PRAISE FOR GLENN PATTERSON

‘One of the fatal flaws of the Brexit project was wilful ignorance about Northern Ireland, its border with the Republic of Ireland, and the historic entanglements that made a “clean break” from the EU impossible. Combining the vividness and humour of the novelist with the insight and astuteness of the analyst, Glenn Patterson unties all the knots and infuses the history with the humanity of lived experience.

As a guide for the bewildered, Backstop Land is a great place to start. As a plea for understanding and care, it reminds us of where we should hope to end up. Funny, wise, entertaining and illuminating, this book is one of the best things to come out of the Brexit saga.’

FINTAN O’TOOLE, ON BACKSTOP LAND

‘The International is an act of courage. It is the best book about the Troubles ever written.’

ANNE ENRIGHT, ON THE INTERNATIONAL

‘Glenn Patterson has become the most serious and humane chronicler of Northern Ireland over the past thirty years, as well as one of the best contemporary Irish novelists.’

COLM TÓIBÍN, ON THE INTERNATIONAL

BACKSTOP LAND

Glenn Patterson

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Glenn Patterson, 2019

‘Speech’ © Elaine Gaston, 2016

The moral right of Glenn Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (FTPO): 9781838932022

ISBN (E): 9781838932039

Cover design: Steve Leard

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Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

Chronology

‘Speech’ by Elaine Gaston

Prologue

Up to Speed

Up on the Hill

DUP

What a Carve-up

Up the Ra

Cupar Street

Up to Two a Day

Uppa Queers

Up and Down the Road

Look Up (Postscript)

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

‘Nobody knows anything.’

William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

‘No Government should commit a country to a course of action in which the consequences were so opaque as to be incalculable.’

Right Reverend John McDowell, Bishop of Clogher1

‘The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people’s suffering for his principles.’

E. L. Doctorow

‘Where we live is basically a piss-take of the world.’

Scott McKendry, Sunflower Bar, 11 June 2019

This is kind of personal

Chronology

Speech

This is the prime manister speakin.

Know what yer aw thinkin.

How ma goin tay sort oot the boarder

noo wi Breggsit an aw?

Mtellinye dinny worry.

Won’t be plain sailin

but fAh could jist explain.

There’s nuthin tay worry aboot.

We don know yet fthere’ll be

a clean Breggsit ra messy Breggsit

nur a hard Breggsit nur a saft Breggsit.

But mnot goin te build a hard boarder.

It’ll be a soft boarder, waitn see.

A sorta magic boarder that no-one can see.

We can hay a boarder that isny a boarder.

One tay keep youse in, an everyone else oot.

We can hay loadsa jobs on the boarder.

Know checkin passports, customs, makin fences,

driving diggers tay dig up roads

n puttin boulders an aw the wee small roads

that’s jist been opened up agin not longsince.

Won’t be goin back tay the old days, not at aw.

Lotsa opportunaties. Wee businesses, know,

filling stayshuns n fegs n booze n that,

know, tea shaps an bars an that kinda thing.

Goin tay stayshun controlsn the portsn airports

n thi Republic, workin wi the Irish government.

Know they’re independent noo but

listen, just cos Ah tawk posh

disny mean Ah dinny unnerstan yer feelins.

Ah was an em pee fur a lang time

fore Ah was the pee em. We wul sort it.

How? I dinny know but ock it’ll be awright.

Quit gernin. What’s that?

Ah canny unnerstan anybody

who tawks like that.

Youse r naw makin sense.

Elaine Gaston

Prologue

Friday, 9 June 2017. I am in London with my friend and screenwriting partner, Colin Carberry, talking to the producers of a couple of films we are working on. Both, as it happens, musical biopics – an area where (in truth, the only area where) we have a bit of form, having co-written Good Vibrations, based on, as we were careful to say, the ‘true stories’ of legendary Belfast record-shop owner, inveterate yarn-spinner and perpetual contrarian, Terri Hooley.

