To Be Seen Is to Be Welcomed

Northerners not welcome? A panel discussion in association with ARINS and The Irish Times took place in the Royal Irish Academy on Thursday, 11 July 2024. Watch back here

‘I’ve been made to understand that I don’t quite make the cut,’ announced Karyn Harty, a lawyer and partner at Denton’s Ireland. Along with Senator Malachai O’Hara, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Green Party, and Dr Una O’Neill, a GP partner at Mercer’s Medical Centre, Harty was asked to respond to the question: ‘When is othering an unwelcome act?’  

This question came with a slew of others posed by Mark Hennessy, the Ireland and Britain Editor of the Irish Times. Hennessy, Harty, O’Hara and O’Neill gathered in the meeting room of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin on Thursday, 11 July for a panel titled ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’, meant to explore the lived experiences of Northerners (i.e. people born in Northern Ireland) living and working south of the border. The panel was hosted by the ARINS Project, a partnership between the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute and the Royal Irish Academy.  

In the build-up to the 12th of July celebrations in Northern Ireland, an occasion on which massive bonfires are lit and loyalist bands march to their favorite tunes to celebrate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, one might expect a panel to delve into the ways division and sectarianism prevent Catholics or people from the South feeling welcome in the North. Instead, the ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’ panel forced audience members to turn the mirror inwards and look at the ways in which Northerners of every persuasion are made to feel othered or excluded in the Republic of Ireland.  

Chair Mark Hennessy kicked off the panel with the question ‘How often have you felt welcomed?’, to which the panelists unanimously answered ‘always’. Karyn Harty stated that ‘I’ve loved it here ever since I crossed.’ Similarly, Senator O’Hara claimed that he was ‘welcomed with open arms in the Oireachtas’. Una O’Neill offered a justification for any othering she experienced, saying ‘I didn’t know them either!’  

But beneath these unanimous declarations of comfort in the Republic, each Northerner noted moments in which they were made to feel as if they didn’t quite fit into the social fabric of their new home. Each speaker remarked that this feeling of ‘other’ didn’t just occur in the Republic of Ireland. Instead, it was the result of a seeming consensus that Northerners are an unknown entity to those who have never lived or interacted with people from the North.  

Dr O’Neill recounted an amusing story in which she worked as a 24-hour nurse for an English couple. Upon telling the family that she was from Northern Ireland, O’Neill watched as a flicker of uncertainty crossed their faces. She half-joked that the couple thought, ‘Oh gosh, they’ve sent me a terrorist!’  

In response to the title of the day’s event, Senator O’Hara remarked that he has never felt that Northerners are not welcome. Instead, he posed the alliterative alternative ‘Northerners are Not Known.’ It is from the multifaceted identity that Northerners hold as a result of the Troubles that O’Hara, and later the other two speakers, felt that they donned such an unusual status.  

Karyn Harty noted that human beings have a strong desire to exist in binaries. But being a Northerner means that one does not fit into the binary that has been established on the island of Ireland. Many of the speakers themselves hold seemingly contrasting identity traits. Harty revealed that she is a Presbyterian, nationalist, Gaeilgeoir.  

Despite, or perhaps because of, Northerners’ fluid identity, each speaker noted instances in which people from the South tried to box them into a single identity trait. Harty recalled being asked what her father did for work by a colleague in the South. In her eyes, it was a firm and forward attempt to categorise her: ‘People here like to place you into the square mile of land you are from.’ O’Hara noted that Northerners too try to delineate each other, but in a much more subtle fashion: ‘When you meet other Northerners, we do the little dance of sorting each other’s identity.’  

Boldly, O’Hara claimed that attempting to categorise others meant ‘something about jockeying for a hierarchical position with someone’. In the South, knowing what someone’s father did for work might delineate the person’s social class. Class, as the speakers went on to discuss, had as much to do with their feeling of being a Northern ‘other’ as religion or culture did.  

It was here that O’Hara joked that his strong Belfast accent meant that many of the staff in the Oireachtas assumed he was a ‘Shinner’ (i,e. a member of the nationalist political party Sinn Féin). In response, Una O’Neill offered that class plays a massive part in accent, which in turn plays a major role in how people perceive one another.  

Moving from this discussion on class, the speakers began to exchange narratives from their childhood, such as whether the television channel BBC was seen to be ‘posh’ or not. Harty recalled the ways her mother ascribed particular bad behaviours to watching certain television channels. Noting the connection that the speakers made to their families, Hennessy astutely asked, ‘What do you say to your family and friends when you go back North and, just as importantly, what do they say to you?’ Candidly, Una O’Neill replied, ‘It doesn’t come up.’ 

O’Neill then followed, ‘My relations from Derry just think they’re Irish and it doesn’t occur to them that they’re not as Irish as they think they are.’ Upon reflection, this declaration offered an interesting lens into the way she has been made to feel in the Republic. Though she has lived in the South for the greater part of her life and is a passport-holding Irish person, she maintains the sentiment that she does not feel fully Irish. Karyn Harty echoed that sentiment: ‘I’ve been made to understand that I don’t quite make the cut.’ 

Whether it be their accent or some other undefined cultural characteristic, all three speakers noted that there was an intangible element to their identity that prevented them from being ‘100% Irish’, if there even is such a thing. So, though the speakers began with the sentiment that they have never felt unwelcome, their answers did not mean that they felt fully Irish either. Holding such a fluid identity status, the panelists seemingly exist in a limbo state between Irish and Northern Irish.  

Closing out the session, Hennessy asked the panelists whether or not they supported a unity referendum. In reply, O’Neill returned to a common theme in her responses: relationships. In reference to Northern Ireland unionists, she claimed ‘If you don’t feel seen, you don’t feel welcome.’ Perhaps that statement was more than a comment on the potential referendum. In any case, O’Neill was decided in her opinion that unionists must feel represented in any future of Ireland.  

Similarly, O’Hara noted that ‘We need to have a rational, long conversation about what a united Ireland looks like.’ The ‘ground is moving’, said the senator, and DUP politicians need to make a plan for a shifting version of Ireland. O’Hara argued that DUP members can be pragmatic and engage in potential plans for a united Ireland without conceding any ideological ground. Otherwise, the Green Party senator claimed that they ‘may be left behind’. 

Karyn Harty, relying on her law background, returned to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. Harty noted that those in the middle ground, those that did not fit into the binary of unionist or nationalist, were left behind in the GFA. In a potentially united Ireland, Harty made the case for the support and amplification of so-called middle grounders.  

It was on that note that Hennessy turned the microphone over to audience members for questions. For anyone watching, the most interesting thing about the Q&A portion was the lack of questions. In lieu of questioning the panelists on their previous statements or opinions, audience members instead felt the need to share their own experiences of being Northerners in the South. One woman told an amusing anecdote about moving from the North to the South in the 1970s and having a priest forcibly try to bless her new home. She is in fact not a Catholic nor even religious at all.  

What stood out from these audience narratives was the fact that each person stated they resonated with panelists’ interviews. They felt both seen and heard by Mark Hennessy, Karyn Harty, Mal O’Hara and Una O’Neill. 

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Clodagh McEvoy-Johnston is a global affairs and peace studies major with a minor in civil and human rights, studying at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. During her summer internship with the ARINS Project, as part of the Dublin Global Gateway Internship Program, she attended the ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’ panel.