Metropolitan Anxieties
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Metropolitan Anxieties

On the Meaning of the Irish Catholic Adventure in Scotland

Mark Boyle

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Metropolitan Anxieties

On the Meaning of the Irish Catholic Adventure in Scotland

Mark Boyle

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About This Book

In a lecture entitled 'Scotland's shame', delivered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1999, Scotland's leading musical composer James MacMillan sought in an explosive way to expose the continuing pervasiveness of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sectarianism and bigotry in contemporary Scotland. A decade of heated public debate has followed. Drawing upon post-colonial critiques of the provincial nature of metropolitan theory, this book approaches the Scotland's shame debate as, in many ways, itself a classic metrocentric cultural struggle over the true and essential telos of a once colonised population. It argues that the most interesting question the debate has provoked, a question which thus far has failed to generate a worthy answer, is: is the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland intelligible and if so, what is the nature of this intelligibility? The purpose of this book is to harness the complex and rich theory of colonialism which French philosopher, political activist and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre developed and struggled over, to venture a qualified and partial interpretation of the Irish Catholic experience of Scotland. Nevertheless, in so doing, the book takes seriously the charge of metrocentricism as it bears on the search for the meaning of the Irish Catholic adventure in Scotland and refuses to permit any simplistic interpretation of this adventure. Presenting findings from a new oral history archive consisting of 67 interviews with members of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland, attention is given to the themes of national identity, estrangement and belonging; diasporic imaginings of Ireland; anti-imperial activism, agitation and advocacy; culture, faith and family; and poverty, work education and equality.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351917865
Edition
1

Chapter 1
Provincialising the Scotland’s Secret Shame Debate: An Enquiry into the Meaning of the Irish Catholic Adventure in Scotland

