The spatialisation of the political imagination: A political discourse analysis of space, fantasy and inter-communal conflict in Derry city

ABSTRACT

From a Political Discourse Theory (PDT) perspective, this article interrogates the role of fantasy in the political-spatial discourse of conservative Protestants in Derry, a divided city in the north-west of Ireland. This article argues, along with recent studies, that the insights of PDT offers a post – foundational and discursive account of the spatial, one that is particularly helpful in understanding the dynamics of spatial contestation in divided societies. The category of fantasy is critical to this discursive conceptualisation of the spatial, as illustrated here through a study of how the fantasmatic spatial imaginary of conservative Protestants in nineteenth-century Derry structured their material practices of space-claiming. Empirically, the article examines two riots that occurred in Derry in 1868 and 1883.

KEYWORDS:

• Laclau
• fantasy
• spatial imaginary
• post-foundational theory
• antagonism

1. Introduction

Firmly grounded in Political Discourse Theory (PDT), this article is a study of how the spatial–political imaginary of conservative Protestants in nineteenth-century Derry city, a contested space in the north-west of Ireland, sustained and organised material practices of space claiming violence. The understanding of discourse at work in PDT, as has been recently argued within the more critical quarters of both social and spatial theory (Hussey, 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Marchart, 2018), can be mobilised to develop a post-foundational account of space. A post-foundational and discursive understanding of space, with its stress on radical contingency and the political as ultimately concerned with the contestation or defence of social foundations, is particularly suited of the study of deeply conflicted spaces such as Derry city. It is argued here that ‘fantasy’ (Glynos & Howarth, 2007) furnishes a critical explanatory layer when interrogating the spatial practices of conservative Protestants in Derry. The fantasmatic aspect of the relationship between the political and space in Derry, is readily discernible within the spatial–political discourse of Derry’s loyalists. As such, the interrelated contributions of this article are that it, along with recent contributions and emerging debates (Landau et al., 2021), insists upon and demonstrates that Political Discourse Theory is of great potential in developing a post-foundational and discursive analysis of space (Marchart, 2018). Secondly, this study shows that the fantasmatic aspects of subjects’ political relationship to space is helpful, critical even, in developing this post-foundational spatial analysis. Thirdly, in mobilising these spatialised insights of PDT, a post-foundational and anti-essentialist understanding of Derry’s and northern Ireland’s histories of violence is further advanced. Beyond the context of northern Ireland, this analysis is of significance for studies of highly contested space, where the political articulation of space perpetuates and shapes the dynamics of inter-communal conflict.

Empirically, this article examines two riots. One occurred in 1868 and the other in 1883. Though separated by fifteen years, these riots share a striking symmetry. On both occasions, Derry’s conservative Protestants objected to public talks being held in the Corporation Hall, located in the centre of the walled city. These talks were by political figures who were deemed offensive to the city’s loyalists as the speakers espoused political positions that were either sympathetic to the cause of Irish Catholics in 1868 or as per the riot of 1883, Irish nationalism. As such, the riots studied here involved attacks on the hall and the attempted occupation of the building to disrupt or prevent the events. These riots were battles over the central public and political space of the city. For Derry’s loyalists, the forces of Irish Catholic nationalism posed not only an existential threat to the Protestant character of Derry (that is, the established relations of power in the city) but also risked severing Ireland’s union with Britain. That is, for the city’s loyalists Derry would always be Londonderry.

This article argues that these riots – essentially episodes of space claiming violence during moments of deep political dislocation – are scarcely fully intelligible without recourse to the explanatory power of the spatial-imaginary through which local conservatives understood and situated threats to Derry as a site of Protestant power. In particular, and drawing extensively from the core categories within PDT, this article posits spatial-imaginaries as political discourses are both antagonistic and fantasmatic in character. That is, they are defined by ineradicable negativity that cannot be overcome as there is always a radical outside that at once both constitutes and subverts a discourse/identity. Fantasy, then, which has been incorporated into PDT primarily through engagements with Jacques Lacan’s work (Glynos, 2011; Stavrakakis, 1999; Žižek, 1989) speaks to both the horrific vision and beatific promise that sustained the political-spatial imaginary of Derry’s conservative Protestants. The political imaginary of Ulster’s loyalists has been regularly termed a ‘siege mentality’ (Govern, 1994). This refers to the totemic place within loyalist discourse afforded to the historic Siege of Derry in 1688, where the city’s Protestant inhabitants prevailed against a siege by the Catholic forces of King James II. The siege was a pivotal episode in the late-seventeenth conflicts between King James II and King William III, which ultimately ensured Protestant dominance in Ireland. The siege then became a political lens through which Derry loyalists tended to survey political struggles and threats. Crucially, the siege myth is at once a political and spatial imaginary. The ‘siege mentality’ as a political imaginary spatialises the political by spatially locating the enemy – the other who poses a threat. The lesson of Siege was that Catholics needed to kept outside the ‘walls of Derry’ (somewhat literally, and figuratively in terms of the bounds of political power), and that Protestants needed to remain on guard against the ‘traitors’ within their own community. The defence of Derry as a Protestant city then, both historically and in the riots studied here, pivots around this horrific spectre of their traditional enemies breeching the walls – overcoming structural barriers to overturn longstanding power relations, as well as the beatific/utopian promise that Protestants will prevail and secure their future. This spatial–political imaginary, as argued here, served both to structure and drive the dynamics of space-claiming violence in Derry.

