Britain, Orangeism: Pieces of the Ulster Puzzle

Tommy sat across from me on the train going to Belfast from Dublin. He propped his elbows on the table separating us, and explained the situation in Belfast. He grew up in Belfast on the Upper Falls road (any Ulsterman knows that means Tommy is Catholic). And he lifted his right hand and stuck out his index finger to speak of one side, then raised the left and slowly released its index-finger while speaking of the other side. Then he hit the tips of his fingers together hard, so tremors went right down his arms and shook the table. He never said Catholic or Protestant, Nationalist or Loyalist. He just said "one side" or "the other," and sometimes he leaned over close to say something he didn't want anybody else to hear. When we talked about civil war-- a very real prospect--Tommy forced a bitter half-smile, looked down at his stationary hands, the same two fingertips locked into one an other at the joints, and said he'd fight, if it came to that: "I've seen too many of me mates killed."

Tommy got off at Dundalk, just south of the border. He works in England--many Irishmen have to--as an apprentice electrician, but his holiday was scheduled for the same two weeks all Orangemen in Northern Ireland take off, and he didn't want to go back for their festivities. Not when he'd have to take the antipapist slogans lying down.

What's important is not that Tommy is Catholic, but that his hopelessness--those fingers locked into each other--seems to express the futility of the situation in Northern Ireland for everyone. It doesn't really matter whether Tommy is Catholic or Protestant, because a Protestant, especially a working-class Protestant, could say the same thing: that he's seen too many of his relatives, or friends or neighbors, hurt or killed. For Protestants too, the prospects of a civil war--some call it "escalated sectarian violence," others call it "tribal warfare"--mean that they will fight.

The train passed into Northern Ireland without notice. There were no officials asking questions or conducting searches, no signs outside to indicate the passage from the South. The countryside seemed no different--a pleasant kind of green through the drizzle feathering the air. A sudden clump of people on a knoll flashing by in a kind of visual doppler effect brought the first traces of the difference. Standing on a group of large rocks, backdropped by reddish-grey cliffs stood three or four British soldiers in green berets and camouflage khakis. They were holding their guns across their arms, watching the train closely as it went by.

It's sudden revelations like those soldiers-- glimpses of the various facets of the complex of issues and factions tearing Ulster apart--that begin to outline Ulster's problems. But the outline only comes in flashes. And these problems puzzle Americans, in part because the American press generally only covers the violence there, but also because Ulster is a puzzle for its own people. The pieces are scattered, nobody has more than a few of them, and of those pieces, not many fit together. Those soldiers up on that hill represent only one small part of the problem: the British dimension.

British involvement in Northern Ireland is so great that it is almost meaningless to speak of Ulster's people solving their problems among themselves. Britain is in control of roughly 45 per cent of the manufacturing firms in Northern Ireland that employ 500 or more workers. Great Britain's expenditures in the form of loans and aid to Northern Ireland amounted to more than 35 million pounds ($771 million) in 1973-74; for 1974-75 it was about 400 million pounds ($884 million); and according to Home Secretary Stanley H. Orme's predictions, it will be "well over 450 million pounds" ($995 million) for 1975-76.

Britain's non-economic interests in Northern Ireland are hard to understand, and many wonder why it doesn't pull out. There are at least two reasons: First, a deep commitment to law and order and an unwillingness to withdraw troops or political control in the face of a terrorist campaign (even if this should extend to England as the Provisional IRA has promised it would); and second, strong diplomatic pressure from the European Economic Community countries, with large Catholic populations, to stay in Northern Ireland and protect the Catholic minority from any possible repression or massacre. Whitehall might have to bow to these pressures even in the event that a majority of Ulstermen vote for independence from Britain--a decision that the British government has said it would respect.

