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 From Atlantic Unbound: Flashbacks: "Ireland's Troubled North" (October 31, 2001) A collection of Atlantic articles on Northern Ireland helps put the current easing of political tensions in perspective. Flashbacks: "Peace for Ireland?" (December 1995) Articles by Robert Coles, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and others consider the political, social, and psychological aspects of the conflict in Northern Ireland. |
Bloody Ulster
An Irishman's Lament "England must rule us, directly, totally," writes a former Ulsterman, who sees firm rule from London as the only hope for peace in tortured Northern Ireland. by Brian Moore ..... 
e are driving in on a wet afternoon, coming from the town of Lurgan, where I spent the night at my sister's house. The new motorway is called the M.I. It is international in design, kin to the Ventura Freeway into Los Angeles, the Long Island Expressway into New York, the Autoroute Paris-Sud: to those new roads I took away from this place which still, foolishly, I sometimes call "home."We veer right. The car flees into an off-ramp and, precipitate, stops with a rubber-mouse squeak of tires. Now, in an older, familiar world, we move forward again. A wet, mean street. Belfast. To our left, in a narrower street, paving stones have been uprooted from the sidewalks and lie ready in handy, hurl-size fragments. A giantess' knitting ball of barbed wire is strewn across the middle of the roadway. A young British soldier, in tin hat, his waterproof cape decaled with camouflage patterns, an automatic rifle crooked under his left armpit, waves us on. Hurry it up. Keep moving. We are tourists: he seems to know it. Coming off this new motorway, I do not know what part of the city we are in. But now we join a slow queue of cars sightseeing these troubles. My father was doctor to the nuns at Beechmount Home for the Sick, a few hundred yards from here. And, further down this road, I would sit, a schoolboy in short trousers, waiting in our old Austin car while he made afternoon sick calls at Saint Mary's Training College for Teachers. The Falls Road. The Catholic part of town. The British Army commander has said the damage is as bad as in a war area. That is true. I am reminded of war. Street barricades, yards of broken windows, buildings burned down. There are soldiers everywhere; some even nap on the sidewalk, heads pillowed on their helmets. Buildings need paint. The city is as neglected and run-down as in the war years when Hitler bombed its insides out. I remember how slow they were to clear up that mess. It occurs to me that there is something sick about Belfast. Perhaps it has always had this sickness. Perhaps it is incurable. We must talk about that. But talk about what? And who am I to talk? A Catholic who is no longer a Catholic, an Ulsterman who holds a Canadian passport and lives in California, an Irishman who has lived longer out of Ireland than he lived in it. What can I know of Ulster's present troubles? Yet here I am. These are the British soldiers I saw last summer, advancing across the tiny screen of a portable television set in the living room of my house in California, six thousand miles from here. Stood, my arm around my Canadian wife, my back to the Pacific Ocean, staring at the set while Walter Cronkite of CBS told us that this is the way it is, and the way it is is that, suddenly, I hear an accent I never thought to hear on the American airwaves, a flat honest-to-Ulster voice, thick with rage, talking about "the civil rights march in Darry." Civil rights? In Londonderry? What in the name of Cromwell is going on over there? Now, in Belfast, I stare out the window of my brother-in-law's car. This is what's going on. Riots. The same old riots we had in my childhood. Mobs of rampaging Protestant lumpenproletariat; trying to terrorize their equally ignorant Catholic lumpenproletariat neighbors. Street fighting, beatings, burnings; people forced out of their homes; a death or two. Ordinary people set against ordinary people because there is something old and rotten still alive here: there are not enough jobs to go around, and religious issues help to mask the truth, which is, in large part, that this Ulster is the backward fief of a Conservative oligarchy, a group which makes up only 9 percent of the population yet owns 92 percent of the land. "Nice" people, who maintain themselves in power by exploiting their poorer Protestant brethren and discriminating against the large Catholic minority. People who went to the British schools, who served in Guards regiments. Who sit on the boards of the interlocking directorates which control what industry there is, and who, naturally, want it to continue this way in saecula saeculorum; just as the local Catholic hierarchy and the few remaining old Catholic "Nationalist" politicians don't really want any drastic change either. Martyrdom keeps the faith strong; Martyrdom gets the old rabble-rousers re-elected. The same old garbage, yes. The same old, stupid mess. And yet, this time, there is a difference. These troubles, unlike all the other riots in the fifty years of Ulster's unhappy constitutional existence, were inspired by an outside force. Television. American television to begin with. Programs on which the Catholics saw the success of the population numbers game as exemplified by black civil rights marches, on which would-be local rioters could see looters scooting through the streets of Watts and Philadelphia with major appliances in tow; television on which clashes between students and police at Berkeley and Columbia could be absorbed as an educational visual aid by the students at Queen's University, Belfast. Television, the