by A. N. Wilson
For Paisley, the Irish Presbyterians, like the regular Ulster Unionists, were fudgers, who had betrayed their basic principles. He saw the Presbyterians as having sold out to modernist, wishy-washy interpretations of Scripture; he saw Captain O’Neill’s party as being toadyish to Westminster, and too willing to kowtow to Roman Catholics. Why, only that Easter, Belfast, bastion city of Protestant independence, had been festooned with Irish tricolours, put up by Irish republicans. The government had done nothing to stop them! Paisley had responded by marching to the City Hall Cenotaph with 6,000 supporters. For the summer picket of the Presbyterian gathering the police were ready for them outside the Assembly Hall, but Paisley changed the route of his march. As they passed Cromac Square a mob of Catholics was waiting with bricks and metal objects. The well-disciplined Protestants did not retaliate, but the police became involved, a riot ensued–minor by the standards of Northern Ireland–and Paisley was arrested and given a prison sentence in Crumlin Road gaol. It was the young firebrand’s political baptism.
J. Enoch Powell, an English politician who chose to involve himself in Irish politics, coined the phrase that all political careers end in failure. He did not live to see Paisley’s career end in success, a success which defied all the received wisdom of moderates, all the believers in compromise, all the advocates of capturing the centre ground in order to attract people of good will from all shades of opinion. Party politics almost by its nature loses touch with the people they set out to represent. They called him, his followers, ‘the big man’, and this he was in all senses. He was always perfectly clear about his constituency: they were the Protestant working-class people of Ulster. When middle-class Presbyterianism began to squirt soda water into the mixture, Paisley simply started a new Church: the Free Presbyterians. When the Ulster Unionists, whose senior politicians tended to be landed, Anglican, with public school backgrounds and accents, seemed to be too willing to play London’s tune or to give quarter to the Roman Catholics, Paisley was equally clear about the political way ahead. He founded his own party, the Democratic Unionist Party, rightly so-called because it reflected what its rank and file supporters actually believed. Paisley was the only person in modern Europe to have founded both a party and a Church. Though attempts were made to see him, like Sinn Fein, as the political wing of a violent or revolutionary movement, or at least to suggest that he colluded in violence on the loyalist side, no evidence was ever produced to substantiate such a claim. True, Paisley attended the funerals of those who had been violent in the Protestant cause. One of his followers once said that ‘those who walked behind the coffins of IRA killers were showing support for their actions’,2 and if there is truth in that, then Paisley may be held to account for the company he kept, as for some of the people he represented. He certainly reacted hotly to any idea of the B-Specials being disarmed. (The B-Specials were police auxiliaries, wholly Protestant, and detested by the Catholics. When the B-Specials were abolished by the Westminster government, some of them became paramilitaries.3) If walking behind an IRA coffin proclaimed support for their activities, then the same can be said of walking behind UDF coffins. ‘Don’t let anyone disarm you,’ Paisley told the B-Specials. In February 1981, when the British and Irish governments looked as if they were trying to solve the Northern Irish problem by the simple means of excluding the Northern Irish people from their deliberations, Paisley took five journalists to a secret location near Ballymena to see five hundred men in combat jackets with what were purported to be certificates for legally held firearms. The point was, these weapons were legally held. He and his followers were operating within the law. Sir Edward Carson had threatened violence in the event of the Protestant North being coerced into some Free State or Home Rule agreement with the rest of Ireland. One hundred thousand men had gathered on the shores of Belfast Lough to brandish guns on 23 September 1911 and hear Carson commit them to fighting, if necessary, to maintain the Union with Britain. While addressing a crowd in Portadown, Paisley ‘brandished the bandolier which his father had worn as a member of Carson’s UVF, an act which impressed upon those gathered the seriousness of the present situation and just what the price could be’.4 No one could doubt the violence of Paisley’s rhetoric–‘I believe the time has come when all Lundies [i.e., traitors], yellow bellies and all cowards must leave our ranks–and we shall fight to the death.’
