Читать книгу Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace - Joshua Levine - Страница 5

Samuel Johnson once told James Boswell that the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing, but not worth going to see. Early on in my journey I visited it with a guide who was even less enthusiastic. Just before it came into view, he turned to me and said, ‘You’re going to find this place disappointing.’ Luckily I was able to set both verdicts aside, especially the one from the man being paid to promote Northern Ireland. On an early summer’s day, with a stiff breeze blowing, the hexagonal black and gold columns seemed eerie and romantic. The Causeway was a bit smaller than I’d expected, and there were a lot of people around, but it didn’t matter; I was in a good mood, and my expectations had been set very low. Standing on a stone crop, staring out to sea, I was joined by the guide who took me into his confidence. All this, he assured me, wasn’t made by molten rock, forced up through the ground. It couldn’t be. The columns are perfect. They’ve got to be man-made. They must have been built by Stone Age people. Stone Age Irish people.

There is a legend concerning the Giant’s Causeway that it was actually built by Finn McCool (Fionn MacCumhaill in Irish), the leader of a band of great warriors, as a land bridge between Ireland and Scotland. McCool and a Scottish giant had been shouting insults across the sea at each other, but McCool wanted to be able to confront his rival in person. Constructing such a mighty land bridge proved hard work, however, and McCool fell asleep as soon as he had finished. While he slept the Scottish giant thundered down the Causeway towards him, but McCool woke up and spotted him. Perturbed by the size of his opponent, McCool – thinking extremely laterally – built a huge crib and lay down inside it, pretending to be a massive baby. The giant arrived, looked inside the crib, saw this grotesque infant, and panicked. If this was the size of McCool’s baby, how enormous must McCool be? The giant ran back to Scotland, tearing up the Causeway as he went, leaving only the remains that Dr Johnson did not consider worth going to see. Whether it was actually built by Finn McCool, a figure who came to inspire the republican movement, or by Stone Age nationalists laying claim to Irish territory, the Causeway, like so much else in Northern Ireland, has been used to service contemporary claims.

Perhaps the greatest character in Irish mythology is Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles, who is supposed to have defended Ulster single-handedly against the warriors of Queen Medb of Connaught. Cuchulainn, fearless, earthy, and principled, is a character with whom many have wanted to be associated. Mortally wounded, he is said to have bound himself to a pillar so that he might die standing up, and this scene is recorded on a bronze statue inside Dublin’s General Post Office, erected in memory of the 1916 republican rising. But Cuchulainn is also claimed by unionists and loyalists; a huge mural on the Shankill Estate shows him waving his sword in defiance at those who would threaten Ulster. When I asked a leading unionist politician about the legend of Cuchulainn, he reacted crossly to the word ‘legend’. Cuchulainn’s defence of Ulster is not a legend, he made it clear; it is history.

I found an interesting version of history in a 1982 play, cowritten by Andy Tyrie, then leader of the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary organization. This Is It! is a sharply observed piece of drama that tells the story of a young working-class Protestant who grows disillusioned with unionism’s lack of political ambition. It particularly caught my eye for the views of one of its characters, Sam, who gives an account of Ulster’s early history from a Protestant perspective. Sam argues that the people of Ulster, Protestant and Catholic alike, share a common ancestry that predates the coming of the Celts in the centuries before Christ; in those days, Sam claims, Ulster and Scotland were populated by the same race, called the Picts in Scotland and the Cruthin in Ulster. When the Celts invaded Ulster, they carried out a long and cruel extermination, forcing the Cruthin to move to Scotland. So, says Sam, ‘You could even suppose that some of those who came over here for the Plantation [Ulster’s colonization by English and Scottish Protestants four centuries ago] were in effect coming home again.’ This reading of history allows Sam to argue that Ulster is the Protestant homeland: ‘Our roots are here! Ulster people – Catholic and Protestant – both have a common ancestry and a common right to be here.’

Fascinated by this, I spoke to a respected university professor who prefers not to be named. Evidently the subject is rather controversial. The professor told me that the pre-Christian period of Irish history is very dark. The Picts were present in parts of Scotland, and there is indeed a tradition of a Cruthin people in East Ulster. But while these people might well have communicated with each other across the sea, and there may even have been an exchange of population, it is impossible to say that the Picts and the Cruthin were the same race. With regard to the Celts, the professor says that although there is a tradition that they arrived in Ireland in the years just before the birth of Christ, no archaeological evidence exists for a mass arrival or for an invasion, and there is no evidence at all that they carried out a long and cruel extermination of indigenous people. There is a tradition of a migration of people from Ireland to western Scotland at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, but it is no more than a tradition. So far as the idea of settlers ‘coming home’ to Ulster at the time of the plantations is concerned, the professor says that the seventeenth-century Scottish settlers came primarily from Scotland’s border with England. These settlers were not Gaelic speakers, and it would be wrong to consider them the same people as those who may once have left Ulster. It would, the professor says, be very difficult to identify an ‘Ulster people’. I am left with the strong caveat that I should be careful of historical interpretations which carry an underlying political motivation.

‘Throughout history,’ declares Sinn Féin’s website, ‘the island of Ireland has been regarded as a single national unit. Prior to the Norman invasion from England in 1169, the Irish had their own system of law, culture, and language, and their own political and social structures.’ While it makes political sense for Sinn Féin to describe pre-1169 Ireland as a ‘single national unit’, it makes less historical sense. During this period the island was a patchwork of independent chiefdoms, often at war with one another, and ready to make alliances to achieve greater power. One such alliance led to the arrival of the English in Ireland. It was struck between Dermot MacMurrough, deposed King of Leinster, and Henry II, King of England, and its legacy has dominated the story of Ireland for the past eight hundred years. Henry granted MacMurrough the services of Anglo-Norman barons to help him to regain his lost kingship. One of these barons, the Earl of Pembroke, known as ‘Strongbow’, overran Waterford and Dublin, and defeated the High King of Ireland in battle. Fearing the emergence of a rival Norman kingdom across the sea, Henry landed an army at Waterford in 1171, with which to confront the ambitious Earl. Strongbow quickly pledged obedience to Henry and promised him the lands that he had conquered. As Henry proceeded through Ireland, the native Irish kings swore fealty to him in turn – all except the rulers of Ulster.

This story of England’s first intervention in Ireland is told by the Welsh-Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, who describes a meeting at Armagh called by the Irish clergy ‘concerning the arrival of the foreigners in the island’. The clergy’s opinion was that God was allowing the English to ‘enslave’ the Irish, ‘because it had been formerly been their [the Irish people’s] habit to purchase Englishmen indiscriminately from merchants as well as from robbers and pirates, and to make slaves of them’. As a result they decreed that ‘throughout the island, Englishmen should be freed from the bonds of slavery’. Unfortunately for the churchmen, this decree did not result in an English withdrawal. Giraldus proceeds to declare proudly, ‘Let the envious and thoughtless end their vociferous complaints that the kings of England hold Ireland unlawfully. Let them learn, moreover, that they support their claims by a right of ownership resting on five different counts…’ Three of these counts rest on legends, one being the claim that the kings of Ireland once paid tribute to King Arthur, ‘that famous king of Britain’. The fourth count is that English rule had the authority of the Pope. The fifth is that ‘the princes of Ireland freely bound themselves in submission to Henry II, king of England, by the firm bonds of their pledged word and oath’. And so, from this casual intervention many hundreds of years ago, described by a highly partial observer, Anglo-Irish relations came to assume their familiar antipathy and bloodshed.

A problem for the English kings who came after Henry II, attempting to assert their authority on Ireland, was the tendency of their representatives to assimilate. The lords who were meant to be cementing English rule began instead to adopt Irish customs, language, and laws, and became difficult to distinguish from the existing Irish chieftains. By the end of the fifteenth century the English Crown’s authority covered only a small area around Dublin, known as ‘the Pale’. The area outside of English influence was therefore considered ‘beyond the Pale’, and remained subject to an anarchy of tribal conflict. Henry VIII attempted to re-anglicize the ‘Old English’ lords; he forced them to drop their Irish titles, and he re-granted them their lands under English feudal law, but his authority was not noticeably strengthened as a result. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, faced six rebellions from the Old English and the Irish. She put these down ruthlessly, and appointed officials with little sympathy for the local people. One of these officials was the poet Edmund Spenser, author of the tender couplet ‘Such is the power of love in gentle mind, that it can alter all the course of kind.’ But Spenser’s gentle mind did not extend to the Irish people, whom he considered ‘vile catiff wretches, ragged, rude, deformed’. As England became wealthier and more powerful, Ireland became a country to be suppressed and civilized. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign a centralized English administration was in place, as was a bitterly confirmed resentment of English rule.

