Introduction

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Melanie Swiatloch
Chuckie certainly contradicts this stereotype but in this case instead of being discriminated
against, this saves him a lot of trouble.
Helen’s colleague at work in One by One in the Darkness, Owen, has experienced
discrimination as well but in a less ‘positive’ way than Chuckie. While going out
with a group of people who are at the same Law Society as Owen the others start
harassing him. Apparently knowing that he is a Catholic they let slip remarks that
begin to upset Owen. Although having had a little drink he knows it is not only
the alcohol to blame for their behaviour: “What they did was deliberate. I could
see them looking at me from time to time, they would say things that were getting
close to the bone, and then look to see how I was taking it. And then suddenly, I
felt afraid, really afraid; and they could see it” (Madden 166). One of the stories
they tell is about a college in the nineteen fifties and a teacher who was in the B
Specials 32. At that time Catholics were admitted to the college for the first time.
One night the teacher came to the storyteller dressed up in his full uniform and
said “Do you know what this means? […] It means I’ll have to teach them by day
and shoot them by night” (ibid. 166ff). Everybody thinks it hilarious except
Owen. He feels afraid, angry and even ashamed that people in 1994 can still do
this to him. It could be argued in this example that the masking described by
Bhabha works the other way round. In this case it is Owen’s colleagues who behave
‘normally’ during the day and wearing the disguise of tolerance at work. Only
in their time off after work “the masks [start] to slip” as Owen calls it (ibid. 166).
In the security of ‘their’ Protestant group they feel free to express what they really
think.
3.5. Changes in Education
“Work hard, girls, because you have more to give society
than you can perhaps realise. We need our Catholic
doctors and nurses and university lecturers; our Catholic
lawyers and civil servants.”
One by One in the Darkness, Deirdre Madden
(1996, 60)
The question remains what role a new intelligentsia might have played in the
Northern Irish conflict. Education in Ireland was strongly marked by the attempt
of the British to anglicise the country as stated in chapter 2; see for example the
introduction of National Schools in 1831 that largely ignored the existence of the
Irish language and taught entirely in English. In Anderson’s terms this was supposed
to strengthen the imagined British community by means of the English
language as the only language available. Nic Craith has stated that “the emphasis
32 A paramilitary police force that had been entirely Protestant. They were disbanded in 1970
(Mulholland 58).