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

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СКАЧАТЬ Belfast. Graham can remember buses of unionists coming down to the Springfield Road, where a big banner was placed across the road and Union flags flew everywhere. ‘It was so British,’ says Graham, ‘you’d have thought you were in the Midlands.’ But for Graham’s family 1953 had a different significance: ‘It was the anniversary of the 1803 rebellion, and I watched my father going up the stairs with a long pole. He went into the girls’ bedroom and set it across the bed, and he opened a wee cubby-hole and he took out the national flag. It was the first time I’d been so close to the national flag, and he set about pinning it onto the pole. Then he got a cable and a lightbulb, and pinned it onto the top of the pole, and put it all out through the bedroom window. I thought it was a carnival thing – but within two hours, the cops were belting up the street in their sedans, demanding that he take it down. My father was a very sedate, serious countryman, and he said that the flag would be flying tonight, and it would be taken down tomorrow morning. By then the Protestants had all gathered, and some were standing in the garden. I’ll always remember the cop, a big, ginger-haired bastard, saying, “That’s a foreign flag! It’ll have to come down!” “Why does it have to come down?” “We’ve got reports that people are offended.” My father asked our neighbour Mrs Rossbottom, “Are you offended?” “Not at all, Jim!” But some of the Protestants started getting angry and shouting at the cop, and my father said, “Why are youse all offended? Have you come all the way from the Springfield Road to be offended?” In the end they left, and the flag flew. That was the first flag that flew in Ballymurphy – and it flew with the grace of the Protestant neighbours. There was no ill intent towards the house.’

      Graham speaks of having an acute awareness of inequality as he was growing up: ‘We Catholics did get a raw deal by design. They planned it so, but in planning it, they made it “us and them”.’ It annoys him that today there are those who rewrite history to make out that things were fine before the Troubles started. ‘There was nothing bright and beautiful about being a Catholic living in these six counties. There were things that took away your heritage. Things like the Special Powers Act. We weren’t allowed to have a rebel song LP. It was confiscated, you were charged. You weren’t allowed to read certain newspapers; if you were caught in possession of the United Irishman – an eight-page newspaper – you could have got two years in prison. If you had a bit of money found in the house, money to buy a horse and cart to create a livelihood, had the peelers come in at any time and found that, that would have been confiscated. It could have been seen as having a political purpose. You couldn’t display the national flag – yet theirs could be thrust in our faces 24 hours a day.’

      It is interesting to compare Joe Graham’s recollections with those of Gusty Spence, a one-time member of the UVF, who served a life sentence for the 1966 killing of Peter Ward, a Catholic barman. Spence subsequently repudiated violence to become a loyalist politician and advocate of the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he gave to Bobbie Hanvey, he describes his youthful attitude to Catholics: ‘Catholics had horns and were in some way inferior to Protestants. We were always led to believe this. At the back of your mind, you knew that it was wrong – but at the same time you lived in that grime and squalor that we lived in, and it was good to feel superior, even at the expense of another human being.’

      When he left school Spence started work in a linen mill, where he came into contact with Catholics for the first time. He met a Catholic boy named Jimmy, who talked to him about Irish history. Jimmy told him that the United Irishmen were Protestant. ‘I had no knowledge, and of course, I thought he was telling lies.’ The two young men used to go swimming together in a Catholic area: ‘Jimmy and I had something in common. We both had tattoos. He had a tricolour on his arm, and I had a Union Jack on my arm. Falls Road baths had good facilities for swimming and whenever I went there to swim with Jimmy I had to get a sticking plaster to cover over my Union Jack. So despite what people say about the good old days, about there being no problems, it’s a load of nonsense. We lived in an abnormal society. Jimmy had to teach me to say something about a Hail Mary, so as I could bluff my way through, otherwise I would have got a duffing up.’ A Protestant from Derry, about the same age as Spence, told me of a duffing-up he had received while dressed in his school uniform: ‘I was walking through some playing fields. Two chaps stepped in front of me, who I later found out were Catholic. One of them pointed to the other and said to me, “He wants a fight!” To which I replied, “Then why doesn’t he fight you?” To which they both landed punches on me…’

      Spence knew that he would have to start work in the mill once he left school: ‘The family needed money desperately so there was no question of where you were going.’ He went down to the Labour Exchange with his birth certificate and school-leaving card and received a new set of cards. After presenting them at the mill he began work the next morning. ‘Someone referred to them as “dark Satanic mills”. I wouldn’t disagree with that description. I started work in the spinning room, which was a very, very hot place and a very wet place. You worked in your bare feet in filthy conditions, and there was no recourse to washing, so you returned home from work the same way as you went. The hours were eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night and to twelve-fifteen on a Saturday. All you were supposed to do was keep your head down, keep your mouth closed and earn your sixteen and eight [£0.83] a week.’

      However superior Spence might have been taught to feel, his home life hardly felt privileged. ‘My ma was a great pawner. All the women of her generation were great pawners because they didn’t have the course to anything else.’ He describes the Sunday School trip as the only light relief in a grey world. When his mother accompanied the group on one of those trips, she had to borrow a coat to make herself respectable: ‘If a woman had a coat, it was a big deal. I’m not overstating the case. Those things hurt. If people would only realize the indignities and the hurt that people felt at having to borrow some other woman’s coat.’

      Spence regrets the fact that for a Protestant to criticize social conditions would – even today – be regarded as disloyalty. ‘You would be called a “closet republican” or a “card-carrying commie”. The continuance of the union would be our main philosophy. However, within that, why does one have to be anything peculiar to articulate a political philosophy?’

      The answer lies in the need to express unity. Unionists were not really a homogenous people. They came from all classes of society and they attended a multitude of different churches, from Presbyterian to High Anglican. They had ranged their wagons in a circle to defend the status quo – and they could not encourage self-examination or internal dissent, for fear of showing weakness to the enemy. Safer to present a united front by placing emphasis on shared values, such as loyalty to the Crown and Protestant supremacy. As Sir Edward Carson, the early twentieth-century unionist leader, had once warned, if divisions within unionism ‘became wide and deep, Ulster would fall’.

      This united front, and the interests of the Protestant people, have been historically guarded over by the Orange Order. Three hundred years old and named after William of Orange, the Protestant king who defeated the Catholic King James, the Orange Order was formed to unite Protestants against demands for an independent Ireland. Members come from all levels of society and from (currently) eighteen Protestant denominations. When members join, they receive an initiation which spells out the aim of the Order as ‘the mutual defence, support and protection of Irish Protestants’. It is also made clear: ‘You have promised…never to attend any act or ceremony of popish worship.’

      The Order borrows freely from the ritual and terminology of freemasonry; members call one another brethren, they attend lodges, they take oaths, and they can attain the position of grand master. The brethren used to wear orange silk sashes, like the one worn by William III at the Boyne, but more recently they have come to wear orange collarettes and bowler hats. Bowlers are Edwardian symbols of respectability, harking back to the period when the Order began to wield its greatest influence. The early years of the twentieth century were a time when dire labour and housing conditions might have created social disorder, but the Orange Order, and its large numbers of working-class members, were concentrating on other issues: fear of Home Rule, and the СКАЧАТЬ