The article proceeds as follows. A brief historical/contextual overview of nineteenth-century Derry is developed. Then, the concept of the spatial imaginary is re-articulated through some of the key categories of PDT, namely discourse, antagonism and fantasy. As such, this re-articulation provides the theoretical edifice on which the subsequent empirical analysis rests. Following this, the choice of case studies as well as the historical sources/data mobilised are discussed. In the final empirical sections of the article, the key signifiers or ‘symptoms’ of the nineteenth-century Ulster Protestant spatial–political imaginary of the siege are interrogated, such as the figure of the Catholic and the internal traitor.

2. Historical background: nineteenth-century Derry

Derry, as the second largest city in Northern Ireland, was a key site of conflict during ‘the Troubles’ of the later-twentieth century (1969–1998). The contested status of the city is betrayed in the politics around the naming of the city. Irish nationalists, who tend to be Catholic, and want to see Northern Ireland united with the rest of Ireland, generally name the city ‘Derry’. While unionists and loyalists, who wish to keep Northern Ireland and thus Derry within the union with the United Kingdom, often refer to city as ‘Londonderry’ (Ó Tuathail, 1996). Derry’s conflicted status, however, long predates the violence of the twentieth century. Since the Planation of Ulster in the early-seventeenth century, the English/ British state’s violent colonial project that saw Irish Catholics dispossessed of their land which was granted to settlers from England and Scotland, Derry has been a frontier city, laying on the boundary where ‘loyal’ Ulster collided with the Gaelic world that lay beyond it. As historian A. T. Q Stewarts details (1989, p. 48), the periodic rebellions against and hostility towards the plantation left the settlers with a sense of ‘chronic insecurity’. This unsettled-ness was more keenly felt by the Protestant inhabitants of Derry, unlike Belfast, for example, as the city was largely surrounded by Catholic hinterlands. As mentioned above, during the Willimate Wars Derry was laid siege by the Catholic forces of King James II. The siege would assume a pivotal place in the political discourse of Ulster’s loyalists, providing a stark reminder and lesson that protestant’s needed to remain on guard against their implacable enemies both beyond and within the walls of Derry (McBride, 1997). During later challenges to Protestant political power, the ‘lessons’ of siege was routinely invoked by political actors as an interpretative frame to situate and understanding contemporary struggles. A key structural position/signifier of loyalist discourse is the figure of Lundy. Lundy, the governor of Derry during the siege, became a synonym for traitor as he was ready to surrender the city.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Catholics migrated to Derry to work in the city’s industries (Hume, 2002). Unlike Belfast, Catholics were not allowed to live within the walls of the city. Catholics, therefore, settled outside the walls in areas such as the ‘Bogside’ on the western flank of the city. The Catholics of Derry, then, writes Adrian Kerr (2013, p. 18), always had an antagonistic relationship to the walls of the city. For Catholics the walls were a symbolic and material boundary, which signified that they were ‘shut out’ from political and social power. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Derry underwent profound demographic changes. By 1834 Catholics accounted for over fifty-percent of Derry’s population. By the census of 1851, owing to migration from rural areas during the potato famine of the 1840s, Catholics were a clear majority (Kerr, 2013, p. 19). This demographic shift, coupled with the easing of restrictions on Catholics, was evidenced in the infrastructure of the town, such as the building of St Eugene’s Cathedral between 1851 and 1873.

Though the city was still politically controlled by Protestants, by the mid-nineteenth century Derry could no longer be considered a categorically Protestant space. Conservative Protestant’s feared that they were losing the city. This was at once a political as well as a spatial anxiety. It is little surprise, then, that the annual commemoration of the Siege of Derry took on a more overtly political character. The Apprentice Boys club, established in 1813, named after the apprentices who famously shut the gates of the city, locking out the enemy during the siege of Derry (McBride, 1997). The Apprentice boys celebrated both the shutting of the gates and the lifting of siege by marching around the city walls. Like the parades of the Orange Order that celebrate the victory of 1690 Battle of Boyne on ‘the Twelfth’ of July, Catholics understood these events a decidedly triumphalist. They were after all victories over Catholics. As historian Ian McBride (1997, p. 50) writes rituals such as these annual parades were ‘used to demarcate boundaries established by the seventeenth-century settlement, and to affirm symbolically the political and social dominance of Protestants. The rituals, then, were a response to profound political dislocation. The riots studied here, are also instances of performative space claiming. As conservative Protestants were increasingly feeling that their hegemonic position was being undermined, it was little surprise that were deeply offended the presence of Catholic sympathetic and nationalist political speakers in the Corporation Hall in Derry in 1868 and in 1883.

