Today I left Cavan town soon after eight o’clock – a sunny morning with a strong cool wind and swift white clouds. In Belturbet post office advice about cross-border routes was offered by a friendly clerk and a tall old farmer with a leathery face. They thought a cyclist might be able to get across, if the water was low, where the bridge used to be. ‘It was blown up twice,’ explained the clerk, ‘so now they’ll leave it that way.’ When I asked who had blown it up, and why, they obviously thought I was ‘leading them on’ and changed the subject. But I genuinely wanted to know. I have a very limited understanding of these matters.
Beyond Belturbet the hilly third-class road passed a few poor little farms and presented two crossroads without signposts. Uncertain of the way, I approached a depressed-looking farm dwelling. As I crossed the untidy yard I called out ‘Anybody at home?’ – not realising (stupidly) the effect an unknown voice would have quarter of a mile from the border. As I stood at the open door the whole family faced me silently like figures in a tableau, eyes full of fear, everybody motionless. A thin bent grandad stood in the centre of the kitchen floor leaning on an ash-plant, his hat pushed back off his forehead. A woman of about my own age, with unkempt foxy hair and a torn pink jersey, had been making bread and stood with floury hands held over a basin. A young woman with impetigo, a ragged skirt and sandals not matching was just inside the door holding an empty pail. A skinny, freckled little boy had been pulling a cardboard carton full of turf sods across the floor and he it was who broke the silence by beginning to cry. It is many years since I last saw that degree of slovenly poverty in my own part of rural Ireland. (Yet the inevitable television set stood in one corner.) But it was the fear, not the poverty, that shook me; that instant of pure terror before my harmlessness was recognised. Then everybody relaxed – except the child – and the women came out to the road to give me precise instructions. They didn’t think the stepping-stones would be above water today – and they were right.
Round the next corner a concrete roadblock supported a no road sign. Then I saw a river lined with willows and alders. Its fast brown water was swirling and glinting in the sun below the trees’ fresh green, and it seemed incongruous – yet obscurely reassuring – to find such a troublesome border taking such a lovely form. Standing on the remains of the old narrow bridge (it must have been very attractive) I looked at a newish county council cottage twenty yards away – deserted, all its windows blown in, yet a framed photograph of a County Cavan football team still hanging on an inside wall. Across the border was a thatched cottage half-hidden by trees: probably it was empty, too. I could see not a sign of life anywhere and suddenly I remembered the Turkish–Soviet border at Ani. Though there are no watch-towers here one gets the same feeling of animation artificially suspended by politics. I looked down at the rusty carcass of a bus filled with boulders; the locals’ attempt – plus these submerged stepping-stones – to replace the bridge. How much more efficiently the Baltis or Nepalese would have coped, with so many boulders and trees available!
Back on the road I was nearly run down by two Irish Army Land-Rovers going towards the non-bridge at top speed. As I turned off on to another by-road they raced back towards Belturbet. Pedalling slowly along a deserted hilly road parallel with the border, I looked north when the high hedges permitted. Fermanagh was a long ridge of wooded or cultivated land with little houses that even from a distance were perceptibly neater than most Co. Cavan homesteads. Within only a few miles I passed several abandoned farmhouses, cottages and hovels; it must be easy to go to ground hereabouts. Most gates had been improvised from old bedsteads, tar-barrels and/or bundles of thorn. I surmounted one bedstead to attend to my morning duty, leaving Roz in the ditch and paying no attention to an approaching vehicle. But it stopped beside Roz with a squeal of brakes and three young soldiers clutching rifles came over the ‘gate’ so quickly that it collapsed. As my activities were at a crucial stage I could do nothing but squat on, causing the Irish Army to retreat in such confusion that one youth tripped over his rifle.
The next cross-border road was about half a mile beyond a little town where a tactful publican said it was tough work this weather on a bike – no doubt by way of easing any embarrassment I might feel about my early thirst. His business had suffered greatly because of The Troubles and he did not lower his voice when condemning the IRA. ‘I’m not a cruel man but I’d hang the lot of them. Shooting’s too good.’ He recalled how along the border things had been improving – significantly, if slowly since 1952, when Dublin and Stormont agreed to run the Foyle Fisheries between them. After that they worked together to drain the Erne and develop a hydroelectric scheme. And for over twenty years the Great Northern Railway has been operated jointly by the two governments. ‘What with all that,’ he said, ‘and people everywhere getting less religious, the border would’ve faded off the map by the end of this century – in spite of the politicians. But now it won’t. Thanks to these Provo bastards – if you’ll excuse me. Ten years ago we were all relaxed around these parts, after the O’Neill–Lemass meetings. It’s hard to explain it, but people on both sides just didn’t feel the border mattered any more. And now look at us – afraid to lie down in our beds at night!’ I found it interesting that he, who was old IRA as he proudly told me, directed all his animosity towards the Provos. This over-simplifying always happens when a situation is both very complex and very emotional; it’s a retreat from laborious thinking into easy feeling.* What a disservice the Provos have done the Northern Catholics! All over the world people felt such sympathy for them when their plight was first publicised in 1969 and now most of that sympathy has been quenched by the excesses of their ‘defenders’. If we in the South, who grew up knowing the background, are beginning to say, ‘To hell with them all!’ how can the uninformed English be blamed for feeling the same only more so?
