I was in secondary school when the IRA death cult was in full swing. Two of its victims were William Gordon and his 9-year old daughter Leslie who were blown up as he drove her to our school. He was a church-goer, a part-time prison warder and a full-time father/husband. She was a year younger than me: a little happy, toothy, blond haired girl with her whole life ahead of her. Her baby brother Stephen was in the back seat and somehow survived, only to sustain life changing injuries.
The IRA and the INLA were completely devoid of humanity (as were their Loyalist counterparts). Americans, who wouldn’t tolerate this stuff in their own country, wrote checks for the freedom fighters ‘back home’.
But as the much missed UK chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs said not long before his death, you have to let go and forgive. Otherwise you will be doomed to repeat the Troubles over and over again. No one in their right mind would wish that on their descendants.
All true- but to be fair to our American cousins , they got the message in the end. I, too, have some personal memories of those involved who died. But dear old Rabbi Sachs was right – and no doubt he knew a thing or two about forgiveness. It is very powerful and we must do it.
“Our American cousins” got the message only when some other terrorists bombed and flew planes into their buildings.(what they call 9/11)
Before that, they think terrorism hadn’t existed.
That fateful day that many an erstwhile hopelessly romantic dewy-eyed ‘buy a bullet, kill a Brit’ American long addicted to their nostalgia porn ceased to see their beloved ‘freedom fighters’ as they fondly imagined them to be any longer and finally came to see them for what they really were, little better than the vicious, cold blooded killers that had just ‘landed’ on their own hitherto sanctified doorstep.
I can well believe that Neil, but that is for them and their consciences to bear, and hopefully some might one day read the other comment I made above regarding what their ‘generosity’ has bought them.
You are quite right Rosy. Without upgraded US anti-terrorism financing legislation and the extraordinary diplomatic efforts of the Bush/Clinton administrations 1998 might never have happened.
My memory was the two Catholic sisters who were out shopping for the older girl’s wedding early in 1972. The IRA blew them up along the restaurant where they were relaxing. The bride made it to her wedding minus both legs, an arm and an eye. Her sister came in a second wheelchair without her legs. Somehow the smaller atrocities stick longer in memory than the big infamous ones.
What an incredibly shocking and moving story. One can only hope and pray that those two ladies were able to lead happy lives despite such dreadful injuries.
Google bloody Friday Belfast to read the full horror of that day.
Peter LR
3 years ago
Those were dark days and not just the miners’ strike switching the lights off. I remember some parents wouldn’t let their children go on our trip to the Tower of London for fear of bombings.
I supported Thatcher’s logic: “he murdered others and now he has murdered himself.” I find it so sad because Ireland is a beautiful country with fabulous people.
Interestingly, when George Fox visited in the 17th century he wrote in his journal that “the land smelled of blood” reflecting on the many massacres which had taken place there.
If we are such a fabulous people why were we driven to such extremes. I’m sick of listening to the lot of you . Just get out of our country and leave us in peace.
G Harris
3 years ago
More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict – never a declared war, you’ll notice – of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were members of the British security forces and 16% were members of paramilitary groups.
Republican paramilitaries were responsible for some 60% of the deaths, loyalists 30% and security forces 10%.
When you see these figures and the disproportionate toll taken on ‘the innocent’ and the British security forces, the vast majority of whom were only ever trying to live their lives, do the right thing and their jobs, it puts the supposedly ‘heroic’ sacrifices of the likes of Bobby Sands and the paramilitaries on both sides in NI during The Troubles into grim context I feel.
Last edited 3 years ago by G Harris
A Woodward
3 years ago
I never gave a crap about these murderers dying. They certainly don’t deserve the UK govt now tying itself in knots to deliver them ‘justice’.
Agreed. They made a choice – something their victims were never able to do.
Riccardo Tomlinson
3 years ago
I visited Belfast last year for a weekend. It is appalling how both sides hang on to their grudges and their martyrs after all this time. It’s like a hobby for them and the world has indulged them in it.
They have simply got to move on, for their children’s sake if nothing else.
Check out the Balkans. In 1996, I went on a trip to Mostar. Our Croatian guide told us about the famous historic Mostar bridge which had been destroyed in the fighting. “This bridge was of great historic and cultural importance. But for us Croatians it was the bridge of tears…” Because of all the Croatians who died building it 500 years earlier.
William, just for clarification, the bridge was destroyed by Croatian gunmen. It was rebuilt in 2004, so if you back you can see it. I actually met my wife through her cousin, who is from Mostar. He and his family fled Mostar during the Bosnian War of Independence, like virtually all of the Serbs living in Mostar. Today the Croats live on one side of the river (and the bridge), the Bosniaks (or Muslims) on the other side, the Serbs have all gone. There is no more war, but it is a dysfunctional kind of peace.
