IRISH HISTORY
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CHAPTER 33
THE
ORANGE ORDER
DIVISION AND DISCRIMINATION
The greed that motivated the English to plant the
country of Ireland with English tenants was, wrote Lecky, based on: ‘The idea,
that it was possible to obtain, at a few hours or days’ journey from the
English coast, great tracts of fertile territory, and to amass in a few years
gigantic fortunes... ‘ The only way to amass a gigantic fortune was to
exploit someone. Exploitation required harsh measures not only against the
natives, but against tenants in general. Eventually the severity of landlord
measures provoked tenants of different persuasions to unite in associations of
anti-landlord bias. However, when landlords eventually saw the writing on the
wall and reforms were introduced, the anti-landlord associations became rival
tenant associations, and poor native tenants began feuding with poor planter
tenants when competition for leases and rents developed. In 1784 an exclusively Protestant association
called the Peep-o-Day boys sprang up in the north. They were subsequently named
‘Protestant Boys’ and ‘Wreckers’ and finally ‘Orangemen’. As a
defence against their attacks, their victims organised themselves into a group
called ‘Defenders’. For a number of years there were minor disturbances
without much official concern. It was only when the United Irishmen were formed
in 1791, with the aim of uniting the Catholics and Dissenters, that the
Government fearing the possibility of a decline of its own influence, should a
reconciliation take place, saw the advisability of fomenting as much hatred and
sectarian bitterness as it could to keep the two sides as far apart as possible. To this end the Government sent agents to areas
of disturbance to fan the sectarian flames. There were pitched battles of
several hundred men in broad daylight and these were actively encouraged by the
authorities. The intensely provoked feuds came to a head in September 1795 at
the Diamond, in County Armagh, when thirty or so Defenders were killed. That was the day the Orange Order was
established. Their oath at that time is said to have been: ‘In the awful
presence of Almighty God, I, ___, do solemnly swear, that I will, to the utmost
of my power, support the King and the present government; and I do further
swear, that I will use my utmost exertions to exterminate all the Catholics of
the Kingdom of Ireland’. The extermination clause was later repudiated,
but the Orangemen themselves left no doubt that the raison d’etre of their existence was the extermination of the
Catholics of their neighbourhood. They forced masters to get rid of their
Catholic servants and landlords of their Catholic tenants. They posted up on the
cabins of the unfortunate Catholic small farmers, and cottiers and weavers,
ill-spelt notices threatening dreadful things if the inmates did not clear out
at once. If the person whose house had been thus ‘papered’, as the phrase
went, neglected the warning, large bodies of armed Orangemen, mad with drink and
religious fanaticism, assembled at night, destroyed the furniture, broke down
the looms, burned the homes and forced the ruined families to flee elsewhere for
shelter. It is said that in County Armagh alone over 7,000 persons were turned
out in the dead of winter to die by the wayside. On July 1 1795, the Rev. Monsell, a Protestant
clergyman of Portadown, invited his flock to celebrate the anniversary of the
battle of the Boyne and preached such a sermon in church that his congregation
fell on every Catholic they met going home and beat them cruelly. They finished
the day by murdering two farmers sons who were quietly at work. A report from the Edinburgh Review in 1836 says: ‘The first Orange Lodge was formed
on 21 September, 1795, at the house of a man called Sloan, in the obscure
village of Loughgall. The immediate cause of those disturbances in the north
that gave birth to Orangeism was an attempt to plant colonies of Protestants on
the farms or tenements of Catholics who had been forcibly ejected. Numbers of
them were seen wandering about the country, hungry, half-naked, and
infuriated...’ The success achieved by the Orange Order within a
couple of years in whipping up sectarianism, not only among tenant farmers but
in the military forces all over the country, as well as in Ulster, is evident
from the accounts of the activities of the various regiments of yeomanry and
militia. The following account is one of many; it concerns the North Cork
militia, operating in Wexford in 1798, and is by Edward Hay: The Orange system made no public
appearance in the country of Wexford until the beginning of April, on the
arrival of the North Cork militia, commanded by Lord Kingsborough. In this
regiment there was a great number of Orangemen, who were zealous in making
proselytes and displaying their devices — having medals and Orange ribbons
triumphantly pendant from their bosoms. It is believed that previous to this
period there were but few actual Orangemen in the county; but soon after, those
whose principles inclined that way, finding themselves supported by the
military, joined the association and publicly avowed themselves by assuming the
devices of the fraternity. It is said that the North Cork regiment were also the
inventors (but they certainly were the introducers) of pitch-cap torture into
the county of Wexford. Any person having his hair cut short (and, therefore,
called a croppy, by which appellation the soldiery designated a United
Irishman), on being pointed out by some loyal neighbour, was immediately seized
and brought into a guardhouse, where caps either of coarse linen or strong brown
paper, besmeared inside with pitch, were always kept for service. The
unfortunate victim had one of these, well heated, compressed on his head, and
when judged of a proper degree of coolness, so that it could not be easily
pulled off, the sufferer was turned out amidst the horrid acclamations of the
merciless torturers; and to the view of vast numbers of people, who generally
crowded about the guardhouse door, attracted by the cries of the tormented. Many
of those persecuted in this manner experienced additional anguish from the
melted pitch trickling into their eyes. This afforded a rare addition of
enjoyment to these keen sportsmen, who reiterated their horrid yells of
exultation on the repetition of the several accidents to which their game was
liable, for, in the confusion and hurry of escaping from the ferocious hands of
these more than savage barbarians, the blinded victims frequently fell, or
inadvertently dashed their heads against the walls in their way. The pain of
disengaging this pitched cap from the head must be next to intolerable. The hair
was often torn out by the roots, and not infrequently parts of the skin were so
scalded or blistered as to adhere and come off along with it. The terror and
dismay that these outrages occasioned are inconceivable. A sergeant of the North Cork militia, nicknamed
Tom the Devil, was notorious for devising new torture methods. But the historian
Plowden, who details his atrocities, concludes by informing his readers that
these same refinements were to be found amongst the nobility as well as the
‘lower class’. He says: ‘It would be uncandid to detail only instances of
the brutality of the lower orders, whilst evidence is forthcoming of persons of
fortune and education being still more brutalised by its [Orangism] deleterious
spirit’. He mentions an instance, on the authority of both eyewitnesses and
the victim, in which Lord Kingsborough, Mr Beresford, and an officer whose name
he did not know, tortured two respectable Dublin tradesmen. John Fleming was a
ferryman and Francis Gough a coachmaker. The noblemen supervised the flogging of
Gough, and at every stroke insulted him with taunts of how he liked it. The poor
victim was confined to bed for six months as a consequence of the infliction.