Not far from the pub a glum young soldier was on duty behind a shoulder-high pile of sandbags with his rifle pointing across the quiet street. Even such an embryonic army-post seemed bizarre in the middle of this dopey Irish townlet. On one level it was hard to take it seriously, a reaction the Provos apparently share. Yet deep down it stirred a flicker of disquiet. Am I becoming morbidly super-sensitive to intimations of violence? In other words, too soft? To acclaim brave warriors has for so long been a part of our tradition that one feels half guilty about no longer liking the thought of young men being trained to kill other young men.
The gardai checkpoint on the edge of the town was manned by an extremely handsome and chatty young guard. He held me in conversation for ten minutes and assured me that I would be perfectly safe across the border where the people are ‘not so bad as they’re made out to be’. As we talked three huge trucks laden with gravel from a County Fermanagh pit came through the barrier en route to a Co. Cavan building-site. ‘Dozens come across every day,’ the guard explained. ‘At this rate we’ll soon have one of the Six Counties back.’
Soon I had passed two signposts, the first saying, ‘Unapproved Road’, the second ‘Co. Fermanagh Boundary 1/2 mile’. This last both amused and irritated me. It is a not-so-subtle reminder that the Republic refuses to recognise the state of Northern Ireland and still claims jurisdiction over the whole island of Ireland, which naturally keeps Unionist ire on the boil.
There is nothing to mark the border; if there were it would long since have been blown up unless heavily guarded day and night. Yet a more peaceful countryside could not be imagined. Rolling farmland – contented cows – quietness – hay-smells – churns by the roadside. Hard to believe that occasionally those churns – solid monuments to the regular rhythm of rural life – do not contain milk … Soon one notices neater gardens, more fresh paint, real gates, trim wooden fencing and newer cars – with British registration numbers – in the farmyards. And the road surface begins to improve.
Upper Lough Erne was all sparkling wavelets between green islands. It is about eleven miles long with fifty-seven islands, some heavily wooded; a few are still inhabited by humans and a few by herds of wild goats. Lisnaskea seemed all grim grey stone houses and empty streets. There was a lot of nasty fast traffic on the main road to Maguiresbridge where I suddenly realised what was missing – parked cars. In most Northern towns parking on the streets is now forbidden. But the publican said with a twinkle, ‘It’s OK to park bikes – if you lock them.’ (Why? A sizeable bomb would fit in Roz’s saddle-bag.)
I detected myself immediately glancing around that pub in search of symbols to give me my bearings. These were not hard to find; a Redemptorist mission collecting box on the bar, an advertisement for a local Gaelic Athletic Association club dance, another for a Feis Ceoil that had taken place three weeks earlier. Any one of these would have been enough. I was displeased to find myself adapting so quickly to the divide – call it religious, ethnic, economic or what you will. But it’s so central to all of life in the North that the outsider at once feels compelled to allow for it. Not to do so would simply show insensitivity to the local atmosphere. And could conceivably, in certain areas, be dangerous.
Despite the hot noon sun a turf fire burned brightly in the bar grate. The only other customer was an ageless sort of man who looked like an unemployed farm-labourer. Both he and the publican were polite but not relaxedly friendly. They refused to comment on even the most trivial aspect of The Troubles and plainly my being from the Free State by no means endeared me to them. They asked why I was cycling around the Six Counties and seemed to think that ‘wanting to get to know the North’ insufficiently explained such eccentric behaviour. Perhaps in future I had best explain that I am hoping to write a book about the area.
The bridge of Maguiresbridge is an attractive seventeenth-century effort which I crossed to leave the main road. Narrow, hilly boreens (perfectly kept) took me to Marble Arch Glen through superb countryside with the Benaughlin and Cuileagh mountains on my left above stretches of dense woodland. Towards Enniskillen lay miles of placid farmland and ahead I occasionally glimpsed Lough Macnean, said by anglers to provide the best coarse fishing in Europe. Leaving Roz locked to a gate I approached Marble Arch on foot, wishing it had been given some name less redolent of diesel fumes and traffic cacophony. For more than a mile my path followed the leaping, clear-brown Claddagh river through a National Trust wood between the tallest ash trees I have ever seen; apparently limestone encourages their growth. The path ended at Marble Arch. This extraordinary complex of dark cliffs, deep pools, piles of giant boulders and shadowy grottoes is the lower entrance to the subterranean labyrinth of Cuileagh, first explored in 1895. Now it is popular with pot-holers but a stern notice warns visitors against solitary underground adventures.
