BOOKS: BEYOND ORANGE AND GREEN: THE NORTHERN CRISIS IN A NEW PERSPECTIVE

BEYOND ORANGE AND GREEN: THE NORTHERN CRISIS IN A NEW PERSPECTIVE, by Belinda Probert, The Academy Press, Dublin, £6.35.

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COLOUR WISE getting beyond Orange and Green produces a rather jaundiced shade of Brown. Dr. Probert's achievement is similar. Review by Mavis Arnold

She sees political Orange and Green as essentially the same: defensible but for workers, diversionary. In her conclusion, she chooses as representatives of those Marxxists seduced from the Red, as it were, by each colour, Michael Farrell and Anders Boserup. By this, she equates

an individual with a following and some influence among the Nationalists with one who has neither following nor innfluence among the Orangeemen.

In practice, left support for the Irish unification struggle has been maintained because the dynamics of Orange and Green reflect, allthough distortedly, the interrnational division between exxploiter and exploited; Orangeeism has shown itself to be compatible with working class political militancy while the aims of Irish nationalism are not. By failing to understand this, Dr. Probert presents a picture of the Northern Irish situation that is, pleasanter than but quite different from reality.

Dr. Probert finds the norrmal Marxist interpretation of Irish history (such as Farrell's) inadequate for three reasons. She claims that the Marxists overstress Britain's role, overrlook the lack of 26 county support for the unification struggle, and stress the ideoological aspect of working class Unionism, rather than its political and economic base.

Her objections are dubious.

Certainly, Britain, in principle, does not support partition, Orangeism, or working class division. There is no evidence, however, that without these the class forces within Ireland could provide a settlement that would secure Britain's 'interests (which are not just economic, as Dr. Probert immplies, but political, military, and social).

As for 26 county support (or its absence), Dr. Probert over-simplifies again. Opinion in the Republic concerning the border is contradictory and is made more so because of the mistakes of those who would end it. Dr. Probert ignores the events in the South after Bloody Sunday, ascribbing the fall of Stormont soleely to IRA bombs.

But her greatest evasion (central to the book) are in her idea that the basis for working class Orange ism is crum bling. Crucial to this is the belief that the decline of the traditional six county innd ustries and their re placeement by branches of multiinational corporations is prooviding "qualitatively new contradictions. » In fact, though the foreign firms innvesting in Northern Ireland are not conscious upholders of work-place divisions, they are not prepared to conscioussly oppose their maintenance. The regional im balance (mentioned by Dr. Probert) carries this further. Official records show that Protestants still have two and a half times more chance of employment than Catholics. And the reecession is widening the gap.

Dr. Probert's book is not all bad. It has much to reecommend it. It is far from beating T. W. Moody's The Ulster Question 1603-1973 as the worst book inspired by the present crisis. Nonetheless, in the end it leaves the currrent confusion worse connfounded. n.R. Lysaght

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Frost In May by Antonia White, Virago. 220pp. £1.95. The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner.' Virago. 297pp. £1.95. Mr. Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Virago. 250pp. £1.95.

These three titles are the first in a new series of outtstanding out-of-print twenntieth century novels to be produced by Virago, the feminist publishing company. They were written when the authors were each 34 years old. Frost in May is a true story. Antonia White started it when she was 15 and then forgot about it until after she was married, when she finishhed it on the insistence of her husband. It tells of Nanda who, at the age of 9 and recently converted to Cathoolicism following the example of her father, went as a boarrder to the Convent of the Five Wounds there to be eduucated in the true virtues of humility, obedience and subbservience to the higher will of God. But opportunities for mortal sin beset her at every turn and no matter how she tried to mortify the flesh (either by putting burrs innside her jumper or salt on her rhubarb), she never attained the state of grace achieved by a certain pupil who, on the occasion of her First Commmunion had a safety pin driven inadvertently through her ear and attached to her

veil by a shortsighted nun. Regarding it as a penance, the child did not mention it and, eventually fainted clean away on the floor.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was inspired to write Mr. Fortune's Maggott as the reesult of a dream she once had. Mr. Fortune - a bank clerk from Hornsey - becomes a missionary and, full of welllmeaning and endearing zeal, goes off to com-en the heathen on a remote South Sea Island called Fanua. He tries very hard. He plays his harmonium, he sings hymns, he reads the Bible out loud. But the friendly, childlike Polynesians only laugh at him. They surround him with their sensuous, graceful boddies and lure him away to bathe with them in warm, scented pools. Mr. Fortune's single, apparent convert is a boy, Lueli. They live together in a peaceful, innocent love which is shattered by the disscovery that Lueli has been worshipping his own pagan god all the time.

The heroine of The True Heart is Sukey Bond. An orrphan, she is sent into service to a lonely farm on the Essex marches, where she meets and falls in love with Eric, a wellborn, gentle simpleton who has been hidden away from society by his rich mother. Marriage between the two is forbidden. But Sukey is a person of determined characcter and, as she scrubs and cleans and polishes she reesolves in her mind that she will marry Eric. Influenced by a picture she sees of Queen Victoria she decides to go to Buckingham Palace and seek the Royal interrcession.