A People Under Siege: The Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond

A Peo P le Under

The Unionists of northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond

Aaron Edwards

A PEOPLE UNDER SIEGE

The Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond

Aaron Edwards

A Sense of Belonging

I did not learn the Protestant version of history from books, but by word of mouth passed on from generation to generation. The ‘quality’, who had education and leisure, knew the details and the dates, but ordinary folk like ourselves carried the facts – or alleged facts – of history in our very bones and in our hearts. We were the people who had never surrendered and would never surrender. As each Twelfth of July came round, Protestant fervour would rise again and be reaffirmed.

Robert Greacen, The Sash My Father Wore: An Autobiography1

Whitewell Road, North Belfast, 12 July 2001

THE BRICKS AND BOTTLES RAINED down thick and fast. I ducked to avoid a golf ball hurtling in my direction. I wove to narrowly miss a bottle smashing on the ground beside me. Up ahead was a solid line of police Land Rovers blocking the bridge. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in full riot gear huddled closely together in front of their vehicles in a welldisciplined formation, holding their reinforced shields tightly to their chests.

Facing off against the police officers were about thirty Orangemen, who had also formed up in orderly ranks, their standard-bearer spearheading their advance towards police lines. The young man carrying the bright blue, gold and red bannerette depicting the local lodge’s emblem – a crest emblazoned with the words ‘For God and Ulster’ – was a friend of mine. We grew up in the same housing estate and occasionally socialised together. As I stood observing the lodge at close quarters, I felt like I was amongst

friends. Amongst people like me. The lodge regalia was completed with a huge banner depicting a painting of soldiers from the 36th Ulster Division going over the top in the trench warfare of the First World War. The soldiers on the banner were portrayed as stoic, defiant and determined. It flapped in the warm July breeze, a reminder of the slaughter of the Somme, held aloft by two Orangemen as bricks and other debris flew above our heads, thrown by angry nationalists behind police lines. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. A red mist descended over those around me. Fear, anger and frustration animated them, and I could see it was taking considerable willpower for the Orangemen to maintain their dignity in the face of such violent provocation.

The lodge had walked the short distance from the Master of the Lodge’s home in White City to hand over a letter of protest to the police. No band accompanied them. ‘Party Tunes’, as they are known, were banned. They wanted to cross Arthur’s Bridge and make their way down the Longlands Road, up Church Road and past a cluster of out-of-town shops before entering the Rathcoole estate, about a mile away, the home of most of the members of the lodge. For generations Orangemen like these had walked along what they called their ‘traditional route’. What they did not know at the time was that the labelling of this parade as ‘contentious’ was not a byproduct of the Troubles, nor of the recent Drumcree, Ormeau Road and Derry controversies. Many Orangemen perceived these protests to be a deliberate Sinn Féin strategy of forming residents’ groups against parades as a means of stopping them from performing their age-old tribal rites,2 though, in reality, such actions had a long history that predated the formation of Sinn Féin and even Northern Ireland itself.

The local Loyal Orange Lodge (LOL) 658 in Greencastle had been formed a few hundred yards from this spot in 1886, amidst frequent disputes between local Protestants and Catholics over parading. Indeed, there had been frequent rioting in the Greencastle and neighbouring Whitehouse areas in 1867, and then again in 1887 and in 1897, commonly involving clashes between Orangemen, bandsmen and the police.3

In July 1899 one local, who went by the nom de plume ‘Unionist’, wrote to the Belfast News Letter to complain about the treatment of the Orangemen of Greencastle and was at considerable pains to state that it was not a nationalist district and, out of the 225 families living there, 135 were

Protestant. The ‘rowdier elements’ amongst the remaining ninety Catholic families, he said, were ‘like a lot of Smithfield corner-boys’.4 Complaining about heavy-handed treatment by the police, he called on his local MP to ‘find out the reason why a rebel procession can walk in Belfast when a procession of men sworn to uphold the empire is not allowed’.5 The News Letter agreed and chastised nationalists who ‘glorify rebellion; they express over and over again their unabated hostility to England; and their great aim is to fracture and weaken the Empire’. As far as the newspaper was concerned, nationalism was ‘at its old game – trying to bring discredit on Orangeism’.6

Other letters flooded the News Letter columns, each one arguing that loyalists had not been responsible for disturbing the peace in the district.7 One even went as far as to suggest it was ‘time that something was done to prevent the Nationalists from taking possession of the village’. The Protestant people, the letter writer said, ‘must be blind, or they have closed their eyes, to what has been going on for the past few years, otherwise they would have been up in arms long since’.8 Another loyalist, signing his letter ‘Anti-Rebel’, stated ‘that they won’t have any more of this nonsense. All that the Protestants of Greencastle want is equality of rights, and this much they intend having.’9

