High fencing and tough security in schools, including primary schools, had become common. Schools were attacked for taking in the wrong kind of pupils, for being the wrong denomination… But integrated schooling was on the increase, slowly.
Started in 1981 by a group of parents in Belfast, the integrated schools movement gathered enough funding and support to start East Belfast’s Lagan College with twenty-eight pupils. Mixed schooling did exist, where schools took pupils on a merit, or scholarship, basis, but this was the first determined drive to stop separation of cultures at an early age. In 1989, the British government agreed that if a school could ensure enrolments for three years and if 60 per cent of the pupils came from the existing majority in the area, the Department of Education would fund integrated schools.
By 1999, Lagan College had 900 students and there were forty-five integrated schools in Northern Ireland. This represented a small percentage of the population, and the movement still faced opposition from both sides. Catholic opposition came from religious leaders who feared the secularization of schools; some groups of Catholic schoolteachers feared the future closure of Catholic schools would leave them high and dry, with jobs being taken by teachers from the Protestant majority. Protestant religious leaders feared the secularization of schools and some Protestant teachers felt their jobs would go to Catholics, to maintain a mixed staff in areas that were once strictly Protestant… Then there were the extremes on both sides who just didn’t want any mixing and tainting.
In spite of all this, the demand for places in integrated schools was very high. The movement had acquired the backing of celebrity campaigners including Kenneth Branagh, Joanna Lumley, Stephen McGann, Brian Friel, Barry McGuigan, Ardal O’Hanlon, Daniel O’Donnell and David Montgomery. Their involvement might bring the moderate success of this quiet, commonsense movement a scrap of the attention given to high-drama bad news.
I wandered into Downpatrick’s dilapidated high street. The street seemed to be full of people with nothing to do. Two of them were PSNI men, standing opposite the dourly secure police station. I was going to ask them the way to the Tourist Information Office, which no longer seemed to be where it was marked on the map. They were chatting to each other, looking quite affable, but went stony-faced when they noticed me.
‘Did you want something?’ one of them asked. The other just stared at me.
I asked them for the Tourist Information Centre, and they looked annoyed.
One reluctantly said, without looking at me, ‘I think there’s something like that in the arts centre.’
The other one looked dubious. ‘No. The Saint Patrick’s Centre down there, try there.’
They were barely managing to mutter these answers. Then they turned away to look at their police station, perhaps checking I was being caught on camera.
I suppose the former RUC might be insulted to be considered mere soft bobbies with nothing better to do than tell you the time, or give you directions. Perhaps recent history had taught them that in the Catholic town centre of Downpatrick, someone approaching them might not be a harmless idiot.
In the shiny-glass, enormous and unmissable Tourist Information Centre I met with an eager gaggle of staff, pressing their helpfulness on me, and an elderly Dutch couple. The couple might have been Dutch just because they were, but I wondered about the connection to Dutchman King Billy. Was there a Dutch tourist trail to the Orange parades opening up?
I kept picking up guidebooks and asking the girls the price.
‘That’s free of charge so it is,’ they’d say cheerily. ‘Yes, that one’s free too.’
I staggered out of the place laden with free books, maps, brochures, booklets, leaflets, postcards…
The tourist complex also had a garden restaurant, an art gallery, a classy souvenir shop, conference facilities and a very exciting-sounding 180-degree audio-visual flight around Ireland. I was clamouring to get in to that, but it had a technical hitch and was closed.
The helpful staff didn’t want me disappointed. ‘Look, we are sorry about this, what about if we give you half-price admission to our Saint Patrick exhibition?’
‘No, really, I…’
‘Here, half price, in you go, no bother.’
I trudged dutifully into a high-tech exhibition explaining how Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland – the whirl of audio, video and projected Celtic artworks didn’t really distract me from the pain.
The whole tourist complex cost £6.3 million, looked stunning but overlooked a car park, Argos, a gigantic cheap supermarket and a depressing, smoke-filled coffee shop. All these places were milling with people who looked miserable and pasty, with accompanying unhealthy-looking children. The split personality of the town started to feel peculiar.
