A reflection on Fleadh Cheoil, contested memory, Orange and Republican traditions, and learning to share history.

One of the most encouraging things about Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann coming to Béal Feirste (Belfast) was seeing people from a unionist background not simply tolerating it, but taking part in it.

That matters.

For too long in Northern Ireland, Irish culture has been treated as though it necessarily comes with a constitutional declaration attached. A fiddle tune, an Irish-language phrase, a traditional song or a cultural festival can be made to carry far more political weight than it ought to.

The Fleadh offered something healthier. It showed that Irish traditional music can belong in the city without requiring everyone who enjoys it to become a nationalist. Unionists could take part, enjoy the music, welcome visitors and recognise that Irish culture is part of the cultural landscape of the place they call home.

That should have been an uncomplicatedly positive thing.

DUP MLA Philip Brett offered a reflection at the end of the Fleadh that contained much with which I agree.

He argued that confidence in one’s own identity should include the ability to respect and enjoy the culture of one’s neighbours. He welcomed the fact that many unionists had embraced the Fleadh, and made the simple but important point that his unionism was not threatened by somebody else being proudly Irish.

That is worth welcoming.

Indeed, it gets very close to what made the week in Béal Feirste significant. Nobody had to stop being British in order to enjoy Irish music. Nobody had to become a nationalist in order to take part in the Fleadh.

But Brett’s reflection also illustrates how difficult we still find it to leave culture alone without turning it back into constitutional argument.

The Fleadh becomes evidence that the United Kingdom can accommodate Irish identity. Republican unease is contrasted with unionist confidence. Féile is invoked through references to the glorification of terrorism. And the reflection concludes with the slogan: “More Fleadh, less Féile.”

Perhaps that is exactly the reflex we need to get beyond.

If the lesson of the Fleadh is that different traditions can share a city without threatening one another, then it need not prove the Union, disprove a united Ireland, vindicate nationalism or defeat republicanism.

It can simply demonstrate that people are capable of sharing space.

And that generosity has to apply when the cultural expression is less comfortable.

It is relatively easy to welcome Irish traditional music when it appears in a form that feels attractive, festive and politically harmless. The harder test comes when we encounter songs, bands, commemorations or historical memories belonging to another tradition that we dislike.

That does not require approving of them.

It does require something like the same historical generosity that we naturally extend to our own tradition.

And yet, almost immediately, the old reflexes returned.

A food outlet was criticised after Celtic Symphony appeared on a playlist during the event, because of the familiar refrain, “Ooh ah, up the ’RA.” From there came accusations that terrorists were being commemorated.

Elsewhere, complaint followed the playing of a republican band in Béal Feirste city centre, particularly because it was near a memorial to members of the Ulster Defence Regiment.

I do understand why such things can cause pain.

The Troubles are not ancient history. People alive today lost parents, children, spouses, friends and neighbours. The Provisional IRA killed people. Loyalist organisations killed people. The security forces were involved in violence and controversy. Families continue to live with consequences that cannot simply be dissolved by appeals to culture or context.

A song that sounds rebellious, historical or even amusing to one person may evoke murder and grief for another.

Who of my generation, growing up in Northern Ireland, is not still affected by hearing Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle? For me, it instantly brings back the 1993 anti-terrorism advertisement broadcast in Northern Ireland. A perfectly ordinary song became bound to a very particular memory of the Troubles.

That deserves to be taken seriously.

But if we are serious about living together, that principle has to work in more than one direction.

Who gets to name history?

One of the difficulties with historical memory is that victors have enormous power over the language in which events are remembered.

We still speak of the Glorious Revolution.

In England, that phrase evokes constitutional settlement, parliamentary government and the replacement of James II by William and Mary.

In Ireland, however, the revolution arrived with armies.

Williamite and Jacobite forces marched across the country. Towns were besieged. Battles were fought. Men were killed in large numbers. Communities found themselves caught between competing claims to sovereignty backed not by polite constitutional discussion but by force of arms.