By this time the issue of religion had also emerged. The Reformation of the Church had taken hold in England, but it had failed to do so in Ireland. It was proving difficult enough to impose an English administration on a resistant, widely scattered population, and utterly impossible to impose the Protestant religion. So a new policy was adopted: the colonization of the province by loyal Protestants. In 1606 Sir John Davies, the Irish attorney general, described Ulster as ‘the most rude and unreformed part of Ireland’ and he hoped that ‘that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English’. What better way to achieve this, and to deter the French and Spanish from creating an Irish bridgehead from which to invade England, than by settling Ulster with English and Scottish Protestants? A good part of the existing Irish population was forced from its land by these ‘plantations’, and the repercussions have been felt down the centuries. The Northern Ireland government of much of the twentieth century would be run by, and for, the descendants of Protestants who were brought to the province in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Lessons learnt in Ulster were immediately put to use by the English in their next effort at colonization by plantation, across the Atlantic in Virginia and New England. The Ulster plantation was the forerunner of the foundation of America. In the New World the native population was all but extinguished by slaughter and Old World diseases, leaving the settlers to thrive and give thanks every November. In Ulster, where the natives did not die off, a population with split allegiances and long memories was created.

Early in my travels I met a man named John Beresford-Ash. He lives just outside Derry with his beautiful French wife, Agnès, in a lovely late-seventeenth-century house, Ashbrook, that benefits from looking and feeling its age. John is a wonderfully old-fashioned character, impeccably mannered, entertaining, honest, and indiscreet. His family can be traced back over four centuries to the earliest Protestants to arrive in Ulster, and I had been told that he would be an interesting man to speak to, so I telephoned him and was immediately invited to lunch the following day. I showed up and sat with John and Agnès, intending to interview him after the meal, but the food was good, the wine kept coming, and the conversation bubbled along, taking in subjects as various as Lord Lucan (an old friend of John’s who is indisputably dead) and the Nuremberg Trials (another old friend was the junior British counsel). I finally rolled out of Ashbrook, virtually incapable, with the promise of an interview the following day. The promise was warmly kept.

Ashbrook was originally granted to Beresford-Ash’s ancestor, General Thomas Ash, by Elizabeth I in recognition of his loyal service to the Crown. Another ancestor was Tristram Beresford, the first land agent for the merchants of the City of London. Beresford was evidently a pragmatist. According to his descendant: ‘The Spanish were very short of oak trees to build their warships and one day some Spanish galleons turned up in the River Foyle. There were a lot of lovely oak trees here in Derry, doire being the Irish for oak grove, and though Elizabeth was a marvellous queen, she was awfully tight-fisted and she hadn’t paid her troops. My ancestor practically had a mutiny on his hands because his troops hadn’t been paid, and the Spanish had an awful lot of gold, so he said to the Spaniards, “If you can pay, I will give you the oak trees of Derry,” which he did – and thus committed high treason. He was had up by the court of the Star Chamber, but fortunately for him – and indeed most fortunately for me – he was a great friend of Walter Raleigh, who interceded on his behalf, so he didn’t get his neck stretched.’

Many of the plantations in Ulster were undertaken privately, the settlers being Presbyterian Scots whose independence of spirit has shaped the history of the province. In Derry, however, the settlement was funded by the livery companies of the City of London and many of the original settlers were Londoners. According to a 1609 privy council document, ‘It [the settlement] might ease [London] of an insupportable burthen of persons, which it might conveniently spare.’ In 1613 the London Companies were granted land by a royal charter, and the name Derry was changed to Londonderry because, according to John Beresford-Ash, ‘The London companies were keen on the fact that it was their money and their expertise that was being used. And it encouraged the people who came to live here, who were being harassed by the native population. The native population naturally resented these invaders coming – but whether they were invaders or not depends on your point of view.’

Invaders or not, the Protestant settlers lived apprehensive lives, surrounded by Irish Catholics who resented them for taking their land and repressing their religion. In 1641 the Irish rebelled, launching attacks on the settlements. A near-contemporary Protestant account describes the attacks, and blames them on the influence of the Catholic church:

‘The Priests gave the Sacrament unto divers of the Irish, upon condition that they should neither spare man, woman, nor child of the Protestants…One Joan Addis they stabbed, and then put her child of a quarter year old to her breast, and bid it to suck English Bastard, and so left it to perish…They brake the backbone of a youth, and left him in the fields, some days after he was found, having eaten the grass round about him; neither then would they kill him outright, but removed him to better pasture…At Portadown Bridge, there were one thousand men, women, and children, carried in several companies, and all unmercifully drowned in the river…Elizabeth Price testified upon oath, that she and other women, whose husbands and children were drowned in that place, went hither one evening, at which time they saw one like a woman rise out of the river breast-high, her hair hanging down, which with her skin, was as white as snow, often crying out, Revenge, Revenge, Revenge.’

It is estimated that about 12,000 Protestants were killed during the rebellion and, however exaggerated contemporary accounts might have been, they helped to condition attitudes that survive to this day. In the following years Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland and took the revenge called for by the snowwhite apparition. In the wake of a massacre at Drogheda where as many as 3,500 soldiers, civilians and clergymen were killed by his troops, Cromwell wrote, ‘It is right that God alone should have all the glory.’ An Irish Catholic tract composed in 1662 begins presciently, ‘It is a sad and severe position, that this contention between the two parties in Ireland will never have an end.’ The author’s solution is plain: ‘The country must at length give denomination to all that inhabit it: and the posterity of those that proclaim loudly the English interest, must within an age, admit themselves to be called Irish as well as descendants from the first Colony of English planted in Ireland.’ Almost 350 years later John Beresford-Ash describes his identity to me: ‘I’m entirely English. My family came from England and we were there before the Norman conquest. We can prove it.’

An Account of the Publick Affairs in Ireland, published in 1678, lays out English strategy in Ireland: ‘The principal and present security of the Kingdom consists of balancing the numbers of Irish with a superiority of strength, and leaving them naked, and the English in Arms.’ In 1685, however, the policy threatened to unravel. In that year the Catholic King James II came to the English throne. His succession brought hope to Irish Catholics, and he proceeded to grant them patronage, but three years later his Dutch Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, landed in England with an army. He came at the invitation of Protestant nobles who sought to save England from Catholicism. James chose to escape to France rather than fight his rival in England, and in James’s absence Parliament declared that he had abdicated his throne. William was crowned King of England in April 1689, by which time James had gathered an army and landed at Kinsale, on the south coast of Ireland, intending to use that country as a base to reclaim his throne. He marched to Dublin in triumph and continued north. It appeared as though he would take Ireland with ease; only the Protestants of Ulster would resist him. Protestants from across the province flocked to Derry with its strong defences, and James’s army besieged the city. ‘We were in our small house,’ says John Beresford-Ash, ‘and King James came over headed by the French, and all the Protestants emigrated within the walls of Derry. Ashbrook was burnt by James’s troops, and it was rebuilt after the siege. Thomas Ash was the senior member of the family, his father was dead, and he was in the yeomanry. He was obviously a fairly decent character.’

Thomas Ash kept a journal chronicling the siege. ‘Apart from eating rats,’ says his descendant, ‘I don’t suppose there was much else to do.’ At the start of his diary, written while King James was still on the throne, Ash stresses the insecurity felt by Ulster Protestants: ‘We had been alarmed by reports that the Roman Catholics intended to rise in arms against us, and to act over the tragedy of 1641.’ These reports coincided with news reaching Derry that a Catholic army garrison was on its way to the city to relieve the existing Protestant garrison. The Protestants of the city did not know what course to take. To refuse entry to the king’s garrison was treasonable, but they feared that the garrison was being sent to massacre them. Ash wrote: ‘While we were in this confused hesitation, on 7th December 1688, a few resolute Apprentice Boys determined for us: these ran to the Gates and shut them, drew up the bridge, and seized the Magazine. This, like magic, roused an unanimous spirit of defence, we determine to maintain the city at all hazards.’