I decided I had to get out of town, escape to Portaferry. The same harassed controller was in the cab office, telling drunks and women with shopping to ‘Wait a minute, Jesus, what did I say? It’ll be ten minutes.’
To me he said, ‘There’s a bus, you know,’ then told me to get in the red car outside.
‘Portaferry and Strangford?’ The driver whistled. ‘OK, but it’ll be a tenner.’
I said I’d manage that, realizing sadly that Downpatrick must be full of people who couldn’t.
The driver asked me what brought me to Downpatrick. I started thinking what would be the best thing to say to the driver to make him feel I was on the right side, got fed up with the whole Protestant/Catholic tightrope walk and just told him the truth, most of my life story back to boating babyhood.
‘Those were the days, eh?’ said the driver, who was probably my parents’ age. ‘It’s got more upmarket, the sailing, but used to be anyone had a boat. What we’ll do is we’ll cross over on the car ferry if you like, I mean if you’re just touring. The view of Portaferry from the Lough would take your breath, it really would.’
It really did. Low terraces of brightly coloured houses and shops in the sun by blue-green water. We crossed on the little car ferry, getting out to look back at Portaferry and up the Lough. A rowing boat made slow, steady progress among skittering dinghies.
The ferry crossed ‘The Narrows’, where the Lough met the Irish Sea; a sharp breeze took away all the drowsy feeling I’d been getting from too much walking around on a hot day.
‘I’ll make you a confession,’ said the driver. ‘When I’m in a bad mood, I cross on the ferry just to calm down.’
I saw how that would work, although the ferry ride to Strangford took less than ten minutes, so he must have had an easily calmed nature.
Strangford had a post-sailing singing pub my parents frequented. The driver said he wasn’t a man for pubs, so he couldn’t tell me if there was still that kind of jollity.
‘But if people are in a pub, don’t some of them start singing eventually, even if it’s just to themselves? There’s a big sort of carnival round here at the end of July. Plenty of music there and clowns for the children, that kind of thing. And that’s the time to see boats! There’s all kinds gather on the Lough. Fine old boats. And there’s always a big gathering of Galway Hookers.’
He paused to look at me in the mirror, having his little joke.
‘In case you’re wondering, that’s an old type of boat from the west of Ireland.’
I laughed obligingly. He started to tell me that if I really wanted to see beautiful scenery I should go to the west of Ireland.
‘We’ve nothing to compare to it.’
I disagreed, it did compare. I always found the west of Ireland, especially round Galway, oversold and overpriced. Maybe Strangford Lough turned a bit touristy when the Galway Hookers came in, but we’d hardly seen a soul all day – just water, boats, birds and the castle towers of old plantation houses in the hills.
‘It’s not crowded, I’ll give you that. But I still think of Galway when I think about retiring.’ He laughed. ‘Bear in mind the expense I’ll be facing, if you were thinking of tipping me.’
When we arrived
back at the cab office, he glared at a pair of drunks leaning against the outside wall.
‘I expect I’ll have them now. A two-pound trip they could walk if they weren’t so senseless.’
I walked away from the cab office as fast as I could. It was all very well being told that in my parents’ day any old person could own a bit of boat, but I still felt like some privileged brat who’d no idea what really went on for people in Downpatrick.
Back in the crochetery of my guest house I fell into conversation with Jennifer, the landlady herself, as she stocked her shop fridge with locally made rare cow and raspberry organic-untouched-by-anyone-who’d-ever-smoked-or-eaten-lard type of ice cream. It was as if she’d been waiting for me, wanting to double check information her mother had passed on.
‘I hear you were born here?’
‘We moved down to Newcastle when I was two. So I don’t know what I remember, or what I’ve seen in photos, but it doesn’t seem very familiar. My parents’ photos were of a little quiet market town, very old-fashioned. I suppose it was a long time ago.’
She put down the last of the ice cream and sighed.