agitprop of modern revolt. For the first time in Ulster's history the marching mobs in Londonderry and Belfast carry banners other than pictures of King Billy crossing the Boyne River to defeat the Papists, signs other than the old Orange yells of No Surrender! F--- The Pope! and the old Irish countercries of Up The Rebels! and Erin go Bragh! Now the signs are not inflammatory, but propagandistic: One Man, One Vote: Ulster Civil Rights Association. The standard-bearers of these new banners dutifully incline them in the direction of the television camera: the devout making obeisance toward their altar. And rightly so. Television begat them. Only television can win for them. For Ulster has had worse riots before. Much worse. You should have seen the 1935 riots. The point is, you didn't. Riots? Not to worry if you were the Northern Ireland government. The police force was, and is, a Protestant force. If Catholics stage a protest march, the police will charge. If Protestant mobs, frustrated by unemployment, want to let off steam by bashing a few Papishes, the police will look the other way. That is the status quo. But that is becoming history, as the absolute powers of the old Ulster Prime Ministers, Lords Craigavon and Brookeborough, are now history. Now the Electronic Eye sees. Police make a baton charge at noon, smashing their heavy truncheons into civil rights marchers' faces. At six that evening, blood flows from those beaten faces on the BBC television news and is seen by millions of British voters. Can this be happening in what is, after all, part of "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"? A British Minister of the Crown is sent to investigate. Correspondents are flown across the Irish Sea. And troops. If you are the loyal government of a loyal corner of the United Kingdom, it is hard to protest the sending in of British troops. Meanwhile, those nosy television crews poke in everywhere, creating their own violent tale: they have made a folk heroine out of Wee Bernadette Devlin, the Rosa Luxemburg of the Catholic civil rights movement; they stuck their cameras in front of Major Chichester-Clark, Ulster's Prime Minister, and the kindest thing one can say about him is that he lacks charisma. That is supplied by the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Frankenstein monster figure created by the major's policies. A tall violent commanding man, the Reverend P. is führer of the Orange militants, a man in love with his queen, a hater of the Pope, his fantasy enemy. Heroine and Heavy. Confrontations staged for the BBC national television news. No wonder the Ulster Establishment is alarmed. A word with the British General Officer Commanding, and now the troops are lens-shy. Near Saint Paul's Catholic Church I notice that the street adjoining the church has been barricaded by its residents against Orange intruders. Bakery vans have been placed end to end across the street, blocking all access. Bernard Hughes, Bakery, says the legend on each van. Memory takes me in sudden painful emotion. I ask my brother-in-law to slow down. I lean out of the car window, thinking to take a photograph. But a soldier comes up, fast. He thinks I am photographing him. "Not allowed, mate," he tells me, waving his gun barrel like a man shooing off a cow. I lower my camera. Hughes Bakery. The madeleine of memory. My father, in an infrequent traverse through the kitchen, stops and asks the maid: "Where did we get this?" There is a loaf of wrapped bread on the kitchen table. Ormeau Bakery is printed on the wrapping paper. My father is puzzled. My mother is summoned. "Hughes and Kennedy are the Catholic bakers," my father says, holding up the offending loaf. "But Ormeau is cheaper, and they say their bread is very good," my mother tells him. "Hughes's bread is very good," my father says. "I don't care if it's a few pennies more. We shouldn't buy from Ormeau. They're Protestant bakers." Catholic butcher, Catholic baker, and definitely Catholic candlestick maker. Besides, they will lend their bread vans to defend your street. We drive on. My mind oscillates. UP THE I.R.A. is painted on the back wall of a working-class dwelling. Was it painted thirty years ago? Or last night? The I.R.A. A young man in the prisoner's box in the Crumlin Road courthouse in Belfast. He would be asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed on him. He would stand up, pale-faced, undernourished, wearing the ill-fitting black suit of the thirties urban poor. He would say: "As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army, I refuse to recognize this court. Long live Ireland!" He would then be sentenced to death, or to life imprisonment, depending on whether he had shot a policeman or tried to blow up a police barracks. He and others like him would be off in back fields somewhere in Enniskillen or Dungannon, with one of their number keeping watch, while the others went through some antiquated small arms drill, learning to be soldiers of the Irish Republican Army. This "army" was illegal in the real Irish republic to the south. This "army" did not recognize the Republican government because that government had made truce with the British. The I.R.A. was our Black Panthers. We despised them. Because of them, Catholics were beaten up by special police. Because of them, the Old Etonians, our masters, could keep the silent Protestant majority in a state of dumb fealty to the British Crown and the Ulster Unionist Party. The I.R.A. was like a foolish boys' game. It gave some purpose, I suppose, to the pinched lives of those unemployed, undereducated young Irishmen who joined it. Its leaders were small losers, willingly headed up a fascistic back alley, fledgling