Viewpoint When N. Irish Protestants stone Catholics, it's not about
religion
By EOIN McKIERNAN
The scene is an unfriendly crowd of a thousand Protestants milling
around a small Catholic church, shouting abuse, jostling the few hundred
Massgoers and pounding their cars, throwing firecrackers and generally making
an unholy racket to drown out the liturgy inside the church. It seems to
confirm the American media's tendency to describe life in Northern Ireland in
terms of religious antagonism.
No one would describe a similar scene in, say, Israel as a
conflict between Judaism and Islam.
This mob scene in the Harryville district of Ballymena, Northern
Ireland -- the Rev. Ian Paisley's electoral district -- has been staged weekly
for over six months. Its intensity grows weekly.
Its organizers threaten to double the number of bands to 22 and to
increase the number of picketers to 2,000. No one doubts their capacity to do
so.
Yet it is an egregious error to label this scene sectarian, the
cliché much favored by correspondents who write their stories from far
away.
Violence in Northern Ireland is not religiously based. It's as
political and territorial as that of the Middle East. A handier analogue is the
black-white issues of civil rights, jobs and housing in our own country.
More so than elsewhere, cultural and political statements in
Northern Ireland are represented by parades. The tumultuous weekly scene in
Harryville is intimately related to a parade that never took place last
summer.
Loyalists, also defined as Protestants or Orangemen (though not
Orangewomen), mount over 2,000 parades or marches each year. Nationalists or
Catholics organize a small fraction of that.
Nationalist marches are less flamboyant and tend to be confined to
their own or neutral areas. Loyalist parades typically insist on passing
through Catholic areas, sometimes with anti-Catholic banners, often with bands
trumpeting tunes offensive to Catholics.
Tiring of this provocation, Catholics with a view toward
mitigating the 17th-century triumphalism of these parades have demanded that
organizers of Orange marches request permission to pass through Catholic
areas.
Even though a blue ribbon committee recently appointed by the
English government and chaired by Sir Peter Robinson, vice-chancellor of Oxford
University, found compromise in this vexatious matter to be reasonable, the
loyalists gave their usual response: "Not an inch!"
The unwillingness of loyalists even to talk about modifying their
route exasperated the Catholics in the village of Dunloy last summer to the
point where they cordoned off their area, denying their streets to the loyalist
marchers.
It is for this reason that the loyalists are revenging themselves
upon the few hundred Catholics in Harryville.
Religion in Northern Ireland is a label for politics. If you are
Catholic it is assumed you are a nationalist, that is, in favor of the reunion
of the country, which was partitioned by the imperial Parliament in 1920.
If you are a Protestant it is assumed you are in favor of the
status quo, that is, the retention of the political union with Britain. Hence
you are a unionist, loyalist or Orangeman (harking back to
the 17th-century defeat of King James' Catholic army by his son-in-law, William
of Orange, a Protestant).
Unless a person is visibly (that is, politically) a Protestant,
he/she is suspect (that is, a "Catholic," hence not "loyal"). This paranoia
could be farcical were it not destructive of community relationships.
Recently David Trimble, head of the Unionist Party in Northern
Ireland, worried that the British Labor Party might win the upcoming English
election, attacked Tony Blair, the Labor leader and therefore the likely next
prime minister, as unfit because he had married a Catholic.
To Trimble, this was sufficient proof of Blair's "disloyalty."
"Loyalty" is the shibboleth in Northern Ireland. A few years ago,
the Rev. Ian Paisley, head of the extremist Democratic Unionist Party, publicly
accused Queen Elizabeth of "treason" because of an ecumenical attitude. Even
the queen can stumble.
Intolerance toward Catholics is justified on the basis that no
Catholic, baptized or not, can be "loyal."
Not too long ago in Northern Ireland, the head of the government
publicly proclaimed that Northern Ireland was a "Protestant state for a
Protestant people." And only now are the Unionists (who governed Northern
Ireland from 1920 to the resumption of direct rule by Britain in 1972)
beginning an internal debate on whether Catholics might be admitted to
membership in the party.
The boundaries of Northern Ireland were carefully drawn to
guarantee a 60-percent majority of loyalists in the new state. To this end the
historic province of Ulster was truncated to six counties, an area of only
5,000 square miles, one-sixth of the whole island. The "minority" -- 40 percent
-- were assured of second-class status.
From the outset, allegiance became a problem. The 60 percent
favoring the union with Britain felt besieged by the 40 percent of "Quislings"
who obviously had to be controlled.
Thus, the 40 percent became the blacks of the North, denied basic
civil rights. Periodic violence flared until the great eruption of 1969, which
has not yet been resolved.
"Protestants," "loyalists" and "unionists," then, are virtually
synonymous, as are "Catholics" and "nationalists." There are, of course,
Protestant nationalists and Catholic unionists: These are the exceptions,
however. Indeed, if a Buddhist were to espouse nationalism, a loyalist would
count him or her "Catholic."
Thus, for "the good of the state," Catholics had to be
contained.
As recent English attempts at remedial legislation confirm, from
1920 on, nationalists were systematically discriminated against in jobs,
housing and even in voting. (Remember the nationalist marches in the late 1960s
for "One man, one vote.")
The ongoing siege of Harryville reminds the Massgoers of their
subordinate position in Northern Ireland.
The story is told about an English pilot on a flight from London
to Belfast who announced, "We are on our final approach to Belfast. Set your
watches back three centuries."
Eoin McKiernan is an Irish specialist with a doctorate from the
National University of Ireland. He is also a feture writer for Irish
America magazine in New York.
National Catholic Reporter, April 11,
1997
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