The most concrete from of British control over Northern Ireland is its troop commitment, now at 14,000 (compared to a high of 21,000). Direct rule--Ulster had its own parliament until 1972--is exercised through Secretary, of State Merlyn Rees (his name has an anagram: Mr. Serenely). And Westminster enacts specific pieces of legislation affecting Ulster, including the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973--which includes the provisions for detention--and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974, which allows the British to deny people from Northern Ireland entry into Britain proper.

A 78-member Constitutional Convention is now meeting to write up a report for Westminster this fall on a possible future constitution for Northern Ireland. But again, the action taken on the basis of this report is entirely up to the British Parliament.

There is at least one more element of British involvement--public opinion in Great Britain. There is already a "Troops. Out Movement" that believes the British Government is faced with a choice between withdrawal or, as it said in one of its statements, "continuing British military involvement in Ireland, with all the loss of life, repression, and violence which that would mean." Troops Out has the support of a few M.P.s, but as one civil servant observed, it's "not very big, and not influential." He also said that he thought the British people were "apathetic," and that he didn't "think many people woule care very much if Northern Ireland became independent, joined up with Eire, or if the whole island sank into the sea."

In the first few weeks of July you can see boys and girls in Ulster rummaging through old junk in every abandoned house, picking up scraps of wood and throwing them onto piles, some as high as the narrow two-story rowhouses. When my train pulled into Belfast on the afternoon of the eleventh, some of the older kids were joining in and throwing old furniture onto the piles. Shops were closing up early and the people on the streets seemed to be in a hurry to get home: the fortnight holiday had begun. That night the red-yellow flames of bonfires etched the city's roofs into the night, and the strains of bagpipe music filtered through the streets, while sirens filled the air. Bonfires lit up all of Ulster, and the sirens were ominous at first--they seemed to presage a hot summer's violence. The next morning the papers explained that fire trucks had to respond to more than 100 calls. But there was no violence.

The July 12 Orange parade is a celebration of the Protestant William, Prince of Orange's victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In a way, it is a hearkening back to the days of Protestant ascendency; when that can't be realized through traditional lyrics like "Boyne" and "The Sash," there are modern versions for the same tunes: "If guns are made for shooting, then skulls are made to crack/You've never seen a better Taig, than with a bullet in his back."

Today, the Orange Order serves much the same purpose it did at its inception in 1795, when, threatened by Catholic peasants willing to undercut them in bids for land tenancy, Protestants united to terrorize and exclude them. The initiation oath for the Orange order still requires that members swear allegiance to the heirs to the Crown, "so long as they support the Protestant ascendancy." and each member must swear, "I am not, nor ever was a Roman Catholic or papist."

Sectarianism in the Orange Order is much more subtle than it used to be. Instead of going around and bullying Catholics, now they do things like commemorating the "B-Specials," the Ulster Special Constabulary. The Specials--who were used only in emergencies-- were disbanded in 1970 and one of the reasons was that they recieved little training and had a long record of recklessness and brutality. The Orange Order made up a special lodge for them last year, the Loyal Orange Lodge 1970, in memory of what they said was the B-Specials' faithful service to Ulster.

The Orange Parade is different from American parades: there aren't any elaborately-decorated floats, no gas-filled balloons of cartoon characters. It is a parade in the traditional sense; the men get dressed up in dark suits and parade themselves, adorned in black bowlers and umbrellas, with orange sashes over their shoulders. This year, over 100,000 Orangemen walked through Belfast's center and out to Edenderry Field to hear the July 12 speeches and more than a quarter of a million people lined the streets to watch the parade.

The parade was led this year by Thomas Passmore, the county grand master for Belfast, who was seated grandiosely in an open, horsedrawn landau. Most Lodges had a black car and a band in front, then a six-by-eight foot silk banner before a procession of four or five columns. The banners were embroidered with exotic scenes; many showed Prince William, in different hues, shapes, and sizes, marching to victory atop his white prancer. Biblical scenes like "Jacob's Dream" or "The Parting of the Red Sea" were common and there were a few uncommon banners like one showing "The Storming of Jaffa," a bizarre scene with British soldiers climbing the city's walls and staring into the suspended smoke of Turkish muskets.

