Identity

Two news stories from this week have got me thinking.

The first is the Northern Ireland political situation. Yet again, Northern Ireland is left without a government, as it has been for a while now. This time it seems the talks to set up power-sharing between the DUP and Sinn Fein broke down because the DUP and their allies in the Northern Ireland Assembly can't accept the Gaelic Language Act that Sinn Fein want.

Some of us in Scotland are worried about losing our parliament when Brexit is pushed through. And we're amazed that the people of Northern Ireland are so ready to allow politicians to hand their country - sorry, province - over to direct rule from Westminster and apparently because of a Gaelic Language Act.

Our amazement only shows our ignorance as outsiders of how important language is to the identity of most people and certainly to people in Northern Ireland, most of whom speak English. Because Gaelic isn't the only language of Northern Ireland: there's also Ulster Scots, the language spoken by people descended from the Lowland Scots who migrated in the 17th century to the Ulster counties of Ireland. The two languages neatly define the religious and political divide of Northern Ireland. The numbers of people speaking either of these languages don't in fact matter. It's not about numbers. It's about identity. And nearly 20 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, issues of identity in Northern Ireland are as heavily politicised and as far removed from tolerance as they ever were.

How do you change attitudes like those in Northern Ireland?

You might as well ask how you change attitudes in the USA to guns. Year after year, skinny, slightly stunned and weird-looking young white men, poorly educated, not obviously clever or talented in any way, appear in court accused of mass murder, after shooting up a school. Time after time, the parents of murdered children demand justice, the parents of murderers either deny all responsibility or claim they asked for help with their sons and got none, and the media - social and otherwise - are filled with claims that carrying guns is an inalienable right of US citizens, guns don't kill people - people do, this wouldn't happen if everyone was armed, etc. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association quite unashamedly feeds funds to politicians who will protect the NRA and its members.

It is true of course that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the 2nd amendment of the US constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Mind you, the arms the writers of the constitution were thinking of were muskets, rather than the AR (Armalite)15 used in many school shootings in the USA in the past 40 odd years. (It seems the AR15 isn't the most dangerous weapon openly available to people who want to shoot people, but is used in school shootings on a 'copycat' basis and also because it is lightweight, readily available and can be fired from waist-high position so you can look really cool while you're killing people).

To those of us looking on from the outside, it seems bizarre that such firepower can be bought in a shop by just about anyone. Indeed, attempts are being made to reduce the restrictions on who can buy weapons like this. And the US government - including Obama - have been unable to tackle any part of this problem.

As in the Northern Ireland language question, it's not about numbers, although there are a lot of gun owners in the USA: it's about identity. Some of the nicest people in the USA simply do not understand that the rest of us find their need to own and carry guns weird. We can - and do - cite murderous events in Dunblane (Scotland) and Tasmania (Australia) and the successful actions taken to reduce murder by gun after them, but the gun attitude in the USA is so ingrained it's hard to imagine how it can be changed.

Maybe we could ask who gains by keeping the people of Northern Ireland split over their identity. And who gains by allowing the people of the USA, the richest country in the world, to arm themselves.

I offer no answers to these questions but I am open to ideas.