That’s easy to say when you’re an outsider. The vast majority of people waiting for answers about what happened to their loved ones are innocent civilians who never lifted a stone or fired a shot.
Ian McKinney
3 years ago
Irish republicanism was built on blood and martyrdom from the beginning – each new phase of conflict had an (often pointless) orgy of killing to birth the phoenix of ‘resistance’.
De Valera, fascist that he was, knew full well the appeal to base instincts of a martyr and sent his merry cult to certain death in 1916 not to win a battle but to create a generation of martyred saints for his new nation.
So much was the same in 1848, 1916, 1971, 1981 and on and on and on.
I read often in various forums of the atrocities of the British, the Northern Ireland government (no one ever notes that Craig’s ‘Protestant state’ was a direct reaction to De Valera’s similarly Catholic one), the RUC, the absentee landlords, the paratroop regiment and the rest. One rarely or ever reads of the bigotry of the jolly Irishman to this day towards the ‘hun’ invaders in the North, the utter refusal of Irish republicanism to condemn the carnage of the troubles, the failure of Sinn Fein and the IRA to address the issue of the disappeared, or even to acknowledge the pain of the 2000+ families they bereaved with their squalid unjustifiable campaign. Crucially, one never reads of the ethnic cleansing of the Irish Free State and almost total destruction of the protestant community in the South in the 1920s. The interesting thing about partition is that it came about largely due to the fear of protestants of rule by the Catholic majority in the island of Ireland. And actually, based on the treatment of protestants in the south, they were right to be fearful. Whilst Catholics were no doubt mistreated in the North, their protestant fellow Irish men in the South had it far worse. The statistics are available and are shocking.
Ultimately, all of this has always been about building a nation and the problem for republicans has always been that they refused to countenance a non-gael, non-catholic variety of Irishman. A coalition and understanding was possible, that was demonstrated in 1798, when protestant and Catholic radicals fought side by side in the United Irish men, but since then ‘Irish’ has been ever more narrowly defined. And in tandem with that, having created a handy enemy within (note that 90%+ of protestants were just as poor and exploited as their Catholic neighbours in the 1800s), republicans added the myth of justified violence – “freedom fighting”.
That has continued up to the present day and the ongoing continued refusal to acknowledge that the IRA campaign was unjustified.
And it was unjustified. None of it was justified. From 1798 to 1978 and beyond, nothing that happened or was happening in Ireland required the slaughter of civilians or the destruction of their livelihoods.
The only reason it was justified was to continue to build the blood myth that the forebears of republicanism founded. ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ can be read on a few levels, including that of threat.
And here we are, 105 years from the Easter Rising, 100 years from partition, 25 years from the Good Friday Agreement, and it is the same shite, still the same interminable groundhog day of yousens and themmuns. And it always will be – even if Ireland is ‘free’. Even if the island of Ireland is a single indivisible westphalian nation state.
It will always be thus until republicans admit that protestants can be Irish too, until republicans of all shades conceive of a new Ireland that properly accepts an orange tradition, and until republicans finally and truly disengage from the repulsive notion that a nation needs a blood sacrifice to be whole and redeemed.
“It will always be thus until republicans admit that protestants can be Irish too”. That’s kind of the point. The modern republican tradition was founded and sustained by protestants. I’d name them , but I expect from your well-informed writing that you know exactly who they were. Protestants have been in Ireland for four centuries and more. They are just as Irish as anyone else on the island. It’s just that they seem violently opposed to accepting this notion.
Gordon Black
3 years ago
Glasgow gallows humour during the hunger strike – “Bobby Sands’s mother has been arrested in the Maze: she was trying to smuggle in a cake hidden in a file”.
Ray Mullan
3 years ago
An interesting and very well framed perspective on a troubled time in our history.
But in my opinion, and with all due respect to Jenny McCartney’s relative youth, the course of (northern) Ireland today was already set in 1968 when a number of rallies organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association — protesting amongst other grievances the sorry state of housing provision for Roman Catholics and a gerrymandering electoral system that rendered Catholic votes largely ineffective beyond a handful of boroughs — were consistently met with brutal violence by the partisan Royal Ulster Constabulary and a general rabble of loyalists masquerading as a militia of “B Specials”.
The reaction to those marches was sadly to be expected in an environment governed by Stormont according to the prescription in 1934 of its first prime minister, James Craig, as “a protestant parliament and a protestant state”.
A child of six in August 1968, I sat on the stoop of my Aunt’s house and watched a pipe band lead one of those civil rights marches from Coalisland to Dungannon some four miles away, where it was welcomed with just such an unsympathetic display of force. Within a year, my sister had to come and get my brother and me from a nearby farm where we were playing because our neighbourhood had emptied for the night. Those same yobs of the RUC and “B Specials” had threatened a repeat of the pogroms in the ’20s when ‘Taigs’ like us were beaten out of our places of work, and indeed our homes. Every family with a car had gone — which was every family but ours and one other.
