I met Bill in the post office-cum-general store of a Co. Antrim village and he invited me home for a cup of tea. He is a British Army pensioner who lives with his wife and half-a-dozen dogs in a little council house. Their only daughter is married to a policeman now stationed in Belfast; their only son went across the water the day after he left school – ‘We didn’t want him hanging around getting mixed up in things.’ Before the First World War Bill’s Catholic father migrated from Cavan to Enniskillen, joined the British Army, married a Church of Ireland girl and became a Protestant. He had wished to become an Orangeman but could not though his conversion was no matter of convenience but absolutely sincere. Only very occasionally are converts admitted to the Order and this man was thought to have too many Papist relatives. However, Bill himself was allowed to join his Junior Orange Lodge at the age of eight and thus he became a full Orangeman at seventeen instead of eighteen (the normal age for being initiated). He explained, ‘Discrimination against Catholics just doesn’t look like discrimination to the average Orangeman. It looks like defending the state against the enemy within the gates – people who have been working to destroy it every way they know how since it was founded – see?’

I did see, but I asked, ‘How long can you expect a state to survive when one-third of its population is opposed to its very existence?’

Bill sighed and slowly shook his head. ‘The pity is the Redmondites couldn’t win before there was any UVF or any 1916.’ We shook hands on that and two beautiful collies wagged their tails delightedly, apparently being Home Rulers too.

On either side of the living-room hearth were bookshelves loaded with volumes on Irish, English and European history – Bill’s hobby. He left school at fourteen, just as I did, and like many self-educated people who lack congenial companionship in their own circle he frequently writes to the newspapers and proudly showed me his file of cuttings on an astonishing variety of subjects. He also showed me his most treasured possession, a handwritten letter from Brian Faulkner thanking him for his help – when he lived in another area – during an election campaign. His devotion to the ex-leader of the moderate Unionists verged on hero-worship and he assured me that had Brian Faulkner not been opposed so relentlessly by Paisley the North would now be prospering under the power-sharing Executive. Although to outsiders Brian Faulkner seemed such an uninspiring character he aroused tremendous admiration among those who worked with him and deep affection among his constituents.

Bill admitted that the way things are now he wouldn’t fancy crossing the border – except of course into Donegal, which no Northerner seems to regard as Republican or Romish though it probably contains more Provo supporters than any other county in Ireland. Having spent many years abroad with his regiment, which included scores of Southern Irishmen, he feels strongly that Northern Irish Protestants have much more in common with the ‘Fenians’ than with anyone else though their myth forbids them to recognise this affinity. Despite his army background, he distrusts and dislikes the British. A lot of the trouble, he said, is being caused by their failure to study the Northern Ireland situation closely enough. ‘They don’t really know what’s going on, or why – and they don’t realise that the “Why” is even more important than the “What”. They keep on and on about “restoring law and order”. But the UDR – a British Army regiment, don’t forget – openly helps the UDA with training and equipment. And sometimes the UVF, too. And that’s been going on for several years. Then the UDA uses its British Army weapons to intimidate Her Majesty’s Protestant subjects and get money out of them – how’s that for a way to restore law and order? The UVF just fix a night to go and raid a barracks and nobody happens to notice. Mind you, I prefer them to the UDA. I know they’re illegal – and quite right too – but they’re idealists, like the Provos. The UDA are just a bunch of thugs. D’you know who was sitting in B– Town Hall during the ’74 Workers’ Strike, controlling everything and handing out chits and permits to everybody? The UDA candidate in the last election – and he’d got 346 votes out of 28,000! How’s that for democracy and law and order? Do you wonder I’m anti-British?’

In a town not far from Bill’s village I had my first experience of intimidation, if that is not too strong a word for a tiny incident. Going into a Catholic pub at noon I joined five customers who were drinking at the bar and noticed in a corner by the door a bearded, stalwart young man sitting alone with a large whiskey and the Irish News. The cheerful barman – the publican’s son – was not long finding out all that his customers wanted to know about me, including my destination for that day.

On the previous evening a local policeman had been badly wounded by a Provo sniper and when this topic was introduced the atmosphere became charged with conspiratorial approval and many cryptic (to me) remarks were made about the ambush. In such a place I should have remained non-committal on all delicate subjects; instead, I replied truthfully when asked for my views on the future of Northern Ireland. It was a pity, I said, that the Provos had no intelligent leaders to help them change their tack. At which point the barman – then sitting opposite me at a little table, having a drink himself – trod heavily on my toes, frowned and rolled his eyes in the direction of the bearded young man. Soon after I went upstairs to the ‘Ladies’ and on coming out found the barman waiting in the corridor. He advised me, with a deadpan face, to look at my map again when I got back to the bar and announce that I had changed my mind and was not going to my original destination. Just for a moment I felt a ridiculous twinge of fear, followed by a rush of impatient resentment. Then I meekly said ‘Thank you’ and returned to the bar to take his advice. In the North today the dividing line between absurdity and danger is not always clear.

That evening, on a Catholic farm in Co. Tyrone, my young host and hostess were able to identify the silent bearded figure. A well-known character, they said, who had been interned without trial for four years and become very unbalanced. Joe was scathing about my indiscretion. ‘You’ve been around the Six Counties now for nearly three months,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that long enough to teach you sense?’

I tried, rather feebly, to defend my rashness. ‘It’s partly not wanting to go along with the violent way of life – I’m used to living in a country where anyone can say what they like about anything. And partly it’s an inability to take it all seriously, even after three months. Everything seems so normal on the surface, outside of Belfast and Derry …’

‘But you know it isn’t,’ said Joe. ‘Mind you, that lad in the pub wasn’t a normal hazard. I’ve known him all my life and he was not in the Provos, or any other illegal organisation, when they lifted him. And he never had been. But he’d an uncle out in ’58 and that seemed a good enough reason to put him inside. By the time they let him out he was a Provo. He did a few jobs but then they chucked him – too unstable. Being interned four years without trial, for no reason, has eaten away at him. He’s gone very violent lately and you just wouldn’t know how he’d react to anything. It’s now he should be put away, poor devil.’

Joe and his wife Phil are in their late twenties and The Troubles have been part of their entire adult lives. They both wistfully recollected their adolescence when it seemed that Terence O’Neill might peacefully end Orange domination. ‘Things were so relaxed then,’ said Joe. ‘We lived on this farm here – my parents and myself and three older sisters. It’s mostly Protestant round here so we always had a Protestant maid and Protestant farm-lads. When we were small the lassie came with us to Bundoran for a fortnight every summer and took us to Mass with no quibble. You wouldn’t get that happening now. You notice the polarisation in all sorts of little ways. My father used to give me double pocket money for the Twelfth and he’d insist on me going to watch the marching for fear he’d be accused of holding me back. It was dead boring but worth it for the extra money. Nowadays round here Catholic kids would be afraid to go outside their front doors for days before and after the Twelfth.’

Phil, however, had slightly less rosy memories of childhood on a Co. Fermanagh farm. She recalled going to a neighbour’s birthday party and being reprimanded for walking on the lawn by her nine-year-old hostess, the daughter of a B Special. When she pointed out that other children were playing on the grass she was told, ‘Do as I say! We’re more important than you because we’re Protestants and if we want we can take your land!’ At once Phil burst into tears and rushed home. Never having heard anti-Protestant talk within her own family she had been unprepared for this introduction to sectarianism. Then, as she grew up, her mother admitted that she dreaded going to Protestant social gatherings because of the silence that fell when a Papist entered the room. ‘But the point is that she was invited to those gatherings,’ said Joe. ‘I doubt if she would be now.’