I came to Scotland from County Mayo in 1936. I was a young girl of 20, full of life. We made our way through Ayrshire and up to Fife. I met my husband who was a Ganger, he was in charge of a group of Potato diggers, when I was working in the fields too. We got married in 1942. We worked on the Potatoes. I loved it. It took me a few days to get used to it. The worst thing was getting up awful early in the morning. You got up at about two or three o’clock in the morning. I thought I was hardly in bed sleeping. But you never said a word. You got up and got on with it. Once you were on your feet, you know first thing in the morning in the countryside on a sunny day in the summer, it was lovely. Some days you had it good, other days you didn’t. But it was lovely. I enjoyed every minute of it. I loved it. I think Scotland is a lovely country. It’s a beautiful country. But England I have no time for at all. (Interviewee 7)
My mother came here in 1946 just after the war. So there was still all those things about ‘No Irish Need Apply’ at that point. She worked as a District Nurse in the Health Service in Kinning Park. She was just telling me the other day about how ignorant and prejudiced the doctors could be and they were supposed to be the educated ones. The area was becoming quite mixed with Asian and Irish families staying there. The doctors would always pick out the Irish kids as they went through and would comment on how dirty they were and would tell the Nurses to watch themselves in inspection rooms in case they caught anything. It was all done innocently but that shows you how ingrained attitudes were. The Irish had nits in their heads as rule so watch yourself in there. (Interviewee 13)
My husband put his finger on it. We were just coming up to Derry when we were coming back from Ireland one weekend, and he said; ‘I think I know why you all want to be back here. You have freedom. You’re with your own people. There’s no strain on you. You can be yourselves’. He said, ‘I can see you physically relaxing. You don’t need to think about what the next man is thinking about you’. And I think it is the opposite here. It’s very frustrating for the kids as I think they feel we’re forever saying ‘oh don’t do that’, ‘don’t wear that’, ‘don’t show anybody that’. (Interviewee 14)
I think in the long run my grandparents made the right choice in coming to Scotland. They certainly had a very hard life coming to a strange country with an entirely different culture and where they weren’t really liked or well treated and only got the most menial of jobs. But as time went on things got better for them. They proved their worth and were fortunate to get better jobs and settle in one place. Their families certainly had better and more comfortable lives. And with each generation things have improved right down to my own family. Although I worked in the mill from when I was 14 years old, I was 26 when I got married and my husband had a good job as an engineering foreman in Babcocks. So we were comfortably well off and were fortunate to see our three sons graduate. I don’t think we would have been any better off if my grandparents had gone to the United States. So I think it was a blessing for us that my grandparents came to Scotland. (Interviewee 27)
I would say what I’ve said rather frequently in the past, which is that we should say our morning and evening prayers to almighty God that he so ordained our lives that we moved to a country that subscribes to the Protestant ethic. And by an application of not dissimilar criteria we prospered. Do you feel you benefited from exposure to Scottish culture? Yes. In the same way you benefit from having a cold shower. It’s not always pleasant. (Interviewee 44)
The mining village I was brought up in didn’t have the same nonsense as they have here [in Glasgow]. The women next door was President of the Eastern Star, Mrs McKiddie, she actually made my sisters First Holy Communion dress. And we as kids used to get up early on a Saturday morning to watch the neighbours doing their little Orange parade in the village before the main parade. There was this sort of tolerance and of course they would be working in the same pit and everything. In the shipyards and the big factories bigotry I think was worse as people didn’t necessarily know each other outside of work. But in any event for me it’s not the guy from the housing estate who wears his 1690 tattoo that’s the problem. I see the ones in the suits who have real influence as the ones who are deep down bitter. (Interviewee 53)
It was very hard for the Irish in Glasgow when the troubles broke out. I remember being in the Western Infirmary in the Day Unit having tests done and when I went in there were two women talking about the troubles. The nurse drew the curtain back and I could see them and they could see me and I said ‘hello’. But they just ignored me and started talking about Southern Ireland and how bad the Irish were. I felt like sitting up and shouting. But it was when the troubles were really bad in 1969. Things were harder for the Irish in Scotland then and really you couldn’t blame people. There were soldiers killed in Northern Ireland and you would hear how the IRA were involved. They didn’t realise what effect their comments were having on people, the majority of folks, who were just as frightened as to where it was all going to end up as they were. (Interviewee 61b)
This book presents findings from a new oral history archive which the author collected between 2000 and 2002. This archive consists of 67 interviews with 76 members of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland, comprising first generation settlers through to fourth generation descendants. These interviews recount the multiple and complex journeys the Irish Catholic community took and continues to take, both to and within Scotland, and help to excavate this community’s various and contradictory encounters with social, economic, political, and cultural alterity and belonging. Each interview was fully transcribed and has now been digitally enhanced for sound quality. It is intended that in time both the oral and the written archive will be deposited in a central location and will become an important research resource for those interested in studying the social and collective memories which have been produced and disseminated by the Irish Catholic community in Scotland. This book represents the first attempt to mine the archive and digest its significance but it is hoped that it will not be the last.