Most of those who wrote letters blamed the trouble on the rise in the number of Roman Catholic police officers stationed in the area, although one letter writer refuted this allegation, arguing that the Greencastle nationalist band was ‘prohibited by the Roman Catholic sergeants here from entering the neighbouring village of Whitehouse just as the Protestant bands are prevented from entering the Roman Catholic village of Greencastle’.10 In the final correspondence published by the News Letter, ‘Unionist’ said the ‘Nationalists have had too much of it their own way in this district, but the Protestant people do not intend to tolerate it any longer.’11

Violence never seemed far from the surface in Greencastle, though it was not until a generation later, during serious civil unrest in the 1920s, that gunmen opened fire at a funeral of a local Protestant, Herbert Hazard, killing one man, Hugh McNally, and wounding another, Thomas McBride. At the same time, it was claimed that a loyalist mob had wrecked the Emmett Hall, chasing a few Catholics out of the area.12 Then came a long détente lasting half a century.

With the re-emergence of violence in the early 1970s, Greencastle’s strong grassroots leadership was tested, with community activist Joe Camplisson lamenting how intercommunal rioting in July 1971 led to a serious deterioration in community relations in the area.13 It would get worse. Much worse.

On 6 January 1973, eighteen-year-old William Rankin was shot dead as he inflated his car tyres at the corner of Mill Road and the Shore Road.14 A few years later, a particularly grisly double murder of a Catholic couple, twenty-six-year-old Mervyn McDonald and his wife, twenty-four-year-old Rosaleen, was carried out in front of their two young children – one aged two-and-a-half, the other four months – at their home on the Longlands Road on 9 July 1976. One neighbour was watching television when they heard the shots. ‘I looked through the curtains and saw two people coming down the path from the house. One of them was carrying a gun. They were so casual it was unbelievable.’15 The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) terror group subsequently claimed responsibility, which the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) claimed was part of ‘a deliberate murderous campaign’ to ‘drive Catholics from Newtownabbey, Whitehouse and Greencastle’.16 The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) subsequently murdered David Nocher, a member of the Workers’ Party, as he cleaned a shop window on the Mill Road in Greencastle on 29 October 1983.17 A few weeks later, the UVF shot and killed Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) member Joe Craven, a neighbour of Nocher’s from Bawnmore Park, while he collected his dole money at the benefits office on the edge of the Rathcoole estate.18 Against this backdrop, tensions remained high between the two communities in the Greencastle area. Changing demographics also conspired to challenge claims to tribal rites the Orange Order may once have exercised in areas like this.19 And so, in July 2001, as I watched the local lodge register its solitary act of protest, I couldn’t help but wonder about the motivations of the youths from the nationalist community on the other side of the bridge. They had gathered at police lines to express their displeasure at what they saw as an act of loyalist defiance. Some of them had empty milk bottles, which they fashioned into Molotov cocktails, known locally as petrol bombs, as well as broken paving slabs, golf balls, and bottles filled with urine. Yet, ironically, the police were facing in my direction, where no one had resorted

to violence, only peaceful protest. In any event, the battle lines had been firmly drawn in the minds of the authorities and the other community, no doubt shaped by generations of antagonism.

For much of my life until that point, we had called the persistent conflict between Catholics and Protestants the ‘Troubles’, which was a reflection of earlier sporadic violence in the early 1920s. But there was nothing sporadic about those three decades of sustained and organised slaughter. With the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, we were led to believe such violence had finally abated, once and for all. It was hard to square this myth with the reality as another bottle of piss whizzed past me.

I began to question why I was even here. The truth was I liked to accompany this lodge every Twelfth of July. It was my grandfather’s lodge. Like my grandmother, he had been born and reared a few hundred yards along the Whitewell Road in a tough, working-class row of terrace homes in Barbour Street. Those were hard times, when the shadow of the Great Depression touched their lives and the lives of their Catholic neighbours in what was known locally as ‘Pope’s Row’. Relations between the two communities were generally good except for times, such as in the mid-1930s, when loyalist and republican gunmen re-emerged to wreak havoc. After my grandparents married, they moved to Mill Road, a few hundred yards across what was now Arthur’s Bridge, before finally settling in East Way, Rathcoole, in the mid-1960s. As the Troubles picked up pace in the 1970s, between 8,000 and 15,000 families were intimidated out of their homes, leaving places like Greencastle, Bawnmore, Longlands and the Whitewell Road predominantly Catholic and nationalist, while Protestant families moved in large numbers to the neighbouring White City and Rathcoole estates.20 Against this backdrop of changing demographics, my grandfather and his Orange brethren were confronted by the harsh reality of social and political upheaval. Their traditional route, which had never fully been ‘theirs’ anyway, was impassable.