Joe’s parents have emigrated to live in Canada with a married daughter. ‘They couldn’t stand another moment of it here,’ explained Joe. ‘Not after a Protestant neighbour was shot dead in his cowshed and the local UVF tried to put it about we sheltered the killer. And before that my mother’s first cousin had her legs blown off in Belfast and my youngest sister was beaten up by a vigilante patrol. Some people can go on and on taking it but my mum’s not like that. She went to bits altogether after the murder. And I was happy to stay – I’d hate to be away across the water in a city. People think we’re brave, especially since Paisley built one of his new churches just down the road. But I reckon round here everyone’s safe enough if they see and hear nothing and keep stuck in their work.’

On the following Sunday I girded my loins and went forth to sample rural Paisleyism. The small Free Presbyterian church on the edge of the town was most attractive; whatever else may be said about Mr Paisley, he certainly encourages an agreeable style of modern architecture. When I entered the building a young woman wearing a pink dress and wide golden hat with flowing pink ribbons was playing the harmonium in one corner and the waiting congregation was cheerfully humming a hymn. As in Belfast, all the woman were dressed to kill. And the many little girls, with shiny ringlets, frilly frocks and wide-brimmed hats, looked like illustrations from the sort of Victorian storybook that utterly repelled me as a child. The church was about two-thirds full and again the congregation included a remarkable number of young people. Beside me sat an elderly woman, with a kindly, gentle face, and a small grandson who throughout the service silently chewed toffees non-stop, neatly tucking the folded papers into the tops of his white nylon knee-socks. My neighbour, realising that I was a novice churchgoer, helped me to find the hymns and shared with me her Bible which had many verses – non-violent – underlined in biro. The preacher was a visiting minister of about fifty, clad in conventional clerical black. He was very professional, yet not unpleasantly ‘smooth’ and had a harmless if rather rudimentary sense of humour. He told us that he came of a staunch Church of Ireland family and ten years ago had been in a good job, with excellent prospects, which he left when God called him through Ian Paisley. His not to reason why and we must not either when the Lord calleth … He spoke of his Church of Ireland relatives in Tipperary and Wexford who are very, very anti-ecumenism and are beginning to take a serious interest in Free Presbyterianism. He visibly tingled with joy as he foretold that in the near future the new faith – which was really the oldest and only form of Christianity, rescued for us by the Reverend Dr Paisley – would sweep the ‘Free State’ leaving a devastated Church of Ireland in its wake. This would serve the Church of Ireland right; its faithful members had been properly taught to regard the Mass as an evil deceit but now were expected to applaud their clergy actually attending Mass. He described the new Prayer Book as ‘an annual event, in different covers every year like a children’s Annual at Christmas time’. This was a symbol of the indecision, instability and weakness of present-day Anglicanism. His sermon was based on Jeremiah 6 – ‘follow the old paths’ – and we were repeatedly reminded that all supporters of ecumenism will unfailingly go to hell.

This might seem fairly uncouth stuff if one weren’t comparing it with Paisley’s evil invective. I particularly enjoyed an aside telling us that though there are many good things in the ‘Free State’ its signposts are not among them. There was something disarming about this innocuous sop to the anti-State sentiments of the congregation; and a neat metaphor quickly followed, deploring the fact that so many down South could not find ‘the old paths’. But what chiefly impressed me was the emphasis on avoiding something quaintly termed ‘carnal violence’. The only weapons of Free Presbyterianism should be spiritual – preaching and prayer – and our preacher made plain his disapproval of ‘certain people, even within Free Presbyterianism’, who seem to think otherwise. This warning so fascinated me that I decided to investigate rural Paisleyism in greater depth – not a difficult task, according to the notices, because this sect is particularly lavish with its services and even provides a sort of dawn chorus at 6.00 a.m. on weekdays.

There was nothing ‘silent’ about the collection here; only one note lay on the plate which reached me and ten pence seemed to be the average offering. As we left, the minister, standing in the porch, shook hands with each individual. When I appeared, clad in slacks and a hooded anorak, he looked embarrassed. Part of his sermon had been a denunciation of what he called ‘he-shes’ – women who wear slacks and short hair and men who wear colourful clothes and long hair. However, he quickly recovered himself and assured me that all are welcome to hear the word of God and seek the old paths. Outside the church my Bible-sharing neighbour shook my hand and said, ‘I can tell by your clothes you’re not saved, but would you like to know how I got saved?’ There is only one polite answer to such a question and I was therefore invited to tea at 5.30 – the meal had to be early on Sundays, Mrs T— explained, so that nobody would be late for prayer-time at 7.00, to be followed by the Evening Service at 7.30.

At 3.20 I pursued my researches by cycling to the crossroads on the edge of the town where about a quarter of the morning’s congregation had dutifully gathered to support a fat little lay preacher with a croaky voice who was trying to save the sort of person not given to churchgoing. But the only non-churchgoers in sight were a group of tough-looking youths who hung about briefly, chewing gum and looking cynical, while we were being exhorted to beware of weak clerics who would lead their followers astray to Rome. The preacher made straight for me at the end, obviously seeing me as the most promising fruit of his afternoon’s labour. While I wheeled Roz he walked back to the town centre beside me, desperately begging me to cast off sin – by which I imagine he meant my trousers. His sort of religion has such an unfortunate effect on me that I was almost tempted to take them off then and there in the Diamond.

Mrs T— and her family were awed to hear that I had actually sat at Paisley’s feet in the Martyrs’ Memorial. None of them has ever seen the building because since 1969 they haven’t risked going to Belfast. I wondered then if Paisley preaches Belfast-style throughout the countryside; it is hard to imagine the gentle Mrs T— listening with any enthusiasm to such rabble-rousing. But possibly she and her like are too overcome by their Founder’s personality to analyse the drift of his ‘sermons’.

Mrs T—’s twenty-two-year-old son and his nineteen-year-old bride explained to me that they find the ‘no-change’ attitude of Free Presbyterianism very reassuring. One can well understand its having this effect – at least in its rural manifestations – on youngsters who since childhood have known so much tension and violence, not to mention social and political changes of the most unsettling sort. All my subsequent observations convinced me that rural Paisleyism attracts many people who are not particularly fanatical but only want to retreat into the security of the familiar. They don’t want to have to think about what part they could play in a changing society and usually they haven’t in any case got very much with which to think. Yet what they may lack in intelligence they often make up in good-nature and sincerity.

By the end of the following fortnight I felt that I had earned the right to pontificate on Paisleyism, having attended eight full-length Free Presbyterian services. Apart from their paralysing boredom no one could take exception to any of those sermons. Three out of the eight preachers condemned violence of any sort, used for any reason, and not one of them even obliquely encouraged it. In all these little churches Free Presbyterianism appeared merely as a dreary stereotyped fundamentalism. Admittedly it contributes nothing to the cause of Reconciliation Between Christians. But neither does it deter its followers from showing strangers a great deal of warm friendliness.

Towards the end of September, when Ian Paisley was in Canada, I checked on the Martyrs’ Memorial to see how Belfast Paisleyism fares in the absence of its founder. The church was scarcely one-sixth full and Mr Paisley’s stand-in was a rather feeble preacher. But the amplifiers were so skilfully manipulated that the hymn-singing gave the impression of a huge throng – an important point since cassettes of the day’s proceedings are sold in the porch after each service. The programme exhorted us to ‘Continue to pray for Dr Paisley as he preaches at the old-time Gospel Campaign in Toronto.’ It also urged us to ‘Make sure to order a copy of Dr Paisley’s 30th Anniversary volume. Order forms in the porches of the church.’ And it revealed that in the Chief ’s absence the ‘Lord’s Treasury’ had dropped the previous Sunday to £484.89. What interested me, however, was the complete inoffensiveness of the sermon, without even a side-kick at Rome or Canterbury. This cheered me enormously. At least Paisley does not have, as I had feared he might, a large team of mini-Paisleys echoing his message throughout Northern Ireland.

