Title: Protestant Boy
Author: Geoffrey Beattie
Genre: Autobiographical Novel
Publisher & Year: Granta, 2004
Pages: 241

I never really comprehended the sectarian strife that so deeply divided Northern Ireland during much of my childhood and teenage years. Growing up in the economically thriving and boringly consensual Netherlands of the 80s, the only references to Ireland that ever entered my consciousness were irregular images of the aftermath of explosions and a fleeting sense of envy and wonder; here were a people as white and “modern” as me who, nonetheless, still seemed to have some pressing cause to fight for. This unusual mixture of familiarity and remoteness is what made the Irish civil war both unsettling and fascinating. What exactly “they” were fighting for, however, or how this was related to either Protestantism or Catholicism, eludes me until now.

However, it was a novel that taught me how even when historical motivations have become obscure to the outsider, a community’s collective memory and that same sense of indefinable pride of one’s identity and struggle that I picked up from the TV as a teenager, can create its own impeccable logic for the perpetuation of hostility and, hopefully one day, for a mutual understanding.

The propensity of man to use cultural and religious symbols to mask basic communal needs and grievances, and his employment or imposition of the same symbols on past and present to construct a common identity contrasting the “other,” often makes it hard for an outsider to discern the complicated patterns of individual and collective experience at the heart of prolonged conflict between (religious) communities. What on the surface may appear as no more than a violent clash of dogmatic creeds, when contemplated from within, will reveal an intricate web of meanings and motivations, each with its own internal narrative and logic. At the intersection of “the” Irish Protestant narrative, with all its symbolism and bravado, and that of a Protestant man and his family, Protestant Boy is born to reveal a fraction of how the interplay of parochial “truths” and symbols and the personal dramas and victories that both inform and challenge them, create modern Irish social and political reality.

Protestant Boy is the memoir of successful Irish Protestant psychologist Geoffrey Beattie, who in 22 short and grasping chapters, describes his return to his native North Belfast and to his ageing mother to discover the story of his family and his community. His story is, more than that of many other middle and upper class Irish literati, very much a story of disintegration, as the backdrop to his childhood was what became notoriously known as the Murder Triangle: the dilapidated old mill-town that became the sprawling lower-class Belfast neighborhood of Ligoniel.

During the “Troubles” of the seventies and eighties, more than 600 people fell victim to sectarian violence there in a seemingly endless cycle of “tit-for-tat”, in Beattie’s words. Still, this memoir is also to a certain extent the story of an outsider who tries to make sense of what happened to his old home while he was away from it, as Beattie left Ireland for the University of Birmingham before the real “Trouble” started.

For Beattie as a psychologist, this is more than just an autobiography; it is a therapy. In his quest for the emotional and psychological landmarks that inform the actions and attitudes of his family and community, he takes us on a journey through both his personal and the Ligoniel Protestant’s memories. We travel back with the author from the bleak street corners and rowdy clubs of the “turn-of-the road”—where young Geoffrey spent his teenage years when he was not behind his school books—to the alien middle- and upper-class environment of the Belfast Royal Academy, where his unusual intelligence lands him a place, in spite of his common background.

We join in his quest for his family roots, in the reminiscences of elder community members about the Ulster Protestant’s important and tragic role in the Second World War’s brutal trench battles, in the photographs of his grandfather’s time with the British Army in India and South Africa, in the words of both perpetrators and victims of sectarian violence in the streets of Ligoniel, and eventually in the rural backwater where his poor Protestant ancestors from Scotland first settled among the poor Catholic peasants of Ulster.

Beattie’s clean and unembellished prose, at times bordering on the impassive, makes for a read that is often shocking, many times profoundly moving, but never dramatic or vainglorious. His empathic understanding for and psychological insight into often violent protagonists of Ireland’s sectarian conflict provides a rare insight into the psyche of an important section of this deeply divided nation, whose image in the foreign media has often been caricatural and simplistic.

Despite the author’s sometimes unabashedly sentimental appreciation of his Ulster Protestant heritage, he never falls into the trap of sectarian propaganda and effortlessly points out the historical inaccuracies and linguistic tricks that are the stuff of political indoctrination. A recurring theme is the way language is subconsciously manipulated by perpetrators of violence to justify their actions and to allocate responsibility with the victim. In the same way, the importance of language for victims in rationalizing and making sense of trauma is discussed in relation to the Irish participation in both the First World War and the Irish civil war. Beattie’s professional background as a psychologist here provides an interesting and unusually intimate angle to a history often veiled in sweeping political generalizations.

In spite of the inevitable role of conflict in Beattie’s story, what truly provides Protestant Boy with its emotional depth is the anonymous and voiceless majority of Ligoniel’s laborers, whose hard work scarcely allows for the luxury of political involvement, whose daily lives are a continuous struggle to protect “their own” from the onslaught of economic and social deprivation. It is in the colorful characterization of Beattie’s sensitive and fragile father; his ruffian, though protective, Catholic uncle; and more than anything, in the excellent, and at times hilarious, portrayal of Beattie’s impossibly stubborn, shamelessly vain, and hilariously cheeky elderly mother, that the nameless multitude acquire a face and a name, and the author’s narrative finds its axis. It is about these “invisible” Irish Protestants that Beattie poignantly observes

They say that the conflict in Northern Ireland is all about group conflict, “them” against “us,” but then it was more about “us” than about “them.” It was about solidarity and being in a group and looking good when the action started. Or at least not looking bad.

Perhaps a lesson we can learn from this book is that only where the “official” interpretations of history are compared and contrasted with those of the family and the individual can we gain any true insight into the collective of individual experiences and choices that ultimately shape the destiny of a society: Geoffrey Beattie has taught me a whole lot more about his.