This archive was collected, collated, and analysed against the backdrop of a decade of heated public debate over the status of sectarianism and bigotry in contemporary Scotland. Controversy has fastened on the degree to which anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment continues to wound, debilitate, and impede the lives of Irish Catholics and Scots with an Irish Catholic lineage, living particularly in the west of Scotland. The debate has been characterised by vigorous claims and counter claims over the enduring scale and impact of sectarianism and bigotry, whether anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment continues to result in social, economic, cultural, and political discrimination and disadvantage, and the extent to which the Scottish Government ought to be doing something to combat remaining instances of intolerance. Some view allegations of discrimination and estrangement as paranoia or worse politically loaded; others regard lingering mentalities and residual attitudes as little more than a hangover from the past which will steadily peter out with time; whilst others again insist that the persistence of hostile assumptions and prejudices needs to be taken seriously.
To be clear, this book harbours no desire to make a contribution to the resolution of what has been labelled the ‘ Scotland’s secret shame’ debate. I take up no position on how sectarian or bigoted or discriminatory Scottish society has been to Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants, past or present. Instead I approach the debate with an altogether different ambition. In fact, the existence of bitter dispute over the extent to which people with Irish Catholic heritage belong or do not belong in modern Scotland presents a remarkable, geographical, anthropological, sociological, and political puzzle. That such different claims as to the importance and virulence of sectarianism and bigotry exist in the first place is itself a crucial object of enquiry. It immediately suggests that the community under discussion is not easily captured. Is this a product of a deficiency in the scale of social scientific surveys of this community? Will a piling up of additional research findings resolve the matter? Or is debate being frustrated by a more profound limit to knowledge? Arguably, the most interesting question which the Scotland’s secret shame debate has provoked, a question which thus far has failed to generate a worthy answer, is the following: is the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland intelligible and if so what is the nature of this intelligibility?
Broadly speaking, two principal explanations of Irish Catholic alterity from Scotland have been presented: one which might be said to be a product of professional and institutional social scientific enquiry and which has sought to defend establishment Scotland; the other which might be appropriately described as derivative of radical and critical social scientific enquiry and which has sought to place a spotlight on institutional sectarianism and bigotry in mainstream Scottish society.
According to commentators from the first camp attention has to be given to the exaggerated sense of paranoia which exists within the Irish Catholic community. The Irish Catholic community has contrived to conjure up a debate about its marginalised position within Scottish society as a buffer against the growing authority of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Fearing that further devolution from Westminster might lead to the formation of a ‘New Stormont’ in Edinburgh, the Irish Catholic community has begun the process of staking its territory and defending its interests. Specifically, anxiety about the potential loss of public funding for Catholic schools is what has animated claims of discrimination and bigotry. Social scientific surveys of occupation, income, health, crime, educational attainment, etc, prove that there exists no systematic bias or inequality in opportunity. The debate over Scotland’s secret shame then has no rooting in objective conditions but reflects one community’s exaggerated fear of the implications of the new political dispensation for Scotland.
According to commentators from the second camp, Scotland needs to be thought of as a location where a number of indigenous and establishment constituencies have enjoyed, and to some extent still do enjoy, a certain vista on the Irish Catholic community; a privilege of seeing without being seen. The debate over Scotland’s shame has very real origins in objective conditions. Irish Catholics have been treated as indigestible because of their race, nationality, class, politics and religion. The troubles which flared up in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s undoubtedly contributed to a stirring of latent passions. But more importantly, a series of locally specific conditions have conspired to reproduce tensions and consolidate a bizarre longevity to a cultural politics which has long ceased to be important in other British cities. What manifests itself as an anachronistic residue elsewhere continues to excite tensions in a very live way in Scotland. Those who deny the pervasive and lingering presence of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in Scottish society are living in denial.
The chief purpose of the book is to develop and apply a novel theoretical framework through which the question of the intelligibility of the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland might be best handled. I submit that to understand public disputation over sectarianism, bigotry, and discrimination in contemporary Scotland it is first necessary to recognise the seminal and pivotal importance of Britain’s long and troublesome colonisation of Ireland. The British Empire and the Irish diaspora share a complex history of intersection and co-constitution. The British imperial project and the Irish diaspora have persistently met in the most unlikely of locations around the globe, including in Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, and have constituted Anglo-Irish relations anew in each case. Points of confluence are most clearly evidenced in the case of Irish migration to the United Kingdom and in my case Scotland, where former colons now dwell as diasporeans in a former metropolitan heartland (Delaney 2007).
When framed in this way it becomes possible to bring the Scotland’s shame debate into conversation with recent thinking in Postcolonial Studies regarding the very possibility of searching for the intelligibility or meaning in history of subaltern or colonised populations. To enquire seriously into the sense which is to be made of the ongoing claims of Irish Catholic alterity and estrangement from Scotland is to enquire seriously into the status of theoretical practices and modes of sociological knowing which are deposits of British colonial history and its historical and cultural legacies, mutations and contemporary manifestations. I take cognisance of the pervasive and debilitating effects in the Scotland’s secret shame debate of what might termed metrocentricism, a practice which is predicated upon an insufficiently reflexive commitment to the superiority of particularly metropolitan forms of social scientific practice and universal theorising. I offer the claim there is a need to provincialise all bodies of scholarship which assert proprietorial control and authority over the correct interpretation of the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland. I cast suspicion on all voices in the debate who claim to know the truth about the experiences and biographies of a community which bears the stamp of a complex colonial history and which as a consequence defies easy apprehension and capture. I question the wisdom of those who display a certain confidence that the meaning and telos of such a community can be painted in a few broad brush strokes.
