Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 205
A young waitress who chats up Jake in a bar whispers the words “Tiocfaidh ar
La” in his ear, which is ironically said to sound like Chuckie’s name, Chuckie Lurgan.
As Jake explains, it is a nationalist rallying cry and means “Our day will
come” (ibid. 150). Because naming in Northern Ireland very often bears the mark
of the British occupier this example turns the table: Protestant Chuckie’s name
suddenly resembles more the Irish than the British, an additional hint that both
Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland unite parts of both Ireland and
Great Britain. Another time the waitress greets the guys with “Slan” and continues
to talk in Irish to Jake. Although everybody at the table is of Catholic origin nobody
understands the “nationalist waitress” (ibid. 295) and “freedom-fighting
waitress” as Jake calls her (ibid. 296).
These scenes already hint at the ambiguous characters Patten is talking about
(see introduction). By giving Aoirghe an English surname and making Chuckie’s
name sound like an Irish rallying cry McLiam Wilson stresses the fact that Northern
Ireland does not consist of a black-and-white society but that multiculturalism
and the merging of identities has been there for ages. It is the same with Saoirse
Pentland whose name is a blending of her mother Deirde O’Conor’s Irish heritage
and her father Colin Pentland’s English/Scottish origin. As these approaches
easily lead to theories of hybridity they are going to be further investigated in
chapter three.
Conflict in Northern Ireland is rooted deeply in society in manifold ways.
While language on the one hand can serve as a marker for a positive communal
consciousness it on the other hand can also lead to misunderstandings and hostilities
towards another group. For Protestants there can develop a strange situation
when fellow Northern Irish citizens are able to speak another language that
sounds as foreign to them as for example Japanese. As English is still the first
language of most of the Northern Irish people the conflict here results in an imagined
language conflict, to use Anderson’s term. Aodán Mac Póilin argues that
conflict arises by ways of definition:
Unlike other societies, linguistic conflict here does not involve two communities
speaking different languages. Instead, it reflects a conflict between
two mainly English-speaking political blocks which define themselves in relation
to their aspirational or emblematic linguistic identity, ultimately traceable
to their sense of origin (Mac Póilin 1999, 109).
Referring back to Anderson the Catholic and the Protestant community are imagined
language communities because each group defines itself with the help of
certain aspects – in this case the aspect of language – and thus conceives the
community as an “horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7) as mentioned earlier. It
is important to notice, however, that the position that language takes is an aspect
that results from the past (a quick reminder: Irish has lost its importance as a
community language rapidly since the 18 th and early 19 th centuries [Mac Póilin