Both men were later tortured with pitchcaps by the same gentlemen. ‘With
difficulty,’ says Plowden, ‘does the mind yield reluctant consent to such
debasement of the human species. The spirit which depraves it to that
abandonment is of no ordinary depravity. The same spirit of Orangeism moved the
colonel in Dublin and his sergeant in Wexford. The effect of that spirit can
only be faintly illustrated by facts. Those have been verified to the author by
the spectator and the sufferer.’ No action was taken against members for
administering the Orange oath, while the United Irishmen were vigorously pursued
and punished for administering their oath. Even what should have been punished
under the Criminal Code-offences such as arson, robbery, and mutilation of
prisoners-went unpunished. So, with the active encouragement of the government,
the Orange Order flourished and spread through the country. The ‘Defenders’ were being pursued with such
vigour that the jails were soon filed with them. On one occasion 1300 were taken
from prison and sent on board British battle ships, a procedure which enjoyed
the protection of an Act of Parliament. Eventually the Defenders merged fully
with the United Irishmen and disappeared as a separate organisation. Just as the penal code had to be wrapped up in
religious garb to conceal the fact that it was framed to protect the ascendancy
in their ill-gotten confiscated properties, religious motives had also to be
found now to conceal the fact that the primary aim of the Orange Order was
economic. The Order was founded by poor Protestant tenant farmers to expand
their material interests against even poorer Catholic tenant farmers. The
religious angle was used to provide a camouflage. Although the Order had been strenuously against
the Act of Union in 1800, and Orange lodges passed resolutions in favour of
retaining the existing (Anglo-Saxon) government in Ireland, when a chance for
getting the government back, under the Home Rule proposal, came around in 1886
they were, now, strenuously against that too. When Gladstone, the newly elected Prime Minister
made his first move to grant a relatively minor measure of Home Rule to Ireland,
it was to the Orange Order in Belfast that his opponent, Lord Randolph
Churchill, turned in an attempt to get his recently defeated Tory party back in
power. ‘Now may be the time’, he told them, ‘to show whether all these
ceremonies and forms which are practised in your Orange lodges are really living
symbols or idle and meaningless shibboleths’. That his agitation of the Orangemen was a
carefully thought out plan is clear from his letter to a friend: ‘I decided
some time ago that if Gladstone went for Home Rule the Orange Card was the one
to play. Please God it may turn out to be the ace....’ Play it he did, giving
the Orangemen their still emotive slogan: ‘Ulster will fight; Ulster will be
right’. (His son, Winston, was to say in the House of Commons, years later in
1921: ‘If a Republic was set up, that is a form of Government in Ireland which
the British Empire in no circumstances whatever can tolerate or agree to’.)
Gladstone foundered under the weight of Tory opposition and Ulster bigotry in
the 1886 elections. Years of painstaking reconciliation lay ahead before the
party was in a position to haul Home Rule out of the depths of the dark abyss
again. The agitation generated by Churchill led to
street riots in Belfast. Many were killed and hundreds were wounded, and
although every word he uttered was seditious, he was neither censured by the
House of Commons nor expelled by the Privy Council as threatened. Others, such
as ‘Roaring Hanna’, warned that Home Rule meant Rome Rule, and nobody
bothered to check that the Pope was 100 per cent for the Union and pro-British;
that it was the pope who had given King Henry II and all his successors in title
the whole island of Ireland for all eternity; that the pope had been an ally of
William of Orange and had sung Te Deums
in Rome after King Billy’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne; that it was the
Catholic Bishops who supported the Act of Union, when the Orange lodges were
passing resolutions in favour of retaining the Irish Parliament in Dublin; and
that Republicanism had its origins in the Presbyterian Church of Ulster, not the
Catholic Church. Of the twenty-eight founders of the United
Irishmen, twenty-six were Presbyterians. Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell were
members of the Established Church. There were no Catholics. The United Irishmen
were the first to develop the concept of one nation in Ireland, a combination of
Gaels and settlers. Historical accuracy means nothing if it
interferes with political opportunism. Churchill roused the mobs in Belfast.
Some of Gladstone’s own party deserted him. The Home Rule Bill was defeated.
The Tories were back in power, with Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This alliance between the Irish Unionist MPs and the Tory Party was to be the
main obstacle to the peaceful achievement of Home Rule. The Tories held a
permanent majority in the House of Lords and the Unionists were able to
influence them far beyond their numbers would indicate. By this time the Orange Order was a widespread
organisation with local lodges affiliated to Country Lodges and a Grand Central
Lodge all under the control of a ‘Grand Black Chapter’, an ‘Imperial Grand
Master’ and a ‘Grand Council’. Large numbers of wealthy business and
professional people, clergymen of all Protestant denominations, as well as
landlords and members of the middle classes joined and came into positions of
control. The Order, that had been founded in 1795 by the
Peep-o-Day Boys and had actively fought the Protestant landlords for tenants
rights, and had won better conditions than the Land League in other parts of
Ireland (known as ‘the Ulster Custom’), was now exclusively interested in
protecting Protestant advantage from Catholics. No sooner had the Liberal government introduced
its Home Rule Bill in 1912 than the Tories played the Orange card again for all
it was worth. A campaign of intimidation began at once. Bonar Law — the leader
of the party-Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead, and anyone who was anything in the
Tory party, as well as former ministers of state, field marshals, generals, and
a menagerie of others who had no knowledge of Irish affairs, descended on
Ulster. At one time there were no less than seventy senior Tories campaigning in
Belfast. It was not concern for minority rights in Ireland
that motivated the Tories; all they were interested in was getting back in
power, and to do that it was necessary to force a general election. Winston
Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty in the Liberal Government at that
time, poured scorn on the Tories: ‘They have always been straining for some
short cut to office and they now seek to utilise the fanaticism of the Orangemen
...Behind every sentence of Bonar Law’s speeches on the Ulster question, there
was the whispering of the party manager, ‘We must have an election. Ulster is
our best card. It is our only card. This is our one chance.’ Churchill had good reason to know of that which
he spoke. He was a member of the Liberal team who had been negotiating with the
Tories with a view to forming a coalition government after the indecisive
general election of 1911. Many Tories including Birkenhead — the most rabid
anti-Home Ruler of them all — were prepared to ditch the Orangemen and
opposition to Home Rule, in order to get into power. Of all the low points in British politics this
was as low as any. They openly incited armed rebellion. They urged the Orangemen
to join the private army which was being organised and armed in Ulster and in
England. In the Commons in June 1912 Bonar Law said: ‘there are stronger
influences than Parliamentary majorities.’ And from Birkenhead in Liverpool:
‘There is no length to which Ulster would not be entitled to go, however
desperate and unconstitutional’. The Tories conspired with senior army officers to
paralyse from within the discipline of the army; they plotted with General Sir
Henry Wilson to ensure that the authorities would not interfere with the
projected illegal importation of arms into Ulster to arm the Orangemen, partly
financed by the Tories; they engineered the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ where British
army officers stationed in southern Ireland refused to move north to disarm the
Orangemen; they planned to get the House of Lords to refuse to pass the annual
Army Bill which would mean that the army would have to disband after 30 April
1914; and finally, they secretly collaborated in the successful landing of
35,000 rifles and 2,500,000 rounds of ammunition at Larne, in Ulster in April
1914. The Liberal government reduced the power of the
House of Lords in the Parliament Act of 1911. Now the Lords could delay a Bill
for two years but they could not prevent it from becoming law. The Liberals had
needed the support of the Irish MPs to pass the Act, and the price of their
support was another Home Rule Bill. The majority in the House of Commons ensured
that the Bill would become law by 1914 at the latest, despite the Lords best
efforts to loiter with it. It was to become law in September 1914 but it was
suspended because of the war with Germany, which had broken out in August. It
never became law. Throughout all the Ulster intrigue the Orangemen
were just pawns in the British political game. There is no evidence that any of
their leaders could see this until it was too late. When, finally, in 1921 a
‘Home Rule Bill’ for Ireland was rushed through the English Parliament, the
north-eastern part of Ulster, the Orange corner, was given a parliament of its
own to detach it from the rest of Ireland. This was how Britain created the
Orange state and in a sense divided the country on sectarian lines. The
Protestants of the North, with some Catholics, were divided from the Catholics
of the South. A divided Ireland had never been the goal of the
Orangemen. Speaking in the House of Lords on 14 December 1921 — eight days
after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty — Edward Carson, the father of
Orange subversion in this century, expressed his bitter disillusionment at the
way he had been duped and manipulated by British politicians: ‘I was in
earnest. I was not playing politics. I believed all this. What a fool I was. I
was only a puppet and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland in the political game
that was to get the Conservative Party into power.’ The Orangemen — ever the Ascendancy in Ireland
treading on the necks of the real Irish — had professed that they feared to
trust themselves to the certain intolerances of an Irish Parliament. The true
facts were well known to English statesmen; even Sir Hamar Greenwood, who
blackened Nationalists Ireland in every possible way and with every device in
his power, had to state in the British House of Commons: ‘I am constrained to
confess that the North is the only part of Ireland where people are interfered
with on account of their religion’. The Presbyterian minister from Ballymoney, Rev.