At the end of August I briefly returned home, to get my daughter back to school, but early one September morning I was again crossing the border, just after dawn – this time into Co. Armagh. I remember a wonderful pink-streaked sky and a silent, hilly landscape that looked strangely un-Irish after the long, hot summer; all golden-brown and fawn, with dry, colourless leaves falling prematurely, and glowing bunches of rowan berries like lanterns in the woods. Honeysuckle and convolvulus draped dusty hedges and then I was cycling above the shores of a wide lake dotted with wooded islets. Soon after, on my right, another lake appeared. It was small, round, still and black, with two swans floating on their own reflections. And all morning the traffic consisted only of cows being driven back to their parched fields after milking.

I reckoned afterwards, when studying the map, that I had crossed the border seven times within a few hours – usually without realising it – while making my way north-west from Carrickmacross. Only one of these crossings was on an ‘approved’ road where, south of the border, a tiny prefab hut contained a solitary, yawning customs officer sitting beside a hideously wailing ‘trannie’. A little way up the road were some fifty overturned, burnt-out car wrecks, rusty memorials to those days when the border was regularly blocked. And half-a-mile farther on I passed a large, heavily fortified British Army post.

By a happy coincidence I free-wheeled into a little border town at 11.30 a.m., just as the pubs were opening. But at first it was not easy to discern a pub. That IRA stronghold has seen so much shooting and bombing that its pubs are now fortified not professionally, as in Belfast, with wire mesh and special locks, but clumsily, with boarded-up windows and barricaded side doors. The pub I eventually detected was packed by noon and I stood at the bar beside the only other woman customer; she was small, sallow, voluble and wearing an inappropriate winter overcoat. ‘The men round here have nothin’ to do but drink,’ she informed me. ‘It’s crool, the unemployment.’

‘And what about yourself, Molly?’ said a weather-beaten young man with enormous ears. ‘Haven’t you somethin’ else to do, with the wains comin’ home for their dinner?’

‘They don’t come home,’ retorted Molly. ‘They has it at school.’ Two vodkas later she was telling me about her husband who had gone across the water in ’71, when the RUC were after him, and never got in touch with her since. At that point Big-ears dug his elbow into her ribs, winked at me and said, ‘But now there’s many more get in touch with you, isn’t that right, Molly?’

Molly looked tearfully into her vodka. ‘ ’Tisn’t the same,’ she said.

A teenage girl hurried in then and tapped Molly on the shoulder. ‘D’you know who’s watchin’, Moll?’

Molly swung around and stared through the open door. On the opposite pavement stood an elderly woman wearing a headscarf and carrying a shopping basket. She was certainly looking in our direction but in rather a vague way. ‘Jaysus!’ said Molly. ‘The bitch! She’s at it again!’

‘She looks fairly harmless,’ I observed.

Molly groaned. ‘Now she’ll be away to tell himself on me!’

‘Himself?’ I asked.

‘The priest above,’ said Molly irritably. ‘The Parish Priest – and by this evenin’ he’ll be at me again over drinkin’ the wains’ money.’ She slammed her empty glass down on the counter and turned to go. ‘But isn’t it me own business what I does with me own money? I’m not askin’ him for nothin’!’

‘Nobody could possibly see into the pub from across the street, in this bright sun,’ I pointed out. Molly laughed sardonically. ‘Don’t you believe it! That witch could see through reinforced concrete!’

I marvelled afterwards at how exactly all this measured up to the Orange concept of Fenian mores. The shiftless deserted wife – of doubtful virtue – drinking at noon, leaving her wains to fend for themselves; and the Parish Priest’s housekeeper spying on behalf of her master, who would promptly mete out some ghastly secret punishment in the name of Rome. Being over-dependent on pub contacts puts one in danger of getting lopsided impressions. For every Molly-type in that little town, there must be a hundred respectable, conscientious wives and mothers never met by wandering cyclists.

The following evening I camped in very beautiful countryside on the edge of a tiny village which at first appeared to be publess. Panic-stricken, I cycled up and down the deserted street – actually half a street, since there were houses on only one side – and then saw a British Army Land-Rover pulling up outside the minute shop. Six weapon-laden youths jumped out and for a moment I thought I was at last going to witness some drama. But no, they had simply stopped to buy ice-creams. As they stood around their vehicle, licking, I approached to ask if they knew where the nearest pub was. The sergeant grinned and nodded towards what looked like a private house on a corner. ‘Knock on the side window and you might get someone at home,’ he said. I was lucky; the young Church of Ireland farmer who runs the part-time pub had just returned from his harvesting.

George was articulate and outspoken, with firm principles but without bigotry. He represented a Protestant type one meets often but hears too little about, so much more ‘newsworthy’ are the Loyalist paramilitaries and the Orange politicians. Soon we were joined by an old man named Pat, a neighbouring Catholic farmer in for his regular six o’clock ‘half-pint and a short’. He and George were in complete agreement about how The Troubles have affected their area. When I remarked on its beauty and apparent tranquillity both shook their heads and Pat said, ‘Easily known you don’t live here!’

‘It’s not like Belfast or Derry,’ explained George, ‘with gunmen fighting the Brits or each other and sectarian assassinations every week. We’ve had our share of that – one of my best friends was murdered in ’72, aged twenty. But now it’s mostly plain crime, not even disguised as any sort of patriotism. Too many youngsters have guns. And not a worry about using them. I’ve an eighteen-year-old cousin – he was eleven when it started and he accepts violence as normal. Last month he robbed £528 from a post office and was caught immediately because he hasn’t really the temperament for crime. But his parents will never get over the disgrace. It’s shaken a lot of us to watch this process among the youngsters. There’s not much parents can do to protect kids from the violence in the air. People think this is mostly an urban problem but they’re wrong. Round here, the amount of robbery with violence is just desperate. Ten years ago we wouldn’t have believed it could ever be like this. It’s not Protestant versus Catholic now – it’s Young Thugs versus The Rest. We never know who the next victim will be. Except that it’ll surely be someone defenceless. And the security forces aren’t even pretending to cope. Maybe they can’t. Maybe they’ve to concentrate all they’ve got on the Provos.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘See yon phone box outside? A few nights ago at 1.30 two young lads were trying to get some sense out of the nearest RUC barracks. Local lads. I know them well. They’d just been roughed up by a Loyalist vigilante patrol – so-called – and they’d guts enough to report this. But the RUC didn’t want to know. They wouldn’t listen. They told the young lads to belt up and go home to bed. And I’m asking – what’s the good of the authorities begging us to cooperate with the security forces if the security forces won’t cooperate with us!’

‘Mebbe they were afraid, above in the barracks,’ suggested Pat. ‘Wouldn’t you be, if you were expected to get out after that lot in the darkness of the night?’

‘Then they should be in another job,’ said George shortly.

When Catholics make similar complaints against the RUC one tends to take them with a grain of salt; but George was a staunch Unionist.

‘I’d settle for Direct Rule indefinitely,’ he went on, ‘if only it was rule and not this kind of sham. The solution may be everyone getting so worn down by violence it flickers out. That’s happening already in some places. A lot who supported the extremists at first are just fed up now.’

Pat shook his head. ‘I’m eighty next month,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you that “everyone getting worn down by violence” is no solution. When partition came, I was the one age with George there. A few years after that, we were all worn down, too – worse than now, a lot, because there was no social security to keep us fed and our bodies were worn as well as our souls. So the violence stopped. For a while. If it stops again now, it’ll only be for another while. Unless there’s been a real solution worked out somewhere, by someone.’

We changed the subject then, by a sort of Pavlov reaction. Perhaps because of ‘outsider participation’ we had ventured much closer than is normal to those areas where Protestants and Catholics fear to tread together.