I contend that we would never have had a resurgence in support for the IRA or indeed the subsequent violence of paramilitaries on both sides and certainly not the situation in the six counties today, if that sour little statelet had not been expressly configured to meet Craig’s prescription of the ’30s — and a complacent protestant establishment had not thought they could get away indefinitely with their hatred of Papes — and all things Irish, for that matter — and simply behaved with more grace.
Those peaceful protests quickly became riots and the helter skelter of “the Troubles” followed. Thanks, Stormont, but you were long gone by then.
I was a student of Fr Denis Faul (or Dennis the Menace as the IRA and its sympathisers liked to describe him) at school throughout the ’70s. I remember him fondly as a man of great erudition, strong principles of justice and something of a thorn in the side of the establishment. He once told us of Cardinal Ó Fiaich’s predecessor, William Conway’s unsuccessful ploy to move him off to Rome — anything to get him out of the political fray in Norn Iron.
All due credit to his memory for helping to finish the Hunger Strike but nevertheless at the age of nineteen I cast my first vote for Sands; mostly on account of a few salient points missing from Ms McCartney’s piece such as the slaughters in Derry and Ballymurphy by the British Army in 1971, the introduction of internment without trial at the time of the Ballymurphy Massacre and, yes, the fact that the man had put his life on the line.
Perhaps N. Ireland could come up with two political parties that don’t want to murder each other and innocent supporters of them. But maybe that’s too sensible a solution.
Thank you Ray for an interesting and enlightening post. The Catholics of Northern Ireland were definitely subjected to discrimination by the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary and Stormont. They also suffered unfair housing allocation and education. I clearly remember my Catholic Uncle telling my parents that he tried to get work at the Belfast shipyards, inevitably, the foreman who chose which men to ‘take on’ was Protestant. He walked along the queue of men asking each their religion. Needless to say he only employed Protestants. The Catholic men were proud of their religion and would never deny it even for a job. No wonder so many Irish emigrated.
Don’t worry. Pretty soon in this post Christian era, both Protestants and Catholics will be equally persecuted, and our govts will say nothing about it.
Ireland was the only European country apart from Slovenia and Slovakia to absolutely prohibit church attendance in the most recent spate of lockdowns. I do not doubt that the stricture was expressly meant to impress the shamans of Silicon Valley who have effectively annexed our wet little rock.
We are becoming more ridiculously Woke by the day.
Personally I think the Church missed a trick as our countryside is peppered with Mass rocks from the last bout of penal laws. She might have drawn a few lapsed Catholics like myself back into her fold and perhaps one or two converts had she shown some leadership to spite the performative tears and protestations of plague from our over-administrated health service and unctuous media.
That was wrong. But did it justify blowing up civilians? The kneecappings and beatings? The disappeared?
Teaching children to kill because they knew that the soldiers had instructions to not shoot at children. (according to my Northern Irish Catholic room mate, in 1976)
Teaching children to kill because they knew that the soldiers had instructions to not shoot at children.
Sadly they did — sixteen-year-old Martin McShane was a neighbour of mine in Coalisland who was shot three times (just to make sure, I suppose) by a British soldier on the 14th of December, 1971. He was playing. He was not carrying a gun.
My apologies for not listing absolutely every awful thing that has bugged me about growing up there.
“That was wrong. But did it justify blowing up civilians? The kneecappings and beatings? The disappeared?”
No, it did not.
Arguably, the killings and bombings, the kneecappings and beatings, the maimings, the orphans and widows, set back the cause of Irish Unification by decades.
To be clear, some actions of the authorities and security forces (including BL00dy Sunday) set back the nationalist community’s peace with the state by decades, in much the same way. Just as the overreaction by the British after the Easter Rising in 1916 turned Ireland against them.
My concern is that the current fanning of flames of sectarian hatred may see a return to the past.
This problem should have been solved in the Summer of 1914, but for the intransigence of Asquith and others. In Asquith’s case, as we now know, he was too busy ‘perving’ over the voluptuous body of Venetia Stanley to address the Irish/Home Rule problem with any real vigour.
As one would expect, young Churchill was fairly gung-ho after the disobedience at the Curragh and wanted to send the Royal Navy in to shell Belfast into submission. (It wouldn’t have taken long).
Sadly the actions of Serbian lunatics on the other side of Europe allowed the wretched Asquith to shelve the issue until the end of the War. By that time thousands of Ulstermen had been slaughtered at Thiepval, thus making the Home Rule Bill of 1914 impossible.
