The voices of N. Ireland in wilderness

Press, 30 August 1989, Page 22

The voices of N. Ireland in wilderness

Twenty years ago Ulster Catholics met to demand voting, housing, and employment rights in what to many of them was a Protestant regime. A violent Protestant backlash brought a heavy British military presence to stand between the two groups. Large numbers of soldiers remain in the British province, with terrorists continuing to wage a guerrilla war.

ROBIN ROBILLIARD, a New Zealand freelance journal-

ist who was recently in Belfast, speaks to Protestants and Catholics in the first article of a four-part series on Ireland. Remaining articles will centre on the Republic of Ireland.

THE TAXI driver, delivering me to my Belfast digs, had a sister doing time in Ardagh jail. At 22 she’d been caught with some guns. “She’d done brilliantly at school.”

He pointed to a lamp-post where a bride, according to tradition, had been chained the previous Saturday, “when the bloody bank beside her got blown up!” Held up by a procession of Protestant bands, mourning the death of two British soldiers, the driver turned off his meter. “Welcome,” he said, “to the best wee city in the world.” I walk up Falls Road, the main artery of the Catholic ghetto of west Belfast. There are side streets of tiny terraced houses, and row upon row of new brick housing. “Brits Out!” says the graffiti. “There is a misconception,” says Mark, aged 26, a university graduate, “that this is a religious war between Roman Catholics and Protestants. It isn’t. It’s a political war against British occupation. How long are they going to stay and keep this thing going? Do they want another 800 years? I’d rather have it all over with; and if I die I die.” A mother, who suspects her son is an I.R.A. volunteer, says she foresees only two ends for him: a life sentence, or coming home in a box. She is completely bewildered by his mentality. “People are afraid to say they don’t support the 1.R.A.,” says a priest. “I don’t know what’s worse — the terrorism of bombs, or the terrorism of fear. A lad was told to shoot someone, and couldn’t. I told him to report to his I.R.A. superior. He said he couldn’t do that. Instead he phoned the British Army barracks and got himself arrested. He said the I.R.A. would have shot him.”

West Belfast has 80 per cent unemployment. “People are poor alright, but they are on Britishpaid welfare. Its just they can’t budget, says the priest. "They dress well, have colour TV, and spend too much on drink. The houses are good now. Some people pay little or no rent. The great majority of the money for the six counties comes from the British taxpayer. Without British subsidies a lot of Protes-

tant business would be destroyed. So British withdrawal is unlikely. The I.R.A. are blind, and can’t see that.”

Maggie, mother of 11, had, from the age of 14 worked in a linen mill. "Even with education, if a good job was going you knew a Protestant would get it. "Stormont (Northern Ireland’s Parliament, 1920-72) was a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people. They had preference over housing. Only those with property could vote. We Catholics were conditioned to being second-class citizens,” she says.

The latest round of the Irish “troubles” started in 1968. The catalyst was television, showing night after night the civil righto marches in the southern United States, led by Martin Luther King. “We all thought if black people could do it, why can’t we?” Maggie says.

On a march from Belfast to Londonderry, in 1969, Catholic civil righto protesters were beaten and clubbed, while the police looked on. In Belfast, fuelled by the rhetoric of the Rev. Dr lan Paisley — “the Pope is an anti-Christ” — mobs from Protestant Shankhill poured into the Catholic Falls, pillaging and burning. The British Army was sent in to restore order, and the “peace line” — the barricade of corrugated iron and barbed wire dividing Protestant from Catholic ghettos — came into being.

The office of the Sinn Fein Party, the political wing of the 1.R.A., felt like a cave with its windows bricked up. “Thatcher wanted for murder,” a wall poster said. I asked Martin Cowley, Sinn Fein city councillor,

what Sinn Fein wanted? “A united socialist democratic 32county republic.” A Protestant, giving me a lift up Shankhill Road, a Protestant ghetto area, asks me not even to quote his profession. “There are only three of us in the Shankhill, and I drive through Catholic west Belfast to get here.” He says

there are two streams of Protestants in the North, liberal and rigid. “The rigid are threatened by being 25 per cent of the population of the whole of Ireland, which makes them feel besieged. The liberal Protestants want power-sharing, and tend to be middle class.”

The Shankhill office of Hugh Smith, Democratic Unionist councillor, has just had its win-

dows bricked up. He had been nicked by a bullet the previous week.

Hugh Smith is a proponent of internment. “Mrs Thatcher must recognise it’s a Falklands situation. The police know who are responsible for these terrorist acts, but their hands are tied by the lack of the evidence. The I.R.A. have the upper hand at the moment.”

There are also about 40 illegal Loyalist paramilitary groups. Only the Ulster Defence Association (U.D.A.) is legal, although it has committed some ghastly murders.

Sonja, a Protestant nurse, has a husband who volunteered for the U.D.A. and then became disillusioned. “At the beginning it was self-help, looking after each other’s houses. Then they asked everyone for 10 pence a week, to make sure your windows weren’t broken.

“There are now flourishing protection rackets. Gangs have carved up the areas. If terrorism stopped tomorrow, the extortion and Mafia-type actions would go on. Shoot to kill is the answer,” she said. “That’s what has to be done.”

