Rebels Without a Cause: The Confederate Flag in Ireland
Confederate flag flown by a fan of the Cork hurling team.
The flying of Confederate flags in support of the Cork hurling and football teams has recently been banned in Ireland. Although it has become an increasingly rare sight, fans of Cork have been flying the Stars and Bars for many years, usually with the pretext that it carries the same colours as their team.
While this premise is now widely challenged in Ireland, particularly amid ongoing racial violence in the US and the use of the flag as a hate symbol, there is a residual cultural investment in displaying this symbol while denying its racial connotations. That investment may be singular in the controversy it causes, but it is also reflective of a broader Irish interest in the culture of the American South.
The regional myths of the American South and West are symbolically mapped onto Irish culture - more often than not, onto rural Irish culture. They are perceived as predominantly non-urban, pre- or anti-modern, frontier spaces of America’s marginalised white peoples. These are the mavericks, the pioneers, the outsiders, who do not respect the powers of the state. These are the rebels and cowboys - of which Ireland has more than its fair share.
Southern Myths
The American South, as much as the American West, is a deeply mythic space. Its historical origins and evolution are shrouded in narratives that symbolically designate it as a place apart in the US. That sense of difference is powerfully shaped by the Civil War and its legacies, though it both precedes and transcends that violent rupture in the new nation, due to the peculiarities of the region’s development and its attachment to the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
The Irish role in the settlement of the Southern states is significant, with mostly Protestant immigrants moving into Virginia and the Carolinas in the Colonial period, followed by large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants in the mid-19th century.
Both Protestant and Catholic Irish mythologies were entwined in the Southern cause leading to the Civil War and the memorialisation of the “Lost Cause” in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Together they signified a Celtic version of ethnicity for white Southerners, who sought to braid the histories of oppression and rebellion of Scottish and Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics into narratives of a mythical past that explained the unique foundations of the South.
In the 20th century the Lost Cause would become a type of civil religion among Southern whites, widely memorialised and celebrated, with the Confederate flag becoming an especially powerful icon. With the advent of the African American civil rights movement in the 1950s, the symbolism of the flag was more pronounced as a standard of white power and privilege.
As liberal democracy became the official American creed, the flag came to signify varied forms of resistance against a mainstream liberalism. “In the South of the 21st century,” Ryan McNutt writes, “wherever it is flown outside of historical contexts, the Confederate battle flag now functions as shorthand: small government, anti-tax, anti-intervention, and…socially conservative viewpoints on gender, sexuality, feminism, and race.”
In recent years, in the context of the Trump presidency and racial unrest in the US, the flag has also come to symbolise white grievance and rage at a sense of disenfranchisement.
It is this sense of disenfranchisement that is most commonly voiced by Americans defending their use of the flag. There is often a defiant belligerence attached to that expression, with terms such as “redneck” and “hillbilly” being taken up as badges of honour by white, usually rural Southerners wanting to stare down a liberalising America and hold on to what they perceive as their undervalued ways of life.
In this expression – very visible in the popular and vernacular cultures of the South, from Southern rock music to NASCAR - the Confederate flag is not only a reference to an imagined Southern past but an affront to respectability and social order, a lower class fingers up to authority, a rebel yell.
Heartland
Commentaries on commonalities between the American South and Ireland tend to rely on shaky or simply false analogies – they are marginalised peoples in underdeveloped parts of the developed world – and vague ideas that these “souths” were sites of oppression and lost causes. However, there are distinctive influences of Southern American culture in Ireland.
They are most evident in the popularity of country music and southern roots music. As has often been observed, there are strong historical linkages between Irish and American forms of folk and traditional music, influencing the genesis and evolution of country music. They are also present in more marginal cultural activities such as stock car racing, which has a large rural following in Ireland and often appropriates NASCAR iconography.
Much of this appropriated American southernness in Ireland is mapped onto rural activities and expressions, indicating an association with the idea of regional exceptionalism that signifies distance from and distaste for the authority and culture of the metropolitan centre. It has an idiomatic presence in rural vernacular speech, primed in part by American popular culture.
Some Irish writers have an ear for the idioms of the American South as they seep into rural Ireland. Patrick McCabe’s novels, set in the midlands of the country, often reference southern Americana. Characters will whistle the theme tune of The Dukes of Hazard or put Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton on the pub’s jukebox. In Heartland (2018), McCabe takes this further to create what he terms a “redneck symphonia” and “a white trash oratorical”, blending the speech idioms of rural Ireland and the American South. He creates a disquieting mise-en-scene in a dilapidated rural “roadhouse” in which “hombres”, grotesque models of failed masculinity, await the inevitable violence.
While signifiers of class, masculinity, and rurality are often clear in Irish performances and representations of American southernness, race (and racism) is more occluded and often overtly disavowed if challenged. Some commentators on the move to ban the flag at GAA matches put forward the defense of the same colours as the Cork team, or Cork as “the rebel county”. It has nothing to do with race.
Such pleas to racial innocence ring hollow at a time of heightened consciousness of racism on both sides of the Atlantic. They have been widely criticised in Ireland. However, they awkwardly echo broader disavowals in a nation that remains wilfully ignorant about the realities of racism and complacent about its own racial innocence.
The Sons of Ulster
“Sons of Ulster Mural” Glenbryn Park, Belfast
The American South has a mythical valence in Northern Ireland that is in significant ways different from that in the South. There the Lost Cause is more directly grafted onto a Protestant imaginary of embattled identity.
As noted, Protestants from Ulster were among the original European colonists in what would become the Southern states. They came to be known as Scots-Irish, an ethnic appellation designating origin but also a signifier of ethnic and religious differentiation from Irish Catholics.
There have been efforts to excavate and celebrate a distinctive Ulster Scots heritage and identity in the North, and the iconography of the Confederate South (and of the American frontier) plays a significant part, particularly its more militant aspects.
Commenting on that sense of heritage, Alex Massie writes,
“you can still see some parallels between ‘redneck’ culture in America and working-class protestant culture in Glasgow and Belfast…A culture that boasts ‘We are the people’ yet fears it's not only misunderstood by the establishment but also actually under attack.”
This is an example of the shaky analogising I mentioned. However, it pinpoints the confluence of class and religion in this mindset of disenfranchisement and betrayal, a siege mentality formed within the peculiar conditions of a para-colony, stultified politically and raging against liberal progress.
A Confederate heritage feeds into this working-class Protestant mentality in Northern Ireland, very visibly in murals and in the use of the Confederate flag. A large mural in Belfast has the legend “The Sons of Ulster Who Led the Confederate Army” and refers to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression”. There are images of and quotes from Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart and “Stonewall” Jackson. The mural is linked to another that depicts Unionist opposition to Home Rule in 1912. In the middle is an image melding the Red Hand of Ulster and the Confederate flag.
The Confederate flag has also been displayed in Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland, particularly during “marching season”, and as an intimidating symbol. The Red Hand Defenders, a Loyalist paramilitary group have been known to carry Confederate flags. In July 2015, a flag was hung outside the home of a young black man in Belfast. In such instances, racism is not being disavowed but very visibly acted out as a perverse claiming of heritage.
Recognizing Racial Determinism
In recent years in Ireland, both South and North, there has been strong and widespread condemnation of the appearance of Confederate flags. This is to be welcomed but it needs to be pressed into a wider and deeper recognition of a reactionary racial determinism on the island, which constructs aboriginal myths of identity that find affinities in the exclusive white ethnicity of the American South.