Co. Armagh is beautiful. There is no other word for it. The back roads, in particular, are a delight, running through undulating orchard country. Yet this small county, at 1,254 sq km the fifth smallest of the thirty-two, is and has been the cockpit of the endless quarrel between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland. It was in Portadown, in the north of the county, that the worst and best-remembered massacre of Protestants took place in 1641, something that no Ulster Protestant forgets for long, if at all. Here, there is little in the way of ‘moving on’.
On 4 January 1976, two Catholics were murdered at their farm near Whitecross, towards the south of the county, and another three of their co-religionists died at the hands of loyalist gunmen across the county boundary in Co. Down. The next day, near Kingsmills in the solidly Catholic and republican south of the county, the Republican Action Force (a thinly disguised cover for the local Provisional IRA, which was officially on ceasefire at the time) exacted revenge in one of the most sordid and cynical atrocities of the Troubles — which is saying something.
A minibus carrying sixteen textile workers was heading towards the village of Bessbrook. The men were eleven Protestants and five Catholics, four of whom got off at Whitecross. Near Kingsmills, the van in which the rest were travelling was stopped by armed men. They called the only remaining Catholic forward. Thinking that the men were loyalist paramilitaries, his Protestant colleagues tried to call him back. Instead, he was instructed to leave and not look back, whereupon the eleven Protestant men were gunned down in cold blood. Amazingly, one survived despite taking eighteen bullets. Depressingly, this revenge attack worked — at least for a time. There were no more Protestant murders of Catholics in Co. Armagh that year. The beautiful orchard county lived by its own logic — unforgiving but well understood.
Although a small county, Armagh is densely populated by Irish standards and has been ever since plantation days. Here is one of the clues to its volatility. It is almost exactly the same size as Co. Monaghan adjacent, but has almost two and a half times as many people. The population of Armagh is greater than those of counties Wicklow, Waterford, Kilkenny, Wexford and Clare. In fact, if you exclude Dublin, Antrim and Down, whose figures are distorted by the cities of Dublin and Belfast, Armagh has the third-highest density of population in Ireland, double that of neighbouring Co. Tyrone.
This pressure of population is suggestive. So is its historical distribution. In the eighteenth century, the county had a tripartite confessional division. In the north and east, centred on the linen manufacturing towns of Portadown and Lurgan, the Anglicans were ubiquitous with only a small and marginal Catholic minority. Surprisingly, there was almost no Presbyterian presence in this region. It was confined to a middle buffer zone, running horizontally across the county south of Armagh city. South of that again was a solidly Catholic and Gaelic-speaking area known as The Fews, which ended in the ring of southern hills and drumlins that separate south Ulster from Leinster.
The tensions between these confessional enemies living in such close proximity were not helped by the presence of armed Protestant gangs. The best-known, the Peep o’Day Boys, rampaged across the countryside from the mid 1780s. A Catholic counter-group called the Defenders was centred on the Fews, an area that was relatively remote and introverted. Both sides committed horrible outrages, but the principal volition was on the Protestant side. Competition for land leases may have sparked off the first attacks, but they continued sporadically and violently for a decade and more.
In September 1795, one such affray at a crossroads near Loughgall to the west of Portadown led to the foundation of the Orange Order. The Peep o’ Day Boys routed a party of Defenders, killing up to thirty of them. They then celebrated their victory in Loughgall in the house of James Sloan where they founded the Loyal Orange Institution.
The Orange Order has a fair claim to be the most enduring legacy of the 1790s in Ireland. It remains the largest Protestant organisation in Northern Ireland with about 100,000 members and has been a central feature of unionist politics since the 1880s. Its annual parade day, 12 July, celebrates the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne and is the highlight of the marching season. Orange marches were deliberately provocative and were designed to be. From earliest days, until restrained by an independent Parades Commission established in 1996, they followed traditional routes which made sure to take in Catholic/nationalist areas. This was a primitive marking of territory, a bullying affront to ‘the other side’ and an assertion of tribal superiority. It was hardly surprising that nationalists wanted Orange marches routed away from their areas and equally unsurprising that the Orangemen resisted.
This issue came to boiling point at Drumcree church, just west of Portadown and only a few miles from Loughgall. Once again, Co. Armagh provided the flashpoint. The Portadown District LOL No. 1, the oldest of all district lodges, held its annual 12 July church service at Drumcree and marched into the centre of the town on a traditional route that took it down the nationalist Garvaghy Road. This had been a source of tension since the late 1970s, but the climax came in 1995 following concerted nationalist protests orchestrated by a Sinn Féin activist and ex-IRA convict. His position as the face of the protest outraged the Orangemen but it reflected the growing self-confidence of nationalists. They simply were not going to be walked over any more.
The police first refused to let the marchers down the road but relented after three days, to the dismay of the residents. Again, in 1996 and 1997, riots and civil disorder accompanied the event but once more the Orangemen got down the road, although their bands stayed silent. In 1998, the Parades Commission finally got hold of the problem and re-routed the march. The price tag had included riots, civil disorder, a huge police and army presence, damage in excess of £10 million and the lowest point in inter-community relations in years, which in Armagh could be a very low point indeed. After the 1996 march, some Catholics organised a boycott of Protestant shops.
The website of Portadown District LOL No. 1 includes an open letter, first published in July 1998 and addressed to ‘Dear Fellow Citizens’. It is a remarkable little document and includes the following bromides:
The disputed parades occur along main arterial roads which are shared by all communities. All are traditional routes, none have been concocted or organised to cause offence. We are not engaged in coat trailing, or triumphalism. We simply want to celebrate our culture and identity peacefully and with dignity.
And later:
The restricting of loyal order parades along main roads creates cultural apartheid, where one community has a veto on another community’s expression of identity and heritage. Banning and re-routing Orange parades from shared road and village main streets will only lead to further segregation of our respective communities. This is not the way to build a future where there is mutual respect and tolerance. Ethnic segregation is morally wrong. It did not work in South Africa and the United States. It must not be allowed to work in Northern Ireland.
This is the first (only?) known instance of the Orange Order invoking fellowship with the anti-apartheid and US civil rights movements.
Not far south of Drumcree, in the Fews — now simply known as south Armagh — the Defender tradition lives on in the form of the most irreconcilable and resourceful IRA district. It was from here that the bomb that nearly killed Margaret Thatcher and half her cabinet came. Some things don’t change fundamentally in the beautiful orchard county.