I hypothesise that those who refuse to recognise the importance of alterity, and its ugly manifestations in sectarianism and bigotry, in the making of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland, and many do so in good faith, in all sincerity, and with the utmost integrity, are so embedded in the intellectual residues and social scientific practices stamped with the legacy of British colonial history that they are incapable of denaturalising and decentring these residues and practices. Across the past decade, in the worst moments the instrumental social scientific traditions of the metropole have arguably served more to mystify and obfuscate than to reveal and explain. But crucially I insist that metrocentricism is equally problematic for critical and radical social enquiry and not just establishment or professional social science. Even within critical literature, there is a growing awareness of the colonising tendencies of apparently radical and progressive theory. Critiques of metrocentrism, it turns out, may themselves be deeply metrocentric. Those who assert that the cultural history of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland is in important ways a product of institutional sectarianism and bigotry also need to reflect upon the reifications of metrocentric ontology they reproduce when making this kind of claim.
One of the most disappointing features of the Scotland’s secret shame debate for instance, has been the scramble to claim legitimate sovereignty over what knowledge counts and what does not. For some academics in particular, the fact that many who are most vocal within the Irish Catholic community are not social scientists but instead artists, musicians, football commentators, and literary critics, has been taken as evidence of their lack of qualification to enter the debate. This defence of the supremacy of certain forms of social scientific knowledge is potentially very misleading and unhelpful. Recently, Michael Burawoy (2005) has offered a sociological reading of the production, circulation, legitimation, and consumption of four kinds of social scientific knowledge, which he terms, ‘professional’, ‘policy’, ‘public’, and ‘critical’ sociology respectively (Figure 1.1). For Burawoy the key is not to assert the supremacy of any one type of sociological enquiry but instead to appreciate that each method produces knowledge and grasps at the world differently so as to furnish distinctive insights; insights which are worthy and legitimate within, but limited and defined by, their own terms of reference. Perhaps those who argue that anti-Irish Catholic sentiment is institutionalised in Scotland base their truth claims on forms of critical and public sociological reasoning whilst those who deny the existence of pervasive sectarianism and bigotry base their truth claims on forms of professional and policy sociological reasoning. Either way it would seem unnecessarily self limiting to fail to appreciate the virtues and vices of different ways of capturing and apprehending the elusive history of this most complex community.
images
Figure 1.1 Division of sociological labour
I propose that to date the problem with the Scotland’s secret shame debate has been with the ways in which the problem of alterity and estrangement has been framed. I call attention to the situated production of all academic, activist, policy, and public vistas on the Irish Catholic adventure in Scotland and offer an approach to the interrogation of this community which is alert to the challenges which the act of framing per se presents. Any search for a definitive theoretical and/or empirical resolution to this debate, critical or revisionist, might justifiably attract the criticism of metrocentricism. Importantly again, attributions of metrocentricism must be levelled equally at those constituencies who deny there is a problem in Scotland and those constituencies who argue that sectarianism and bigotry are institutionalised in Scottish life. Both believe in a fundamental sense that they are better and indeed best qualified to decipher the legibility of the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland. The challenge is to recognise the value of different modes of sociological enquiry and sociological knowledge whilst resisting the tendency to claim sovereign supremacy for any one.
How are we to progress? It is the view of this author that it is impossible to even approach the question of the meaning of the Irish Catholic adventure in Scotland without developing a framework that is alert to five basic fundamentals:
  • The central importance of the history of asymmetric and colonial Anglo-Irish relations in the mediation of the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland.
  • The recognition that Irish Catholics have experienced alterity and belonging from and to Scottish society in wide variety of ways, mediated in part by date of migration, place of origin, location of destination, generation, age, gender, class, and sexuality.
  • The awareness that Irish Catholics have chosen to create and bear responsbility for creating a particular type of Irish Catholic community which is distinctive from Irish Catholic communities in Ireland and in other parts of the diaspora.
  • The registering that many of the most impressive cultural practices (from everyday events to social and political movements) which the Irish Catholic community has deposited have been those which have been co-authored with progressive communities in Scotland,
  • The importance of monitoring and critiquing anti-racist racism within the Irish Catholic community itself and of holding in tension the workings of anti-colonial and Irish nationalist impulses.
With these as guiding precepts, the purpose of this book is to harness the complex and rich theory of colonialism which French philosopher, political activist, and novelist Jean Paul Sartre developed and struggled over, to venture a qualified and partial interpretation of the Irish Catholic experience of Scotland. In unexpected ways, Sartrean Existentialism, and laterally Sartrean Existential Marxism, continues to animate and influence theorists and activists interested in imperialism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, decolonisation, postcolonialism and neo-colonialism. It is time his work was dusted down and considered anew. According to Anne Buttimer (1993) the dramas of western humanism are best captured in...

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