The true siege began four months later, once William had become king and James had arrived in Ireland to try to win back his throne. On 15 April 1689 Ash writes of his suspicion that the man in charge of the city’s army garrison, Robert Lundy, was a traitor. Days later he records, ‘Colonel Lundy deserted our garrison, and went in disguise to Scotland, and by this, proved the justness of our former suspicions.’ To this day a traitor to the Protestant cause is known as a ‘Lundy’, and the man has become the Ulster Protestant equivalent of Guy Fawkes: his effigy is burned every December in the centre of Derry. Ash’s journal records a steady rain of ‘bombs’ and ‘mortars’ falling on the city from Jacobite guns, killing and injuring his acquaintances. On 10 July he records that inside one bomb there was no gunpowder but rather a ‘written paper’ offering James’s terms for surrender. ‘Be not obstinate against your Prince,’ read the paper, ‘expose yourselves no longer to the miseries you undergo…’ The cannonball that once contained this note is now on display in the vestibule of St Columb’s, Derry’s Anglican cathedral.

By 26 July the miseries of the besieged men, women and children had grown so bitter that ‘an experiment was tried on a cow at Shipquay. She was tied, and smeared with tar, and tow stuck to it, which was set on fire to make her roar, thinking that the enemy’s cows which were grazing in the orchard would come to her.’ The experiment was not a success. The following day Ash writes, ‘God knows, we never stood in so much need of a supply; for now there is not one week’s provision in the garrison: of necessity we must surrender the City, and make the best terms we can for ourselves. Next Wednesday is our last, if relief does not arrive before it.’ The entry also states that horses’ blood was changing hands within the city for two pence per quart, and it ends: ‘There is not a dog to be seen, they are all killed and eaten.’

His entry for the next day begins: ‘A day to be remembered with thanksgiving by the besieged in Derry as long as they live, for on this day we were delivered from famine and slavery.’ Two ships laden with supplies had burst through the boom placed across the river, and sailed into the quay below the city walls, while a third engaged the enemy’s guns. The siege was broken. The captain of the leading ship, the Mountjoy, was Michael Browning, the brother-in-law of Thomas Ash. According to John Beresford-Ash, ‘It was always said that Captain Browning was fanatically Presbyterian and anti-Catholic, but he simply wanted to rescue his wife who was inside the walls, so he persuaded the admiralty to allow him to take a ship up the Foyle. Tragically, he was shot before he got to relieve his wife – who remarried and had a baby about a year later. Pragmatic lady.’ He showed me a delicate tie pin, presented to the family by King William IV almost a hundred and fifty years after the siege, on which miniatures of the three ships are painted, with the words ‘To the memory of the gallant Captain Browning 1689’. Towards the end of his journal Thomas Ash writes: ‘The Lord who has preserved this city from the enemy I hope will always keep it to the Protestants.’

The city’s refusal to surrender ensured that James’s army did not take Ireland, and was not able to mount an attack on England. In June 1690 William landed at Carrickfergus and on 12 July his army defeated James’s troops at the Boyne. The triumph of the Protestants was complete, and the siege of Derry has symbolized Protestant defiance ever since. When men of the 36th (Ulster) Division went over the top at the Somme on 1 July 1916, their cries of ‘No surrender’ surprised members of a neighbouring battalion. Why shout about surrender at the start of a major push? But the cries were not referring to the current battle, but to a siege long gone, and to a state of mind ever present.

Walking through John Beresford-Ash’s house, with its portraits and its treasured jumble collected down the centuries, gave me a vivid sense of the family’s continuity. But his story is interesting in its own right. He came back to Northern Ireland in 1959, after school at Eton and a spell in the Irish Guards. ‘I became the first member of either the Beresford family or the Ash family to employ Catholics. Of course, they had had Roman Catholic tenants, but they had never employed them in the house, or on the farm, or as coachmen. I did it because I thought it was the most sensible thing to do.’

Beresford-Ash says that he could see the political situation deteriorating in the Sixties: ‘It was entirely the intransigence of the Proddies. The problem was not just the virulent speeches of people like Paisley, but also the blind stupidity of the so-called posh Protestants who ran everything. Roman Catholics in the Creggan and the Bogside had no vote at all. It was just so thick and stupid. And the British government took no interest in the situation. They couldn’t give a damn. I joined what was then the Unionist and Conservative party, and I had ideas. I said, “You’re riding for a fall!” I said the business about voting and gerrymandering has to end, but I was told that I was a new boy, and that I knew absolutely bugger-all about anything. Those were the things that kept us free, as they put it. Up in the Creggan, the roads were one-track because it was said the Roman Catholics would never have enough money to buy cars, so there was no need for cars to be able to pass each other. All this went on until the mid-Sixties. Most extraordinary blinkered situation among the Proddies over here.’

He remembers the reaction of other Protestant landowners to the fact that he was employing Catholics:

‘Oh, they thought I was beyond the pale. I was “one of them”. But my employees got on perfectly well with each other. There was no way they would be allowed to fight – or I would just sack the lot of them. I was the first member of our family to go to the Catholic church on Beech Hill, to a funeral. Paddy Gormley, our stack man, had died. I put on tails and a top hat, and I went inside the church, and none of them had ever seen that before. It impressed them that I would bother to do that, but I didn’t expect my Presbyterian men to go inside the church. They were willing to stand outside, and go to the grave – and none of them had ever done that before.’

In 1970 he met Cardinal Conway, the Catholic Primate of All Ireland:

‘The Cardinal had been asked to St Columb’s by the Dean, but nobody would talk to him at the Diocesan tea party afterwards. So I said to Agnès, “For God’s sake, go and get a table, and I’ll bring him over.” We started talking about life – not about Northern Ireland – and he realized that Agnès was French, and he said, “Whereabouts are you from?” and she said her father lived in Bar-le-Duc, and he said, “I remember coming back from Rome once, we stopped there when I was a young priest, and we went to the barber. We were talking among ourselves in Gaelic, and the barber said to us, in French, ‘What the hell language is that?’ and I said it was Gaelic. The barber looked at me and said, ‘Mon père, vous êtes préhistorique!’” But nobody else would talk to Conway at this tea party, and Agnès said that the thing to do was not to treat him as a bloody pariah. Agnès can do that, and so can I, and that’s how you make friends.’

For all that he recognized the political tension in Northern Ireland forty years ago, Beresford-Ash did not foresee the Troubles. ‘I don’t think anybody did,’ he says. He and Agnès were married in Paris in the spring of 1968, at the time of the student riots: ‘It’s so funny, I remember all the people at the reception after the service, saying it was wonderful that I was taking Agnès away to this lovely place from the ghastly city of Paris. Then, the next forty years…’

In 1971 Beresford-Ash almost lost his life, during an encounter with a local figure: ‘I was listening to the ten o’clock news one evening, and I realized I’d run out of cigarettes. I got in the car – Agnès was away in Paris – and I went to Guildhall Square. But the cigarette machine had been vandalized, so I went to Fiorentini’s café. There were two girls sitting in the café, and they asked me if I could give them a lift home. I thought to myself, well now, two young girls, my wife’s away. What about it? So I said yes, and asked where they lived. They said in a very subdued whisper, “The Creggan.” I thought about it – my God! This really is an opportunity. The Creggan was a no-go area, I could say that I’ve been there, and nobody else has. So I said OK, and I finished my cup of coffee, and Mr Fiorentini gave me two packets of cigarettes. We got in the car, and went up into the Lecky Road, and there were armed IRA men all over the place. The girls said some password to them, and we were let through. Then we were let through a second one by Free Derry Corner. Just after that there was a third one – and all hell broke loose. The car was surrounded. I was pulled out and forced onto the ground, and the girls were taken away.

