Commentary It's the old, everyday hate that still
grips
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Armagh, Northern Ireland
Portadown, a tidy, uptight, mostly Protestant town, forms one
angle of what has become known as Northern Ireland's Murder Triangle.
Early July 6 police dragged away some 200 Catholics who had
threatened to block an Orange parade down Catholic Gervaghy Road. In the
afternoon, 2,000 Protestants marched. Instead of the usual triumphalist music
they marched to the eerie beat of a single drum. Only a few Catholics watched.
Only a few bottles and rocks were hurled. No one was killed and few were hurt.
The Orangemen were in and out of Gervaghy Road in less than 10 minutes.
Though a small matter in a world full of bigger turmoil, this
episode was reported around the world -- as if there were more to it than meets
the eye. While most accounts were woefully shallow -- the TV reports I saw took
less than 10 seconds each -- they hinted that heavy issues were at stake.
It reminded me of poet Patrick Kavanagh, from across the border in
Monaghan, ruminating about a similar small-time skirmish -- two pitchfork-armed
farmers fighting over land -- that seemed inconsequential "Till Homer's ghost
came whispering to my mind/He said: 'I made the Iliad from such a local
row.' "
What blows in the wind -- that's what the epic is made of. But
it's so far away, and touches few lives in, for example, America. People ask
what's really going on but after 30 seconds their eyes glaze over. My
wife explained the Orange marches: Imagine the Ku Klux Klan, in full regalia,
singing "I wish I was in Dixie" and marching through your town's black ghetto
because it was part of the Klan's cultural heritage. This parallel worked well
in at least one instance.
The Orange Order was founded down the road from Portadown, in the
sleepy village of Loughgall, in 1793. As usual it was the Catholics' fault. The
local Battle of the Diamond, between the new Protestant settlers and the
dispossessed Irish, left about 40 people dead. Although the avowed purpose of
the oath-bound Orangemen was self-defense, they soon found this was best
accomplished by driving the Catholics off to barren Connaught and taking over
the vacated properties.
A 19th-century Orange toast hints at members' cultural outlook:
"To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of King William III, who saved us
from rogues and roguery, slaves and slavery, knaves and knavery, popes and
popery, from brass money and wooden shoes. And whoever denies this toast, may
he be slammed, crammed and jammed into the muzzle of the great gun of Athlone,
and the gun fired into the pope's belly, and the pope into the devil's belly,
and the devil into hell, and the door locked and the key in an Orangeman's
pocket."
While the Protestant aristocracy looked on these buffoons with
disdain, the aristocrats needed Orange support, as one wrote: "With all their
licentiousness, on them we must rely for the preservation of our lives and
properties should critical times occur."
Now it's 1997. Welcome to the time warp.
The Gervaghy Road episode marked the beginning of what is called
"the marching season," which, people say, will be more combustible than usual
this year. There will be approximately 3,000 such parades by the end of August,
mostly by Protestants/Unionists/Orangemen but some by Catholics/Nationalists.
The Catholics will celebrate the rebellion of 1916 and aspire rhetorically to a
united Ireland after the British have gone safely home; the Protestants will
celebrate the 1690 defeat of Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne and
vow never to capitulate to a united Ireland. Their slogan: Not an inch!
If pageantry were the purpose, the Orange parades would be, as
Northerners sometimes say, a good "turn." And a good tourist attraction. Famous
flautist James Galway did his apprenticeship on the streets of Belfast with a
tin whistle.
Instead, there is a deadly seriousness about the marches.
Catholics in the North say tensions have scarcely been so high since the
troubles started. The anecdotal evidence is repeated by Catholics in one Ulster
town after another, told almost without anger now, with resignation at the way
things are. They are stories of brutality by Protestants against Catholics,
while police or soldiers, knowing the score exactly, looked on. No doubt
Protestants have some similar stories to tell. Two policemen were murdered in
the nearby town of Lurgan in June. It's a powder keg, people say.
The media have been full of peace talks and who could sit at the
table, who would disarm first, who would blink. But down in the neighborhoods
and in the townlands it's the old hate that grips people, and fear and
mistrust. Members of both denominations will say their neighbors of the other
persuasion, those who "dig with the other foot," are the best of people, except
during marching season or when conflict descends, as it repeatedly does. No one
is in the mood for quaint tourist turns.
It is sad as well as ironic that such a large, vibrant community
should be arrested in time and place in an otherwise progressive and prosperous
Ireland. The little island is currently a cultural mecca basking in the renown
of, for example, Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize, Frank McCourt's Angela's
Ashes, Riverdance and U2, world famous playwrights and a litany of
compelling home-grown movies. New houses dot the landscapes and swell the
cities. Ireland has by far the youngest population in Europe. Its economic
prosperity is among the highest in Europe, attracting emigrants back home.
There are downsides such as high unemployment, high crime, anger
at the Catholic church and the old reasons for that anger. Yet the island as a
whole seems more hopeful than it has been for generations. Impressions abound
to confirm the new confidence. It's a modern country building self-consciously
on the best of its past. A gaggle of druids descended on Tara of the ancient
kings to celebrate the summer solstice. Irish workers are "the healthiest and
happiest in Europe" and also among the hardest-working, according to a European
study. The natives are celebrating the 1,400th anniversary of St. Columcille,
son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, the first High King of Ireland -- back
before the British came.
One interesting thing about Columcille is that he didn't stay home
with papa the king. Instead, he was raised by a priest called
Cruithneachán. This was in keeping with the custom of the time whereby
children of leading families were fostered out to other ruling families. This
cemented relations between them, and no chieftain would wage war on a clan
where the kid was in fosterage. One can only speculate what such an arrangement
between Protestants and Catholics might do for Northern Ireland today. No one
seems to have thought of trying it.
In a country renowned for its playwrights, the latest phenom is
Martin McDonagh, whose "The Leenane Trilogy" has been described as "a great
gothic soap opera." Among the cornerstones of Irish life that take a beating
are the family, the law and the church. What is depicted, writes Fintan O'Toole
in The Irish Times, is "a version of one of the great mythic landscapes
-- the world before morality."
And this, if we want it to, recalls the marchers of the North,
"with their little hard hats on their little hard heads," as they have been
unkindly characterized. When it comes to assigning blame, it would be a
travesty to put Catholics and Protestants on an equal footing. Up to now, the
Protestants have held all the cards. They ruled the roost. Their marches were
for the most part an act of domination over Catholics, rubbing Catholic noses
in Catholic inferiority. That is true as recently as July 6. There was no
reason, geographical or aesthetic or spiritual, to march down Gervaghy Road.
Only the act of domination.
Others search for more benign explanations for what might be a
final act of defiance by Orangemen who see themselves being cut adrift in a new
Ireland and a new Europe. Catholics are not only outbreeding Protestants, they
are becoming more politically sophisticated. For the first time ever a
nationalist has become lord mayor of Belfast. As one newspaper put it, "When
the land goes, the roads are all the Unionists think they have left."
How dirty and undignified the marching season will get remains to
be seen. History shows logic or love are no match for old hatreds.
O'Toole, describing "The Leenane Trilogy," may not have had the
Orangemen in mind, but he could have. The playwright's brilliance, he writes,
"drains the heroics out of the myth. He suggests that what happens when order
collapses is not just the big, epic horrors but a hysterical riot of
incongruities. What makes his characters so like old, mad children is that
everyone has forgotten what adults are supposed to learn -- the difference
between what matters and what doesn't."
Homer's ghost is still having a field day in Ireland.
NCR Editor Michael Farrell recently returned from a three-week
visit to Ireland.
National Catholic Reporter, July 18,
1997
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