in principle they will still adhere to a united Ireland. There may be a general feeling that a united Ireland is not on in the immediate future, but no one doubts that there is a historical progression towards it."
The “global view” from Derry is of a North breaking up into two, a Protestant east of the Bann and a Catholic west. The Catholic population of the city, from which 600 people emigrated each month in the 1950s and 1960s, is now growing fast.
Emigration from the city has ceased because of the cut-down on emigration in Australia, Canada and the US, the high unemployment rate in England, where a Bogside address is an invitation to interrogation under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and because there are now almost enough houses for all in Derry for the first time in its history.
As in all Catholic Border areas, the physical barrier of partition in itself is enough to keep alive the united Ireland ideal. “It is hard to justify the existence of any border between Derry and Inishowen in Co Donegal, its natural hinterland,” said Bishop Edward Daly in his home beside St Eugene’s Cathedral, above the Bogside.
“It’s my personal view that many, many Catholic people here still see unity as the only long-term solution, achieved peacefully and by consent.”
Derry Catholics share the disappointment of their Belfast counterparts in Dublin governments.
In the Republican Bogside, daubed with H-Block slogans, accusations of sell-out were common. “The British government have more to say in the south of Ireland than we have,” said one woman.
“There’s a general feeling in the city,” said Curran, “that when the British army were putting the boot in here, the Dublin government didn’t make any serious attempt to get the British to cool it.”
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