‘Oh, Downpatrick’s changed. It’s got very down at heel. It used to be exactly as you say, a quiet market town, surrounded by agricultural land. It had a properly integrated community. But then…’ she looked at me as if deciding whether I could be trusted, ‘then in the late seventies and eighties, they started to move people out of the slums of Belfast and built all these cheap, bad housing estates. And Downpatrick was suddenly swamped with people. There was no work for them and the transport system’s not good enough for them to go to Belfast and work. So they’re all here, with no work and they drink in the pubs and cause trouble, so no one else goes in the pubs. And there’s no nice shops any more – just these big stores for people without much money and loads of kids, you know, stores with cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap children’s clothes… They’re a giro culture; it’s not their fault, all dumped on these terrible estates with no industry for them, no future.’
So I hadn’t been imagining that Downpatrick felt dislocated and dilapidated. The atmosphere wasn’t some natural side effect of ill-thought-out modernization. Downpatrick was artificially overgrown and full of people who didn’t know what to do with themselves.
Those who did know what to do were obviously working to build up the tourist industry, but they had all these poor people around…
The poor people hadn’t exactly been dumped. Most of them had fled Belfast when Protestant gangs started burning Catholics out of their homes. There’d been an evacuation to quiet Catholic towns like Downpatrick. It had been hoped this was temporary, but there was no going back.
I was glad to be leaving in the morning. I didn’t feel comfortable up among the flowers and crochet, where poor Catholics were regarded as spoiling the view, the town prospects and without an ounce of enterprise to make a future for themselves. And who did Jennifer think was driving the cabs? Who did she think was working in all the cheap shops for the people to buy the cheap things, creating a working-class, admittedly unattractive economy? I preferred her mother, who’d just known something didn’t feel right and she’d rather be back in Kent.
From feeling uncomfortable with the social injustices of life in Downpatrick, I got off the bus in Belfast and realized I was suffering from a discomfort I could do something about. The disgraceful trainers were tearing holes in my feet where they were still connected to me and were all holes where they weren’t.
I found a shop selling cheap shoes suitable for the likes of me and my eye was drawn to some bright pink trainers. They were not only pink, they had all manner of strange cross hatchings and side effects and Velcro flaps. They were reduced to ten pounds, fitted like lovely decorative feet cushions and I just had to have them. The polite shop assistant started the usual shoeshop sales talk as I pranced up and down in front of the mirror: ‘They’re great, aren’t they? And they’d look good with jeans, or they’d be fine with a skirt and…’ Suddenly her real thoughts burst out of her, she looked at me with concern for the terrible mistake I was making and asked gently, ‘Do you really like pink shoes?’
I assured her I did and I’d wear them out of the shop. She took my money, looking ashamed that she hadn’t been more firm with me.
I bounded to the city-centre bus stop I needed, I had pink shoes, nothing bad had happened to me yet and I was off to the parade.
10. Lions and Headhunters
I told myself to forget anything I’d ever read, heard or absorbed genetically about Orange marches. I would spend a few days in Protestant East Belfast, trying to imagine I was from some remote place, never reached by news from Ireland. I wouldn’t be looking for signals and subtexts, I’d just take the marching season as I found it.
It became hard not to see signals and subtexts the minute I boarded the bus to go up the Newtownards Road. I asked the driver to drop me off at the crossroads the landlady had told me to ask for, and he looked troubled. He said he didn’t know it, was it near such and such? I said I’d never been there. He looked more troubled.
An elderly lady sitting opposite the driver had been listening. Something about my request was bothering her too.
‘I know the place, I’ll let you know,’ she said, almost in a whisper.
Neutrality and empty-mindedness were too difficult to maintain as the bus progressed along a road slapped with flags and militaristic Protestant murals.
I passed wall after wall painted with the badges of various divisions of things beginning with ‘U’. There was a mural of men shaking hands, with the words: ‘Surrender of all our Dead Comrades’. A reference to peace talks. Down side-roads I could see muralled estates with more Union Jacks than you’d ever think had been made. We passed a big black building with heavy security; shortly afterwards the bus-driver said, ‘I think it’s around here you want.’
I saw the guest-house signboard. ‘Yes, that’s the place.’
He wasn’t at a stop but he pulled up, glanced at the guest house, then at me. ‘Are you staying there?’