Musicals are having a moment. La La Land is still in its first flush and Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns is filming at Shepperton Studios, sixteen miles down the road from where Colin and I are having our meetings.

Yesterday, Thursday, 8 June, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland went to the polls, in a general election called just two months before and against all expectation by Prime Minister Theresa May (already that feels like writing ‘Anthony Eden’), in a bid to strengthen her hand within parliament and her own party ahead of Brexit negotiations with Brussels. The election had taken the Conservatives from 330 seats – an overall majority of four – to just 317, nine short of the number needed to govern without the support of other parties.

The Northern Ireland electorate, meantime, with no Labour or Liberal Democratic candidates to choose from, and only a very small field of Conservatives, had returned seven Sinn Féin MPs (who had run, as was their wont, on an abstentionist ticket, that is, a promise not to take any seats they won) and from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the only Northern Irish party to have backed Leave in the United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum the year before, ten MPs.

It had become starkly apparent by the time Colin and I stepped off the early Friday morning plane from Belfast that the fate of Theresa May’s government – the whole tenor of the UK’s departure from the European Union – depended on a single Northern Irish party. Not just any Northern Irish party, that Northern Irish party, with its eccentric views on all manner of things, from same-sex relationships to the origins of the universe. (Though, in true DUP negotiation style, the pact that the Tories sought would not be reached until seventeen days later and even then would take the form of a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement rather than formal coalition: the government would have to keep coming back to seek their support.)

The people we were meeting were by turns baffled and affronted. ‘Who the fuck are these people?’

And they weren’t the only ones. The question dogged Colin and me every step of our day.

They were asking it in shops – who the fuck are they?

They were asking it in bars – who the fuck are they?

They were asking it on the streets – who the fuck are they? – and out the windows of cars – who the fuck are they?

If we had been writing it as a musical, the billposter sliding down his ladder would have been asking it, over his shoulder – who the fuck are they? The faces on the bill he had just finished posting would have been asking it and everyone would have laughed, short and sharp, taking the number up another notch – full-blown Mary Poppins Returns style, drone’s-eye view, upper windows thrown wide open, half a million of them maybe, one for every person who in the next forty-eight hours would sign a petition calling on the Tories not to do a deal – Who the fuck are they? Who the fuck are they? – building and building to a surround-sound crescendo.

Just – who – the – fuck – are – they?

And then a pause in which Colin and I looked at one another, shrugged, and turned to the camera and sang our first and only line… ‘Welcome to our world!’

Up to Speed

It is Tuesday, 2 July 2019, and there’s a burst bass-drum skin lying on the footpath at the end of my street, an arc of blood spray inwards towards the centre from the point where the bass drummer’s wrist, repeatedly and with great force, met the skin’s steel rim. You don’t beat the bass drum in Belfast, you blatter it. And carry a spare – or two – for whenever it yields to the laws of physics.

Last night, hundreds of bandsmen and women led Orange Lodges around the streets of east Belfast (sitting MP: Gavin Robinson, DUP) on the annual Somme Memorial parade. I know to call it Somme Memorial parade now, but I had always when I was growing up referred to it as the Mini Twelfth (the ‘Wee’ Twelfth others called it), a curtain-raiser, no more, for the main event in the Orange calendar, the Twelfth of July. The anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Though in truth the curtain is raised inch by inch, foot by marching foot from sometime in April, and lowered just as gradually until the end of the ‘season’, on what’s known as the Last Saturday in August.*

One of the main roads out of the city, the Albertbridge Road, just beyond the station where the Dublin train stops, was closed to traffic this evening from half past six. Police erected corrugated iron sheets along the north side of the road where normally a combination of railings and carefully cultivated shrubbery delineate the (nationalist) Short Strand district, where any parade involving the Orange Order is considered a provocation. Elsewhere, including at the end of my street, folding chairs had started to appear on the kerbside even before the roads were closed. On some, the chair owners had set trays of sandwiches covered with cling film. In what would on any other evening at that hour be Urban Clearway, cars were parked with the windows down and the radios on.

