The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

(#ulink_3e60142d-5a23-53a6-b503-f840749699f6) stereotype – the American who was more republican than the republicans, whose crassness and bigotry made even Sinn Féin twitch.

She lived in Derry, it emerged, and had done so for two years. She had come to Newtownbutler with a carload of protest banners and was staying in a local guest-house. Amid great laughter at her own intrepidness, she explained how on the phone she had had to ask the guest-house owner if it was a nationalist household to be sure she’d be with ‘our people’. She talked a lot about ‘our people’. She spoke of Derry and of how Gerry O’Hara (Gearóid Ó hEárá) was ‘an angel’, who had obligingly arranged for her to be registered for voting purposes at his brother’s house.

She spoke with shining eyes of the protest movement. ‘Soon they won’t be able to march anywhere,’ she said triumphantly. ‘They should all be sent off to Scotland in a boat.’ (In this at least she showed herself slightly more moderate than one of the inhabitants of Derry who recently wrote on a wall across the road from the Apprentice Boys’ headquarters: ‘NO MORE LONDON/DERRY/START SWIMMING’.

Gerry McHugh, the local residents’ leader, was uneasy with her. He was well enough trained to know that you watch your words except in private; republicans never admit in public that they want to get rid of Protestants, and indeed many of them would never be anything like that extreme. As she ran out of steam, Mark asked her disingenuously if she’d now be going back to Derry for the Apprentice Boys’ parade. ‘Certainly not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m off to Donegal to speak Irish with my friends. Most of my friends speak Irish.’

Mark and I withdrew, leaving her to carry on encouraging Irish Catholics to hate and persecute Irish Protestants.

Some Anthropological Notes from the War-zone, 8 August 1998

The following night was to be the first time drumbeats continued to reverberate in my head long after I arrived back in London. But then I had had a double and severe dose of the war-drums. Not only had I stood on Saturday for more than two hours at the flashpoint in Derry where bands demonstrated what they thought of their old enemies from the Bogside, but I had walked along the Falls Road the next day beside republican bands vigorously putting up an aural two fingers at their Protestant neighbours in the nearby Shankill Road. The banners, the uniforms and most of the tunes were different; the motives and the methods identical.

Chris Patten, chairman of a commission on policing, watched the Apprentice Boys’ parade from the safety of a window high above the Diamond, the commercial centre of Derry, thus missing the frisson shared by those of us down below who were dodging the missiles occasionally being exchanged between loyalist and republican oiks over the heads of the police who protected them from each other.

That morning, a few Bogside residents had violated the deal struck with the parade organizers and had jeered and spat when wreaths were being laid at the war memorial in the Diamond. The Apprentice Boys’ leaders, who had been making heroic efforts to make their parade acceptable to nationalists, had urged calm and good behaviour, but as each club and accompanying band arrived at the Cenotaph, you could feel a palpable sense of grievance about the earlier insults to their dead. Bands had been instructed to stop the music as they passed the memorial, but they were provoked by republican cat-calls from behind the police Land Rovers and more seriously by accusatory bellows from a couple of dozen loyalist drunks about ‘big girls’ and ‘Lundys’ if they stopped playing. (Lundy is burned in effigy by the Apprentice Boys annually for having proposed surrender during the Siege of Derry.)

The temperature increased when, in response to a waving of the Irish flag, a yob climbed a lamppost and waved a Union Flag at his enemies. Sporadically, the stones came flying over from the republicans and were picked up and returned by their loyalist counterparts. ‘I’m very impressed at their range,’ observed an American visitor to me as we ran. ‘If they were in the United States they’d be champion baseball players.’

The majority of bands virtuously obeyed orders, though many of them relieved their feelings by breaking into loud martial music as soon as they had passed the memorial. The unvirtuous lost their tempers at the memorial itself and played to their hooligan gallery with deafening renditions of songs guaranteed to provoke the most reasonable of nationalists. It was the drummers who provided the most fascinating tribal spectacle, for some of them conducted war-dances on the spot, jumping around in circles and bumping and grinding as they banged their drums and went red and sweaty with effort and rage. The ecstatic response from some female bystanders indicated this was the loyalist equivalent of the Chippendales.