The settlement of 1921 somewhat naively expected the members of the Protestant nano state to behave like Gentlemen in regards to their treatment of the the then Catholic minority*. Despite the fact that many of the members of the Stormont Protestant Oligarchy were Public School & Oxbridge educated they subsequently behaved as barbarians, to the eternal shame of England, which remained blissfully unaware of what was going on from 1922-68.
As Cicero would have said “Cui Bono”, ‘Who benefits’? Well in this case an infinitesimal group of major Protestant property/landowners,
who have lived well at England’s expense for the past century. Enough is enough, we must get rid of the place with “all expediency”
Just to be clear, I should point out that plenty of Catholic Irishmen fought on Britain’s behalf during the Great War. My own father served in the British Army and was stationed in Palestine during the ’30s. He was in Cherbourg at the close of World War II.
The King’s shilling was always a great fallback in Ireland when one’s employment prospects proved otherwise weak.
The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there. Back in the 1920s, multiculturalism (for all its flaws) wasn’t a thing. The older Irish Republican ideals of a country for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter had given way to a narrower vision of Irishness, with comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, and De Valera’s catholic state for a catholic people. This was mirrored in the Northern protestant state for a protestant people, and discrimination of various sorts was all too common in both jurisdictions. In the North, this was predominantly by Protestants and against Catholics, as Ray and others have explained. In the South, it was the other way around – and in the decades after independence, aided partly by informal inequities in taxation and administration, and Ne Temere (a new and less liberal Catholic position on mixed marriages), the protestant population fell from 10% to 2%.
The response to the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent violent struggle of the PIRA (and allied/rival republican groups, and the violent response from loyalist terrorists) entrenched division in Northern Ireland for decades. The divisions live on in segregated schools, and – in some towns – catholic and protestant bars, clothes shops (selling uniforms for the appropriate segregated schools), newspapers, and even groceries and butchers. There is an absence of war, but there is not quite peace. And “peace walls” that separate sometimes hostile communities have increased rather than decreasing.
However things are better than in the 1920s or even the 1950s. Ireland is not the confessional state it was. The Good Friday Agreement provides a peaceful way to settle the constitutional question in Northern Ireland. The Republic in particular has handled its centenaries with great maturity and inclusiveness. In the North there is more introspection on the anniversaries than in the past, but much room for improvement.
I worry that Brexit has inflamed the politics of Northern Ireland and the border. Rhetoric is heating up again. If leaders don’t work for peace, and continue to use “themmuns” as bogeymen, it may not end well.
Thanks for adding a little balance. Sadly most of the comments reflect the ongoing lack of real knowledge regarding the place where we grew up. To be daily stopped on your own streets and harassed by soldiers from another country , to be terrorised by their ill-disciplined and often murderous local auxiliaries , to be classed as less than a citizen in a statelet literally founded on a sectarian head count…I wonder how many British people would have put up with this. Of course awful things were done , but as Martin McGuinness said (and nowhere is this more true than in Ireland ) “no-one has a monopoly of suffering”.
Mark Knight
3 years ago
Gallows graffiti at the time, and effecitve critique: “We’ll never forget Johnny Sands.”
David D'Andrea
3 years ago
It seems to me, from a distance, that the fate of Ireland was determined long before, for example, when the English parliament established a policy of the “total Reducement and Settlement of that Nation”
Think of all the SS men who died heroically. Especially their foreign recruits, like Leon Degrelle (whose history is still extremely embarrassing in modern Belgium) and the French Charlemagne SS unit which fought the Russians in the ruins of Berlin.
Last edited 3 years ago by William Murphy
J Bryant
3 years ago
Excellent essay that provides insight into the complex politics of that period of Irish history.
Northern Ireland is such a small place. My sense is the people there have limited opportunity and all that gives their lives meaning is their history and their grievances.
J Bryant. What a crass & ignorant statement. Northern Ireland is a beautiful place & I’ve met plenty of English people who’ve settled here. Most tell me they have a better quality of life than they did in England. Given the fractious nature of Brexit you should perhaps reflect on what happens when two intractable opposites emerge in politics. Once you’ve solved Brexit amicably, come back & comment on us.
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
“Squalid” as the IRA campaign was, it never reached the level of barbarism attained during the Palestine Mandate Campaign 1945-8, or perhaps that of EOKA in Cyprus 1956-60.
seanoshah
3 years ago
As usual, Jenny McCartney’s writing is brilliant and insightful. This is an enjoyable article about an appalling time.
I was in secondary school when the IRA death cult was in full swing. Two of its victims were William Gordon and his 9-year old daughter Leslie who were blown up as he drove her to our school. He was a church-goer, a part-time prison warder and a full-time father/husband. She was a year younger than me: a little happy, toothy, blond haired girl with her whole life ahead of her. Her baby brother Stephen was in the back seat and somehow survived, only to sustain life changing injuries.
