Westminster Constituecnies

(SOMETHING WENT WIERD WITH MY BLOG. PLEASE CLICK ON "OLDER POSTS" BELOW THE MAP, THERE'S HUNDREDS MORE POSTS ON MY BLOG)

This post is slightly about easing anxiety I have about some mistakes I make, and also would make more sense if I had published it least 8 years ago when this blog was started. But it's also something that I would like to share with the world, even at such a late date as this. It's about drawing the boundaries of Westminster constituencies in N. Ireland. About 14 years ago I learned that the commission responsible for that was in the process of re-drawing them (first consulting with the local communities and then re-drawing them, etc.). They use wards kind of like Americans use precincts and I used the figures for ward population that they were using, and maps at a great site for N. Ireland elections and I re-drew them based on criteria that I felt were important.

(The map I drew is a little further below)

The embarrassing thing I want to get out of the way- I named one that I THOUGHT had a large Unionist majority "South and East Londonderry." I thought that with those demographics it was slightly appropriate and a harmless concession to them. In hindsight I think I was wrong about the demographics (and maybe using the word "South" as well) and am kind of embarrassed by it.

The criteria I used were:

1) Constituencies had to be within 5% of the electoral quota (what you might call the average size of a constituency). In the UK they're frequently well beyond 5% off and I think that's a problem.
2) With the exception of the three County Antrim constituencies that were pretty much brand new, if a constituency was above quota before, it was under in my map, and vice versa.
3) I thought the semi-urban area called South-East Antrim in the map below should be in one constituency instead of two bigger ones containing suburban and rural areas.
4) On a map of the old Dungannon local government district it looks like Coalisland is what MIGHT be called something like an immediate high-density suburb of Dungannon. Since I did this re-drawing I looked at a Google map of the area and it seems like maybe there's enough open space between Dungannon and Coalisland that it doesn't matter, but at the time I felt they should be together. Fermanagh and South Tyrone, right after Derry, was the second one I did and was earlier OVER quota, so kicking out Dungannon made a lot of sense, even though there may have been some housing on the outskirts of mid- and southern Dungannon on the wrong side of the boundary in my map.

Some other notes:
1) I think that the East Belfast and North Down constituencies are high-demsity enough that it's okay I split Newtownards in two.
2) I wish I had included all the wards immediately around Armagh, Ballymena, and Antrim, but those situations were less compelling than was the case with Dungannon and Coalisland (the surrounding wards were MUCH bigger than the town/city wards were).
 3) In Newry and Armagh I improved it in that sense since I added Derryleckagh to the the high-density city wards of Newry.

I think that's about it. I might be doing this sort of thing in the next several weeks as they're doing another re-drawing of the boundaries.

Tom

The map below is a heavily altered version based on one found here.

My Two Favorite Things

My Two Favorite Things
A Review by Tom Shelley of “Where Are You Really From?” memoirs by Tim Brannigan

As you might guess from reading this blog, my two favorite things are fighting racism in America, and the politics of Northern Ireland. When they (or anti-racism in the North and Irish republicanism) intersect I get pretty excited. For example, after reading a book in 1998 about connections between blacks in America on one hand and Irish nationalists and republicans and  civil rights activists on the other I proposed to the student group I was organizing on the issue of the North that we get funding to bring the author, Brian Dooley, to speak on campus. Or, when Gerry Adams tweeted the n-word in the Spring, I wrote what might be one of the best posts I’ve written on this blog.

It was when I read about that tweet that I first learned about Tim Brannigan- he was described as being a republican ex-prisoner and of mixed race. Not long after that I learned a little more about him and then I bought his memoirs. I have read the book twice now and it’s great. It’s called “Where Are You Really From?: Kola Kubes and Gelignite, Secrets and Lies- the true story of an extraordinary family.” It includes a fair amount of biographical material about his mom, but is mostly about him. Two-thirds of it is political and about one-third is personal (which is almost as interesting to me- his life is a great story). He writes about experiencing racism in the nationalist community, his family’s involvement with the IRA, school, supporting the Hunger-Strikers as a teenager, his first job, going to college, being interrogated at the notorious Castlereagh interrogation centre, the many interesting details of being a republican prisoner (first on remand and then in Long Kesh prison (informally but partly run by the IRA prisoners)), his career as a journalist, his mother’s death, and meeting his dad for the first time.

His mom became pregnant with him as a result of an affair with a junior doctor from Ghana in 1966. She convinced the relevant staff of the hospital she gave birth at to say that the baby was stillborn and to take him to a baby home (with instructions he wasn’t to be adopted by anyone but her). A year later she adopted him (she had long ago made it clear to friends and family that she was anti-racist). Part of the fascinating story is that she didn’t tell him that she was really his mom until he was 19.

