First Confession

by Chris Patten

  Amnesia about Northern Ireland was more or less a continuation of the way it had been treated since the partition of Ireland in 1923. The struggle for Irish independence had been increasingly complicated by the results of the colonization of some northern counties in the seventeenth century by English and Scottish Protestants. The so-called flight of the earls and subsequent fighting between the Catholic aristocracy in Ireland, King James I and later William of Orange drove Catholics off much of their land, and replaced them with Protestant settlers whose loyalty to monarchs in London could be guaranteed by ties of religion and possessions. John Hewitt, progeny of this plantation, was one of many fine Northern Ireland poets who emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. It was as though their creativity had been precipitated by the bloodshed around them. In his poem ‘Ulsterman’ Hewitt wrote:

  Kelt, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Scot,

  time and this island tied a crazy knot.

  Elsewhere he noted:

  This is my country. If my people came

  from England here four centuries ago,

  the only trade that’s left is in my name …

  While he was appalled by the violence and hatred that ran through the history of some of his Protestant co-religionists, he could never disavow his own country. His heritage was not the violence inflicted by others, but he warned that he would ‘not be outcast in the world’. Another Protestant poet, Louis MacNeice, expressed a similar sentiment:

  I can say Ireland is hooey, Irelandic

  A gallery of fake tapestries

  But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,

  The woven figure cannot undo its thread.

  Where did that thread lead? The partition of Ireland and the creation of the statelet to the north was a direct result of the Easter Rising in 1916. Home Rule could not incorporate the whole of an island, whose northern, Protestant citizens remembered 1916 not principally for the martyrdom of Irish Nationalists who had called for independence in the Post Office in Dublin, but for the sacrifices of the battle of the Somme. The huge losses sustained by the largely Protestant soldiers in the Ulster Division at Thiepval were in fact later followed by the deaths of many Catholic members of the 16th Irish Division at Guillemont. But for the north the Easter Rising looked like an Irish and Catholic stab in the back, supported by Germany, which could lead not to Home Rule but Rome Rule.

  So what was this ‘Northern Ireland’ that turned its Britishness into a sacred identity that most of the rest of Britain could barely recognize or comprehend? What, for a start, should we call the place? Northern Ireland itself is something of a misnomer. There are three counties of historic Ulster’s nine which are left outside the state completely because the boundary was drawn with some political guile. One of the three counties of the Ulster Province, Donegal, excluded from the north and included in the Republic, is actually further north than the other counties of the Northern Irish State, or perhaps the Almost-Northern Irish State. The ‘Six County’ state is a term, mostly out of fashion now, which was originally used by moderate anti-partitionists who would not go so far as many Republicans in talking about British-occupied Ireland. This business of names is something of a minefield, one that crosses the whole northern Province, and nowhere more so than in what ministers informally used to call ‘Stroke City’ on the banks of the Foyle. The city and its county are called Derry by most Catholics and Nationalists, and Londonderry by Protestants and Unionists. Derry is derived from the Gaelic name for oakwood; the prefix ‘London’ was added in the seventeenth century. The name of the city became an absurdly contentious issue when the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, hence the absurd but neutral ‘Stroke City’, though I used myself whenever possible to avoid the problem by talking vaguely about ‘this beautiful part of Northern Ireland’. What made this argument (to which I will return later covered in bruises) even more absurd is that the principal ceremonial organization of local Protestants was called ‘the Apprentice Boys of Derry’. Sportsmen somehow seem to get round this turbulence over names: both rugby and soccer players have clubs named after Derry and play in leagues in the Republic.

  So in Northern Ireland – or whatever you want to call it – after 1923, what went wrong in communities which though divided by religion had certainly not regarded ethnic cleansing as an acceptable mode of behaviour? The blame for what happened is mostly Britain’s, but the Republic played its own significant role too.