I climbed out of the dim, cool, still wood on to the windy brightness of high green uplands. In every direction I could see distant mountains and often the glint of lakes. Late primroses grew around silvery chunks of limestone on the close-cropped turf and small clouds sailed fast in a very blue sky. On the next, higher hill dazzling white lambs bounded away from me but their mothers now have such heavy fleeces that they could only waddle. I found one dead ewe, trapped on her back by the weight of her wool with a sad, puzzled lamb lying beside her. Strange piles of stones, amidst groves of ash and hawthorn, looked pagan and mysterious; their arrangement seemed not fortuitous. I walked on and on through this innocent brightness and beauty thinking how unlikely that, two miles away, three men were blown to bits a few weeks previously. And a few days previously a farmer, whose house I passed on the way back to Roz, was made to drive a bomb to the nearest village and park it outside the police-station. Odd that the atmosphere of the place has not been tainted – no bad ‘vibes’. But there are other vibes. Ernest Sandford’s splendid new guidebook tells me that in parts of Fermanagh some people still use a combination of herbs and magic to cure both human and animal ailments. I can believe it.
My first Enniskillen pub, though new and luxurious, was not unpleasant. The affable young man behind the bar explained, ‘We used to be on the corner over there. Then after the bomb we built this place.’ According to him, inflation is ‘making a nonsense’ of the compensation system. If your property was blown up in 1974 compensation is paid according to its 1974 value – and where does that leave you, when you are rebuilding in 1976? The government, he felt, should do something about this injustice. I cravenly said nothing. But I wondered how many governments would treat an anarchic region as generously as Westminster is now treating Northern Ireland.
In the street I asked a young woman wearing a Pioneer pin the way to the post office. ‘First to your right,’ she said – and then called after me, ‘Careful not to miss it! It’s in a caravan since it was blown up, inside a wire barrier.’ (I notice Catholics tend to say ‘since it was blown up’ and Protestants ‘since they blew it up’.) Everybody seems unselfconsciously matter-of-fact about the extraordinary way they live now. Yet the process of adapting to this sort of permanently watchful existence must be damaging. The annual statistics say that Northern Ireland’s citizens are no more at risk from bombs and bullets than from road accidents. But it’s the nature of the threat that creates tension, not the numbers of victims.
The grey-faced post office clerk was the first (and so far the only) person to react unfavourably to my accent. He was chatting cosily to another customer when I entered the caravan, then his face and voice hardened for dealing with me. But can he be blamed if an instinctive hostility is triggered off by a ‘Catholic’ accent? Who knows what he and his colleagues suffered mentally and/or physically when the post office was blown up?
This evening I realise that I’ve been suffering from ‘anticipation neurosis’, a condition automatically cured by being in, instead of approaching, the feared situation. Once over the border my nervousness evaporated completely. I just feel a bit guilty now towards all my jittery friends. At home I soothed them with assurances – perfectly sincere at the time – that I would avoid Northern pubs. Yet already I’ve been in three. And not, as cynics may think, because my love of beer is stronger than my fear of death. Some obstinacy mechanism – a form of pride, really – begins to operate when there is a question of changing normal habits because of pressures being put on society by factions one cannot respect. (Also there is the universal delusion ‘It can’t happen to me’, which no doubt is necessary to prevent people going to bits under stress.) Anyway, how else, in Europe, can one meet the locals? Outside of Europe it’s easy, so many are so eager to befriend the traveller. But in Northern Ireland especially, where it’s prudent now to suspect strangers, even a teetotaller would have to frequent pubs or forever hold his tongue.
I have fallen in love with Fermanagh – especially the rough border stretches, all mountains and moors and wide silent lakes. In places one can still imagine how it must have seemed to the English in 1606, when the touring King’s Deputy and his retinue had to sleep in their tents because throughout the whole county there was not even an attempt at a town. The assizes had to be held in a ruined monastery, the only building big enough. Fertile ground here for Orange myth-making! The good land going to waste, populated only by savage Gaels living mainly on curdled milk in cramped wattle huts without chimneys – a people ignorant of and indifferent to the fast-changing world of Renaissance Europe. So what a good thing that along came the industrious planters to develop this wilderness, just as their relations were in due course to develop the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, large areas of Africa – all places populated by other savages who were mostly easier to cope with than the Gaels, possibly because they weren’t the same colour.