Unexpectedly there came a lull in the fracas as the angry shouts and sounds of broken glass and crashing masonry died down. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted some community activists from the local branch of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) emerge from a side street to seek a peaceful resolution, and within a few minutes the violent protest had ended.

The Orangemen returned to the White City side of the Whitewell Road, where they were bused out of the area and to Rathcoole to complete the remainder of their filter parade to join the much larger Twelfth celebrations. Many of the Orangemen on the bus that day felt their tribal rights had been infringed. It left them deflated and humiliated. There were plenty of people to blame: quite apart from the other side, the police – who they had come to see as their police – were singled out for especially harsh criticism. History repeated itself that day in North Belfast.

Later that evening, in a social club in Rathcoole, the Orangemen recalled how ‘the Provies’ had prevented them from walking ‘their traditional route’ and how they were lucky the police were there to prevent matters ‘getting out of hand’. All they wanted was ‘their rights’ respected. Where was ‘their parity of esteem’ promised by the recent Belfast Agreement? The conversation soon turned to great danger lurking round every corner.

During a visit to Belfast in the late 1970s, writer Dervla Murphy spent time in the company of loyalists like these, pondering ‘for how long more can the dying Orange tradition linger on? It is very much a wary, close-the-ranks tradition, always suspecting threats, plots betrayals, conspiracies, always on the look-out for danger … As a social force it is as negative and destructive as the Republican hatred of England.’21 I can’t now remember the exact moment it dawned on me that I was amidst this ‘close-the-ranks tradition’, but I knew that as a young man I had begun to think to the contrary. I had got to know nationalists during three years as an undergraduate at the University of Ulster. Quite a few were committed republicans from Belfast, Derry and Armagh, who had their own version of history and understanding of politics. I was aware that their reading of the past was, like the unionist and loyalist interpretations of history, frequently manufactured from misperceptions and misremembrances. As historian Brian Walker has so eloquently observed, the ‘Unionist sense of history … with its great emphasis on 1641, 1689 and 1690, and with the accompanying idea of constant conflict between Protestant and Catholic, is highly selective.’22

In working-class communities, where oral tradition is the principal means of passing on history, customs and tradition, this lived experience was streetwise knowledge designed to keep us safe, while republican violence and political agitation posed an existential threat to our very existence.

While my undergraduate history degree had taught me to be sceptical of received wisdom, to question everything I was being told, I knew that being on the Whitewell Road that day, amongst loyalists who felt themselves to be under siege, meant I was part of something greater than myself. I was part of a community, both real and imagined. We were Protestants loyal to Her Majesty the Queen, her heirs and successors, and to the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Above all, though, we were loyal to each other. Some might even have called us ‘loyalists’. It felt good to belong, even if we felt embattled by our physical encounter on the bridge that day or in the stories that sprang from our lived experience.23

I was born in 1980 and grew up at a time when the armed conflict on the streets was winding down, though the violence continued to shape and influence our lives in both direct and indirect ways. Family and friends seemed consumed by a state of heightened anxiety, occasionally punctuated by outright fear when, for instance, republican terrorists gunned down a member of the local community. Fifty-one-year-old John Gibson was shot dead as he arrived home from work on 21 October 1993 not far from my front door. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) justified his murder on the basis that he worked for a construction company that rebuilt police and army barracks. Then there was my father’s friend, forty-three-year-old Sergeant Robert Irvine, who was shot dead at his sister’s home in Rasharkin a year earlier, on 20 October 1992, because the PIRA deemed him a ‘legitimate target’ for belonging to the local battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. I had a schoolfriend whose father, thirty-eight-year-old John McConnell, a civilian contractor, was murdered on his way home from work, when the IRA detonated a 1,500lb bomb at the Teebane crossroads between Omagh and Cookstown on 17 January 1992. The Provos said he and his co-workers were legitimate targets because they helped to rebuild security force bases. Finally, there was forty-four-year-old Gerry Evans, who had just opened a fishing tackle shop in Glengormley. My father had been talking to him a few hours before he was gunned down by the PIRA on 27 April 1994. The mere fact that he was a loyalist was enough for them to sign his death warrant.24

One thing all these people had in common was their community identity. They were unionists. Although they were very different as individuals, the local insistence on ascribing political identities to everyone meant they were

part of an imagined community that saw their murders as a common assault on all of us.25 As far as we were concerned, these people were our kith and kin – part of a broader unionist family. An insidious feeling of fear gripped us in the wake of their deaths. It made us paranoid that we were on the verge of destruction – about to be eradicated like those communities in the Balkans and elsewhere we read about in newspapers and saw on television. We hunkered down. Our enemies were out to get us. They could be anywhere. We were a people under siege.

