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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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.

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