JB Armour had earlier castigated those who were stirring up religious hatred:
‘Some of those who are exploiting the persecuting bogy for political ends’,
he said, ‘have not much religion to persecute. To their credit, Irish
Catholics have never been known to persecute for religious beliefs...’ These Orangemen in 1920 had celebrated their
coming freedom from an ‘intolerant’ Irish Parliament by instituting a series
of pogroms (condoned acts of ‘spontaneous’ violence) against the minority
among them. In the course of twelve months, more than one hundred of the
minority were killed by being beaten, stabbed, kicked, or shot to death, and
more than one thousand injured, while the homes and belongings of several
hundreds were burnt, without a single perpetrator being brought to justice. Six
thousand Nationalists were at the same time driven out of employment. With a sort of poetic justice, having fought
against Home Rule for almost a century, Unionists were, in the words of Rev. JB
Armour, ‘compelled to take a form of Home Rule that the devil himself could
never have imagined’. When Premier Lloyd George, having ignored the
tide of world indignation against Britain, had secured his hold on Ireland’s
north-eastern corner, he then had King George go to Belfast to open Britain’s
branch parliament there (Stormount); make a prepared speech calling for unity
and union, fellowship and harmony between the people he was dividing and
discording and asking also for peace between England and Ireland, whilst in the
act of making war on Ireland. The British Royal Family, as stooges of their
parliament, have parodied that speech numerous times since, but never, never,
never acknowledged the real problem, or even the despicable part Britain played
in dividing for sectarian reasons the oldest historic nation in western Europe
and one of the most geographically complete entities in the world. Why six counties were selected rather than four
or nine is unashamedly straightforward. The traditional nine counties of Ulster
held 900,000 Protestants, most of whom supported the connection with Britain,
and 700,000 Catholics, most of whom wanted to end it. In the six counties that
were to become Northern Ireland, the religious breakdown was 820,000 Protestants
and 430,000 Catholics. James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern
Ireland, expressed the case for six counties in the House of Commons in 1920:
‘If we had a nine-county parliament, with sixty-four members, the Unionist
majority would be about three or four; but in a six-county parliament, with
fifty-two members, the Unionist majority would be ten’. The new state was born amid bloodshed. In 1922,
233 people were killed in the violence and almost 1,000 wounded. The Nationalist
minority refused to recognise the new state. Catholic teachers shunned the
educational system. At the time when the institutions of the new state were
being established, a considerable number of its citizens were refusing to
participate on committees, or to perform any action that might lend support to
its authority. As time passed, and the state remained,
Nationalists decided on a reluctant acceptance. They found the institutions
which has been set up were so arranged as to effectively exclude them from
positions of power. Most of the institutions were heavily biased in favour of
Unionists. There was once again ‘peace’ in Northern
Ireland but as always in Ireland, under British rule it was the peace of the
dead. Institutionalised sectarianism, economic apartheid, and discrimination of
every possible description were practised and taken to a fine art.
Disappointingly, the southern government, whose constitution still regards the
northern counties as a part of Ireland, was to ignore the plight of its kinfolk
in Ulster and was to abandon them to the brutality of British rule and the
Orange Order. Between 1930 and 1939 the unemployment rate in
the province never fell below twenty-five per cent. The Ulster Protestant League
was formed in 1931 and encouraged Protestants to employ other Protestants
exclusively. This sentiment was endorsed by Basil Brooke, the Minister of
Agriculture and future Prime Minister. During the 1930s, Catholic children in Northern
Ireland were known as ‘half-timers’, being-half time at school and half-time
at work, generally four hour stints of each, and all under the age of twelve.
Were it not for the Christian Brothers who dosed the children with cod liver oil
daily, many would not have survived. It was a time of disillusionment and
frustration as well as a breeding ground for revolutionaries. Widespread riots in 1931 resulted in between
sixty and seventy people being injured. In 1935 twelve people were killed and
six hundred wounded. The Council of Civil Liberties issued a report on the
Northern Ireland situation in 1936 which said: Firstly, that through the
operation of the special Powers Act contempt has been begotten for the
representative institutions of government. Secondly, that through the use
of Special Powers, individual liberty is no longer protected by law, but is at
the disposition of the Executive. This abrogation of the rule of law has been so
practised as to bring the freedom of the subject into contempt. Thirdly, that the Northern
Government has used Special Powers towards securing the domination of one
particular political faction and, at the same time, towards curtailing the
lawful activities of its opponents...The Government’s policy is thus driving
its opponents into the way of extremists. Fourthly, that the Northern
Irish Government, despite its assurances that Special Powers are intended for
use only against law-breakers, has frequently employed them against innocent and
law abiding people, often in humble circumstances, whose injuries, inflicted
without cause or justification have gone unrecompensed and disregarded.
