The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. Ruth Edwards Dudley

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СКАЧАТЬ by the inhabitants of the Fountain. There were other occasional jarring notes provided by militaristic bands.

      The Apprentice Boys, being a mainly urban and working-class organization, attract some people who think the Orange is for wimps and the Black for old men. There have been problems with one or two clubs which are nothing more than fronts for paramilitaries and whose members turn up at parades in dark glasses and strut menacingly. (This was to be more evident the following year when two or three bands carried banners saying: ‘RE-ROUTE REPUBLICANS OUT OF NORTHERN IRELAND’.) Yet these represent a tiny fraction of the participants in a parade which is largely well-disciplined and brilliantly stewarded.

      We headed for the Apprentice Boys’ HQ to look at some memorabilia, to find ourselves briefly caught, like the RUC, between drunken bottle-throwing loyalists and stone-throwing Bogsiders. A few minutes later, returning to the centre, we found tremendous RUC and media activity in a side-street. Cautiously peering around the armoured cars I saw the RUC extracting a dozen or so violent drunks from a pub while surrounded by perhaps twenty photographers and cameramen. At one stage a policeman almost fell over a TV camera. The yobs, of course, played up enthusiastically to their audience and obligingly created a small mini-riot with stones, glasses, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on. There was not an Apprentice Boy among them, for they had all marched over the bridge and were on their way to their coaches, but of course the violence was the scene that was shown on most news bulletins.

      In 1997, the Apprentice Boys showed they were learning something about PR and began to speak of the parade as a pageant. There were lengthy discussions with politicians and residents and the nationalist SDLP mayor gave the Apprentice Boys his support. Reluctantly, MacNiallais agreed to allow the pageant’s participants on to the wall, so children dressed as King William and Queen Mary and assembled attendants walked along it in the morning. There was a difficulty about the flag outside the Apprentice Boys’ HQ: the union flag would be offensive. So the Apprentice Boys’ historian produced a green flag with a harp in the middle, which symbolized the unity of England and Ireland in 1689. The BRG did not identify it in time to object. They have since deemed it unacceptable.

      Still, an accommodation had been worked out and there was no need to put a police line between the Bogsiders and the marchers. McNiallais and some colleagues came up to look at the parade and then some of their number began taunting the most militaristic-looking bands. A few bandsmen broke ranks and there was a scuffle.

      I was at the same vantage point as the year before; exaggerated rumours were spreading about the level of trouble. That was a sufficient excuse for a couple of hundred drunks from the Fountain to start throwing stones and bottles and glasses at police: none of them was an Apprentice Boy. Television cameras were there again. Loyalists, as usual, were handing propaganda gifts to the enemy.

      Having had the experience craved by all journalists of being hit by a stone that didn’t hurt but nevertheless gave one street-cred, I left that riot as it died down and with my English friend Mark proceeded to the Bogside. There was a crowd of children, mostly between six and sixteen, throwing stones at the police who were sealing off Butcher Gate and guarding the Apprentice Boys’ building. Standing in the middle of the kids, I could see how dehumanized are policemen in riot gear: they looked more like a row of Darth Vaders than human beings. But then you can’t withstand stones and petrol bombs in a woolly cardigan.

Out from the Bogside with MacNiallais came Gearóid Ó hEara, chairman of Northern Sinn Féin. He walked up to the middle of the crowd of children, put his arms around two of the littler ones and said: ‘Away now down to the Bog. You don’t want the international TV cameras to be seeing you behaving like Orangies.’^* There was a diminution in the stone-throwing and some children drifted back through the gate. Then the television cameras went away. So did Ó hEara and MacNiallais. It was a dull, grey afternoon as well whiled away by stone-throwing as by anything else, so the children went back to work vigorously. A dog, who was clearly a seasoned rioter, rushed up and down between the children and the police barking, until he got hit by a stone and hobbled off whimpering. The children went on throwing stones: no grown-up came out of the Bogside to try to stop them.

      MacNiallais was busy elsewhere, explaining to the media that nationalists had been assaulted during the parade and there would therefore now be no tolerance for the December Apprentice Boys’ parade; it would not now be allowed to go around the Diamond in the commercial centre of Derry.

Simpson had offered to halve the normal numbers in December but the BRG were not prepared to compromise. The day before the parade, which the police refused to ban, republicans went around shops and restaurants in Derry telling them to close: this form of intimidation is carried out by republican and loyalist thugs on special occasions and few businessmen are strong enough to withstand it.^* So MacNiallais was able to complain that the parade had closed down the commercial life of Derry on a Saturday before Christmas to the inconvenience of everyone.

      A well-orchestrated Bogsiders’ riot began behind the police lines that separated them from the Apprentice Boys. The complaint was that because Butcher Gate was closed off, they were being hemmed in; the alternative, longer, route to the city centre was unacceptable. The television showed Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin being denied permission by the RUC to go through their lines. The riot followed shortly afterwards. There was a rare slip-up when a Sky camera took a shot of McGuinness smiling broadly at the stone-throwing Bogsiders. Later in the evening, a phalanx of youngsters arrived at the city centre from the Bogside wheeling shopping trolleys full of petrol bombs, of which about 1,000 were fired at police.

      The allegation that this had been a spontaneous riot resulting from the disruption of the commercial life of the city at Christmas time did not convince on this occasion. The general conclusion was that the republican leadership had thought it useful to allow some of their hotheads to let off steam: the bill for the city was five million; the damage to the reputation of Derry abroad incalculable.

      6. Glenageeragh, 15 June 1997

      ‘Like migratory birds, we return to the same scene every year,’ said Henry, as we headed towards his Orange Lodge’s annual service. ‘Whole families come together from elsewhere in the province or overseas. Like Christmas, it’s a time for family bonding. We tread well-trodden roads that our own blood have walked for many generations, be it to a country lane, to a rural church or through a little village or down a main thoroughfare into a town.’

      Of all my Northern Irish friends, Catholic or Protestant, Henry has the greatest sense of place. A farmer who believes in working with rather than against nature, he has a view of the land that takes account of beauty as well as utility. Because he spends so much of his life in physical labour, his mind and his imagination have plenty of time to roam free and much of his intellectual energy is devoted to devising ways of making his people comprehensible to the modern world. A typical phone call from Henry will begin: ‘As I was graiping the silage this morning, I was thinking that another thing that makes my lot [i.e. his people] so cussed is …’ Or he might be in fatalistic mood: ‘Well, don’t worry about it: whatever we do, the rivers of destiny will find their own way into the sea of history.’

      Henry had decided it was time I engaged with a past not focused on King Billy or the siege of Derry. ‘We’re going to where my family come from, where my blood flows, and to the burial ground of my people, Presbyterians all,’ he said, as we drove along the Clogher Valley. ‘Look at it. Picturesque, quiet, typical south Tyrone countryside, with its rolling hills and green grass.’

      Of Scots planter stock on both sides, Henry’s lines can be traced back in Ulster to the late 1700s. He stopped to point upwards. ‘At the top of that hill, that’s where my great-grandmother McMaster was reared, СКАЧАТЬ