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

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СКАЧАТЬ Parliament that he was ‘an Orangeman first, and a politician and a member of this parliament afterwards’.

      A very rare unionist politician who was not an Orangeman was Samuel Hall-Thompson, a minister of education responsible for post-war educational reforms. In 1949 a meeting was called by the Sandy Row Grand Orange Lodge to protest against his proposals concerning the payment of Catholic teachers. The Prime Minister attended and, under pressure, promised to revise the plans. He then sacked Hall-Thompson, who became a high-ranking victim of the Orange Order’s grass roots. In Britain the working classes came to voice their struggle through the trade unions. In Northern Ireland the trade union movement carried little weight. The unionist working class expressed itself through the Order, and the Order was not overtly class conscious. It is little wonder that in Gusty Spence’s experience it was ‘peculiar’ to articulate a political philosophy. Andy Tyrie, the one-time leader of the UDA, was once asked what he thought was the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The only difference, he replied, was that Protestants couldn’t complain.

      However firmly unionists stood together, and however robustly the Northern Ireland government asserted its claim to be master of its own house, there was always one party with the capacity to undermine it: the British government. While Britain was allowing the province free rein, little complaint could be heard from Stormont. But in 1940 a proposal from Winston Churchill’s wartime government horrified unionists, and threatened to end the life of their young state. As Britain and her colonies stood alone against Hitler, and the people of Britain braced themselves for a German invasion, Churchill’s war cabinet offered Eire an undertaking towards a united Ireland, in return for Eire’s abandonment of wartime neutrality. The Northern Ireland cabinet reacted furiously at the perceived treachery. In the event Eire, already keener on reunification in theory than in practice, rejected Churchill’s offer. After only twenty years of existence, Northern Ireland had Eire to thank for its survival.

      The incident seemed to confirm the unionists’ worst fears concerning Britain’s attitude to her loyal province. I considered the nature of Britain’s attitude as I wandered around the Stormont Parliament buildings. From the ceiling of Stormont’s Great Hall hangs a huge gold-plated chandelier, which had been a wedding present from the German Kaiser to his cousin King George V. This chandelier had spent a few years hanging in Windsor Castle until it was taken down at the start of the First World War, when German light fittings fell out of favour. Eighty years later an inventory at Windsor found the chandelier to be missing, but there was no record of where it had gone. Much has been said about Northern Ireland’s strategic and economic significance, but its use as Britannia’s informal dump has not been so well recorded.

      While the British government had the power to destroy Northern Ireland, another organization had the desire to do so. From the time of the creation of the State until the advent of the modern Troubles, the IRA made sporadic attempts to shoot and bomb its way to a united Ireland, but the organization always remained small and received little support from the Catholic community. Joe Cahill joined the IRA in 1938 in west Belfast. He was one of several men convicted of the 1942 killing of a police officer, and was sentenced to death but later reprieved. Just one man, Tom Williams, was hanged for the murder. Cahill described his experiences to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘There were actually eight of us arrested on Easter Sunday 1942. Easter Sunday was a period when parades were banned. Our idea was to fire shots over security patrols in three areas, to draw all the security forces into those areas, leaving the other two areas free where parades could be held. So we fired shots over a patrol car. When that was finished, we retreated. There was a bit of a problem then; it just didn’t work out as we had planned, and we all finished up in a house. The house was surrounded, there was a bit of shooting, and a policeman was shot dead. We were all arrested and taken to the police headquarters, and brought before the court and charged with murder. We were remanded, and brought before the court on several different occasions right up to the High Court, which lasted three days. Eventually the jury came back in, and six of us were found guilty and sentenced to death.’

      For four and a half weeks Cahill shared a condemned cell with Tom Williams. He describes the conditions: ‘It’s fair to say that the food was much better in the condemned cell. You got two bottles of stout a day, or a half and a whisky. You had hospital beds. And along with the two prisoners, there were three warders there, twenty-four hours a day; even when you were sleeping they were still there.’ Cahill already knew Williams; they had gone to dances together, and in prison they became closer still. They passed their days exercising in the yard and had access to chess, draughts, and cards. ‘It’s fair to say the day was fairly well spent. It normally started off with Mass, then in the evening we had devotions. We had two visits a day, there were so many relatives and people wanting to see us.’

      Cahill describes the prospect of death: ‘I’m not being boastful about this, but once you made your peace with God, I think death is very easy to face. The only way I can equate it, is often I’ve heard people saying, “He died a lovely death” because they were prepared to die. Once you’re prepared to die, I think death is easy faced. That’s where religion plays a big part in my life.’

      On a Sunday afternoon, all of the condemned were brought into the solicitor’s room. ‘The solicitor looked at the six of us. He says, “I have good news for everybody except Tom. The rest of you have been reprieved. Tom,” he says, “you’ll die.” And it was a shock to everybody. At this stage we didn’t expect to be reprieved; we thought we were all going to be executed because it was only three days away. There was a tremendous silence and the first one to break the silence was Tom Williams. He says, “This is how I wanted it from the start. Don’t grieve for me,” he says. “I’m happy to die.” And that was the saddest moment in my life. We were taken away from him and we were given a guarantee that we’d see him again before Wednesday. The authorities never kept their promise. We didn’t see him again. We were taken to the penal servitude wing. The last memory I have of Tom Williams was on the day of his execution. The chap in the cell above me rapped on the floor and he says, “Joe, jump up to your window.” I jumped up to the window and I looked out and I saw his funeral going to the back of the hospital for burial. That’s my last memory of Tom Williams.’

      One man who volunteered to combat the IRA was Wallace Clark. Clark was a member of the B Specials, the largest of three arms of the Ulster Special Constabulary. He entered the constabulary in 1950, the third generation of his family to join, and became a District Commandant. The B Specials had a sinister reputation; they were greatly feared by Catholics. In an interview with Bobbie Hanvey, Clark challenges the reputation: ‘The general view of the Catholics was that the B Specials were heavily biased, tending to brutality, and did a lot of quiet killing – which is all untrue if you look at the statistics. But they were all so frightened of the Bs, which gave us a very strong moral position, in that a B man was very rarely attacked in his house. They were stewing in their own juice, they demonized the Bs so effectively. We did a lot of our work at night dressed in black or very dark green. That’s one reason it was so easy to demonize the B Specials. It created the “bogeymen” image.’

      Clark explains why he joined: ‘I think sort of family pride, like it applied to a lot of men in the B Specials. It was public service, the country was under threat. I felt I could do my little bit in putting down terrorism.’ The B Specials were a part-time force. ‘They operated around home, they kept their rifles at home, their uniforms at home, and turned out to parade locally. Initially, we drilled a lot in Orange halls but not because of any tremendous connection with the Orange Order. We were sometimes accused of being run by the Orange Order, which was absolute bunkum. The Orange Order hadn’t the organization or structure to run a force like the B Specials.’

      As a commandant, Clark had eight sub-district commandants under his command, each of whom commanded about thirty men. ‘With that organization, and with the rifles at home, we could put down twenty-four roadblocks within ten minutes of getting the alarm. Because the men could turn out quickly. We had these funny old uniforms with a stand-up collar, and you could pull it over your pyjamas, and you could pull on your black trousers. We patrolled the roads, СКАЧАТЬ