Before I left George said, ‘Remember this – it may be something a stranger doesn’t notice but it’s true. Everybody in Northern Ireland – everybody – has been branded by our experiences since ’69. If you meet people who tell you The Troubles have never bothered them, they’re liars. Maybe some of us needed to be branded. Maybe all of us did. You don’t have to be damaged when you’re branded. But we’ve all been painfully changed, us and our country. We’ll never be the same again.’

‘It’s not really about religion or jobs or power,’ said the young university lecturer. ‘Maybe once it was, but not now. Now it’s all about identity. Who’s what? If everybody in Northern Ireland could answer that question, without hesitation, we’d be more than halfway to a solution.’

‘What are you?’ I asked.

Andrew hesitated. And then we both laughed, a little wryly.

According to himself, Andrew is the fervently agnostic son of orthodox Presbyterian parents. He votes Alliance, is married to a Dublin Catholic and hopes soon to get a job in Britain. No wonder he hesitated. However he described himself – whether as an Ulsterman, an Irishman or British – he would, in these confused times, have an uneasy feeling that he was not being quite precise enough, that someone or something was somehow being ‘let down’. He knows exactly when his forefathers came from Scotland to help colonise Co. Armagh. They came in 1618, two years before the Mayflower sailed. And many centuries earlier, their forefathers may well have migrated from the north-east of Ulster to help colonise Scotland.

‘Trouble is,’ I said, ‘you colonists went too easy on us natives. What sort of mess would the US be in now, if the Indians hadn’t been properly tidied away?’

‘Trouble is,’ replied Andrew, ‘that we weren’t all the same religion. Can you imagine a family which moved from Scotland to England 358 years ago not regarding itself as English? And if my parents go to Scotland for a holiday they don’t feel they’re going home the way colonists from Rhodesia might. Of course they don’t feel they’re abroad either. But they admit if they meet a Southerner in London they feel they’ve more in common with him than with all the Prod Londoners. Yet they won’t go South for a holiday any more because they reckon it’s a foreign state with designs on their territory. Do you wonder a lot of us are in agony at the moment, with the horns of our dilemma so sharp?’

‘But a few moments ago you said it wasn’t about religion!’ I protested.

‘Of course it was, originally – religion plus land-ownership. I meant it isn’t any more. The hang-up’s identity, now.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘to the outsider you Northerners already seem to have a special and very distinct identity. It exists. It’s not something new or artificial you’re trying to find or make. Surely the hang-up is about recognising what you have in common, instead of fiercely denying it?’

Andrew suddenly became impatient with himself – or with me, or with Northern Ireland. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I’ve had all this waffling about looking for a new identity for Ulster. Why should one and a half million of us in this little corner of a little island have any special identity? In global terms, aren’t we all first cousins if not half-brothers and sisters on these islands? And aren’t we all in the EEC and moving towards the twenty-first century? Why can’t we just get on with being Europeans?’

When people are deeply unsure of themselves, when their past has to be constantly invoked to explain or excuse their present and when nothing about their future is known or can be safely predicted, a sort of intellectual ferment starts; and not merely, or even chiefly, in academic or literary circles. All over Northern Ireland ordinary people are trying to think their own way through The Problem and this personal sorting-out process marks one of the most obvious differences between North and South. The Northern Irish do not just passively endure their regional tragedy. Many are questioning and probing and doubting and the result is immensely stimulating for a visitor from the lazy-minded South. The combinations and permutations are endless as individuals half-fearfully look at themselves in relation to their homeland, and to Britain and the Republic, and grope towards something new. Something as yet nameless and formless and not – at least on the Protestant side – greatly desired, but now dimly seen as inevitable. I remember a youngish Catholic mountain farmer in Co. Derry debating UDI with his cronies and attempting to work out a basis for it that could be acceptable to Catholics. And a middle-class Protestant housewife in Co. Down entertaining me in her kitchen while she did the washing-up and remarking that she would never have believed, a few years ago, how little the British public know or care about Unionist feelings. Then she asked, very sadly, ‘Has loyalty any meaning if nobody wants it?’ And in Co. Antrim a Presbyterian minister filled me with potato cakes and said of course a united Ireland was coming but the good stock would never stay to be ruled from Dublin. ‘So in the end the IRA will have its way and we’ll all go back where we came from – or at least, the best of us will. And I wish Dublin joy, trying to cope with the rump that’s left.’ There is nothing very startling about any of these remarks, except as indications that people who ten years ago would never have stopped to think about their myths now feel compelled to do so. Recently, outsiders have begun to comment on Northern Ireland’s apathy; but this disease is largely confined to frustrated and disgruntled politicians. Although the Northern Irish may have their defects apathy of any sort is not – in my experience – among them.

In general the country-folk seem more flexible than the city-folk; there is a basic pragmatism in farming communities that contradicts the notion one has of cautious, conservative peasants. Life on the land teaches people to make do with what’s available and to adapt to the dictates of wind and weather – to forces beyond their control. And The Troubles are a force beyond control. They have blighted Stormont, dried up the sympathy of the Great British Public for Unionist aspirations and made Orangeism an object of scorn. The average rural Unionist, given civilised leadership, might slowly be led on from here to an acceptance of such horrors as power-sharing with Catholics – not initially because he saw the justice of it but because it has become inevitable, as it might be inevitable, one year, to sell calves for a pound apiece. The tragedy is that such leadership is nowhere in sight. This is one of the reasons why there is unlikely to be any Great Leap Forward into the 1970s as the rest of Europe knows them.

Many of those with whom I discussed the future spoke in terms that would have appalled their fathers, Orange or Green, but often they seemed unaware of having budged from their inherited position. And if I betrayed that I had detected a deviation they tended to explain hastily that they never meant that – they weren’t giving in on anything – they were only talking generally … The modification of Northern attitudes is going to be like the movement of a glacier, imperceptible to the onlooker though with effects which change the face of the land.

Andrew had complained about the sharp horns of the Orange dilemma and the horns of the Green dilemma, though quite differently shaped, are no less uncomfortable. (As a child, I used to picture a dilemma as something between the Great Irish Elk and the rhinoceros.)

All Northern Catholics unequivocally describe themselves as Irish; they hesitate – if they do – only when asked, ‘To which government do you owe your allegiance?’ Most now see four alternative governments, two existing and two hypothetical: Westminster, the Dail, some future power-sharing Stormont substitute – possibly associated on a federal basis with Britain and the Republic – or some future semi-autonomous nine-county Ulster Parliament (‘Dail Uladh’) forming part of a thirty-two-county Republic. That last is a Provos’ ‘solution’; not even they imagine that Northern Ireland could be brought into an All-Ireland Republic without ‘special arrangements’ having been made for the one million Protestants. (I am leaving Official IRA ambitions out of this. As Marxists, the Stickies have few followers at present. But they advocate a genuinely secular state, and as thinkers are far better equipped than the Provos, so they may well prove more important in the end.)

Extreme Republicans swear fealty to Dail Uladh, ignoring the fact that it is very unlikely ever to exist. Indeed, in an hallucinatory sort of way they regard themselves as Dail Uladh. When asked on whose authority they are fighting their ‘war’ they claim, in all seriousness, to be the only legal government of the Irish Republic. This fantasy is not laughable; it has brought too much grief and suffering to too many for its comic element to be any longer visible.