  Britain largely ignored the creation of Orange, Unionist myths about their offshore statelet, and generally tried to forget about it as it marinaded in its own prejudices, bigotry and victimhood, a less and less significant part of the wider United Kingdom economy as the textile, heavy engineering and ship-building industries declined. Just as decent Americans in the north of the United States in the 1930s, 1940s and even later tried to look the other way when segregation in the southern states came into view, so Britain pretended that there was nothing wrong with Ulster. But there plainly was. Votes were rigged; constituencies were gerrymandered; public spending was skewed towards Protestants; policing kept the ‘taigs’ – slang for Catholics – in their place with the excuse of occasional terrorist activity by Catholic Republicans. Housing and employment heavily favoured Protestant communities. The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Lord Brookeborough (who presided over a mini-Westminster parliamentary system), said in 1937, at a meeting to mark 12 July and the victory in 1690 on that day by King William over the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne, that many Protestants employed Roman Catholics even though Catholics were set on destroying Ulster. He appealed to all Unionists to ‘employ good Protestant lads and lassies’.

  Arguably things did not get much better even in the 1960s. Terence O’Neill, a Prime Minister who was swept from office in 1969 for being too much in favour of inter-community reconciliation, noted approvingly in his autobiography that the typical Belfast Protestant working man was ‘strongly anti-Catholic, but decent’.fn1 And could the Protestant, Belfast working man or his Catholic peer tell who was on the other side of the divide? Names helped the instant forensic quest; looks, sometimes; streets, schools, pubs and communities certainly. A crucifix or painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary glimpsed through a window would provide proof certain, a reason for keeping drawn what a Belfast mayor once described to me as the ‘Vietnamese blinds’. But usually you didn’t need any of these things. You just knew who was topdog and who came along behind. One Catholic writer claimed he could detect a sort of Protestant swagger or show of self-confidence; they – the ‘Prods’ – looked as though they owned the place. And so they did. A friend of mine who lived south of Belfast in a rural town called Downpatrick remembers the time when he heard the children of a Catholic family, driven out of their home in Belfast by intimidation, playing in their neighbouring garden. He heard one little girl saying to her sister, ‘Now I want to be the Prod.’ He leant over the fence and asked what she meant. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I want a go on the swing now.’

  So was the problem really religion? Was there some doubt about interpretations of the Nicene Creed? Did the doctrine of justification through faith stir political passions? Did transubstantiation irk members of the Orange Order? In fact, the main idea of religion in some Unionist homes was simply to tell the Bishop of Rome to piss off. Rome and Catholicism were at the kernel of Nationalist and Republican identity. So religion, shorn of any idea of Christianity, provided the kindling for the blazing struggle because it encapsulated land, power and ascendancy. What was at stake were not articles of faith or liturgical rituals but the role of master, and the idea of who ‘we’ were. Sure, Catholicism itself provided lots of targets – incense, lace, Latin prayers, devotion to the Pope’s slipper, not the Queen’s crown, the example of the Republic (to which I will also return). But this was not a Protestant cri de coeur, not Luther or Calvin howling at the gates or nailing manifestos to them. This was simply about centuries-old prejudice.

  The tawdry pageantr
y of Protestant dominance in Northern Ireland continues to amaze British mainlanders and foreign visitors, who are told it is all about showing loyalty to the notion of Britishness. Perhaps these days the followers of Nigel Farage and other Brexiteers find it easier to embrace and support these manifestations of the Protestant make-up. They start with the kerbstones painted red, white and blue, the end walls of terraced houses decorated with memorials to the massacre of Protestants in 1641, the 103-day siege of Derry in 1689, the Protestant Apprentice Boys who shut the gates of Derry against the army of the Catholic King James, the Protestant victory under King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the Ulster Covenant of 1912 signed by just under half a million men and women against Home Rule. This is the remembered narrative of identity. It is the iconography of the so-called Loyalists’ anthem, ‘No Surrender’ – ‘no surrender’ to Catholics, Republicans, Nationalists; ‘no surrender’ to the twentieth century let alone the twenty-first.