3. Spatial imaginaries as antagonistic and fantasmatic discourses

Re-articulated through the lens of Political Discourse Theory, here spatial imaginaries are understood as discursive, antagonistic and fantasmatic in character. These three interlocking theoretical categories constitute the theoretical foundations and thoroughly inform the methodological strategies of the analysis developed here. Over the past few decades, critical geographers have increasingly grappled with the concept of spatial imaginaries (O’ Brien, 2019). Spatial imaginaries are modes of representing space at a range of scales from the imperial, to discourses of globalisation, to the national and international, to the more intensely local. Such discourses about space, however, do not merely pertain to discussions of certain spaces, but rather spatial imaginaries organise and are constituted by the political and social practices that inaugurate, reproduce and or contest configurations of space (Wolford, 2004). As such, as Davoudi (2018, pp. 97–98) writes, spatial imaginaries not ‘unproblematic representations of the places of yesterday, today or tomorrow and are deeply implicated in power struggles over those places and spaces that constitute the sites of struggle’. In his definition, Davoudi further puts the stress on the power saturated and performative character of spatial imaginaries, stating that they are

deeply held, collective understandings of socio-spatial relations that are performed by, give sense to, make possible and change collective socio-spatial practices. They are produced through political struggles over conceptions, perceptions and lived experience of place. They are circulated and propagated through images, stories, texts, data, algorithms and performances. They are infused by relations of power in which contestation and resistance are ever present. (Davoudi, 2018, pp. 97–98)

Spatial imaginaries, then, are power-laden and contested discourses that are constitutive of subjects’ experience of space (Watkins, 2015). To borrow Mustafa Dikeç’s (2012) phrase, ‘space’ in this light becomes ‘a mode of political thinking’. From a PDT perspective, however, the political dimension of spatial imaginaries is epiphenomenal of their discursive and, thus, antagonistic constitution.

A range of critical spatial theorists draw heavily on contemporary ‘post-foundational’ political and social theory, putting varying emphasis on the discursive construction of social reality (Landau et al., 2021) such as Judith Butler’s performative and iterative, conceptualisation of identity (e.g. Gregson & Rose, 2000; Smitheram, 2011), and, of particular relevance here, Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of discourse and their project of radical democracy (Gibson-Graham, 1995). Though the work of Laclau and Mouffe has already been taken up and has shaped debates within some critical quarters of spatial theory in past few decades (Massey, 2008), it has been recently argued that their theoretical category of antagonism offers a truly post-foundational analysis of not only the social but also the spatial (Hussey, 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Marchart, 2018). In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2014 [1985]), Laclau and Mouffe developed a post-Saussurian understanding of discourse, where discourse was no longer confined to purely linguistic phenomena but was instead co-extensive with the social (Carpentier, 2017, p. 18), thereby including linguistic and material practices (Howarth, 2018). Discourses, however, are antagonistically structured. That is, they are defined by the inscription of a frontier or a limit. As such, there is a ‘radical outside’ that constitutes social identity/objectivity (Laclau 1996, p. 38; Laclau & Mouffe 2014 [1985]). While this antagonistic outside, defines a social identity it at once subverts it. As Laclau and Mouffe (2014 [1985], p. 111) put it ‘in the case of antagonism […] the presence of an “Other” prevents me from being totally myself’. Antagonisms then, as Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000, p. 10) detail ‘disclose the lack at the heart of all social identity and objectivity […] the social is thus revealed as a field that can never be closed or constituted as an objective full presence’. This antagonistic constitution of social objectivity is critical to a post-foundational and discursive understanding of space, separating it from other post-structuralist accounts of space (Landau et al., 2021). If space is discursively articulated, it is also antagonistically constituted. That is, it remains marked and haunted by its own radical impossibility, that its foundations are the product of contingent political institution. From this perspective, it is the primacy afforded antagonism in the constitution of the spatial that makes this conceptualisation of space distinct.

The Lacanian category of fantasy has entered PDT through a productive cross reading of the work of Laclau and Lacan (Glynos, 2003, 2008, 2011; Laclau, 1990: Stavrakakis, 1999), and, as argued here, provides a critical explanatory layer when developing a post-foundational discursive analysis of space and the political. Fantasy is tied to the discursive and antagonistic constitution of social objectivity. Slavoj Žižek (1989, p. 44) argues that fantasy is not a synonym for the distortion of reality or a myth that obscures truth, but rather fantasy provides the very support that sustains and gives consistency to our experience. As our social world is always discursively articulated, and, therefore, antagonistically constituted it remains disturbed by a radical outside which, again, makes identification both possible and yet impossible to fully attain. Fantasy negotiates with and conceals this radical impossibility. In more post-foundational terms, fantasy is a framing device ‘subjects use to protect themselves from the anxiety associated with the idea that there is no ultimate guarantee or law underlying our social existence’ (Glynos, 2011, p. 70). Fantasy is implicated in the construction of antagonistic frontiers through the naming of an enemy – the radical outside that subverts/constitutes an identity. As Žižek (1990, p. 252) suggests, though ‘all identity is in itself blocked’ we project this immanent impossibility onto an external enemy thereby taming spectre of radical groundlessness by locating an obstacle that can and must be overcome. As Sean Homer (2005, p. 62) details, there is always two sides to fantasy. These are namely, the ‘beatific’ promise of a fullness-to-come once this obstacle, this enemy, is overcome, and the horrific dimension of fantasy which suggests ruin if this threat is not eliminated. ‘Every utopian fantasy’, as Yannis Stavrakakis (1999, p. 100) puts it, ‘produces it reverse and calls for its elimination’. The positing of such obstacles, or in more Lacanian terms, the symptom, in fantasy, then, serves to negate the trauma of the real (encounter with impossibility). Fantasy and the symptom are intertwined to the extent that fantasy ‘can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom’ (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 65). As Žižek argues, fantasy ensures the self-consistency of a discourse by articulating the symptom as ‘an alien disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of an otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order’ (Žižek, 1990, p. 40). For example, more liberal Protestants in Derry who were content to make political alliances with Catholics, as shall be discussed below, were described as traitors and not ‘true Protestants’, thereby negating the challenge such liberal iterations of being Protestant presented to conservatives.

Fantasy then, ‘grounded in a Lacanian ontology of enjoyment’ (Glynos & Howarth, 2007, p. 107), speaks to how our desire is structured. As Jason Glynos summarises

Rather than satisfying desire, fantasy structures desire. It does so, usually through a narrative that promises fullness-to-come once a named or implied obstacle is overcome, or foretells disaster if the obstacle proves too threatening or insurmountable. But the obstacle which often comes in the form of a prohibition or threatening Other, transforms impossibility into a ‘mere difficulty’, thereby creating the impression that its realization is at least potentially possible.

The horrific-beautific dialectic at work in fantasy is of direct relevance to social conflict. ‘What is at stake in ethnic tensions’, according to Žižek (1990, p. 193), ‘is always the possession of the national Thing: the “other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”)’. As Stavrakakis further argues

We need enemies to keep our treasured – and idealised – selves intact’ (Post, 1996, pp. 28–29) […] The fantasy of attaining a perfect harmonious world, or realising the universal, can only be sustained through the construction/localisation of a certain particularity which cannot be assimilated but, instead, has to be eliminated. There exists a crucial dialectic between the universal fantasy of utopia and the particularity of the – always local-enemy who is posited as negating it (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 108).

Of critical significance here, especially in terms of thinking fantasy in spatial terms, is that an enemy is ‘localised’ (Pohl, 2021) – the symptom, that figure of impossibility which needs to be overcome. In highly contested spaces such as Derry this localisation of the threat is quite literal. Spatial imaginaries, then, as both fantasmatic and antagonistic constructions can serve to generate, reproduce and structure the material dynamics of conflict, as revealed through the case of Derry. The category of fantasy helps to account for both the long-term durability and the force or radical investment that drives and sustains these political-spatial practices.

4. Cases, sources and methodological reflection

The empirical focus of this article is on two riots that occurred in Derry in 1868 and in 1883. During these riots the object of struggle was the Corporation Hall located in the heart of the walled city. The building was significant as it was Derry’s literal and symbolic seat of power, where the political and official life of the city was transacted (Inquiry Report, 1884, p. v). The riots are chosen, in part, due to their symmetrical character as they share striking similarities. In themselves, these events clearly illustrate the tensions and political dynamics in Derry in each moment. More significantly, however, they betray in stark fashion how deeply held political understandings of space (that is, spatial–political imaginaries) can shape the material practices and dynamics of space-claiming violence. In both cases, the presence of pro-Catholic or Irish nationalist figures in the central civic space of a formerly categorically Protestant space, positively localised the symptom, the ‘horrific’ spectre of the enemy, of loyalist political discourse thereby sparking these riots. As such, a careful reading of these riots reveals the constituents and contours of the loyalist spatial–political imaginary that provided the fantasmatic force which drove these events.

4.1. Case 1: 1868 Corporation Hall riot

The first riot in June 1868 took place in the context of a deeply polarising election. Derry’s candidates were the Gladstonian liberal, Richard Dowse and the conservative Lord Claud John Hamilton. Hamilton solicited strong support from the city’s conservative Protestants and was staunchly backed by the Apprentice Boys (Doak, 1978: Maddox, 2005). Dowse represented a hegemonic alliance of more liberal Protestants, wealthy Presbyterians and Catholics. He attracted the ire of conservatives as he was a proponent of Prime Minister’s William Gladstone’s liberal reforms (George-Boyce, 2010). Particularly contentious for conservatives, Gladstone sought the disestablishment of the minority Irish Protestant Church as the state church. In fantasmatic terms, Dowse, as a Protestant, was presented as a traitor who colluded with the radical enemy of loyalism, namely the Irish Catholic. In its coverage of the election, the Derry Sentinel declared that ‘in Derry battle has fairly begun. An adventurer seeks place at the expense of the honour of Derry. He hoists the banner of “religious equality” and revolution”’ (LD Sent., 21 July 1868). That is, the election and Dowse posed a total threat to the position of loyalists.

Dowse was scheduled to present a lecture to his supporters in the Corporation Hall on the evening of 20 July 1868 (Inquiry Report, 1870, p. 54; DJ, 5 August 1868). Given the political tensions, the organisers fearing disturbances sought to regulate access to the talk by means of issuing non-transferable tickets (LD Sent., 21 July 1868; LD Stand., 22 July 1868). The exclusive issuing of tickets to the ‘friends of Dowse’ was understood as flagrantly antagonistic to the city’s conservative Protestants as they felt they were being locked out of the centre of power. The Sentinel lamented that many of Derry’s ‘respectable citizens’ were turned away at the door, while working class Catholics packed the hall. To make matters worse, fifty quay labourers ‘fortified’ the hall, to act as security in the event of an attack. This was taken as an ominous portent of things to come, as the political mobilisation of Catholics and the lowering of the franchise presented a threat to Protestant power in Derry and in Ireland.

At 7:45pm, about fifty members of the Apprentice Boy club marched on the hall in ‘military – like formation’ (Inquiry Report, 1870, p. 54; DJ, 5 August 1868). They attempted the breech the Corporation Hall and halt the lecture but were repelled by the quay labours who improvised weapons from the bannisters of hall’s stairs. The poorly armed police who were guarding the hall stepped aside (Radford, 2009, p. 353). The hall remained largely un-breeched and the lecture continued, though the building’s windows were smashed in the general riots that ensued outside. Inside the hall, Dowse in his speech drew a sharp antagonistic frontier between those inside the hall and those without. Those outside were cast as the true wreckers and a danger to progress and liberty.

4.2. Case 2: 1883 Corporation Hall riot

The Corporation Hall riot of 1883 was sparked by a visiting speaker, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Charles Dawson, who was an Irish nationalist and a Home Ruler. The Home Rule movement sought a limited form of independence or self-governance for Ireland. As such, as a Home Ruler, the presence of the Dublin Mayor in Derry, at a time of growing nationalist political agitation, was again deeply anathema to the city’s conservative unionists. In advance of Dawson’s visit a ‘Loyal Proclamation’ was circulated in the town. The ‘Men of Derry’ were warned that through ‘crafty subterfuge’ and ‘Jesuitry’ (Catholicism) there was an attempt to bring to their city the Home Rule movement, which was cast as ‘a foul nursery of murder and rebellion, treachery and crime’ which had been driven from ‘every spot in Ulster’ by the shouts of ‘loyal men’ (LD Sent. 30 Oct. 1883). Sedition was in full swing according to the proclamation, with torches already purchased, ‘the bands prepared, the rebel flags of “disgrace and infamy” ready to be flaunted when he arrives within your walls’ [emphasis added]. Invoking the historic siege, the loyalists of Derry were summoned to defend ‘their’ town

By the memories of a glorious past and great cause […] mount guard on Wednesday night and in the cause of loyalty and law meet in your thousands at Walker’s Pillar on Thursday, 1st of November, at twelve o’clock noon, to raise your protest by declaring for Queen and Constitution in the face of sedition mongers and “veiled rebels”. Remember your watchword “No Surrender”. (LD Sent., 30 October 1883)

Prior to the arrival of Dawson, a procession Apprentice Boys marched on the Corporation Hall. They forced their way into the hall and pre-occupied it to ensure that the talk could not go ahead. As the Journal reported, shortly after gaining possession of the building, the Apprentice Boys flaunting their successes by ‘planted their colours’ on the roof – an obvious act of space-claiming (DJ, 2 Nov. 1883). A leader of the Apprentice Boys gathered in the hall declared he was glad that the Union Jack was flying, and was equally pleased to see a mingling of the loyal crimson and orange in the hall (the colours associated with loyalism) (LD Sent., 3 Nov. 1883). The Apprentice Boy president told the crowd to prepare for a ‘state of siege’ and not to ‘wander out of garrison’ as it would be necessary to hold the hall until late into the night. Another speaker reinforced the vision of invasion and being besieged by nationalism:

We hereby protest against the insidious attempt of the so-called National party to enter Ulster through the gates of our city […] and we emphatically declare our attachment to the Union, and our determination to maintain the connection between Great Britain and Ireland as at present established. (LD Sent., 3 Nov. 1883)

When the nationalist welcome procession made its way with Dawson through the city-centre a riot commenced as opposing factions clashed. Gun shots were fired from the windows of the Corporation Hall causing some serious injuries but no fatalities. Roof tiles also rained down on the mayor’s procession. Eventually the military and police redirected the Catholic crowd towards the Bogside, a Catholic area outside the walls of the city. Interestingly, from a spatial perspective, the riot died down as Catholics left the city-centre even though the talk still went ahead in the Bogside. Loyalist objections only became violent once the ‘sacred ground’ of Derry city-centre was ‘violated’. That is, once Catholics were kept outside the walls, their actions were less offensive.

In both these riots the political, or inter-communal antagonism, was spatialised at the very door of the Corporation Hall. Given the political context, it is obvious enough that such events would be provocative to the city’s loyalists, especially as they violated the sacred ground of Derry as Protestant space. Yet the antagonistic force of these events only becomes more fully intelligible when we interrogate the spatial–political imaginary of Derry’s loyalists.