What most surprised me, however, was the number of moderate Catholics who admitted – often with elaborate, apologetic explanations – that in a changed atmosphere, which did not make them feel inferior, they would willingly forget about a united Ireland and be faithful to a power-sharing Stormont-substitute if it did not insist on ritual affirmations of loyalty to the Crown. A significant number of non-extremist under-fifties either belong to this group or are being pushed towards it by the South’s increasingly explicit loss of interest in reunification. There are of course other moderate Catholics who still regard the Dail as their ‘natural’ government though they may dislike the particular régime that happens to be in power in Dublin. But this group, too, has been forced, over the past few years, to acknowledge the impracticality of its preference. Its members seem now to be moving either towards the Provos – seeing Dail Uladh as the only acceptable substitute for a Dail Eireann which has betrayed them – or towards those who are hoping for some more durable version of the Northern Ireland Executive, minus that Council of Ireland which so infuriated the Loyalists. After the Executive had been sabotaged in May 1974, the Dublin Government – according to one popular Green interpretation – kicked the Catholics while they were down by suggesting that the most realistic policy for the future would be to slaughter the sacred Green cow of a united Ireland, in the hopes that eventually the Unionists might respond by slaughtering the sacred Orange cow of ‘a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people’. This blasphemy did to some Catholics what had been done to some Protestants by Britain’s declaration that Westminster would not oppose a united Ireland should the majority of Northerners ever vote for it. They could scarcely credit Dublin’s perfidy. And yet, harsh as this may sound, they needed some such shock to dislodge them from the myth to which they had been clinging for so long. Neither the British nor the Irish Government was being unreasonable when their adherents were ‘betrayed’. The British were politely expressing their longing to be honourably free of a problem that has haunted them at irregular intervals since 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill decided – for his own political ends – that ‘the Orange card is the one to play’. And the Irish Government was being realistic at last when it admitted that for the foreseeable future it will be not merely futile but irresponsible for any Dublin administration to advocate a united Ireland. To recognise this fact is not to feel happy about it. And those Northern Catholics who bitterly accuse the South of selfishness and cowardice – of trying to disengage because we are terrified of becoming involved in a full-scale war with the Loyalists – are missing the point. For many years we have indeed shown an I’m-all-right-Paddy indifference towards Northern problems. But the fact that few of us would wish to see our army crossing the border to fight Loyalist paramilitaries is a mark of maturity rather than cowardice. Such a war could not possibly benefit anyone in any way. If another ‘pogrom’ situation did arise – which to me seems unlikely – it would make more sense to welcome half a million refugees into the Republic and make some sacrifices to look after them there rather than to send 12,000 troops over the border to defend them on their own territory.

Apart from new Green hesitations about loyalty, the physical fear which exists throughout both communities is much greater on the Catholic side. A report published by the Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission states that between 1969 and 1972 Northern Ireland experienced the most widespread forced movement of populations to take place in Western Europe since the Second World War. And of the 60,000 who had to leave their homes during that period 80 per cent were Catholics. Moreover, moderate Catholics are very aware of the increasing danger from Loyalist paramilitaries to which continuing Provo violence exposes them. Paddy Devlin has pointed out one sad result of this in The Fall of the N.I. Executive, published in 1975. ‘The current rate of inquiries at the emigration offices in Belfast indicates that the number of families interested in moving abroad is nearly five times what it was a few years ago. It is significant that the families making inquiries are almost all of the Catholic faith; are of the professional classes; have been living outside the ghettos and would be ideal types to blaze the trail towards integration across the frontiers of the sectarian divide.’

Paddy Devlin’s own career provides a good example of the sort of horns a Green dilemma can have. Born in 1925 into a Belfast ghetto, he joined Na Fianna (the junior IRA) at the age of eleven. Six years later, as a full member of the IRA, he was interned in Crumlin Road gaol. In 1950 he left the IRA because it seemed to him badly led and politically aimless. He then became involved in the trade union movement and in local politics and in 1958 he joined the NILP, hoping through it to be able to improve the lot of the ghetto dwellers, both Orange and Green. His election to Stormont as a NILP candidate took place early in 1969, after he had helped to found NICRA. In 1970 he became one of the founders of the SDLP and when the power-sharing Executive was established in January 1974 he was appointed Minister of Health and Social Services. I have never met Mr Devlin – or any other ‘reigning’ Northern politician – but he is praised even by Orangemen as the best Minister of Health the North ever had. His book certainly reveals a typically forthright Northern character, tough-talking, tender-hearted and quick-witted, with a no-nonsense approach to ‘delicate’ problems and a fierce loyalty to – the North. The spontaneous, white-hot fury with which he defends the Loyalists (his deadliest political enemies) against Wilson’s infamous ‘spongers’ sneer is amongst the most cheering things to be found in any recently published book on Northern Ireland. Yet for all his sensible willingness to serve the Northern Irish as one of Her Majesty’s Ministers, and for all his clear thinking on social issues, he is obviously in a hopeless emotional muddle about ‘Who’s What?’ He writes:

Reading those statements through Orange eyes, they provide ample justification for never trusting a Fenian – and for believing that one day, if Britain deserts the North, it will be invaded by the Irish Army on the pretext of protecting ‘that part of the national majority that lives over the Border’. Reading them through my own eyes, they strengthen my conviction that we would help all the Northerners to sort out ‘Who’s What?’ by scrapping Articles 2 and 3 of our Constitution.

I met many Catholics who confessed that they had lost all faith in traditional Republicanism but not one Catholic who would ever consider accepting full integration with Britain. Yet some expressed a grudging appreciation of Direct Rule, merely because it is so much less awful, from the Green point of view, than was Stormont. And those people often added, ‘Unless the Unionists are to be allowed to take over again, there’s no alternative to Direct Rule for decades ahead.’ Meanwhile, of course, all citizens – even the most extreme Republicans – give de facto recognition to Westminster and make the best of a bad job by collecting as many government hand-outs as possible.

A carefully planned campaign to re-teach history in Northern Ireland would be one of the most practical contributions the British Government could make towards an eventual solution. I have been rather unkindly told that this suggestion is typical of the useless weeds that flourish in literary minds. What ghetto hard-liner, my critics ask, is going to sit down and read (or listen to) a version of history that will repeatedly diverge from the myths on which he or she has been nurtured? However, I am not now thinking of the ghetto folk but of the tens of thousands of other hard-liners, people who would be horrified to be so described though their brains have been as thoroughly washed as any ghetto dweller’s. That section of the population might slowly be weaned off its myths, over the next few generations, by a change of historical diet. Many people are, in a sense, waiting for it now; their reluctant half-admissions that there must be a new Northern Ireland – neither Orange nor Green – shows this.

At the very least, the present policy of handling the ‘official’ Orange myths with kid gloves could be discouraged. In one large town I talked to a Protestant secondary schoolteacher who the previous winter had been invited by the local Council to give a series of historical lectures as part of an adult education course. He saw this as a wonderful opportunity to eliminate some popular misconceptions and expended much time and energy on producing six lectures as unbiased as he could make them. But so many in the class objected to the first of the series that the remainder were heavily censored by semi-literate Loyalist members of the Council. Again, I heard several people, including two history professors, complaining about a recently held History Exhibition in Belfast which apparently leaped from St Patrick to 1914 in one disingenuous bound. And – though here we move from the secular to the religious authorities – one of the saddest examples of a responsible institution unconsciously distorting history is Loyalism in Ireland.

