Introduction

214
Melanie Swiatloch
Nic Craith here argues that unionists conceive themselves to belong to the realm
of Great Britain because they share the same ideas of politics and the same world
view. Nationalists on the contrary rely much stronger on Irish cultural elements,
which is also another form of imagined community, if an imagined cultural community.
So politics and culture basically clash in conflict.
As already mentioned above, Mitchel names five aspects that are significant
for forming a nation and thus nationalism. They are the worlds of nations, myths,
culture, territory and symbols/rituals (Mitchel 50ff). Within Northern Irish society
many of these aspects are received differently and are of different origins as well.
Beginning with the world of nations the nation thus normally represents the will
of the people who ideally all share a collective identity. It thus receives its legitimacy
and can also represent the will of the people internationally, continues
Mitchel to explain (ibid. 51). But what happens if a nation is not able to represent
a consistent will because its people are not unified in their beliefs and do not share
a common culture? In this respect Northern Ireland has failed for a long time as
both Catholic and Protestant needs were neglected by the governing parties. By
contrast, myth – as for instance in Where They Were Missed – links a nation to its
imagined past and opens new ways for the future. Like the West Belfast families
that thought it important to give their children back what they felt was missing
(the Irish language), Saoirse’s mother tells her children the tales of the legendary
hero Cúchulainn because she thinks it is “important that the stories are told”
(Caldwell 14). Although Deirdre Pentland is not a typical nationalist it here can be
seen that she strongly clings to aspects of cultural nationhood as described by Nic
Craith.
Two of the most obvious Protestant and Catholic myths in Northern Irish history
are those of William of Orange and Cúchulainn. “Orange culture is central to
the ideology of loyalism and marching is a particularly significant emblem of their
sense of belonging to the region” (Nic Craith 2003, 38). Both the myth of Cúchulainn
and the historical figure of William of Orange demonstrate Nic Craith’s
assertion that unionists identify with Great Britain and nationalists with their cultural
background, as William of Orange stands for a political change in the history
of Britain while Cúchulainn is a legendary Irish cultural hero. Nevertheless they
have also something in common: The function of these historical myths and the
commemoration of bygone days is to equip people with a “meaning beyond individual
existence” (Mitchel 53). By celebrating the Orange Parades each and every
year as by telling the stories of Cúchulainn and other Celtic heroes, people uphold
a common past. It still remains imagined in the sense Anderson uses the term as it
is a past nobody alive today has experienced in reality. In that sense I would argue
that the cultural nationhood Nic Craith mentions also belongs to the realm of the
imagined community (which has already been assumed in this paper but this is the
positive proof). Culture remains an abstract notion by which thousands of people
that have never seen each other feel united. It is just the image of a past that is