Introduction

236
Melanie Swiatloch
has a brief relationship with Steven. Chuckie’s mother Peggy after years of deep
friendship finally recognises her love for her neighbour Caroline who in turn
leaves her husband and moves in with Peggy. While for Helen and David’s friends
his homosexuality is quite a normal thing Peggy’s new life as a lesbian causes an
uproar in Eureka Street:
Peggy Lurgan was now a lesbian living with Caroline Causton. This was
spectacular news. People had called press conferences. Peggy and Caroline
were the most Protestant and the most working-class women I had ever
met. Such women did not normally end up munching blissfully at each
other, or so everyone had believed (McLiam Wilson 341).
After this news also Chuckie’s and Jake’s friend Deasely comes out as a gay (ibid.
342). As these ways of life do not stand in the traditional, or old-fashioned, lifestyle
Caroline, Peggy, Deasely and David also represent types of the New Irish.
Although they do not unite Protestant and Catholic ingredients in themselves they
nevertheless leave nationalism behind and dedicate themselves to their own lives
in the form of citizenship. Thus, they express their identities like Jake, Chuckie,
Cate and Saoirse in other ways that do not aim at upholding the Northern Ireland
conflict.
3.4. The Other in the North: Stereotypes and Discrimination
“When someone sets out for no good reason to try to
humiliate you or make you feel ill at ease in a social
setting, you’re often so taken aback that you don’t
know how to respond; and it’s hard to be able to put
them down without sinking to their level.”
One by One in the Darkness, Deirdre Madden
(1996, 167)
Human beings have always been fascinated by things that are different from what
they know. Even today people book expensive flights to travel to up to this point
unseen countries and unfamiliar cultures. Tourism has thus become the modern
way of ‘invading’ foreign countries in order to experience a different world. Few
people will have the chance of actually living in another country in the way the
native inhabitants do; as a result, travelling in most cases has a certain voyeuristic
touch. Of course, travelling is not to be equated with occupying a foreign nation
by force, making its people subaltern and taking over the sole government of the
country. Despite this fact the point of wanting to see the unknown remains a
common feature. While the example should not be taken too seriously I would
nevertheless like to point out that the fascination with the unfamiliar, the mysterious,
the ‘Other’ is an underlying character trait of the human soul. Homi Bhabha