When I think back to those years, I can still feel the fear and anxiety I experienced, as death or serious injury skulked around every corner. You carry it in your bones and your blood forever. During times of great uncertainty, we all want to belong. It’s what makes humankind the social species it has become.

A People Under Siege is a book about the sense of belonging felt by the unionist community in Northern Ireland, but it is much more than that – it is an attempt to articulate what is meant by unionism. In taking this approach it is necessary to confront both the narrow, sectional beliefs and prejudices of unionists and loyalists, as well as the more positive and forward-thinking aspects of this political creed. As a people, I believe unionists in Northern Ireland are capable of being great innovators, problem-solvers and thinkers. ‘Northern Protestants have an eloquent artistic and intellectual tradition,’ wrote journalist Susan McKay, ‘though it is often obscured.’26 However, McKay is generally dismissive of unionists and even more so of loyalists, lampooning them for their flags, their Orangeism, their values, and going as far as to stereotype them as counting ‘inflexibility’ amongst ‘traditional Unionist virtues’.27 She is not alone. Unionists have frequently been misrepresented in Great Britain by journalists like Max Hastings, who once claimed his memory was ‘far too unreliable to offer valid testimony’ to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday,28 yet has, nonetheless, been especially vivid in his recollections of ‘several hundred thousand embittered “Proddies”’29 who ‘have been able to sustain a sorry pantomime, conscious that they are unloved beyond their own streets’.30 There may be some truth to this, but it does not excuse attempts to misrepresent and denigrate an entire community.

I no longer live in Northern Ireland. I relocated to England when I was in my late twenties, though I return home regularly to the place of my birth

to try to understand its people and what makes them tick and, importantly, why the community I grew up alongside continues to harbour the sort of deep-seated feelings of fear and anxiety I once felt. I believe unionism is a political fraternity that has the potential to be much more benevolent, positive and inclusive than its critics admit, and so it is important to spell out how and why it can realise this potential. A People Under Siege, therefore, seeks to explain key developments within unionism from the point of view of its prominent personalities and political parties, including the forms of unionism and loyalism that run like tributaries into a fast-flowing river of British national identity. It also attempts to examine how they are seen from the perspective of others beyond their community.

Political unionism in Northern Ireland is much more than a sense of belonging. It is also about how people organise themselves according to their relationship with one another, with those they elect to govern on their behalf, and how, as a people, they contribute to their country, the United Kingdom. At a time of considerable domestic political turmoil and global uncertainty, I have seen much more pragmatism than pessimism, and more self-reflection than the flagrant displays of primordial sectarian bigotry you read about in the columns of denigratory journalism. It is for this reason that a new book on Northern Irish unionists is badly needed. If we do not acknowledge, accept and respect our differing political outlooks, we may never move to a position of mutual acceptance, tolerance and understanding that will help us build a lasting peace in this troubled part of the world.

Sir Edward Carson at the annual Twelfth of July celebrations in Belfast circa 1914. Carson is seen as the founding father of Irish Unionism, but the reality is the ideas behind political Unionism pre-date him by several centuries. © Edwards Collection

Sir James Craig was the organisational brains behind the opposition to Home Rule. Craig was an empire loyalist who built a form of state-based unionism that appealed only to one section of a divided community. © Edwards Collection

A bonfire built in the Rathcoole estate, depicting effigies of Sinn Féin and Alliance Party politicians. The exhibition of intolerance at some bonfires deepened the sense of loyalist alienation and feelings of victimhood. © Edwards Collection

Queen

II pictured alongside the Duke of Edinburgh and the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Sir Basil Brooke, on a visit to Northern Ireland on 2 July 1953. Queen Elizabeth visited Northern Ireland on many occasions during her long reign, demonstrating the strong bond between Crown and the unionist community. ©

Stock Photo

John Miller Andrews, Northern Ireland Prime Minister 1940–43. © Museum of Orange Heritage

Sir Basil Brooke, Northern Ireland Prime Minister 1943–63. © Museum of Orange Heritage

Elizabeth

SuperStock/Alamy

Captain Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland Prime Minister 1963–69, pictured with Taoiseach Seán Lemass on 9 February 1965. O’Neill attempted to reform the UnionistOrange state according to his liberal convictions, but he was thwarted by a powerful right-wing populist conspiracy. © PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

British Prime Minister Harold Wilson pictured with NILP leader Tom Boyd and his party colleagues at 10 Downing Street. Despite impressive election results at local, regional and national level, the NILP was unable to sustain its challenge to Unionism beyond the outbreak of the Troubles. © Laurence Galbraith