It helps to remember that the Protestants have been in Northern Ireland longer than the Whites have been in the US. It is now their country as much as the Catholics’; they have no other. Had the Gaels been ‘subdued’ as effectively as the Red Indians and the Aboriginals there would be no disputing that point in the 1970s. But apart from anything else Gaelic labour was needed, just as convict labour was needed to develop Australia. Then religion (can’t get away from it) frustrated widespread miscegenation; and was reinforced by the settlers’ feelings of racial superiority – something linked to yet other than the religious difference. Not to mention the blood-pride of the Gael – a strong and silent pride, far removed from sentimental word-spinning in Celtic twilights. Something old as the bogs and tough as the oak in them. I can see it still on the lean dark faces of the hill-farmers here. And feel it still, too, occasionally, stirring in my own mongrel blood of the Pale. So there could be no merger of races; and recurring rebellion throughout the rest of Ireland kept the pot of sedition and suspicion simmering in Ulster – and sometimes boiling. And here we are …
If the Unionists were not now entitled to call Northern Ireland their own country it would logically follow that half the population of the world should be shifted or conquered to right ancient wrongs. Perhaps the snag is that there are too few Unionists; were there several million their claim to Northern Ireland would be more obvious. Because there are only one million, too many people vaguely feel they could and should be made to toe the Republican line – especially as their treatment of Catholics has made them seem people who deserve punishment. But if it were formally accepted by the Northern Catholics, and by Dublin and London, that Northern Ireland is the Unionists’ homeland by right – not merely because nobody can think of any way of wresting it from them – might they not then treat the Catholics more justly, seeing them at last as fellow-citizens rather than as subversives? Looked at this way round, the ball is now in the Catholics’ court. If they could bring themselves to accept that 350-year-old wrongs cannot be righted and are best forgotten, then the way would be clear for the Unionists to relax, clean out their reeking stable and start again – for the first time free of fear lest someone might somehow suddenly dispossess them. Perhaps enough allowance has never been made for the constant insecurity they have suffered since their makeshift state was set up in 1920. Nobody behaves well when feeling threatened.
This line of thought is cheering. It offers some hope since the non-IRA Catholics are far more mentally and emotionally flexible than the Protestants and so are more likely to compromise. I have left the British out of my long-term reckoning. Less than a week here has convinced me that they have no important role to play in the future of this region. The Unionists can’t have it every way and in fact must cease to be Unionists and become Northern Irishmen if they want their claim to own and rule Northern Ireland generally recognised.
This Fermanagh farmhouse is large, substantial, spotless – the cleanest home I’ve been in since visiting Switzerland. No need to add that it’s Protestant. Sam and Betty are staunch moderate Unionists who spent ten years in Canada but came back when Sam’s unmarried elder brother died. Their two sons are at school in Enniskillen and soon – they hope – will be off to study ‘across the water’. Certainly not in Belfast; they haven’t gone near the place for a decade and think I’m mad even to cross the Bann. Had life been normal they would have preferred their boys to stay in Northern Ireland and of course George would have got the farm; now they are considering selling it when Sam wants to retire. ‘I’d rather see them away out of it,’ says Betty. ‘What is there for them here but risk and uncertainty? It said on the radio 16,000 left Northern Ireland last year and would you blame them? It’s peaceful enough in South Fermanagh for people our age. But with boys you never know … What is there for them but work – or mischief? Young lads need a bit of fun. Surely they could go over the border to dances and so on – we’ve cousins in Leitrim – but you’d be uneasy with them toing and froing in the dark. We had our honeymoon in Killarney but we wouldn’t have any mind to travel the Free State now.’
Yet Betty and Sam go to Donegal for a weekend three or four times a year ‘to get away from it all’. Most Fermanagh people can’t think of Donegal, Leitrim and Cavan as belonging to another political entity. These are close and familiar counties, part of their traditional ‘home territory’ though largely Catholic – and far safer, they feel, than Protestant Antrim or Down. In this area partition often seems merely ludicrous. Many of the ‘settler’ farmers in the mountains have absorbed an amount of ‘native’ culture and there have even been some mixed marriages. One is told in a whisper that So-and-So’s maternal grandfather was a Catholic – ‘But there was no ill-feeling about it. We’ve always been easy-going round here. “Live and Let Live” – did you see that motto up on the old corn-market in Lisnaskea? That’s the way we’d like to keep it in Fermanagh.’
In both communities many of those who grew up pre-partition still see the border as contrived and undesirable, something imposed on innocent country-folk by a bunch of squabbling politicians. It saddened me to talk to such old men up on their windy, lonely, lovely bogs overlooking both North and South. They are a link with something lost that can never be found again. Their children and grandchildren, whether Catholic or Protestant, seem much more British; some of the former might be shocked to realise how hybrid they have become under the influence of the British media, educational system, social welfare system and all the rest.
One old man, met below Cuileagh, reminded me that in Ulster the Gaelic civilisation lasted longer, in a pure form, than anywhere else. He was Church of Ireland but scorned myths, Orange or Green. For an hour he stood talking to me in the sun, leaning on his spade, while his son and grandson loaded turf into a trailer. He had left school at the age of twelve and all his life laboured happily on these hills. He loved books, he said, and when he was a lad an old rector had died and left him a whole boxful. He quoted Gibbon, Chesterton, Wolfe Tone, Macaulay, Yeats, Thackeray, Milton, Mangan, T. S. Eliot – and of course the Bible. His wife died last year and his married daughter wants him to move into Enniskillen. ‘But I’m better off on my own. Her place is full of children watching television. It’s not a place you could be at peace in, with the books.’ A man after my own heart.