The Somme is big in Northern Ireland: part battle, part foundation myth. Of 57,000 British casualties on 1 July 1916 – the costliest day in British military history – 4,900, or approaching one in ten, were serving with the 36th Ulster Division, drawn from a region with something more like one in thirty-five of the United Kingdom population. Over 2,000 of these died, more than 300 from the city of Belfast. (The city’s losses rise to 375 when soldiers serving with other regiments are added in.) All this was occurring less than ten weeks after Irish Volunteers, supported by the Irish Citizen’s Army, and taking advantage of the war in France (‘England’s difficulty, Ireland’s opportunity’), occupied buildings across Dublin in the doomed (at least in the moment) Easter Rising.

Many – if not the majority – of those going over the top at the Somme had themselves been members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (the UVF, on which the Irish Volunteers were modelled).† They had been contemplating a rebellion of their own against a proposed Home Rule Bill (‘Home Rule, Rome Rule’, was their slogan), which they put aside to serve the country they had been prepared to take up arms against.

About five or six miles further east of my street on Tuesday, 2 July, the five-star Culloden Estate and Spa (motto foi est tout: faith is all) is playing host to Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson, the two remaining runners in the Tory leadership race, in town for a hustings debate before an audience of five hundred Northern Irish Conservatives. Or maybe that sentence should read: before an audience of Northern Ireland’s five hundred Conservatives. Or maybe (again) ostensibly for an audience of Northern Ireland’s Conservatives. Really, they are both coming to talk to the Democratic Unionist Party.

Those negotiations Theresa May entered into in the wake of the 2017 election produced a Draft Withdrawal Agreement that included a protocol to ensure that the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland remained open, without customs or police checks, no matter what the terms of the UK’s departure from the EU: the ‘backstop’.

(How touching now to look at the word dozing in my 2007 Oxford English Dictionary between ‘backstitch’ and ‘backstory’ – a little nod, next to it, towards its English sporting equivalent, the long-stop – all unaware of the prominence it was about to achieve.)

The backstop, requiring continued regulatory alignment between the whole of the UK and the EU, with Northern Ireland alone cleaving to certain principles of the single market, proved so unpalatable to Tory Brexiteers – the extreme wing of the Leave campaign – and to the DUP that a further ‘instrument’ was introduced acknowledging that the measure was ‘suboptimal’ and that both the EU and the UK did not want to see it come into force: would do everything in their collective powers, in fact, to ensure that it didn’t.

And still the Brexiteer objections remained.

After three failed attempts to get the Withdrawal Agreement – with backstop – through the House of Commons, Theresa May revised back the date for the UK leaving the EU by a couple of hundred days and, hard on the heels of that, announced her intention to quit as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. The contest began to find her successor.

Two weeks in, I finally understood that the Tory Party leadership contest was actually a Radio 4 comedy panel show in the vein of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, whose most famous game, for many years, was ‘Mornington Crescent’, a game that operated to rules no one but (or possibly including) the contestants understood, and the point of which was to ‘arrive’ at Mornington Crescent by way of other randomly (though passed off as strategically) named London underground stations. For ‘Mornington Crescent’ read ‘Hard Border’, only, instead of arriving there, the object of the game is to avoid it altogether, without relying on the word ‘backstop’. The one who tells the stupidest, most obvious lie proceeds to the next round. Rory Stewart does surprisingly well to begin with but – alarm bells should have rung when he mentioned he had been reading Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy of all things, with its oft-quoted line about hope and history rhyming, showing far too much actual interest and knowledge – he comes a cropper when he appears to misunderstand this particular game and talks about how the return of a hard border might actually be avoided… Buzzers all round from the other contestants, sympathetic groans from the audience: yes, I’m afraid, Rory, you used the b-s word!

And suddenly I remember my friend Kathleen, a casting agent in New York, who told me a couple of years back about the TV series she was working on, the script of which had not yet been completed at the start of the last day of filming. How I laughed as she related the whole sorry farce of actors all on standby, taxis with their meters running.

This is no way to make television!

