9th December 1999

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A book, which has been published by a senior academic at the University of Ulster, asks if the Protestant culture, both within Northern Ireland and internationally, is real or imagined and questions what people think they are doing when they assert that culture.

The book also questions some of the main features of the Republican tradition.

The Plain Style: Reformation, Culture and the Crisis of Protestant Identity is written by David Brett, a design historian based at the School of Art and Design at York Street in Belfast.

Central topics in the book are the removal of images from worship and education, which it argues, helped create a plain style of worship, building, language and behaviour across Northern Europe and America.

"Occasionally these everyday qualities are remarked upon. In Belfast we might say of someone's housekeeping that 'she keeps a very Protestant looking sort of house', by which we mean it has a kind of prim neatness.

"Or we look at wall-end murals and see how King Billy and the UVF are celebrated in flat, playing-card images that are essentially emblematic while there is a tendency in Republican murals for dramatic gesture and sentiment."

Brett provides an unusual analysis of features in both the Protestant and the traditional/Irish/Catholic cultures.

He believes practices in one of the traditions in Northern Ireland could be said to mirror images of the other, such as the argument for the existence of the Ulster Scots language.

"Anyone with half an ear knows that some Ulster speech contains usages and constructions which seem consistently different from Scots or northern English or Irish usages of English.

"Why would one want to assert its existence? The answer would seem to be to assert a native version of Ulster Protestant identity, which would mirror that version of Irish identity in which the possession of a distinct language is central."

The book also expresses reservations about the use of some major incidents in history:

"A sinister example is the use made of the Battle of the Somme, which some choose to portray as the blood sacrifice of Protestant culture to set against the mirrored blood sacrifice of the Easter rising, as if German bullets could discriminate.

"Both notions are horribly inflated with rhetoric of Old Testament or the Passion and both are, intrinsically, death cults."

In sport, Brett argues that 'the degree to which hurling is in any historically significant sense a national game is a matter of scepticism'

He argues that attempts to get Irish music recognised as different 'leaves open the degree to which what is now called Irish traditional music is in any long time perspective either traditional or distinctly Irish.'

He says Ireland's greatest industrial moment - shipbuilding - has been largely written out of Irish/nationalist history because of its incompatibility with the idea of traditional Ireland.

"Yet the work of Harland and Wolff predates partition: it cannot be understood without reference to Glasgow and Liverpool, a comparison intolerable to the nationalist concept of Ireland as a separate nation having a unique identity."

The book concludes that the people of Ulster have rather few cultural differences and great many similarities.

"The question is not of differences but of the uses made of them. If this book has a political intention it would be to encourage the diverse Protestant communities to dismantle old and now self destructive models of thought and to remind them of their more substantial and creative lineage."

The Plain Style: The Reformation, Culture and the Crisis of Protestant Identity is published by Black Square Books.

For further information, please contact:

Press Office Department of Communication and Development
Telephone: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk