Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace

Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace Joshua Levine An ambitious and powerful account of modern Irish history through the eyes of those who experienced it at first hand.Forty years after the Provisional IRA was formed and British troops arrived in Ireland, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness sit together as leaders of a devolved Northern Irish government, in which Sinn F?in and the Democratic Unionists share power. The Troubles appear to be over; the future promises to be quite different from the past. But recent events perhaps suggest otherwise, as old tensions rise to the forefront once more.Through countless interviews with the people from both sides that lived through, participated in and were victims of the Troubles, the author builds a picture of the attitudes and the beliefs that shaped three decades of Ireland's history. There are those whose lives have been shattered, those who have tried to ignore the realities, those who have attempted to bridge the divide, those who do not accept the peace, and some who refuse to look back at all.What emerges is a balanced and wide-ranging account that explores the struggle between ideology and compassion, how the battles and politics of centuries ago still define people's attitudes towards their neighbours today, and how political injustice and the course of time can make a complex reality seem like simple history. Beauty & Atrocity People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace Joshua Levine Table of Contents Cover Page (#u74913172-5be9-5eed-800b-7aa87a233ac1) Title Page (#u91480832-ffdf-5d45-b91e-9c4ad911101f) 1 THE STRANGER (#u2a948013-b921-57ff-94f5-2dc3403c1cd7) 2 THE SETTLERS (#u24647dc0-fb12-579c-98e5-1e45fd35768f) 3 THE STATE (#ued0ab7d2-2013-57f7-b967-43d78fc7a30c) 4 THE REFORMER (#u2fc0bbcf-070a-53e1-bcb7-93c4c31883e6) 5 THE TROUBLES (#litres_trial_promo) 6 THE MARCH (#litres_trial_promo) 7 THE BOMB (#litres_trial_promo) 8 THE BOMBER (#litres_trial_promo) 9 THE PRISON (#litres_trial_promo) 10 THE TRUTH (#litres_trial_promo) 11 THE PEACE (#litres_trial_promo) 12 THE SUNRISE (#litres_trial_promo) POSTSCRIPT (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix VICTIMS OF THE TROUBLES (#litres_trial_promo) INDEX (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 THE STRANGER (#ulink_460c1206-552b-5c05-9a11-9677483ea66e) In the autumn of 2008 I flew into Belfast to begin a journey. I had little idea where it would take me, although I knew that its first night would be spent in the Madison Hotel on Botanic Avenue. As I stood at the airport baggage carousel, I was nervous. I had never been to Northern Ireland before, and I decided that I ought to have a first impression, so I began to pay deliberate attention to everything around me. In the end I needn’t have worried because my first actual impression almost overwhelmed me. The taxi driver taking me into town asked my name and, within a beat of my reply, asked whether I was ‘a Jew’. I said I was. ‘My son’s name is Reuben,’ he said. ‘He sounds like more of a Jew than you.’ I had absolutely no idea what to say. ‘The Catholics are anti-Semitic, they support the PLO,’ he continued, ‘but I’m a Presbyterian and we like you.’ He assured me that I had nothing to worry about because, when Christ comes again, the Jews are going straight to heaven. If I wanted to understand more, then I should visit an Orange Lodge. On he went, as though sent by the Tourist Board to give me an unforgettable first impression. Eventually, with a smile and a handshake, he dropped me outside the hotel. I was in Belfast to try to discover what the Troubles had been about. I wanted to find out the history behind them, and in order to do that I wanted to meet the people who had lived through them, those who had suffered, and those who had caused the suffering. I wanted to know why people had behaved as they did, how representative they had been, and whether they now try to justify their actions. And I wanted a sense of the future, of whether Northern Ireland is moving beyond the Troubles. And so here I was, ten minutes into my journey, with lots of questions, and a place in heaven to look forward to. I have a particular memory of the Troubles. Bombs and bullets did not affect me in any real way, but it is a memory worth recounting because it mirrors the experience of many who lived in London during the Seventies and Eighties, for whom the Troubles were always in the background. On a summer’s afternoon in 1982 I was at home, wearing a green football shirt and gloves. I cleared some space on the floor, took down a picture, and started throwing a ball against the wall, diving to save it as it came back. I would play like that for hours, but on this particular day I was interrupted by a loud noise. Half a mile away, in the Inner Circle of Regents Park, a bomb planted underneath a bandstand blew up. In that moment seven people were torn to pieces. I knew the bandstand very well. My father would take my sister and me to sit in deckchairs by the lake, where we would listen to brass bands playing funny mixes of military marches and West End show tunes. And now the masked bogeymen of the Provisional Irish Republican Army had decided to kill the performers – who had been in the middle of a medley from Oliver! – in front of people like us who’d come along to listen. According to a member of the audience, ‘Suddenly there was this tremendous whoosh and I saw a leg fly past me. The bandstand seemed to lift off and I could see bandsmen flying through the air. For a moment I could not believe it.’ I had not witnessed the bomb, but I can remember the bleakness and confusion that it conjured up. Who in the name of God had done this and why? As the years went by, I, like almost every other English person, became very familiar with reports of the Troubles in the papers and on the news. But the sensible questions never seemed to be asked. The reports all blended into one another, leaving me with a tired stream of images so clich?d they sometimes bordered on the comic. I got to know men in bowler hats marching down streets, men in balaclavas firing over coffins and men with dubbed voices defending the latest outrage, but I had no context for these people, no real sense of them. I never noticed any genuine discussion about what they were fighting for, or how the situation might be resolved. Bombs and death just seemed to be things that happened over there and sometimes over here. The media seemed to want us to believe that Northern Ireland was populated by two kinds of people: bigots and psychopaths. If the real attitudes and beliefs of the people of Northern Ireland were ever reported – as they must have been – they certainly never filtered through to me. I cannot have been the only person in Britain to have been left in the dark about a subject that was never out of the news. Now I wanted to find out more. As I was to discover, I had not been alone in my ignorance. The British government had very little sense of historical context when it sent its troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969. The arrival of its soldiers, in response to escalating violence, marked the start of the government’s active participation in the Troubles, and represented an unusually vigorous British reaction to an old problem. For the first fifty years of Northern Ireland’s existence, the British government had kept the province at arm’s length. Northern Ireland was given its own parliament at Stormont, to set policy on internal matters, allowing Whitehall and Westminster to remain in the background. One little Home Office unit might cast an occasional glance towards Ulster, but the unit’s importance can be gauged by the fact that it was also responsible for the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, and the state licensing system in Carlisle. According to Ken Bloomfield, the retired head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, there were times when the government was less in touch with what was happening in its own province ‘than it was with what was happening in Gambia or Outer Mongolia’. In 1970 Reginald Maudling, the British Home Secretary, boarded a plane bringing him home from Northern Ireland with the words, ‘For God’s sake, someone bring me a large scotch. What a bloody awful country…’ He gasped for a drink because he simply did not know what do about the essential problem of Northern Ireland, a problem that still exists today: the province is populated by two distinct groups. The overwhelmingly Protestant unionists consider themselves British and want the north to remain part of the United Kingdom. The overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists consider themselves Irish and want the north to become part of a united Ireland. A unionist might speak of ‘Northern Ireland’, a loyal province of the United Kingdom, and a nationalist might speak of the ‘six counties’, an arbitrarily displaced chunk of the Irish nation; but they are both referring to the same piece of land of 5,452 square miles, roughly half the size of Wales. Back in the Seventies and Eighties I would probably not have heard the terms ‘unionist’ and ‘nationalist’ as often as the terms ‘loyalist’ and ‘republican’. Broadly speaking – because these definitions are subjective – republicans are those who have supported the use of force to create a single independent Irish republic, while loyalists are grass-roots unionists, many of whom have supported the use of force to maintain the union with Britain. When I arrived in Belfast the Good Friday Agreement was a decade old and the Troubles appeared to be over. But several months later Northern Ireland was reminded of what it had been missing. On the evening of Saturday, 7 March 2009 two pizza delivery men arrived at the Massereene army base in the town of Antrim. Four soldiers came out to the main gate to meet them. As the pizzas were handed over, gunmen in a nearby car opened fire with semi-automatic rifles, leaving all six men lying on the ground. The gunmen stepped out of their car, moved forward and opened fire again, before driving away. Two of the soldiers were killed. The other two soldiers and the delivery men, both Polish immigrants, were wounded. ‘For the last ten years,’ said Ian Paisley Jr. of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), ‘people believed things like this happened in foreign countries, places like Basra. Unfortunately, it has returned to our doorstep.’ Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Real IRA, a group of dissident republicans who had broken away from the Provisional IRA in 1997. Shortly after the murders at the Massereene barracks a policeman was shot dead in Craigavon by the Continuity IRA, another dissident organization which had broken away from the Provisional IRA, back in 1986. These attacks were intended to provoke a reaction from loyalist paramilitaries, to reignite the tit-for-tat killings that characterized thirty years of the Troubles, to force the British to bring soldiers back onto the streets of Northern Ireland, and to reawaken the war. The overwhelming majority of people in the north, including most of those for whom violence was once a way of life, are keen to see that the dissident republicans do not get their wish. Northern Ireland has changed a great deal since the days of violence – but Belfast remains a city with a grim reputation to overcome. Paul Theroux, writing in 1983, was not seduced: ‘I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare – such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children – it looked like the past in an old picture.’ And if this is how it was to visit, how much worse to live in the place? A local man told me of a drive south along the Ormeau Road in the late Seventies. He passed a building standing on its own, while those on either side lay in ruins. ‘Look at that!’ he remembers saying to his wife, ‘How has that building escaped the bombs?’ When he drove back up the road a few hours later, it was gone. Yet even during the bad times, when the evenings saw the city’s streets empty, pubs deserted, and restaurants closed, there were visitors to Belfast who could see beyond the obvious. ‘It’s a charming port, one of the world’s great deep water harbours, cupped in rolling downs on the bight of Belfast Lough,’ wrote the often acerbic P. J. O’Rourke in 1988. He admired the buildings too: ‘The city is built in the best and earliest period of Victorian architecture with delicate brickwork on every humble warehouse and factory. Even the mill hand tenement houses have Palladio’s proportions in a miniature way.’ The port, the linen mills, the rope works, tea-drying, whisky and tobacco manufacture: these were the foundations of Belfast’s once great civic pride. Walking around the city today, that pride hangs on in the self-conscious grandeur of the neo-classical buildings, the immensity of the Laganside cranes, the self-assurance of Queen’s University, the extravagance of the Grand Opera House, and the dignity of the figures that stand in front of City Hall, embodying hard work and learning. Modern Belfast may not be a beautiful city, but it has nothing at all in common with the war-torn nightmare that sent Theroux scurrying on to his next port of call. While it may mourn the loss of its industrial strength, it has welcomed peace, and it is trying to create an identity for itself. It is busy and vibrant, a collection of areas rather than a unified whole, not yet sure whether it will be a city built around its specifics, or an urban mess of shopping malls and car parks. Its restaurants, clubs, hotels, and caf?s are unself-consciously appreciated. People in Belfast speak to you, they are friendly, city dwellers without the sneer. Perhaps that’s because in Belfast you can exist in two worlds at once, staring out over Cave Hill as you wait for a bus in the centre of town. It does not take long to escape into the hills, where generations of Belfast children have played at being soldiers. It doesn’t do, however, to overstate the affability. While I found people from Belfast (Belfasters? Belfastians?) friendly and keen to talk entertainingly on all manner of subjects, I encountered wariness too. Of course I did. I was writing a book. I was a busybody, and an English busybody at that. Northern Ireland people have had every reason to be wary over the last few decades. As Seamus Heaney warned in the title of his 1975 poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could have dangerous consequences. As I settled into my journey, befriending strangers and begging interviews, encounters that began warmly could sometimes chill, as though I had stepped across an invisible line. A lot of the time that line should have been perfectly obvious. Once, standing about with a group of republicans, all of them friendly and chattering away, I asked a question about a particular man. I asked whether he had ever come under suspicion as an informer. It was a foolish, foolish question. For all I knew, he could have been a personal friend of everybody in the room. For all I knew, he could have been in the room. Everyone stopped speaking, and my legs gave way a fraction. ‘Be very careful…’ said one man, before repeating the warning twice. It was a lesson in Northern Ireland etiquette. On another occasion somebody said of me, ‘He knows more than he’s letting on.’ I’m still not entirely sure what the man meant, but I suppose he was suggesting that I might be working for the secret services. Once I was actually told by a republican that I’d been ‘vetted’ but it was all right, because I wasn’t a ‘spook’. When I asked him how he could be so sure, he smiled. The fact is that Belfast is a complicated but friendly place. Hospitable too. I was bought many drinks and cooked many meals by people who weren’t flush with money. And if there was suspicion based on my English accent, or the level of interest I was taking, well, how could it be any other way in a place where informers are still reporting back to handlers? In the wake of the March 2009 killings the authorities were quick to reassure the public that the dissident groups were well infiltrated. And people have not forgotten about men like Robert Nairac, an undercover army officer who was killed in South Armagh in 1977 while pretending to be a Belfast republican. He raised suspicions by asking questions in a pub. An English stranger asking questions can still raise suspicions. Belfast may have an impressive industrial heritage (after all, its yards built the Titanic and the Olympic), it may be strikingly situated, and it may be friendly, but these things are not what the city is known for today. It is known for its Troubles, its murals of gunmen and hunger strikers, and the great iron curtain that separates its communities, euphemistically described as the ‘Peace Walls’. And no matter how much a visitor has read about this peculiar divide, it still comes as a shock to find the Catholics of the Falls Road and the Protestants of the Shankill Road living mutually exclusive lives, so close to one another. It is difficult not to encounter striking images in the city. Walking around the ‘interface’ area of Ardoyne in north Belfast, I looked into a Catholic back garden backing onto a Peace Wall. The wall consists of ten feet of concrete, ten feet of steel, and thirty feet of wire-mesh fence on top. And there, in this cramped garden at the base of the wall, sits a well-used child’s trampoline and a tiny washing line. If, in years to come, a museum of the Troubles is opened, the curators could do worse than to recreate this tableau in the entrance hall. On the other side of the wall lies a similar garden and a similar house, in a different world. Re-reading this paragraph, I see that it contains the phrase ‘a Catholic back garden’. In Belfast a square of paving can have a religion. But just as things that would be normal to a local person strike a visitor as odd, so the opposite is true. Taking a bus tour of the city, the guide pointed out the Royal Victoria Hospital, where, he gushed, ‘Not only do Catholic and Protestant doctors work together, but for years they have treated Catholic and Protestant patients side by side.’ In a world where segregated housing and education still exist, an integrated hospital passes for a tourist attraction. To visit the interface areas of Belfast is to enter a world of frontier-like alertness. These were the paramilitaries’ breeding grounds. I went to the Shankill Estate, a collection of grey, two-storey, postwar terraced houses, set around a grassy central area. I was taken there by a Catholic taxi driver who fidgeted nervously as we walked around. A few years ago, he said, he would never have dared come here, as we would have been challenged within seconds of our arrival. But things have changed. The Shankill Estate is now on the visitor’s map. This is partly because of its edgy association with violence, but mainly because of its murals. They are painted on the gable ends of the terraces, and they represent scenes and individuals from mythology, history, and the very recent past. There are the paramilitary crests of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) and the UDA (Ulster Defence Association), Union flags, and masked gunmen pointing their rifles directly at the tourist. There are men in sashes and bowler hats, demanding the right to march. There is the face of Oliver Cromwell, with, in capitals, a quote attributed to him: ‘Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political power therefore I’m led to believe that there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed.’ There is a massive photograph, transposed onto a wall, of ‘Military Commander Stevie “Top Gun” McKeag, 1970–2000’, who wears a backwards-facing baseball cap, an earring, and a thick gold chain. Stephen McKeag was a young man responsible for the killing of Philomena Hanna, a Catholic woman serving behind the counter of a pharmacy on the nearby Springfield Road. McKeag entered her shop, fired at her until she fell, and then fired into her head as she lay on the ground. Today, according to the mural, McKeag is ‘sleeping where no shadows fall’. One of the murals particularly caught my eye. It depicts a rock by the sea, on which sits a severed hand, oozing blood. In the background a hairy warrior stands on the prow of a ship, one hand in the air, as though he has just thrown something. Where his other hand should be is a bloody stump. The painting represents the story of the Red Hand of Ulster, of which there are several versions. In one, there is no rightful heir to the throne of Ulster, so the High King of Ireland suggests a boat race across Strangford Lough and whoever reaches the far shoreline first will be crowned king of Ulster. The race begins and one man, O’Neill, falls behind, but he has an idea. As his rival is about to reach the shore, he hacks off his own hand and hurls it onto the land. He wins the race and becomes king. In another version of the story the handless man isn’t Irish at all; he is a Scot named MacDonnell. So the legend of the Red Hand has been used to support contrasting claims to the province. It has been present on loyalist paramilitary crests and on the official Ulster flag, but it has also appeared on the uniforms of the republican Irish Citizen Army, founded in 1913, and on badges of the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is now predominantly associated with unionism and loyalism, but it is an emotive symbol that has crossed the divide. Which is interesting – because the story of the Red Hand represents a state of mind that spans the divide. It is the story of a man who wants Ulster so badly that he is willing to cripple himself in order to lay his claim. The confrontational style of the Shankill murals reflects the attitudes of the Shankill people. The area has the nervous energy of a pioneer post. Protestants may be in the majority in Northern Ireland, but they have always been a minority on the island of Ireland, and their 400-year fight for survival is the key to their identity. A British army officer, serving in Belfast in the early Seventies, told me of walking past a statue of William III with the slogan ‘This we will maintain’ carved on its base. He stopped a Protestant man and asked him, ‘What will you maintain?’ and was told, ‘I don’t know – but we’ll maintain it.’ Nowadays, wandering around the city centre, the visitor might feel a sense of faded unionist pride, but on the Shankill this comes into sharper focus. These people fear they are losing their industrious province, and they refuse to stand for it. In this enclave they behave like frontiersmen, wagons drawn in a circle. Shankill people have long represented the most staunch elements of loyalism, the proud British identity which celebrates empire, the royal family, and the Battle of the Somme. If you want to destroy Ulster, it has been said, you start with the Shankill. For all the talk of the divide, as an outsider walking through the centre of Belfast I cannot begin to tell who is a Protestant and who is a Catholic. But then neither can they. The Shankill Butchers, a gang of loyalist killers who sliced Catholics to death with kitchen knives in the mid-Seventies, searched for clues and even then killed some of their own by mistake. There are no distinct physical characteristics and the accents are more or less indistinguishable – although it is often said that a Catholic will pronounce the letter ‘h’ in isolation as ‘haitch’ and a Protestant will pronounce it ‘aitch’. But in a province where allegiance counts for so much, and where people are quick to categorize one another – rather as my taxi driver could hardly wait until the meter was running to start probing – there are questions commonly asked to uncover allegiance. The answers given to ‘Where do you live?’, ‘Where did you go to school?’ and ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ are good indicators. These are the sort of questions that were once asked at job interviews to gauge an applicant’s suitability. But since these people look the same and talk the same, it amazes an outsider that they need walls to separate them. The divide is very real, though. It is geographical, economic, political – and of course religious. It is a hoary old question whether the Troubles have been religious in nature, so I felt I ought to ask it as soon as I arrived in Belfast. One man told me that it would be simplistic to blame the Troubles on religion. Nobody has ever been shot dead in the name of transubstantiation. The majority of members of the IRA, INLA (Irish National Liberation Army), UVF and UDA (to account for both sides of the divide) were not religious; they were thinking of their people and their grievances, not God, when engaged in the struggle. On the other hand, without God, Catholicism, and Protestantism there would have been no struggle in the first place. Protestants would not have been sent to settle a Catholic country, there would have been no geographical split, no political discrimination, and no present-day labels to decide who stands on which side of the divide. Catholicism and Protestantism may be little more than symbols nowadays – but the effect of belonging to one or the other religion is much more than symbolic. Only 6 per cent of schools are integrated, the majority of people (more than before the Troubles) live in segregated communities, huge numbers of Catholics know no Protestants, and vice versa. The problem may often be spoken of as cultural rather than religious, but it seems rather simplistic not to allow religion some share of the blame. As Conor Cruise O’Brien almost said, if religion is a red herring, it’s a red herring the size of a whale. But if it is wrong to speak in terms of a religious conflict, it is surely also wrong to place too much stress on cultural divisions. One Protestant told me sadly about the Catholic man he works with in Derry. ‘He thinks exactly the same way as me,’ he said, ‘there’s just no difference between us. But the pubs in the city are all one or the other, and if I went to one of his pubs, his friends might recognize me.’ A nurse from Belfast agreed: ‘If people had got together, they’d have realized they had so much in common. The Falls and the Shankill houses were much the same, and the people were much the same. When they get away abroad they talk to each other as though they’ve known each other all their lives, and then when they get home they don’t know each other.’ Indeed a 1968 survey found that 81 per cent of northern Catholics and 67 per cent of northern Protestants felt that those of the other community were culturally ‘the same as themselves’. So, while the sides clearly have different political cultures, perhaps it is reasonable to suggest that wherever their political bonds lie, their cultural bonds rest much closer. Rather than seeing the Ulster divide in religious or cultural terms, it makes more sense to view it in terms of identities that have been created by perceptions of history, by economic and political relations, and by a rejection of the other side’s identity: whatever they are, we are not. Protestants in areas such as the Shankill might have lived lives culturally similar to – and as economically deprived as – their Catholic neighbours, but members of the opposing communities have very rarely worked together towards shared goals. Their tribal identities have not allowed it. From the Shankill, my taxi driver and I drove across the divide onto the Falls. The atmosphere here is slightly less intense, but the sense of republican identity is as strong as its equivalent on the other side. Just as the Shankill grew up on the old route between the Protestant counties of Down and Antrim, so the Falls grew up on the route out to the Catholic west, and it was populated by workers in the many mills that were built nearby. The Falls saw a great deal of street fighting in the early days of the Troubles, becoming a rallying point for republican resistance to the state. In the words of Provisional IRA hero Brendan Hughes, it was where the belief arose, in 1970, that ‘We can beat these fuckers.’ On that occasion, as so often, the ‘fuckers’ were the British army, who had raided the Falls in an attempt to remove a cache of weapons. A visit to the Irish Republican History Museum, in Conway Mill, just off the Falls Road, is a memorable experience. At first sight it is a frightening place, full of guns, rubber bullets, prison doors, and clothes worn by the Provisional IRA. It feels like a sinister chapel, Armalite rifles and prison-carved harps in place of crucifixes and stained-glass windows. I have rarely been so self-conscious as I was in my first few minutes in this place; I felt as though I was wearing a Union Jack waistcoat as I wandered about, peering at artefacts and nodding at people who were drinking tea at a small table. I looked around the well-stocked library, then I walked into a recreated cell from Armagh Prison. After a while the place began to seem less like a shrine to violence and more like a focal point for the community. Its custodian is a friendly man, happy to explain the local perspective, and it became clear that the museum’s intention is not to intimidate or to glory in brutality. Just as one side feels at the mercy of its enemies, so can the other, and this place reflects the fear and pride of a beleaguered people. In the end it is an interesting and well-run local museum with little chance of government funding. When I first visited the Republican Museum, the Real IRA killings at Massereene barracks had not yet occurred. When I returned months later, with a peaceful future looking less certain, the place unnerved me a little once more. It had not changed and its custodian was as thoughtful and generous with his time as he had been on my first visit. But much else had changed, including my attitude to my work. What had begun as a history project, its subject matter more or less packaged, now felt like current affairs muddled with uncertainties. The guns were no longer just museum exhibits. The past and the present were blurring. Seventy years ago Harold Nicolson wrote, ‘The Irish themselves have no sense of the past; for them, the present began on 17 October 1171, when Henry II landed at Waterford. For them, history is always contemporaneous and current events are always history.’ Walking around parts of Belfast, glancing at the murals and graffiti, it can seem as though the rebels of 1916 have only just risen, and the Somme is still being fought. Sometimes, in ordinary conversation, history comes tumbling out of people. The partition of Ireland or the Siege of Derry can appear as relevant to someone’s state of mind as something that happened that morning. But the versions of the past that you will hear are unlikely to coincide. Identities do not allow it. There is a Northern Ireland neologism, ‘Whataboutery’, that is used to describe the bouts of accusation-slinging that characterize local politics. When a politician from one side charges the other side with some wrongdoing, the matter will rarely be discussed rationally. Instead it will be answered with a corresponding accusation: ‘What about such and such injustice?’ Whataboutery is symptomatic of the chasm in the interpretation of history that exists between the communities. In Northern Ireland, it has been said, there is no one history. Indeed the Tower Museum in Derry makes the point graphically – it displays the story of the period between 1800 and 1921 along two parallel walls, one from the unionist-loyalist perspective, the other from the nationalist-republican perspective. You can walk down the middle and take your pick. By the same logic, the actions of the dissident republicans ought to be sending the politicians scurrying to their entrenched positions, from where they can interpret events accordingly. But that has not been happening. In the aftermath of the 2009 killings, the politicians have appeared united. The Reverend Ian Paisley, a man often blamed for kindling the fire that led to the Troubles, announced, ‘There is grieving, there is despair, but beyond the despair there is being born a spirit of unity that we have never seen before.’ If he is right – and the very fact that he is saying it suggests that he might be – perhaps this spirit of unity could create a single history in Northern Ireland, a single wall in the Tower Museum. The past might be consigned to the past. If that were to happen, then I would love to revisit the Shankill murals and the Irish Republican History Museum, emotive reminders of a shared turbulent story. It will take a lot to create just one history, however. The sense and depth of history arises out of continuity, out of a firm linkage of people to place. In parts of Northern Ireland surnames have remained constant for many hundreds of years, and this has created a society where family and community count for a great deal. As one nationalist put it, ‘When we want to get something done here, we phone a cousin.’ In the north, four hundred people can show up to a funeral, and when somebody is shot dead the lives of hundreds can be directly affected. With this continuity comes a sense of history and identity that is rarely questioned. One Belfast man, whom I met early on in my travels, gave me a warning: ‘All that everyone will say to you here – no matter how much of it seems to be foregrounded on fact – it’s all subjective experience. None of it is true. There is no truth in this place. Anyone who gives you the true version, well, you know immediately not to trust them.’ He had offered me a liar’s paradox: if a Northern Ireland man tells me that in Northern Ireland people don’t tell the truth, how can I believe him? Riddles aside, I was to hear many ‘true versions’ over the coming months, from the senior politician who cheerfully informed me that Catholics cannot be considered Christians, to the ex-IRA man who was certain that the British government retains a strong strategic interest in Northern Ireland. A lot of the time, however, these ‘true versions’ would consist of interpretations that sounded plausible until somebody else said something just as plausible but wholly contradictory. I was to find myself deluged by such declarations of identity. At times I would listen with interest, at other times with weariness – and sometimes with something close to jealousy. Louis MacNeice wrote of his native Northern Ireland: We envy men of action Who sleep and wake, murder and intrigue Without being doubtful, without being haunted. And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim’s face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives. It is quite possible for an outsider to feel envy in the province, a place seemingly free from doubt. My own world of moral equivalence, where one is not encouraged to pass judgement on the beliefs of others, can seem, by comparison, to be a place without conviction. How fortifying it must be to have something always to believe in, and somebody always to react against. Is this what Dominic Behan wrote about in his lovely song, ‘The Patriot Game’: ‘For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing, it banishes fear with the speed of a flame, and it makes us all part of the Patriot Game’? Now flip the coin. Perhaps Northern Ireland is a place where judgement is too readily passed. It has produced people prepared to die, prepared to cut off a hand for the cause, but not prepared to make lesser compromises. A weaker identity might produce a stronger society. One Belfast republican told me of time spent, many years previously, in Coventry. There he became friendly with a local Labour Party activist, but he could never understand how someone could be politically active in a ‘twilight city’ where nothing ever happened, where the construction of a zebra crossing was held up as a political achievement. For many in Northern Ireland, politics is not about the mundane or the consensual, it is about the struggle of identities: them and us. Why give a damn about helping kids across a road when there is an identity to preserve? Alongside intensity of belief can sit self-importance. When a great deal of time is spent gazing inwards, it is possible to lose – or fail to gain – perspective on one’s position in the world. MacNeice again, this time seething with indignation: I hate your grandiose airs, Your sob stuff, your laugh and your swagger, Your assumption that everyone cares Who is the king of your castle. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1922, Winston Churchill (a member of the Liberal government team that negotiated the Anglo-Irish treaty with Michael Collins, and, according to his bodyguard, the subject of an attempted assassination by the IRA the previous year) noted that while the First World War might have overturned great empires, and altered ways of thinking across the globe, it had not changed attitudes everywhere: ‘As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’ Churchill’s speech has often been quoted to underline the unchanging nature of Northern Irish politics. Yet it is his perception of people so unaffected by world events, so in thrall to their own reflections, that is most striking. Seventy-nine years later Northern Ireland would gain a perspective of its position in the world. On 11 September 2001, as Al Qaeda mounted a raw and shocking attack on New York City, the Troubles were suddenly made to seem stale, predictable and petty. Blinkers fell away as all parties were forced to look beyond themselves, and to accept that men with stronger senses of identity were now commanding the world’s attention. Fewer people – in particular fewer Americans – now cared who was the king of their castle. September 11 was an attack on all that the world understood, and it shook some of the certainty and self-importance out of Northern Ireland. In its aftermath the move towards peace accelerated. Not long after I arrived in Belfast, I met a man who told me a story. He had been sitting at home with his wife and small daughter, watching the film Schindler’s List. During a brutal camp scene the man’s wife leant across to him and whispered, ‘Is that what your prison was like?’ The man, a former member of the IRA who had planted bombs, shot at British soldiers, and served time in jail, explained that however hard prison had been for him, however brutal the screws, his treatment could not be compared to that of concentration-camp inmates. The next day, as he drove his daughter to school, the little girl asked him whether he’d really been in prison. ‘Yes.’ ‘But aren’t prisons for bad people?’ ‘Not always. You saw the film last night? Those prisoners weren’t bad people. They were put in prison by bad people. Sometimes the bad people aren’t the prisoners.’ These are the words of a father explaining his past to his daughter, but they could easily be addressed to the world at large. Over the course of this book we will encounter people who have done things that most would consider unacceptable. Some have placed morality to one side more readily than others, but how many of them now consider what they did to be wrong? Some may see their acts as having been politically motivated, in defiance of an unjust system, or in defence of their communities. These may not have been the only – or sometimes even the primary – reasons for their behaviour; they could be handy rationalizations, cynical assaults on a morally sustainable position. But they could also be sincere responses to a complex history, and they may explain why one likeable man feels able to compare his captive status, if not his actual treatment, to that of a Holocaust victim. So how should we approach men who used violence – other than with great care? Is it wrong to judge people in terms of absolutes? While a man may have committed terrible acts in certain situations, in all other areas of life he may have behaved in an entirely moral fashion. If he believes that he had right on his side, can we take him at his own estimation of himself? We will meet those who suffered the direct consequences of these terrible acts. One man, an ex-police officer – who was himself injured in a bomb attack – told me of arriving at the scene of an explosion to find a friend and colleague lying dead. His reaction had not been one of anger or vengeance, but sadness and a sense of futility. He told me how he would have loved to bring the people responsible down to the scene, where he could ask them exactly what uniting Ireland was about. We will meet those who never used and sometimes never endorsed violence, but who are entrenched in traditional ways of thinking: people from the Protestant tradition who consider themselves British at a time when Britishness is losing its meaning and relevance for the English, Welsh and Scots; people from Catholic backgrounds whose lives have been devoted to reuniting with the Irish Republic despite its lack of interest in reuniting with them. Slighted by their chosen partners, many of these uneasy neighbours now stand together under the umbrella of the Good Friday Agreement. What divides them unites them. It is important to remember that the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland, whether Orange or Green, did not participate in, or support, the violence of the Troubles. Yet many of them were affected by it. In 1999 researchers from the University of Ulster published the ‘Cost of the Troubles Study’, for which they had interviewed 3,000 men and women across Northern Ireland to gauge the effects of the Troubles on ordinary people. Of those interviewed, a quarter had seen people killed or injured, a fifth had experienced a deterioration in their health which they attributed to a Troubles-related trauma, and almost one in twenty had been injured in a bomb explosion or a shooting. As well as recording a large increase in alcohol consumption and the taking of medication, the study found a high level of fear of straying from one’s own area and an acute wariness of outsiders. The ‘Cost of the Troubles Study’ opens up a vista on a world beyond belief and self-importance. It is a world with few spokesmen, but plenty of inhabitants. These are the people whose voices were rarely heard in the reports that filled the English newspapers. One man told me of sitting in a bar on the Falls Road, listening to some old-time republicans boasting of the length of time they’d spent in prison. After a while another man tired of what he was hearing. ‘Fucking lucky for you!’ he shouted. ‘You done twenty years sitting in a safe wee cell? And your family provided for? What about the poor man who had to go out to work every morning, risking fucking death? You were in a fucking sanctuary!’ At the junction between the two worlds, an act of common kindness could attract recrimination. A Catholic man from Claudy told me how he had once tended a policeman who had been shot in the street. He put a tourniquet around the policeman’s leg and sat with him until an ambulance arrived. A while later, at his holiday home across the border in Donegal, an IRA man on the run approached him and asked why he had helped the policeman. He replied that he would have helped a dog if he had needed it. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I might even have helped you.’ Days later he was threatened: ‘We’re very worried for you and your family so long as you stay here…’ I asked him how republicans in one town had known of an incident that occurred in another. ‘Kick one of them,’ he said, ‘and they all limp.’ One man who spoke for the citizens of the stifled world was Seamus Heaney. Heaney, a Catholic from Derry, was once asked by Sinn F?in director of publicity Danny Morrison, ‘Why don’t you write something for us?’ ‘No,’ replied Heaney, ‘I write for myself.’ His poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ gives voice to a passive people, too cowed to speak out against ‘bigotry and sham’. According to Heaney, ‘smoke signals are loud-mouthed compared with us’. The poem ends: Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bit and sup, We hug our little destiny again. A ‘little destiny’ is not much of a thing to hug. It is hardly surprising that so many of the people of Northern Ireland, once denied a life before death, now fear a return to the Troubles; nor is it surprising that tens of thousands of these people gathered in Belfast, Derry, Newry, Lisburn, and Downpatrick to rally for peace in March 2009 in the wake of the dissident killings. And yet ‘The Grauballe Man’, another of Heaney’s poems from the same collection, includes the words ‘hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity’. Echoing W. B. Yeats, who spoke of ‘a terrible beauty’ born of the 1916 Easter Rising, Heaney is daring to hint at a beauty to the modern Troubles. While giving a voice to those silenced by the violence in one poem, he is suggesting a nobility to that violence in another. Northern Ireland is built on such contradictions. It was created as a political compromise to bring an end to conflict, but conflict has flourished within it. It goes by the name of ‘Northern Ireland’, but its northernmost point lies to the south of part of the Irish Republic. Its people are divided by religion, but their quarrel is not religious. And while they are divided, they are also united. As a man once said, ‘If you understand Northern Ireland, you don’t understand Northern Ireland.’ As I eased my way into this world of divided, united people, I made my first base just outside the pretty town of Killyleagh, on the banks of Strangford Lough in County Down. I was staying with the Lindsays, a warm and generous family who had never met me before yet welcomed me like an old friend. Katie, their daughter, is a talented artist who works with patients at the Mater Hospital in Belfast. Their lives were a world away from my own in London, but I quickly became very adept at lighting a wood fire, and sitting by it with a glass of whisky. Through the Lindsays I had the fortune to meet Bobbie Hanvey, a photographer, writer, broadcaster, and one-time nurse in Downshire mental hospital, a man described by J. P. Donleavy as ‘Ireland’s most super sane man’. Bobbie hosts a programme, The Ramblin’ Man, every Sunday night on Downtown Radio, in which he interviews local personalities. His easy-going charm allows him to get away with asking some very awkward questions. He prised several seconds of rare silence from Ian Paisley by asking him whether, had he been born a Catholic, he could have been a member of the IRA. It cannot be easy for Paisley to accept that God could have made him a Catholic, never mind that he could have been a member of the IRA. The eventual answer was, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ followed by an unprovoked denial that he had ever supported loyalist violence. A Hanvey trademark is the undercutting of a serious subject with a flash of mischief. He interrupted the ex-leader of the UVF, in mid flow on the subject of large booby traps, with the observation that the biggest booby trap he’d encountered was a brassiere. He also advised a Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), who had once worked in vice, to write a memoir with the title Pros ’n’ Cons. Nonplussed, his guest thanked him for ‘that very impressive suggestion’. But Bobbie’s irreverence cannot mask a keen intellect and a shrewd understanding of the complexities of Northern Ireland, from which he seems to stand aloof, friendly with men and women of all sides. I would become very grateful for his insights, and even more grateful for the chance to quote from his interviews in this book. One of my abiding memories of my time in Northern Ireland is of an evening spent upstairs in his Down-patrick house, listening to recordings of interviews. As I wondered where I could get something to eat, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Bobbie appeared in the doorway, his Marty Feldman hair silhouetted against the light. He walked in and plonked a plate down in front of me, on which sat two foil-wrapped chocolate marshmallows. ‘I’ve got to tell you,’ he said, ‘I’m not much of a cook.’ Maybe not, but he was a very helpful ally in this strange and familiar place. He phoned me recently, asking me to find him a couple of Chasidic Jews to photograph. As though I’d have them around the house. That’s fair enough, though. He’s brought me his people. He can have a pair of mine. 2 THE SETTLERS (#ulink_2b02e5e7-6419-5dd1-8506-bb68a5d96293) Samuel Johnson once told James Boswell that the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing, but not worth going to see. Early on in my journey I visited it with a guide who was even less enthusiastic. Just before it came into view, he turned to me and said, ‘You’re going to find this place disappointing.’ Luckily I was able to set both verdicts aside, especially the one from the man being paid to promote Northern Ireland. On an early summer’s day, with a stiff breeze blowing, the hexagonal black and gold columns seemed eerie and romantic. The Causeway was a bit smaller than I’d expected, and there were a lot of people around, but it didn’t matter; I was in a good mood, and my expectations had been set very low. Standing on a stone crop, staring out to sea, I was joined by the guide who took me into his confidence. All this, he assured me, wasn’t made by molten rock, forced up through the ground. It couldn’t be. The columns are perfect. They’ve got to be man-made. They must have been built by Stone Age people. Stone Age Irish people. There is a legend concerning the Giant’s Causeway that it was actually built by Finn McCool (Fionn MacCumhaill in Irish), the leader of a band of great warriors, as a land bridge between Ireland and Scotland. McCool and a Scottish giant had been shouting insults across the sea at each other, but McCool wanted to be able to confront his rival in person. Constructing such a mighty land bridge proved hard work, however, and McCool fell asleep as soon as he had finished. While he slept the Scottish giant thundered down the Causeway towards him, but McCool woke up and spotted him. Perturbed by the size of his opponent, McCool – thinking extremely laterally – built a huge crib and lay down inside it, pretending to be a massive baby. The giant arrived, looked inside the crib, saw this grotesque infant, and panicked. If this was the size of McCool’s baby, how enormous must McCool be? The giant ran back to Scotland, tearing up the Causeway as he went, leaving only the remains that Dr Johnson did not consider worth going to see. Whether it was actually built by Finn McCool, a figure who came to inspire the republican movement, or by Stone Age nationalists laying claim to Irish territory, the Causeway, like so much else in Northern Ireland, has been used to service contemporary claims. Perhaps the greatest character in Irish mythology is Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles, who is supposed to have defended Ulster single-handedly against the warriors of Queen Medb of Connaught. Cuchulainn, fearless, earthy, and principled, is a character with whom many have wanted to be associated. Mortally wounded, he is said to have bound himself to a pillar so that he might die standing up, and this scene is recorded on a bronze statue inside Dublin’s General Post Office, erected in memory of the 1916 republican rising. But Cuchulainn is also claimed by unionists and loyalists; a huge mural on the Shankill Estate shows him waving his sword in defiance at those who would threaten Ulster. When I asked a leading unionist politician about the legend of Cuchulainn, he reacted crossly to the word ‘legend’. Cuchulainn’s defence of Ulster is not a legend, he made it clear; it is history. I found an interesting version of history in a 1982 play, cowritten by Andy Tyrie, then leader of the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary organization. This Is It! is a sharply observed piece of drama that tells the story of a young working-class Protestant who grows disillusioned with unionism’s lack of political ambition. It particularly caught my eye for the views of one of its characters, Sam, who gives an account of Ulster’s early history from a Protestant perspective. Sam argues that the people of Ulster, Protestant and Catholic alike, share a common ancestry that predates the coming of the Celts in the centuries before Christ; in those days, Sam claims, Ulster and Scotland were populated by the same race, called the Picts in Scotland and the Cruthin in Ulster. When the Celts invaded Ulster, they carried out a long and cruel extermination, forcing the Cruthin to move to Scotland. So, says Sam, ‘You could even suppose that some of those who came over here for the Plantation [Ulster’s colonization by English and Scottish Protestants four centuries ago] were in effect coming home again.’ This reading of history allows Sam to argue that Ulster is the Protestant homeland: ‘Our roots are here! Ulster people – Catholic and Protestant – both have a common ancestry and a common right to be here.’ Fascinated by this, I spoke to a respected university professor who prefers not to be named. Evidently the subject is rather controversial. The professor told me that the pre-Christian period of Irish history is very dark. The Picts were present in parts of Scotland, and there is indeed a tradition of a Cruthin people in East Ulster. But while these people might well have communicated with each other across the sea, and there may even have been an exchange of population, it is impossible to say that the Picts and the Cruthin were the same race. With regard to the Celts, the professor says that although there is a tradition that they arrived in Ireland in the years just before the birth of Christ, no archaeological evidence exists for a mass arrival or for an invasion, and there is no evidence at all that they carried out a long and cruel extermination of indigenous people. There is a tradition of a migration of people from Ireland to western Scotland at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, but it is no more than a tradition. So far as the idea of settlers ‘coming home’ to Ulster at the time of the plantations is concerned, the professor says that the seventeenth-century Scottish settlers came primarily from Scotland’s border with England. These settlers were not Gaelic speakers, and it would be wrong to consider them the same people as those who may once have left Ulster. It would, the professor says, be very difficult to identify an ‘Ulster people’. I am left with the strong caveat that I should be careful of historical interpretations which carry an underlying political motivation. ‘Throughout history,’ declares Sinn F?in’s website, ‘the island of Ireland has been regarded as a single national unit. Prior to the Norman invasion from England in 1169, the Irish had their own system of law, culture, and language, and their own political and social structures.’ While it makes political sense for Sinn F?in to describe pre-1169 Ireland as a ‘single national unit’, it makes less historical sense. During this period the island was a patchwork of independent chiefdoms, often at war with one another, and ready to make alliances to achieve greater power. One such alliance led to the arrival of the English in Ireland. It was struck between Dermot MacMurrough, deposed King of Leinster, and Henry II, King of England, and its legacy has dominated the story of Ireland for the past eight hundred years. Henry granted MacMurrough the services of Anglo-Norman barons to help him to regain his lost kingship. One of these barons, the Earl of Pembroke, known as ‘Strongbow’, overran Waterford and Dublin, and defeated the High King of Ireland in battle. Fearing the emergence of a rival Norman kingdom across the sea, Henry landed an army at Waterford in 1171, with which to confront the ambitious Earl. Strongbow quickly pledged obedience to Henry and promised him the lands that he had conquered. As Henry proceeded through Ireland, the native Irish kings swore fealty to him in turn – all except the rulers of Ulster. This story of England’s first intervention in Ireland is told by the Welsh-Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, who describes a meeting at Armagh called by the Irish clergy ‘concerning the arrival of the foreigners in the island’. The clergy’s opinion was that God was allowing the English to ‘enslave’ the Irish, ‘because it had been formerly been their [the Irish people’s] habit to purchase Englishmen indiscriminately from merchants as well as from robbers and pirates, and to make slaves of them’. As a result they decreed that ‘throughout the island, Englishmen should be freed from the bonds of slavery’. Unfortunately for the churchmen, this decree did not result in an English withdrawal. Giraldus proceeds to declare proudly, ‘Let the envious and thoughtless end their vociferous complaints that the kings of England hold Ireland unlawfully. Let them learn, moreover, that they support their claims by a right of ownership resting on five different counts…’ Three of these counts rest on legends, one being the claim that the kings of Ireland once paid tribute to King Arthur, ‘that famous king of Britain’. The fourth count is that English rule had the authority of the Pope. The fifth is that ‘the princes of Ireland freely bound themselves in submission to Henry II, king of England, by the firm bonds of their pledged word and oath’. And so, from this casual intervention many hundreds of years ago, described by a highly partial observer, Anglo-Irish relations came to assume their familiar antipathy and bloodshed. A problem for the English kings who came after Henry II, attempting to assert their authority on Ireland, was the tendency of their representatives to assimilate. The lords who were meant to be cementing English rule began instead to adopt Irish customs, language, and laws, and became difficult to distinguish from the existing Irish chieftains. By the end of the fifteenth century the English Crown’s authority covered only a small area around Dublin, known as ‘the Pale’. The area outside of English influence was therefore considered ‘beyond the Pale’, and remained subject to an anarchy of tribal conflict. Henry VIII attempted to re-anglicize the ‘Old English’ lords; he forced them to drop their Irish titles, and he re-granted them their lands under English feudal law, but his authority was not noticeably strengthened as a result. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, faced six rebellions from the Old English and the Irish. She put these down ruthlessly, and appointed officials with little sympathy for the local people. One of these officials was the poet Edmund Spenser, author of the tender couplet ‘Such is the power of love in gentle mind, that it can alter all the course of kind.’ But Spenser’s gentle mind did not extend to the Irish people, whom he considered ‘vile catiff wretches, ragged, rude, deformed’. As England became wealthier and more powerful, Ireland became a country to be suppressed and civilized. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign a centralized English administration was in place, as was a bitterly confirmed resentment of English rule. By this time the issue of religion had also emerged. The Reformation of the Church had taken hold in England, but it had failed to do so in Ireland. It was proving difficult enough to impose an English administration on a resistant, widely scattered population, and utterly impossible to impose the Protestant religion. So a new policy was adopted: the colonization of the province by loyal Protestants. In 1606 Sir John Davies, the Irish attorney general, described Ulster as ‘the most rude and unreformed part of Ireland’ and he hoped that ‘that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English’. What better way to achieve this, and to deter the French and Spanish from creating an Irish bridgehead from which to invade England, than by settling Ulster with English and Scottish Protestants? A good part of the existing Irish population was forced from its land by these ‘plantations’, and the repercussions have been felt down the centuries. The Northern Ireland government of much of the twentieth century would be run by, and for, the descendants of Protestants who were brought to the province in the first half of the seventeenth century. Lessons learnt in Ulster were immediately put to use by the English in their next effort at colonization by plantation, across the Atlantic in Virginia and New England. The Ulster plantation was the forerunner of the foundation of America. In the New World the native population was all but extinguished by slaughter and Old World diseases, leaving the settlers to thrive and give thanks every November. In Ulster, where the natives did not die off, a population with split allegiances and long memories was created. Early in my travels I met a man named John Beresford-Ash. He lives just outside Derry with his beautiful French wife, Agn?s, in a lovely late-seventeenth-century house, Ashbrook, that benefits from looking and feeling its age. John is a wonderfully old-fashioned character, impeccably mannered, entertaining, honest, and indiscreet. His family can be traced back over four centuries to the earliest Protestants to arrive in Ulster, and I had been told that he would be an interesting man to speak to, so I telephoned him and was immediately invited to lunch the following day. I showed up and sat with John and Agn?s, intending to interview him after the meal, but the food was good, the wine kept coming, and the conversation bubbled along, taking in subjects as various as Lord Lucan (an old friend of John’s who is indisputably dead) and the Nuremberg Trials (another old friend was the junior British counsel). I finally rolled out of Ashbrook, virtually incapable, with the promise of an interview the following day. The promise was warmly kept. Ashbrook was originally granted to Beresford-Ash’s ancestor, General Thomas Ash, by Elizabeth I in recognition of his loyal service to the Crown. Another ancestor was Tristram Beresford, the first land agent for the merchants of the City of London. Beresford was evidently a pragmatist. According to his descendant: ‘The Spanish were very short of oak trees to build their warships and one day some Spanish galleons turned up in the River Foyle. There were a lot of lovely oak trees here in Derry, doire being the Irish for oak grove, and though Elizabeth was a marvellous queen, she was awfully tight-fisted and she hadn’t paid her troops. My ancestor practically had a mutiny on his hands because his troops hadn’t been paid, and the Spanish had an awful lot of gold, so he said to the Spaniards, “If you can pay, I will give you the oak trees of Derry,” which he did – and thus committed high treason. He was had up by the court of the Star Chamber, but fortunately for him – and indeed most fortunately for me – he was a great friend of Walter Raleigh, who interceded on his behalf, so he didn’t get his neck stretched.’ Many of the plantations in Ulster were undertaken privately, the settlers being Presbyterian Scots whose independence of spirit has shaped the history of the province. In Derry, however, the settlement was funded by the livery companies of the City of London and many of the original settlers were Londoners. According to a 1609 privy council document, ‘It [the settlement] might ease [London] of an insupportable burthen of persons, which it might conveniently spare.’ In 1613 the London Companies were granted land by a royal charter, and the name Derry was changed to Londonderry because, according to John Beresford-Ash, ‘The London companies were keen on the fact that it was their money and their expertise that was being used. And it encouraged the people who came to live here, who were being harassed by the native population. The native population naturally resented these invaders coming – but whether they were invaders or not depends on your point of view.’ Invaders or not, the Protestant settlers lived apprehensive lives, surrounded by Irish Catholics who resented them for taking their land and repressing their religion. In 1641 the Irish rebelled, launching attacks on the settlements. A near-contemporary Protestant account describes the attacks, and blames them on the influence of the Catholic church: ‘The Priests gave the Sacrament unto divers of the Irish, upon condition that they should neither spare man, woman, nor child of the Protestants…One Joan Addis they stabbed, and then put her child of a quarter year old to her breast, and bid it to suck English Bastard, and so left it to perish…They brake the backbone of a youth, and left him in the fields, some days after he was found, having eaten the grass round about him; neither then would they kill him outright, but removed him to better pasture…At Portadown Bridge, there were one thousand men, women, and children, carried in several companies, and all unmercifully drowned in the river…Elizabeth Price testified upon oath, that she and other women, whose husbands and children were drowned in that place, went hither one evening, at which time they saw one like a woman rise out of the river breast-high, her hair hanging down, which with her skin, was as white as snow, often crying out, Revenge, Revenge, Revenge.’ It is estimated that about 12,000 Protestants were killed during the rebellion and, however exaggerated contemporary accounts might have been, they helped to condition attitudes that survive to this day. In the following years Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland and took the revenge called for by the snowwhite apparition. In the wake of a massacre at Drogheda where as many as 3,500 soldiers, civilians and clergymen were killed by his troops, Cromwell wrote, ‘It is right that God alone should have all the glory.’ An Irish Catholic tract composed in 1662 begins presciently, ‘It is a sad and severe position, that this contention between the two parties in Ireland will never have an end.’ The author’s solution is plain: ‘The country must at length give denomination to all that inhabit it: and the posterity of those that proclaim loudly the English interest, must within an age, admit themselves to be called Irish as well as descendants from the first Colony of English planted in Ireland.’ Almost 350 years later John Beresford-Ash describes his identity to me: ‘I’m entirely English. My family came from England and we were there before the Norman conquest. We can prove it.’ An Account of the Publick Affairs in Ireland, published in 1678, lays out English strategy in Ireland: ‘The principal and present security of the Kingdom consists of balancing the numbers of Irish with a superiority of strength, and leaving them naked, and the English in Arms.’ In 1685, however, the policy threatened to unravel. In that year the Catholic King James II came to the English throne. His succession brought hope to Irish Catholics, and he proceeded to grant them patronage, but three years later his Dutch Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, landed in England with an army. He came at the invitation of Protestant nobles who sought to save England from Catholicism. James chose to escape to France rather than fight his rival in England, and in James’s absence Parliament declared that he had abdicated his throne. William was crowned King of England in April 1689, by which time James had gathered an army and landed at Kinsale, on the south coast of Ireland, intending to use that country as a base to reclaim his throne. He marched to Dublin in triumph and continued north. It appeared as though he would take Ireland with ease; only the Protestants of Ulster would resist him. Protestants from across the province flocked to Derry with its strong defences, and James’s army besieged the city. ‘We were in our small house,’ says John Beresford-Ash, ‘and King James came over headed by the French, and all the Protestants emigrated within the walls of Derry. Ashbrook was burnt by James’s troops, and it was rebuilt after the siege. Thomas Ash was the senior member of the family, his father was dead, and he was in the yeomanry. He was obviously a fairly decent character.’ Thomas Ash kept a journal chronicling the siege. ‘Apart from eating rats,’ says his descendant, ‘I don’t suppose there was much else to do.’ At the start of his diary, written while King James was still on the throne, Ash stresses the insecurity felt by Ulster Protestants: ‘We had been alarmed by reports that the Roman Catholics intended to rise in arms against us, and to act over the tragedy of 1641.’ These reports coincided with news reaching Derry that a Catholic army garrison was on its way to the city to relieve the existing Protestant garrison. The Protestants of the city did not know what course to take. To refuse entry to the king’s garrison was treasonable, but they feared that the garrison was being sent to massacre them. Ash wrote: ‘While we were in this confused hesitation, on 7th December 1688, a few resolute Apprentice Boys determined for us: these ran to the Gates and shut them, drew up the bridge, and seized the Magazine. This, like magic, roused an unanimous spirit of defence, we determine to maintain the city at all hazards.’ The true siege began four months later, once William had become king and James had arrived in Ireland to try to win back his throne. On 15 April 1689 Ash writes of his suspicion that the man in charge of the city’s army garrison, Robert Lundy, was a traitor. Days later he records, ‘Colonel Lundy deserted our garrison, and went in disguise to Scotland, and by this, proved the justness of our former suspicions.’ To this day a traitor to the Protestant cause is known as a ‘Lundy’, and the man has become the Ulster Protestant equivalent of Guy Fawkes: his effigy is burned every December in the centre of Derry. Ash’s journal records a steady rain of ‘bombs’ and ‘mortars’ falling on the city from Jacobite guns, killing and injuring his acquaintances. On 10 July he records that inside one bomb there was no gunpowder but rather a ‘written paper’ offering James’s terms for surrender. ‘Be not obstinate against your Prince,’ read the paper, ‘expose yourselves no longer to the miseries you undergo…’ The cannonball that once contained this note is now on display in the vestibule of St Columb’s, Derry’s Anglican cathedral. By 26 July the miseries of the besieged men, women and children had grown so bitter that ‘an experiment was tried on a cow at Shipquay. She was tied, and smeared with tar, and tow stuck to it, which was set on fire to make her roar, thinking that the enemy’s cows which were grazing in the orchard would come to her.’ The experiment was not a success. The following day Ash writes, ‘God knows, we never stood in so much need of a supply; for now there is not one week’s provision in the garrison: of necessity we must surrender the City, and make the best terms we can for ourselves. Next Wednesday is our last, if relief does not arrive before it.’ The entry also states that horses’ blood was changing hands within the city for two pence per quart, and it ends: ‘There is not a dog to be seen, they are all killed and eaten.’ His entry for the next day begins: ‘A day to be remembered with thanksgiving by the besieged in Derry as long as they live, for on this day we were delivered from famine and slavery.’ Two ships laden with supplies had burst through the boom placed across the river, and sailed into the quay below the city walls, while a third engaged the enemy’s guns. The siege was broken. The captain of the leading ship, the Mountjoy, was Michael Browning, the brother-in-law of Thomas Ash. According to John Beresford-Ash, ‘It was always said that Captain Browning was fanatically Presbyterian and anti-Catholic, but he simply wanted to rescue his wife who was inside the walls, so he persuaded the admiralty to allow him to take a ship up the Foyle. Tragically, he was shot before he got to relieve his wife – who remarried and had a baby about a year later. Pragmatic lady.’ He showed me a delicate tie pin, presented to the family by King William IV almost a hundred and fifty years after the siege, on which miniatures of the three ships are painted, with the words ‘To the memory of the gallant Captain Browning 1689’. Towards the end of his journal Thomas Ash writes: ‘The Lord who has preserved this city from the enemy I hope will always keep it to the Protestants.’ The city’s refusal to surrender ensured that James’s army did not take Ireland, and was not able to mount an attack on England. In June 1690 William landed at Carrickfergus and on 12 July his army defeated James’s troops at the Boyne. The triumph of the Protestants was complete, and the siege of Derry has symbolized Protestant defiance ever since. When men of the 36th (Ulster) Division went over the top at the Somme on 1 July 1916, their cries of ‘No surrender’ surprised members of a neighbouring battalion. Why shout about surrender at the start of a major push? But the cries were not referring to the current battle, but to a siege long gone, and to a state of mind ever present. Walking through John Beresford-Ash’s house, with its portraits and its treasured jumble collected down the centuries, gave me a vivid sense of the family’s continuity. But his story is interesting in its own right. He came back to Northern Ireland in 1959, after school at Eton and a spell in the Irish Guards. ‘I became the first member of either the Beresford family or the Ash family to employ Catholics. Of course, they had had Roman Catholic tenants, but they had never employed them in the house, or on the farm, or as coachmen. I did it because I thought it was the most sensible thing to do.’ Beresford-Ash says that he could see the political situation deteriorating in the Sixties: ‘It was entirely the intransigence of the Proddies. The problem was not just the virulent speeches of people like Paisley, but also the blind stupidity of the so-called posh Protestants who ran everything. Roman Catholics in the Creggan and the Bogside had no vote at all. It was just so thick and stupid. And the British government took no interest in the situation. They couldn’t give a damn. I joined what was then the Unionist and Conservative party, and I had ideas. I said, “You’re riding for a fall!” I said the business about voting and gerrymandering has to end, but I was told that I was a new boy, and that I knew absolutely bugger-all about anything. Those were the things that kept us free, as they put it. Up in the Creggan, the roads were one-track because it was said the Roman Catholics would never have enough money to buy cars, so there was no need for cars to be able to pass each other. All this went on until the mid-Sixties. Most extraordinary blinkered situation among the Proddies over here.’ He remembers the reaction of other Protestant landowners to the fact that he was employing Catholics: ‘Oh, they thought I was beyond the pale. I was “one of them”. But my employees got on perfectly well with each other. There was no way they would be allowed to fight – or I would just sack the lot of them. I was the first member of our family to go to the Catholic church on Beech Hill, to a funeral. Paddy Gormley, our stack man, had died. I put on tails and a top hat, and I went inside the church, and none of them had ever seen that before. It impressed them that I would bother to do that, but I didn’t expect my Presbyterian men to go inside the church. They were willing to stand outside, and go to the grave – and none of them had ever done that before.’ In 1970 he met Cardinal Conway, the Catholic Primate of All Ireland: ‘The Cardinal had been asked to St Columb’s by the Dean, but nobody would talk to him at the Diocesan tea party afterwards. So I said to Agn?s, “For God’s sake, go and get a table, and I’ll bring him over.” We started talking about life – not about Northern Ireland – and he realized that Agn?s was French, and he said, “Whereabouts are you from?” and she said her father lived in Bar-le-Duc, and he said, “I remember coming back from Rome once, we stopped there when I was a young priest, and we went to the barber. We were talking among ourselves in Gaelic, and the barber said to us, in French, ‘What the hell language is that?’ and I said it was Gaelic. The barber looked at me and said, ‘Mon p?re, vous ?tes pr?historique!’” But nobody else would talk to Conway at this tea party, and Agn?s said that the thing to do was not to treat him as a bloody pariah. Agn?s can do that, and so can I, and that’s how you make friends.’ For all that he recognized the political tension in Northern Ireland forty years ago, Beresford-Ash did not foresee the Troubles. ‘I don’t think anybody did,’ he says. He and Agn?s were married in Paris in the spring of 1968, at the time of the student riots: ‘It’s so funny, I remember all the people at the reception after the service, saying it was wonderful that I was taking Agn?s away to this lovely place from the ghastly city of Paris. Then, the next forty years…’ In 1971 Beresford-Ash almost lost his life, during an encounter with a local figure: ‘I was listening to the ten o’clock news one evening, and I realized I’d run out of cigarettes. I got in the car – Agn?s was away in Paris – and I went to Guildhall Square. But the cigarette machine had been vandalized, so I went to Fiorentini’s caf?. There were two girls sitting in the caf?, and they asked me if I could give them a lift home. I thought to myself, well now, two young girls, my wife’s away. What about it? So I said yes, and asked where they lived. They said in a very subdued whisper, “The Creggan.” I thought about it – my God! This really is an opportunity. The Creggan was a no-go area, I could say that I’ve been there, and nobody else has. So I said OK, and I finished my cup of coffee, and Mr Fiorentini gave me two packets of cigarettes. We got in the car, and went up into the Lecky Road, and there were armed IRA men all over the place. The girls said some password to them, and we were let through. Then we were let through a second one by Free Derry Corner. Just after that there was a third one – and all hell broke loose. The car was surrounded. I was pulled out and forced onto the ground, and the girls were taken away. ‘Now, I looked and sounded like a British officer; I was about 30, and spoke the Queen’s English, so somebody must have assumed that I was a British officer, or that I was trying to spy on the IRA. My car was taken away, and I was bundled into the back of another car, and I was sat on by about five heavy young men – which was a most horrid thing. I was given a few kicks – not in the balls – but around the back and arms, and I was manhandled across a bit of green in front of the modern Catholic cathedral, into a place where I was sat in a chair, with a lightbulb above me, just like interrogations in films. A couple of fellows were behind me with old-fashioned Sterling machine guns, pointing at the back of my head, and then the most extraordinary sight. A crocodile of about a dozen men entered, all in balaclavas, a pretty shambolic-looking lot. Then an extraordinary character came in, who had the air of a deserter from the army. He was clean, fair-haired and much younger than me.’ (This man would one day rise to political prominence in the republican movement.) ‘The man took position behind my head, drew a pistol from his belt, and asked me various questions – which were pretty banal. Since I wasn’t in the army, and I wasn’t in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he couldn’t get any information out of me. He said, “Your car’s been seen going out of Ebrington Barracks on many occasions, so you must be a spy!” I said to him, “My dear fellow, you’re completely and absolutely crazy! These are my friends. These people were at school with me. Of course I’m going to go and see them and have them to my house. Do you think they’re going to tell me secrets about you? You’d have to be joking – they just don’t do that sort of thing!” Eventually he got fed up talking to me, and I stayed with these fellows guarding me for several hours. There was absolutely no brutality whatsoever, no question. ‘Eventually somebody else came in, and said, “OK, you. We’ll give you back your car” and I was led outside, and there was the car, engine running. The man who had been interrogating me was in an absolute fury. His eyes were just full of fury. He drew his pistol, cocked it, put it beside my head, and this other fellow said, “Oh no! Don’t kill him! We’ve checked him out with the boys in Ardmore, and he and his family have always been decent to people like us. He’s OK.” I remember those words very well; one tends to listen if you think you’re about to be killed. The man was absolutely livid. He put his pistol back in his belt and said, “Fuck off!” So I got in the car and drove away. But I had to ask, “Could you please show me the way out? I’ve never been here before.” And they did – they got into another car and they drove in front of me! They also pinched my cigarettes, which I really objected to. I still didn’t have any cigarettes after the whole bloody night.’ Many years later Beresford-Ash came across his interrogator again. ‘We were in a pizza restaurant one day, eating our nice pizzas, and as I walked through to have a pee, I walked past him. His table had a screen in front, with a bit of ivy on it, and as I went past, I put my fist through the screen, just to annoy him. I don’t know if he saw my face, but he could have seen my fist, all right.’ Thirty years after his experience in the Creggan, Beresford-Ash was again fortunate to escape with his life; between August 1997 and June 1998 his house was fire-bombed three times. He explains, ‘On the feast of the Assumption in August – the “Catholic Twelfth” as it’s called over here – they have a bonfire. People from the local council estate cut down an awful lot of our trees to make the bonfire, and this particularly annoyed me because there is so much dead wood lying about in our woods, all you’ve got to do is go and pick it up. I’d actually help them pick it up and make their bonfire with them – not a hope – they must go and cut down young trees instead. I got fed up with this, and I remonstrated with them.’ He was told, ‘We’ll get you for this!’ One night shortly afterwards Beresford-Ash and his wife were asleep in bed, when ‘there was a crash. It was the hall windows coming in, and petrol bombs landing. I was a damn sight fitter in those days, and I was down in a few seconds. My daughter also came down and, between us, we put the fires out.’ Six months later the house was attacked again. ‘This time it was much more dangerous, because they bust a hole through a window, and put a can of petrol on the window seat. They sprayed paraffin all round it, and set it alight; the idea was that when I came down to put the fire out, it would explode and blow me up, and the house as well. But someone – “the man upstairs” – was looking after me because the petrol can leaked. So when I came downstairs I saw a terrific ball of fire. There were fumes, and smoke, and flames, but I could see the white faces of my ancestors on the walls, and I remember saying to them, “It’s all right, chaps! I’ll save you!” And by God, I bloody well did! I still get quite emotional about that. I went over to pick up the water fire-extinguisher, and my bloody hip dislocated. Agn?s was ringing up the fire brigade in the kitchen, and she heard me yelping, and she thought I’d caught fire, so she came in with a bucket of water. “Darling, don’t throw it over me,” I said, “throw it on the fire!” Then the fire brigade arrived, and they were absolutely superb.’ A few months later Beresford-Ash had a sixtieth-birthday party. ‘The local paper took a picture of Agn?s, myself, and our three daughters outside the house, which they published, and we had a nice birthday lunch. Very soon after that, there was a hell of a thumping on the windows. By this stage we’d got bulletproof security windows, so they couldn’t fire-bomb the house. Instead they lit five fires on the gravel at the front, which represented myself, my wife, and our three children being burned.’ Beresford-Ash is convinced that he knows the identity of the chief culprit: ‘It was all done by the same people, led by the same man, and everybody knew it, the police knew it, it was the joke of the local pub.’ He later met a barrister, and told him the whole story: ‘I said, “For you, in the legal profession, how do you feel about this?” He said, “We know, and our judges know, who has done these things over the years, who these people have killed, and when and how they killed them.” I said, “Look, mate, point of it is, you’re prepared to say that, but then you’re prepared to go back on Monday morning and draw the old pay?” And he said, “Yes. Why not? Because if I didn’t, somebody else worse than me certainly would.” What can you say to that?’ I asked Beresford-Ash whether he considered moving away from Ashbrook after the attacks. ‘What? Leave here? Good God no! My dear Josh! This house has woodworm and dry rot, but, my God, I’m fond of it, and nobody’s going to kick me out of here! My daughter summed it up: after the second petrol bombing, Agn?s was fed up and said we ought to go, but my daughter said, “Come on, Mum! We were here before these people, and we’ll be here after them!”’ Beresford-Ash is a man of great charm, who has made efforts over the years to foster good local relations, and this fact probably saved his life in the Creggan. Nevertheless, his attitude hardens as he discusses the peace process. ‘When the process started, I would wake up in the morning and listen to the news on Radio 4, and think to myself, thank God another soldier or policeman hasn’t been killed. But that has been the only real benefit. Otherwise I consider it the most disgraceful and despicable surrender by the British politicians, the judiciary, the legal profession, and it should have been stopped immediately it started. Because the Queen’s enemies were attacking the Crown forces. They should still be hanged – they’ve done it. And that’s my instinct.’ In Killyleagh I met another man whose family arrived in Ulster four centuries ago. Denys Rowan Hamilton is a man of precise military bearing beneath which lies a charming streak of mischief who, after coming to live in Northern Ireland in 1967, quickly became infuriated by much of what he saw. Born and raised in Scotland, Rowan Hamilton spent his childhood holidays in Ireland, and on leaving the army in his late forties he moved to County Down. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle, a fairy-tale fortress of towers and dogtooth walls that stands above the town. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans shortly their arrival. In 1604 the castle was taken over by Sir James Hamilton, an Anglican from Ayrshire, who was granted extensive lands in Ulster during the first plantation. It has remained in the family ever since. In 2000 Rowan Hamilton passed it on to his son and now lives in a house outside the town, where I kept him from his lunch, urging him to tell of his experiences. ‘When I made up my mind to come here,’ he says, ‘I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. I was going to start a new life. It’s quite a thing to do at 47.’ He was immediately f?ted by well-to-do society: ‘They were saying, “We’ve got to have him!” and it was because I was the young Hamilton of Killyleagh. It really makes me laugh. They didn’t know me at all. I might have been the most ghastly shit.’ Killyleagh Castle, into which the ‘young Hamilton’ was moving, had been requisitioned by the army during the war, and had suffered from years of neglect: ‘My great uncle was clever, he wrote Latin poems and that sort of thing, but he was a useless fellow, and never did a stroke of work. Not much happened when he was in the castle. He sold a farm a year to pay his servants. When I finally took over, there were only twenty-seven acres left out of an estate that once ran up to Bangor. If we hadn’t come along, the castle would never have survived. Now it’s in better nick than it’s been for 150 years. And my son, the first Hamilton in four hundred years to make a penny, has redecorated it very nicely.’ On arriving in Northern Ireland, Denys Rowan Hamilton took an interest in more than just his castle, however. He had entered a world that was quite alien to him: ‘I had arrived from a sane society. This place wasn’t a democracy!’ He remembers meeting a clerk of the works at the council: ‘He would wring his flat cap in humility, asking if I had any jobs for him to do, and then he would start talking about all the dreadful murders of Protestants throughout history. He knew them all. He’d been taught at his mother’s knee how dreadful the Catholics were.’ Rowan Hamilton was furious at much of what he saw and heard, and he freely expressed his views. His stance, he believes, reflected his family’s values: ‘My family had always been moderate and liberal in their views. When Catholics had wanted their own church, the Hamiltons provided them with a place to hold their services.’ Rowan Hamilton was asked to stand as a reforming unionist candidate in the 1969 General Election. ‘I said I would stand. It was totally on principle. I wasn’t a politician, but I couldn’t believe that people could not try to get on with the other side. As soon as it was announced that I would stand, two staunch, bigoted unionists arrived at the castle. They demanded that I stood down. These were “respectable” people, masters of the stag hounds, and they marched towards me, yelling “No Surrender!” I pleaded my case to them, but they were pretty threatening. They told me that my mother would never speak to me again. I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known it would be like this! It was disruptive of the peaceful life that I’d wanted!’ Rowan Hamilton lost the election heavily, but it is a measure of his principle and determination that in a later election he agreed to stand for the Alliance Party, which seeks to bridge the gap between Catholics and Protestants. ‘In the run-up to that election,’ he says, ‘the person who invited me to stand, declined to come out in public and support me. He was frightened and didn’t have the guts to stand up for his views. I would say that I was socially ostracized for my stance.’ This foray into politics placed him in unlikely situations: ‘I found myself taking part in a roadblock for half an hour near Seaforde, at a junction of some importance. I was compelled to do it for political reasons, but I was rather embarrassed. It wasn’t really my thing.’ Rowan Hamilton is not the first member of his family to take a controversial political stance. His great-great-great grandfather, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, had been a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen. The Society, formed in 1791 in Ulster, was a secret organization, intent on creating a single Irish nation, independent of Britain, that would unite Catholics and Protestants. Catholics were subjected to repressive Penal Laws by the British authorities, but the United Irishmen were not Catholics; the original members were Protestants, mostly Presbyterians (known as ‘dissenters’) who were also subjected to discriminatory measures. Many tens of thousands of Presbyterians had left Ulster during the eighteenth century to begin new lives in the American colonies, where they contributed to the revolutionary fervour of the War of Independence. The democratic ideas of Tom Paine that inspired the American revolutionaries also stirred the United Irishmen. It would not be true to say that the bulk of the Ulster Presbyterians were sympathetic to Catholic grievances; the vast majority were sectarian in outlook. Nevertheless, there were those who were keen to sever links with Britain, and a few who were motivated by a desire for government by election and representation. While the Provisional IRA would one day be made up almost exclusively of Catholics, the leaders of the first republican movement to fight for an independent Ireland were Protestants. Archibald Hamilton Rowan was an Anglican, born and raised in England, and educated at Westminster School, where he displayed ‘animal spirits and love of bustle’. His Cambridge tutor was John Jebb, an Irish radical who influenced his thinking, and an acquaintance was Lord Sandwich, with whom he ate an unusual meal of ‘thin slices of bread and butter with cold meat between each’. As a young man he went to live in France, where, during the American War of Independence, he displayed an early radical streak by introducing Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, to two Englishmen who wanted to enlist in the American forces. He came to Ireland in 1783 and became known as a defender of the rights of the oppressed after he espoused the case of a 12-year-old girl, Mary Neal, who had been abducted by the owner of a bawdy house. He became a member of the United Irishmen in November 1791 and wrote of the need for ‘reformation of the present state of the representation of the people’. He took to wandering around Dublin in a green uniform and standing up in theatres and shouting when ‘God Save the King’ was played. In 1794 he was convicted of distributing inflammatory material – a pamphlet entitled ‘Citizens to Arms!’ – and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. While in prison he was regularly visited by a close associate, Theobald Wolfe Tone, an Anglican lawyer from Belfast, who is nowadays the most celebrated of the United Irishmen. Hamilton Rowan asked Wolfe Tone to draft a memorandum to send to revolutionary France, encouraging the French to send an invasion force to Ireland. Wolfe Tone composed the memorandum, which assured the French that they would receive support from ‘the great bulk of the people’: 900,000 Presbyterians ‘from reason and reflection’ and 3,150,000 Catholics ‘from hatred of the English name’. Hamilton Rowan made copies of the memorandum in his own hand – and one of these copies fell into the possession of the British authorities. Realizing that he would be convicted of high treason and executed, he conceived, aided by his wife, a plan to escape from prison. He persuaded his gaoler that he would have to return home briefly in order to sign papers relating to the sale of a property. For a ?100 bribe the gaoler agreed to accompany him to the house and escort him back to prison. This, at least, is the official version; Denys Rowan Hamilton said that his ancestor ‘bribed his gaoler to let him out of prison to screw his wife’. Either way Hamilton Rowan describes in his autobiography what happened next: ‘I then descended from the window by a knotted rope, which was made fast to the bedpost and reached down to the garden. I went to the stable, took my horse, and rode to the head of Sackville Street, where Mat Dowling had appointed to meet me…Some of my friends advised my taking my pistols with me; but I had made up my mind not to be taken alive, so I only put a razor in my pocket.’ Hamilton Rowan was taken first to the seaside house of a United Irishman, and then onto a boat owned by smugglers. As the little vessel passed the west coast of England, it caught sight of the British fleet, but Hamilton Rowan arrived safely in revolutionary France. But his troubles were not at an end. Expecting to be welcomed by the French as a republican hero and an enemy of Britain, he found himself imprisoned by the local authorities on suspicion of being a British spy. He was only released when his plight came to the attention of a prominent official who happened to be Irish. Once his identity had been verified, Hamilton Rowan was presented to Robespierre, the driving force behind the reign of terror that was gripping France. He set about convincing the French to mount an invasion of Ireland, with the aim of securing its independence. His plan was that he himself would lead the invasion; the official who placed the plan before Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety described Rowan Hamilton as ‘the most striking patriot in Ireland’. It must have looked to Rowan Hamilton as though he was destined to become Ireland’s great revolutionary leader, but the plan came to nothing. Robespierre and the Jacobins were overthrown, and Hamilton Rowan became ‘much discontented with the distracted state of Paris, where they were too busy with their own intestine divisions to think of assisting Ireland’. He hurriedly left France for a slightly more established beacon of liberty – America. The experience of living in Paris during the bloody reign of terror, and perhaps also the disappointment of watching his heroic destiny fail to materialize, seems to have dulled Hamilton Rowan’s revolutionary zeal. From Philadelphia he wrote to his wife: ‘I owe to you candidly, when it is of no avail, that my ideas of reform, and of another word which begins with the same letter, are very much altered by living for twelve months in France; and that I never wish to see the one or the other procured by force.’ Nevertheless, within months he had been joined in Philadelphia by Wolfe Tone, whom he offered to introduce to the French Minister to the United States. For a while Wolfe Tone settled down to live as a farmer in Princeton, but he did not admire the attitudes he encountered, describing Americans as ‘a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money’. While Hamilton Rowan remained in America, eking out a living as a farmer, dyer, and brewer, Wolfe Tone sailed to France, where he resumed his efforts on behalf of the Irish people ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils’. Wolfe Tone achieved what Hamilton Rowan had not: he persuaded the French to mount an invasion of Ireland in 1796, which might have succeeded had the thirty-five expeditionary ships, laden with thousands of French troops, not been prevented by bad weather from landing in Bantry Bay in County Cork. Wolfe Tone was on board a French ship during the failed Bantry Bay expedition, and he persuaded Napoleon Bonaparte to launch another invasion fleet in 1798. The United Irishmen attempted to stir up an internal rebellion to coincide with the French invasion, but the government’s network of informers was effective, and the insurrection was ruthlessly put down in most areas. Only in County Wexford did a band of Catholic rebels mount a serious challenge to the army, but their indiscipline and lack of strategy eventually ensured their defeat. A small French fleet landed in County Mayo, but its troops surrendered to government forces when they could find no internal rebellion with which to join. Wolfe Tone himself arrived with a subsequent French expedition, which was defeated by a British fleet in Lough Swilly. He was arrested and taken to Dublin, where he was sentenced to hang. While in custody he slit his throat with a penknife and a week later he died of his wounds. The rebellion of the United Irishmen was at an end, but republicans still gather at Wolfe Tone’s grave in Bodenstown every year to honour the man they revere as the father of republicanism. While Wolfe Tone was attempting to bring revolution to Ireland, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was living a quiet life of near penury in America. At home in Ireland, his wife was attempting to restore his reputation in the hope that he might be allowed to return. He was eventually given permission to come back, first to Europe, then to England, and finally to Ireland. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle in 1806, where he retained his liberal beliefs to the end of his life. He was known as a benevolent landlord who reduced his tenants’ rents during times of economic distress. He also expressed a strong disapproval of slavery; a story in his autobiography recalls an encounter with a slave in New York State in 1799: ‘I lost one of my gloves, and having searched back the road for it in vain, I continued my route. Overtaking a Negro, I threw him the other, saying that “I had lost the fellow on that hill somewhere; that perhaps he might find it, and he never was possessed of such a pair in his life.” The fellow smiled. “No, Master, you not lost it; here it is;” and he took the fellow out of his bosom and gave them both to me. And this man was a slave, whose portion was stripes, and black dog his appellation from a whey-faced Christian!’ Hamilton Rowan died in 1834 at the age of 84. His last public appearance was at a meeting of the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, from which he was borne aloft by a triumphal crowd. Looking back on Hamilton Rowan’s life, William Lecky, the nineteenth-century Irish historian, described him as ‘foolish and impulsive, but also brave, honourable, energetic and charitable’. Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s son reversed the order of the family name, turning Hamilton Rowan into Rowan Hamilton. According to his great-great-grandson Denys, he did this partly to emphasize the Hamilton side of the family and partly to disassociate himself from his radical and embarrassing father. When Denys was at prep school, two American brothers with the surname Hamilton Rowan entered the school, and Denys has little doubt that they are relatives. ‘To me it is quite obvious that Archibald Hamilton Rowan took a common-law wife while he was in America, and started a family, but when I said to the American Hamilton Rowans, “You’re all from the wrong side of the blanket,” they didn’t like it much. Americans can be churchy.’ However fruitful his American legacy, the extent of Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s Irish legacy – or at least the legacy of the United Irishmen – is considerable. Until the 1800 Act of Union, Britain and Ireland were legally distinct kingdoms with separate Parliaments. The Act brought the kingdoms together to create a ‘United Kingdom’. Some Protestants objected to the Act of Union because it removed any prospect of an independent Ireland. And some Catholics welcomed the Act of Union because it offered the possibility of a more tolerant administration. Over time, however, attitudes migrated into those with which we are familiar today; Protestants came to believe that the union with Britain would guarantee them their ascendancy, and Catholics came to believe that their condition could only be improved by a repeal of the union. These beliefs lie at the very heart of the two communities’ modern identities. Republican movements arose in the years after the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion; the forerunner of the modern IRA was the Fenian Brotherhood, named after Cuchulainn’s band of warriors, the Fianna. Formed in the aftermath of the Irish famine of 1845–51, during which the population of Ireland fell by as many as two million, the Fenians planted a bomb in a wheelbarrow outside Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867. The bomb killed six people and injured hundreds of others. Rumours spread through London of further planned Fenian attacks, sparking widespread panic. When, six years later, a bridge over Regent’s Canal was destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder on a barge, it was immediately believed – wrongly – to be the work of Fenians: troops based at the nearby Albany Street barracks were mobilized to counteract the supposed Irish threat. Such fears would return a century later, when the Provisional IRA started planting bombs in England. And to this day ‘Fenian’ is a derogatory term used by Protestants to describe a Catholic. In 1886 the Liberal Party in Westminster, led by William Gladstone, introduced a bill attempting to grant Home Rule to Ireland. Home Rule would have amounted to limited self-government, an early form of devolution. Gladstone’s bill failed and Ulster unionists proceeded to do everything they could to prevent another bill from succeeding. The Presbyterians and Anglicans of Ulster had come to consider themselves defenders of the British empire, fearful for their prosperity and heritage in a Catholic-dominated Ireland. As another Home Rule bill passed through the House of Commons in 1913, a quarter of a million Protestant Ulstermen signed a covenant – some in their own blood – pledging to resist it. An Ulster Volunteer Force of 100,000 men was created, armed with weapons smuggled in from Germany, ready to fight for Ulster’s future. But as the prospect of civil war loomed, the attention of all parties was diverted by the outbreak of a bigger conflict – the First World War. The implementation of Home Rule was delayed until after the end of the war, and young men from both sides of the Irish divide joined the British army; unionists in order to prove their loyalty to the King, nationalists in order to earn the right to have Home Rule implemented once the Great War was over. On 24 April 1916, at the very height of the war, an event took place in Dublin which had a profound effect on the Irish people, whose attitudes were, to quote Yeats, ‘changed utterly’. A small number of rebels, led by Patrick Pearse – a poet and schoolmaster who once wrote: ‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; slavery is one of them’ – seized public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the formation of ‘the Provisional Government of Ireland’. The rebellion was put down, and its leaders, including Pearse, were executed as traitors. The almost mystical influence that Pearse has come to exert on the modern republican movement was brought home to me by one republican, who told me this story. ‘Patrick Pearse had no republican background. His father was an Englishman. But when he walked down the street he saw the kids in their bare feet on the cobblestones, and their feet hacked with darkened blood. And the kids were playing, and singing about the Grand Old Duke of York, a bastard who had them shoeless and poverty-stricken in their own country. And he went up the stairs, and his brother Willie followed him up and said, “What’s wrong, Patrick?’ He said, “I’ve seen a terrible thing. Children, not fed properly, with their feet hacked, glorifying the Grand Old Duke of York.” Pearse was a sensitive man, and an educated human being, and he was choked up, and the two men hugged, and swore that they would never desist until English rule in Ireland had ceased. It was the last straw. And the last straw wasn’t theological or cultural. It was as simple as that.’ Following the executions of Pearse and the other rebels, Irish expectations changed. No longer was Home Rule considered a sufficient ambition. The national objective became full independence. For two years, between 1919 and 1921, a war (known by one side as the Anglo-Irish War and by the other as the War of Independence) was fought between the British government and the guerrilla IRA, until a truce was called. A treaty was signed which created the Irish Free State, a dominion state, similar in status to Canada, but not the republic for which the IRA had been fighting. Michael Collins, who negotiated the treaty on behalf of the republicans, argued that the treaty gave the Irish ‘the freedom to win freedom’. Other republicans took the view that it represented a betrayal of their principles. A bitter rift developed which gave way to a bloody civil war between recent brothers-in-arms. Yet as republicans argued about the constitutional status of the Free State, they barely questioned another result of the treaty: the formation of a northern state for the Protestants of Ulster. The new state of Northern Ireland consisted of only six of the nine counties of the old province of Ulster, carefully chosen by unionists to ensure that the new state was large enough to be politically and economically viable, but small enough to embrace a large Protestant majority. Northern Ireland was granted its own Parliament, meaning that it was no longer subject to direct rule from Westminster – and so, with a certain irony, the province that had vowed to take up arms to resist Home Rule became the only part of Ireland actually to receive Home Rule. The lack of vocal objection from republicans to the creation of Northern Ireland may have been because they expected a forthcoming Boundary Commission to reduce its size to an unviable four counties, forcing it to reintegrate with the Free State. But in the event the Boundary Commission merely ratified the existing border. More than one present-day republican would tell me, with great regret, that had Michael Collins suspected that the border would remain unchanged, he would never have signed the treaty. Once in place, the government of Northern Ireland became, in the words of its first Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. It viewed itself as an answer to the Free State’s Catholic government. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, sincerely believed that the partition of Ireland would finally solve the ‘Irish problem’, but hundreds of years of antipathy were not to be cancelled out by the stroke of a Boundary Commissioner’s pen. Throughout the Troubles, republicans in Northern Ireland considered the results of the 1918 General Election and the 1920 Local Government Elections – the very last all-Ireland elections – as their mandate for a unified, independent Ireland. In those elections supporters of Irish independence won a majority of votes across the entire island. As a result, say republicans, the subsequent partition of the country was unlawful, and successive IRA campaigns aimed at reversing partition have been legitimate. Yet in the 1918 election unionist candidates won twenty-two out of twenty-nine constituencies in the north-eastern counties. Does this then confer on unionists the right to live in Ulster under British rule? The traditional republican view is that unionists are Irish men and women who will one day wake up to their true Irish identity, just as the United Irishmen once did. Unionists have little time for such an analysis. So far as they are concerned, they are loyal subjects living in a legitimate state, with a right to choose their own sovereignty. There has been a long tradition of settlers arriving in Ulster, and that tradition has continued to the present day. Andy Park is a Presbyterian, born and raised in Glasgow, who decided to come to live in Northern Ireland in the early Seventies because ‘I was a loyalist, and I felt that my country was under threat. I felt that my culture and heritage was disappearing here.’ I went to visit Park at his smart home on a newly built estate in Lisburn. I arrived much later than I had intended, after setting off late and then being held up by a series of police roadblocks, but Park and his wife, Mary, could not have been friendlier. Park has a very cheeky, boyish manner, and I felt relaxed talking to him, but whenever I challenged him, he would stand his ground with a vehemence that made me wonder whether I was offending him. I don’t think I was, but his is the passion of a man who has devoted his life to a cause, and that passion is not easily switched off, even over tea and KitKats, while a cat snoozes on his lap. Park had a ‘straight type of Scottish Presbyterian upbringing’ in Glasgow. ‘As a young teenager my Sunday consisted of Boys’ Brigade Bible class between ten and eleven. Then I went to church. After that I had the Church Youth Fellowship, and then I had Sunday School. I came home from Sunday School, had something to eat, and then me and a couple of my friends went to a wee Apostolic church Sunday School from three to four. At half past six I went back to the Fellowship, and that was my Sunday. And we weren’t allowed out to play. We had very clear guidelines on what was right and what was wrong.’ Members of his family had moved from Ulster to Scotland over the previous century, and Park was enlisted in the ‘Cradle Roll’ of the Orange Order before he was even born. He became a member of the junior Orange Order when he was about seven, and later joined an Orange flute band: ‘I learnt to read and appreciate music. I would never have got that at school.’ His father left the Order because of the friendships he had made with Catholics during the war, when he was fighting in Italy with an Irish regiment. ‘But,’ says Park, ‘he was still supportive, and he’d go to the Orange parades.’ Park began work in the shipyard in Clydebank, like his father before him, but the shipyards began to close and he found himself out of work, so he joined the Royal Engineers. ‘When the Troubles started, there were people in the army who held republican views, and I felt challenged, so I put photographs from the Belfast Telegraph over my bed on 12 July [the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne] and I was told to take them down.’ He was sent to Northern Ireland with the Royal Engineers: ‘I did three tours. The second tour was an interesting one because I was stationed in Lurgan, and I let it be known locally that I was an Orangeman, and I was invited to an Orange meeting that nobody knew about. I would have been in trouble if the army had found out.’ Soldiers were supposed to be impartial; their role was to keep the peace between the sides. Active participation in the Orange Order hardly constituted impartiality. When he left the army, Park moved to Northern Ireland because he felt his country was under threat. I asked him what he means when he says ‘my country’. He explained, ‘I’m British and I will defend my right to be British. I believe in the British way of life, I believe in the sense of justice and fairness that British society gives me. It’s not religious, it’s not sectarian, and it’s not racist. It gives me my whole value system, the whole being and identity of who I am.’ Later in our talk Park was to describe his membership of the Orange Order in almost identical terms: ‘Orangeism is what gave me my value system, who I am today, gave me my roots, gave me my identity, my morals. It’s a camaraderie, a fellowship.’ The key words here are ‘camaraderie’ and ‘fellowship’. National identity is a very nebulous concept; Park’s sense of sharing values with others who describe themselves as British may to be enough to give him a British identity, just as sharing values with those who describe themselves as Orangemen gives him an Orange identity. But I wanted to dig a little deeper. If people across the United Kingdom nowadays describe themselves as Scottish, as Welsh, as Londoners, but rarely as British, does it occur to him that the unionists of Northern Ireland are becoming isolated in stressing this identity? ‘Yes, I’ve questioned this myself,’ he says, ‘Sometimes I feel more British than what the English do. I accept that. I think that’s because we felt under threat for the last hundred years, so we said, “This is who we are, and what we are, and you’re not taking it away from me!”’ Britishness in this context could be construed as a negative: as a way of saying that, whatever we are, we are not Irish. But Park is adamant that his Britishness is far from negative: ‘Britishness is about openness, it’s about giving freedom to all. That’s what William of Orange stood for – freedom for all faiths. It’s not just a bland “I’m British” and it’s not a white Anglo-Saxon thing either.’ When I asked Park how Scottish he feels, and how Northern Irish, he answered, ‘Being British doesn’t divorce me from my Scottishness, and it doesn’t divorce me from my thirty-seven years in Northern Ireland.’ He tells me the story of a loyalist politician who travelled to the United States several years earlier, where he was challenged by an Irish American on the subject of his identity. The politician said, ‘You identify yourself as an Irish American when you’re three or four generations down the line, and yet you say it’s wrong for me to call myself British! Why can I not identify myself as British Irish?’ I asked Park if he remembered what was in his head was when he settled in Northern Ireland in 1972. ‘I wanted to come over and fight the war. If I had any skills, I wanted to bring them over to Northern Ireland. There was no use me sitting in a pub in Glasgow, talking about it.’ What does he mean by ‘fight the war’? ‘I believed that the British army, for various reasons, wasn’t defending Protestant people, either by government restraints or in personal restraints. Some of the squaddies were, in my eyes, republican sympathizers. That challenged me very much, so I came over.’ He tells me that he did not join a paramilitary organization. Given that he had spoken of the need to ‘fight the war’, I asked him why not, and he told me, ‘You’re trying to make a distinction between being a member and not being a member. There’s maybe no distinction. I maybe have given tacit support – and maybe more than tacit support – without being a member. So don’t assume because I wasn’t a member that I wasn’t doing things.’ Park calls himself a loyalist. I asked him what this means. ‘A loyalist is somebody who wants to maintain the union with Britain and will go to lengths to maintain that union.’ What lengths? ‘Defending the community. Because we felt under daily threat.’ Park describes his politics as left-of-centre, and in recent years he has been an influential member of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which once represented the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but has proved forward-thinking in its policies. The PUP has strongly supported the peace process and attempted to forge links between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Its ideal is an inclusive socialist United Kingdom. I asked Park whether there was a contradiction between his loyalism – which would seem to have conservative overtones – and socialism. ‘Most of the victims and perpetrators of this dirty war came from the working classes. Not too many middle-class people got their hands dirty. I’m not part of any Protestant ascendancy! As a working-class Prod, where’s my ascendancy? I don’t own a big house! And my daughter can’t be Queen of England because she’s a Presbyterian! I’m a dissenter! I started off in a worse place than the Roman Catholics did – at least they had a title! Presbyterianism is the core in Northern Ireland.’ In January 1976 Park was badly injured in an explosion in the Klondyke Bar in Belfast. He tells the story: ‘People came from the IRA to bomb a pub in Sandy Row. The Klondyke was next to the bridge, and it was an opportunity for them because there were no visible guards, and they placed the bomb inside the door. I was standing just the other side of the door with my two mates when the bomb went off. I remember a flash; there was one of these gas fires in the pub and I had a vague thought something had happened with the fire. Up until a few years ago, I had a picture in my head of flying through the air – but I spoke to an ambulance driver who said, “Andy, it didn’t happen that way. We dug you out. The roof caved in and the bar came on top of you.” I’ve never read about the bomb, and I never saw a picture of it until recently.’ Park was in the Royal Victoria Hospital for almost a year. He lost part of his thighs and one hip, and had steel callipers on both legs for eight years. The initial medical view was that one leg would have to be amputated, but the leg was saved. Park was bedridden for three months. ‘When I started putting my legs over the bed, just to sit – the blood rushing down was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.’ He remembers incidents from his time in hospital. ‘Just after the bomb, there was a guy next to me who was dying, and his sister was a nun. They were sitting there going through the rosary beads, and oh! Can you understand the anger, resentment, hatred I had for all things Roman Catholic? I couldn’t distinguish between Roman Catholicism and the IRA. They were all the same. It was so hard. And then I remember the two night nurses. One night a bomb went off right outside the hospital and one of the nurses sat with me the whole night, did not move from my bed, comforted me, talked to me. I was… Jesus…I was almost hanging from the ceiling. I later learnt that it was an IRA bomb and the bomber had blown himself up. I’m sorry to say, when I found that out it gave me a sense of satisfaction.’ Park’s wife Mary would come to visit him twice a day in hospital, even while she was pregnant with their son. ‘I’d give her a tongue-lashing if she was late. She brought me pieces of chicken and steak, and I wasn’t grateful at all. The nurses would give me a bottle of Guinness to build me up, and my wife used to bring me a half-bottle of whisky or vodka, so I was drinking when I was still in hospital on medication. The only reason I wasn’t falling about drunk because I was already lying down.’ Two of Park’s friends died as a result of the explosion. One, John Smiley, was killed at the time; the other, Jackie Bullock, lost both of his legs, and drank himself to death over the next two years. Once he was out of hospital, Park began drinking several bottles of vodka a day. He describes his state of mind: ‘Turmoil, hatred, anger. I hated them all. Hated them with a vengeance. I lay in bed at night, planning how I was going to get my revenge. I went through scenario after scenario, finding out where they lived, how I was going to visit them. Revenge, total revenge. And I became an alcoholic. It killed the pain. And the uselessness. I felt useless. Worthless. Even when I started on the road to physical recovery, I wasn’t achieving what I set out to do, and it was hard for the wife and the family. I’ll be straight with you – if the roles were reversed, I don’t think I’d have been around to take the abuse. I wasn’t physical, but I was sarcastic, cutting to the bone with a remark. I wasn’t grateful at all to be alive. When I stopped drinking in 1984, I was six and a half stone.’ He explains how he managed to stop drinking: ‘One time I was in hospital for about ten days, I’d burnt the gullet of my stomach lining with alcohol. The doctor was absolutely brilliant. She turned around to me and she said, “Andy, would you like to see someone who deals with alcohol-related illnesses?” She didn’t say to me I was drinking too much, didn’t say I was an alcoholic, and the upshot of that was I went into a mental home in Down-patrick, and I was there for nearly four months drying out and detoxing and things like that. And through that I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. It told me to get a sponsor, somebody you can identify and talk with, and the strange thing was that my first and only sponsor in AA was a Roman Catholic, a high member in the Gaelic Athletic Association – and I was sharing secrets with him that I hadn’t shared with any person in my life. That was changing for me, and I became a twelve-step carer, I did prison visits, and I was also very heavy into politics.’ Park might have been sorting out his own chaos, but Northern Ireland remained a chaotic place to live. ‘Everything became normal. That’s the crazy thing. You’d just think, there’s a bomb over there, I’ll cut down this way instead. Near the end of the Troubles my little sister came over to visit me from Scotland, and she brought a friend. One day there was a soldier lying in my garden, and I brought them home, and we had to step over the soldier to open the front door. The wee friend started getting in hysterics, saying, “There’s a man lying in your garden with a gun!” I goes, “Aye, it’s a soldier. It’s all right.’ It wasn’t until later on that I saw that this wasn’t normal. We never ventured outside of our own immediate areas. That wee geographical circle became your world. You wouldn’t go into town after five o’clock, and there were no buses on. Being aware of where you could go, and where you couldn’t go, became a natural instinct. You didn’t even think about it. It’s why I say that everybody in Northern Ireland has been a victim of this war.’ When Park travelled across to Scotland, he took his Belfast habits with him. ‘I went out shopping in Glasgow, and when I came back to the car, I was down on my hands and knees checking underneath the car. Mum said, “What are you doing?” so I pretended I’d seen a flat tyre. Once when I went to get a drink with my dad, a car backfired, and I assumed the position down on my right knee. My dad didn’t say anything.’ Park became the chairman of the Ulster Clubs movement. The movement was intended to unite loyalist groups against government moves to increase links between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and to provide an association for loyalists unwilling to join a paramilitary group. In September 1988 the movement’s treasurer, Colin Abernethy, a close friend of Park, was shot dead by the IRA on a commuter train. ‘Colin was travelling to his work, and as the train drew in at Lambeg station, two guys dressed as postmen got up and shot him in the head. The statement came out that they’d killed the leader of the Ulster Clubs movement, but that was me. My son Andrew and Colin were very close. During that week Colin had come up with two fish tanks and all the equipment, said he’d be up next week to bring the fish. Andrew and Colin were both into tropical fish. Andrew took it quite badly at the time. The visual impact was that he lost all interest in tropical fish, and didn’t set up the tank. He was spending more and more time in the house, you know, we thought it was him just growing up, his adolescence. I was getting heavily involved in the loyalist movement in my politics, and there were threats to my life, but I was trying to keep that away from him.’ One day Park received a message from his son’s school. ‘We went up to the school, and the teacher said, “Are you aware that Andrew is taking on your security?” He was getting up at seven o’clock in the morning, looking underneath the car, and on the nights I wasn’t in he was sitting at the window waiting for me to come back. Mary was working as a nurse in Musgrave Park Hospital, and Andrew said to her, “Would you not give up that job, Mum? Because if anything happened to Daddy I wouldn’t know what to do.” I mean that came as a big, big blow to me because I thought I was keeping that side of my life away from the family.’ Years later, in 1996, when a bomb in Canary Wharf in London broke the IRA ceasefire, Andrew reacted badly: ‘I was going up the stairs, and Andrew was coming down when we heard the news. Andrew would have been 20, a big, strapping lad, six foot one, and he wrapped his arms around me and started crying, and he said, “No, it’s not starting again, Daddy, is it?” and I had to assure him that everything was all right. That’s the scars that people don’t see. At that time I was doing peace work, and it was risky, and if my own community was to find out who I was talking to, it would have been pretty bad. It started to edge out that I was doing these sorts of things, and we had a family conference and Andrew turned around and said, “Dad, how can you talk to these bastards? They blew you up, they killed your mates!” And that came as a shock to me because here was me, I was moving from one end of the sphere to the other, and trying to look at dialogue and mediation, and here was my son stuck with my pain, my anger. For our children, they’ve seen the aftermath of it, and we need to keep a cycle going where their children don’t see physical force or violence.’ When I asked Park how his experiences have affected his loyalism, he told me, ‘I’m still a loyalist, but now we can look at how we can achieve our aspirations in a different way. We don’t need to kill and maim and blow each other up for it. There’s a lot of scars out there, I mean I’m still living with the scars, I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I get into depressions, I shut myself away for days at end, but at the end of the day it’s people like me and other people who do this work, it’s the only way forward. If I relate it to how I felt in 1972, it was important for me to come over and fight the war for my culture, and I think it’s also incumbent on me to fight for peace.’ I asked him whether genuine politics has come to Northern Ireland. ‘We need to move into normal politics,’ he replied. ‘We’re only starting – we’re learners at the political game. We’ve got to learn what democracy is. We need to get involved in civic responsibility. I think working-class Prods have been disenfranchised from civic society. My party, the Progressive Unionist Party, is a social-justice party. Left-of-centre politics: we try to look at bread-and-butter issues. We believe in maintaining the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but we believe that’s done and dusted. We try to be broad-based, and we stress the importance of health and education and real issues.’ Does he feel threatened by the possibility that Northern Ireland might one day become part of a united Ireland? ‘Where are we going to be in fifty years politically? If the present circumstances were to still exist, then yes, possibly I would feel threatened, and maybe wanting to take up arms again. But life changes. Everything’s up for grabs within politics, and the onus is on republicanism to persuade me that I’d be better off. One thing I’ve not heard in all the talk of a united Ireland is what will they do about the northern Prods? Do they think northern Prods are going to roll over, have our bellies rubbed, and we’ll be all right? I want to know where I am in this republican vision.’ Park fears a united Ireland in which unionists and loyalists would have little significance. He tells me of a recent attempt to mount an Orange parade in Dublin. ‘Remember our headquarters was once in Dawson Street in Dublin. So nowadays we’d get a wee corner of the road where we’re not significant? That’s not how I want to practise my culture, my heritage, my beliefs. We’ll get a wee corner, with another corner for the Moslems, and another corner for the Jews. That’s not what I want. I want my kids to be proud of who they are and what they are.’ So is he frightened of becoming a minority in his own land? ‘No, I’m not saying that. I am a minority in a certain sense. If Catholics and republicans want to be the majority, are they going to do the same things that the majority did to them, or they perceive the majority did to them?’ Despite his obvious concerns for the future, Park echoes the view of Ian Paisley about society coming together: ‘I see an “usness” creeping in. I see a “we” instead of an “us” and “them”. Maybe I’m being optimistic. But life’s made me pragmatic. If I think too much about the past, I get hurt and pain. Now the future is what’s important. I want to make sure that nobody else goes through that hurt and pain.’ As I say goodbye to him, Park tells me that there is stuff in his past that he will never divulge. ‘I’ll take it to my maker, and that includes people that I’ve talked to, and influence that I’ve had.’ Andy Park, with his enthusiasm for life, his sudden bouts of intensity, his simultaneous openness and secrecy, his desire for tolerance and understanding within an unrepentant ideological framework, has been a good introduction to the Northern Ireland state of mind. Six decades before the Troubles began, G. K. Chesterton wrote: The Great Gaels of Ireland, The men that God made mad For all their wars were merry, And all their songs were sad. I thought about this ditty as I drove away from Lisburn. Chesterton may not have had the Troubles in mind when he wrote it but, still, having spoken to Andy Park, it bothered me. Park’s injuries, the deaths of his friends, and his part – whatever it may have been – in ‘fighting the war’ did not strike me as very merry. And no matter what God made the people of Northern Ireland, and no matter what the newspaper reports would have had us believe, it was surely not going to be possible to waive an airy hand, and dismiss them as ‘mad’. Passionate, prejudiced, charming, conditioned, self-important, victimized, stubborn, self-righteous. But mad? 3 THE STATE (#ulink_9d12336c-b1f9-53cc-ae7a-a9791c62e810) The Wild Birds Protection Act, passed by the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1931, was a significant piece of legislation – for birds and for nationalists. For birds it created designated sanctuaries. For nationalists it was the only bill sponsored by their political party to become law between the creation of the state of Northern Ireland and the suspension of its Parliament in 1972. Northern Ireland was a strange democratic anomaly for the first fifty years of its existence, demonstrating more concern for the welfare of curlews than Catholics. Throughout that half-century Northern Ireland was governed by a single party – the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). For almost all of that time the UUP had complete freedom to implement its policies. The Nationalist Party refused to participate in the 1921 Parliamentary election, believing the state to be illegitimate. This effectively left Catholics unrepresented, although four years later the party changed its policy and won a number of seats. Nevertheless, the Nationalist Party provided only slight opposition. It was disunited and ineffective, overwhelmed by the sheer determination of unionism to mould a state in its own image. As Britain looked the other way, unionists set about creating a democracy unlike any other in western Europe. Fierce determination was not surprising among a Protestant people who had watched the extent of their authority steadily diminish on the island of Ireland. Brought up on folk memories of the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, events in which their ancestors had resisted Catholic challenges to their authority, they had lately watched their dominion shrink to just six of the nine counties of Ulster, while the Catholics received a Free State to the south. In the first year and a half of its existence Northern Ireland was rocked by a level of bloodshed not to be repeated until the modern Troubles. Hundreds of people were killed, some by IRA incursions over the border, most by internal sectarian violence. The disorder added to unionists’ insecurities and hardened their attitudes. At political meetings they carried placards bearing such legends as ‘What We Have We Hold!’ and ‘No Surrender!’ They feared the Catholics in their midst, and they mistrusted the British government, which they believed would only act halfheartedly – if at all – to ensure their survival. In their suspicion and cautious aggression they were probably not very different from their ancestors who, hundreds of years earlier, had arrived in Ulster to stake their claim in the midst of a resentful enemy. To ensure their survival, unionists introduced their own security measures. The mixed Royal Ulster Constabulary and the exclusively Protestant ‘B Special’ reserve were created to defend against insurrection, and the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, 1922, was passed, giving the right to intern suspects without trial and allowing juryless courts to order the flogging of a prisoner. Over and above these powers, however, that Act – which remained in force until 1973 – gave the Home Affairs Minister the right to ‘make any regulation at all necessary to preserve law and order’. These were desperate measures introduced by desperate people. When the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble accepted his Nobel Prize for peace in 1998, he made a speech offering an insight into unionist thinking over the previous eighty years. ‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house,’ he said, ‘but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.’ It does not take much imagination to see why Protestants would have been happy to keep the house cold, even if some unionists still deny that the temperature was ever turned down. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2001, Gregory Campbell, the Democratic Unionist Party member for Londonderry, said that ‘the acceptance of that premise has done untold harm in the past 30 years’. Yet the Northern Ireland government did employ some very brazen political strategies to retain its mastery. In 1923 the system of proportional representation, which had been introduced by the British government throughout Ireland to safeguard the interests of minority communities, was abolished for local elections. Nationalists were swiftly relieved of their majorities in over half of the councils over which they had control. Unionists were so pleased with this outcome that proportional representation was subsequently abolished for Parliamentary elections as well. One factor that helped the unionist cause was the fact that only the owners or tenants of a house had the right to vote in local elections. Sub-tenants, lodgers, and others did not. Not only that, but for every additional ?10-a-year valuation of a house after the initial ?10, additional voters could be appointed up to a maximum of six. This meant two things: first, that poorer people could not vote at all, and second, that wealthier people could vote several times. And of course the poorer people tended to be Catholic while the wealthier tended to be Protestant. Another rotten measure was the system of gerrymandering in areas where unionists were outnumbered. This involved the reorganization of boundaries within districts. The most famous example of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland – although by no means the only one – occurred in Derry, where a predominantly Catholic populace would consistently find itself returning a Protestant-dominated council. In the build-up to the 1938 elections, the number of council wards in Derry was reduced from five to three. Almost the entire Catholic population of 9,500 voters found itself crammed into the South ward, which returned eight councillors, while 7,500 Protestant voters were divided between the North ward and the Waterside ward, which between them returned twelve councillors. At a 1936 public inquiry into the arrangement – whose findings were ultimately ignored by the Northern Ireland government – the Catholic barrister Cyril Nicholson asked the unionist councillor James Welch how the arrangement looked to him. ‘It looks a bit slightly out of proportion,’ Welch admitted. Not only was gerrymandering a bit slightly out of proportion, but it laid the ground for future trouble. It encouraged the development of further segregation and all the disharmony this entailed. It also meant that when opportunities arose to build houses for Catholics within the ‘wrong’ ward, these opportunities were rejected, however badly the housing was needed. The need to maintain political control would always trump the desire to improve the conditions of ‘the other lot’. So it was that unionism remained solid – even as trouble was being stored up. But it would be wrong to think that the standard of living of most unionists was good. For the gentry and the professional classes it might have been, but, for the working classes of both traditions, poverty was a reality. Unemployment was high, incomes were considerable lower than those in Britain, and the standard of housing and public amenities was poor. Many country farmhouses and town terrace houses had no mains water or provision for gas lighting until well into the twentieth century. Protestants, you might say, were second-class citizens, while Catholics were a class below that. With regards to employment, though, it was better to be second- than third-class. Many firms employed almost exclusively Protestant workforces. An Englishman who came to Northern Ireland in the late Fifties to work as a personnel manager relates how a Ministry of Labour official taught him to distinguish Protestant names from Catholic names, and then advised him to select only the Protestants. Even within a mixed business certain jobs might be reserved for Protestants. I was told the story of a young Catholic, working in a shirt factory, who had taken his own life after being refused a position as a shirt cutter. Afterwards a friend remarked angrily, ‘He should have known he wasn’t ever going to be permitted to be a shirt cutter! Catholics don’t get those jobs!’ So far as many unionists were concerned, the fact that Catholics did not ‘get those jobs’ was not a matter of discrimination at all. It was simply the way things were. Many of the ‘unionist jobs’ had been done by the same families for many years and when a position became available a worker would recommend a friend or relative. There was no question of Catholics even applying for these jobs. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, whose huge yellow cranes still dominate the Belfast landscape, is a case in point. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholics were expelled from jobs in the yard during periods of sectarian unrest. Over time they stopped applying for those jobs, and they became the natural preserve of unionists without active bias having to be applied. Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff in 1937. He described conditions in the yard to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘People used to earn their pay, or they didn’t get it, and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it. That meant working in all sorts of weather, where it poured all day, you got wet right through to the skin. You sat in the open, taking your tea from an old can, out between boats in the cold and wet. You only got a half an hour break, and there wasn’t much to do other than religious services, or playing rubby-dub with dice. If you went out, you had no sickness pay, there was no holiday pay, just the wages you had.’ Murray explains how workers had to keep on the right side of the foremen: ‘The foremen were a queer lot. Hard. Some of them really took on the mantle of God. If they took a dislike to you, you were out for life. If they didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out. They seemed to be picked for their hardness, to be able to kick people up the backside. And there was a lot of things that went on that was very dishonest. One foreman used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job. In those days people were more humble than what they should have been because they were driven by management and by foremen. Even with getting the wages out of the shipyard, the wages weren’t great and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’ Having experienced such conditions, some Protestants feel frustration at being told that Catholics were discriminated against. They look back on their own lives and wonder how they can be considered fortunate. But, in a place as economically deprived as Northern Ireland, even assured basic housing or the guarantee of a lowly paid job in industry could amount to meagre privilege. Higher up the ladder, the senior posts in the local authorities were filled almost exclusively by Protestants, as were the upper ranks of the civil service, and nearly all the judgeships. I was told of a Catholic lawyer who was passed over for a position as a judge because the incumbent Prime Minister had already nominated one Catholic judge for a judicial post ‘and couldn’t bring himself to nominate another’. The National Health Service was similarly blighted. A nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, which according to my tour guide had been a model of equality, remembers: ‘There was a vacancy for a sister. Someone said to matron that this very good staff nurse would make an excellent sister, and was told, “There can’t be two Catholic sisters in one department.”’ She also recalls a Catholic doctor who emigrated to Australia ‘because he wasn’t getting any promotion’. Finding routes barred to them, Catholics often had to use their wits to create work for themselves. According to a retired civil servant, ‘The Protestant community relied on the thought that the government was their thing, and it would look after them. Employment in the old days was very much on the lines that “Willie” is retiring after many years working in the workshop, and he says he’s got a nephew, “Sammy”, who’s very much the man. But things were different in the Catholic community. For many years Catholics thought we’d better get on and do things for ourselves. And nowadays the Catholic working class is more up and doing than their Protestant equivalent.’ Some attitudes have clearly not changed a great deal over the centuries. In the seventeenth century the expression ‘nits make lice’ was used to justify the killings of Irish children by settlers. In the 1930s the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, warned the Australian Prime Minister to watch the Catholics in his country. ‘They breed like bloody rabbits,’ he said. And in 2009 I was told a story about a recent Protestant wedding in Armagh. Several guests had been sitting in a limousine in formal dress, when a group of Catholics spotted them and started shouting abuse. A girl in the back of the car leant forward and said to the driver, ‘You’d better drive into them! They’ll just breed!’ These are variations on a theme – and they could be multiplied ad infinitum – but they reflect only one side of a mutual antipathy. Northern Ireland was built on sectarianism, both Orange and Green, with roots hundreds of years old. Sectarianism is the raw essence of today’s identities. Years ago it was expressed freely and without apology. Nowadays it is reserved for those who feel the same way, or else it is turned into a joke. Twice I was told the same joke, once by each side: Q. How do you know ET’s a Catholic/Protestant? A. Because he fucking looks like one. Probably the most shocking joke I heard in Northern Ireland was repeated to me by a Catholic man who had heard it from one of the Shankill Butchers when they briefly shared a prison wing: Butcher: What’s the difference between a Catholic and an onion? Man: I don’t know. Butcher: I cry when I slice up an onion. While I was in Belfast I met a man named Joe Graham. He is a writer, historian, storyteller, and a veteran of the civil rights movement. He is, above all, an old-fashioned republican and political activist. I sat interviewing him, chain-smoking his cigarettes, in his tidy house in Andersonstown filled with Country and Western memorabilia that he picks up on trips to Nashville. The only part of the house that isn’t tidy is a cubby-hole beside his study which is crammed with shelves of books, audio tapes, and videos on Irish history, and equipment for the interviews he records himself. Graham is a friendly man in his mid-sixties with wavy grey hair. He has a huge physical presence, and the words ‘Belfast’ and ‘Ireland’ tattooed on his hands. While I could not mistake his allegiance, he had a knack for consistently scuppering my preconceptions – by suddenly telling me, for example, that in his younger days he modelled himself on the pop singer Tommy Steele. Joe Graham is very good company, which was just as well because I arrived thinking that we would chat for an hour and eventually staggered out of his front door ten hours later. He began by sharing his memories of growing up in Ballymurphy, a housing estate in west Belfast, built after the war. Ballymurphy is now an urbanized republican area, but back then it was a mixed area on the edge of open country. Graham remembers: ‘We were the last houses before the countryside. The mountains came right down on us. The big mill dam. The water was crystal. Two rounds of bread, a milk bottle of cold tea, and away you went up into the mountains. All the local kids. Ten of you, you didn’t know who was who, running about, swimming. There was an old mill, and the part that housed the big wheel was the dungeon. It was a beautiful thing of childhood – but every now and again you’d get a reminder, and you were acute enough to take it.’ He describes a reminder: ‘One beautiful sunny morning when I was 11 I went up the street. All my mates were Protestant, because all our street was Protestant except us. So I went to wee Billy Smith’s house, and Mrs Smith said to me, “He’s away out, Joe, son.” I said, “Dead on.” The same thing happened at the next house. Then, at Jimmy Reilly’s house, I knocked on the back door: no answer. His Aunt Tilly was at work, but Jimmy and his wee sister should have been there. Where were they all? So I ran down the dividing fence to the garden next door. Just as I vaulted over the fence into that garden, I saw the curtains flicker in Jimmy’s bedroom. So I came back over the fence, climbed on top of the coal shed, leaned over and banged Jimmy’s bedroom window. He opened it – and it was all the boys sitting there, red, white, and blue everywhere. “What the fuck’s going on?” “Joe! Joe! Get off!” they said to me. So I jumped down and stood in the garden, until Jimmy came down. He said, “We’re going to let you in, but for God’s sake, don’t let my dad know.” “Why? What’s going on?” “We’re making flags!” There was a big football match at Windsor Park, the Six Counties versus England – so they were on a winner either way. I went up into the bedroom and there were thousands of these mini Union Jacks, and the boys were on a couple of pennies each to staple them together. But that wee Fenian bastard Graham wasn’t to be seen about the place. Hurtful. Because these were my best mates. Hurtful. But I helped them to staple these things. And then, in turn, I said, “Don’t tell my mummy and daddy I helped with these…” But it meant fuck all. Even now, it would mean fuck all. A man trying to make a few quid for his family selling Union Jacks? So what? But the sad thing was that in doing so, he hurt a child. He marked a child – and he did no good to the Protestant kids, because they – in adulthood – must feel guilty.’ For Graham the divide was often emphasized casually but firmly nonetheless. ‘I went to St John’s School. At the foot of the street there was a huge industrial complex belonging to James Mackie, who employed 99.9 per cent Protestants. You were playing on that street during lunch break and the workers were coming out to go to their dinner, you would get a cold, icy look, as if you weren’t there. Yet local people would rub your head fondly. “Hello, wee man. How you doing? Are you being good today?” There was that difference. That coldness from the other people. You were aware that this place was totally split.’ Graham, and others like him, could sometimes take advantage of the split. ‘We’d get up in the morning to buy pigs’ feet. We would hoof them and singe them, we would scrub them and cook them, and me and Paddy would sell them around the bars. But not on the Falls Road! These people had no work and the Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday. So we went down the Shankill, the Old Lodge Road, Sandy Row, where all the Protestants who had shillings lived, and we sold the pigs’ feet in the bars down there. That was an education. To get a shilling for pigs’ feet, we had to go to these people.’ In 1953, the year of her coronation, the Queen visited Belfast. Graham can remember buses of unionists coming down to the Springfield Road, where a big banner was placed across the road and Union flags flew everywhere. ‘It was so British,’ says Graham, ‘you’d have thought you were in the Midlands.’ But for Graham’s family 1953 had a different significance: ‘It was the anniversary of the 1803 rebellion, and I watched my father going up the stairs with a long pole. He went into the girls’ bedroom and set it across the bed, and he opened a wee cubby-hole and he took out the national flag. It was the first time I’d been so close to the national flag, and he set about pinning it onto the pole. Then he got a cable and a lightbulb, and pinned it onto the top of the pole, and put it all out through the bedroom window. I thought it was a carnival thing – but within two hours, the cops were belting up the street in their sedans, demanding that he take it down. My father was a very sedate, serious countryman, and he said that the flag would be flying tonight, and it would be taken down tomorrow morning. By then the Protestants had all gathered, and some were standing in the garden. I’ll always remember the cop, a big, ginger-haired bastard, saying, “That’s a foreign flag! It’ll have to come down!” “Why does it have to come down?” “We’ve got reports that people are offended.” My father asked our neighbour Mrs Rossbottom, “Are you offended?” “Not at all, Jim!” But some of the Protestants started getting angry and shouting at the cop, and my father said, “Why are youse all offended? Have you come all the way from the Springfield Road to be offended?” In the end they left, and the flag flew. That was the first flag that flew in Ballymurphy – and it flew with the grace of the Protestant neighbours. There was no ill intent towards the house.’ Graham speaks of having an acute awareness of inequality as he was growing up: ‘We Catholics did get a raw deal by design. They planned it so, but in planning it, they made it “us and them”.’ It annoys him that today there are those who rewrite history to make out that things were fine before the Troubles started. ‘There was nothing bright and beautiful about being a Catholic living in these six counties. There were things that took away your heritage. Things like the Special Powers Act. We weren’t allowed to have a rebel song LP. It was confiscated, you were charged. You weren’t allowed to read certain newspapers; if you were caught in possession of the United Irishman – an eight-page newspaper – you could have got two years in prison. If you had a bit of money found in the house, money to buy a horse and cart to create a livelihood, had the peelers come in at any time and found that, that would have been confiscated. It could have been seen as having a political purpose. You couldn’t display the national flag – yet theirs could be thrust in our faces 24 hours a day.’ It is interesting to compare Joe Graham’s recollections with those of Gusty Spence, a one-time member of the UVF, who served a life sentence for the 1966 killing of Peter Ward, a Catholic barman. Spence subsequently repudiated violence to become a loyalist politician and advocate of the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he gave to Bobbie Hanvey, he describes his youthful attitude to Catholics: ‘Catholics had horns and were in some way inferior to Protestants. We were always led to believe this. At the back of your mind, you knew that it was wrong – but at the same time you lived in that grime and squalor that we lived in, and it was good to feel superior, even at the expense of another human being.’ When he left school Spence started work in a linen mill, where he came into contact with Catholics for the first time. He met a Catholic boy named Jimmy, who talked to him about Irish history. Jimmy told him that the United Irishmen were Protestant. ‘I had no knowledge, and of course, I thought he was telling lies.’ The two young men used to go swimming together in a Catholic area: ‘Jimmy and I had something in common. We both had tattoos. He had a tricolour on his arm, and I had a Union Jack on my arm. Falls Road baths had good facilities for swimming and whenever I went there to swim with Jimmy I had to get a sticking plaster to cover over my Union Jack. So despite what people say about the good old days, about there being no problems, it’s a load of nonsense. We lived in an abnormal society. Jimmy had to teach me to say something about a Hail Mary, so as I could bluff my way through, otherwise I would have got a duffing up.’ A Protestant from Derry, about the same age as Spence, told me of a duffing-up he had received while dressed in his school uniform: ‘I was walking through some playing fields. Two chaps stepped in front of me, who I later found out were Catholic. One of them pointed to the other and said to me, “He wants a fight!” To which I replied, “Then why doesn’t he fight you?” To which they both landed punches on me…’ Spence knew that he would have to start work in the mill once he left school: ‘The family needed money desperately so there was no question of where you were going.’ He went down to the Labour Exchange with his birth certificate and school-leaving card and received a new set of cards. After presenting them at the mill he began work the next morning. ‘Someone referred to them as “dark Satanic mills”. I wouldn’t disagree with that description. I started work in the spinning room, which was a very, very hot place and a very wet place. You worked in your bare feet in filthy conditions, and there was no recourse to washing, so you returned home from work the same way as you went. The hours were eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night and to twelve-fifteen on a Saturday. All you were supposed to do was keep your head down, keep your mouth closed and earn your sixteen and eight [?0.83] a week.’ However superior Spence might have been taught to feel, his home life hardly felt privileged. ‘My ma was a great pawner. All the women of her generation were great pawners because they didn’t have the course to anything else.’ He describes the Sunday School trip as the only light relief in a grey world. When his mother accompanied the group on one of those trips, she had to borrow a coat to make herself respectable: ‘If a woman had a coat, it was a big deal. I’m not overstating the case. Those things hurt. If people would only realize the indignities and the hurt that people felt at having to borrow some other woman’s coat.’ Spence regrets the fact that for a Protestant to criticize social conditions would – even today – be regarded as disloyalty. ‘You would be called a “closet republican” or a “card-carrying commie”. The continuance of the union would be our main philosophy. However, within that, why does one have to be anything peculiar to articulate a political philosophy?’ The answer lies in the need to express unity. Unionists were not really a homogenous people. They came from all classes of society and they attended a multitude of different churches, from Presbyterian to High Anglican. They had ranged their wagons in a circle to defend the status quo – and they could not encourage self-examination or internal dissent, for fear of showing weakness to the enemy. Safer to present a united front by placing emphasis on shared values, such as loyalty to the Crown and Protestant supremacy. As Sir Edward Carson, the early twentieth-century unionist leader, had once warned, if divisions within unionism ‘became wide and deep, Ulster would fall’. This united front, and the interests of the Protestant people, have been historically guarded over by the Orange Order. Three hundred years old and named after William of Orange, the Protestant king who defeated the Catholic King James, the Orange Order was formed to unite Protestants against demands for an independent Ireland. Members come from all levels of society and from (currently) eighteen Protestant denominations. When members join, they receive an initiation which spells out the aim of the Order as ‘the mutual defence, support and protection of Irish Protestants’. It is also made clear: ‘You have promised…never to attend any act or ceremony of popish worship.’ The Order borrows freely from the ritual and terminology of freemasonry; members call one another brethren, they attend lodges, they take oaths, and they can attain the position of grand master. The brethren used to wear orange silk sashes, like the one worn by William III at the Boyne, but more recently they have come to wear orange collarettes and bowler hats. Bowlers are Edwardian symbols of respectability, harking back to the period when the Order began to wield its greatest influence. The early years of the twentieth century were a time when dire labour and housing conditions might have created social disorder, but the Orange Order, and its large numbers of working-class members, were concentrating on other issues: fear of Home Rule, and the desire to maintain supremacy. Almost every person of influence in Northern Ireland was a member. In 1932 Sir James Craig announced in Parliament that he was ‘an Orangeman first, and a politician and a member of this parliament afterwards’. A very rare unionist politician who was not an Orangeman was Samuel Hall-Thompson, a minister of education responsible for post-war educational reforms. In 1949 a meeting was called by the Sandy Row Grand Orange Lodge to protest against his proposals concerning the payment of Catholic teachers. The Prime Minister attended and, under pressure, promised to revise the plans. He then sacked Hall-Thompson, who became a high-ranking victim of the Orange Order’s grass roots. In Britain the working classes came to voice their struggle through the trade unions. In Northern Ireland the trade union movement carried little weight. The unionist working class expressed itself through the Order, and the Order was not overtly class conscious. It is little wonder that in Gusty Spence’s experience it was ‘peculiar’ to articulate a political philosophy. Andy Tyrie, the one-time leader of the UDA, was once asked what he thought was the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The only difference, he replied, was that Protestants couldn’t complain. However firmly unionists stood together, and however robustly the Northern Ireland government asserted its claim to be master of its own house, there was always one party with the capacity to undermine it: the British government. While Britain was allowing the province free rein, little complaint could be heard from Stormont. But in 1940 a proposal from Winston Churchill’s wartime government horrified unionists, and threatened to end the life of their young state. As Britain and her colonies stood alone against Hitler, and the people of Britain braced themselves for a German invasion, Churchill’s war cabinet offered Eire an undertaking towards a united Ireland, in return for Eire’s abandonment of wartime neutrality. The Northern Ireland cabinet reacted furiously at the perceived treachery. In the event Eire, already keener on reunification in theory than in practice, rejected Churchill’s offer. After only twenty years of existence, Northern Ireland had Eire to thank for its survival. The incident seemed to confirm the unionists’ worst fears concerning Britain’s attitude to her loyal province. I considered the nature of Britain’s attitude as I wandered around the Stormont Parliament buildings. From the ceiling of Stormont’s Great Hall hangs a huge gold-plated chandelier, which had been a wedding present from the German Kaiser to his cousin King George V. This chandelier had spent a few years hanging in Windsor Castle until it was taken down at the start of the First World War, when German light fittings fell out of favour. Eighty years later an inventory at Windsor found the chandelier to be missing, but there was no record of where it had gone. Much has been said about Northern Ireland’s strategic and economic significance, but its use as Britannia’s informal dump has not been so well recorded. While the British government had the power to destroy Northern Ireland, another organization had the desire to do so. From the time of the creation of the State until the advent of the modern Troubles, the IRA made sporadic attempts to shoot and bomb its way to a united Ireland, but the organization always remained small and received little support from the Catholic community. Joe Cahill joined the IRA in 1938 in west Belfast. He was one of several men convicted of the 1942 killing of a police officer, and was sentenced to death but later reprieved. Just one man, Tom Williams, was hanged for the murder. Cahill described his experiences to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘There were actually eight of us arrested on Easter Sunday 1942. Easter Sunday was a period when parades were banned. Our idea was to fire shots over security patrols in three areas, to draw all the security forces into those areas, leaving the other two areas free where parades could be held. So we fired shots over a patrol car. When that was finished, we retreated. There was a bit of a problem then; it just didn’t work out as we had planned, and we all finished up in a house. The house was surrounded, there was a bit of shooting, and a policeman was shot dead. We were all arrested and taken to the police headquarters, and brought before the court and charged with murder. We were remanded, and brought before the court on several different occasions right up to the High Court, which lasted three days. Eventually the jury came back in, and six of us were found guilty and sentenced to death.’ For four and a half weeks Cahill shared a condemned cell with Tom Williams. He describes the conditions: ‘It’s fair to say that the food was much better in the condemned cell. You got two bottles of stout a day, or a half and a whisky. You had hospital beds. And along with the two prisoners, there were three warders there, twenty-four hours a day; even when you were sleeping they were still there.’ Cahill already knew Williams; they had gone to dances together, and in prison they became closer still. They passed their days exercising in the yard and had access to chess, draughts, and cards. ‘It’s fair to say the day was fairly well spent. It normally started off with Mass, then in the evening we had devotions. We had two visits a day, there were so many relatives and people wanting to see us.’ Cahill describes the prospect of death: ‘I’m not being boastful about this, but once you made your peace with God, I think death is very easy to face. The only way I can equate it, is often I’ve heard people saying, “He died a lovely death” because they were prepared to die. Once you’re prepared to die, I think death is easy faced. That’s where religion plays a big part in my life.’ On a Sunday afternoon, all of the condemned were brought into the solicitor’s room. ‘The solicitor looked at the six of us. He says, “I have good news for everybody except Tom. The rest of you have been reprieved. Tom,” he says, “you’ll die.” And it was a shock to everybody. At this stage we didn’t expect to be reprieved; we thought we were all going to be executed because it was only three days away. There was a tremendous silence and the first one to break the silence was Tom Williams. He says, “This is how I wanted it from the start. Don’t grieve for me,” he says. “I’m happy to die.” And that was the saddest moment in my life. We were taken away from him and we were given a guarantee that we’d see him again before Wednesday. The authorities never kept their promise. We didn’t see him again. We were taken to the penal servitude wing. The last memory I have of Tom Williams was on the day of his execution. The chap in the cell above me rapped on the floor and he says, “Joe, jump up to your window.” I jumped up to the window and I looked out and I saw his funeral going to the back of the hospital for burial. That’s my last memory of Tom Williams.’ One man who volunteered to combat the IRA was Wallace Clark. Clark was a member of the B Specials, the largest of three arms of the Ulster Special Constabulary. He entered the constabulary in 1950, the third generation of his family to join, and became a District Commandant. The B Specials had a sinister reputation; they were greatly feared by Catholics. In an interview with Bobbie Hanvey, Clark challenges the reputation: ‘The general view of the Catholics was that the B Specials were heavily biased, tending to brutality, and did a lot of quiet killing – which is all untrue if you look at the statistics. But they were all so frightened of the Bs, which gave us a very strong moral position, in that a B man was very rarely attacked in his house. They were stewing in their own juice, they demonized the Bs so effectively. We did a lot of our work at night dressed in black or very dark green. That’s one reason it was so easy to demonize the B Specials. It created the “bogeymen” image.’ Clark explains why he joined: ‘I think sort of family pride, like it applied to a lot of men in the B Specials. It was public service, the country was under threat. I felt I could do my little bit in putting down terrorism.’ The B Specials were a part-time force. ‘They operated around home, they kept their rifles at home, their uniforms at home, and turned out to parade locally. Initially, we drilled a lot in Orange halls but not because of any tremendous connection with the Orange Order. We were sometimes accused of being run by the Orange Order, which was absolute bunkum. The Orange Order hadn’t the organization or structure to run a force like the B Specials.’ As a commandant, Clark had eight sub-district commandants under his command, each of whom commanded about thirty men. ‘With that organization, and with the rifles at home, we could put down twenty-four roadblocks within ten minutes of getting the alarm. Because the men could turn out quickly. We had these funny old uniforms with a stand-up collar, and you could pull it over your pyjamas, and you could pull on your black trousers. We patrolled the roads, and guarded the checkpoints, or key points at times of high tension. We had two categories – “drill category” when the IRA weren’t in the active stage of warfare, and “patrol category”, when we were turned out every night, walked along the roads, checked cars, and had a good look at enemy movements. We could switch from drill category to patrol category within twenty-four hours.’ In 1956 the IRA began a border campaign – Operation Harvest – with the intention of forcing British troops out of Ireland. At this time the IRA was only a shadow of what it was to become. Internment was introduced in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and within two years the campaign had ground to a near stop. According to Clark: ‘The IRA lost that campaign and they made a formal declaration of defeat in February 1962. They weren’t very effective, and they weren’t getting popular support. They were limited in the amount of weapons and ammunition they had, and I never like to underrate my enemies, because there are plenty of clever and brave men in the IRA, but it didn’t show in that campaign. They missed lots of opportunities where they could have done a great deal more damage. The funny thing was, you’d mix with IRA men locally. You’d go down to the post office, and see fellows who had been IRA-active, and I would have no objection to having a chat with them.’ The most famous IRA operation of the campaign was the unsuccessful attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks, carried out on New Year’s Eve 1956. Two IRA men were killed during the attack, which quickly entered the annals of romantic republicanism; thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the two dead southern volunteers, and Dominic Behan wrote the song ‘The Patriot Game’ about one of them, Fergal O’Hanlon from Monaghan. Paddy O’Regan, an IRA volunteer, was wounded in the leg during the attack by two bullets from a Bren gun fired by a police sergeant. He considers that Operation Harvest was ‘an honourable campaign in as far as we could make it, and I suppose that was reflected in the fact that there were very few people killed on either side’. The IRA had a policy of non-sectarianism at the time: ‘We were instructed not to attack the RUC because they were a police force, but they were given a number of days to stand aside, and when they did not, they became targets. On the other hand, the B Special constables were looked on as a Protestant sectarian force, so we were told that we were not to attack them at all.’ The IRA’s next campaign would prove to be a much longer and more bitter affair, with far fewer rules of engagement. 4 THE REFORMER (#ulink_864c818b-0e92-5f95-b14d-3886745bccde) As western democracies underwent a social shift in the Sixties, away from the conservatism of the past, it appeared as though Northern Ireland was being dragged along with them. Terence O’Neill, the fourth Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, took office in 1963 and spoke of introducing ‘bold and imaginative measures’. He began visiting Catholic schools, having his photograph taken with nuns, attending civic receptions in Catholic towns, and attempting to introduce what he described as ‘long overdue reforms’. O’Neill’s attitudes were not those of a lone man crying in the wilderness. In the early Sixties some young Protestants were even willing to countenance a united Ireland. One man who attended Foyle College, a Protestant school in Derry, remembers: ‘Most of my school friends were very pro a united Ireland in those days. We’d have discussions, and we decided that we would still hold onto British culture, but we hoped for a united Ireland where both cultures were valued and accepted. I expect that after the Troubles started, many of these people retrenched back into more black-and-white attitudes.’ But even before the Troubles, most people in Northern Ireland were not so liberal in their outlook. O’Neill’s attempts to bring the province into the twentieth century were darkly observed by a man whose feet were planted somewhere in the seventeenth: the Reverend Ian Kyle Paisley. O’Neill and Paisley were very different men. Educated at Eton, a member of the Guards during the Second World War, speaking with an English accent, O’Neill was at the Anglo-Irish end of unionism. To read his autobiography gives a touching sense of the man; his genuine belief in reform shines through, and he writes in an endearingly Pooterish manner: ‘For some years we had been in the habit of taking the car to Britain for a holiday in August. Our second stop was with Jean’s cousin Jack…’ The overall impression is of a quiet, well-meaning man, who became involved with events and personalities far bigger than himself. One of those big personalities was Paisley, the son of an itinerant preacher father, and a Scottish Presbyterian mother. Like his father, Paisley became a fundamentalist preacher, and a hugely charismatic one. In this 1969 sermon Paisley – a fine performer in his own right – tells the morality tale of an ungodly actress: ‘Some years ago, outside a very famous hotel, in Durban in South Africa, a gospel evangelist was giving out gospel tracts. In that hotel there was staying a very famous actor, and down at the quayside was a great liner called the Durban Castle. And that famous actress had booked a passage and had a ticket on that liner, and she came out through the door, to get the cab to take her to board the vessel, and this Christian gentleman stepped up, and he handed her a gospel tract. And when she saw it, she threw it on the pavement and she stamped her heel through it and she said, “Damn your God!” She went aboard the Durban Castle. But when it docked at Southampton, she had disappeared. There was an inquiry, a steward was arrested, he was tried and he was found guilty of murder. And he murdered that actress, and it was found that he had pushed her dead body through the port-hole. And she had been buried in the briny deep. Her name was Gay Gibson, a famous actress. “What think ye of Christ?” “Damn your God!” My friends, you don’t need to use such a blasphemous expression, but tonight, by turning your back on Christ, you can go to the same hell that that Christ-rejecting actress went to! SHE DIDN’T KNOW THAT SHE WAS ON HER LAST JOURNEY! And her body perished in the depths of the sea, but her soul baptised in the waves of infinite wrath, for all eternity paid the penalty for her doom and for her Christ-rejection. Friends, how is it with your soul? Men and women, eternity! Eternity! WHERE WILL YOU BE, IN ETERNITY?’ Yet as well as being a hell-fire preacher with the ability to inspire and terrify his congregants, Paisley has also been the most influential Protestant politician of the past fifty years. It has often been difficult to gauge where his politics ends and his religion begins. When he has thundered against Catholicism in sermons – ‘Romanism is the enemy of liberty! Romanism is the enemy of this province! Romanism is the enemy of God!’ – he has been speaking as both cleric and politician. He has articulated the political fears of his people with an evangelical fury: ‘The Protestants of Ulster are not going to be trifled with! We are in no mood to permit anything that is going to hinder our defence and preservation of Ulster as part of the United Kingdom!’ The Troubles might not have been religious in nature, but the wily, ambitious Paisley certainly was, and his presence was one of the major reasons why Northern Ireland careered into chaos at the end of a decade that had promised hope. At the beginning of his tenure, O’Neill made speeches promising that his government would no longer be acting solely in the interests of unionists. His words were received positively by many Catholics, but this only served to make him unpopular with the harder-line unionists. It was a matter of basic mathematics that if he were to bring more jobs, more houses, and more votes to Catholics, that meant fewer of each for Protestants, and this fact was never lost on loyalists. These were the fears that Paisley was able to articulate, while turning himself, in the eyes of some of his supporters, into a prophet of semi-biblical proportions. In 1964 he threatened to march his supporters to the republican headquarters in west Belfast to remove a small Irish flag that had been spotted in the window. The police had decided not to intervene, but under pressure from Paisley they smashed the window and removed the flag. Riots ensued and attitudes hardened on all sides. There are many, many incidents which have been said to have led to the Troubles. Of all of those commonly cited, this is probably the earliest. In 1965 O’Neill invited the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Irish Republic, Sean Lemass, to Stormont. It was an attempt to normalize relations between north and south, and to promote economic cooperation. Previous prime ministers of Northern Ireland had refused to meet leaders of the Irish Republic, on the grounds that the Republic still laid constitutional claim on the north. The visit was controversial and was only publicly announced as Lemass was arriving at Stormont. Even the Northern Ireland cabinet had not been informed until that morning. Grasping for the right words with which to welcome his guest, O’Neill rejected ‘Ulster’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ and settled on ‘Welcome to the North’. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joshua-levine/beauty-and-atrocity-people-politics-and-ireland-s-fight-for/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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