His description of how bad racism was in Belfast is a bit mixed. He says that unlike what was happening in some British cities there wasn’t much racism in Belfast because there weren’t many people of color there. His description of the racism he experienced from people in the nationalist community as a child in the 1970s made me think I had seriously under-estimated how racist the nationalist community was back then. On the other hand, he says that, although he doesn’t want to overstate this, in the nationalist community, “to be a racist was to have crossed a line.” In the middle of the book he describes some of the racism he experienced as a teen-ager- it sounded like it was not as bad as it was when he was a child, but still kind of surprises me. He also writes about how British soldiers on patrol in west Belfast would abuse him racially, but that’s not a surprise at all.

His mom was a republican and she often let the IRA use her home for meetings and for hiding weapons or explosives. In 1981 initially he wasn’t interested in the Hunger-Strike by republican POWs, but his mother made him go on the first march in support of the strike. After that he went on more marches and attended at least two funerals and started selling Sinn Fein’s newspaper. On May Day 1984 he joined SF.

Like most republicans, his opposition to injustice went and goes way beyond the usual issues for N. Ireland (the division of the country, the police, etc.). One story that’s brief but worth a mention is that he tried unionizing his work-place. It didn’t work out, but it’s still pretty cool. When his mom asked him if he was interested in finding his father, he said no and, writing his book, he says that he didn’t identify with Ghana but identified strongly as Irish and was very interested in African-AMERICAN politics (he was reading books about Black Power like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”) (when he meets his father later in the book, it’s in Ghana and he learns some about the country of his father). There's some stuff in his book indicating he's probably a socialist, and according to his Twitter page he IS.

When he was probably around 19 years old and raising money for SF by going around to bars with a tin for collecting loose change from people he had a pretty serious incident with a racist. At one bar one day, this guy asked what was he doing collecting for SF and used the N-word. A very brief and minor physical altercation develops. One or two days later two men (probably with the IRA) spoke with him about it and offered to have the racist shot. He said no. In the book, he writes: “if I decided to have everyone shot who ever made a racist remark to me, there would be a bloodbath. They were satisfied once they had made it clear to me that my back was covered. I knew this but it was good to have it reiterated.”

In 1990 he got a degree in Politics from Liverpool Polytechnic. Earlier he had also studied sociology and English literature. Although he had planned on enjoying a more diverse city than Belfast, he was housed with the other Irish students and became quite patriotic.

Shortly after he came home to Belfast he allowed the IRA to hide some weapons in a car in the driveway of his mom’s house. The security forces learned of this and he and his mom were taken to the notorious Castlereagh Interrogation Centre where you could be held for seven days without charge. He describes the interrogation efforts of the police. Also, as if there was some doubt, we get evidence of racism among the police- a police officer refers to him by using the n-word. He ends up admitting to hiding weapons and explosives in order to get his mom released.

The next two parts are very interesting. First he describes life in the Crumlin Road Jail, where he was on remand. It’s largely about the non-political aspects of life there, but also about tension between the republican prisoners (with whom he lived) and the loyalist prisoners. After about a year there, he was convicted and was moved to the Long Kesh H-Blocks, the large prison containing hundreds of sentenced republican POWs. Although he wasn't an IRA member, that didn’t stop the IRA from making him the leader of one of the H-Blocks. He describes the daily routine in Long Kesh, and touches on politics here and there. There were some racist comments during his 4-5 years in the prison. For example, one prisoner insisted that the republican struggle wasn’t Brannigan's fight, despite him explaining his background in the mid- Falls Road area and the sectarian and racial abuse he took from the British Army. On the other hand, he says that the prison was the least racist place he had ever been. Once when watching a football game on TV a fellow prisoner called a black player a mugger. After he said that and he noticed Branngan was there the racist then spent the entire game praising anything done by a black player. Brannigan writes: “that was as rough as it ever got.”

When he got out in 1995 he soon started a career as a journalist. That’s a good part of the story, but one I’m going to largely skip. He spent some time working at the Irish News and more recently he has been a free-lance journalist.

The second to last part is about the tragic decline of his mom’s health and then her death. It’s very moving in at least one way- he got to spend a lot of time with her before she died- he taking care of her and them just enjoying each other’s company.

