Buried Lives

by Bury, Robin;

  However, there are now some Protestant schools that play GAA games today. The main problem with the GAA is that it never embraced the Protestant community in Donegal ‘because they view the Protestant community as distinctive and not of them … the GAA makes no effort to integrate the Protestants and nor do Protestants try to integrate themselves with the GAA.’ I spoke to John after the GAA opened Croke Park to rugby and football matches. He sensed that the sea change in nationalism generally was beginning to permeate down to its most conservative elements. He welcomed this and warmly applauded those within the GAA who were redefining their cultural position.

  On Anglophobia, he believes that anti-Englishness is ‘shorthand for being anti-British’. Just because you are born in the North does not stop you from being British, just as the Scots and the Welsh are British. In Donegal, young people of his age ‘have never had access to British passports’.

  [They] never experienced Donegal being part of Britain, so you cannot expect them to say I am British as that is not true. The question is do you feel sympathetic to the views of people in Northern Ireland who think of themselves as British? I would say if you asked that of Donegal Protestants, 80 per cent would say I feel sympathy and understanding with people in Northern Ireland who want to maintain their Britishness. By extension, then, I would ask them, is there some element of your identity which does not fit with Irish nationalism, that you are quite happy to have a British ancestry and identity, then most Donegal Protestants are quite at ease with the fact that their ancestors were unionists and that they are not Catholics. They don’t associate being Irish with being Catholic.

  Donegal Protestants still associate themselves very much with the Ulster unionists in culture and background and accent. They are all planters, with a huge Ulster-Scots community in Donegal. So John ‘has a British heritage in my identity that I am happy with but I would not want other people to deny this and say I am less Irish because of this’. He believes it was not realistic to expect people in Donegal to think of themselves as British. At the same time, ‘If you asked them if there should be a British aspect to an Irish identity, they would agree. The very fact that they have not generally got involved with the GAA says a lot.’

  He believed that there was very little interest in the Irish language. During the first 30 or 40 years of the State, the Donegal Protestant community lobbied to remove compulsory Irish:

  … de Valera made it an offence for your children not to be taught Irish if they lived in the county as many children crossed the border so they did not have to learn Irish. Basically the Donegal nationalist community thought the Protestants should have been welcoming Irish but Irish was associated with Catholicism, poor farmers.

  We ended by discussing the possibility of Ireland being united. He thought that if the day came when unionists would be happy to be in a united Ireland, that would be fine, but the danger was forcing people into a united Ireland.

  My father said to me when the troubles were very bad, ‘John, if things go bad in the North, and people are slaughtered, don’t you expect that a mob will come up the road and burn us out as at the end of the day they see us as being British?’ Like Serbia, when things boil up, we are not one of them. If the north went into a doomsday scenario, Protestants in the border area would be targeted. We still occasionally have Protestant churches vandalised in border areas, still have rare attacks on Orange halls. Why is that happening if these people are viewed as being fully Irish? That is because if someone is seen as not having a true Irish heritage stretching back to pure nationalism, he is less of a citizen. I often wonder how Protestant immigrants who are now coming in to Ireland from Africa and are filling up the Protestant churches will be seen. I think their arrival will refocus minds, challenge perceptions and will be a good thing.

  He concluded that, thankfully, ‘the days have gone when the IRA/Sinn Féin approach of “Brits out” held any water. Cross-border and cross-community work would be in the best interests of the majority community. Half the new property built in Donegal was now being built by people from the North.’ The Protestant community has never been fully accommodated. He believes that there is a clear reason for this. In Donegal, those of a unionist disposition (virtually every one of the 20,000 Protestant community in Donegal in 1920) were viewed as enemies of the fight for independence. It is impossible for any society to assimilate these people as fellow citizens right away. Crucially, though, the host society never had any interest in embracing these people.

  An interesting illustration of this comes from a MA thesis by Donegal man Jim Tunney, entitled ‘From Ascendancy to Alienation: A Study of Donegal’s Protestant Community 1811–1932’ and undertaken at NUI Galway. Tunney’s research suggests that – incredibly to modern eyes – no political party wanted to be seen to get the Protestant vote immediately after partition. He adds that there was also significant resistance amongst the minority Protestant community to the teaching of Irish. Tunney also probes the motives that led 16,000 east Donegal farmers to petition the Northern government to take them and their land into Northern Ireland at the height of de Valera’s economic war.

  Interestingly, Tunney moves outside his timescale to suggest that a distinct Protestant core vote still remains in East Donegal almost a century after partition. He mentions a Bible-thumping Unionist pastor from Northern Ireland who put his name forward in the 1987 election in the East Donegal constituency and, with no canvassing or profile, pulled in 700 votes purely on the basis of his religion (more than the Labour Party candidate!).

  So to conclude, Donegal Protestants, 86 years after independence, are a distinct community, left on the wrong side of the border. They have suffered a perhaps low-intensity pain as a result of their British background and culture arguably not being accepted in the nationalist community in which they live, the fate of any ethnic minority in post-independence Ireland. But as time goes on, attitudes are changing, particularly in the context of the Belfast Agreement, and there appears to be little discrimination today – though if the situation in the North deteriorates again, the community may be forced back to square one. At the time of writing, this seems unlikely.