Unionists first actions, when they came to power,
had been to abolish proportional representation in local government elections
and to rearrange constituencies to give control to Unionists. In 1929
proportional representation was abolished in parliamentary elections also,
wiping out independents and leaving a Protestant government firmly entrenched by
a majority of three to one over a Catholic opposition. This was way out of
proportion to the numbers of citizens of each political persuasion. The
Unionists showed great talent for gerrymandering and vote rigging and they
succeeded in taking segregation to new heights. Schooling was also firmly
established on a denominational basis, thus perpetuating the ghetto mentality on
both sides. The British did much to exploit the religious
difference and to exploit the ‘divide and conquer’ rule. However, the IRA
made major efforts during the 1930s to bridge the religious divide. A copy of an
address from the Army Council of the Irish Republican Army to the men and women
of the Orange Order reads in part as follows: Fellow Countrymen and Women, It is a long call from the ranks
of the Irish Republican Army to the marching throngs that hold the 12th
July Celebrations in North East Ulster. Across the space we have sometimes
exchanged shots, or missiles or hard words, but never forgetting that on
occasions our ancestors have stood shoulder to shoulder. Some day we will again
exchange ideas and then the distance which now separates us will shorten. For we
of the Irish Republican Army believe that inevitably the small farmers and
wage-earners in the Six County area will make common cause with those of the
rest of Ireland, for the common good of the mass of the people in a Free United
Irish Republic. Such a conviction is forming itself in an ever increasing number
of minds in North East Ulster. Working-farmers and Wage-earners
of North East Ulster! You surely must see that your future is bound up with the
mass of the people in the remainder of Ireland. To preserve yourself from
extinction, you and they must combine and go forward to the attainment of A
Free Irish Nation within which life and living will be organised and
controlled by you to serve your needs and thus end the present economic and
social injustices for ever. The industrial
capacity, and training of your industrial workers, of North East Ulster ensure
for you a leading influence and place in the economy and life of a Free Irish
Nation. You celebrate the victory of the
Boyne [12 July]. This battle was a victory for the alliance of the then Pope and
William of Orange; strange alliance for you to celebrate; strange victory for
Catholics to resist! History has been muddled to hide the occasions when your
forefathers and ours made common cause, and passions are stirred to manufacture
antagonisms. If William of Orange and His Holiness could achieve an alliance,
there is hope that ‘No Surrender’ may come from a throng which also roars
‘Up The Republic’. Your stock were the founders and
inspiration, and North East Ulster the cradle, of the modern Revolutionary
Movement for National Independence and Economic Freedom. Your illustrious
ancestors and co-religionists, The United Irishmen, by their gallant struggle in
1798 set aflame the ideals of Republicanism which never since have been
extinguished. We ask that you join us to achieve their ideals — National
Freedom and religious toleration. To prejudice you, it is
emphasised that we of the Irish Republican Army and the mass of the Republicans
are mainly Catholic, and that your religious beliefs would not be respected in a
free Ireland! It is quite true we are mainly Catholics, but in Southern Ireland
the same political and economical interests and voices that tell you we are
Catholics, tell the Catholic population of the South that we are anti-God
fanatics, and yearning for the opportunity to make war on the religion to which
the majority belong! The fact is we are quite unaware
of religious distinctions within our Movement. We guarantee you, you will
guarantee us, and we will both guarantee all full freedom of conscience and
religious worship in the Ireland we are to set free. This is the simple truth,
and just now when the Imperial interests are attempting to conceal themselves
behind the mad fury of religious strife, you and we should combine to make
certain that no such escape should be provided them. Do you not find yourselves
queued shoulder to shoulder outside the Unemployment Exchanges waiting for the
‘Dole’, that crumb which the exploiters throw to the exploited of different
religions? In these vital matters your religion or your membership of the Orange
Order counts for little, nor does Catholicism to the unemployed and starving
Catholics in Southern Ireland. The fact is that the religious feelings of the masses of both the
Orangemen and Catholics are played on and exploited by the Imperialists and
Capitalists the more surely to enslave them. As this letter shows, an offer of friendship was
extended and the real enemy — imperialism and class distinction — was
recognised. However, as always, sectarianism and bigotry
reasserted themselves. The Republicans said this was deliberately provoked by
some of the members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in baton charges and
firing on Catholics, intended to provoke a retaliation. The Ulster Protestant League adjured its members
‘neither to talk nor walk with, neither to buy nor sell, borrow nor lend, take
nor give, or have any dealings at all with them, nor for employers to employ
them, nor employee to work with them’; the ‘them’, of course, being
Catholics. The League habitually paraded through Belfast with bands and banners
flying, lambasting the government for being ‘soft’ on Roman Catholics, just
as Paisley’s followers did prior to the 1969 riots. This tried and trustworthy
method eventaully revokes a response from the Catholics, thus making their
prejudices self-fulfilling. However, efforts to create unity still continued
on both sides, following the foundation of the James Connolly Club for
unemployed Protestant and Catholic workers and on the liberal Presbyterian
strain from which Wolfe Tone drew his followers. They gave Northern
Protestantism an attractive vein which never quite died out, even at moments of
extreme religiopolitico fervour. The comparative peacefulness of the next twenty
years lulled the government, and the people in southern Ireland in general, to
believe that all was well. Indeed important changes seemed to be taking place in
the 1950s and 1960s. The province was comparatively wealthy as a result of the
war years which brought unprecedented prosperity to Northern Ireland. Her
shipbuilding, engineering and aircraft production boomed. The post-war years consequently saw efforts on
the part of the Northern Ireland government to attract foreign capital and
industry. Its success was considerable. One hundred and fifty new factories were
established. The new industries, many of which were international companies,
employed their workers without regard to religious affiliation. The 1947 Education Act introduced free secondary
education, and the remarkable rise in the number of Catholics attending
university was one measure of its effectiveness. There is no doubt that there
was a growing tendency for Catholics to see their future in terms of a Northern
Ireland context rather than an all-Ireland state. The IRA abandoned their campaign of 1956-62,
mainly due to apathy. Their decision to abandon military means and concentrate
on socialist objectives by political means seemed to promise that the 1960s
would be free of violence. More importantly, there were dramatic gestures
towards reconciliation in the exchange visits between the Northern Ireland Prime
Minister, Captain O’Neill and his southern counterpart, Mr Lemass, in 1965.
This, indeed, seemed to be the decade of tolerance and change. There were, however, people to whom
reconciliation was a dirty word. Though in temporary hiding, Orange bigotry soon
emerged with banners flying. Indeed it was the flying of a banner and an attempt
to remove it — in this case a tricolour belonging to Liam McMillan, the
republican candidate for West Belfast — that provoked the first riot. The man
who played a leading role in demanding the removal of the flag — Ian Paisley,
head of the Free Presbyterian Church and the Protestant Unionist Party had
attitudes with roots stretching deep into history. In 1966, the Malvern Arms murders and the
apprehension of the murderers revealed the existence of the Loyalist UVF (Ulster
Volunteer Force). Paisley’s men killed two Catholics going home from work in
Malvern Street, Belfast, apparently mistaking them for two others they believed
were guilty of some ‘anti-Protestant’ crime. The pressures for change had produced strong defenders of the
status quo. The failure of the O’Neill administration to
translate its intentions into practice caused considerable frustration and
resentment. A series of measures, but in particular the decision to establish a
new university in Coleraine instead of in Derry, and the establishment of a new
growth centre in Craigavon, were seen by Catholics and Protestants as blatant
discrimination against the disadvantaged west. The discrimination against the
west of Northern Ireland exists because the two eastern counties, Antrim and
Down, are the only counties in Ulster with a real Unionist majority. In March 1967 the Republican Clubs, which
represented an attempt by Republicans to find a legitimate method of political
expression, were declared illegal by the government. This move was seen as
intolerant and repressive by many people who did not share Republican views. It was now over forty years since the founding of
the state and there was a significant change in attitude, towards the state, on
the Unionist side. The downright opposition to the new state in the 1920s had
been replaced by a fierce pride and loyalty towards its institutions. They were
proud of the economic performance of the Protestant state, helped along by the
war years and favourable trading relations with Britain. They saw their economic
‘miracle’ as being a Protestant ‘miracle’ and they saw themselves as the
chosen people. Catholic participation in affairs of the state could only anger
the Almighty as it was obvious whose side he had come down on. Pages could be filled itemising instances of
discrimination against Catholics. Apart from its existence in private firms such
as Harland and Wolfe Shipping Company which, out of a work force of 10,000, had
few, if any, Catholics. In Derry, for instance, as the Civil Rights Movement
began, the heads of all fifteen departments in Derry City Council were
Unionists, and blatantly anti-Catholic. Dungannon, with a fifty-three per cent
Catholic population, returned, through careful gerrymandering, twice as many
Unionists as Nationalists in county council elections, so that there was
flagrant injustice and discrimination against Catholics in housing. In Derry at
the time of the Civil Rights Movement, there were practically no Protestants
unhoused, whereas the majority Catholic population had 2,000 unhoused families.