The IRA and the INLA were completely devoid of humanity (as were their Loyalist counterparts). Americans, who wouldn’t tolerate this stuff in their own country, wrote checks for the freedom fighters ‘back home’.
But as the much missed UK chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs said not long before his death, you have to let go and forgive. Otherwise you will be doomed to repeat the Troubles over and over again. No one in their right mind would wish that on their descendants.
All true- but to be fair to our American cousins , they got the message in the end. I, too, have some personal memories of those involved who died. But dear old Rabbi Sachs was right – and no doubt he knew a thing or two about forgiveness. It is very powerful and we must do it.
“Our American cousins” got the message only when some other terrorists bombed and flew planes into their buildings.(what they call 9/11)
Before that, they think terrorism hadn’t existed.
Ah yes, 9/11.
That fateful day that many an erstwhile hopelessly romantic dewy-eyed ‘buy a bullet, kill a Brit’ American long addicted to their nostalgia porn ceased to see their beloved ‘freedom fighters’ as they fondly imagined them to be any longer and finally came to see them for what they really were, little better than the vicious, cold blooded killers that had just ‘landed’ on their own hitherto sanctified doorstep.
Some of the Irish diaspora in the USA might have stopped contributing, but by no means all have.
I can well believe that Neil, but that is for them and their consciences to bear, and hopefully some might one day read the other comment I made above regarding what their ‘generosity’ has bought them.
Proud, I’m sure.
You are quite right Rosy. Without upgraded US anti-terrorism financing legislation and the extraordinary diplomatic efforts of the Bush/Clinton administrations 1998 might never have happened.
My memory was the two Catholic sisters who were out shopping for the older girl’s wedding early in 1972. The IRA blew them up along the restaurant where they were relaxing. The bride made it to her wedding minus both legs, an arm and an eye. Her sister came in a second wheelchair without her legs. Somehow the smaller atrocities stick longer in memory than the big infamous ones.
What an incredibly shocking and moving story. One can only hope and pray that those two ladies were able to lead happy lives despite such dreadful injuries.
Google bloody Friday Belfast to read the full horror of that day.
Those were dark days and not just the miners’ strike switching the lights off. I remember some parents wouldn’t let their children go on our trip to the Tower of London for fear of bombings.
I supported Thatcher’s logic: “he murdered others and now he has murdered himself.” I find it so sad because Ireland is a beautiful country with fabulous people.
Interestingly, when George Fox visited in the 17th century he wrote in his journal that “the land smelled of blood” reflecting on the many massacres which had taken place there.
If we are such a fabulous people why were we driven to such extremes. I’m sick of listening to the lot of you . Just get out of our country and leave us in peace.
More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict – never a declared war, you’ll notice – of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were members of the British security forces and 16% were members of paramilitary groups.
Republican paramilitaries were responsible for some 60% of the deaths, loyalists 30% and security forces 10%.
When you see these figures and the disproportionate toll taken on ‘the innocent’ and the British security forces, the vast majority of whom were only ever trying to live their lives, do the right thing and their jobs, it puts the supposedly ‘heroic’ sacrifices of the likes of Bobby Sands and the paramilitaries on both sides in NI during The Troubles into grim context I feel.
I never gave a crap about these murderers dying. They certainly don’t deserve the UK govt now tying itself in knots to deliver them ‘justice’.
Agreed. They made a choice – something their victims were never able to do.
I visited Belfast last year for a weekend. It is appalling how both sides hang on to their grudges and their martyrs after all this time. It’s like a hobby for them and the world has indulged them in it.
They have simply got to move on, for their children’s sake if nothing else.
Check out the Balkans. In 1996, I went on a trip to Mostar. Our Croatian guide told us about the famous historic Mostar bridge which had been destroyed in the fighting. “This bridge was of great historic and cultural importance. But for us Croatians it was the bridge of tears…” Because of all the Croatians who died building it 500 years earlier.
William, just for clarification, the bridge was destroyed by Croatian gunmen. It was rebuilt in 2004, so if you back you can see it. I actually met my wife through her cousin, who is from Mostar. He and his family fled Mostar during the Bosnian War of Independence, like virtually all of the Serbs living in Mostar. Today the Croats live on one side of the river (and the bridge), the Bosniaks (or Muslims) on the other side, the Serbs have all gone. There is no more war, but it is a dysfunctional kind of peace.
That’s easy to say when you’re an outsider. The vast majority of people waiting for answers about what happened to their loved ones are innocent civilians who never lifted a stone or fired a shot.
Irish republicanism was built on blood and martyrdom from the beginning – each new phase of conflict had an (often pointless) orgy of killing to birth the phoenix of ‘resistance’.