When ‘the Troubles’ of modern times began, the bullying Protestants appeared to most dispassionate outside observers, as to the Westminster government, to be without moral excuse, and the put-upon Catholic minority in the North to be the ones who needed protection. (Hence the British government sending in troops to defend the Catholics against Protestant violence.) When the Catholic Civil Rights Movement was taken over by the IRA the political complexion of the situation altered radically. Neither the mainstream Northern Irish parties–the Catholic SDP, and the official Ulster Unionists–nor the governments of Dublin and Westminster quite knew how to cope with the IRA. When civilian casualties escalated, there was always the tendency for politicians–except Paisley–to buckle. There was therefore a supreme paradox about the Northern Irish story which, in our times, moved from cataclysmic violence to relative peace. So long as Dublin and Westminster appealed to ‘reasonable’ middle ground, the Northern Protestants knew that what they were in fact doing was trying to bring about a United Ireland behind their backs. Only when they stopped treating Paisley like a dangerous ranter, and recognised that he more than the official Unionists represented the fears and aspirations of the working-class Protestant majority, was the IRA terrified into serious cooperation. For thirty years the IRA appeared to dominate the story. ‘We demand,’ Paisley thundered, ‘that the IRA be exterminated from Ulster…There are men willing to do the job of exterminating the IRA. Recruit them under the Crown and they will do it. If you refuse, we will have no other decision to make but to do it ourselves.’5 The English TV viewer, and perhaps the English politician, maybe thought this was some sort of absurd bluff, an attempt to become the Oliver Cromwell of East Belfast. The IRA platoons knew it wasn’t bluff. If Northern Ireland moved towards a solution of its problems which was both just and democratic, it was thanks, far too late in the day, to two British Prime Ministers, Mr Major and Tony Blair, harnessing the Revd Dr Ian Paisley.
The province of Northern Ireland, its very existence as a political entity, bristles with paradox. It came into being after the First World War and as part of the peace settlement between Britain and the rest of Ireland which by then was known as the Irish Free State. The governance of Ireland had haunted and disturbed W. E. Gladstone: ‘The long, vexed, and troubled relations between Great Britain and Ireland exhibit to us the one and only conspicuous failure of the political genius of our race to confront and master difficulty, and to obtain in a reasonable degree the main ends of civilised life.’6 Gladstone, as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister, made three attempts to pass a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. This would have given Ireland, the whole island, the status of a Dependency, like Canada. The Irish would have their own parliament, run their own affairs, and yet owe allegiance to the British Crown. It was not what the out and out nationalists would have wanted but it was better than reliance upon Westminster. The first Home Rule Bill, 1886, was defeated in the Commons by 343 votes to 313 because the puritanical North Country Liberals were shocked by revelations about the adultery of the Irish nationalist leader Charles Parnell. The Second Bill of 1893 was passed in the Commons but thrown out by the Lords (overwhelmingly, a vote of 419 to 41). The Third Bill was also thrown out by the Lords but the new Parliament Act of 1911 allowed the Commons to overrule the Lords in matters of such importance and so it passed into law–in 1914, with the proviso that the Irish would put the whole matter on ‘hold’ during the First World War. The Prussian, the Russian, the Ottoman Empires fell, millions died. The British, French and Americans presided over the Treaty of Versailles, which if it had a central idea was the right of se
lf-determination to be given to small nations, and then the British politicians realised that the problem of Ireland remained unsolved. Churchill had written, ‘The mode of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the groupings of parties, all encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been left unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’7
While the Catholic majority throughout the island of Ireland wanted independence, this desire was not shared by the Protestants of the North, whose ancestors had been transplanted Presbyterian Scots.
The outbreak of civil war in Ireland, the tragic story of Irish republicans killing one another over the issue of Irish partition, led eventually to a compromise which probably no one completely wanted. In 1922 the Irish Free State was established, but consisting only of twenty-six counties. The remaining six counties included the two mentioned by Churchill, Fermanagh and Tyrone, which were in fact predominantly Catholic. These six counties were the new province of Northern Ireland. Upon these people, predominantly Protestant, predominantly Scottish, overwhelmingly Unionist, the British government imposed Home Rule against their will. The twenty-six counties, the Free State, were independent. David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, did not wish to do anything that could look, either to the new Irish government in Dublin, or to the United States, as if Britain were still trying to exercise power on the island of Ireland. So he set up the Stormont Assembly, and gave to the people of Northern Ireland their own Prime Minister, Cabinet, government.
