Flegs and Amblems

Pic yoinked from: Declan Gallen

Identity: powerful word that.

Put 'cultural' in front of it or 'crisis' after it and you open up a whole dashboard of hot-button issues.

It's ineffable, elastic and slippery as a tickled trout the minute you start trying to define it.

It's also one of those things about which people are irrationally filled with pride.  They'll waste no time in telling you how they are: Proud to be English, Proud to be Irish, Proud to be a Prod, (Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee....) as if this was some kind of marvellous achievement; a feat of derring do which they had performed through sweat and toil and with swashbucklingly scant regard for their own health or safety. 

The truth about identity is always more prosaic than the ballads belie; you're English/Irish/Prod/Okie because that's probably what your Daddy was and his Daddy before him.  

 I'm guilty of it all the time myself; from Barack Obama to the inventor of the submarine and Che Guevara, I claim them all for the sainted western isle of saints and scholars; I strive endlessly to define and clarify that will-o-the-wispish geist of Gaelic quintessence but like marsh gas, mirages or the end of the rainbow, it's a quest for the elusive and illusive and is doomed to futility.

Or more accurately, it's futile if one expects it to end in a quantifiable destination. As a diverting exercise in myth re-enforcement however , the dumb-ass joy of patriotic pathos and Paddywhackery is its own reward. But this is after all a heady mix; it's all very well singing The Sash or The Foggy  Dew but they really should come -- like spirits -- with a health warning and the advice to consume responsibly.

Right now, Ulster loyalism -- the unloved ginger step-child of the disunited kingdom -- is having a cultural identity crisis of epic proportions. If Ulster Loyalism was a forty-year old man, he'd be dyeing his hair, stuffing a pair socks down his pants and mooning around car lots, casting longing looks at the cabriolets.

The only certainty for this community seems to be the knowledge that they will be manipulated by their 'betters' mar dhea*: the 'haves' and the 'have yachts' of the unionist top table. It's the same old Orange card that's been played for the last hundred years at least -- whip up the faithful, get them all riled up and fighty over some issue or other of grave importance to the future of the Union and then stand back and watch the fireworks (which are probably being launched at a police land rover).

Here again, in 2013, in the centenary year of the formal establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force, Loyalism is once more the hapless dupe in an internecine struggle within the unionist political class.

The sad thing for them is that the identity to which they are clinging is viewed with exasperation and bemusement by most people in the UK. Britishness is -- as we've touched on before in these pages -- at the best of times, a complex, accommodating but occasionally ambivalent identity.

The fact is Loyalism makes many people in Britain very uncomfortable; its undertones of hard right association and increasingly -- perhaps because of emerging stories of collusion with the security forces in state-sponsored assassinations -- it's an ideology that is wholly unpalatable to the would-be metropolitan elite as well as most left-leaning institutions or media. So much so in fact that the old habit of dissociation and the trite but comforting mantra of 'it's those warring tribes again innit?' are every bit as much a feature of 21st century life as they were in the rather more scabrous 19th and 20th.

So whither Loyalism?

Well, if I was a Loyalist...

*Mar dhea: Irish; as it were