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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