“I showed my appreciation for my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could,” said Bernard Shaw. Along with his asserting that you can “put an Irishman on the spit and you will always get another Irishman to turn him,” one can see a truth about the core principles of the romantic nationalism. Though it must be considered that Shaw was a contrarian.

Nationalism, and nationality more generally, is based primarily upon feeling. The awareness of belonging whenever you stand on Slieve Gullion and all the daily torments, which had previously ailed your mind, subside for a moment and allow you to simply be. The balanced mind reads the papers afterwards and comes to some sort of accord between the two instincts.

There is a particular strand of romantic nationalism which works best, however, with its eyes wide shut, lest a droplet of perfidious daylight should break in to disturb its pleasant and creative slumber.

This is demonstrated in the life and intellectual evolution of Iris Murdoch, novelist and philosopher. Born in Dublin in 1919, to a Presbyterian father from outside Lisburn and a middle class Church of Ireland mother from Dublin, Murdoch’s family moved to London when she was two years old. Despite the uprooting, she always maintained an Irish accent through hearing her parents’ voices, as much as she retained a sense of Ireland as her “spiritual home,” much as I describe above.

In the early part of her writing career she was not only an avowed nationalist, but also a member of the Communist Party – the two combined making a follower of Connolly. She was also, as was historically the case with the London Irish, very much anti-English.

She wrote that England had destroyed Ireland “slowly and, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone treads on an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it a second time.” Furthermore, she went so far as to argue that Shakespeare must have been an Irishman, as the English were far too stupid to have produced him.

However, much like Ulster, Murdoch’s life reached a crossroads when the Troubles began. At this first experience of the reality of violence, she performed a U-turn that would give motorists and psychologists alike cause to be alarmed.

She became an ardent unionist, her sense of Britishness intensifying with age, as well as a supporter of Ian Paisley. Of the Very Reverend Doctor she said, “He sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists,” obviously turning a deaf ear when the fellow said that “Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs!” And, equally so, a blind eye whenever he made a show of trying on the red beret.

As Maurice Hayes, former Chairman of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, said, “I have often thought there are about six Paisleys. Two of them are very nice people, two quite awful, and the other two could go either way.”

In 1978, she wrote in a letter to a friend that she was “unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred,” and after attending a Franco-Irish conference in Normandy in 1982 reported, “that all those sounds of Irish voices made me feel privately sick. They just couldn’t help sympathising with the IRA, like Americans do.”

One sees this mindset coming from the Republic often. Where people with more Wolfe Tones records than sense will enjoy the notion of militant republicanism, in much the same way that Nigel Farage enjoys the D-Day landings, as the righteous and the valiant fight for country and liberty, but get awfully quiet when a gunshot is actually heard.

There is a farcical distinction made between the ‘IRA’ and the ‘murderers’, here meaning the old IRA and the more recent brandings.

This is without regard, or maybe knowledge, for the fact that not only did republican violence instigate the War of Independence but, as historian Peter Hart charted, acts of republican violence outnumbered acts of British violence to the tune of double, each year between 1919 and 1921.

Conversely, the Troubles was a much more complex, and dirty little war, to paraphrase David Ervine. Not only were there more belligerents involved, a greater context of communal violence, which served as the build up, but it is also true that the lot of a northern Catholic in 1969 was far worse than that of a Catholic, generally, in 1916. Really the two conflicts were only two, meaning separate, in the same sense that there were two world wars. In a more realistic sense, the poor and inconclusive end of the former created the foundations of the latter.

Iris Murdoch, in the early period of her life, stood as a polar opposite to a man such as John Hume, or even Martin McGuinness. In both cases you had nationalists with an inherent, as well as inherited, sense of Irishness and a belonging to the land and all related to it. One case was manifested in a fairy tale, and the other in recognition of the cold light of day. The latter case ran concurrent with a social philosophy that aspired to make the nation the best that it could be, the best that it was.

Murdoch’s nationalism was based upon one square foot of real estate – her own mind – and just as no man is an island, one person does not make a nation.

It is disturbing, and a cause to withhold trust from a person if nationality, which is a thing felt at the very foot of the soul, can be violently overturned by such a simple act as reading the news.  This sort of dishonesty and ineptitude is something which genuine nationalists of all climes, classes, and creeds should be wise to and learn to call out whether it presents itself.