This little pamphlet of thirty-six pages is a report prepared by the Committee of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and presented to the General Assembly in June 1975. It is competently written and the authors have obviously tried hard to be fair. But their heritage proved too much for them. The nearer we get to the present day the more misleading is their choice of words. The start of The Troubles in 1968 is described thus: ‘A campaign for Civil Rights mushroomed, professedly not concerned with the issues of “Irish unity”, but with compelling the Northern Ireland Government into internal reforms by mass demonstrations and “direct action” rather than by parliamentary processes. A university-based marxist-inspired “People’s Democracy” movement helped to increase the confrontations and defiances of authorities and their exercise of public order. On the loyalist side a similar extra-parliamentary campaign was mounted.’ Only a Loyalist could see any ‘similarity’ between the People’s Democracy Movement and the numerous Paisleyite gangs, armed with nail-studded cudgels and newly sharpened scythes, which roamed the countryside in November 1968 to harass the unarmed Civil Rights marchers as they attempted to use a police-approved route. The pamphlet goes on to explain that:

Here the use of the word ‘punitive’ conveys that those against whom the raids were launched deserved to be punished. There is no direct attempt to defend the behaviour of the Loyalist mobs; but an uninformed reader could be left feeling that their anger and violence were easily excusable – even laudable in intent, though ill-judged in deed. Which is not at all the impression given by that popular Loyalist ballad dealing with the same events around Bombay Street which I have already quoted.

On the next page we are invited to view the Unionist Party through Orange spectacles.

These quotations reveal the compulsively dishonest thinking of men whose personal integrity is, one can be certain, above reproach. To some, all this may seem like nit-picking; political propaganda and slanted reporting are common in every free society. However, in Northern Ireland, where British tolerance is virtually unknown, distorted history and slanted stories can and do endanger lives.

Had I read Loyalism in Ireland before visiting Northern Ireland I would have dismissed it as contemptibly tendentious; now I can exactly picture the types likely to write such a thing. Studious, upright, God-fearing characters who would never deliberately harm anybody, who uphold job discrimination and never employ Catholics but in other ways would go to great lengths to help a needy Catholic because that is their Christian duty, and who firmly believe that the Vatican is rooting away in the background for a form of Irish unity that will destroy Irish Protestantism. A closed mind is repellent on paper but it does not necessarily imply either a cold heart or a feeble intellect. While talking to the sort of Presbyterian who might have written that pamphlet, I was often reminded of my own father. He had exactly the same sort of closed mind, except that his bigotry was not religious/political but pure political. He was almost (not quite!) as blinkered about Britain and the British as Orangemen are about Rome and the Pope. But that did not prevent him from being, in other ways, a perfectly reasonable and civilised man.

Loyalism in Ireland scores a valid point in relation to the Green myth-makers: ‘Demonstrations in support of the will of the majority, whether by loyalist parties or Orangemen and others, have been automatically labelled “provocative”, while far more defiant and disorderly demonstrations by the minority have not; and any casualties arising have been simply blamed on the authorities and in no way on the lawbreakers, e.g. in the tragic “Bloody Sunday” shootings in Londonderry.’

As Henry Kelly has pointed out in How Stormont Fell, ‘In Northern Ireland the fact that appearances are more important than reality is a running tragedy. The state lives … on “ghosts”. And it lives on myths that don’t need to have originated in 1690 or 1916. A day is generally long enough.’ The Bloody Sunday myth has become so valuable a weapon against the Brits that anyone seeking to blunt its cutting edge will not be popular. Indisputably, none of the thirteen civilians shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry was handling a gun or bomb when shot. Equally indisputably – and by now this is common knowledge – the Provos had made a careful plan to attack the William Street barricade; two senior volunteers were armed and waiting in a house to shoot at the army; and the paratroopers saw an armed group racing out of Glenfaddagh Park, where the Provos had parked a car containing guns. The ‘myth’ version of the tragedy does not include these details. If the Provos wanted to make sure that no innocent civilians were shot during that illegal march they should have kept themselves and their weapons out of the way.

In my ignorance, I used to feel that discussing the role of the myth in Northern Ireland was a way of being comfortably abstract about the whole problem and evading the real issues. I have learned a lot since then. Now I feel that the single most important issue is the extent to which ordinary people live in an extraordinary miasma of untruth. The average Northern Ireland citizen is born either Orange or Green. His whole personality is conditioned by myth and he is bred to live the sort of life that will reinforce and protect the myth for transmission to future generations. Moreover, those myths are used daily to justify distrust and resentment of ‘the other side’.

Quite apart from the effects which this way of life is having on Northern society at present, it is a personal disaster for the individuals concerned. It retards their development as free human beings, which is no less of a tragedy than having a limb blown off by a bomb. No individual is free who cannot evolve beyond the confines of the mental world into which he was born. And in Northern Ireland most people are inhibited, by the atmospheric pressures of their mythology, from maturing and mellowing in the way that is normal for twentieth-century Europeans. At least, in the South, we are now free in this sense. Someone born into a Catholic or Protestant, or Fianna Fail or Fine Gael family can decide to change sides without their whole world collapsing around them – or any of their neighbours deciding that they should be shot. Not many of us, as yet, use this freedom; but that is owing to mental laziness rather than to irresistible forces thwarting our natural development. The Southern myths, based on Catholicism and Republicanism, have never, even at their most potent, been as restrictive as the Northern myths. Churchmen and politicians may have wished them to be so but some inherent flexibility has always saved us from the worst consequences of our own myth-making.

According to Malinowski, ‘The function of myth is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of ancient events.’ (Though in Northern Ireland recent events will do, as Henry Kelly has noted.) But are there any living traditions left within the Orange and Green myths? Or are they mere empty shells, continuing to exist after the creature inside has died?

The Irish Republican tradition can trace its spiritual origins far beyond the French Revolution, which is usually quoted as its first inspiration. Under our ancient Gaelic law the land belonged to the people, who were free, following the death of a provincial King or chieftain, to choose a new ruler from among the dead man’s heirs. In 1170, when a Norman army landed at Waterford under Strongbow, there began a slow conquest that was to replace the Brehon Laws by a system under which all land belonged to the King and nobody could possess it except by Royal Grant. One can therefore understand how the Republican ideal, when first presented to the Irish in the 1790s, sounded echoes within their racial memory even after 600 years. France’s new-fangled Republicanism might not have too much in common with the Brehon Laws but at least it was a step away from England’s system of government which had come to be associated, after the Reformation, with rulers who hated the religion of Ireland’s majority.

By now, however, extreme Republicanism might more accurately be described as a militant anti-British tradition. If a full-blooded Gaelic king could be conjured up tomorrow morning, and if he made the right anti-British noises, I am convinced that most of our extreme Irish Republicans would promptly become fanatic monarchists. In the 1790s Wolfe Tone wrote, ‘To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country – these were my objects …’ And in the 1970s Seamus Loughran of Provisional Sinn Fein, when asked what he meant by ‘British withdrawal’, said, ‘We want to get rid of the British way of life.’ The same sentiment is expressed even more succinctly on many walls in Northern Ireland and on some walls in the South: Brits out. Yet sociologists have come up with statistics to prove that in the Republic we prefer the English to any other foreigners; a fact ascertainable without benefit of statistics if one happens to live in the South. And about one and a half million Irish people are settled in Britain (as many as live in Northern Ireland) and seem to find the English way of life entirely agreeable and a good deal more lucrative than the Irish way of life. At this point any student of the Irish scene might be forgiven for losing his way in the mists of humbug. One cannot even argue that the Irish living in Britain are not subscribers to the Republican myth; many of them are.

Happily, the militant, anti-British tradition within the Green myth is now dying fast, of its own absurdity, in both Northern and Southern Ireland. Yet it remains stirring enough to lure easily roused youngsters and the ineffectiveness of the Provo campaign is a positive asset to its guardians. As J. Bowyer Bell remarks in The Secret Army, ‘No tradition runs deeper in Irish politics than to turn physical defeat into spiritual victory, the slain rebel into patriot.’ Many ballads, often execrable in both their moral and literary content, commemorate Republican martyrs from 1798 to 1977. A typical sample was written in 1957, after the killing of two young IRA volunteers during a raid on Brooke-borough Police Barracks.