The Unionist position had been stated eloquently in the House of Commons by Lord Robert Cecil in 1920–‘We shall have this astounding position, that the only form of Home Rule which will exist in Ireland will be that which exists in Ulster… Home Rule is to be established effectively only in that part of Ireland which hates and loathes the whole idea of Home Rule.’8 The leader of the Irish Unionists, Sir Edward Carson, in the same debate had implored, ‘She [Ulster] has always made the simple appeal to you to leave her alone and to treat her as you treat your own people and she would be perfectly satisfied. And I am bound to say that this breaking up and the giving to Ulster a Parliament may lead to many unforeseen consequences.’9
By creating ‘Ulster’, the British had indeed stored up unforeseen consequences. Forced against their will to have their own Free State, the Northern Protestants evolved, over the years 1922–68, a system of life in which the Catholics were second-class citizens. The constituency boundaries in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Londonderry were redrawn so that although these places were demographically predominantly Catholic, the Protestant candidates got elected to Stormont. Not for nothing was it in Ulster that the election joke ‘Vote early, vote often’ was coined. Discrimination against Catholics in the workplace was routine. The great shipbuilders Harland and Wolff had a policy of not employing Catholics. Housing allocation was unfair. There was blatant discrimination in making local government appointments. Despite occasional suggestions that they should do something about it, the English politicians had invariably held back. The British government did not want, in the words of the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, ‘to get sucked into the Irish bog’.10 Sucked in, however, they inevitably were.
On 12 August 1969 the Apprentice Boys’ parade marched, as it had often done, through Londonderry. The Apprentice Boys were a largely working-class movement, political more than religious–less religious, say, than the Orange Order, which required its members to ‘honour and diligently study the Holy Scripture’11–and as time went on owing less and less allegiance to the Ulster Unionist Party. (In the 1920s the Apprentices had upper- and middle-class members; by 1974 they formally broke their ties with the UUP.12)
The 1969 march through Londonderry was to commemorate the action of the Apprentice Boys who, against the advice of the bishop and the civil leaders of 1685, closed the gates of the city and kept out the army of James II, thereby, eventually, securing the defeat of the Catholic cause, the expulsion of the Catholic King to France, and the victory of William of Orange, William III, and the triumph in the whole of the British archipelago of those ‘values’ which had secured the growth of science, the progress of well-ordered Whiggish statecraft, the situation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which had made Britain a palpably freer, happier and better ordered place than nations which had lived through the alternative–Bourbon absolutism, revolution, counterrevolution, communards, mutual distrust. The name of William of Orange, excluded from history syllabuses in British schools since the start of the Troubles, was not merely celebrated in Northern Ireland but throughout the United Kingdom, and the expulsion of James II was spoken of without irony in English as well as Northern Irish textbooks as the Glorious Revolution.
Naturally, the Apprentice Boys of 1969 were a provocation to the Catholics of Bogside in that city whose very name was a controversy (Catholics called it Derry). Gerrymandering ensured that this largely Catholic city was represented by Protestants in Stormont.13 There followed a three-day siege of the Bogside, in which the Royal Ulster Constabulary were pelted with petrol bombs by the Catholics and then, aided by the B-Specials, they tried to break the forty-two barricades with which the Catholics had ringed themselves. The police began to fear that they were facing not a mere street fight, but an armed uprising. On 14 August, the head of the RUC Inspector General Joseph Anthony Peacock asked for the British Army to be deployed. Callaghan as Home Secretary agreed, and at around 5.00 p.m. the first soldiers of the Prince of Wales Regiment arrived on Londonderry’s streets.
