St. Narcissus strikes again

Looking in the mirror, trimming down a eyebrow with a finger, and taking the food from between my teeth, here I am again for a brief word. I hope someone is still reading ... I'm just about getting back into a morning time mentality, but it is not without a fight, as the term begins properly. One cause of this is due to the quandary 'why do they put on all the best films on at about 12 o'clock at night?' My habitual keeping of late hours yields under the pressure of necessity, and the human orange becomes clockwork and clockwise once more.

I am now a fully fledged Irish citizen, if there was ever any doubt, as I received my passport to that effect last Thursday. I need it as I prepare for the trip to visit Ferrara, in Italy next month for Carlo's ordination. Due to this, or otherwise, I have begun to think again about my Irishness and about being Northern. When I got it I felt sort of properly Irish, able to vote even, whereas before it was more in the ether or the collective cultural imagination that I was Irish. People in the south do attribute nationality to Northerners, but in a way that seems almost charitable. The situation has moved on so much since the institution of the state that to be a citizen of the south almost puts me a little outside the northern context. So I am reflecting on what identity means to me, and will not make any rash decisions.

Talking about this with Mette, my supervisor, and Ann over a cup of tea last night, raised the idea of ourselves, any northerners who might be reading - that's you Fionnuala - as sort of caught between two stools in terms of our sense of belonging. Not between Britain and Ireland, no-one really feels this too much, I think. But between being Irish and being Northern Irish on the one hand. And on the unionist side, between being British and Northern Irish. Just being Northern Irish by itself doesn't seem to exist, but also I'm not sure it would mean anything in a collective cultural sense. If we are to have any reconciliation in the north, this question of identity has itself to be reconciled satisfactorily. At the moment there is a certain amount of limbo on both sides, but primarily on the unionist, as there doesn't seem any way back to purely British domination, and so something is felt as lost in that community. To get beyond this, a gain must be experienced in that community too, but what is unionism without a union? I am tempted to say that possibly economic relationships can help where political ones have been impossible, but this would be to simplify and artificially treat the essential difficulty of diversity of traditions. So while commercial links can break down some barriers, for example in the working class areas, fundamental hatreds have to be broken down through inspecting the prevailing notions of identity to see what still makes sense and what has to be cut away on both sides.

And doesn't the problem seem as intractable as ever?