4.3. Sources and method

Though decidedly theoretical this study is very much historical, and, as such, makes extensive use of historical sources through which a more finely grained picture of Derry emerges. These sources include regional newspaper sources such as the Londonderry Sentinel, The Londonderry Standard and The Derry Journal. A significant portion of this research, therefore, necessarily entails intensive consultation of historical newspaper archives. These newspapers are available online through the British Newspaper Archive. The decision to ultimately settle on Derry as the site of interrogation, was very much informed by the abundance of historical empirical material made available through local Derry newspapers that devoted extensive attention to events that were shaping the city’s political antagonisms. Provincial newspaper presses proliferated during the nineteenth-century (Jackson, 2010). In contrast to metropole presses, provincial newspapers can convey the rich sense of cultural and political identity at the local level, and, crucially, how wider political forces and events are articulated within, and shaped, such local contexts (Jackson, 2010, p. 103). Also critical to this study are two government reports which emerged from inquiries into unrest in Derry in 1869 and 1883. The reports are namely: ‘Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry, into the Riots and Disturbances in the City of Londonderry’ and ‘The Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into certain disturbances which took place in the city of Londonderry on 1 November 1883’. These reports record the evidence of numerous witnesses, and, again, give a detailed view of the events which played out in the city, as well as how inter-communal antagonisms were articulated. In a certain sense, especially in terms of methodological approach and contextual sensitivity, this study is a post-structuralist local history. What is critical here is that national level discourses and antagonisms are not straightforwardly mapped onto the local context. Methodologically this involves a continual consultation or a dialectic between local sources and the wider historiographical literature and debates on the period.

The categories of PDT very much inform the methodological approach to the empirical corpus of this research. As a work of PDT, particular attention is paid to the construction/articulation of antagonistic frontiers. Focus is given to how certain signifiers are of special significance within a discourse. These privileged signifiers, or ‘nodal points’ in Laclau and Mouffe’s work or points de capiton in Jacques Lacan’s work (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014 [1985], p. 99), are relatively fixed and give a consistency to a discursive formation, in this case the spatial–political imaginary of Derry’s conservative Protestants. A sustained engagement with the empirical material of this project reveals that the core categories of this spatial imaginary are the fantasmatic figure of the Irish Catholic and the traitor within, termed a ‘Lundy’. These are essential to the antagonistic constitution of loyalist discourse. These figures as symptoms provide the fantasmatic force that drives the material practices of space claiming. Again, the significance and historical weight that overdetermines these signifiers is only fully intelligible through the researcher being immersed in the discursive field of the texts, documents and social practices that constitute the context under study.

5. The siege as political-spatial fantasy

In these remaining sections, the core signifiers that constitute the spatial–political imaginary of Derry’s loyalists and provided the fantasmatic force behind the material practices of space-claiming such as the attacks on the Corporation Hall will be interrogated. Again, these fantasmatic figures are the Irish Catholic and the internal traitor or the ‘Lundy’, located in the framing device of the historic siege of Derry which served as an interpretative key through which loyalists surveyed contemporary challenges to the existing order. But before moving on it is necessary to discuss the ‘empty signifier’ of loyalist discourse. This is the signifier of ‘security’. Laclau’s (1996) concept of the ‘empty signifier’ is grounded in the radical impossibility of identity, and thus we can say that it is closely tied to the fantasmatic promise of fullness-to-come. Empty signifiers name what is absent, what cannot fully be attained. As Laclau suggests ‘although the fullness of society is unachievable, its need does not disappear: it will always show itself through the presence of its absence’ (Laclau, 1996; Howarth & Stavrakakis 2000, p. 8). Or as Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000, p. 8) clarify, while the full closure of society is not realisable ‘the ideal of closure and fullness still functions as an (impossible) ideal’. Laclau (1996, p. 45) invokes Hobbes’ use of the empty signifier ‘order’. ‘In a situation of radical disorder’ writes Laclau, ‘order is present as that which is absent’. The purpose of space-claiming practices is to secure ones’ ‘ground’ in the radical sense. In a period of profound dislocation, such practices seek to deny the radical contingency and insecurity of social foundations. Within loyalist discourse, if Derry was to be lost, or its Protestant character eroded, then the fate of Ireland’s place within the union with Britain was in jeopardy. The security of the union was then bound up with the future of Derry. This is glimpsed in a polemical historical account of the Siege, tellingly re-reprinted by the Derry Sentinel in 1868

Had Derry been surrendered it is considered that the whole Kingdom of Ireland would have been lost, after which James would probably have embroiled Scotland and disturbed the peace of England. But “the defence of Derry obviated all these dismal evils, blasted, in a great measure, all other designs of the Popish faction against Britain, and facilitated the reduction of Ireland, the very flower of King James’ army having perished, and the courage of such as survived sank before the walls of Derry. (LD Sent. 14 Aug. 1868)

As localisations of radical impossibility, the Catholic and the Lundy are figures of insecurity.

Though framed here as a spatial imaginary, in many respects, it is worth noting here that the siege as a spatial–political discourse, is closer to the Laclauian understanding of myth. According to Laclau, a myth emerges as a response to structural dislocation, that is, when a social formation encounters its own radical impossibility. As Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000, p. 15; Laclau, 1990, p. 61) suggest, myths create new spaces of representation that seek to absorb or negate such dislocations. Myths negate the intrusion of the temporal, that which disrupts, by subordinating the event to the spatial. Which is to say, they rob events of their historicity. The siege myth serves precisely this function. The siege as a spatial–political discourse negates the trauma of the radical contingency of the social by already predicting dislocations – as shall be discussed below the signifiers of the Catholic and the Lundy serve this function.

