Backstop Land

By Glenn Patterson

'Funny, wise, entertaining and illuminating, this book is one of the best things to come out of the Brexit saga' FINTAN O'TOOLE.
'Read this absorbing book to understand why, since 2016, we have been playing with fire. There is no longer any excuse for ignorance' MISHA GLENNY.

Northern Ireland's frontier with the South has been an invisible line since the peace agreement of 1998. Now the battle over the UK's decision to leave the EU risks turning it into a hard border. Yet few people in the rest of Britain (or Ireland) know anything much about this most volatile part of an increasingly disunited Kingdom.

This book was written in the feverish summer of 2019, in the aftermath of the 'New' IRA's murder of Lyra McKee, with the fear and anxiety of Brexit looming over a region in which paramilitary forces are still carrying out beatings, and worse, even as the numbers of tourists drawn by the Titanic and Game of Thrones continue to grow.

The power-sharing government created by the Good Friday Agreement has not met – a bleak record in a long-running farce – in over 1,000 days. If it wasn't for the wonderful weather you might wonder why anyone stayed there at all.

Glenn Patterson brings a lifetime's engagement with Northern Ireland and a brilliant novelist's eye to an informative, darkly entertaining portrait of a fragile country.

Welcome to Backstop Land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781838932039

Glenn Patterson

Glen Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied for a Creative Writing MA at UEA, taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He is author of five novels. His first, Burning Your Own (1988), won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Glen Patterson has been Writer in Residence at the Universities of East Anglia, Cork and Queen's University, Belfast. Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast. The author of fifteen previous works of fiction and non-fiction, he co-wrote the screenplay of the film Good Vibrations. He is currently Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University.

Book preview

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PRAISE FOR GLENN PATTERSON

‘One of the fatal flaws of the Brexit project was wilful ignorance about Northern Ireland, its border with the Republic of Ireland, and the historic entanglements that made a clean break from the EU impossible. Combining the vividness and humour of the novelist with the insight and astuteness of the analyst, Glenn Patterson unties all the knots and infuses the history with the humanity of lived experience.

As a guide for the bewildered, Backstop Land is a great place to start. As a plea for understanding and care, it reminds us of where we should hope to end up. Funny, wise, entertaining and illuminating, this book is one of the best things to come out of the Brexit saga.’

F

INTAN

O’T

OOLE, ON

B

ACKSTOP

L

AND

‘The International is an act of courage. It is the best book about the Troubles ever written.’

A

NNE

E

NRIGHT, ON

T

HE

I

NTERNATIONAL

‘Glenn Patterson has become the most serious and humane chronicler of Northern Ireland over the past thirty years, as well as one of the best contemporary Irish novelists.’

C

OLM

T

ÓIBÍN, ON

T

HE

I

NTERNATIONAL

BACKSTOP LAND

Glenn Patterson

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Glenn Patterson, 2019

‘Speech’ © Elaine Gaston, 2016

The moral right of Glenn Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (FTPO): 9781838932022

ISBN (E): 9781838932039

Cover design: Steve Leard

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Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

Chronology

‘Speech’ by Elaine Gaston

Prologue

Up to Speed

Up on the Hill

DUP

What a Carve-up

Up the Ra

Cupar Street

Up to Two a Day

Uppa Queers

Up and Down the Road

Look Up (Postscript)

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

‘Nobody knows anything.’

William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

‘No Government should commit a country to a course of action in which the consequences were so opaque as to be incalculable.’

Right Reverend John McDowell, Bishop of Clogher¹

‘The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people’s suffering for his principles.’

E. L. Doctorow

‘Where we live is basically a piss-take of the world.’

Scott McKendry, Sunflower Bar, 11 June 2019

This is kind of personal

Chronology

Speech

This is the prime manister speakin.

Know what yer aw thinkin.

How ma goin tay sort oot the boarder

noo wi Breggsit an aw?

Mtellinye dinny worry.

Won’t be plain sailin

but fAh could jist explain.

There’s nuthin tay worry aboot.

We don know yet fthere’ll be

a clean Breggsit ra messy Breggsit

nur a hard Breggsit nur a saft Breggsit.