As well as bias against the Irish in housing and employment, there was the
injustice of the bloody-minded destruction of their culture, language, music,
art, drama and customs. Under a system of plural voting, which gave
individuals more than one vote, companies and occupiers of premises with a
rateable valuation of $20 could appoint nominees to cast votes in other
constituents (where Catholics might have a majority) so that the poorer Catholic
community was, in effect, electorally disenfranchised. Between 1945 and 1968, the allocation of new
houses to Protestants and Catholics on a percentage basis was Protestants 71%,
Catholics 28.9%. The Civil Rights Movement got tremendous impetus from a sit-in
over the allocation of a house to the eighteen-year-old secretary of a prominent
local Protestant. She was jumped over a housing waiting list that included
Catholic families with children. Though the electoral laws were reformed, under
the Downing Street declaration, it was too little and too late and it was
drafted in such a way as to shed no light on Nationalist aspirations. A portion
of the declaration read as follows: ‘In no event will Northern Ireland or part
thereof cease to be a part of the United Kingdom without the consent of the
Parliament of Northern Ireland. The border is not an issue.’ It was the old English strategy of giving with
one hand and taking with the other. To anybody following the British strategy
with any interest, this was nothing new. The confidential minutes of the British
Labour Cabinet of 1949, Number 49(4) says it all: ‘So far as can be foreseen,
it will never be to Great Britain’s advantage that Northern Ireland should
form part of a territory outside His Majesty’s jurisdiction. Indeed, it seems
unlikely that Great Britain would ever be able to agree to this, even if the
people of Northern Ireland desired it.’ In 1968 there were riots in Strabane, Derry and
Belfast. By 1969 the situation had really deteriorated. On 12 August the
Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry held their march commemorating their
resistance to the Catholic James during the Williamite Wars. ‘Before the
procession, a few Apprentice Boys tossed coins from the City Walls towards small
knots of people below’, says the official inquiry. ‘It was a gesture of
contempt which can only have inflamed the Bogside.’ This was an
understatement. The Bogside is the Catholic ghetto of Derry. The march was meant
to draw a response from the Catholics. It did. A stone was thrown. The reaction
of the police to the attackers in the Catholic Bogside area of Derry caused the
Irish Prime Minister Jack Lynch to make the famous ‘we will not stand by’
speech. The violence spread to Belfast. In August the Catholic Lower Falls area
was invaded by a hostile mob. Seven people were killed; more than three thousand
lost their homes. The situation was changed utterly. The Unionists (Protestants) were well-armed the
Nationalists (Catholics) were not. There was danger of a massacre in Derry.
Barricades grew up on the streets. Police reinforced by Paisleyites invaded the
Bogside and were driven out with bottles and stones. The Irish Government requested that United
Nations peace-keeping forces be sent to Northern Ireland because British troops
would be unacceptable to the Irish people. On 14 August the British Government sent the army
into Derry and on the next day into Belfast. The soldiers were received
rapturously in Catholic areas. The people were later to remember Bernadette
Devlin’s words: ‘You’re giving them tea now. What will you be giving them
in six months?’ No-one died in Derry. In Belfast, ten civilians were killed
and 145 wounded. The Irish Foreign Minister urgently asked the Security Council
to be allowed to send an Irish peace-keeping force to Northern Ireland. He
received a polite hearing but the Irish request was ignored. While the Catholics were being pulverised, the
Protestant paramilitary groups were extremely well armed and operated without
fear of curtailment. They were, in fact, above the law. The B-Specials took part
in acts of burning and violence not as a legitimate aid to patrolling the border
but as a Protestant militia seeking to extirpate the Catholics, in the centre
of cities, just as their forefathers had done. Some of the episodes in which the
B-Specials were involved were shown on British television and enlightened
English public opinion was outraged. Curiously enough there were reforms now.
Reforms which would have been gratefully accepted two years earlier now went
unnoticed. The Protestant force, the ‘B’ Specials, was disbanded. The Royal
Ulster Constabulary was disarmed the following month. But it was too late, and
although the B-Specials were disbanded, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) which
took their place was just the old force in a new guise. The new Ulster Defence
Regiment, comprising 3,000 full-time and 3,000 part-time members, was fully
equipped by the British and was substantially better armed than the Specials it
replaced. The growing pacifism of the IRA during the 1960s
was blamed for the vulnerability of the Falls Road area in 1969. When the IRA
began its campaign against the British army in Ulster, they were disgusted with
the posture adopted by the British establishment. For their part, the British
gave the impression of condescension and heartlessness that repelled the IRA.
‘We can accept the casualties’, William Whitelaw said. ‘We probably lose
as many soldiers in accidents in Germany’. That sort of philosophy, which was
not confined to Whitelaw, was a major factor in the IRA’s decision to move its
bombing campaign to England, where the casualties would not be acceptable. ‘IRA — I Ran Away’, chalked derisively on
the walls of the city, determined some members that this must never happen
again. The Provisional IRA was officially formed in January 1970. The troops, when they did arrive, were left to
blunder forward, resulting in a morass of brutality — kicked down doors,
beaten up young men, and worse, occasional bursts of ill-directed rifle fire and
CS canisters thrown down narrow teeming streets that claimed civilian life and
helped on the one hand to eventually land Britain before the European Court of
Human Rights, and on the other to build up the IRA’s strength. In July 1970, before a single shot was fired on
the Nationalist side, the British army moved to the offensive. Curfew was
imposed on the Republican Falls Road but not on the Unionist Shankill Road.
Troops killed four civilians, in their own streets, by their own houses. They
had broken no law. They died because they lived in a Nationalist area. On 9 August 1971, 365 so called
‘Nationalists’ were rounded up in the early hours of the morning and
interned without trial. Before the end of the year, almost 1,000 men and women
were being held without trial. All parades, marches and processions were banned.
