In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13. Minorities 152 I was asked by The Furrow magazine to write this article to promote the launching of an issue of Crane Bag dealing with minorities. In my paper, written on 7 May 1981, I started with a poem by Bobby Sands, who had died on hunger strike. However, because of the political tensions surrounding his death at the time, The Furrow magazine refused to publish the article unless I removed the reference to Bobby Sands. This I refused to do, and the article was never published. I am very happy to have been asked to help with the launching of the current issue of Crane Bag, which deals with ‘minorities’. The question of minorities within our society is a subject that has always interested me, but I now see it from rather a different point of view to that which I think is usual. When the question of minority groups such as the travelling people, the mentally ill or the Protestant minority is raised, it is usually in the sense of seeing them as a problem apart from ourselves, a group existing somewhere in society that has to be dealt with but for which I am not personally responsible. To my mind, to look at things in this way is to misunderstand the true nature of what is involved. The reality represented by the various minorities is not something external to me, something out there in society, but is intimately related to what I am, to what is inside me. This may seem a strange thing to say, and implies a rather different view of what a human being is from what is perhaps the way we normally understand ourselves. We usually think of ourselves as something solid: I am an individual, a self, a person with a strong ego, a sort of core within me that enables me to withstand the buffeting of life around me/myself. I want to put forward a very different conceptual model of ourselves as human beings, which may not itself be totally correct but which I find operationally more useful for understanding what is going on between the individual and the various groups, families and Minorities 153 organizations that make up the society of which he/she is a part. I see a human being as a living system, as a piece of reality separated from the rest of reality by a boundary, by a surrounding skin or envelope. This external boundary is not simply the physical barrier of our skin but is, so to speak, a living membrane separating what is inside from what is outside and managing the dynamic interactions which take place between these two realities. When we think of all that takes place during development and of all that the growing child takes in from its parents and family and of the interaction of that family with the outside world, it is not so strange to state that the internal reality of that individual, when they reach adult life, is not really different from the reality of the external society. All the confused jumble of ideas, views, emotional attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, fears and hatreds which we find, say, in contemporary Irish society are really to be found in the same confused chaotic mixture within each of us. The only thing which separates one reality from another is the semipermeable membrane around each of us that enables us to recognize what is within: a self. From this point of view I think it is more useful to think of ego function as the boundary system by which we manage the transactions between ourselves and the outside world. If I look honestly at myself, I have to admit that I contain an aspect of most, if not all, of the minorities that are dealt with in the present issue of Crane Bag. I am part homosexual, part female, half a Protestant; I will be old and have been through the throes of adolescence ; I am a frustrated artist and failed musician; like most people I have felt the desire to travel the roads and have at times experienced rejection by society; and certainly I have within me the anxieties, the depressions and, lurking beneath, the madness of the mentally ill. The question is not so much that all of this reality is within each of us but how we deal with it, whether we accept or reject it. To understand this further, it may help to turn to Freud...

Share