  On the high days and holidays of Loyalist celebrations, to the gaudily painted streets – ‘a by-word of offence’, in John Hewitt’s words – you add the bunting, streamers, flags and bonfires, built to burn effigies of the Pope and other Nationalist villains. Then come the marches of the Orange Order, with each lodge celebrating its loyalty to their own version of Queen and Country. The lodge from each town – Portadown, say, where the Orange Order began, or Ballymena, constituency of the late Ian Paisley – is led on a march along traditional routes that mark out the geography of Protestant ascendancy, like dogs cocking their legs against favourite lamp-posts. Wherever possible, these routes allow for Orange hate to be shoved in the faces of Catholics. At the front of the march to Drumcree, say, in Portadown are the grand masters of the lodges in navy blue suits, bowler hats and sashes, carrying bibles or ceremonial swords, and behind them come the bands of fifes and horn pipes, with at their heart the great Lambeg drums, a foot in depth and three in width, lashed with canes as they warm the Pope’s ears and cover the towns through which Loyalists march with what Bernard MacLaverty called ‘a canopy of dark noise’. With their banners showing Queen Victoria sitting on a Union Jack or handing a bible to a grateful black man, or the burning of Latimer, they remind us of the days when the Penal Laws allowed lower-class Protestant settlers to lord it over indigenous Catholics, before the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 began the long and slow business of restoring some sort of political and economic balance. This is the history acknowledged by Hewitt in his brave poem ‘The Colony’:

  We took their temples from them and forbade them,

  For many years, to worship their strange idols.

  They gathered secret, deep in the dripping glens,

  Chanting their prayers before a lichened rock.

  And, of course, in their glens and their slums, they plotted revenge. That is one reason why those parades needed, as Seamus Heaney said, ‘policemen flanking them, like anthracite’.

  So Catholic areas, too, bore the gaudy paintwork of their own remembered history, all exploitation, outrage and martyrdom, the kerbstones in Nationalist colours of green, white and orange, the frescoes of the hunger strikers and of masked men with balaclavas and Kalashnikovs. The worst example of this was perhaps Crossmaglen, a murderous centre of IRA activists near the Irish border. As you approached this grim town, a military stockade at its heart, there were posters urging British murderers to go home. While the north dug itself ever deeper into its sad and divisive history, the Republic, at least until the 1980s, pretended that it was resolutely set on uniting the island and fulfilling the northern Republican dream.

  The candles of this mythology were regularly re-lit with Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution (eventually amended in 1999 after the Good Friday Agreement) claiming the whole island as one national territory. John McGahern described Ireland in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s living through ‘a very dark time’ in which ‘an insular church colluded with an insecure State to bring about a society that was often bigoted, intolerant, cowardly, philistine and spiritually crippled’.

