Two months after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Belfast's retiring Lord Mayor, Sir Joseph Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain's policies: policies that had relegated it to 'the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony'. The Lord Mayor's parting shot is one of my favourite quotations, for as well as being banal, ridiculous, righteously angry and very dim, it offers a profound insight into the Northern Irish troubles. It has an ironic resonance - a sort of Belfast ou-boum - which must haunt and torment anyone who probes the nature of Ulster Loyalism. It's a deeply parochial statement, and like all such statements, it issues from an intense love of place, while also containing a definition of nationality and cultural identity.

LRB 5 November 1981 | PDF Download