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

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СКАЧАТЬ experienced such conditions, some Protestants feel frustration at being told that Catholics were discriminated against. They look back on their own lives and wonder how they can be considered fortunate. But, in a place as economically deprived as Northern Ireland, even assured basic housing or the guarantee of a lowly paid job in industry could amount to meagre privilege.

      Higher up the ladder, the senior posts in the local authorities were filled almost exclusively by Protestants, as were the upper ranks of the civil service, and nearly all the judgeships. I was told of a Catholic lawyer who was passed over for a position as a judge because the incumbent Prime Minister had already nominated one Catholic judge for a judicial post ‘and couldn’t bring himself to nominate another’. The National Health Service was similarly blighted. A nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, which according to my tour guide had been a model of equality, remembers: ‘There was a vacancy for a sister. Someone said to matron that this very good staff nurse would make an excellent sister, and was told, “There can’t be two Catholic sisters in one department.”’ She also recalls a Catholic doctor who emigrated to Australia ‘because he wasn’t getting any promotion’.

      Finding routes barred to them, Catholics often had to use their wits to create work for themselves. According to a retired civil servant, ‘The Protestant community relied on the thought that the government was their thing, and it would look after them. Employment in the old days was very much on the lines that “Willie” is retiring after many years working in the workshop, and he says he’s got a nephew, “Sammy”, who’s very much the man. But things were different in the Catholic community. For many years Catholics thought we’d better get on and do things for ourselves. And nowadays the Catholic working class is more up and doing than their Protestant equivalent.’

      Some attitudes have clearly not changed a great deal over the centuries. In the seventeenth century the expression ‘nits make lice’ was used to justify the killings of Irish children by settlers. In the 1930s the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, warned the Australian Prime Minister to watch the Catholics in his country. ‘They breed like bloody rabbits,’ he said. And in 2009 I was told a story about a recent Protestant wedding in Armagh. Several guests had been sitting in a limousine in formal dress, when a group of Catholics spotted them and started shouting abuse. A girl in the back of the car leant forward and said to the driver, ‘You’d better drive into them! They’ll just breed!’

      These are variations on a theme – and they could be multiplied ad infinitum – but they reflect only one side of a mutual antipathy. Northern Ireland was built on sectarianism, both Orange and Green, with roots hundreds of years old. Sectarianism is the raw essence of today’s identities. Years ago it was expressed freely and without apology. Nowadays it is reserved for those who feel the same way, or else it is turned into a joke. Twice I was told the same joke, once by each side:

      Q. How do you know ET’s a Catholic/Protestant?

      A. Because he fucking looks like one.

      Probably the most shocking joke I heard in Northern Ireland was repeated to me by a Catholic man who had heard it from one of the Shankill Butchers when they briefly shared a prison wing:

      Butcher: What’s the difference between a Catholic and an onion?

      Man: I don’t know.

      Butcher: I cry when I slice up an onion.

      While I was in Belfast I met a man named Joe Graham. He is a writer, historian, storyteller, and a veteran of the civil rights movement. He is, above all, an old-fashioned republican and political activist. I sat interviewing him, chain-smoking his cigarettes, in his tidy house in Andersonstown filled with Country and Western memorabilia that he picks up on trips to Nashville. The only part of the house that isn’t tidy is a cubby-hole beside his study which is crammed with shelves of books, audio tapes, and videos on Irish history, and equipment for the interviews he records himself. Graham is a friendly man in his mid-sixties with wavy grey hair. He has a huge physical presence, and the words ‘Belfast’ and ‘Ireland’ tattooed on his hands. While I could not mistake his allegiance, he had a knack for consistently scuppering my preconceptions – by suddenly telling me, for example, that in his younger days he modelled himself on the pop singer Tommy Steele.

      Joe Graham is very good company, which was just as well because I arrived thinking that we would chat for an hour and eventually staggered out of his front door ten hours later. He began by sharing his memories of growing up in Ballymurphy, a housing estate in west Belfast, built after the war. Ballymurphy is now an urbanized republican area, but back then it was a mixed area on the edge of open country. Graham remembers: ‘We were the last houses before the countryside. The mountains came right down on us. The big mill dam. The water was crystal. Two rounds of bread, a milk bottle of cold tea, and away you went up into the mountains. All the local kids. Ten of you, you didn’t know who was who, running about, swimming. There was an old mill, and the part that housed the big wheel was the dungeon. It was a beautiful thing of childhood – but every now and again you’d get a reminder, and you were acute enough to take it.’

      He describes a reminder: ‘One beautiful sunny morning when I was 11 I went up the street. All my mates were Protestant, because all our street was Protestant except us. So I went to wee Billy Smith’s house, and Mrs Smith said to me, “He’s away out, Joe, son.” I said, “Dead on.” The same thing happened at the next house. Then, at Jimmy Reilly’s house, I knocked on the back door: no answer. His Aunt Tilly was at work, but Jimmy and his wee sister should have been there. Where were they all? So I ran down the dividing fence to the garden next door. Just as I vaulted over the fence into that garden, I saw the curtains flicker in Jimmy’s bedroom. So I came back over the fence, climbed on top of the coal shed, leaned over and banged Jimmy’s bedroom window. He opened it – and it was all the boys sitting there, red, white, and blue everywhere. “What the fuck’s going on?” “Joe! Joe! Get off!” they said to me. So I jumped down and stood in the garden, until Jimmy came down. He said, “We’re going to let you in, but for God’s sake, don’t let my dad know.” “Why? What’s going on?” “We’re making flags!” There was a big football match at Windsor Park, the Six Counties versus England – so they were on a winner either way. I went up into the bedroom and there were thousands of these mini Union Jacks, and the boys were on a couple of pennies each to staple them together. But that wee Fenian bastard Graham wasn’t to be seen about the place. Hurtful. Because these were my best mates. Hurtful. But I helped them to staple these things. And then, in turn, I said, “Don’t tell my mummy and daddy I helped with these…” But it meant fuck all. Even now, it would mean fuck all. A man trying to make a few quid for his family selling Union Jacks? So what? But the sad thing was that in doing so, he hurt a child. He marked a child – and he did no good to the Protestant kids, because they – in adulthood – must feel guilty.’

      For Graham the divide was often emphasized casually but firmly nonetheless. ‘I went to St John’s School. At the foot of the street there was a huge industrial complex belonging to James Mackie, who employed 99.9 per cent Protestants. You were playing on that street during lunch break and the workers were coming out to go to their dinner, you would get a cold, icy look, as if you weren’t there. Yet local people would rub your head fondly. “Hello, wee man. How you doing? Are you being good today?” There was that difference. That coldness from the other people. You were aware that this place was totally split.’

      Graham, and others like him, could sometimes take advantage of the split. ‘We’d get up in the morning to buy pigs’ feet. We would hoof them and singe them, we would scrub them and cook them, and me and Paddy would sell them around the bars. But not on the Falls Road! These people had no work and the Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday. So we went down the Shankill, the Old Lodge Road, Sandy Row, where all the Protestants who had shillings lived, and we sold the pigs’ feet in the bars down there. That was an education. To get a shilling СКАЧАТЬ