Cath na Bóinne (the Battle of the Boyne), Eachroim (Aughrim), Luimneach (Limerick) and the other episodes of the Williamite War were not chapters in a peaceful constitutional seminar.

They were war.

That does not mean that the Williamite army should simply be labelled a “terrorist organisation”. Applying modern categories carelessly to the seventeenth century tells us very little.

But neither should we pretend that because the victorious side later acquired the language of liberty, constitutionalism and glorious revolution, its soldiers somehow ceased to be an army marching through somebody else’s landscape.

The Jacobites were doing the same.

For the ordinary people through whose fields, villages and towns these forces moved, the distinction between glorious constitutional settlement and war may have looked considerably less tidy than it does in commemorative history.

And yet today we are quite capable of understanding that an Orange parade commemorating the Williamite victory does not necessarily mean that every person walking in it is celebrating seventeenth-century death.

We recognise—or at least we ought to recognise—that historical events acquire cultural meanings.

They become connected with identity, religion, family, community, memory, and belonging.

That is precisely why the comparison matters.

Not because a Williamite soldier is the same thing as a Provisional IRA volunteer.

Not because all historical violence is morally equivalent.

But because we already know how to distinguish between commemoration, culture, identity and literal endorsement of every act of violence associated with a tradition when the tradition happens to be our own.

Perhaps we might sometimes extend the same historical intelligence to traditions we do not share.

There is very little neutral ground

The objection to a republican band playing near a memorial to UDR soldiers raises another difficulty.

Where, exactly, in Béal Feirste is historically neutral?

Nearly every part of the city carries layers of memory.

There are streets associated with bombings and shootings. There are former barracks, police stations and military sites. There are churches connected with funerals and political movements. There are memorials, murals, parade routes, republican sites, loyalist sites, graves, meeting halls and street corners whose meanings differ depending upon who is telling the story.

Go further back and the layers multiply again.

Plantation. Rebellion. Penal laws. Industrialisation. Home Rule. Partition. War. Civil rights. The Troubles. Peace.

Northern Ireland—or the North of Ireland, if that is the language through which someone understands it—is not a blank stage on which culture can take place free of historical association. The landscape itself remembers.

And that is hardly unique to the North.

Across the island there are monuments, battlefields, barracks, churches, estates, graves, memorials and streets carrying competing versions of the past. What looks like national heritage to one person may represent defeat, exclusion or dispossession to another.

If every piece of music, every parade, every banner, every cultural event and every public gathering had first to be checked against everything that once happened nearby, there would be very few places anywhere in Ireland where anything could happen at all.

The alternative cannot be to empty the public square of every history that makes somebody uncomfortable. There would be nothing left.

The orange in the tricolour

And this is where the Republic of Ireland has something to consider too.

The national flag is green, white and orange.

Its symbolism is familiar: green representing one tradition, orange another, and white between them representing peace.

It was—and is—an extraordinarily ambitious symbol.

But at times it can feel as though the orange is more easily tolerated as a stripe on the flag than as a living tradition on the island.

Unionism, Orange culture and British identity are sometimes spoken of in the Republic as though they belong entirely somewhere else—as though they are foreign intrusions into an otherwise straightforward Irish story.

But they are part of Irish history too.

There are people on this island whose family histories, religious traditions and sense of belonging include Britishness as naturally as somebody else’s include Irish republicanism.

One does not have to agree with unionism to recognise that.

Nor does recognising it somehow diminish Irish national identity.

Indeed, if the tricolour means what generations have said it means, then the orange cannot simply be a historical footnote.

It represents people.

And people are rather more complicated than coloured cloth.

There is therefore a challenge on both sides of the border.

If unionists in Northern Ireland want their Britishness, their commemorations and their cultural traditions to be understood in context rather than reduced to crude accusations, they must be prepared to extend the same generosity towards Irishness around them.

And if the Republic wishes to think of itself as a pluralist society representing the whole breadth of Irish experience, it must be prepared to recognise that Orange and British traditions are also part of the history of this island.

