THIS TIME of year, a piece of red fabric in the shape of a flower brings a small dilemma to some Northerners. It usually lifts again within seconds. Poppy season is the most muted of Northern Ireland's divisive issues, the resentments it causes usually silent, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
The ditherers wonder, since this is supposed to be a new age, whether they should ditch communal and parental habits. These are Catholics – or at least people born into Northern Catholic families. By and large, it is Protestants who almost automatically buy and wear the artificial poppies sold by the British Legion, to commemorate those who have fought, and are still fighting, in wars for the UK. Public figures of various kinds begin to wear poppies weeks before Remembrance Sunday – this year on November 8th. By and large, Catholics do not even think about buying the emblems.
Unthinking, inherited belief – or prejudice? From a distance you might plump for prejudice, with a degree of disgust at Northern narrowness. But as well as being a touching reminder of heroism and selfless deaths, the poppy is a holdover from a time when Northern Catholics were repeatedly asked for proofs of “loyalty” to a state with which few identified. (Few poppies are visible in the Republic at this time of year, it might be noted, nor ever were.)
It is pretty safe to speculate that DUP Minister for Culture Nelson McCausland will wear his poppy in public every day for the next fortnight, and that, if asked, he would say Catholic failure to do likewise is dislikeable, if not offensive.
McCausland knows about offence, given and taken. After voicing his trademark strong views recently he tacked and trimmed a little: a first, and worth remark. But the trimming came after he had offended a whole swathe of Catholic opinion.
There was his suggestion that official grants might be removed from GAA clubs which bear the names of IRA figures – which irked the GAA, which had belatedly dropped the old ban on police and soldiers playing Gaelic games and gradually moderated attitudes to “foreign” soccer and rugby. Protestants still tend to believe they are the Catholic Church at play, until recently the IRA at play. In this case, McCausland hit so close to mainstream opinion in his own community, and echoed just enough Catholic unease about the use of GAA premises for hunger strike commemorations, to dim controversy pretty fast.
Then came his assertion that his Protestantism would not allow him to accept any invitation, as Minister, to attend a service in a Catholic church. This year’s Presbyterian Moderator, Dr Stafford Carson, rowed in to say that attending a service did not necessarily endorse the beliefs of a denomination. McCausland is an Independent Methodist, not a Presbyterian. But his position shifted: he said he would have no difficulty visiting Catholic churches for events that did not include religious services.
And he turned out cheerily to watch his first GAA game, between the Garda and the revamped police force, the PSNI: one-quarter Catholic now, hence their ability to field a Gaelic team. (The Garda won by 3-9 to 0-5.) That the game was in the PSNI athletic grounds and on a Saturday made life easier for him. As a strict Sabbatarian, he had made it plain he would attend no Sunday fixtures.
Some are dejected by the attitudes of a DUP supposedly now sharing power with republicans and moderate nationalists. Others note the McCausland adjustments and are cheered. The debate was healthy. Radio phone-ins, the Slugger O’Toole website and newspaper articles canvassed ideas about ministerial responsibility, tension between private beliefs and public office, and what citizens have a right to ask.
Sinn Féin denounced the original McCausland stance as dereliction of ministerial duty. Bloggers and letter-writers who described themselves as republican said it was a travesty of republicanism to want a Minister to attend religious services.
The old monoliths are crumbling, even in the North. With the publication of the Dublin and Cloyne reports, after the flood of revelations in recent years about priestly paedophilia and church cover-up, any number of Catholics may come to share McCausland’s wariness about Catholic churches.
And the poppy season may lose its overlay of expectation – or not. BBC Northern Ireland, for example, insists – like the BBC throughout the UK – that all television presenters wear it. Memos set last weekend as the kick-off, though sticklers for protocol say the “wearing” season should be 1st to 11th November. The practice is UK-wide. But the North is not as British as Finchley.
It would be nice to think that BBCNI considers the ruling afresh each year.
They take unending unionist criticism, though – essentially for having diluted the unionism which once dictated output to reflect the other major community.
Poppies may bloom, perforce, on screen in Northern Ireland for decades to come.