Making my way down that mountain, on a rough sheep-track, I asked myself – who would have developed Ulster had the province not been planted? The Gaelic chiefs? But they had a vested interest in keeping it the way it was. Yet somebody had to interfere if it were ever to catch up with the rest of Ireland, never mind the rest of Europe. Perhaps the plantations were inevitable, however deplorable; history taking its course, wearing down an anomalous people as rivers wear down rocks on their way to the sea.
After supper this evening Betty’s sister and brother-in-law called for a ceidhle† with the news that a neighbouring farm has gone up for sale. Much speculation: ‘They say John’s heart isn’t the best and he thinks Jane has to do too much’ – ‘But it could be they know Robert won’t ever come back. And isn’t he better off where he is?’ – ‘All the same, I wouldn’t be sure John could ever be happy inside himself off the land. You’ll find ’tis Jane behind it.’ It is accepted that John will settle for less than the real value of the place because he is a responsible citizen who wouldn’t sell to a Catholic. Catholics will bid and bid high (‘Where do they get the money?’ asks Betty grimly), but it was carefully explained to me that it wouldn’t be fair to the security forces to give the Provos another foothold so near the border. Everybody had been warned about this at the Hall; ‘Wasn’t that so?’ – and Betty looked to Sam for confirmation. But Sam’s usually open and friendly face had closed and hardened. The Orange Order is a semi-secret society and Betty should not have forgotten where I come from. I hastily changed the subject.
Betty, however, was not at all abashed. She is naturally communicative and guileless and soon returned to the mystery of Catholic wealth. Her brother-in-law then reported what he had been told in Omagh by a decent man who wouldn’t spread rumours. It was proved now, and there was no more doubt about it – the Provos were being supported in their efforts to buy land by the Allied Irish Banks, backed by the Bank of Manhattan, which had been given orders by the CIA. Sam nodded knowingly, while the two women exclaimed in horror and alarm – yet relishing the drama of the revelation. In silent astonishment I considered this new myth, gleaming from the mint. Is it needed to reinforce some of the old Orange myths, now being slightly devalued by Northern Ireland’s unwonted exposure to the outside world? If Rome seems a little less menacing than it did, why not coin a CIA threat? Anything to keep Orangemen united and on the defensive against Catholics, who are always supported by evil outsiders. Or is all that supposing a more calculated origin for myths than they actually have? How do they start? By a sort of spontaneous combustion of the public imagination? Or through one tiny seed of truth having an Orange or Green spell put on it by professional mythographers so that it grows into a monstrous tree of falsehood? The Provos do get funds from Irish-Americans with more money than sense who see them as the pure-bred descendants of Tone, Pearse et al. And the AIB in Northern Ireland (and maybe in the South, too) does pay them protection money. Given those two seeds you can grow any number of myths, especially at a time when so many outlandish things are happening on the international scene.
Northern Ireland induces contradictory moods. For a while I’m elated and hopeful because of the sheer likeableness and good sense of the people I meet; then it seems possible that they will be able to sort out their problems sooner rather than later. Yet within an hour I can be cast into deep gloom by conversations that reveal the hard unchanging core of those problems. I have now been four days with this family and it is impossible to think of them as stereotyped bigots. The evening I arrived we sat by an unnecessary fire (lit to underline how welcome I was) and Betty assured me, ‘There’s no ill-feeling around here and never has been. We’d all go to the end of the earth for each other. I respect anyone who lives up to their beliefs and our Catholic friends feel the same.’ Did the lady protest too much? I don’t think so. I have seen for myself how good relations are in all sorts of little ways – ways which seem to reflect a genuine wish on both sides to live in civilised harmony.
Yet the very fact that I automatically used that word ‘sides’ is ominous. Nowadays Sam and his friends can be told at their Loyal Orange Lodge meeting not to sell to papists for security reasons. But even if there were no such convenient ‘instant rationalisation’ available, they would still have been reminded not to sell to papists, period. He and Betty and their friends aspire to tolerance yet no ordinary individual can escape from the wheel of intolerance to which their community has been bound for centuries. And if someone did escape – what then? If Sam insisted on selling land to a papist, what would happen to him? The Orange Lodges do not encourage violence – we are told. They don’t really have to; thousands of Orangemen are well-armed and worship the sort of Old Testament God who is always gratified by the elimination of his enemies. And of course The Troubles have made it much easier to disguise bigotry as patriotism.