De Valera, fascist that he was, knew full well the appeal to base instincts of a martyr and sent his merry cult to certain death in 1916 not to win a battle but to create a generation of martyred saints for his new nation.
So much was the same in 1848, 1916, 1971, 1981 and on and on and on.
I read often in various forums of the atrocities of the British, the Northern Ireland government (no one ever notes that Craig’s ‘Protestant state’ was a direct reaction to De Valera’s similarly Catholic one), the RUC, the absentee landlords, the paratroop regiment and the rest. One rarely or ever reads of the bigotry of the jolly Irishman to this day towards the ‘hun’ invaders in the North, the utter refusal of Irish republicanism to condemn the carnage of the troubles, the failure of Sinn Fein and the IRA to address the issue of the disappeared, or even to acknowledge the pain of the 2000+ families they bereaved with their squalid unjustifiable campaign. Crucially, one never reads of the ethnic cleansing of the Irish Free State and almost total destruction of the protestant community in the South in the 1920s. The interesting thing about partition is that it came about largely due to the fear of protestants of rule by the Catholic majority in the island of Ireland. And actually, based on the treatment of protestants in the south, they were right to be fearful. Whilst Catholics were no doubt mistreated in the North, their protestant fellow Irish men in the South had it far worse. The statistics are available and are shocking.
Ultimately, all of this has always been about building a nation and the problem for republicans has always been that they refused to countenance a non-gael, non-catholic variety of Irishman. A coalition and understanding was possible, that was demonstrated in 1798, when protestant and Catholic radicals fought side by side in the United Irish men, but since then ‘Irish’ has been ever more narrowly defined. And in tandem with that, having created a handy enemy within (note that 90%+ of protestants were just as poor and exploited as their Catholic neighbours in the 1800s), republicans added the myth of justified violence – “freedom fighting”.
That has continued up to the present day and the ongoing continued refusal to acknowledge that the IRA campaign was unjustified.
And it was unjustified. None of it was justified. From 1798 to 1978 and beyond, nothing that happened or was happening in Ireland required the slaughter of civilians or the destruction of their livelihoods.
The only reason it was justified was to continue to build the blood myth that the forebears of republicanism founded. ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ can be read on a few levels, including that of threat.
And here we are, 105 years from the Easter Rising, 100 years from partition, 25 years from the Good Friday Agreement, and it is the same shite, still the same interminable groundhog day of yousens and themmuns. And it always will be – even if Ireland is ‘free’. Even if the island of Ireland is a single indivisible westphalian nation state.
It will always be thus until republicans admit that protestants can be Irish too, until republicans of all shades conceive of a new Ireland that properly accepts an orange tradition, and until republicans finally and truly disengage from the repulsive notion that a nation needs a blood sacrifice to be whole and redeemed.
Great comment.
I hope more people get to see and read this.
“It will always be thus until republicans admit that protestants can be Irish too”. That’s kind of the point. The modern republican tradition was founded and sustained by protestants. I’d name them , but I expect from your well-informed writing that you know exactly who they were. Protestants have been in Ireland for four centuries and more. They are just as Irish as anyone else on the island. It’s just that they seem violently opposed to accepting this notion.
Glasgow gallows humour during the hunger strike – “Bobby Sands’s mother has been arrested in the Maze: she was trying to smuggle in a cake hidden in a file”.
An interesting and very well framed perspective on a troubled time in our history.
But in my opinion, and with all due respect to Jenny McCartney’s relative youth, the course of (northern) Ireland today was already set in 1968 when a number of rallies organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association — protesting amongst other grievances the sorry state of housing provision for Roman Catholics and a gerrymandering electoral system that rendered Catholic votes largely ineffective beyond a handful of boroughs — were consistently met with brutal violence by the partisan Royal Ulster Constabulary and a general rabble of loyalists masquerading as a militia of “B Specials”.
The reaction to those marches was sadly to be expected in an environment governed by Stormont according to the prescription in 1934 of its first prime minister, James Craig, as “a protestant parliament and a protestant state”.
A child of six in August 1968, I sat on the stoop of my Aunt’s house and watched a pipe band lead one of those civil rights marches from Coalisland to Dungannon some four miles away, where it was welcomed with just such an unsympathetic display of force. Within a year, my sister had to come and get my brother and me from a nearby farm where we were playing because our neighbourhood had emptied for the night. Those same yobs of the RUC and “B Specials” had threatened a repeat of the pogroms in the ’20s when ‘Taigs’ like us were beaten out of our places of work, and indeed our homes. Every family with a car had gone — which was every family but ours and one other.