The last part is about Brannigan connecting with some of his black half-siblings and eventually, with his father. He had promised his mom, not long before she died, that he would search for his father. During the search he also became more interested in where he came from on his father’s side. He does meet his father, but unfortunately, his father was kind of a jerk and at the end of the book, Brannigan is apparently no longer welcome in the lives of his father or his black half-siblings.

Although I’ve only touched on it a little, there is a lot of material about how other members of the nationalist community and the republican movement saw him, and how he identified strongly as Irish and as a republican- “a black Irish republican.”

There is a fair amount of humor in his book. One example is found while reading his description of his time at Castlereagh.  The police showed him the first two lines in his security file: “this man is a republican,” and “this man is black.” He writes in his book, “clearly they’d had their top men on the job.”

Unfortunately I think I have good reason to criticize one small bit of his story. He gives (as an example of the racial harassment he experienced) a description of an incident when he proudly wore a child’s toy American Indian headdress and held a rubber tomahawk while standing outside his home’s front door hoping to impress other children (I think he was around 8 years old). Older boys walking by called him “Geronimo” and “Sambo,” and made “war-cry” sounds they had heard in John Wayne movies and made him feel, as he frequently did while growing up, isolated, picked on, and angry. I like to think it’s apparent that I’m sensitive to what he has experienced at the hands of ignorant and racist people in the Nationalist community, and how that made him feel. But I have to say that his mom buying that headdress and tomahawk for him offends me as an ally of Native American people. It’s called cultural appropriation, taking something from a community of nations in this hemisphere that has already had so much taken from them. I think I have to kind of criticize him for wearing the headdress and holding the tomahawk, but I realize he was a young child and had no idea how offensive what he was doing was. As much as I love the book that I am reviewing, I am disappointed that he, while writing it as an adult, failed to say anything about how offensive this (his mom buying the headdress and tomahawk and him wearing it and holding the tomahawk in order to impress other children) was. If  he DID write something critical of it and his editor took it out I’ll edit this review to acknowledge that. To his credit, he DOES suggest that the Indians in John Wayne movies are not like real Indians.

I have referred a couple of times to me thinking that the nationalist community of the 1970s and 1980s as described in the book was more racist than I had earlier estimated it was. I have some solid information for the recent period. The Northern Ireland Life and Times survey seems well respected. The following question was asked annually 2005-2014 with the exception of 2011: “How much do you agree or disagree with the statement, ‘In relation to colour and ethnicity, I prefer to stick with people of my own kind’”. The average answers for the Catholic population are: Strongly Agree 4%; Agree 18%; neither agree nor disagree 24%; disagree 35%; and strongly disagree 19%. For the Protestant community the numbers are: 9; 24; 28; 28; 10. In August of 2015 a crowd of young people in west Belfast spent three hours throwing bricks etc. at Brannigan’s house, an attack based on race considering the verbal abuse they also hurled at him. It did surprise me when I read about it. Because of his story I have made minor adjustments to about 5 paragraphs on this blog that are about racism in the nationalist community.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in studying race/racism/nationality/nationalism or The Troubles.

Gerry Adams and the n-word

Gerry Adams, President of SF, recently created a controversy with a tweet that many would describe as racist. He wrote: “Watching Django Unchained- A Ballymurphy N----r!” but he spelled out the n-word (Ballymurphy is part of west Belfast, and is a republican area Adams apparently lives in). Although I haven’t seen it yet, according to the BBC, it’s a movie “set before the American Civil War and focuses on racism, slavery, violence and murder.” Please read the BBC article for Adams’s response to the criticism of his tweet.

Although I of course believe that there are strong similarities between the oppression of Northern Catholics (referred to hereafter as "Catholics") and the oppression of American Blacks (referred to hereafter as "Blacks") in the last century, and I think an argument can be made that the former are not white, I think Adams was out of line with this statement (and if we're talking specifically about slavery in America, that's VERY different from what Adams has experienced as a Catholic, even if we look back to the Stormont era). Although he might not be white in the N. Ireland context, he’s not a person of color and to one degree or another, outside N. Ireland, he’s sort of white (crucially, in multi-racial yet (at least fairly) racist societies like America and the Republic  of Ireland (where he’s a TD (member of parliament))).