On Sunday, 30 January 1972, the Civil Rights Association held an anti-internment
march in Derry, despite the ban. Within twenty minutes, thirteen unarmed
civilians (seven of them of school-going age) were shot dead, and the same
number wounded. The army has been on a state of alert ever since. In March 1972 the British Government abolished
Stormount, the Northern Ireland branch parliament. The traditional response of
the Protestant establishment when the natives become restive has always been to
crack down hard. Scores of young Catholics were found with hoods over their
heads and bullets through their brains. Others were found in conditions better
imagined than described, with mutilations, throat cuttings and every form of
atrocity. During a murder trial in 1973 in which Albert Baker got life for the
murder of four Catholics, the activities of a torture chamber in the Shankill
Road were revealed. Known as ‘Romper Room’ a speciality was hoisting torture
victims ceiling high by means of a pulley and then letting them crash to the
floor. Men were killed in every conceivable and inconceivable way. With the suspension of Stormount the British
sought a new settlement. The result was the Sunningdale Agreement: a
power-sharing Executive representative of both Catholics and Protestants. The
Protestants refused to cooperate and the British government capitulated to the
Protestant strike of May 1974. In March 1979, the Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC) admitted that the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) members had been involved
in thirty known cases of murder, the two most spectacular or horrific examples
of which were the massacre of the Miami Showband, a very popular southern group,
and the activities of the Shankill murder gang, known as the ‘Butchers’. The ‘Butchers’ day of reckoning came in 1979
in Belfast when a judge sentenced eight of them to a total of forty-two life
sentences for nineteen deaths. One of the most prominent members of the group,
‘Basher Bates’, was an ex-UDR man. Many Catholics believed that the
authorities connived or at least turned a blind eye to such activities, because,
acting on the theory that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, it was felt
that such pressures would soften up the Catholics and make them more willing to
yield up the IRA in their midst. The ‘Butchers’ downfall came when they left
one victim for dead, but through a change in their method of operation, he
recovered. Instead of using a meat clever or an axe on Gerrald McClaverty after
the customary bout of torture, they tied a boot lace around his throat to
silence him and then slashed his wrists with knives and threw him in an alleyway
where his blood congealed in the cold so that the bleeding stopped and saved his
life. Sentencing the killers, the judge made it clear that in their case life
was to mean LIFE and that no reason was to be accepted in terminating this
sentence.
What has happened politically
since the Civil Rights Movement days in the late sixties? Nothing! Twenty-five
years of inquiries and inquests, of commissions and reports, of claims and
counter-claims. Commissions about commissions, reports about reports, inquiries
about inquiries, talks about talks. Twenty-five years of waffle. Sunningdale,
the Constitutional Conventions, Round Table Talks, Rolling-Devolution, the
Assembly. The Hillsborough Treaty which was launched in
1985 amidst a wave of pomp, ceremony and media hype failed to achieve any of its
inordinate claims: n
It failed to effect any change in the operation of the RUC. Torture
continued in interrogation centres. Nationalists were still systematically
harassed in the streets and even funerals became a major target for harassment. n
It failed to achieve any reform of the UDR, much less the disbandment
called for at various times since 1985, by pro-Hillsborough politicians. n
It failed to end the system of paid-perjurer (‘supergrass’) trials.
These were halted only because they were thoroughly discredited. n
It failed to stop the shoot-to-kill policy of summary executions by
British forces. n
It failed to end the routine and constant harassment of Nationalists by
RUC and British Army. n
It failed to end the use of plastic bullets which the RUC and British
Army continued to fire with impunity, a fact underlined by the acquittal of the
RUC man charged with killing John Downes at a peaceful rally in 1984. An
incredible total of 374 plastic bullets were fired in the Springhill/Springfield
Road area in the two days from the 7-9 June 1988. n
The right to silence was removed as a means of defence. The British Government rejected a claim by
Amnesty International made in 1993, that the Right to Silence legislation in the
North of Ireland breaches international civil and political rights standards.
Amnesty said they found it to be inconsistent with the presumption of innocence
and the right not to be compelled to testify against oneself or confess guilt.
They pointed out to the British Government that these rights are protected by
international standards to which the United Kingdom is a party, and therefore
bound to comply. Amnesty said it was particularly concerned about
the application of the order to people arrested under emergency legislation in
Northern Ireland. It points out that, unlike other parts of the United Kingdom,
people arrested under emergency legislation in Northern Ireland can be detained,
and questioned, for up to seven days without charge. Neither are they brought
before a judge during those seven days, which the European Court of Human Rights
found in 1988 to be in violation of the European Convention. The submission goes on to criticise the situation
in Northern Ireland, concluding: ‘...thus, many detainees in Northern Ireland
are questioned and must decide whether to exercise their right to remain silent
during police questioning, before they have the opportunity to consult with
their lawyer to discuss the consequences of their decision’. Amnesty also points out that many cases before
the courts are based on uncorroborated confessional evidence (‘supergrasses’)
and the standard under which confessional evidence is admissible is lower than
in other parts of the United Kingdom. ‘The combination of this lower standard
of admissibility of confessions with the curtailment of the right to silence is
inconsistent with the internationally recognised rights of presumption of
innocence and the prohibition of the use of compulsion to obtain evidence from
the accused.’ Amnesty used three cases to illustrate the
Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1988. The case of Dermot Quinn is
typical. According to the Amnesty report, Dermot Quinn was
arrested on the night of 13 April 1988, under suspicion of having participated
in an ambush an hour earlier on two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC). Upon being stopped at a road-block Quinn explained that an hour earlier
he had been at work nearby, and explained where he was going. Charges against
him were dropped in September 1988. However, he was re-arrested on 16 July 1990,
and in the intervening time the Criminal Evidence (NI) Order 1988 had become
effective. The prosecution case was based primarily on
disputed scientific evidence (as most of the cases are). Notwithstanding the
statements of alibi made initially at the road-block, the corroboration of his
alibi by his employer, his trial testimony, and the fact that Mr Quinn had
remained silent during police questioning, the court (no jury) convicted Dermot
Quinn on all charges, and sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison. There were a number of benefits for the Loyalists
resulting from the Hillsborough Agreement. These resulted in an increase in the
number of attacks by Loyalists on Catholics. In the first year of the treaty,
there were over five hundred attacks on Catholics and Catholic property,
including churches. Twelve Catholics and one Protestant woman married to a
Catholic were killed by Loyalists. There was widespread intimidation of Catholic
families, and along the Irish border the British army seized hundreds of acres
of farming land and built a series of spy posts known locally as the
Hillsborough Wall. A British Army soldier, sentenced to life for the
killing of a West Belfast man, Kidso Reilly, was released. Charges were dropped
against another British soldier for killing Aidean McAnespie and the damming
Stalker Report was suppressed. The SAS, the highly-trained group with an
independent command structure, continued their loose-cannon technique without
fear of curtailment. In the 25 year period, since 1969 they were involved in a
series of controversial shootings, while operating in plain clothes and using
non-standard weapons. They euphemistically call their killings ‘executive
actions’, carried out on behalf of the Prime Minister direct from the Joint
Intelligence Committee in Downing Street. They were responsible for the
Gibraltar Affair, where they opened fire on, and shot dead, unarmed suspected
‘terrorists’. They were involved in a number of actions in Ireland, like the
Loughgall ambush when they killed eight men. The RUC also has a specialist undercover group of
plain clothes and uniformed officers who are ‘tasked’ (given their orders)
by M I5, but they lack the political independence that made the SAS an
unpredictable ingredient in the Northern Troubles. It is noteworthy that during
much of the period when the IRA was receiving such widespread condemnation in
the popular press, in the tragedy that was Northern Ireland, Loyalist
(Protestant) paramilitaries were responsible for more murders during those years
than the IRA. This statistic is from the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), itself
a Pro-Loyalist police force. This does not include the murders of IRA members by
the British occupying forces, which do not receive any publicity in the
Australian press. Of the thirty-three civilians killed in the North in 1993,
twenty-one — almost two-thirds were killed by Loyalists. Jim Bell, an ice-cream delivery man, was shot
dead by two UVF gunmen in Belfast in September 1993. He was deeply loved by his
neighbours and family and had no involvement with any political or paramilitary
group, it was established. He was picking up supplies of ice-cream for delivery
around the city. Margaret Wright’s murder was described as one
of Belfast’s most horrible killings. Ms Wright who suffered from epilepsy was
beaten up at a dance hall and then shot. Her body was dumped in a bin. She was
killed in the mistaken belief that she was a Catholic. The local Protestant
Minister described Ms Wright as ‘a lovely, quiet and sweet girl, completely
harmless’. Police said people remained in the club after the shooting and
continued with their party in the illegal drinking den. Within a few days of the
shooting the UVF claimed to have ‘executed’ one of their own, Ian Hamilton,
who they say admitted killing Margaret Wright. There was much evidence of collusion between the
British Crown forces and the Loyalist death squads which shows that information
gathered by army intelligence concerning Republican ‘suspects’ was passed to
the death squads for ‘processing’. After the killing of Loughlin Maginn by
the Loyalists in County Down, 25 August 1989, the killers showed a BBC reporter
a British intelligence photo-montage and a video containing details of Mr Maginn.