I contend that we would never have had a resurgence in support for the IRA or indeed the subsequent violence of paramilitaries on both sides and certainly not the situation in the six counties today, if that sour little statelet had not been expressly configured to meet Craig’s prescription of the ’30s — and a complacent protestant establishment had not thought they could get away indefinitely with their hatred of Papes — and all things Irish, for that matter — and simply behaved with more grace.
Those peaceful protests quickly became riots and the helter skelter of “the Troubles” followed. Thanks, Stormont, but you were long gone by then.
I was a student of Fr Denis Faul (or Dennis the Menace as the IRA and its sympathisers liked to describe him) at school throughout the ’70s. I remember him fondly as a man of great erudition, strong principles of justice and something of a thorn in the side of the establishment. He once told us of Cardinal Ó Fiaich’s predecessor, William Conway’s unsuccessful ploy to move him off to Rome — anything to get him out of the political fray in Norn Iron.
All due credit to his memory for helping to finish the Hunger Strike but nevertheless at the age of nineteen I cast my first vote for Sands; mostly on account of a few salient points missing from Ms McCartney’s piece such as the slaughters in Derry and Ballymurphy by the British Army in 1971, the introduction of internment without trial at the time of the Ballymurphy Massacre and, yes, the fact that the man had put his life on the line.
And I still cast my vote for Sinn Féin.
Perhaps N. Ireland could come up with two political parties that don’t want to murder each other and innocent supporters of them. But maybe that’s too sensible a solution.
Now why ever did no one think of that, I wonder?
You should be in politics, Jim.
They had them, and still have them: the SDLP and the Alliance Party (and you can include the UUP since 98).
Thank you Ray for an interesting and enlightening post. The Catholics of Northern Ireland were definitely subjected to discrimination by the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary and Stormont. They also suffered unfair housing allocation and education. I clearly remember my Catholic Uncle telling my parents that he tried to get work at the Belfast shipyards, inevitably, the foreman who chose which men to ‘take on’ was Protestant. He walked along the queue of men asking each their religion. Needless to say he only employed Protestants. The Catholic men were proud of their religion and would never deny it even for a job. No wonder so many Irish emigrated.
Part of the problem today is that much of the Loyalist community continue to deny that this ever happened
Don’t worry. Pretty soon in this post Christian era, both Protestants and Catholics will be equally persecuted, and our govts will say nothing about it.
Ireland was the only European country apart from Slovenia and Slovakia to absolutely prohibit church attendance in the most recent spate of lockdowns. I do not doubt that the stricture was expressly meant to impress the shamans of Silicon Valley who have effectively annexed our wet little rock.
We are becoming more ridiculously Woke by the day.
Personally I think the Church missed a trick as our countryside is peppered with Mass rocks from the last bout of penal laws. She might have drawn a few lapsed Catholics like myself back into her fold and perhaps one or two converts had she shown some leadership to spite the performative tears and protestations of plague from our over-administrated health service and unctuous media.
That was wrong. But did it justify blowing up civilians? The kneecappings and beatings? The disappeared?
Teaching children to kill because they knew that the soldiers had instructions to not shoot at children. (according to my Northern Irish Catholic room mate, in 1976)
Sadly they did — sixteen-year-old Martin McShane was a neighbour of mine in Coalisland who was shot three times (just to make sure, I suppose) by a British soldier on the 14th of December, 1971. He was playing. He was not carrying a gun.
My apologies for not listing absolutely every awful thing that has bugged me about growing up there.
No, it did not.
Arguably, the killings and bombings, the kneecappings and beatings, the maimings, the orphans and widows, set back the cause of Irish Unification by decades.
To be clear, some actions of the authorities and security forces (including BL00dy Sunday) set back the nationalist community’s peace with the state by decades, in much the same way. Just as the overreaction by the British after the Easter Rising in 1916 turned Ireland against them.
My concern is that the current fanning of flames of sectarian hatred may see a return to the past.
This problem should have been solved in the Summer of 1914, but for the intransigence of Asquith and others. In Asquith’s case, as we now know, he was too busy ‘perving’ over the voluptuous body of Venetia Stanley to address the Irish/Home Rule problem with any real vigour.
As one would expect, young Churchill was fairly gung-ho after the disobedience at the Curragh and wanted to send the Royal Navy in to shell Belfast into submission. (It wouldn’t have taken long).
Sadly the actions of Serbian lunatics on the other side of Europe allowed the wretched Asquith to shelve the issue until the end of the War. By that time thousands of Ulstermen had been slaughtered at Thiepval, thus making the Home Rule Bill of 1914 impossible.
The settlement of 1921 somewhat naively expected the members of the Protestant nano state to behave like Gentlemen in regards to their treatment of the the then Catholic minority*. Despite the fact that many of the members of the Stormont Protestant Oligarchy were Public School & Oxbridge educated they subsequently behaved as barbarians, to the eternal shame of England, which remained blissfully unaware of what was going on from 1922-68.