Both lots of would-be rioters shared a deep frustration because cross-community agreement over the parade had removed the excuse for serious trouble. Like hooligans everywhere, they were dying for a rumble. And assiduously they pressed the buttons they knew would wind up the other side. ‘Fenian bastards’ and ‘Provo scum’ calls were balanced by ‘Fuckin’ Orangies’ and subtleties like ‘Billy Wright, bang bang’ – an allusion to the killing in the Maze prison of hard-line loyalists’ favourite murderer. Leaping up behind the police lines, they made throat-cutting gestures at each other, whistled their preferred national anthem and waved their colours. Yet balking them at every turn was their mutual enemy, the ever-present and highly efficient RUC. So as they were blocked by riot police from climbing over the barriers into each other’s territory, both sides screamed ‘SS RUC’, a chant first developed by republicans.

Driving away from Derry with my friend Henry, he said: ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you the bull-pens.’ Obediently, I waited until Sunday morning to be enlightened. At the local cattlemart I surveyed the rows of heavy steel pens. ‘You get two bulls together and they don’t know anything except that they have to fight,’ said Henry. ‘And they’ll break through cement walls to get at each other. All you can do is stop them seeing each other. That’s what should have happened yesterday.’

‘That’s all very well, Henry,’ I said, ‘but there would have been an outcry from the Bogsiders about the police hemming them in and there would have been violence with the loyalists. And all this with Chris Patten looking down at the police from above.’

‘What drives me mad about politicians – and I’ve no reason to think Patten’s an exception,’ said Henry, as we squelched back from the pens, ‘is that they won’t face reality. Now what you had yesterday were two lots of young fellas with hundreds of years of breeding telling them to fight each other. It’ll take another hundred years to breed out that tribalism. We have to face what we’re dealing with. And what we’re dealing with are bad bastards who are egged on by worse bastards who nurture what nature’s already given us. If people behave like animals, they have to be treated like animals.’

I thought of Henry throughout the afternoon in Belfast as I watched little children marching along with the Republican parade commemorating the twenty-seventh anniversity of internment alongside fife-and-drum bands – some wearing camouflage gear – which were blaring out the tunes of famous songs about brutal Brits and heroic Irish and martyred dead. Four or five youngsters sat on the edge of the platform in the lorry outside Belfast City Hall and cheered and clapped a collection of speeches from angry revolutionaries, who included an implacable ETA spokeswoman. When they had finished applauding Gerry Adams’s vitriolic attacks on the RUC and the British occupying forces and the unionists, they cheered again when he sent them away with instructions to agitate until the republican wish-list had been fully granted. All the kids grasped that Sunday afternoon was that their tribe was good, the other one was bad. And every time they saw policemen or Land Rovers – there to keep them safe from loyalists – they shouted ‘SS RUC’. Whatever the politicians say, while we need the bull-pens, we’re a long way from peace.

(#ulink_26f7ee4b-acc2-5832-9679-3248afaaa878) This is as good a place as any to clear up a problem of language that is a running sore today in Northern Ireland. Catholics are those who believe their Church has evolved from the ancient Christian Church; Anglicans, many other Protestant sects and Orthodox Eastern Churches come into this category, along with those who acknowledge the Pope as head of the Church, and who have historically therefore been termed ‘Roman Catholics’. ‘We stand,’ says the Orange Order, ‘for the true Catholic Faith and we deny any church the right to make exclusive claims thereto. The title “Catholic” belongs to all who own the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour and honour Him as Lord. They are all by His grace members of His Catholic or Universal Church. That saving grace is confined to no single sect.’

Yet since Rome has always insisted it had exclusive use of the term ‘Catholic’ and since the belief that it is the one, true Catholic Church has been a principle of Roman Catholic teaching in Ireland, it is in the psyche of the Irish Roman Catholic that he is a Catholic, and that anyone calling him a Roman Catholic is in some obscure way being offensive. A Southern Irish friend of mine recalled hearing the term first in the 1960s in television coverage of an Ian Paisley speech; he and his other teenage friends gazed at each other indignantly. ‘What does he mean Roman Catholic?’ said one of them. ‘We’re not Italians.’