‘Now, I looked and sounded like a British officer; I was about 30, and spoke the Queen’s English, so somebody must have assumed that I was a British officer, or that I was trying to spy on the IRA. My car was taken away, and I was bundled into the back of another car, and I was sat on by about five heavy young men – which was a most horrid thing. I was given a few kicks – not in the balls – but around the back and arms, and I was manhandled across a bit of green in front of the modern Catholic cathedral, into a place where I was sat in a chair, with a lightbulb above me, just like interrogations in films. A couple of fellows were behind me with old-fashioned Sterling machine guns, pointing at the back of my head, and then the most extraordinary sight. A crocodile of about a dozen men entered, all in balaclavas, a pretty shambolic-looking lot. Then an extraordinary character came in, who had the air of a deserter from the army. He was clean, fair-haired and much younger than me.’ (This man would one day rise to political prominence in the republican movement.)

‘The man took position behind my head, drew a pistol from his belt, and asked me various questions – which were pretty banal. Since I wasn’t in the army, and I wasn’t in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he couldn’t get any information out of me. He said, “Your car’s been seen going out of Ebrington Barracks on many occasions, so you must be a spy!” I said to him, “My dear fellow, you’re completely and absolutely crazy! These are my friends. These people were at school with me. Of course I’m going to go and see them and have them to my house. Do you think they’re going to tell me secrets about you? You’d have to be joking – they just don’t do that sort of thing!” Eventually he got fed up talking to me, and I stayed with these fellows guarding me for several hours. There was absolutely no brutality whatsoever, no question.

‘Eventually somebody else came in, and said, “OK, you. We’ll give you back your car” and I was led outside, and there was the car, engine running. The man who had been interrogating me was in an absolute fury. His eyes were just full of fury. He drew his pistol, cocked it, put it beside my head, and this other fellow said, “Oh no! Don’t kill him! We’ve checked him out with the boys in Ardmore, and he and his family have always been decent to people like us. He’s OK.” I remember those words very well; one tends to listen if you think you’re about to be killed. The man was absolutely livid. He put his pistol back in his belt and said, “Fuck off!” So I got in the car and drove away. But I had to ask, “Could you please show me the way out? I’ve never been here before.” And they did – they got into another car and they drove in front of me! They also pinched my cigarettes, which I really objected to. I still didn’t have any cigarettes after the whole bloody night.’

Many years later Beresford-Ash came across his interrogator again. ‘We were in a pizza restaurant one day, eating our nice pizzas, and as I walked through to have a pee, I walked past him. His table had a screen in front, with a bit of ivy on it, and as I went past, I put my fist through the screen, just to annoy him. I don’t know if he saw my face, but he could have seen my fist, all right.’

Thirty years after his experience in the Creggan, Beresford-Ash was again fortunate to escape with his life; between August 1997 and June 1998 his house was fire-bombed three times. He explains, ‘On the feast of the Assumption in August – the “Catholic Twelfth” as it’s called over here – they have a bonfire. People from the local council estate cut down an awful lot of our trees to make the bonfire, and this particularly annoyed me because there is so much dead wood lying about in our woods, all you’ve got to do is go and pick it up. I’d actually help them pick it up and make their bonfire with them – not a hope – they must go and cut down young trees instead. I got fed up with this, and I remonstrated with them.’ He was told, ‘We’ll get you for this!’

One night shortly afterwards Beresford-Ash and his wife were asleep in bed, when ‘there was a crash. It was the hall windows coming in, and petrol bombs landing. I was a damn sight fitter in those days, and I was down in a few seconds. My daughter also came down and, between us, we put the fires out.’

Six months later the house was attacked again. ‘This time it was much more dangerous, because they bust a hole through a window, and put a can of petrol on the window seat. They sprayed paraffin all round it, and set it alight; the idea was that when I came down to put the fire out, it would explode and blow me up, and the house as well. But someone – “the man upstairs” – was looking after me because the petrol can leaked. So when I came downstairs I saw a terrific ball of fire. There were fumes, and smoke, and flames, but I could see the white faces of my ancestors on the walls, and I remember saying to them, “It’s all right, chaps! I’ll save you!” And by God, I bloody well did! I still get quite emotional about that. I went over to pick up the water fire-extinguisher, and my bloody hip dislocated. Agnès was ringing up the fire brigade in the kitchen, and she heard me yelping, and she thought I’d caught fire, so she came in with a bucket of water. “Darling, don’t throw it over me,” I said, “throw it on the fire!” Then the fire brigade arrived, and they were absolutely superb.’

A few months later Beresford-Ash had a sixtieth-birthday party. ‘The local paper took a picture of Agnès, myself, and our three daughters outside the house, which they published, and we had a nice birthday lunch. Very soon after that, there was a hell of a thumping on the windows. By this stage we’d got bulletproof security windows, so they couldn’t fire-bomb the house. Instead they lit five fires on the gravel at the front, which represented myself, my wife, and our three children being burned.’

Beresford-Ash is convinced that he knows the identity of the chief culprit: ‘It was all done by the same people, led by the same man, and everybody knew it, the police knew it, it was the joke of the local pub.’ He later met a barrister, and told him the whole story: ‘I said, “For you, in the legal profession, how do you feel about this?” He said, “We know, and our judges know, who has done these things over the years, who these people have killed, and when and how they killed them.” I said, “Look, mate, point of it is, you’re prepared to say that, but then you’re prepared to go back on Monday morning and draw the old pay?” And he said, “Yes. Why not? Because if I didn’t, somebody else worse than me certainly would.” What can you say to that?’

I asked Beresford-Ash whether he considered moving away from Ashbrook after the attacks. ‘What? Leave here? Good God no! My dear Josh! This house has woodworm and dry rot, but, my God, I’m fond of it, and nobody’s going to kick me out of here! My daughter summed it up: after the second petrol bombing, Agnès was fed up and said we ought to go, but my daughter said, “Come on, Mum! We were here before these people, and we’ll be here after them!”’

Beresford-Ash is a man of great charm, who has made efforts over the years to foster good local relations, and this fact probably saved his life in the Creggan. Nevertheless, his attitude hardens as he discusses the peace process. ‘When the process started, I would wake up in the morning and listen to the news on Radio 4, and think to myself, thank God another soldier or policeman hasn’t been killed. But that has been the only real benefit. Otherwise I consider it the most disgraceful and despicable surrender by the British politicians, the judiciary, the legal profession, and it should have been stopped immediately it started. Because the Queen’s enemies were attacking the Crown forces. They should still be hanged – they’ve done it. And that’s my instinct.’

In Killyleagh I met another man whose family arrived in Ulster four centuries ago. Denys Rowan Hamilton is a man of precise military bearing beneath which lies a charming streak of mischief who, after coming to live in Northern Ireland in 1967, quickly became infuriated by much of what he saw. Born and raised in Scotland, Rowan Hamilton spent his childhood holidays in Ireland, and on leaving the army in his late forties he moved to County Down. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle, a fairy-tale fortress of towers and dogtooth walls that stands above the town. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans shortly their arrival. In 1604 the castle was taken over by Sir James Hamilton, an Anglican from Ayrshire, who was granted extensive lands in Ulster during the first plantation. It has remained in the family ever since. In 2000 Rowan Hamilton passed it on to his son and now lives in a house outside the town, where I kept him from his lunch, urging him to tell of his experiences.

‘When I made up my mind to come here,’ he says, ‘I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. I was going to start a new life. It’s quite a thing to do at 47.’ He was immediately fêted by well-to-do society: ‘They were saying, “We’ve got to have him!” and it was because I was the young Hamilton of Killyleagh. It really makes me laugh. They didn’t know me at all. I might have been the most ghastly shit.’

Killyleagh Castle, into which the ‘young Hamilton’ was moving, had been requisitioned by the army during the war, and had suffered from years of neglect: ‘My great uncle was clever, he wrote Latin poems and that sort of thing, but he was a useless fellow, and never did a stroke of work. Not much happened when he was in the castle. He sold a farm a year to pay his servants. When I finally took over, there were only twenty-seven acres left out of an estate that once ran up to Bangor. If we hadn’t come along, the castle would never have survived. Now it’s in better nick than it’s been for 150 years. And my son, the first Hamilton in four hundred years to make a penny, has redecorated it very nicely.’