He seemed surprised and regretful. The old woman looked really distressed. As I got off the bus she was still looking at me as if she wanted to tell me something, or just shout, ‘Don’t!’
The guest house didn’t look as attractive as it did in the guidebook photograph, but there was nothing obviously alarming about it.
When the bus moved away, I saw the house opposite was burnt out.
The big black building down the road was the UDA headquarters. A woman in the shop near by told me, as if I was extremely stupid or pulling her leg. At least I wasn’t going to be somewhere ambivalent.
I’d gone down to the shop to pass the time because, yet again, I’d arrived early and found no one to let me into the inn. The shop didn’t have much in it – soft drinks, cigarettes and lots of small newspapers belonging to organizations beginning with ‘U’.
I sat on the guest-house doorstep drinking lemonade and enjoying the sun, contemplating pointing out to the Tourist Board that the trees photographed in front of the guest house no longer existed and unwitting foreign tourists might not be seeing the best of Belfast looking at the burnt-out building opposite for a view.
I wondered again about the people on the bus: did they notice I had some kind of Catholic aura? Well, that could certainly prove a nuisance if I was trying to mingle a few doors down from the UDA.
The landlady swung her car into the tarmac in front of the double-fronted Victorian house.
‘Annie Caulfield?’ she asked as she slammed her car door shut. ‘You’re early.’
She would probably think of her manner as brisk; I thought she was rude. Again with the paranoia, but Caulfield was a name that could go either way. Maybe it was the Annie that was a bit Catholic… Maybe she just didn’t like the look of me in general.
I didn’t like the look of her guest house. It had a feel of cheap London bedsits, everything stained and worn. Every flower was plas
tic and every curtain was faded dralon. Still, at least I could smoke. If the rest of the street was anything to go by, I could torch the place and no one would mind.
My room was just about clean, but as I flopped down on my duvet for a rest, I smelt old sweat. Not mine. I hurled the smelly duvet on the floor and hoped the hot weather would continue into the night and I wouldn’t need it. I might have enjoyed complaining to the rude landlady, but I was trying to take a positive attitude…
I went out for a walk, wandering side-streets – not streets, avenues, much Union Jacked and Red Handed. Again there were a couple of burnt-out houses, on fine Victorian terraces with trees in front of them. Houses that weren’t burnt, or boarded up, were well cared for. This should have been a nice part of town to live in.
I turned into another avenue and on the corner was a group of what I’d learnt to recognize as ‘real wee bastards’ – kids with shaved heads and Chelsea shirts. I told myself they might look unpleasant and it was four against one – but they were only about twelve years old. They were watching me, talking about me. They looked like they might throw a stone at me for something to do.
I’d seen a lot of Chelsea FC shirts. Protestant support for Rangers and Catholic for Celtic was a division all over Scotland, as well as Northern Ireland, but Chelsea was a strange one. Little logic to it, considering that Liverpool was the soccer team founded by an Orangeman.
There was a group called the Chelsea Loyalists, with a website full of talk of ‘Republican scum’, displaying photographs of East Belfast murals. They were part of the British Ulster Alliance, formed in 1999: ‘Supporting Loyalists and highlighting issues on the mainland’. Issues being mainly the villainy of Sinn Fein and the British politicians who spoke to them.
ChelseaHooligans.com had ‘No Surrender’ as the strapline on their website and among photos of ‘loyal fans’ were a couple of men in parkas in front of Red Hand of Ulster flags. Chelsea had an extremist wing of their hooligans called the Headhunters – ultra-violent hooligans with right-wing connections, notorious for having drunken days out at Auschwitz for a laugh. Several English football teams had this nasty corner of fans – Leeds, West Ham, Millwall – but in the mid-1980s the National Front and British National party made a particular point of targeting Chelsea fans for recruitment and found they had a good uptake. The rampant Britishness of Ulster Loyalists also became cause of choice for this level of Chelsea fan. The Chelsea Headhunters, and right-wing fans from other English clubs, usually got up a charabanc or two to go to Belfast for the 12th of July.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 17