One is immediately struck by the unwitting accuracy of that phrase ‘the Patriot Game’. By now militant Republicanism has become just that: a macabre bit of make-believe in which grown men and women behave like six-year-olds earnestly enacting their fantasies. Incidentally, the ‘rebels’ referred to in the last line are the Southern politicians who accepted partition.

Some people see the IRA’s lack of animosity towards Protestants qua Protestants as a sign of almost saintly magnanimity. But it is not quite like that. Undoubtedly, as I have already pointed out, most Northern Catholics (though not their clerical leaders) are more tolerant religiously than most Northern Protestants. But sometimes there is an element of fantasy in their tolerance; on analysis it is seen to be part of the Green myth. Since the Northern Protestants are Irish it would be totally against Republican tradition to oppose them as non-Catholics. When the Provos kill a policeman, or a Belfast businessman, or a UDR man, they are attacking these people not as fellow-Irishmen with whom they disagree on religious matters or domestic politics, but as pro-British Quislings. Of course they hate the UVF, the UFF and the various other Loyalist paramilitary groups which have been responsible for the random murders of so many innocent Catholics; in 1973 an article on the UFF in a Provo newspaper was headed THIS UGLY CREATURE MUST BE DESTROYED. Yet the main Provo aim is to convert the Protestants – not religiously, pace Orange fears, but politically. A few years ago they produced a pamphlet entitled Freedom Struggle in which they urged the Northern Protestants to see the light. ‘The Provisionals ask the majority in the North to unite with them in making a new nation, an old country. Six counties is but a fraction of Ireland, the Protestant and Presbyterian peoples of the North have as much birthright to the twenty-six as have any Catholic. It is our dearest wish that they would claim that birthright now and having claimed it that they then proceed to enrich and cultivate it with the industry for which they are renowned.’ The fatuity of this plea is staggering when one remembers that it was written on behalf of an organisation which is engaged in a ruthless attempt to destroy the Protestants’ beloved ‘Ulster’. There could be no clearer proof of the extent to which the Green myth isolates the Provos from reality. And yet this plea is curiously moving, too, because it is utterly sincere; and the viciousness of the Provo campaign is partly a result of their frustration at not being able to convince the Protestants of its sincerity.

The Orange myth similarly isolates Unionists/Loyalists from – I am tempted to write, not merely reality, but sanity. The Orange tradition, too, is dying at the moment, but very slowly. The allegedly canny, unimaginative Protestants seem to be finding it even harder than the allegedly impractical, romantic Catholics to abandon the technicolored past and face the black-and-white present. In September 1971 Billy Hull of the Loyalist Association of Workers revealed the panic-stricken tangle of post-1969 Orange emotions. To a huge Loyalist rally in Belfast he announced, ‘The age of the rubber bullet is over. It’s lead bullets from now on … We are British to the core but we won’t hesitate to take on even the British if they attempt to sell our country down the river.’ Orange mental confusion also seethes through an anonymous pamphlet entitled Security in Northern Ireland and produced a few years ago by the United Ulster Unionist Coalition (now defunct). In the second paragraph we read, ‘It may be assumed that the ultimate aim of both the British Government and the UUUP is the same: that is to see a permanent end to violence in the Province. Where they differ is that the British Government does not really mind whether this is achieved within the UK or within a United Ireland, whereas the Unionists are determined that it shall be within the UK.’ This is very lucid yet the rest of the pamphlet shows no awareness of the imbecility of persisting in frenzied protestations of loyalty to a UK that is at best, on this anonymous writer’s own admission, indifferent as to whether it receives Northern Irish loyalty or not. The Northern Protestant has always prided himself on his independence. Yet he is now reduced to forcing unwanted attentions on a Britannia who would much prefer not to know him and may one day rap him over the knuckles with her trident and tell him it is time he took his loyalty elsewhere. But where? Plainly the present generation of Loyalists would prefer to starve on the streets of Belfast rather than to be linked, however loosely, with the Republic. Even if they believed that nobody in a United Ireland would discriminate against them, they would still – like the white Rhodesians – detest the prospect of being a minority with only a share of power surrounded by a majority whom they see as inherently inferior to themselves. For the Republic to alter its laws to accommodate the Protestant ethic would not be enough. The Loyalists would also need to be educated to feel that we Southerners are ‘equal’ enough to share statehood with them.

‘Which Majority?’ is an integral part of the ‘Who’s What?’ dilemma. Our anonymous guide to Unionist thinking gives one sort of answer:

But how and why did Northern Ireland first become a ‘Province’ of the UK? In 1920 the Unionists were granted those six counties of Ulster which had the largest Protestant populations; but in Fermanagh and Tyrone Catholics were in the majority and were appalled to find themselves thus abandoned to Orange domination. Had these two counties been allowed ‘self-determination’ at that time they would without hesitation have voted themselves out of Northern Ireland. Neither were the Unionists too pleased, since they wanted not Home Rule but a maintenance of their position within the UK. However, as Professor Beckett explains in The Making of Modern Ireland, ‘They were won over by the fact that, in the six counties left to them, they would be in a permanent majority.’ It is often forgotten nowadays that the Government of Ireland Act (1920) was not intended to partition Ireland permanently. It made provision for the setting up of a Council of Ireland, ‘With a view to the eventual establishment of a Parliament for the whole of Ireland, and to bring about harmonious action between the Parliaments and governments of Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland …’ It even mentioned reserving to Westminster postal and other services ‘until the date of Irish union’. Fifty-two years later all this was echoed in Mr Whitelaw’s Green Paper which declared that:

Now, however, the Northern Protestants are more determined than ever to resist absorption into an overtly Catholic Republic which they are quite convinced has been energetically supporting the Provo campaign since 1970. But for how much longer can the dying Orange tradition linger on? It is very much a wary, close-the-ranks tradition, always suspecting threats, plots, betrayals, conspiracies, always on the look-out for danger – from Rome, from a Canterbury corrupted by ecumenism, from the US, from Dublin, from Moscow, even from some surrealist alliance between all those ‘enemies’. As a social force it is as negative and destructive as the Republican hatred of England, as an expression of Christianity it is as perverse as Irish Catholicism (how much have these bitterly antagonistic parodies of Christianity influenced each other?). Yet Northern Protestantism – especially the Presbyterian version – has produced many individuals whose profound religious faith can be oddly consoling, even to an agnostic, amidst that tortured chaos to which the churches, as arrogant institutions, have contributed more than their share. Shorn of its neuroses, it could become a very valuable asset to the Ireland of the future.

I attended my first Peace March in Coleraine; because of domestic commitments I had missed the earlier, historic marches in Belfast and Derry. People warned me that this would be a mini-march – ‘The Coleraine folk are too bourgeois and buttoned-up, they’d never let themselves go like your lot from Shankill and the Falls!’ By the standards of those early marches it was indeed a small, subdued turnout of perhaps 2,000 (in a town with a population of 15,000). The majority of marchers were female and looked ‘middle-aged, middle-class and middle-brow’. Yet there were also quite a few young couples with infants in push-chairs or on Dad’s shoulders and several pairs of clergymen – Protestant and Catholic – pointedly walking together. I wondered what were the attitudes of the many impassive onlookers and passers-by who were not taking part. Surprisingly few policemen seemed to be around and there was no counter-demonstration such as had been organised by the Provos in Derry.

In the shadow of the handsome Town Hall we recited the Peace Declaration fervently, and sang a few hymns, rather tentatively, and mumbled a few prayers, rather vaguely. Then everybody marched downhill to cross the fine stone bridge over the Bann. On the other side we followed the river upstream for a quarter of a mile before turning off to pass through a working-class district with UVF RULE HERE daubed in black paint on several walls, Outside the Orange Hall we were silently observed by a group of hard-faced men (the UVF reps, mayhap?). One small boy, sitting astride a high wall, yelled, ‘Fuck the lot o’ yous!’ and the chatty woman beside me – wearing pale blue hair and a pale pink sweater – said apologetically, ‘Don’t be shocked, dear. You have to make allowances for them – it’s the way they’re brought up.’ I assured her that I was not shocked.