  Until globalization, feminization and membership of the European Union set it firmly on the road to modern and prosperous pluralism, the Republic as a whole behaved as though its script had been written in the Orange Lodges of the north. It gave Protestant Loyalists all that they wanted to hate. Under de Valera, Ireland became (as McGahern suggested) a confessional state, policed by Archbishop McQuaid and other narrow churchmen. The Protestant community dwindled to 3.5 per cent of the total population, partly because to marry a Catholic a Protestant was required (as my mother did) to embrace the partner’s beliefs, at least nominally. With contraception, abortion, homosexuality and divorce all illegal, the community was trapped in a world of dark confessionals and the rejection of modernity. Emigration continued to drain the country of some of its best. Colm Tóibín, one of the Republic’s fine modern novelists, wrote in South, ‘If you know anything about the country, you wouldn’t ask me why I left.’ Put on the spot by the violence against the human rights covenants in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and 1970s, and then by the growing communal violence there, with the British army turned by bloodshed from defenders of the Catholic minority into the targets of armed Republicans, southern politicians initially resorted to Fenian conspiracies – like Charlie Haughey’s support of gun-running – and to rhetorical sympathy for down-trodden Catholic cousins in Ulster. All this was sustained by an idea of Irishness which played well to the Irish American diaspora, mixing the suffering of a crushed colonial country with the twinkling toes of step-dancing and mildly risqué humour about priests, whiskey and horse-racing. All this was broken down by economic growth (the sort that would have horrified de Valera), membership of the European Union, the ability of Ireland’s well-educated work force to attract inward investment, the return home to a now prospering country by many immigrants, the brave campaigning of the two female presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, the political leadership of politicians like Garret FitzGerald (a real hero of our time) and Dick Spring, and Irish cultural achievement from popular music to literature. Moreover, the tight grip that the Catholic Church had on Irish life was destroyed by its terrible moral failures shown in the child abuse and related scandals. That the Irish Catholic Church could still be civilized, thoughtful and relevant – think for example of Archbishop Martin of Dublin – was too often forgotten, not least because Rome’s disapproval of how the Church had behaved in its authoritarian prime was less clear than it should have been. Gradually, both London and Dublin came to realize that a problem they had both caused could only be solved by working together across a border that geographically wriggled over Ulster, without it being clear some of the time which side was in the north and which in the Republic. Happily, the border was also flattened psychologically and politically by both countries’ membership of the EU and by the arrival in Ireland, rather late, of the twentieth century.

  As late as the 1980s, when I arrived in Belfast as a junior minister, Northern Irish identity still compartmentalized the tribes, a point noted in a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Tit Willow’ by Robert Johnston. In this poem, addressing British, Irish and Ulster drinkers in a bar, the poet concludes:

  As I left, I called out, ‘Sure our family tree

  Is part Scottish, part Irish, part English.

  I don’t give a toss about identity,

  Whether Ulster, or Irish, or British.

  For each of your gods I have only a curse!’

  At this the three of them looked fit to burst,

  And they all there agreed that agnostics were worst,

  Whether Ulster, or Irish or British.

  The new Parliamentary Secretary was of British Irish heritage and Catholic, plainly not agnostic so far as local media were concerned but a little odd. Lavender is a member of the Church of England and at an early press conference a journalist asked me about my ‘mixed marriage’. She sounded as though she thought my wife and I were from a very distant planet, dis
ciples now of strange and alien rites. Our children at the time were very young – Kate ten, Laura eight and Alice three. We decided immediately that we were not going to cocoon them, keep them at several removes from a new life full of real excitements and enjoyment but also of potential threats and armed bodyguards. Security is not something you should be casual about, but nor should you allow it to dominate the way you live: that way lie madness and a victory for the violent. So we took our children to Northern Ireland when I was on duty (once a month) over weekends and for two Christmas holidays. We used to stay in a modern flat next to the old Governor-General’s house at Hillsborough, a handsome Georgian building in beautiful grounds twelve miles from Belfast. I was looked after by four charming police officers, two in my ministerial car and two in the follow-up vehicle. They all became friends, as golfers, sailors, pint-sinkers. They were (I think) all Protestant, with not a hint of bigotry about them. They were prepared to die for me, and you cannot ask any more of men than that, especially when they are not maudlin about it. On our first weekend at Hillsborough, my youngest daughter hit the inviting red panic button within five minutes of arriving in our flat. ‘We’d taken a bet on how long that would take,’ said one of the police guards with his gun cradled across his chest. Later that day we saw Alice being swung between two armed police officers – automatic weapon in one hand, three-year-old in the other. The only time my children were a little spooked was when, after I had left Northern Ireland, they were watching BBC News and the first item was a story that an IRA bomb factory had been found in London; among the items there was a terrorist death list of ten targets, including me.

  Back in London I was not provided with any security beyond a reinforced front door, a panic button and curiously a mirror which Lavender was advised to use to check under the car every morning in case of a bomb. While it is possible that she might know what a bomb would look like, the same could not be said of me. I think I can tell an exhaust pipe when I see one and that is about it.