I’ll tell you something else for nothing, it’s no way to leave an economic and political union either. No script, and no idea who the main actors are going to be when it comes to the final act.

So, eleven Tory candidates quickly became ten, became nine, became, at last, the two who have fetched up, this second evening of July, at the Culloden Hotel. The renegotiated withdrawal date of 31 October is 121 days away and still the border in Ireland and the backstop are the great unanswered questions, the issues on which Brexit will stand or fall. (I use ‘the border in Ireland’ there and not the ‘Irish Border’ taking my lead from comedian Dara Ó Briain. The ‘Irish border’, he says, is the beach.‡)

And guess what?

The questions are still left unanswered (unless you think saying ‘the backstop must change or go’ for the nine hundredth time, or muttering about alternative arrangements, is an answer§), at least by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, as Wednesday, 3 July dawns and 121 becomes 120 days to go and I finally pick up the burst bass-drum skin from the footpath at the end of my street and look for a bin big enough to put it in.

*

I appreciate that, for some readers, a lot of this will not be new. And then again, others will be like Karen Bradley, the former Secretary of State for this part of the UK, who was blissfully unaware of certain fundamentals of life here. Say, that people in Northern Ireland have historically had a tendency to vote along religious lines, or that quite a large percentage of the population consider at least some of the killings for which the police and army were responsible in the course of our Troubles (Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy, Secretary of State?) to be crimes.

*

I list among my hobbies emailing eBay sellers to explain that there is no such thing as the ‘Mainland UK’, no such thing as the UK indeed without Northern Ireland, that postage rates to Belfast are identical to postage rates to Belmarsh, Belshill and Benllech, and that actually they can deliver their excellent used-condition shoes to me without surcharge. Though the misconception is not peculiar to eBay sellers. I remember a frantic phone call from my first London publishing house, in the late 1980s, asking me if they needed ‘special stamps’ to send me proofs of my novel.

(On the phone this summer to an Apple Tech guy – Australian – trying to find me an appointment with a Genius. ‘Does North Ireland fall under the UK?’ he asks. Fall under? Well, when you put it like that…)

Northern Ireland is an administrative region of the UK. Not a country (though it competes as one in FIFA and UEFA competitions and in the Commonwealth Games), still less a province: Ulster, one of the four provinces on the island of Ireland, has nine counties, including Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan, which are in the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland, shorn of those three, has six.

At primary school we were taught FAT LAD as a mnemonic: Fermanagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Londonderry, Armagh, Down. I used it as the title of my second novel, which immediately identified me to some people as Protestant by upbringing: a Catholic would not recognize or countenance the L. County Derry, they would say, rather than Londonderry (a few objectors stop their cars on roads heading to the northwest to adjust the signage accordingly), giving you FAT DAD, or indeed DAFT AD… for how to settle one constitutional crisis by storing up another. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which created the land border on the island, was ushered in at the height of the first of the twentieth century’s Troubles – all-island in this instance – which had picked up where it had left off before the First World War: nationalists set on Home Rule (as a minimum now) and unionists, concentrated in the northeast, determined to resist inclusion in what they feared would be a notably Catholic state.

Reading again about the negotiations – machinations – leading up to Partition, you can’t help but hear echoes of the current Brexit wheezes, a lot of leaving but not really leaving, remaining but not really remaining, time-bound opt-outs…# (The quip made about one ardent Partitionist – ‘he never knows what he wants but is always intriguing to get it’ – could have come straight from the mouth of Donald Tusk.)