As Cicero would have said “Cui Bono”, ‘Who benefits’? Well in this case an infinitesimal group of major Protestant property/landowners,
who have lived well at England’s expense for the past century. Enough is enough, we must get rid of the place with “all expediency”
(*Two thirds Protestant)
Just to be clear, I should point out that plenty of Catholic Irishmen fought on Britain’s behalf during the Great War. My own father served in the British Army and was stationed in Palestine during the ’30s. He was in Cherbourg at the close of World War II.
The King’s shilling was always a great fallback in Ireland when one’s employment prospects proved otherwise weak.
Yes I completely acknowledge that. Indeed were not the Irish Guards raised in recognition of Irish bravery in the Boer War?
It’s a great pity we can’t put some of the horrors behind us, but the future (which I will never see), looks promising.
The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there. Back in the 1920s, multiculturalism (for all its flaws) wasn’t a thing. The older Irish Republican ideals of a country for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter had given way to a narrower vision of Irishness, with comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, and De Valera’s catholic state for a catholic people. This was mirrored in the Northern protestant state for a protestant people, and discrimination of various sorts was all too common in both jurisdictions. In the North, this was predominantly by Protestants and against Catholics, as Ray and others have explained. In the South, it was the other way around – and in the decades after independence, aided partly by informal inequities in taxation and administration, and Ne Temere (a new and less liberal Catholic position on mixed marriages), the protestant population fell from 10% to 2%.
The response to the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent violent struggle of the PIRA (and allied/rival republican groups, and the violent response from loyalist terrorists) entrenched division in Northern Ireland for decades. The divisions live on in segregated schools, and – in some towns – catholic and protestant bars, clothes shops (selling uniforms for the appropriate segregated schools), newspapers, and even groceries and butchers. There is an absence of war, but there is not quite peace. And “peace walls” that separate sometimes hostile communities have increased rather than decreasing.
However things are better than in the 1920s or even the 1950s. Ireland is not the confessional state it was. The Good Friday Agreement provides a peaceful way to settle the constitutional question in Northern Ireland. The Republic in particular has handled its centenaries with great maturity and inclusiveness. In the North there is more introspection on the anniversaries than in the past, but much room for improvement.
I worry that Brexit has inflamed the politics of Northern Ireland and the border. Rhetoric is heating up again. If leaders don’t work for peace, and continue to use “themmuns” as bogeymen, it may not end well.
Thanks for adding a little balance. Sadly most of the comments reflect the ongoing lack of real knowledge regarding the place where we grew up. To be daily stopped on your own streets and harassed by soldiers from another country , to be terrorised by their ill-disciplined and often murderous local auxiliaries , to be classed as less than a citizen in a statelet literally founded on a sectarian head count…I wonder how many British people would have put up with this. Of course awful things were done , but as Martin McGuinness said (and nowhere is this more true than in Ireland ) “no-one has a monopoly of suffering”.
Gallows graffiti at the time, and effecitve critique: “We’ll never forget Johnny Sands.”
It seems to me, from a distance, that the fate of Ireland was determined long before, for example, when the English parliament established a policy of the “total Reducement and Settlement of that Nation”
I consider myself lucky that my ancestors got shot of the place 5 generations ago.
You can’t beat the death of a ‘martyr’ for whipping up support. George Floyd anyone?
You have to be the right one, GF was an habitual criminal, black, the perfect colour, collect $27 million as you pass Go.
Ms Ashli Babbitt, a ‘veteran’, white, Trump fan, kill with impunity, do not pass Go, but continue onwards to Hell.
Bravo for the Great Republic!
The idea seems to be that dying for a cause proves it to be true and good. Unfortunately, there is no such discoverable relationship at all.
Think of all the SS men who died heroically. Especially their foreign recruits, like Leon Degrelle (whose history is still extremely embarrassing in modern Belgium) and the French Charlemagne SS unit which fought the Russians in the ruins of Berlin.
Excellent essay that provides insight into the complex politics of that period of Irish history.
Northern Ireland is such a small place. My sense is the people there have limited opportunity and all that gives their lives meaning is their history and their grievances.
J Bryant. What a crass & ignorant statement. Northern Ireland is a beautiful place & I’ve met plenty of English people who’ve settled here. Most tell me they have a better quality of life than they did in England. Given the fractious nature of Brexit you should perhaps reflect on what happens when two intractable opposites emerge in politics. Once you’ve solved Brexit amicably, come back & comment on us.
“Squalid” as the IRA campaign was, it never reached the level of barbarism attained during the Palestine Mandate Campaign 1945-8, or perhaps that of EOKA in Cyprus 1956-60.
As usual, Jenny McCartney’s writing is brilliant and insightful. This is an enjoyable article about an appalling time.