  8

  The Triumph of Intolerance

  In 1996 the Revd Brian Kennaway, Chairman of the Education Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, thought it appropriate to commemorate the first meeting of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland held on 9 April 1798 in Dawson Street, Dublin. He was supported by members of the Dublin and Wicklow Loyal Orange Lodge 1313. It was suggested that a parade should take place in Dawson Street, after which a plaque would be unveiled by the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Senator Mary Henry was supportive, as was the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Mary Freehill. The date proposed was Sunday, 28 May 2000.

  This suggestion brought powerful religious, political and social attitudes to bear, both North and South, which eventually brought about the withdrawal of the plan, though the unveiling of the plaque took place in highly controversial circumstances. Not one Orangeman was present at the unveiling.

  For Irish politicians, and the Irish people as a whole, it was arguably the first real litmus test for the Belfast Agreement in the Irish republic. Orange parades had taken place in areas near the border, notably at Rossnowlagh in Co. Donegal, which passed off with no controversy. The difficulty in Dublin, however, was the timing. Orange parades in Northern Ireland had become controversial, especially in Drumcree. It was not only the political classes in the Republic, but also the leadership of the Church of Ireland that linked a parade in the capital city with recent bitter events in Northern Ireland, which had taken place in a very different context.

  The republic had become a rich country in a very short period of time, with an open economy to which came many of the world’s best multinational manufacturers of high-tech products such as computer parts and pharmaceuticals. De Valera’s economically protectionist Ireland had gone. But had his essentially monolithic culture also disappeared? This was the major questio
n raised by the parade. In the words of Andrew Finlay and Natalie McDonnell (Irish Studies Review, Vol 11, No. 1, 2003), ‘the proposed parade tested the rhetoric of multiculturalism’. Were the Belfast Agreement’s clauses laying out conditions for a pluralist and tolerant society to be upheld in an increasingly multicultural Republic? It seemed doubtful, with both Dublin County Council and the Oireachtas being either opposed to the parade or silent. They were aware of the sectarianism engendered by some Orange parades in the North, and were nervous of a repetition in Dawson Street, with more extreme elements from the North travelling to Dublin to cause trouble, even riots. Mary Henry, and the Lord Mayor, Mary Freehill, were exceptions to this; two women who supported the parade.

  A commercial consideration then came into play: Canon Empey wrote a letter to the Dublin and Wicklow Lodge on 18 April 2000, expressing concern that financial support might be withdrawn from Dawson Street traders if the service went ahead:

  Since we have a very small congregation consisting for the most part of people on old age pensioners [sic], I need the support and enthusiasm of our business neighbours to help us to maintain the fabric of the church. In this I am glad to say, I have had a large measure of success.

  The Dublin and Wicklow Lodge accepted this decision gracefully.

  The Church of Ireland leadership in Dublin was generally reluctant to get involved, with one spokesman reminding people that some Orangemen had burnt Roman Catholic children – the Quinn children – to death in Northern Ireland at around this time. Deplorable as this was, it had little bearing on the Dublin and Wicklow Lodge and on Protestantism in the South. In any case, as Mark Davenport from BBC Ulster, reported at the time:

  The Orange Order had had nothing to do with the violence which had been taking place across Northern Ireland that week. But it had less than nothing – if that’s possible – to do with this particular attack. In fact the death of the children could well have happened in any other week in the year, in any other town, in any other country.

  The residents who lived on the Garvaghy Road near Drumcree were influenced by Sinn Féin on the ground. The situation became politicised when Sinn Féin took control of events on the Garvaghy Road, a road on which most houses did not overlook the street the Orangemen wanted to walk down.

  It was a complex, highly emotive situation, and it seems the Church of Ireland leadership in the Republic, above all anxious to distance itself from the Orange Order in the North, did not seem to want to support a parade in Dawson Street that had no connection with the events in Drumcree, although Archdeacon Gordon Linney was a notable exception. He explained to me that the Church of Ireland saw the parade in Dawson Street as a national issue rather than a local one. In the public mind, both in Ireland and abroad, the Drumcree parade was one which started after a Church of Ireland service in Northern Ireland and was associated with violence and sectarianism.

  A Church of Ireland subcommittee was appointed to ‘promote, at all levels of Church life, tolerance, dialogue, co-operation and mutual respect between the churches and in society and to identify and recommend specific actions towards that end.’

  The subcommittee met eighteen times and received thirty-four written submissions and some face-to-face meetings were held with contributors.