By now I have cycled many miles around Fermanagh but have seen only two members of the security forces – a pair of good-looking, cheerful, helpful RUC women police constables in Enniskillen. No other police, no UDR, no British Army patrols, nothing to flaw the impression of a traditional rural community going about its daily tasks in a contented neighbourly way. A Protestant lends medicine for a sick Catholic cow, a Catholic fetches a spare part for a broken Protestant tractor, everybody goes to the funeral of an Orangeman who always spoke out against the fiddling of the voting register. All seems as it should be and what’s the fuss?
The fuss is when any member of either community breaks an unwritten sectarian law. Or when paramilitaries need to ‘borrow’ your car or telephone – or simply want all the money you have in the house, or a cheque will do if you’ve no cash handy. The effect of what goes on behind the scenes is noticed only when the stranger arrives unexpectedly in someone’s farmyard, or at someone’s door, and sees the momentary fear on faces that an instant later will have become smiling and welcoming.
It is strange to sit in a comfortable farm kitchen – with cattle lowing near by, bright copper pans on the walls, a sheep-dog and two tabbies on the hearthrug, Queen Elizabeth II in coronation robes over the mantelpiece – and suddenly to realise that this is, and for fifty-five years has been, a society governed under the surface by guns. In past years the guns of the B Specials, the RUC and at intervals the IRA; more recently the guns of the UDR, British Army, Provos, Stickies, UDA, UVF, UFF, and countless individual gangsters who have not found it hard to acquire weapons under prevailing conditions.
Most Protestants in this area believe that the present troubles would never have become so acute but for the disbanding of the B Specials and the disarming of the RUC – two measures insisted upon by the Hunt Report. To the ‘Bs’, especially, they say, should go most of the credit for keeping the IRA down during ‘the peaceful years’. The Bs were unofficially yet openly the military arm of the Orange Order, a semi-private force of 10,000 men who kept their guns in their homes and were subject to none of the normal British controls under which their successors in the UDR now chafe. Their duty was to protect the state from Taigs – which they did, and nobody questioned their methods. They were rough, tough bigots, obviously not as depraved as Green propaganda would have it yet the authentic descendants of the dreaded eighteenth-century Peep o’ Day Boys. Catholics feel an hysterical hatred for them and cannot see that it was possible to excuse the creation of the force, if not its subsequent behaviour, by reference to the papists’ opposition in 1920 to the founding of the state of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately the fact that so many ex-B men joined the UDR, when it was established to reinforce the disarmed RUC, deterred those moderate Catholics who might otherwise have enlisted in the new regiment.
The vicious circle of gun-law has not really been broken by the 1970 reforms. Since then gun-clubs have proliferated throughout the North where there are more firearm licences held than in any other part of the UK. Also, dangerous attitudes have been bred by half a century of government-condoned illegal violence. Protestants often think it necessary and normal to have firearms in the house for self-defence against the IRA; Catholics often think it allowable to attack the security forces of a state that has never shown much regard for impartial law-enforcement.
This morning I asked Betty where in Lisnaskea I could find a certain sort of shop and she gave me two addresses. This evening when I told her I had got what I needed at So-and-So’s she smiled and said, ‘That’s my brother! He just opened up the business a few months ago but I didn’t want to influence you so I said nothing!’ A tiny detail, yet telling a lot about the ethos of the upright Northern Irish Protestant farming family.
In Lisnaskea I visited a young couple who have left their myths behind them and face into a lonely future – if they stay in Northern Ireland. James comes from a Co. Down Protestant family, Una from a Co. Armagh Catholic family. I first met them a few years ago when they were living in Dublin, giving both sets of parents a chance to recover from the shock of their marriage. Now two children have arrived and reconciliation – with reservations – has taken place; yet they would not care to live in either of their home-towns. They returned to the North for mixed reasons. James’s job is unusual and there was little scope for him down South; also – this was obvious, though not explicitly stated – they feel that not to have returned would have been a personal surrender to sectarianism. They are pioneers who instinctively respond to challenges in a positive way. It helps their personal relationship – Una explained – that both had abandoned Christianity before they met; therefore there can be no recriminations about undue influence having been used by either side. But now they have no niche in Northern society and they find discrimination cutting both ways. For over a year Una could not get a suitable job because she had been to a Catholic school and on their return from Dublin James, who works for a Protestant firm, was made to realise that as a non-Orangeman he cannot expect quick promotion.
I was amused this evening by the verbal fencing that took place when Una and James called at the farmhouse to collect me for a pub-crawl. They were of course invited in – to have let them turn away from the door without refreshment would have been unthinkable – and plainly it was at first deduced from their surname that they were Protestants. (Though surnames have become a rather unreliable guide over the centuries; and first names can be ambiguous, too, despite many being unmistakably ‘sectarian’.) Then a chance remark seemed to imply Catholic links and once doubt had been raised Betty and Sam could not rest easy until the matter had been clarified. They would have treated them – and I believe felt towards them – no less kindly if they knew them to be Catholics; but they just had to be sure. Schools are of course an almost infallible guide to religion, followed by sports clubs, home addresses and employers’ identities – though the higher one rises on the social scale the less reliable are these last two indicators. Una and James must often encounter this situation and at first they good-humouredly evaded the various trip-questions. Then Una went slightly on the defensive and this seemed to be the signal for James to end the game by giving the facts.