On the other hand, the ways Catholics have been treated since partition are similar to the ways Blacks have been treated since Reconstruction. I’m going to assume the reader, especially if they’re American, is familiar with how Blacks were/are treated and focus mostly on the Catholics part of this comparison. In N. Ireland (this is not an exhaustive list):

(the Stormont era refers to 1921-1972, when there was a devolved government there and The Troubles were roughly from 1969 until somewhere around 2005)

1. There were laws (during almost all of the Stormont era) about voting for local government which, without mentioning Catholics, were anti-Catholic and could be compared to poll taxes and literacy tests, etc. that were used to keep Blacks in the South away from the polls (for local, state, and federal elections). Also, certain kinds of businesspeople, who were disproportionately Northern Protestant, had MORE than one vote in local and regional elections.
2. Although it wasn’t formal, there was segregation in housing- crucially, Catholics in mixed areas were often intimidated out of their homes (Stormont era and The Troubles) (of course some things very similar happened (and might BE happening) to blacks).
3. There was clear evidence of widespread discrimination in employment during both periods (towards the beginning of The Troubles Catholics were 2 times more likely than Northern Protestants to be unemployed and in 1988 they were 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed) (in recent decades Blacks have experienced an unemployment rate consistently about twice what the white one is (see this))
4. There was clear evidence of discrimination in the allocation of public housing in the Stormont era (partly because of that it was incredibly common during the Stormont era for more than one Catholic family to be living in a small home and this may have continued to a small degree in the 70s and 80s, although apparently DISCRIMINATION stopped in the very early 70s) (there was and is also housing discrimination against Blacks).
5. The police were vastly disproportionately Northern Protestant and very bigoted (both Stormont and The Troubles) (there was and is also a similar problem in America with police racism). In The Troubles, the British Army also behaved violently towards Catholics or at least harrassed them.
6. There was sectarian murder of Catholics civilians (including murders by the British Army) even at times when there was little or no armed activity by republicans (most of the Stormont Era and the last 19 years) (not that such activity justified such murders). During The Troubles, it probably was (on a per-capita basis)  5-10 times worse than what Blacks experienced during the same time period (since the end of the Troubles it's probably worse in America (part of the difference during the Troubles was that the "rebellion" in America was a lot less militaristic and that appears to be a factor in terms of what kinds of repressive tools are used)). (UPDATE 2/18/20 although the asymmetric chronology of this comparison is starting to frustrate me, I should say that in the decades before the Troubles, with lynching in the American South, it was probably worse for blacks)
7. To be fair, the informally but VERY segregated nature of the education system in the North is something the Catholics actually welcomed, whereas, of course, in the American South it was formal and a huge part of the problem (third level education (i.e. universities) in N. Ireland haven't been segregated at all for decades now, but besides that there's a high degree of segregation).
8. I am almost certain that Catholics haven’t had anywhere near the same problem with mass incarceration that Blacks have had in America, but the use of internment, non-jury courts, etc. is kind of similar.
9. Considering the poverty and unemployment that Blacks disproportionately experience and the horrible health-care system we have, I have to point out that Catholics benefit from the UK's National Health Service.

10. UPDATE 6/1/21 When I first did this comparison, I left out one aspect of oppression. And that is what might be called pogroms (bigoted riots against minorities), in this case not against Jews but against Northern Catholics or Black Americans. I had almost no knowledge of that when it came to Blacks and I didn’t want to imply that it happened to Catholics but not Blacks. It did happen to Catholics, crucially in the first few years when N. Ireland was being established in the early 1920s and then again at the beginning of the Troubles in Aug. 1969. In July, Aug, and September 1969, and mostly during a period of 2-3 days, in Belfast, 1,505 Catholic families fled their homes (probably something like 18% of Belfast’s Catholic population, probably something like 1.8% of the North’s Catholic population). In one night alone 650 families were burnt or at least forced, out f their homes. There were some smaller-scale pogroms at other times in N. Ireland. In America, I’ve been aware for decades of the events illustrated in the movie 
“Rosewood.” And for at least a year now I have been aware of what happened in Tulsa OK in 1921. What prompted me to do this update is that CNN created a sort of interactive report on all the times there have been race riots in America. It’s here.

On a related note, there have been, historically, strong person-to-person and organization-to-organization contacts between the various Nationalist and/or Republican and/or anti-Unionist struggles in British occupied Ireland and the various struggles among Black people in America. I go into that more here.