On arriving in Northern Ireland, Denys Rowan Hamilton took an interest in more than just his castle, however. He had entered a world that was quite alien to him: ‘I had arrived from a sane society. This place wasn’t a democracy!’ He remembers meeting a clerk of the works at the council: ‘He would wring his flat cap in humility, asking if I had any jobs for him to do, and then he would start talking about all the dreadful murders of Protestants throughout history. He knew them all. He’d been taught at his mother’s knee how dreadful the Catholics were.’ Rowan Hamilton was furious at much of what he saw and heard, and he freely expressed his views. His stance, he believes, reflected his family’s values: ‘My family had always been moderate and liberal in their views. When Catholics had wanted their own church, the Hamiltons provided them with a place to hold their services.’

Rowan Hamilton was asked to stand as a reforming unionist candidate in the 1969 General Election. ‘I said I would stand. It was totally on principle. I wasn’t a politician, but I couldn’t believe that people could not try to get on with the other side. As soon as it was announced that I would stand, two staunch, bigoted unionists arrived at the castle. They demanded that I stood down. These were “respectable” people, masters of the stag hounds, and they marched towards me, yelling “No Surrender!” I pleaded my case to them, but they were pretty threatening. They told me that my mother would never speak to me again. I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known it would be like this! It was disruptive of the peaceful life that I’d wanted!’

Rowan Hamilton lost the election heavily, but it is a measure of his principle and determination that in a later election he agreed to stand for the Alliance Party, which seeks to bridge the gap between Catholics and Protestants. ‘In the run-up to that election,’ he says, ‘the person who invited me to stand, declined to come out in public and support me. He was frightened and didn’t have the guts to stand up for his views. I would say that I was socially ostracized for my stance.’ This foray into politics placed him in unlikely situations: ‘I found myself taking part in a roadblock for half an hour near Seaforde, at a junction of some importance. I was compelled to do it for political reasons, but I was rather embarrassed. It wasn’t really my thing.’

Rowan Hamilton is not the first member of his family to take a controversial political stance. His great-great-great grandfather, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, had been a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen. The Society, formed in 1791 in Ulster, was a secret organization, intent on creating a single Irish nation, independent of Britain, that would unite Catholics and Protestants. Catholics were subjected to repressive Penal Laws by the British authorities, but the United Irishmen were not Catholics; the original members were Protestants, mostly Presbyterians (known as ‘dissenters’) who were also subjected to discriminatory measures. Many tens of thousands of Presbyterians had left Ulster during the eighteenth century to begin new lives in the American colonies, where they contributed to the revolutionary fervour of the War of Independence. The democratic ideas of Tom Paine that inspired the American revolutionaries also stirred the United Irishmen. It would not be true to say that the bulk of the Ulster Presbyterians were sympathetic to Catholic grievances; the vast majority were sectarian in outlook. Nevertheless, there were those who were keen to sever links with Britain, and a few who were motivated by a desire for government by election and representation. While the Provisional IRA would one day be made up almost exclusively of Catholics, the leaders of the first republican movement to fight for an independent Ireland were Protestants.

Archibald Hamilton Rowan was an Anglican, born and raised in England, and educated at Westminster School, where he displayed ‘animal spirits and love of bustle’. His Cambridge tutor was John Jebb, an Irish radical who influenced his thinking, and an acquaintance was Lord Sandwich, with whom he ate an unusual meal of ‘thin slices of bread and butter with cold meat between each’. As a young man he went to live in France, where, during the American War of Independence, he displayed an early radical streak by introducing Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, to two Englishmen who wanted to enlist in the American forces. He came to Ireland in 1783 and became known as a defender of the rights of the oppressed after he espoused the case of a 12-year-old girl, Mary Neal, who had been abducted by the owner of a bawdy house. He became a member of the United Irishmen in November 1791 and wrote of the need for ‘reformation of the present state of the representation of the people’. He took to wandering around Dublin in a green uniform and standing up in theatres and shouting when ‘God Save the King’ was played. In 1794 he was convicted of distributing inflammatory material – a pamphlet entitled ‘Citizens to Arms!’ – and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

While in prison he was regularly visited by a close associate, Theobald Wolfe Tone, an Anglican lawyer from Belfast, who is nowadays the most celebrated of the United Irishmen. Hamilton Rowan asked Wolfe Tone to draft a memorandum to send to revolutionary France, encouraging the French to send an invasion force to Ireland. Wolfe Tone composed the memorandum, which assured the French that they would receive support from ‘the great bulk of the people’: 900,000 Presbyterians ‘from reason and reflection’ and 3,150,000 Catholics ‘from hatred of the English name’. Hamilton Rowan made copies of the memorandum in his own hand – and one of these copies fell into the possession of the British authorities. Realizing that he would be convicted of high treason and executed, he conceived, aided by his wife, a plan to escape from prison. He persuaded his gaoler that he would have to return home briefly in order to sign papers relating to the sale of a property. For a £100 bribe the gaoler agreed to accompany him to the house and escort him back to prison. This, at least, is the official version; Denys Rowan Hamilton said that his ancestor ‘bribed his gaoler to let him out of prison to screw his wife’. Either way Hamilton Rowan describes in his autobiography what happened next: ‘I then descended from the window by a knotted rope, which was made fast to the bedpost and reached down to the garden. I went to the stable, took my horse, and rode to the head of Sackville Street, where Mat Dowling had appointed to meet me…Some of my friends advised my taking my pistols with me; but I had made up my mind not to be taken alive, so I only put a razor in my pocket.’

Hamilton Rowan was taken first to the seaside house of a United Irishman, and then onto a boat owned by smugglers. As the little vessel passed the west coast of England, it caught sight of the British fleet, but Hamilton Rowan arrived safely in revolutionary France. But his troubles were not at an end. Expecting to be welcomed by the French as a republican hero and an enemy of Britain, he found himself imprisoned by the local authorities on suspicion of being a British spy. He was only released when his plight came to the attention of a prominent official who happened to be Irish.

Once his identity had been verified, Hamilton Rowan was presented to Robespierre, the driving force behind the reign of terror that was gripping France. He set about convincing the French to mount an invasion of Ireland, with the aim of securing its independence. His plan was that he himself would lead the invasion; the official who placed the plan before Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety described Rowan Hamilton as ‘the most striking patriot in Ireland’. It must have looked to Rowan Hamilton as though he was destined to become Ireland’s great revolutionary leader, but the plan came to nothing. Robespierre and the Jacobins were overthrown, and Hamilton Rowan became ‘much discontented with the distracted state of Paris, where they were too busy with their own intestine divisions to think of assisting Ireland’. He hurriedly left France for a slightly more established beacon of liberty – America.

The experience of living in Paris during the bloody reign of terror, and perhaps also the disappointment of watching his heroic destiny fail to materialize, seems to have dulled Hamilton Rowan’s revolutionary zeal. From Philadelphia he wrote to his wife: ‘I owe to you candidly, when it is of no avail, that my ideas of reform, and of another word which begins with the same letter, are very much altered by living for twelve months in France; and that I never wish to see the one or the other procured by force.’ Nevertheless, within months he had been joined in Philadelphia by Wolfe Tone, whom he offered to introduce to the French Minister to the United States. For a while Wolfe Tone settled down to live as a farmer in Princeton, but he did not admire the attitudes he encountered, describing Americans as ‘a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money’. While Hamilton Rowan remained in America, eking out a living as a farmer, dyer, and brewer, Wolfe Tone sailed to France, where he resumed his efforts on behalf of the Irish people ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils’. Wolfe Tone achieved what Hamilton Rowan had not: he persuaded the French to mount an invasion of Ireland in 1796, which might have succeeded had the thirty-five expeditionary ships, laden with thousands of French troops, not been prevented by bad weather from landing in Bantry Bay in County Cork.

