The controversy over the celebrations of the Irish women’s soccer team after winning qualification to the World Cup this week tells us a lot about the chasm between the generations in their perception of the IRA’s 30-year campaign of violence/struggle against the forces of oppression (delete according to your age).
But this is only one part of a wider division that will have significant political implications into the future. And if politics is downstream of culture, then the political outworking of these generational differences promises yet another sea-change in Irish electoral politics.
Many older voters have always regarded the IRA’s campaign with horror and disgust; others had sympathy in the days of the civil rights campaign but were alienated by the years of atrocities and the death of so many innocents.
The tiny minority of the vote won by Sinn Féin in the Republic and the less tiny share – but still a minority – of the nationalist vote won by the party in the North gave the lie to the idea that there was widespread support for the IRA
The outrage they felt that these acts of violence were carried out in their name was, for many, transferred to Sinn Féin when that party started to become a political force in the Republic. That did not mean that they viewed the British forces in Northern Ireland or the unionist state as injured innocents; far from it. But even if the campaign (irony of ironies) reinforced partition by turning them away from the Troubles up the road, they knew enough about the North to see that John Hume showed there was a way to address the oppression of the Northern state by peaceful means. They never bought the Michelle O’Neill view that there was “no alternative” to bombs and bullets. They still don’t.
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The tiny minority of the vote won by Sinn Féin in the Republic and the less tiny share – but still a minority – of the nationalist vote won by the party in the North gave the lie to the idea that there was widespread support for the IRA. Not alone was the IRA’s campaign not supported by the majority of people on the island, in the Republic or even among nationalists in the North, it was vehemently opposed by them. These are historical facts that cannot be erased. Subsequent generations are entitled to come to the view that the IRA campaign was justified; they are not entitled to infer that most people believed it to be so at the time of its conduct.
The view among some younger voters of the IRA as rather over-enthusiastic human rights activists or inappropriately muscular diversity champions is not one shared by most people who lived through the conflict in the North or for whom it was a daily presence in the national life of the South.
But life moves on and history with it. Conflicts recede, the bloodstains fade; old hatreds may die slowly, but they die off.
Whatever your view about it, it’s now the case that chants of “ooh ah, up the Ra” are commonplace. Thousands at Féile an Phobal in Belfast last August; every junior B football team that wins the county final; now the women’s soccer team. My guess is that the more tut-tutting there is about it, the more popular it’ll become.
Greener and keener
What does it signify? Like everything else, different things for different people. Are there those who want to stick it to the unionists? You bet there are. Among them is Brian Warfield of the Wolfe Tones, who dismissed complaints on RTÉ’s Drivetime as coming from people who “aren’t really Irish” (more revealing, perhaps, that he knows).
The people who are most enthusiastic about the [unification] project often seem to be the least willing to make any of the changes likely to persuade unionists to think about it
Unlike their parents, some of the post-conflict generation follow Warfield’s line: they’re greener and they’re keener on a united Ireland, too. This always strikes me as one of the paradoxes of the unification debate – the people who are most enthusiastic about the project often seem to be the least willing to make any of the changes likely to persuade unionists to think about it.
But is all this in the mind of all those roaring their heads off in celebratory dressing rooms or the boozed-up parties? I don’t think so. They don’t have visceral opposition to the IRA their parents had. But the contrite response of the women’s football team told us something else too, that might have been alien to their parents’ generation: they don’t want to be gratuitously offensive to anyone. If the fact of the chants told us something important, then so did the general reaction against them.
The generational division is reflected in real-life experience when it comes to housing, where younger people – with good reason – feel themselves shut out. They’re stuck at home with their parents (arguing the toss on ooh-ahh-gate this week, maybe) or paying exorbitant rents that sap their ability to save for a deposit. It’s easy see why they feel they’re getting a raw deal.
The polls paint a stark picture of the extent of this generational divide. Three years ago, in October 2019, Sinn Féin was at the same level of support (14 per cent) as it had been at the 2016 general election; among those aged 18-24, it was at 17 per cent, among those aged 25-34, the figure was 23 per cent. In the latest Irish Times Ipsos poll, the party was at 36 per cent among all voters, at 44 per cent among the 18-24s and 43 per cent among 25-34s.
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Opposition parties often see midterm peaks when the government is unpopular, but still: these numbers are more than mildly terrifying for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael shouldn’t worry too much what the youngsters are singing. They can’t do much about that anyway. They should worry about fixing the housing crisis. Sure, it’s not all about housing, but nothing is more important politically, and the clock is ticking. A developer tells me that anything that isn’t on site by the end of this year has no hope of being delivered before the next general election. Tick tock.