Files on Nationalists began appearing systematically all over the North and the
UDA even plastered them on walls in Belfast. It should be remembered that the motto of these
noble Orangemen is ‘Civil and Religious Liberty’. The problem in Northern Ireland, although it is
officially regarded as being as much a part of England as Liverpool, is that the
British Government adopts measures that would be unacceptable on the British
mainland. Moreover, the treatment meted out to so called ‘terrorists’, which
included internment without trial and prison torture, was usually inflicted on
ordinary law-abiding citizens. In the case of internment, it was solely an
anti-republican, and anti-Catholic measure, carried out in the same spirit, and
against the same people who had suffered at the hands of extreme Ulsterism for
hundreds of years. No Protestants were seized, although there was a litany of
criminal activity on that side of the fence visible for all to see. The first
killings of any sort, the Malvern Street murder, the first explosion and the
first constable killed in the North, were all carried out by Protestants. Eventually, in the best British tradition of
calling a spade an agricultural implement, the unpopular term ‘internment’
disappeared and was replaced by ‘detention’. Once picked up or
‘detained’, prisoners were remanded in custody almost indefinitely. This led
to an embarrassing number of political prisoners to account for internationally. Prison torture is a tradition dating back to
before the Rising of 1798. Irishmen apprehended for attempting to free their
country invariably received rough justice in prison. Nothing has changed over the last twenty years.
Warders at Hull Prison went before the Courts on charges arising out of the
treatment of Irish prisoners. In Parkhurst Prison, on the Isle of Wight, Irish
prisoners sought solitary confinement to escape their tormentors who, at one
stage, led by the infamous Kray Brothers, could offer them violence and threats
of death without interference from warders. The Krays were eventually moved to a
criminal lunatic institution. A young Protestant ex-warder at Long Kesh Prison
in Ulster explained why he had left the prison service: ‘I don’t like the
IRA. You see that knuckle, I broke that on an IRA man’s head but I always used
my hands and I never hit a man unless I had to, but you should hear the way the
fellows over from England talk. “The Paddys”, they call us Protestants and
Catholics. They treat the prisoners like scum. They’d use boots, batons,
anything. They sickened me and I got out.’ It became an accepted fact of life that the way
to get confessions out of suspects was to brutalise them. In November 1977,
thirty solicitors who did most of the work in the ‘Terrorists’ jury-less
‘Diplock Courts’, where a single judge hears the evidence and makes
decisions on matters of law, guilt or innocence and sentencing, wrote to the
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, stating: ‘Ill-treatment of suspects
by Police Officers, with the object of obtaining confessions, is now common
practice, and most often but not always takes place at Castlereagh RUC Station
and other Police Stations throughout Northern Ireland’. The question of the use of torture has been very
emotive. Although alleged by the IRA it was not until the Sunday Times published the fact that the Army were using such
techniques that the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs began opening a file on
torture with a view to government action. The European Court of Human Rights delivered its
verdict in 1978. The Courts established that the following techniques were used: 1.
Hooding the detainees except during interrogation. 2.
Making them stand continuously against a wall in a spreadeagled and
painful posture for prolonged periods. 3.
Submitting them to continuous and monotonous noise. 4.
Depriving them of sleep. 5.
Restricting them to a diet of one round of bread and one pint of water at
six hourly intervals. The Court was not allowed to visit the Irish
barracks because the British claimed that the lives of witnesses would be
imperilled. The account of one of the torture victims, Kevin
Hannaway, whose experience led to the Belfast courts awarding him damages goes
like this. ‘After they arrested me, I was thrown into a lorry where I got a
kicking. Then I was taken to another barracks where I got another kicking, and
they took me up in a helicopter and told me they were going to throw me out.
They set alsatians on me, my thigh was badly torn and they made me run in my
bare feet over broken glass.’ Following these happenings, Hannaway underwent
the ‘five techniques’. Not only troops and police warders, but British
personnel generally, seemed either to have a natural antipathy for the Irish or
to have been indoctrinated against them. An example of indoctrination was a so-called IRA
oath which was contained in a manual issued to every soldier who came to
Northern Ireland. The manual was withdrawn from circulation and the ‘oath’
deleted only after its contents were published in the Irish press years later.