Orangemen are asked not to take offence but, in the interest of saving trees, throughout this book I use ‘Catholic’ to mean ‘Roman Catholic’.

(#ulink_b4888047-8d25-5c91-ae33-c347466ae448) Irish for ‘vision poem’. The Irish Catholic Utopia was a country from which all the Protestants would have been evicted.

(#ulink_f54ae91a-858a-5086-9807-1833d539355a) Protestants call Catholic churches chapels.

(#ulink_9bde5504-a06a-5df1-b2a7-86959f128ac4) An Orangeman asked me to point out that such merchandise has nothing to do with the Orange Order.

(#ulink_1bd30b19-8d6b-5ff9-a42b-0e7110dedf06) I was wrong. Paisley did not join the Independents when he fell out with the Orange Order. He is, however, an Apprentice Boy.

(#ulink_d051c5e6-1abd-5e59-babc-5a427e8164d7) Known locally as a heart-attack on a plate, this is normal rural fare and can include bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread and potato bread, and is usually accompanied by home-made soda bread, one of the most delicious foodstuffs in the world.

(#ulink_9bda735c-ac88-56be-b162-a1bdf9319d6c) Ireland has few black residents and Ulster hardly any, so locals are unaware of any ambiguity when they refer to the Blackmen. One July I was standing at a reception desk in a Belfast hotel when an American woman asked if there would be any more marches that summer. ‘Oh yes,’ said the receptionist, ‘the Blackmen parade on the last Saturday in August.’ She continued finalizing the guest’s account and thus missed her astounded and bewildered expression. I thought of setting the tourist right, but decided it was more fun not to.

(#ulink_165cedcf-ab41-50e2-9f25-f02a5c7f1153) I am told that some local Orangemen who are members of the DUP were annoyed at this remark. I am sorry to have hurt their feelings, but I record what I hear.

(#ulink_165cedcf-ab41-50e2-9f25-f02a5c7f1153) I was corrected about this later. It would have been true six or seven years ago: indeed, in 1991 the wife of a Sinn Féin worker brought her children, her sunglasses and a chair with her and watched the parade. In the last few years, however, because of the increase in sectarian tension, Catholics stay away. There would, however, be many stalls and shops manned by Catholics servicing the paraders and onlookers.

(#ulink_aec20160-df19-5feb-bb2f-e4073f9d0996) Orangemen describe them as ‘blood-and-thunder’ bands, Catholics (because they dislike them) and loyalist youths (because they love them) call them ‘kick-the-pope’.

(#ulink_84ca4f34-f5b5-5f2f-b915-1c0aff0f32d9) I should have added, ‘or in the Gaelic Athletic Association, which provides a social and sometimes political focus to their lives’.

(#ulink_334dea17-1d96-56d3-8406-48dfe1baec9d) I remember particularly the Murley renditions of ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.

(#ulink_abce21c4-970e-510f-8f2e-41acacd82670) A clarifier here. My occasional references to ‘my’ lodge merely denote a friendly relationship and are not intended to suggest that a male-only all-Protestant lodge has taken leave of its senses and admitted as a member a female atheist who was baptized Catholic. I have standing invitations to certain functions there, I’ve eaten there three times and I feel a special gratitude to the brethren for being so kind and welcoming to a nervous outsider.

(#ulink_498537c5-e5d6-55fe-a326-60d7c289ee57) Technically, in 1984, the city became ‘Derry’ while the county remained ‘Londonderry’. In practice, Catholics tend to call both Derry and Protestants both Londonderry. Those trying to avoid giving offence call the city Derry/Londonderry and humorists call it Stroke City.

(#ulink_2278bcd5-91de-5468-ae3f-7a021f420962) Republicans irritate unionists by comparing themselves with the ANC.

(#ulink_ae41d1f4-3a41-51bc-bd06-144d27575359) Another insulting term for Protestants is ‘Jaffas’. Abusive terms for Catholics include ‘Fenians’ and ‘Taigs’.