I have spent the past five days cycling from village to small town to farm through the counties of Londonderry and Tyrone.
My first glimpse of the Brits came near Omagh, where an open Land-Rover slowly overtook me with two boy soldiers and a happy-looking tracker-dog gazing out from the back. When I waved and smiled the youths saluted and the dog stood up and wagged his tail. Then came an incongruous-looking war-machine. No doubt it would have seemed commonplace to those who have been following the fortunes of Northern Ireland on television over the past several years, but to me it was a most extraordinary unidentifiable object, at once comical and sinister as it trundled through the quiet countryside.
In the next village I asked the Catholic youth behind the bar if he thought it would be a good idea for Britain to withdraw her troops. He sighed. ‘Of course we’d thank God to be shot of them – but not now. Not the way things are.’ The only other customer agreed. He, too, was a Catholic, a middle-aged commercial traveller from Derry. ‘If the Brits went I’d be on the boat with them,’ he said.
‘They’re not all bad,’ continued the youth, ‘just a mixed bunch, like anyone else. My father hates the lot – he’d see ’em all dead, never mind gone home. But I say most of ’em don’t know what it’s all about – they’ve nothing against us.’
I clutched happily at this straw of tolerance. How splendid – I thought – if the young are beginning to question parental prejudices! But then the youth went on, ‘Things are much worse round here since The Troubles. In the old days everybody mixed and got along – and mostly the older people still do. But me and my friends, we keep well away from the other lot. Mixing isn’t safe. Tartan gangs come out from Derry and the RUC pretend not to see them.’
I asked how my companions felt about a united Ireland and the youth shrugged. ‘D’you want us down there? I wouldn’t say you do – not since we got so troublesome!’
The commercial traveller smiled. ‘And wouldn’t we lose an awful lot? Just to be sensible about it … I’m not fussy. If it came and worked I suppose I’d be glad enough. I was brought up to think that’s what I should want … But I’m damn sure I wouldn’t kill anyone to get it.’
On my way into the next village (mainly Protestant) I came upon a gaily decorated stretch of main road. Right across it was freshly painted, in three lines of huge red, white and blue letters, NO POPE HERE, UP ULSTER, WE WANT DEMOCRACY, REMEMBER 1690. In the local hotel lounge hung a large photograph of a smiling, eager-looking, handsome young man; the black marble plaque underneath was inscribed in gold letters: ‘Murdered by the IRA in 1972. At the rising up and the going down of the sun we will remember him!’ Unfortunately they will. And, in a way, who can blame them?
The barman – small, slight and sandy – seemed quite determined to remain aloof from the Southerner. But when I persistently chatted on he thawed and asked, ‘Do you still talk down there about the Black North?’ I had to admit that now it’s even worse, that most of us don’t talk at all about the North because we’d rather forget it. Then he and I and the three obvious Orangemen who were having their lunch-time beers discussed The Troubles for an hour. They were virulently anti-Westminster yet they favoured an indefinite continuation of Direct Rule because a Southern take-over seemed the only possible alternative.
In several Protestant pubs or hotel bars I have had to spend over an hour getting across the simple message that I am well-disposed towards the entire population of Northern Ireland. This seems a strange struggle to be taking place in Europe though I am used to versions of it further afield. When for half an hour grunts and nods, with heads averted, are the only responses from my fellow-drinkers, I am sometimes tempted to give up. Yet if I burble inanely on about the weather and inflation and the scenery, and then mention that I hope to write a book about Northern Ireland, the barriers almost always suddenly go down. And when they do it is astonishing how freely people talk, as though they had been waiting years to meet an outsider who wanted to hear their point of view.
Most Northern pubs are owned by Catholics because Protestants have an uneasy feeling that it is sinful to sell alcohol. Yet they drink with enthusiasm so thousands of good Orangemen who would never otherwise allow a penny of theirs to stray into Green pockets are obliged regularly to patronise ‘the others’. This curious example of double-think makes it quite difficult for me to find Protestant pubs for my heart-to-heart talks with Unionists, who naturally won’t open out within earshot of papist bar-attendants. However, I have been greatly cheered by my sessions with mixed groups in Catholic pubs. Many everyday issues still unite the country folk and in some villages I rejoiced to hear the two sides teasing each other about religion – with no hidden barbs.
To meet the women folk, and the sort of men who don’t drink in pubs – a considerable minority, even in Ireland – I have been stoically frequenting cafés and tea-shops and dutifully partaking of unwanted beverages and fattening foods while engaging my neighbours in conversation. And isolated farms are easy prey. The arrival of a talkative female on a bicycle usually causes some alarm at first but then I am seen as a wonderful break in the monotony and often it is hard to get away.