The bands were primed for this Twelfth, especially the local boys from Belfast. They had names like "Pride of the Shankill," "The Ligoniel True Blues," "Sons of Ulster," and "Young Conquerors." The drummers would weave in and around each other, dipping from side to side; they were the toughest-looking too, with rolled-up sleeves invariably revealing an Ulster tatoo.

Aong the back edge of the crowds, Belfast's teenieboppers, with stencils on their shirts reading "Bay City Rollers" (the local rock group that made it big) ran alongside their neighborhood bands. At the beginning of a new tune, the drums would sound a sharp call and the girls would throw up their fists three times, punching the air with a stacatto "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

The B-Specials brought up the rear of the parade, but they didn't have a band. Their banner showed three innocent-looking B-Specials dressed in full uniform (one facing forward, the other two flanking him as if protecting him) holding pistols level with their shoulders, pointing toward the sky. They got the biggest hand of the day.

Even if the more sinister sectarian rituals are still strong, some of the other traditions of fanatic Orangeism are dying out. One of the true traditions of the Orange parade, the lambeg drum--weighing about 40 pounds and fabricated from oak, ash and goatskin (only the skin of the she-goat will do)--is just about extinct. A lambeg drummer used canes instead of drumsticks and during the course of a single parade, he'd break more than ten of them. That's because the drummer hits the drum as hard as he can. In the process, he hits his knuckles against the edge of the rim. By the end of a march, the drummer's hands would be dripping with blood, and sometimes mangled. But lambegs slowed up the parade, and now only one band in all of Ireland uses them.

The Twelfth parade has always been a sensitive flashpoint, especially in the sections of town where it passes by the Catholic community--like Unity Flat, at the entrance to the Protestant stronghold of Shankhill road. This year these sections were blocked off with large canvas screens. There were some stone-throwing incidents--mostly at the edges of all-Catholic or mixed neighborhoods. And another man was killed, a Protestant, but it seemed to be because of an internecine squabble.

As the day wore on the parade was a still a grand affair, but it had lost a lot of its solemnity as the Orangemen got drunk and tired. By the time the I reached Edenderry Field, suitcoats were off, bowlers tipped back, ties pulled down and disordered. Edenderry is an expansive horseshoe-shaped slope and the speakers' platform was tucked away in one corner under some trees--almost, it seemed, on purpose. Most of the revelers just lounged around on the grass, eating, drinking, or trying to get over hangovers from drinking earlier in the day. And only a small crowd gathered around the platform.

The speeches at "The Field" this year all centered around Loyalty. Loyalty is a concept of much debate among the Unionists (those seeking to perpetuate union with the United Kingdom) since Enoch Powell, the Official Unionist M.P. from South Down said the week before that a proper Loyalist should be "loyal to the Crown in Parliament: the Parliament of the United Kingdom." Every Unionist faction had denounced Powell's commitment to Parliament by the Twelfth, supporting instead the "constitutional Protestant majority," for them the Crown.

Most of the speeches at "The Field" seemed to echo Martin Smyth, Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Institution, who pledged his allegiance to the Crown. "The Monarchy stands for the highest and best of our Constitutional procedures," Smyth said. "All things are done in the name of Her Majesty whether it is a result of foolish counsel by her ministers or not..."

The Orange Institution in Northern Ireland is like the Elks in America; they espouse arcane political theory at social functions, but mainly they serve as bastions of sectarianism and Protestant ascendancy.

But when I talked in depth with Protestants not in the Orange Order, I found out that the Lodges were to some degree a manifestation of a much larger current of subtle Protestant sectarianism.

By the end of my first full day in Belfast, I still hadn't talked to any Catholics. But then not many Catholics are visible on the Twelfth.