For the next thirty years, a bloody life unfolded for the soldiers deployed, and for the people foolhardy or unfortunate enough still to reside in the trouble spots of Northern Ireland, which were limited overwhelmingly to the border territories, and to the working-class districts of Londonderry and Belfast, and other towns. (Even at the height of the Troubles, the more genteel suburbs of Belfast seemed no more violent, and a good deal more beautiful, than those of Manchester or Birmingham.) If the British government had been merely dealing with a Catholic civil rights organisation, there might have been some hope of brokering a settlement, which gave justice to Catholics and appeased Protestant fears.
Even the Civil Rights Movement, however, was not all that it seemed. The first president of the Civil Rights Association, Betty Sinclair, was a Stalinist communist. She was succeeded by another communist, Edwina Stewart, who then gave place to a representative of another group, the People’s Democracy, and their young leader, a graduate of the Queen’s University, Belfast, called Bernadette Devlin, who was elected to Westminster as an MP for Mid Ulster in April 1969, at the age of twenty-one–the most youthful member of the Commons since William Pitt the Younger. Bernadette came just too early in feminist history to make an impact. Her demeanour in the House of Commons–crossing the Chamber and striking Reggie Maudling when Home Secretary was a high point–spilled over into farce. Was this because a largely male press, a largely male political Establishment, patronised her? Certainly. Did she confirm, with her appalling teeth, and wild hair, deep-seated anti-Irish prejudices? Without a doubt. Was her having a baby out of wedlock enough to ditch her career with her respectable Irish constituents and brand her in the British press as a brazen hussy? Yes, indeed–these were still the days of shotgun weddings and phrases like ‘living in sin’. She was not destined to be the Countess Marcewiez or Maud Gonne of the 1970s; her career survived only one session of the British Parliament. The straitlaced Catholics who had voted her in voted her promptly out. She married, went to live in the South, had a family, took an interest in left-wing politics, was chairman, indeed, of the ‘Independent Socialist Party’, but Who’s Who listed her recreations as ‘walking, folk music, doing nothing’. Her place as the champion of Catholic Northern Irish poor would be taken by altogether more dangerous individuals.
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The Irish Republican Army in 1969 was a group of people, or several groups, very different in outlook from those enthusiasts for the Celtic twilight, those patriots of both religions or none, those rebel daughters of country houses, those poets and soldiers who had either belonged to, or supported, the IRA at the time of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. In the Republic of Ireland, it had settled down to a comparatively small collaboration of gangsters and political dreamers of the Marxian end of the spectrum, thousands of miles, ideologically, from the actual Irish men and women who had put Eamon de Valera in power. The coming, or renaissance, of the Troubles, should have been the ideal opportunity for the IRA to come to the aid of the beleaguered Irish nationalists of Derry, as they called it, and West Belfast, but while Bernadette Devlin, the Joan of Arc of the Civil Rights Movement, went to prison for her part in the Siege of Derry, the IRA were felt to have betrayed their natural working-class constituents. In 1967 the IRA Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding had, while not renouncing physical force, placed the importance upon creating ‘a radical socialist agenda’. No wonder the graffiti began to appear on the riot-scarred walls–‘IRA–I ran away.’14
There followed, perhaps inevitably, a split between the official IRA and the Provisionals, or Provos. The officials were always uneasy about performing acts of violence which would harm ‘civilians’, seeing it as their task, when acts of murder were to be performed, to kill B-Specials, RUC officers and, when they arrived, British soldiers. The Provos as revolutionary Marxists believed that mayhem and fear would advance the revolution, though the incoherence of their aims was another ingredient in the Troubles. The aims of the (largely) peaceful Catholic republicans of the North were easily understood. A man such as Gerry Fitt, MP for West Belfast since 1966, was more troubling for the IRA–and for the Paisleyites–than it was for the British government. Gerry Fitt represented a minority in the narrow confines of Ulster, but if a poll had been taken which included British (let alone American, or world-wide) opinion, Fitt would have probably commanded an enormous majority. He wanted an alleviation of the injustices which had plagued Catholics in the North since 1922. He wanted fairness. He resigned as SDLP leader when it became clear how close his colleagues were getting to ‘traditional nationalism’, that is to the IRA. What Fitt could not get through persuasion, and the ballot box, he did not want. Some SDLP politicians were happy to talk peace and allow the men of violence to achieve their objectives for them.