5.1. ‘A plurality of Lundies’

A critical lesson that the Siege bestowed on Derry Protestants was that loyalism would always face internal betrayals. Robert Lundy, the Governor of Derry during the Siege, who through either military incompetence, realism, fatalism or as Derry’s loyalists saw it, treachery, was willing to surrender the city. As such ‘Lundy’ is a key signifier and symptom in loyalist political discourse, becoming a synonym for traitors. In the Siege narrative Derry was almost lost, not only due to the efforts of its enemies beyond its walls, but through internal enemies disguised as friends. As a character in Charlotte Elizabeth’s (1846, p. 200) account of the Siege reflects ‘Derry men had a greater spite to traitors within than with foes without’. Here, Nico Carpentier’s analysis of the traitor signifier in nationalistic discourse is illuminating

In antagonistic nationalisms, the self becomes articulated through the solidified chain of equivalence that homogenises the self, also by defining enemies within, which then needs to be purged for that nationalist chain of equivalence, e.g., through the traitor signifier which aligns the traitor with the other-foreigner. (Carpentier, 2017, p. 231)

A highlight of the annual Closing of the Gates celebrations is when the city’s Apprentice Boys take an effigy of Lundy and burn it on the Derry walls. It is a ritual that purges Derry of its internal traitors. As McBride details

Each year, on the 18 December the internal differences are symbolically resolved as the Apprentice Boys Clubs re-enact the shutting of the gates. The climax of the day is the burning of the traitor Robert Lundy in what A. T. Q Stewart has described as an ‘act of ritual purgation’. (McBride, 1997, p. 13)

McBride (1997, p. 13) continues that Lundy is a part of a ‘schizophrenic memory of the siege’ that co-articulates an intense fear of betrayal along with the ‘triumph of liberation’. That is, in fantasmatic terms, Lundy as symptom is bound up with both the horrific vision of losing Derry and the beautific vision of ultimate Protestant victory and security.

The Sentinel’s reportage of the 1868 Closing of the Gates celebrations suggests that Derry loyalists were once again under siege, and that internal traitors were actively undermining Ulster Protestantism. Recent political defeats were largely realised through the support of liberal Protestants and Presbyterians, who had made political alliances with Catholics. The Sentinel reported that the ‘grim spectacle’ of Lundy hung on Walker’s pillar until 4 pm, where it burned for a mere ten minutes. Given the political adversity conservative Protestantism in Derry was facing, the Sentinel suggested that

not a few thought that there should have been placed upon it [Walker’s Monument] a plurality of “Lundies”, and that the Apprentice Boys should not, in this part of their arrangement, have merely confined their attention to the Lundy of the Siege. (LD Sent. 22 Dec, 1868)

As Carpentier (2017, p. 174) details ‘the creation of [the] solidified chain of equivalence, with the enemy as the constitutive outside, little room is left for internal differences’. The presence of internal others, e.g. liberal Protestants, confronts loyalism with its own contingency – its repressed ‘real’. That is, rather than Derry loyalism expressing a universalised Ulster Protestant subject, it becomes just a particular iteration of Protestant identity. Designating those ‘within the walls’ (the bounded frontier of Ulster Protestantism) who do not conform to this essentialised identity as traitors is a mechanism through which a homogenous Protestant political identity is sustained. The fixity of Lundy in Derry Protestant discourse thus serves to routinise the dislocationary force of ‘traitors’ by divesting their presence of its temporality and their disruptive potential. The traitor then is not the advent of something new, as he was always-already expected.

In a speech during at the December celebrations, the editor of the Sentinel, J. E Finlay, suggested that those who voted for Dowse were Lundies and therefore non-Protestants, thus upholding the internal homogeneity of Derry Protestantism

There were traitors at work, but they were not in the Protestant camp- I say “Protestant” deliberately, for it requires too great a stretch of charity to concede the term to men who are in league with Rome, and labouring to damage a Protestant church, and to promote the interests of Popery. There were traitors at work – Lundies as they are called in these parts. (LD Sent. 22 Dec. 1868)

In Finlay’s speech, Dowse and his supporters were cast as traitors, as a trojan horse that was within the walls that threatened to ruin the city:

the huge wooden horse – Dowse – has been admitted within the walls, and it remains to be seen […] whether the city is to be set on fire, or whether the wooden horse is to be thrown into the Foyle [river]. (LD Sent. 22 Dec. 1868)

In Derry, then, the traitor within the walls is not just a topographical metaphor. As per the Dowse riot, the presence of the usual enemy of loyalism (Irish Catholics) within the walls of Derry welcomed by Dowse, a ‘Lundy’ was decidedly antagonistic to the loyalist articulation of the city as sacred Protestant ground. The Dowse lecture was in this sense, for conservatives the materialisation of a horrific vision within the city. That is, in Derry the political imagination was at once a spatial imaginary.

