Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe’s oddest countries.
I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn’t my business.
But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.
I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.
I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn’t talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.
Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody’s lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.
Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I’ve allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.