The green cannot simply tolerate the orange as an abstraction.

The orange cannot demand recognition while treating the green as a threat.

And the white between them cannot mean that nobody mentions the difficult things.

It must mean room.

The difference between offence and threat

None of this means that context does not matter.

Deliberately playing a song to intimidate people is different from a song appearing on a general playlist.

Marching directly past grieving relatives while triumphalising their loss is different from a cultural event taking place in a city containing memorials.

Intent matters.

Context matters.

Proportion matters.

We should be able to distinguish between an act intended to threaten and the unavoidable reality of encountering another community’s cultural memory.

That distinction becomes impossible when every appearance of a republican song is automatically described as “commemorating terrorists”, as military symbolism from another tradition is allowed the more generous vocabulary of history, heritage and culture.

The same is true in reverse.

A nationalist who interprets every Orange band, Lambeg drum or Union flag as an immediate personal threat is also refusing to recognise the distinction between historical identity and present-day violence.

Living together requires more sophistication than that.

What the Fleadh actually showed

That is why the unionist participation in the Fleadh was so important.

It did not prove that competing identities had disappeared.

It proved something better: that they did not have to disappear.

A person can be British and enjoy Irish traditional music.

A person can support the Union and recognise the Irish cultural inheritance of Béal Feirste.

A nationalist can welcome unionist participation without demanding constitutional conversion.

Irish music does not become less Irish because somebody with a unionist identity enjoys it.

The music of Ulster’s loyalist bands does not become less British because it was showcased at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann.

British identity does not become weaker because somebody attends the Fleadh.

And perhaps the same lesson can travel south.

The Republic does not become less Irish by recognising the British and unionist inheritance of some of the people who share this island.

Ireland does not become weaker when its history becomes more complicated.

Quite the opposite.

A mature national identity should be able to encounter traditions that challenge its preferred story without immediately needing to erase or assimilate them.

That is what genuine inclusion looks like.

Not the bleaching out of every uncomfortable historical association until culture becomes harmless and meaningless.

Not insisting that every person share one account of the past.

Not deciding that only one community’s symbols are complicated while everybody else’s are dangerous.

It means allowing different traditions to occupy the same civic space.

Perhaps we do not need one shared history

For decades we have spoken about developing a “shared history”.

I increasingly wonder whether that asks the wrong thing of us.

We are unlikely ever to share one interpretation of Cath na Bóinne.

We will not all understand 1798 in the same way.

We will not agree about 1916.

We will not agree about partition.

We certainly do not yet agree about much of the Troubles.

Nor will everyone understand the British state, the Irish state, republicanism, unionism or nationalism through the same historical lens.

And perhaps we do not need to.

What we need is something slightly different.

We need the maturity to live beside histories we do not share.

That means recognising that what one person calls liberation, another may remember as defeat.

What one calls resistance, another may call terrorism.

What one celebrates as constitutional progress, another may experience as conquest.

What one calls heritage, another may experience as triumphalism.

And sometimes several of those descriptions can contain some truth at the same time.

History is rarely as clean as the slogans inherited by the victors.

That should make us humbler about our own traditions and more curious about everyone else’s.

The success of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Béal Feirste was not that the city somehow became historically neutral for a week.

It was that people with different identities entered the same space, heard music that did not necessarily belong to their own tradition, and discovered that participation did not require surrender.

Perhaps both jurisdictions on this island can learn something from that.

The North can learn that Irish culture and the Irish language are not a constitutional threats.

The South can learn that British and unionist identities are not stains to be quietly airbrushed from the Irish story.

Neither community gains anything by demanding that the other become invisible.

Because reconciliation cannot mean erasing the past.

It cannot mean sanitising every song, parade, memorial or cultural tradition until no one is ever confronted by a history they dislike.

It means learning to inhabit the same island while remembering differently.

We do not need a shared version of history.
We need the maturity to share space with histories we do not share.

That may be a much harder task.

But it is also a much more honest one.