Afterwards in a crowded pub I sat among several young women who were refreshing junior marchers with odious fizzy liquids. When an elderly woman came to sit beside me I asked her if she had been marching. She looked scandalised and said fiercely, ‘I’m a Unionist, see. I wouldn’t have anything to do with these Peace People. It’s all organised from Andersonstown, so it is.’ (Andersonstown is one of Belfast’s Catholic strongholds.) Two friends of hers at the next table added grimly and rather cryptically – ‘It’s too late now!’ Yet the four of us had soon settled down to a mild booze-up and those hard-liners could not have been kinder to me. They were the type – very common in the North – who have hermetically sealed compartments in their minds. With the contents of the ideological compartment they hate Fenians and anything that might be suspected of having a Fenian taint; with the contents of the ‘human’ compartment they are spontaneously warm and welcoming to the individual ‘Fenian’ who happens to come their way.

Wherever I went, during this period, I heard people arguing about who should march with the Peace People. To outsiders it must seem that every sane person should have supported them, everybody who for seven long years had felt frustrated because there seemed to be nothing the ordinary citizen could do … But of course no Northern situation has been as simple as that for centuries past. In some areas I found that the most ardent peace-lovers had chosen not to march because they felt it was wiser to avoid giving the Movement a ‘gentry-image’. In other areas it was argued that no clergy should march as it would be fatal to give the Movement a ‘church-image’. Elsewhere it was judged a mistake for the families of ex-servicemen to march as this could give the Movement a ‘government-image’. And these various reactions were not as neurotic as they may sound. Behind the scenes at that time, in both the Orange and Green wings, many stood poised to seize on any scrap of ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ to their gullible followers that the Peace People were somebody’s tools. On the Orange side it was easy to discredit them by stressing their Catholicism, as Paisley did on the front page of his Protestant Telegraph on 18 September 1976. There he reminded his readers that the Peace Campaign was ‘commenced in St John’s Chapel, encouraged by Roman Catholic priests and perpetuated by such as Miss Corrigan and Mrs Williams’. Really nothing more was needed to turn thousands of fundamentalist ghetto dwellers against the Movement. However, to reinforce their antagonism, five ‘anti-peace’ biblical quotations were provided on the same page. For instance, ‘Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts (Ps. 28.3).’

It is tempting to condemn those who are so readily swayed by Mr Paisley. But the Loyalists to whom I talked in the ghettos of East Belfast, when I returned there in mid-September, did not seem blameworthy. To them there is a war on and they feel for the Peace People that scorn which the average stout-hearted Englishman or woman felt for pacifists during the world wars. I particularly remember one small neat parlour where Queen Elizabeth and Ian Paisley were grotesquely improbable companions on top of the television set. A pale little woman with lank black hair, whose UVF husband had been ‘in’ for the past two years, told me that a friend had urged her to march – ‘for the sake of the children, to try to stop it all before they grow up’. But how could she betray her husband – he who was doing time to preserve Ulster for the Queen! – by ‘walking in the street with papist harpies and viragos?’ (A verbatim quote.) To this woman, as to thousands of her neighbours, Fenians represent a threat to their state, their jobs, their religion. So they are easily persuaded that to support a movement which opposes all violence, including anti-Fenian violence, is treachery. Mr Paisley’s party proclaims itself interested only in Peace through Victory, by which it means a return to pre-1969 days with the Protestant majority firmly in control and no nonsense talked about power-sharing.

Green anti-Peace Movement propaganda paralleled the Orange version. It portrayed the Peace People as cowardly Quislings who were prepared to betray to the Brits those gallant lads who have sacrificed so much to win justice for the minority. This sounded plausible in those districts which for years now have been suffering daily and nightly at the hands of British soldiers who torment both the innocent and the guilty as they go about their business.

However, all the world knows that during the autumn of 1976 very many thousands ignored the propaganda of their hard-line leaders and were brave enough to march with ‘the other side’. When I returned to Belfast on 15 September it was over two months since I had left the city and I at once became aware that the eruption of the Peace Movement, during August, had dramatically changed the atmosphere. It is very difficult to describe such changes. I can only say that there was new hope on people’s faces and in their voices – even people who themselves had never marched, for one reason or another, and were sceptical about the Movement’s long-term prospects.

The other momentous event to have happened in Ireland during those months was the assassination of the British Ambassador to the Republic near Dublin. Throughout the Northern countryside that tragedy – so shattering and humiliating for us in the South – seemed to have made extraordinarily little impression. Where the murders of friends and acquaintances are comparatively common the blowing up of one more unknown person is evidently not very memorable. In Belfast, however, I did notice an unpleasant ‘undercurrent’ after-effect. Among extremists of both communities disappointment was frequently revealed at the failure of the assassination to damage Anglo-Irish relations. There was an almost childish sulkiness involved. Catholics commented sourly that after the grovelling public speeches of various Irish cabinet ministers, both on the day of the murder and at the memorial service, the ‘Free State’ might as well rejoin the UK. And Loyalists commented, equally sourly, that Britain had lost a wonderful opportunity to show the world what she really thought of those Fenian bastards. One man added, ‘See how well the IRA propaganda machine works? Even when an ambassador is murdered London can’t see through the hypocrisy in Dublin. But we won’t be listened to! In London they’d listen for ever to Fenian propaganda, like it was the gospel, but never to us.’

Several Loyalists insisted that the ambassador’s death was just one more bloody stupid Fenian mistake and that the intended victim was a top Northern Ireland Office official who was travelling in the next car. When I aired this theory in Provo circles it was naturally denied. But whether a mistake or not, Mr Ewart-Biggs’s murder is already being woven into the Green myth as the great and glorious exploit of a selfless patriot-hero. And of course there is a ballad …

The Northern Ireland Problem repeatedly provokes such ghastliness that it has come to be seen from outside almost as a Morality Play featuring allegorical figures impossible to think of as people like us; the figures of Anger, Pride, Greed, Revenge – or (rather less conspicuously) Temperance, Humility, Forgiveness. After eight years of terror and horror the mental gulf separating the North from the rest of the British Isles is immense. Even before 1969 it was wide enough because of Northern Ireland’s chronic introversion. For historical reasons the region has always been inward-looking and during its half-century of self-government it ‘got lost’, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, and simmered unhealthily in its own mythological juices. Then it was found again, but in circumstances that emphasised its isolation by making it seem – to the uninformed outsider – physically unapproachable, economically unreliable, morally undesirable and generally not nice to know. (Or at best, to the more charitable, an object of exasperated pity.) If this disdain is not tinged with guilt it should be. The Republic is guilty for having until quite recently encouraged Northern Catholics to adhere to the Green myth; and Britain is guilty for having ignored the dire influences of the Orange myth on the administration of one area of the UK.

A prolonged crisis becomes distorted in the public view when known only through the media. Tragedy, violence, drama, destruction, suspense – day after day and year after year the abnormal is stressed. And the ordinary individual, trying to lead as normal a life as possible, is quite forgotten. In an effort to restore the balance sentimentalists sometimes assert that only a tiny minority of the Northern Irish are responsible for The Troubles, the rest being innocent victims. I myself used to try to believe this but within weeks of crossing the border I had realised that it is nonsense. No society could get itself into such a mess without a majority of its population being involved – not through their deeds but through words and attitudes that create an atmosphere conducive to hatred, suspicion and revenge. It would be dishonest and ultimately unhelpful to ignore this harsh fact.