I came across a report on Protestant Alienation in Northern Ireland yesterday and, although it was originally published 12 years ago, much of it still resonates today.

One factor in particular identified as a source of alienation is entitled "The High Profile of Nationalist/Catholic Culture." Even within Northern Ireland it's fairly obvious that one culture is considered more 'acceptable' than the other, and that is the gaelic/celtic culture.

The Red Hand, long-since removed from the NITB logo.

In July 1990 the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, even before it began promoting "Ireland" as a destination, replaced the red hand on its logo with the current shamrock (with a red central leaf). Today, as I looked at a PSNI constable's business card I realised that despite using 6 separate symbols for the PSNI badge (scales of justice, crown, harp, shamrock, laurel branch and torch) the designer managed to completely ignore one of the only symbols that uniquely identifies Ulster/Northern Ireland - the Red Hand (admittedly it would need to be clawed back in popular opinion from the paramilitaries, but this will never happen if we abandon it to them). Christ, even use of the term Ulster itself is usually avoided, despite being much more marketable than "Northern Ireland."

The "Taste of Ulster" shop at Belfast International Airport seems to almost exclusively offer traditionally "quaint Irish" souveneirs of Ireland rather than Ulster or Northern Ireland. At Glasgow airport I noticed one shop selling some great T-Shirts with English definitions of Scots dialect words (blether, eejit, numpty, steamin etc) all of which would sound perfectly familiar in Ulster. We've had the assault of the Irish Gaelic language to the point where it receives £18 million a year in funding (in NI, from the British government) and we're looking at some kind of Irish Language Act in the near future which will doubtlessly increase this figure dramatically. That's a lot of endulgance for a language which probably doesn't have a single monoglot speaker in the country. Oh, and I'm not even starting on Saint Patrick's day or a certain council's last-ditch attempt to consign the name of the city of Londonderry to history.

Follow up:

Arguably, we've nobody to blame but ourselves. Gaelic football, traditional Irish music, the Irish language, Irish dancing etc are all part of a very fashionable trendy Irishness. Meanwhile the other Irish (unionist/British-Irish/Ulster-Scots) haven't learned to promote their own culture sufficiently and also seem unwilling to adopt things like the Irish language as their own due to the fact that these things have too often excluded them or been used to promote an opposing political viewpoint. The result is a near total cultural whitewash.

My suggestion would not be to exclude Irish cultural identity, in fact quite the opposite, I feel we should claim back some ownership of it, as I believe it forms a central part of our own culture and ignoring it would be akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face. I simply believe that we're currently missing an opportunity to take advantage of what distinguishes us from the rest of the island and its inhabitants in favour of focusing exclusively on what binds us together.