(#ulink_2e65eda7-1129-5209-9590-9448358d6c82) The playwright Hugh Leonard elucidated this approach in a comment on the funeral in January 1998 of Billy Wright, the notorious loyalist terrorist: ‘The town of Portadown was closed down yesterday for the obsequies of Billy Wright. Shopkeepers were “asked” to suspend business. “Your co-operation is noted (my italics) and appreciated,” is how the request was worded. Take away the olde-worlde politeness, and the translation goes: “Shut up shop or we’ll blow your effin’ heads off.” The morality is, of course, that the more people you murder, the bigger your funeral.’

Even when operating ceasefires, loyalist and republican paramilitaries have traditionally kept control of their ghettos by kneecapping or beating half to death with iron bars or baseball bats studded with nails the disobedient or those classified as ‘anti-social’; shopkeepers are brought to heel by vandalizing or setting fire to their property.

(#ulink_4f5781fc-54c2-5a33-abaa-f8eb4c5e5289) In 1996, after Drumcree Two, the subtle, learned and sophisticated Cardinal Daly – like most of the population of Ireland – went nakedly tribal. In an emotional and often bitter television interview he declared himself betrayed and shocked by the decision to let the Orangemen down the Garvaghy Road and thereby reinforced the prejudices of all those loyalists who doggedly believe that Catholic clergy are, at best, closet republicans and, at worst, tribal witchdoctors.

(#ulink_aaa6f782-5805-529c-a9ce-f34f4f465463) My brother pointed out that the poem was based on Longfellow’s ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’, which laments the fate of the Jews at Christian hands.

(#ulink_e66e60bc-3ba2-5ad2-9b30-089b442c6abf) Orangemen report frequent confusion on the titles front. My favourite example was the Australian who got so muddled about whether to call a visiting dignitary ‘Most’, ‘Right’ or ‘Very’ Worshipful, that he lost his grasp completely and addressed him as ‘Most Adorable Brother’.

(#ulink_4c84a255-82af-5c3a-b4b9-a95725086241) I mentioned to a Orangeman on one occasion that I had left in the middle of a set of speeches because they were awful and I couldn’t bear any more. He laughed. ‘My favourite moment at these events,’ he said, ‘is when after a particularly excruciating performance, the seconder gets up and says: “I would like to second the motion so ably proposed by Brother X.” ‘

(#ulink_2e664ebe-9483-59d7-bf58-cd05bdff9a43) I once went to a Portadown Black ‘Last Saturday’ where my companion and I were taken to eat in the Orange Hall and therefore became honoured guests, even though James was from the British Foreign Office – an institution which as a consequence of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is believed by most unionists to be intent on selling them out. After the meal, we stood with some friends in the field waiting for the speakers on the platform to get going. We were spotted by an officer who felt we had to be given some mark of respect. Two chairs were brought down from the platform, placed in front of the crowd and we were summoned. ‘No, no, please, I’m fine,’ said James, who is of a retiring disposition. More experienced in the ways of Orangemen, I sat down without protest and eventually he too was persuaded to sit. Within a minute he had spotted an elderly woman and had given her his seat. Down from the platform came the officer, carrying another chair; this time James accepted his fate. For the whole of the service, except when on our feet for hymns and the national anthem, the three of us sat there, apart from those on the platform the only people among the thousands present not standing or lying on the grass.

(#ulink_c533b9e8-08d6-5e67-aed1-12fce4f163f7) NORAID (the Irish Northern Aid Committee) has since 1969 raised money in the United States ostensibly for the families of republican prisoners. In effect, it has freed up IRA money which could then be used to buy weapons. Its members are happy to encourage people 3,000 miles away to kill and be killed. Its organ, The Irish People, is a hymn to hate.

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What Members of the Irish Loyal Institutions Do (#ulink_40d3e93d-bce4-5262-8322-4b04f7fa87e7)

The Orangeman is a man of truth,

Who scorns all fraud and art;

And rear’d in truth, from his early youth,

He has shrin’d it in his heart;

For it proves to him a mighty shield

Against every foeman’s dart;