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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a Protestant people who had watched the extent of their authority steadily diminish on the island of Ireland. Brought up on folk memories of the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, events in which their ancestors had resisted Catholic challenges to their authority, they had lately watched their dominion shrink to just six of the nine counties of Ulster, while the Catholics received a Free State to the south.

      In the first year and a half of its existence Northern Ireland was rocked by a level of bloodshed not to be repeated until the modern Troubles. Hundreds of people were killed, some by IRA incursions over the border, most by internal sectarian violence. The disorder added to unionists’ insecurities and hardened their attitudes. At political meetings they carried placards bearing such legends as ‘What We Have We Hold!’ and ‘No Surrender!’ They feared the Catholics in their midst, and they mistrusted the British government, which they believed would only act halfheartedly – if at all – to ensure their survival. In their suspicion and cautious aggression they were probably not very different from their ancestors who, hundreds of years earlier, had arrived in Ulster to stake their claim in the midst of a resentful enemy.

      To ensure their survival, unionists introduced their own security measures. The mixed Royal Ulster Constabulary and the exclusively Protestant ‘B Special’ reserve were created to defend against insurrection, and the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, 1922, was passed, giving the right to intern suspects without trial and allowing juryless courts to order the flogging of a prisoner. Over and above these powers, however, that Act – which remained in force until 1973 – gave the Home Affairs Minister the right to ‘make any regulation at all necessary to preserve law and order’. These were desperate measures introduced by desperate people.

      When the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble accepted his Nobel Prize for peace in 1998, he made a speech offering an insight into unionist thinking over the previous eighty years. ‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house,’ he said, ‘but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.’ It does not take much imagination to see why Protestants would have been happy to keep the house cold, even if some unionists still deny that the temperature was ever turned down. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2001, Gregory Campbell, the Democratic Unionist Party member for Londonderry, said that ‘the acceptance of that premise has done untold harm in the past 30 years’.

      Yet the Northern Ireland government did employ some very brazen political strategies to retain its mastery. In 1923 the system of proportional representation, which had been introduced by the British government throughout Ireland to safeguard the interests of minority communities, was abolished for local elections. Nationalists were swiftly relieved of their majorities in over half of the councils over which they had control. Unionists were so pleased with this outcome that proportional representation was subsequently abolished for Parliamentary elections as well.

      One factor that helped the unionist cause was the fact that only the owners or tenants of a house had the right to vote in local elections. Sub-tenants, lodgers, and others did not. Not only that, but for every additional £10-a-year valuation of a house after the initial £10, additional voters could be appointed up to a maximum of six. This meant two things: first, that poorer people could not vote at all, and second, that wealthier people could vote several times. And of course the poorer people tended to be Catholic while the wealthier tended to be Protestant.

      Another rotten measure was the system of gerrymandering in areas where unionists were outnumbered. This involved the reorganization of boundaries within districts. The most famous example of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland – although by no means the only one – occurred in Derry, where a predominantly Catholic populace would consistently find itself returning a Protestant-dominated council. In the build-up to the 1938 elections, the number of council wards in Derry was reduced from five to three. Almost the entire Catholic population of 9,500 voters found itself crammed into the South ward, which returned eight councillors, while 7,500 Protestant voters were divided between the North ward and the Waterside ward, which between them returned twelve councillors. At a 1936 public inquiry into the arrangement – whose findings were ultimately ignored by the Northern Ireland government – the Catholic barrister Cyril Nicholson asked the unionist councillor James Welch how the arrangement looked to him. ‘It looks a bit slightly out of proportion,’ Welch admitted.

      Not only was gerrymandering a bit slightly out of proportion, but it laid the ground for future trouble. It encouraged the development of further segregation and all the disharmony this entailed. It also meant that when opportunities arose to build houses for Catholics within the ‘wrong’ ward, these opportunities were rejected, however badly the housing was needed. The need to maintain political control would always trump the desire to improve the conditions of ‘the other lot’.

      So it was that unionism remained solid – even as trouble was being stored up. But it would be wrong to think that the standard of living of most unionists was good. For the gentry and the professional classes it might have been, but, for the working classes of both traditions, poverty was a reality. Unemployment was high, incomes were considerable lower than those in Britain, and the standard of housing and public amenities was poor. Many country farmhouses and town terrace houses had no mains water or provision for gas lighting until well into the twentieth century. Protestants, you might say, were second-class citizens, while Catholics were a class below that.

      With regards to employment, though, it was better to be second- than third-class. Many firms employed almost exclusively Protestant workforces. An Englishman who came to Northern Ireland in the late Fifties to work as a personnel manager relates how a Ministry of Labour official taught him to distinguish Protestant names from Catholic names, and then advised him to select only the Protestants. Even within a mixed business certain jobs might be reserved for Protestants. I was told the story of a young Catholic, working in a shirt factory, who had taken his own life after being refused a position as a shirt cutter. Afterwards a friend remarked angrily, ‘He should have known he wasn’t ever going to be permitted to be a shirt cutter! Catholics don’t get those jobs!’

      So far as many unionists were concerned, the fact that Catholics did not ‘get those jobs’ was not a matter of discrimination at all. It was simply the way things were. Many of the ‘unionist jobs’ had been done by the same families for many years and when a position became available a worker would recommend a friend or relative. There was no question of Catholics even applying for these jobs. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, whose huge yellow cranes still dominate the Belfast landscape, is a case in point. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholics were expelled from jobs in the yard during periods of sectarian unrest. Over time they stopped applying for those jobs, and they became the natural preserve of unionists without active bias having to be applied.

      Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff in 1937. He described conditions in the yard to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘People used to earn their pay, or they didn’t get it, and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it. That meant working in all sorts of weather, where it poured all day, you got wet right through to the skin. You sat in the open, taking your tea from an old can, out between boats in the cold and wet. You only got a half an hour break, and there wasn’t much to do other than religious services, or playing rubby-dub with dice. If you went out, you had no sickness pay, there was no holiday pay, just the wages you had.’

      Murray explains how workers had to keep on the right side of the foremen: ‘The foremen were a queer lot. Hard. Some of them really took on the mantle of God. If they took a dislike to you, you were out for life. If they didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out. They seemed to be picked for their hardness, to be able to kick people up the backside. And there was a lot of things that went on that was very dishonest. One foreman used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job. In those days people were more humble than what they should have been because they were driven by management and by foremen. СКАЧАТЬ