Wolfe Tone was on board a French ship during the failed Bantry Bay expedition, and he persuaded Napoleon Bonaparte to launch another invasion fleet in 1798. The United Irishmen attempted to stir up an internal rebellion to coincide with the French invasion, but the government’s network of informers was effective, and the insurrection was ruthlessly put down in most areas. Only in County Wexford did a band of Catholic rebels mount a serious challenge to the army, but their indiscipline and lack of strategy eventually ensured their defeat. A small French fleet landed in County Mayo, but its troops surrendered to government forces when they could find no internal rebellion with which to join.

Wolfe Tone himself arrived with a subsequent French expedition, which was defeated by a British fleet in Lough Swilly. He was arrested and taken to Dublin, where he was sentenced to hang. While in custody he slit his throat with a penknife and a week later he died of his wounds. The rebellion of the United Irishmen was at an end, but republicans still gather at Wolfe Tone’s grave in Bodenstown every year to honour the man they revere as the father of republicanism.

While Wolfe Tone was attempting to bring revolution to Ireland, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was living a quiet life of near penury in America. At home in Ireland, his wife was attempting to restore his reputation in the hope that he might be allowed to return. He was eventually given permission to come back, first to Europe, then to England, and finally to Ireland. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle in 1806, where he retained his liberal beliefs to the end of his life. He was known as a benevolent landlord who reduced his tenants’ rents during times of economic distress. He also expressed a strong disapproval of slavery; a story in his autobiography recalls an encounter with a slave in New York State in 1799: ‘I lost one of my gloves, and having searched back the road for it in vain, I continued my route. Overtaking a Negro, I threw him the other, saying that “I had lost the fellow on that hill somewhere; that perhaps he might find it, and he never was possessed of such a pair in his life.” The fellow smiled. “No, Master, you not lost it; here it is;” and he took the fellow out of his bosom and gave them both to me. And this man was a slave, whose portion was stripes, and black dog his appellation from a whey-faced Christian!’

Hamilton Rowan died in 1834 at the age of 84. His last public appearance was at a meeting of the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, from which he was borne aloft by a triumphal crowd. Looking back on Hamilton Rowan’s life, William Lecky, the nineteenth-century Irish historian, described him as ‘foolish and impulsive, but also brave, honourable, energetic and charitable’.

Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s son reversed the order of the family name, turning Hamilton Rowan into Rowan Hamilton. According to his great-great-grandson Denys, he did this partly to emphasize the Hamilton side of the family and partly to disassociate himself from his radical and embarrassing father. When Denys was at prep school, two American brothers with the surname Hamilton Rowan entered the school, and Denys has little doubt that they are relatives. ‘To me it is quite obvious that Archibald Hamilton Rowan took a common-law wife while he was in America, and started a family, but when I said to the American Hamilton Rowans, “You’re all from the wrong side of the blanket,” they didn’t like it much. Americans can be churchy.’

However fruitful his American legacy, the extent of Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s Irish legacy – or at least the legacy of the United Irishmen – is considerable. Until the 1800 Act of Union, Britain and Ireland were legally distinct kingdoms with separate Parliaments. The Act brought the kingdoms together to create a ‘United Kingdom’. Some Protestants objected to the Act of Union because it removed any prospect of an independent Ireland. And some Catholics welcomed the Act of Union because it offered the possibility of a more tolerant administration. Over time, however, attitudes migrated into those with which we are familiar today; Protestants came to believe that the union with Britain would guarantee them their ascendancy, and Catholics came to believe that their condition could only be improved by a repeal of the union. These beliefs lie at the very heart of the two communities’ modern identities.

Republican movements arose in the years after the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion; the forerunner of the modern IRA was the Fenian Brotherhood, named after Cuchulainn’s band of warriors, the Fianna. Formed in the aftermath of the Irish famine of 1845–51, during which the population of Ireland fell by as many as two million, the Fenians planted a bomb in a wheelbarrow outside Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867. The bomb killed six people and injured hundreds of others. Rumours spread through London of further planned Fenian attacks, sparking widespread panic. When, six years later, a bridge over Regent’s Canal was destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder on a barge, it was immediately believed – wrongly – to be the work of Fenians: troops based at the nearby Albany Street barracks were mobilized to counteract the supposed Irish threat. Such fears would return a century later, when the Provisional IRA started planting bombs in England. And to this day ‘Fenian’ is a derogatory term used by Protestants to describe a Catholic.

In 1886 the Liberal Party in Westminster, led by William Gladstone, introduced a bill attempting to grant Home Rule to Ireland. Home Rule would have amounted to limited self-government, an early form of devolution. Gladstone’s bill failed and Ulster unionists proceeded to do everything they could to prevent another bill from succeeding. The Presbyterians and Anglicans of Ulster had come to consider themselves defenders of the British empire, fearful for their prosperity and heritage in a Catholic-dominated Ireland. As another Home Rule bill passed through the House of Commons in 1913, a quarter of a million Protestant Ulstermen signed a covenant – some in their own blood – pledging to resist it. An Ulster Volunteer Force of 100,000 men was created, armed with weapons smuggled in from Germany, ready to fight for Ulster’s future. But as the prospect of civil war loomed, the attention of all parties was diverted by the outbreak of a bigger conflict – the First World War. The implementation of Home Rule was delayed until after the end of the war, and young men from both sides of the Irish divide joined the British army; unionists in order to prove their loyalty to the King, nationalists in order to earn the right to have Home Rule implemented once the Great War was over.

On 24 April 1916, at the very height of the war, an event took place in Dublin which had a profound effect on the Irish people, whose attitudes were, to quote Yeats, ‘changed utterly’. A small number of rebels, led by Patrick Pearse – a poet and schoolmaster who once wrote: ‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; slavery is one of them’ – seized public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the formation of ‘the Provisional Government of Ireland’. The rebellion was put down, and its leaders, including Pearse, were executed as traitors. The almost mystical influence that Pearse has come to exert on the modern republican movement was brought home to me by one republican, who told me this story. ‘Patrick Pearse had no republican background. His father was an Englishman. But when he walked down the street he saw the kids in their bare feet on the cobblestones, and their feet hacked with darkened blood. And the kids were playing, and singing about the Grand Old Duke of York, a bastard who had them shoeless and poverty-stricken in their own country. And he went up the stairs, and his brother Willie followed him up and said, “What’s wrong, Patrick?’ He said, “I’ve seen a terrible thing. Children, not fed properly, with their feet hacked, glorifying the Grand Old Duke of York.” Pearse was a sensitive man, and an educated human being, and he was choked up, and the two men hugged, and swore that they would never desist until English rule in Ireland had ceased. It was the last straw. And the last straw wasn’t theological or cultural. It was as simple as that.’

Following the executions of Pearse and the other rebels, Irish expectations changed. No longer was Home Rule considered a sufficient ambition. The national objective became full independence. For two years, between 1919 and 1921, a war (known by one side as the Anglo-Irish War and by the other as the War of Independence) was fought between the British government and the guerrilla IRA, until a truce was called. A treaty was signed which created the Irish Free State, a dominion state, similar in status to Canada, but not the republic for which the IRA had been fighting. Michael Collins, who negotiated the treaty on behalf of the republicans, argued that the treaty gave the Irish ‘the freedom to win freedom’. Other republicans took the view that it represented a betrayal of their principles. A bitter rift developed which gave way to a bloody civil war between recent brothers-in-arms. Yet as republicans argued about the constitutional status of the Free State, they barely questioned another result of the treaty: the formation of a northern state for the Protestants of Ulster.

The new state of Northern Ireland consisted of only six of the nine counties of the old province of Ulster, carefully chosen by unionists to ensure that the new state was large enough to be politically and economically viable, but small enough to embrace a large Protestant majority. Northern Ireland was granted its own Parliament, meaning that it was no longer subject to direct rule from Westminster – and so, with a certain irony, the province that had vowed to take up arms to resist Home Rule became the only part of Ireland actually to receive Home Rule.

The lack of vocal objection from republicans to the creation of Northern Ireland may have been because they expected a forthcoming Boundary Commission to reduce its size to an unviable four counties, forcing it to reintegrate with the Free State. But in the event the Boundary Commission merely ratified the existing border. More than one present-day republican would tell me, with great regret, that had Michael Collins suspected that the border would remain unchanged, he would never have signed the treaty.