From 1920 to 1972 we had our own parliament, at Stormont, which, by virtue of the very fact that one (predominantly Catholic) third of Ulster had been excluded from Northern Ireland (those counties weren’t left out just for the sake of an acronym), was guaranteed to return a Unionist government. Time after time after time. Catholics were entitled to vote in these and in Westminster elections. As many as three in ten, though, along with a smaller number of Protestants,∫ were excluded from elections to local councils – where crucial decisions about public housing allocations were made – by virtue of the property requirement, which conversely (perversely) gave some wealthy Protestants several votes. The demand of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) for ‘One Man One Vote’ in the late 1960s therefore looked in two directions: giving to those who had none and taking from those who had too many.Ω

Worse still was the manipulation of electoral ward boundaries – ‘gerrymandering’ – which ensured that even where there was a Catholic majority, Protestants still retained control of most councils. NICRA was formed in January 1967, though agitation around housing had been building since 1964. Extreme unionists dismissed it as a front for communists and republicans. The writer Anne Devlin, who ‘bunked off’ school to go on Civil Rights marches, says they weren’t all about ‘Civil Rights for Catholics’: ‘… this was our generation in a show of strength. Of course there were communists and republicans – why not? It’s a democracy.’1

The Civil Rights campaign gathered force throughout 1968 and into 1969, and at every stage was met with ever-greater resistance from those extreme unionists (including some in uniform), whose anger only increased when the more liberal (very small ‘l’) government of Captain Terence O’Neill attempted to introduce a measure of reform.

Then, in August 1969, the lid came off. A parade by the Apprentice Boys in Derry in the middle of that month led to an outbreak of rioting in the Catholic Bogside, which stretched into a second and then a third day. (As I was writing this, I heard Carmel McCafferty interviewed on a Radio Ulster programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of this ‘Battle of the Bogside’2 about the feeling of freedom from throwing her first stone – not necessarily, as it may have looked, at the ‘Orangemen’ and the police: ‘I was throwing it at my boss, who was paying me – I was twenty-one at the time – three pounds a week.’)

Violence spread from Derry to Belfast, where the sectarian geography of the city – Catholics and Protestants in some cases living at opposite ends of the same street – meant that it was even nastier, and very quickly bloodier too. British troops were introduced to one city after the other and what was intended as a solution to the problem became a very large part of the problem itself. And the pattern was established for the next quarter of a century.

Several attempts were made to establish power-sharing governments, most notably in 1974 following the Sunningdale Agreement, but all were opposed or thwarted, by republicans and loyalists alike, until the 1998 Belfast – aka Good Friday – Agreement: ‘Sunningdale for Slow Learners’, as Seamus Mallon, the inaugural Deputy First Minister of our Legislative Assembly, dubbed it.

The Agreement consists of three strands (or Three Strands, to show that they aren’t just any old strands): Strand One, the Assembly and ruling Executive; Strand Two, North–South bodies; and Strand Three, their East–West equivalents. All three to be interlocking and interdependent.

The Executive is headed by a First and Deputy First Minister. The Deputy First Minister is actually Joint First Minister: like love and marriage you can’t have one without the other.≈ The office, though officially now the Executive Office, is still referred to by most people, in one breath, as OFMdFM (in Northern Ireland, even the use of the lower-case ‘d’ is significant and probably the result of a week’s negotiation): the Office of First and deputy First Minister.

Uniquely among the constituent parts of the UK, there is no requirement for Members of our Legislative Assembly (MLAs) to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. The existence – persistence – of the oath at Westminster is central to the refusal of the seven MPs from Sinn Féin to take their seats there, although, you will more often hear that policy of abstention spoken of in terms of jurisdiction: the party refuses to recognize the UK parliament’s right to a say in the affairs of any part of Ireland, which remains in their eyes one nation, indivisible (though a man Gerry Adams once referred to as a ‘good’ republican, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, former IRA Chief of Staff, serial smuggler and convicted tax evader, could take cognizance of the fact that in matters of revenue in regard to fuel and pigs, the nation is currently – if scarcely visibly – divided and profits from the translation of said goods, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, from one jurisdiction to the other).

Sinn Féin likewise, for most of the twentieth century, refused to give credence to the Dublin government – the ‘Free State’ government as they would have it, using the name coined by the Government of Ireland Act that brought about Partition. They looked back for their authority to the last pre-Partition election, in 1918: a Sinn Féin landslide everywhere but the northeast where the constituencies won by the Irish Unionists (as they still were) formed a shape remarkably similar to today’s Northern Ireland.