A judge says the imposition of a united Ireland is not worth considering at the moment. “Withdrawal of the troops is an unpractical solution. The Protestant majority would panic and strike out — as they did in 1969 — but this time it would be worse, because there’d be no British troops to maintain law. No, the United Nations is not the answer, because then people would shoot at them. "The basic fear of the North’s

Protestants is that they will be outbred by the Catholics. It’s in the Anglo Irish Agreement (signed by Britain and the Irish Republic, November, 1985) that the Republic of Ireland will absorb the North if the majority of the population want it.” “I wouldn’t go into a united Ireland,” says Amy, a Protestant typist, “with restrictions on contraception, no abortion or divorce.”

Majorie, on the other hand, a retired headmistress, would be happy in a united Ireland, "but I’ll be damned if I’ll be bombed into it.” She regards herself as British. “I was educated in the British way.” Protestant children, up to the age of 18, have only one term of Irish history.

clergy seen visiting Catholic territory can get rough treatment from parishioners. I meet two Protestant ministers who say they’d never exchanged a word with a Catholic until they went to university, “and discovered they didn’t have two heads.”

“The stereotyping here is not exaggerated,” says a Canadianborn political scientist at Queens University. Of the 70 to 80 professors only two or three are Roman Catholics in a 50-50 student body. The intellectual achievements of both religious groups is the same, with the Roman Catholics perhaps more achievement-orientated in the North where the dice is loaded against them. “The university does not overtly give the top jobs through religion, but more from the stereotype of the Catholic being lackadaisical. And I believe it’s true that “Catholic” means more

Many Northern Protestants have such a superstitious fear of Catholicism, that one of their fun, humour, when employers want punctuality, honesty, sobriety. There is also the security risk for a Protestant employer — what a Catholic might carry in his lunch bag.” The Martyrs Memorial is the church of the Rev. Dr lan Paisley. “Christ was a violent man! Violent for good! And we must be violent for God’s sake!” he roars from the pulpit. We are ordered to sing the hymns, not mumble. The choir is reprimanded for having been at less than full force at the previous day’s open-air service. The

“Lord’s Treasury” requires much greater giving. Paisley’s Free Presbyterian followers are estimated at only 5 per cent of the North’s population, but in aggression and fanaticism they are probably worth several regiments. Moreover

Paisley is extreniely popular as an M.P., and has the reputation for working equally hard for both Catholics and Protestant constituents. This leader of the Democratic Unionist Party tops the polls in the European elections.

A spokesman of the Royal Ulster < Constabulary, asked why Paisley is not arrested under the Incitement to Hatred Act, says it is too difficult to prove. “We ask

him to tone it down, and he’ll cooperate, but every now and again he’ll have an outrage — to keep his flock happy.”

Paisley, as an M.P., has a 24hour police guard. “But the I.R.A. don’t want to kill him,” a historian says, “because he suits their purpose. On the one hand he acts as a catalyst, mobilising Loyalists to look after their own interests; on the other hand his crude behaviour, and vehement anti-English remarks, further alienates British public opinion.

"The I.R.A. has a plan. Tenacity will pay off: continue the armed struggle until the British get frustrated and withdraw. The I.R.A. knows it can’t win a military victory against the security forces. It aims to win by attrition. It’s estimated that the I.R.A. can survive with as little as 3 per cent support among the Catholic population. "The 1.R.A.,” the police spokesman told me, “only numbers about 500 people.”

If Britain left it would take away the social security structure. Public expenditure now accounts for more than 70 per cent of the gross domestic product. Forty-five per cent of those who work are employed in the public sector. Large numbers of jobholders, from prison warders to glaziers, are direct beneficiaries of "the troubles.” Others owe their employment to the need for duplication in a divided society, which has two lots of teachers, doctors, and lawyers.

The only time I feel an urge to

say “excuse me, do you mind checking under your car for a bomb?” is when driving with Dan McGuinness, chairman of Alliance, the North’s only nonsectarian party. Membership, predominantly middle-class, attracting intellectuals, averages 10-15 per cent at the polls.

McGuinness, a solicitor, lives with his parents in Andersontown, a working class Catholic ghetto. In this staunchly nationalist area the I.R.A. regard him as a threat. Sixteen years ago he was kneecapped, and given a week to get out of the area. Stones are thrown through his windows. "Alliance aims for a better society. We stand up for what we think. Not necessarily what appeals to voters. We opposed the hunger strike in 1981. The S.D.L.P. (Labour Party) stood on the fence. We said the Anglo Irish Agreement must be given a chance to work.”

Dan McGuinness is a practising Catholic, but says nationalism is an outdated concept. "I’m not anti-Irish, however, and I don’t think you have to be anti-British to be Irish. The republican tide can be pushed back with hard work, and power-sharing is still the best solution.”

The I.R.A. kneecappers failed miserably in their task of suppressing a dissident 16 years ago. If McGuinness can remain optimistic about the future, what right has anyone else to be depressed? The Alliance Party is a voice of tolerance, crying in the wilderness.