Once in place, the government of Northern Ireland became, in the words of its first Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. It viewed itself as an answer to the Free State’s Catholic government. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, sincerely believed that the partition of Ireland would finally solve the ‘Irish problem’, but hundreds of years of antipathy were not to be cancelled out by the stroke of a Boundary Commissioner’s pen. Throughout the Troubles, republicans in Northern Ireland considered the results of the 1918 General Election and the 1920 Local Government Elections – the very last all-Ireland elections – as their mandate for a unified, independent Ireland. In those elections supporters of Irish independence won a majority of votes across the entire island. As a result, say republicans, the subsequent partition of the country was unlawful, and successive IRA campaigns aimed at reversing partition have been legitimate. Yet in the 1918 election unionist candidates won twenty-two out of twenty-nine constituencies in the north-eastern counties. Does this then confer on unionists the right to live in Ulster under British rule? The traditional republican view is that unionists are Irish men and women who will one day wake up to their true Irish identity, just as the United Irishmen once did. Unionists have little time for such an analysis. So far as they are concerned, they are loyal subjects living in a legitimate state, with a right to choose their own sovereignty.

There has been a long tradition of settlers arriving in Ulster, and that tradition has continued to the present day. Andy Park is a Presbyterian, born and raised in Glasgow, who decided to come to live in Northern Ireland in the early Seventies because ‘I was a loyalist, and I felt that my country was under threat. I felt that my culture and heritage was disappearing here.’ I went to visit Park at his smart home on a newly built estate in Lisburn. I arrived much later than I had intended, after setting off late and then being held up by a series of police roadblocks, but Park and his wife, Mary, could not have been friendlier. Park has a very cheeky, boyish manner, and I felt relaxed talking to him, but whenever I challenged him, he would stand his ground with a vehemence that made me wonder whether I was offending him. I don’t think I was, but his is the passion of a man who has devoted his life to a cause, and that passion is not easily switched off, even over tea and KitKats, while a cat snoozes on his lap.

Park had a ‘straight type of Scottish Presbyterian upbringing’ in Glasgow. ‘As a young teenager my Sunday consisted of Boys’ Brigade Bible class between ten and eleven. Then I went to church. After that I had the Church Youth Fellowship, and then I had Sunday School. I came home from Sunday School, had something to eat, and then me and a couple of my friends went to a wee Apostolic church Sunday School from three to four. At half past six I went back to the Fellowship, and that was my Sunday. And we weren’t allowed out to play. We had very clear guidelines on what was right and what was wrong.’ Members of his family had moved from Ulster to Scotland over the previous century, and Park was enlisted in the ‘Cradle Roll’ of the Orange Order before he was even born. He became a member of the junior Orange Order when he was about seven, and later joined an Orange flute band: ‘I learnt to read and appreciate music. I would never have got that at school.’ His father left the Order because of the friendships he had made with Catholics during the war, when he was fighting in Italy with an Irish regiment. ‘But,’ says Park, ‘he was still supportive, and he’d go to the Orange parades.’

Park began work in the shipyard in Clydebank, like his father before him, but the shipyards began to close and he found himself out of work, so he joined the Royal Engineers. ‘When the Troubles started, there were people in the army who held republican views, and I felt challenged, so I put photographs from the Belfast Telegraph over my bed on 12 July [the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne] and I was told to take them down.’ He was sent to Northern Ireland with the Royal Engineers: ‘I did three tours. The second tour was an interesting one because I was stationed in Lurgan, and I let it be known locally that I was an Orangeman, and I was invited to an Orange meeting that nobody knew about. I would have been in trouble if the army had found out.’ Soldiers were supposed to be impartial; their role was to keep the peace between the sides. Active participation in the Orange Order hardly constituted impartiality.

When he left the army, Park moved to Northern Ireland because he felt his country was under threat. I asked him what he means when he says ‘my country’. He explained, ‘I’m British and I will defend my right to be British. I believe in the British way of life, I believe in the sense of justice and fairness that British society gives me. It’s not religious, it’s not sectarian, and it’s not racist. It gives me my whole value system, the whole being and identity of who I am.’ Later in our talk Park was to describe his membership of the Orange Order in almost identical terms: ‘Orangeism is what gave me my value system, who I am today, gave me my roots, gave me my identity, my morals. It’s a camaraderie, a fellowship.’

The key words here are ‘camaraderie’ and ‘fellowship’. National identity is a very nebulous concept; Park’s sense of sharing values with others who describe themselves as British may to be enough to give him a British identity, just as sharing values with those who describe themselves as Orangemen gives him an Orange identity. But I wanted to dig a little deeper. If people across the United Kingdom nowadays describe themselves as Scottish, as Welsh, as Londoners, but rarely as British, does it occur to him that the unionists of Northern Ireland are becoming isolated in stressing this identity? ‘Yes, I’ve questioned this myself,’ he says, ‘Sometimes I feel more British than what the English do. I accept that. I think that’s because we felt under threat for the last hundred years, so we said, “This is who we are, and what we are, and you’re not taking it away from me!”’ Britishness in this context could be construed as a negative: as a way of saying that, whatever we are, we are not Irish. But Park is adamant that his Britishness is far from negative: ‘Britishness is about openness, it’s about giving freedom to all. That’s what William of Orange stood for – freedom for all faiths. It’s not just a bland “I’m British” and it’s not a white Anglo-Saxon thing either.’

When I asked Park how Scottish he feels, and how Northern Irish, he answered, ‘Being British doesn’t divorce me from my Scottishness, and it doesn’t divorce me from my thirty-seven years in Northern Ireland.’ He tells me the story of a loyalist politician who travelled to the United States several years earlier, where he was challenged by an Irish American on the subject of his identity. The politician said, ‘You identify yourself as an Irish American when you’re three or four generations down the line, and yet you say it’s wrong for me to call myself British! Why can I not identify myself as British Irish?’

I asked Park if he remembered what was in his head was when he settled in Northern Ireland in 1972. ‘I wanted to come over and fight the war. If I had any skills, I wanted to bring them over to Northern Ireland. There was no use me sitting in a pub in Glasgow, talking about it.’ What does he mean by ‘fight the war’? ‘I believed that the British army, for various reasons, wasn’t defending Protestant people, either by government restraints or in personal restraints. Some of the squaddies were, in my eyes, republican sympathizers. That challenged me very much, so I came over.’ He tells me that he did not join a paramilitary organization. Given that he had spoken of the need to ‘fight the war’, I asked him why not, and he told me, ‘You’re trying to make a distinction between being a member and not being a member. There’s maybe no distinction. I maybe have given tacit support – and maybe more than tacit support – without being a member. So don’t assume because I wasn’t a member that I wasn’t doing things.’

Park calls himself a loyalist. I asked him what this means. ‘A loyalist is somebody who wants to maintain the union with Britain and will go to lengths to maintain that union.’ What lengths? ‘Defending the community. Because we felt under daily threat.’ Park describes his politics as left-of-centre, and in recent years he has been an influential member of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which once represented the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but has proved forward-thinking in its policies. The PUP has strongly supported the peace process and attempted to forge links between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Its ideal is an inclusive socialist United Kingdom. I asked Park whether there was a contradiction between his loyalism – which would seem to have conservative overtones – and socialism. ‘Most of the victims and perpetrators of this dirty war came from the working classes. Not too many middle-class people got their hands dirty. I’m not part of any Protestant ascendancy! As a working-class Prod, where’s my ascendancy? I don’t own a big house! And my daughter can’t be Queen of England because she’s a Presbyterian! I’m a dissenter! I started off in a worse place than the Roman Catholics did – at least they had a title! Presbyterianism is the core in Northern Ireland.’

In January 1976 Park was badly injured in an explosion in the Klondyke Bar in Belfast. He tells the story: ‘People came from the IRA to bomb a pub in Sandy Row. The Klondyke was next to the bridge, and it was an opportunity for them because there were no visible guards, and they placed the bomb inside the door. I was standing just the other side of the door with my two mates when the bomb went off. I remember a flash; there was one of these gas fires in the pub and I had a vague thought something had happened with the fire. Up until a few years ago, I had a picture in my head of flying through the air – but I spoke to an ambulance driver who said, “Andy, it didn’t happen that way. We dug you out. The roof caved in and the bar came on top of you.” I’ve never read about the bomb, and I never saw a picture of it until recently.’