Are Northern Catholics white in N. Ireland? There are two crucial ways in which they aren't:

1) You can sort of say they don’t have white privilege. IN NORTHERN IRLEAND (until the last 10 years or so when things improved for them) they had it worse than people of color IN NORTHERN IRELAND. I’m not sure of the exact history of the growth of that population, but in 2001 they were about .7% of the population and in 2011 they were about 2% (Chinese people were arriving in the 1960s and Vietnamese “boat people” were arriving in the 1970s). But on a per-capita basis there were more (or a LOT more) sectarian murders of Catholic civilians (by loyalist paramilitaries frequently with some degree of help from the security forces or by the security forces (including the British Army) than racist murders (as far as I can tell there wasn’t a single racist murder). As far as I can tell, unemployment among Catholics was also higher than that among people of color in N. Ireland. I found a table that touches on this, in a  book partly available on-line thanks to Google called “Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland,” by Paul Hainsworth. 21% of the general population, 2% of the Chinese population, 7% of the Pakistani population, and 3% of the Indian population “had no paid job within the last ten years” (p.195) (that was in 1992 (and back then Catholics would have been a lot more likely to be unemployed than the general population)). According to the same book (p. 7), in 1997 Baroness Denton said in the House of Lords, while a Northern Ireland minister, that employment “is not a current problem” for ethnic minorities in N. Ireland. In general, based on doing searches for two words in the book, and skimming through the pages available on the web and looking for the word “unemployment” or the word "unemployed" highlighted, unemployment was an absolutely tiny part of the book- and with one possible exception, none of the references to unemployment (or the unemployed) suggested that it is or was a problem among people of color there as seriously as it was a problem for Catholics.

Some people would say that the lack of racist murders is not because racism is less widespread and less deep there than sectarianism is, but because people of color stayed out of the conflict and would have been slaugtered if they hadn't. If they had suffered civilian deaths for standing with the Catholics, that would have been because they stood with the Catholics, not because of racism. If they had stood with the Protestants, civilian people of color would have been less likely to be killed by republicans than Protestant civilians were, and very few Protestant civilians were killed because they were Protestant (primarily because of what I write below and some stuff here, it should be accepted that republicans were incredibly anti-racist, IN N. IRELAND (I could also point to support from people of color in America and good relations with the ANC, but that is probably less convincing)). I'm not sure what effect involvement in the conflict would have done to unemployment among people of color. If they sided with the Protestants, it wouldn't have mattered since Catholics did not control a large part of the economy. If they sided with the Catholics, they probably would have been less prosperous (possible boycotts by Protestants, etc.).

2) Although I’m not very familiar with this sociological process, it could be said that many if not most Catholics are not socialized to identify as white. I’m not saying that message never gets through, or that there aren’t racist Catholics there. But a frequent message from many of their political leaders, many of their community organizations, and some of their schools is to identify with people of color throughout the world. For example, MANY of the numerous murals in republican areas stress anti-racism, celebrate African-American political figures, express solidarity with struggles in the “developing world,” or compare the experiences of Catholics with those of people of color elsewhere.

Lastly, I need to stress that Gerry Adams is not a racist. SF, under his leadership, has an impressive record (in IRELAND, and kind of in America) of opposing racism. I offer some examples of that here. (the America part is briefly discussed here).

The Irish, Slavery, and Racism Today

On the blog of the Southern Poverty Law Center there was a very prominent post where they interviewed an Irish scholar about a new racist meme on the Internet. For the most part I'll just encourage you to read it yourself. It's fascinating and could come up as something anti-racists have to deal with while doing our work.

This is fairly embarrassing, but earlier there were three posts on this blog that claimed that Cromwell sent 10s of thousands of Irish people to the Caribbean to work as slaves. First of all, I never said or even thought, not even briefly, any of the offensive claims about slavery attributed to racists in that article (that is, the following: "that “Irish slaves” were treated far worse than black slaves; that there were more “Irish slaves” than black slaves; that “Irish slaves” were worth less than black slaves, that enslaved Irish women were forced to breed with enslaved African men, and that the Irish were slaves for much longer than black slaves;" or, "overtly racist statements, e.g. 'yet, when is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching and moaning about how the world owes them a living?' ”). But after discussing it with three knowledgeable people, I know now I was wrong to refer to the Irish in the Caribbean as slaves who were treated the same as African slaves. I'm not sure where I got that from. They were more or less forced into indentured servitude, although they would have worked in slave-like conditions and many or MOST died before earning their freedom (they lasted about 3-7 years). Their children did not become slaves (I somehow got the idea that 1-2 generations would have been born slaves and then that practice would have died out somehow (I could see the British doing that for 1-2 generations and then a majority of decision-makers deciding that the Irish were white enough that their forced labour shouldn't be hereditary- that that would apply only for Africans)). In fact, a friend knowledgeable about this told me that some of the Irish, after earning their freedom, became overseers of the slaves or even slave owners themselves.

One of the three references to this issue on this blog was in a poem and it made the most sense for me to remove the issue from that poem. The other two I fixed a bit and left them there.

Tom