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

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СКАЧАТЬ by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.

      We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.

      Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.

      ‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.

When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,^* a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’

      Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,

      Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below, Who once saw winter into summer pass, Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow

      O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,

      On the white walls of homestead and of byre Loved beyond death, even as men love them now, With a devotion burning like a fire.

      Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth

      To seek a better country than their own, As Abraham from Ur once quested north Obedient to the faith which led him on.

      Obedient down the wandering of the years

      Through many a hope deferred, a plan delayed, Claiming the land for ever by his tears Shed at the grave where his dear dust was laid.

      So by these graves we claim the country still,

      This land made rich by sacrifice and tears, Held with such passionate love, such stubborn will, Tom from the people oft down bitter years,

      Spoiled by the hirelings of a servile court,

      Harried by prelates of a faith denied. The rebels’ plunder and the landlords’ sport, Yet loved of those who tilled her fields, and died,

      And dying passed into her kindly mould

      To sanctify for us each kirkyard green, Each sheltered vale and every hillside cold, And little highways where their feet have been.

      Thus do we claim our country from the lord

      As Abraham claimed his at Machpelah’s cave, From age to age still runs the changeless word, ‘The land is his who claims it by a grave.’

      It came as no surprise that such an anti-Episcopalian poem had been written by a Presbyterian minister. What was more surprising was that he was a distant kinsman of Henry’s, for I had thought all of his blood were farmers or businessmen apart from the odd engineer. And Henry was able to tell me the story that had inspired such ardent love of Ulster and such bitter denunciation of his ancestors’ persecutors.

      The paternal family of the poet, John Worthington Johnston, had farmed south of the border in County Monaghan from King William’s time until, in the 1860s, as a result of some skulduggery by the landlord and his steward, who wanted the prosperous farm for himself, they had to move. In the Clogher Valley, Johnston’s grandfather started afresh and turned unproductive land into a fertile farm; he had seven children, including one who became Henry’s great-grandmother. When Johnston died at fifty-one, his eldest son took over, ran the farm and then became a Presbyterian minister. He had a church in County Antrim and then for a long time served in Dublin. His son John, who was born south of Dublin, was only twelve when his father’s church, the Abbey, was burned down during the 1916 Easter Rising.

      John Johnston graduated from Trinity College Dublin with first-class honours in Classics and from Cambridge University with a first in Theology and then, like his father before him, became a minister in County Antrim. In October 1942 he joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, in the 6th Airborne Division, and served as one of the small number of ‘parachute padres’ until invalided out in 1945 after a parachute jump that went wrong. Of his three daughters, one became a distinguished historian and the other two senior civil servants, one of whom later became, like her father and grandfather, a Presbyterian minister.

      The story of the Johnstons is an illustration of how, until very recently, almost the only acceptable way for any rural Presbyterian to follow an intellectual route was through the ministry. And equally graphically, his poem shows how even one of the loftier intellects among Presbyterian ministers kept true to his roots. Being elected by the members of their congregation, and running their kirk hand-in-hand with their elders, keep ministers humble and in touch with reality.

      In his book on Presbyterians, the Reverend John Dunlop described the Bible as ‘the book of a pilgrim people’, which goes a long way towards explaining why they identify so much with the Israelites of the Old Testament, an aspect of their collective psyche represented throughout the rituals of the Orange and Black institutions. There was not a man walking in an Orange collarette down that hill from Glenageeragh, thinking about Drumcree, in whom Johnston’s poem would not have struck a deep chord.

      7. Rossnowlagh, 5 July 1997

      The annual Orange parade in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, challenges two beliefs: the first that Orange marches are inherently territorial and triumphalist; the other that a United Ireland would stamp out the Protestant identity.

      The truth is more complicated. Northern Irish Orangemen love the Rossnowlagh parade because there is no trouble and nothing to prove: citizens СКАЧАТЬ