A recent article on Northern Slant by John Coulter argued that unionists should cease their insistence that the “Ballymena accent” receive recognition as a language, and instead rediscover their claim of their Irish inheritance to the greatest extent. He is in the latter regard entirely correct, but the denigration of Ulster Scots is where the argument starts to wear a little thin.

The Ulster dialect, and Scots influence, of Irish must be factored in to anyone learning the language here, otherwise they will be sorely confused if ever they try to converse in Munster.

It is certainly true that there are no shibboleths of any kind when it comes to the Irish language, save for those that exist inside the heads of people who can’t see beyond their nose. As Coulter acknowledges, the United Irishmen was a largely Presbyterian movement. The tradition of Gaeilge in predominantly Protestant communities is kept alive by Linda Ervine, and her initiative Turas.

The vast majority of all place names in Northern Ireland are little beyond a single degree removed from their Irish equivalent, such is the case with Béal Feirste or An Iúraigh. However, there are also Irish names that seemingly bear no resemblance to their English variant, as is the case with the street sign erected in Randalstown that made the news recently. This is usually because the Irish relates to a much older name of the place in question, and as such provides its inhabitants with a link to their history; surely that cannot be a negative.

The cultural shift that saw Protestants and unionists extricated from their language, and by extension their Irish identity, happened concurrent to the political divisions over Home Rule at the turn of the last century. The hundred years of conflict which then ensued resulted in a retreat to the cultural trenches of the mind on all sides. Just as there are unionists who are averse to the Irish language, there are republicans who do not see Remembrance Sunday as a part of their narrative.

The ‘not an inch, no surrender’ mentality of Ian Paisley is found across many different communities and manifests itself in conversations on various political subjects, and wherever it rears its fire-breathing head it serves as the antithesis to healthy and democratic dialogue. Rigidity of thought is a barrier to progress, and the tides of political opinion must not be dammed to the extent that they cannot flow an inch in whatever direction that good sense will require.

As the writer John Green is fond of saying, “The truth resists simplicity,” and we can all be guilty of simplifying the truths that surround us.

There have been steps made by various nationalist leaders to the rediscovery of what it means to be Irish, at a deeper level, yet there is plainly a ways still to go. Since Mary Lou McDonald became President of Sinn Féin she has intermittently started adding the prefix ‘London’ to the name ‘Derry,’ which is a positive step towards removing the political charge from either variation which itself only came about around the same time as the Troubles.

While leader of the SDLP, Margaret Ritchie made the decision to wear a poppy on Remembrance Sunday, in recognition of the 220,000 Irishmen who fought as British soldiers in the First World War, the majority of whom were nationalists. In 2015, Martin McGuinness and other Sinn Féin MLAs made a similar effort by attending an Armistice Day service at Stormont. Unfortunately, the wind was taken out of the significance of the latter effort by the TUV, with a characteristic single-dimension approach, not being able to grasp why ‘God Save the Queen’ had been taken out of the order of service.

We can come to recognise the complexity of our narratives, by an honest and multi-faceted reading of the lives of those who have gone before. People such as John Redmond and James Connolly were by no means what may be considered conventional Irishmen.

Redmond was married to Johanna Dalton, an Irish-Australian heiress, and through meeting her saw evidence that the British Empire was not inherently set against the Irish; it was only direct British governance of Ireland that was not working for the majority of people.

Connolly was born in an Irish enclave of Scotland, and first set foot in Ireland as a soldier in the 2ndBattalion of the Royal Scots Regiment, though he later came to despise the British Army. The main cause of his life was socialism, but it was nationalism that claimed his death. His life is evidence that one can possess a worldview and prioritise a number of principles without diminishing commitment to any one of them.

Connolly is also a relevant example in the current debate over whether Irish citizens in the North, as well as the diaspora, should be given a vote in presidential elections. Connolly shows that it is a fallacy to claim that a person has no stake in the affairs of a country by mere virtue of the fact that they do not live there.

Recognising the diversity of our language is the gateway to recognising the diversity of ourselves, as it is the living, everyday embodiment of a culture forged over the course of centuries gone.

On a recent visit to the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, a fantastic resource in Bellaghy, Co. Derry, I had a very enjoyable conversation with other visitors regarding a word cloud that hangs from the ceiling of the entrance hall and features the sort of words used regularly by Heaney in his writing. To trace the origin of the words in question would be to travel in a haphazard beeline from Donegal to Scotland, and possibly with a brief sojourn to France.

As a letter makes a word, a word a sentence, and sentence compile until eventually you have a language and a body of literature, so too is the case for people and towns, towns and counties, and eventually the world at large.