It was first published in an April 1967 issue of the Protestant Telegraph, the organ of the Rev. Ian Paisley. This
so-called oath read in part: These Protestant robbers and brutes, these
unbelievers of our faith, will be driven like the swine they are into the sea by
fire, the knife or by poison cup until we of the Catholic Faith and avowed
supporters of all Sinn Féin action and principles, clear these heretics from
our land... At any cost we must work and seek, using any method of deception to
gain our ends towards the destruction of all Protestants and the advancement of
the priesthood and the Catholic Faith until the Pope is complete ruler of the
whole world.. We must strike at every opportunity, using all methods of causing
ill-feeling within the Protestant ranks and in their business. The employment of
any means will be blessed by our earthly Fathers, the priests, and thrice
blessed by His Holiness the Pope. So shall we of the Roman Catholic Church and
Faith destroy with smiles of thanksgiving to our Holy Father the Pope all who
shall not join us and accept our beliefs. This type of attitude leads to the type of
situations that resulted in a British soldier being convicted of attempted
murder after he fired twenty shots into a crowd of mourner. Andrew Brian Clarke
of 9th/12th Lancers from Merseyside emptied his rifle of
twenty bullets while he was a member of a mobile patrol which was on duty to
protect the mourners from attacks by Loyalists. Although he claimed his gun went
off accidentally, the court was told that although British soldiers carry loaded
guns they do not carry a bullet in the breach and the safety catches are placed
on. As a further precaution weapons are set in manual mode not automatic. The
judge said that Clarke would need to have cocked the gun and released the safety
catch before a bullet was fired. He would also have to set the gun to automatic
mode to fire twenty rounds. This could not have been done accidentally. Clarke had told police, ‘I just shot the
bastards’. He was jailed for ten years in 1995. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had its
strength more than trebled from 3,000 to about 10,000. It still continued to be
an almost entirely Protestant force. Taken in conjunction with all others
involved in security, it is estimated that roughly 30,000 people — mostly
Protestants — were engaged in policing the Nationalist minority. The figures
amount to about one in thirty of the Protestant population. Police in Northern
Ireland are extremely well-paid and they can afford to live in suburbs far away
from the ghettos where most of the trouble originates. It was to take nineteen years,
and the British media,
(The Birmingham Six, the Guilford Four, the
Gibraltar murders, the shoot-to-kill scandals— were not first exposed by the
timid Irish media.) to investigate a day of horror
in southern Ireland. The carnage on that day-26 dead in Dublin, seven in
Monaghan and, overall, more than two hundred injured-constitutes the worst
single day of mass murder in either Ireland or Britain in the past twenty-five
years. The Yorkshire Television program that investigated the slaughter was
entitled ‘The Forgotten Massacre’. Forgotten for good reason — it happened
in Southern Ireland — and nobody was ever brought to trial in connection with
the bombings. The injured, and the relatives of the dead, received virtually no
compensation. In fact, this, the single biggest act of murder and maiming in the
‘Troubles’ had receded into little more than a footnote in Irish history.
The program contended that the bombs were the work of a UVF (Ulster Volunteer
Force) unit from Portadown, a Protestant town near Belfast. The UVF is a
Unionist paramilitary force notorious for its sectarian murders. Allegedly there were fifteen UVF activists
involved. Six cars were stolen in the North — both getaway vehicles and bomb
cars. The three bombs, in city centre locations, exploded within a few minutes
of 5.30 p.m. Dublin rush hour. There was at the time a bus strike in the city,
so the throngs walking were even greater than usual and this contributed to the
high number of casualties. Ninety minutes later a bomb exploded in the main
street of Monaghan town and seven more people lost their lives. Prior to these bombings, the UVF had been a
less-than-expert terrorist force which concentrated on soft targets (‘any
Catholic will do’) and many people were surprised by the sophistication
displayed in the Dublin/Monaghan attacks. Almost immediately, suspicion fell on
the British SAS which had exploded a bomb in Dublin two years earlier in which
two bus company workers were killed. Conveniently, that bomb ensured the passing
in the Dail Eireann (Irish Parliament) of the Republic’s Special Powers Act.
‘The Forgotten Massacre’ supported the theory
that the British SAS had been involved, though it did not name the British agent
involved in supplying and training the bombers. London’s Observer
newspaper stated that the man has since been promoted and decorated by the Queen
of England ‘for services rendered’. The program also maintained that the Irish police
were repeatedly hampered by the RUC (the North’s police) in their
investigation of the bombings, to the point where they simply had to give up.
Some RUC members knew of the bombing in advance and the bombing was carried out
by the same gang that was responsible for the massacre of the Miami Showband
near Newry. The names of the bombers and the likely
involvement of British Military Intelligence in the atrocities were, the
documentary added, known to the Irish police within a short time of the
bombings. For legal reasons the program did not name the MI5 officer who it
claimed organised and directed the bombings, but it named some of the people it
believed planted the bombs. Since the program was shown the UVF has finally
admitted responsibility for the bombs. Even after twenty‑five years of supposed
reforms in employment practices, discrimination against Catholics in Northern
Ireland continues. Roman Catholics are still regarded as second class citizens.
They are still two and a half times more likely to be unemployed or without job
opportunities equivalent to their Protestant counterparts. Discrimination
against them has been developed over a long period by the Orange Order. It has
been practised by the business community for generations. It is still rife in
the public service, semi-state bodies, universities and trade unions. The public sector accounts for the employment of
more than 200,000 people and is largely controlled by British ministers through
the civil service. Figures published in Belfast in 1991 by Equality Working
Group indicate the position in some important areas. In the top level of payment
in the civil service, 85.5% of the senior posts are still held by ‘Protestants
and others’, as against 14.5% by Catholics. In the local service, up to 90% in
most areas, and in one case 100%, of senior officers and staff, are stated to be
Protestant and others. In the Northern Ireland Electricity Service, 96% of the
management, senior and middle grades are ‘Protestant and others’. In the
engineering grade the figure is 97%. In the Ambulance Service 95.5% of officers
and 85.9% of leading ambulance personnel are ‘Protestant and others’. In the
fire service, 92.9% of officers, 93.3% of sub-officers and 89.7% of fire control
staff are ‘Protestant and others’. The pattern is repeated in the universities. Out
of a total of 2,991 employed by Queen’s University, 84% are ‘Protestant and
others’ and 16% are Catholic. In Ulster University the figures are 83.6%
Protestant and 16.4% Catholic, out of a total of 2,402. Discrimination on religious grounds is as deeply
entrenched in the six counties as ever. The practice of discrimination ensures
that Catholic unemployment is kept more than twice that of Protestants. The
overwhelming proportion of well‑paid jobs remain in the hands of
Protestants, forcing young Catholics to emigrate twice as fast from the six
counties as their Protestant counterparts. This is a means of selective
population control without which a growing Catholic population might eventually
outnumber the Unionists. It is just another update of the British policy of
‘rooting out the Irish’. Since 1969, 117 people have died
in Britain as a result of the Troubles; 101 have been killed in the Republic and
more than 3,200 in the North. Despite this statistic the North of Ireland is
still a safer place to live than many large American cities. In
the United States in 1992' 23,760 people were murdered. (This means a person is
three times more likely to be murdered in the US than in NI.) One in four
households was affected by violent crime or theft. Even Washington had about
seven random shootings a day and the city had more than 3,500 non-fatal
shootings in 18 months. According to British Government information
published in June 1993, the North is still a far less violent society than
Britain. During the period 1981 to 1991, for every 100 persons in the North
there were four notifiable offences committed, according to the survey. The
comparable figure is nine in Wales and ten in England. Overall, the crime rate
in the North remained static whereas it nearly doubled in Britain in the same
period. For the Republic, membership of the European
Community has been all gains. Economic dependence on Britain is over. While
Britain’s cheap food prices kept Ireland poor, the EEC’s agricultural
protection policy is making Ireland rich. The Republic is one of the safest
places in the world to reside and despite the common image of the stereotypical
drunken Irishman, the country is not in the top ten of alcohol consumers per
capita. |
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