Nazis who admired Hitler as Britain's enemy. It kept us all, Catholic and Protestant alike, frozen in the past, unable to better our condition. It was, and is, the perfect red herring. My brother-in-law drives on. The graffiti announce that we have left the Catholic area and are moving in Protestant streets. NO POPE HERE announces a whitewashed wall. GOD BLESS OUR QUEEN says the sign under the papal warning. Protestant territory; but these streets are equally drear, the same shut little workingmen's dwellings, the same stale corner pubs, tawdry sweetie shops, and gimcrack, sludgy little grocery stores. Is this all that the right to vote, the pick of available jobs and housing, the welfare state, has brought the Queen's Irish Protestant liege-men and -women? Yes, it is. They have so little, they feel they cannot afford to share it. So turn the Papish out. As we enter the Crumlin Road, I see a chalked warning. REMEMBER 1690. It is the one date in history I will not forget. I was born, further down this road, in Clifton Street. When I looked out my bedroom window on the top floor of our house, across the street I could see, graven into a stone plinth on top of a building, the figures 1690. On the plinth, a cavalier stood in his stirrups, brandishing his sword over his head as he stared in stone-eyed triumph at the chimneys of the York Street Flax spinning Mills. He was William III of the Dutch House of Orange, atop the Kremlin of the Orange Order, the central Orange Hall, world headquarters of the Orangemen's movement. Yes, that same King Billy "Of glorious, pious and immortal memory," who defeated James II, the Papist champion, at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, in the year of grace, 1690. REMEMBER 1690? Yes, I do. The Glorious Twelfth. There was something heartrending and grand and wild and real about it all. They started assembling at seven in the morning, coming in on lorries and bicycles from villages around the city, walking the darkened streets from Ballymacarrett and Queens Island, from York Street and the mills, taking the early trams across the city. Quiet now, and sober, in their dark-blue Sunday suits, wearing big gray tweed caps or black Masonic bowler hats, and, tied across their chests, the broad silk Orange sashes their fathers wore before them; some with silk Masonic ceremonial embroidered aprons, with stiff cuffs, white gloves; many uniformed bands, a tiger skin for the drum major; bagpipes and flutes and snare drums and clarinets and cornets and big slide trombones. Massing in the side streets like the mobs of Paris, smoking and spitting, talking in low, morning voices. And now their shield arrives, the B Specials, the infamous special police, Orangemen all, drafted for special duty on this day, coming in on police carriers, armed with revolvers and batons, ostensibly under the orders of the regular police, but in reality, a law unto no men but their own violent selves. Ten A.M. By God, it put blood on a person's bones to see them skirl out to the meeting point, playing snatches of bagpipes and brasses (I still weep with impossible emotion when I hear a pipe band), and now they are coming up Clifton Street like good ones, the street wet with rain they ignore, the showers pelting down on their best blue Sunday suits and on their elaborate, many-colored, silk Lodge banners, carried with many trailing guide ropes and ornate streamers (banners curiously reminiscent of the banners seen in Southern European religious processions), and now as they assemble at the parade start, coming in to mass in Carlisle Circus, the rotunda at the top of our street, it is no music at all, just row on row of silent men between these bright, silken banners, the bands silent, a few cars growling in among the marchers, stuffed with dignitaries and men too old for the walk, each lodge and chapter waiting in a side street to join the main river, and now they are formed and begin to come, stepping out with a Left! Left! Left-Right-Left! and the drumbeat to keep the step, Baraumpp! Baraumpp! Baraumpp-umpp-umpp! and as they march out of Carlisle Circus and start down Clifton Street, going in the direction of Saint Patrick's Catholic Church (its gates locked, doors barred, the only day of the year the church is shut), the marchers raise their eyes up in the drizzling Irish rain, and there he is, statue-still on his stone gray charger, standing on that graven date of 1690, with his faging sword raised over his head to clout the faging Fenian gets, King Billy, begod! And now, in the forefront of the procession, a wee man begins to caper ceremonially, like Puck, and prancing, turns to face the marching rows of men, and the drumbeat is stilled, all you hear now is boots, boots, on the iron tramlines in the middle of the street. From his coat pocket the wee man takes a penny whistle, and capering, puts it to his lips and tootles the tune of "The Protestant Boys." This is the signal. The young lads, two of them to a drum, who are carrying the big Lambegs, strip the tarpaulins down off those drumskins and stick an Orange lily on the top of each great drum, while the drummers are stripping off their coat jackets and rolling their shirt sleeves all the way up to their elbows, and now the lads strap the drums onto the drummers, pulling the buckles tight in back, for the Lambegs are five feet in diameter and a man cannot hold one up by himself for more than a few streets, but now the Lambegs are up on their chests and long, thin rattan canes are put in their fists, and they take a big breath and it's up with the fists and hammer them skins with the long thin canes and you couldn't hear the world end for the terrible bloody din of it, the din that will hammer the