But mnot goin te build a hard boarder.

It’ll be a soft boarder, waitn see.

A sorta magic boarder that no-one can see.

We can hay a boarder that isny a boarder.

One tay keep youse in, an everyone else oot.

We can hay loadsa jobs on the boarder.

Know checkin passports, customs, makin fences,

driving diggers tay dig up roads

n puttin boulders an aw the wee small roads

that’s jist been opened up agin not longsince.

Won’t be goin back tay the old days, not at aw.

Lotsa opportunaties. Wee businesses, know,

filling stayshuns n fegs n booze n that,

know, tea shaps an bars an that kinda thing.

Goin tay stayshun controlsn the portsn airports

n thi Republic, workin wi the Irish government.

Know they’re independent noo but

listen, just cos Ah tawk posh

disny mean Ah dinny unnerstan yer feelins.

Ah was an em pee fur a lang time

fore Ah was the pee em. We wul sort it.

How? I dinny know but ock it’ll be awright.

Quit gernin. What’s that?

Ah canny unnerstan anybody

who tawks like that.

Youse r naw makin sense.

Elaine Gaston

Prologue

Friday, 9 June 2017. I am in London with my friend and screenwriting partner, Colin Carberry, talking to the producers of a couple of films we are working on. Both, as it happens, musical biopics – an area where (in truth, the only area where) we have a bit of form, having co-written Good Vibrations, based on, as we were careful to say, the ‘true stories’ of legendary Belfast record-shop owner, inveterate yarn-spinner and perpetual contrarian, Terri Hooley.

Musicals are having a moment. La La Land is still in its first flush and Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns is filming at Shepperton Studios, sixteen miles down the road from where Colin and I are having our meetings.

Yesterday, Thursday, 8 June, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland went to the polls, in a general election called just two months before and against all expectation by Prime Minister Theresa May (already that feels like writing ‘Anthony Eden’), in a bid to strengthen her hand within parliament and her own party ahead of Brexit negotiations with Brussels. The election had taken the Conservatives from 330 seats – an overall majority of four – to just 317, nine short of the number needed to govern without the support of other parties.

The Northern Ireland electorate, meantime, with no Labour or Liberal Democratic candidates to choose from, and only a very small field of Conservatives, had returned seven Sinn Féin MPs (who had run, as was their wont, on an abstentionist ticket, that is, a promise not to take any seats they won) and from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the only Northern Irish party to have backed Leave in the United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum the year before, ten MPs.

It had become starkly apparent by the time Colin and I stepped off the early Friday morning plane from Belfast that the fate of Theresa May’s government – the whole tenor of the UK’s departure from the European Union – depended on a single Northern Irish party. Not just any Northern Irish party, that Northern Irish party, with its eccentric views on all manner of things, from same-sex relationships to the origins of the universe. (Though, in true DUP negotiation style, the pact that the Tories sought would not be reached until seventeen days later and even then would take the form of a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement rather than formal coalition: the government would have to keep coming back to seek their support.)

The people we were meeting were by turns baffled and affronted. ‘Who the fuck are these people?’

And they weren’t the only ones. The question dogged Colin and me every step of our day.

They were asking it in shops – who the fuck are they?

They were asking it in bars – who the fuck are they?

They were asking it on the streets – who the fuck are they? – and out the windows of cars – who the fuck are they?

If we had been writing it as a musical, the billposter sliding down his ladder would have been asking it, over his shoulder – who the fuck are they? The faces on the bill he had just finished posting would have been asking it and everyone would have laughed, short and sharp, taking the number up another notch – full-blown Mary Poppins Returns style, drone’s-eye view, upper windows thrown wide open, half a million of them maybe, one for every person who in the next forty-eight hours would sign a petition calling on the Tories not to do a deal – Who the fuck are they? Who the fuck are they? – building and building to a surround-sound crescendo.

Just – who – the – fuck – are – they?

And then a pause in which Colin and I looked at one another, shrugged, and turned to the camera and sang our first and only line… ‘Welcome to our world!’

Up to Speed

It is Tuesday, 2 July 2019, and there’s a burst bass-drum skin lying on the footpath at the end of my street, an arc of blood