In the 1883 riot on the occasion of the visit of the Dublin Lord Mayor, the ‘violation’ of the city centre was also deeply felt by conservatives. While Catholic nationalists were understood as traitors in loyalist/unionist discourse, their ‘treachery’ was of a different order than that of the ‘Lundies’. Catholic and Irish nationalists were seen as disloyal by their nature in their non-pledging of allegiance to the Crown, and the Union, as well as their supposed fidelity to Rome. In the 1883 riot it was not so much that ‘Lundies’ let the enemies within the walls, it was that a resurgent Irish nationalism that confidently repudiated the established order was inside the city walls – they had pushed their way through previous structural barriers. Therefore, by 1883 Ulster’s Protestants were more united as they faced the threat of Irish nationalism, therefore the figure of Lundy seems to have featured less in loyalist public discourse in that moment. That is, with the deepening polarisation between Catholic nationalists and those who supported the Union, social antagonisms became even more simplified. The social space was cleft between those who repudiated the political status quo and those who sought to uphold it.

5.2. The perennial Catholic threat

The ‘constitutive outside’, the enemy at the gates, of loyalist discourse was the Irish Catholic. If Ulster Protestants were under continual siege it was the Irish Catholic that was their perennial besieger. In the political vision of loyalism, the figure of the Catholic was a figure evacuated of history. The essential character of the Catholic remained the same. The Irish Catholic lay behind every historical threat to the Protestant order in Ireland, be it the 1641 uprising, the Siege of 1689, the 1798 rebellion, Fenianism and as per the case in the riots detailed here, the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and Irish nationalism. These episodes, according to loyalist discourse, were less about political struggles engendered by histories of colonial violence and dispossession, but rather they betray an unfolding teleology of essential Catholic being. The figure of the Irish Catholic then is decidedly fantasmatic. The Catholic is the fundamental obstacle, the horrific spectre, that disturbed and threatened Ulster Protestant identity and the security of the Union.

In August 1868, the period of the first riot detailed here, the Sentinel published some of the historian John Mackenzie’s (1861; LD Sent. 14 Aug. 1868) account of the Siege as a timely reminder to Derry’s Presbyterians and liberal Protestants of the enemy that they all faced as Protestants. According to Mackenzie’s narrative the Siege and the turmoil of the events it is located within, was a result of essential Catholic malevolence. It was ‘general design of the Irish Papists against the British Protestants, and particularly the Ultoghs, who had given the earliest demonstration of their cruel disposition in the Rebellion of ‘41, and engraven it in the most bloody characters’. The Sentinel further quotes Mackenzie’s assertion that the men who served under Lord Antrim, a Jacobite leader during the siege, were descended from the Irish rebels of 1641. In loyalist political discourse it was not individual Catholics who were violent and disloyal and so on, but rather it was all Catholics. As the extract of Mackenzie’s text published in the Sentinel continues

A mischievous project was hatching among the Irish Papists against the whole body of British Protestants ‘that priests had told their people that some great design was at hand, and that they should provide weapons; “that not only the men, but the women and boys too, began to furnish themselves with skeanes and half-pikes” and that a friar had preached a sermon about “Saul’s destroying of the Amalekites”. (LD Sent. 14 Aug. 1868)

The eternal threat posed by the Catholic sustained the political-spatial imaginary of the siege and constituted loyalist political identity. The contingencies of Irish history were evacuated in this discourse. Again, as per the figure of Lundy the traitor, the unchanging nature of the Catholic threat somewhat minimises the dislocationary power of each new challenge Protestant Ulster faced. What is more, is that this essential threat could be located spatially. It was therefore imperative, in loyalist discourse, that Catholics be kept outside the walls, figuratively in terms of political power but also quite literally in terms of the riots discussed here.

6. Conclusion

Interrogating the conservative Ulster Protestant siege myth as a spatial–political discourse brings into relief the fantasmatic force that helped sustain Derry loyalists’ communal-political subjectivity as well as structure and perpetuate the dynamics of space-claiming practices in Derry. This is readily discernible in the riots of 1868 and 1883. As such, fantasy provides a critical explanatory layer in understanding the dynamics of how antagonism was spatially articulated in the city. More generally, this analysis has shown that fantasy is a critical component in further developing a discursive, antagonistic and post-foundational understanding of space, especially when it comes to contextual analyses of spatial contestation.

The siege myth as a political discourse is remarkably durable. It continued to be the broad interpretative frame of Ulster’s conservative Protestants as they faced the renewed challenges posed by a resurgent Irish nationalism and republicanism throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The core ‘moments’ of the discourse remained the same, structured through the empty signifier of ‘security’ and the figure of the implacably hostile Catholic, as well as the traitor within. While this spatial–political discourse seems to a large extent fairly rigid, in another sense it is remarkably flexible. New crises would always throw up new internal traitors, and whatever iteration of nationalism was ascendant, be it constitutional nationalism or the more revolutionary and conspiratorial variety, it could always be understood as the latest manifestation of the perennial Catholic threat. These internal ‘moments’ that constituted conservative Protestant discourse were structural positions, which could always be refilled as long as the antagonistic constitution of the social remained overtly intelligible. Given Derry’s position on the very frontier of Protestant Ulster, the spatial aspects of the siege myth ensured that it would remain a political as well as spatial imaginary.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful critique and comments he received from the reviewers and Prof Niall Ó Dochartaigh, who read earlier versions of this article.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Notes on contributors

Gary Hussey

Dr Gary Hussey is a social theorist whose current research largely focuses on the interrelations of space, violence and the political. He recently completed his PhD at the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His Phd thesis is titled Spatialising antagonism: A post-foundational analysis of space, violence and the political in Derry city.