  The report was submitted to the General Synod in 1999. It arose out of the anxiety caused by events at Drumcree, which had the effect that ‘the whole Church of Ireland has been seriously damaged in international esteem, internal cohesion and public reputation throughout Ireland’.1

  The concern was simple: the Church of Ireland’s relationship with the Orange Order was giving the impression that it was a sectarian body. Leaders of the Church of Ireland believed that it had moved away from some of the beliefs it had shared with the Orange Order. The emphasis now was on ‘rapprochement and mutual respect between the denominations’.2 The Church of Ireland was working for ‘the visible unity of the Church’3 and it was noted that ‘the Church of Ireland has committed itself to working for Christian Unity’.4 Yet the report, in its anxiety to emphasise ecumenism, seems to overlook the deep doctrinal differences between Roman Catholicism and the Reformed churches. The report states, ‘Whereas the Orange Order adopts an anti-Roman Catholic stand, the Church of Ireland is fully engaged in inter-church relations with the Roman Catholic church in Ireland’.5 Furthermore, it was emphasised that the Church of Ireland ‘owes the Orange Order an apology for having moved on and changed without telling them’.6 It could be argued that the Church of Ireland was naïve in their belief that the Roman Catholic Church was going to go down a road which would in any way compromise its doctrines and beliefs.

  So what did this mean as far as Drumcree was concerned? A recommendation was made that the Church of Ireland had to ‘give careful thought to the way in which it responds to situations in which one of its parish churches is seen repeatedly to be at the heart of serious and damaging controversy’.7 These ‘situations’ had led to ‘displays of hostility, hatred and lawlessness’,8 and the murder of the Quinn children was given as an example.

  Resolution 3 of the report recognised the powerlessness of a bishop to intervene in the decision of the incumbent clergyman and his vestry at Drumcree.

  … the Rector and Select Vestry of Drumcree [are] to endorse the pledges called for by the Archbishop of Armagh in respect of the conduct of those attending the annual parade … the pledges are as follows:

  The avoidance of any action before or after the service which diminishes the sanctity of that worship.

  Obedience to the law of the land before and after the service.

  Respect for the integrity of the Church of Ireland by word and action and the avoidance of all church property or its environs in any civil protest following the service.

  If the pledges of the Archbishop of Armagh are not adhered to, the rector and select vestry should withdraw their invitation ‘to the Lodges to attend Morning Service’.

  The Church of Ireland wished to almost disown the Orange Order, as it had not ‘moved on’. It was an embarrassment. But what was the Rector of Drumcree, Revd John Pickering, to do? Might he have done what the Revd Bingham did? Again, Mark Davenport of BBC Ulster commented on the situation:

  The Reverend William Bingham took a different tack to some other Orangemen. He did not tell his faithful, gathered in the Presbyterian church in Pomeroy that Sunday, that the dispute over Drumcree had had nothing to do with creating an atmosphere in Northern Ireland in which some loyalists, armed with a whiskey bottle full of petrol, thought they could get away with setting fire to a house in which children slept. Instead he urged his flock and Orangemen everywhere to walk away from Drumcree, telling them that ‘no road is worth a life’. The next day he was accused of betrayal by Joel Patton of the hardline Spirit of Drumcree group and there followed an undignified but suitably symbolic joust of black umbrellas between different sections of the Order. At Drumcree a few diehards lingered but most people voted with their feet.

  In Dublin, the situation was being deeply influenced by the events at Drumcree, though in a quite different context. Eric Waugh was sympathetic to the plight of the Orangemen in Dublin. He wrote an article in the Belfast Telegraph on 19 May 2004, 4 years after the Dawson Street controversy. Waugh shows a Northern unionist’s attitude towards the republic’s intolerance towards its old unionist minority, one that many from the ex-unionist southern community prefer not to discuss, or may even oppose:

  To be Protestant and/or unionist down south is still to tread on thin ice. Two Orangemen tested its weight-bearing propensity four years ago when the then Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mary Freehill, gave support to their proposal that the Dublin and Wicklow Lodge should march down Dawson Street, the spot in the city centre where the Grand Lodge was founded in 1798.

  But, then, strangely, since the lodge had openly opposed the goings-on at Drumcree, all sorts of obstacles were put in their way. St Ann’s Parish Church in Dawson Street was not available for an Orange service.
The Round Room in the Mansion House would cost £4,500. It would cost another £1,500 for the police to close Dawson Street.

  Then the Lord Mayor said she would not actually be attending the parade herself. Businesses on Dawson Street complained about closing of the road – on a Sunday afternoon.

  The thirty-seven members of the lodge began to get threatening letters. One Dublin journalist set the mood. ‘Apparently it is not enough for us to allow our neighbour to keep a dog,’ wrote he. ‘It must also be allowed to defecate in our rose bushes.’ Another suggested the citizens of Dublin should lie down in Dawson Street in front of the parade. But a third warned that the people of the Republic had sent a clear message: there would be no public demonstrations of Protestant tradition in that country, that the only good southern Prod was an assimilated one, willing to forget his heritage.

  But Waugh’s views were not quite accurate. Many letters to the papers supported the parade. Mary Freehill stood firmly behind it to start with, as mentioned previously. However, if the few members of the Dublin and Wicklow Orange Lodge were not supported by one of their own churches, it is understandable that Freehill’s resolve would weaken. More importantly, she increasingly came under pressure from fellow Dublin Roman Catholic councillors, particularly those in Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, though Fine Gael councillors were also opposed.

  Raised in the Cavan/Fermanagh border area in Ballyconnell, Mary Freehill understood Orangemen and understood that up North, knocks are routine. But at least Northerners of both tribes are aware of the deep political and religious differences between them. That is a difference between North and South.