I now find myself in the vaguely embarrassing position of being able to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants by appearance – or is it by ‘aura’? One would prefer not to react to other human beings in sectarian terms but this is what Northern Ireland does to travellers. In London I often play an ethnic game, spotting people I guess to be Irish and then asking the way to find out if my guess is correct. It usually is and this subject fascinates me. Emerson pointed out that in England every religious sect has a distinctive physiognomy. And some twenty years ago Michel Leiris, the French anthropologist, argued that facial expression should come under the heading of ‘behaviour’ rather than ‘physique’. Were I asked to describe the difference in the North I could only say that to me the Catholic face seems on the whole more humorous, more happy and less ‘controlled’.
These past few days have been still, warm and overcast, with the flanks of the Sperrins muted brown and olive-green, or grey-blue in the distance. I stopped one morning in the mountains to watch sheep being sheared by three men with ‘Protestant’ faces. When they had slowly decided that I was harmless, and invited me to the farmhouse for elevenses, they revealed ‘Protestant’ feelings, too – of animosity towards London for conspiring with Dublin to betray them, and towards Dublin for having undermined London’s loyalty to the Loyalists. They considered the Unionists misunderstood, misinterpreted, misused and about to be misled into some cunningly disguised trap which would have them all in the ‘Free State’ before a rabbit could hop. They blamed ‘that Paisley’ for a lot of it because his raving and ranting had got decent Unionists a bad name. They agreed with his anti-ecumenism – they were old-fashioned Presbyterians and wouldn’t want to pretend otherwise – but they didn’t like the way he put it over. And they wouldn’t ever be for stirring up hate – ‘There’s enough of it around.’ I liked them enormously. There is something very disarming about these rugged ‘no surrender’ types with their high principles, straightforward talk, tough attitudes and soft hearts.
Beyond the sheep farm a little lonely road climbed high between small emerald rock-flecked fields. Low rounded mountains overlooked green valleys dotted with neat white dwellings. The turf-cutters on the dark-brown bogs straightened up to wave and sometimes marshy land glistened black and silver. Along high steep banks grew vivid clusters of pink and purple bog-flowers and the may and gorse were still blooming – great clouds of white and gold resting on the fields. There was no traffic until I had free-wheeled down and down to level, rich farmland, sheltered by many strands of beeches, elms and chestnuts.
The North’s towns and villages seem unnaturally subdued. There are so few cars, so many lines of concrete-filled barrels down the main streets to prevent parking near shops, so few people about and such grim police barracks – fortified, inside giant wire cages, against bombs and machine guns. These jolt one, in prim-looking little towns, after cycling for hours through tranquil countryside. We are used to thinking of the village police-station or gardai-barracks as a place into which anyone can wander at any hour, without even knocking, for advice and sympathy about a lost cat or a stolen bicycle. It is very much part of our way of life that the police should be acceptable and accessible, not driven to defend themselves from the public like an army of occupation. Until the policing problem has been solved, how can normality be restored anywhere in Northern Ireland?
Of course not all Northern towns are prim. And when you come to a dejected, neglected main street, with litter in the gutter, cracked (or missing) windows, green brasses on the hall-doors, untidy displays in the shops and an indecent number of pubs (boarded up against bombs and bullets) you can be sure that most of the inhabitants are Catholic. In one such town, in a decrepit pub, the only other customer pulled my pint because the barman was ‘out the back’. Strangers are never left alone for an instant in Northern pubs. When I asked ‘Have you had much trouble around here?’ the reply was cheerful. ‘No, thanks be to God, we’ve been terrible lucky. There was on’y the supermarket burned down, and a garage and tailor’s shop blown up, and the RUC post mortar bombed. And there was two police shot dead just round the corner there. But mostly we’re very quiet.’ I looked hard at him, suspecting irony, but he had meant exactly what he said. Everything is relative. Then the middle-aged barman returned and made his comment. ‘It’s a shame we couldn’t have the police back same as before and be rid of the army. Those two RUC lads shot here was fine fellas – everyone loved ’em, Catholic and Protestant. ’Twas some outsider done it for sure. But look at Belfast these times with the army – they’ve destroyed the place entirely. I wouldn’t go there now to save my life.’
I suggested that even more of Belfast might have been ‘destroyed entirely’ without the Brits as a buffer state; but the barman, who was very well-disposed towards the RUC, would not accept this. Yet I have met other Catholics who view the army as a comparatively benign force while concentrating all their hatred on the RUC and the UDR – seeing the latter as B Specials in disguise, which too often they are.
* During later wanderings in the counties of Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal I often came across this ‘fading border’ theory – or perhaps I should say ‘memory’.
† Many Gaelic words are still heard in Northern Ireland. Down South ‘ceidhle’ means a session of traditional Irish dancing: in Fermanagh it means dropping in on a neighbour for a cup of tea and a chat, either casually or by invitation.