fear of Christ into those Papish hearts, sitting silent and afraid in their wee houses in those mean streets just off the parade route. The Lambegs! Blatter! Blatter! Blatter! and maybe the drummers hear the penny whistle but the rest of us hear only the drums, and see the drums, and as the thin rattan canes slap against the drumskins, the skin on the drummers' knuckles is stripped to raw flesh and the blood runs between their fingers, spilling in red, gory trickles down their bare forearms as they come down our street toward the balcony of the Orange Hall, where Sir Joseph Davidson himself stands in top hat and some sort of Thirty-Third Degree Orange-Masonic fig and when the loyal Protestant crowd lining the streets, waving penny Union Jacks, sees the drummers' blood, sees that blood spilt for England, that true, blue blood, and the Catholics, sitting sullen and afraid behind their shut doors, hear that faging din: three drummers abreast in rows of three, nine Lambeg drums in each thunderous phalanx, and now the drummers, exhausted, let their bleeding arms hang loose and that's the signal to break out the pipe bands, joyous and triumphant music with a good Orange tune, and we Moore children, watching from our window, know the words of that tune and the marching men know it too, but it is early morning and they march silent, not singing. But there is always some poor woman with a drink taken, waving a penny Union Jack from the sidelines and wanting to act up and let a yell out of her and show her knickers to the marching men, and she will sing the words and the marchers will hear her and they will wink at each other and smile. Do you think that we will let,No, they will not. Soon, they will arrive at Finaghy Field, just outside the city, a staging ground for violence. They will have a terrible thirst on them from the march and black pints of porter will be poured and bottles of Guinness's stout, and whiskey for those who have the price of it, and with their ties off and their collars loosened, they will hear the big men of the Orange Order and of the Unionist Party blame unemployment on the rising Catholic birthrate, warning against the nationalists who would sever us from Britain, and where would we be without the jobs and benefits that Britain provides us with, lads, and now, three cheers for the Royal Family, and hip, hip, for the Orange Order, and hooray for the Party in Power. (That same party which is in power today, which has ruled Ulster for fifty years.) And then, drunk, they will disperse in midafternoon to walk back with their bands and their drums, back to their mean houses and the unemployment assistance, which is what most of them live on, year in and year out in this Irish corner which has always been the most depressed area of the British Isles. And so, as they start off home, knowing the big day is ending and it is drab Do-Nothingsville for all the other days of their year, they will up and beat the lights and livers out of any Catholics they can lay their hands on. And they will find them, for the Catholics, resentful and bored, have sat all day in sullen hate and now are looking for a fight. And these are riots. The same riots we have now. The same old, awful mess. The Catholics of Ulster do not want to join the Irish Republic to the south of them. That republic is, alas, no economic advertisement for independence. It is the Sicily of Northern Europe: it cannot offer the people of Ulster even the crumbs of the British welfare state. Ulster's Catholics simply want their ration of British crumbs. They want an end to gerrymandering in voting privileges, they want an end to discrimination in matters of housing and jobs. Simple? Yes. Thanks to television and these new-style troubles, they have come close to getting these things. But not close enough. Driving down Clifton Street, home at last, I remember the first evening I saw this fuss on television. There, far away in California, I sensed an exile's truth, that truth which now homes in on me. This news item is dying: if it dies, nothing will change here. It must escalate. Blood must run in the streets. Ulster people must die like dogs. Unless they do, nothing will change. The British public cares deeply about dogs. It does not want to think about the Irish who are a centuries-old nuisance. We must, in the next year, get together, all of us, Paisleyites, Devlinites, civil rights groups, students, Orangemen, I.R.A. men, the lot, we must prove once and for all that we cannot be left any longer in the dead hands of our Unionist masters, those masters who, in fifty years, have made us incurably, terminally sick with foolish religious prejudice and thus completely incapable of managing our own affairs. Our Ulster government is incapable of change: we are incapable of founding another. We must now become wards of the English state. England must, at last, accept its responsibility toward us, which is to rule us, directly, totally, as part of that "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" which our passports proclaim us to be. Forever and ever, amen. That young English soldier advancing against the grimy backdrop of industrial Belfast. I sensed it when I saw him in black and white on my tiny television set in California. Glum, I know it now, in living color, as we reach the bottom of Clifton Street. He fired down this street to save us Irish from ourselves the night I was born. He must save us now. He is our savior.We must turn again to him. That English soldier. The wheel has come full circle.
Copyright © 1970 by Brian Moore. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 1970; Bloody Ulster; Volume 226, No. 3; page 58-62. |
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