Park was in the Royal Victoria Hospital for almost a year. He lost part of his thighs and one hip, and had steel callipers on both legs for eight years. The initial medical view was that one leg would have to be amputated, but the leg was saved. Park was bedridden for three months. ‘When I started putting my legs over the bed, just to sit – the blood rushing down was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.’ He remembers incidents from his time in hospital. ‘Just after the bomb, there was a guy next to me who was dying, and his sister was a nun. They were sitting there going through the rosary beads, and oh! Can you understand the anger, resentment, hatred I had for all things Roman Catholic? I couldn’t distinguish between Roman Catholicism and the IRA. They were all the same. It was so hard. And then I remember the two night nurses. One night a bomb went off right outside the hospital and one of the nurses sat with me the whole night, did not move from my bed, comforted me, talked to me. I was… Jesus…I was almost hanging from the ceiling. I later learnt that it was an IRA bomb and the bomber had blown himself up. I’m sorry to say, when I found that out it gave me a sense of satisfaction.’

Park’s wife Mary would come to visit him twice a day in hospital, even while she was pregnant with their son. ‘I’d give her a tongue-lashing if she was late. She brought me pieces of chicken and steak, and I wasn’t grateful at all. The nurses would give me a bottle of Guinness to build me up, and my wife used to bring me a half-bottle of whisky or vodka, so I was drinking when I was still in hospital on medication. The only reason I wasn’t falling about drunk because I was already lying down.’

Two of Park’s friends died as a result of the explosion. One, John Smiley, was killed at the time; the other, Jackie Bullock, lost both of his legs, and drank himself to death over the next two years. Once he was out of hospital, Park began drinking several bottles of vodka a day. He describes his state of mind: ‘Turmoil, hatred, anger. I hated them all. Hated them with a vengeance. I lay in bed at night, planning how I was going to get my revenge. I went through scenario after scenario, finding out where they lived, how I was going to visit them. Revenge, total revenge. And I became an alcoholic. It killed the pain. And the uselessness. I felt useless. Worthless. Even when I started on the road to physical recovery, I wasn’t achieving what I set out to do, and it was hard for the wife and the family. I’ll be straight with you – if the roles were reversed, I don’t think I’d have been around to take the abuse. I wasn’t physical, but I was sarcastic, cutting to the bone with a remark. I wasn’t grateful at all to be alive. When I stopped drinking in 1984, I was six and a half stone.’

He explains how he managed to stop drinking: ‘One time I was in hospital for about ten days, I’d burnt the gullet of my stomach lining with alcohol. The doctor was absolutely brilliant. She turned around to me and she said, “Andy, would you like to see someone who deals with alcohol-related illnesses?” She didn’t say to me I was drinking too much, didn’t say I was an alcoholic, and the upshot of that was I went into a mental home in Down-patrick, and I was there for nearly four months drying out and detoxing and things like that. And through that I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. It told me to get a sponsor, somebody you can identify and talk with, and the strange thing was that my first and only sponsor in AA was a Roman Catholic, a high member in the Gaelic Athletic Association – and I was sharing secrets with him that I hadn’t shared with any person in my life. That was changing for me, and I became a twelve-step carer, I did prison visits, and I was also very heavy into politics.’

Park might have been sorting out his own chaos, but Northern Ireland remained a chaotic place to live. ‘Everything became normal. That’s the crazy thing. You’d just think, there’s a bomb over there, I’ll cut down this way instead. Near the end of the Troubles my little sister came over to visit me from Scotland, and she brought a friend. One day there was a soldier lying in my garden, and I brought them home, and we had to step over the soldier to open the front door. The wee friend started getting in hysterics, saying, “There’s a man lying in your garden with a gun!” I goes, “Aye, it’s a soldier. It’s all right.’ It wasn’t until later on that I saw that this wasn’t normal. We never ventured outside of our own immediate areas. That wee geographical circle became your world. You wouldn’t go into town after five o’clock, and there were no buses on. Being aware of where you could go, and where you couldn’t go, became a natural instinct. You didn’t even think about it. It’s why I say that everybody in Northern Ireland has been a victim of this war.’

When Park travelled across to Scotland, he took his Belfast habits with him. ‘I went out shopping in Glasgow, and when I came back to the car, I was down on my hands and knees checking underneath the car. Mum said, “What are you doing?” so I pretended I’d seen a flat tyre. Once when I went to get a drink with my dad, a car backfired, and I assumed the position down on my right knee. My dad didn’t say anything.’

Park became the chairman of the Ulster Clubs movement. The movement was intended to unite loyalist groups against government moves to increase links between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and to provide an association for loyalists unwilling to join a paramilitary group. In September 1988 the movement’s treasurer, Colin Abernethy, a close friend of Park, was shot dead by the IRA on a commuter train. ‘Colin was travelling to his work, and as the train drew in at Lambeg station, two guys dressed as postmen got up and shot him in the head. The statement came out that they’d killed the leader of the Ulster Clubs movement, but that was me. My son Andrew and Colin were very close. During that week Colin had come up with two fish tanks and all the equipment, said he’d be up next week to bring the fish. Andrew and Colin were both into tropical fish. Andrew took it quite badly at the time. The visual impact was that he lost all interest in tropical fish, and didn’t set up the tank. He was spending more and more time in the house, you know, we thought it was him just growing up, his adolescence. I was getting heavily involved in the loyalist movement in my politics, and there were threats to my life, but I was trying to keep that away from him.’

One day Park received a message from his son’s school. ‘We went up to the school, and the teacher said, “Are you aware that Andrew is taking on your security?” He was getting up at seven o’clock in the morning, looking underneath the car, and on the nights I wasn’t in he was sitting at the window waiting for me to come back. Mary was working as a nurse in Musgrave Park Hospital, and Andrew said to her, “Would you not give up that job, Mum? Because if anything happened to Daddy I wouldn’t know what to do.” I mean that came as a big, big blow to me because I thought I was keeping that side of my life away from the family.’

Years later, in 1996, when a bomb in Canary Wharf in London broke the IRA ceasefire, Andrew reacted badly: ‘I was going up the stairs, and Andrew was coming down when we heard the news. Andrew would have been 20, a big, strapping lad, six foot one, and he wrapped his arms around me and started crying, and he said, “No, it’s not starting again, Daddy, is it?” and I had to assure him that everything was all right. That’s the scars that people don’t see. At that time I was doing peace work, and it was risky, and if my own community was to find out who I was talking to, it would have been pretty bad. It started to edge out that I was doing these sorts of things, and we had a family conference and Andrew turned around and said, “Dad, how can you talk to these bastards? They blew you up, they killed your mates!” And that came as a shock to me because here was me, I was moving from one end of the sphere to the other, and trying to look at dialogue and mediation, and here was my son stuck with my pain, my anger. For our children, they’ve seen the aftermath of it, and we need to keep a cycle going where their children don’t see physical force or violence.’

When I asked Park how his experiences have affected his loyalism, he told me, ‘I’m still a loyalist, but now we can look at how we can achieve our aspirations in a different way. We don’t need to kill and maim and blow each other up for it. There’s a lot of scars out there, I mean I’m still living with the scars, I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I get into depressions, I shut myself away for days at end, but at the end of the day it’s people like me and other people who do this work, it’s the only way forward. If I relate it to how I felt in 1972, it was important for me to come over and fight the war for my culture, and I think it’s also incumbent on me to fight for peace.’

I asked him whether genuine politics has come to Northern Ireland. ‘We need to move into normal politics,’ he replied. ‘We’re only starting – we’re learners at the political game. We’ve got to learn what democracy is. We need to get involved in civic responsibility. I think working-class Prods have been disenfranchised from civic society. My party, the Progressive Unionist Party, is a social-justice party. Left-of-centre politics: we try to look at bread-and-butter issues. We believe in maintaining the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but we believe that’s done and dusted. We try to be broad-based, and we stress the importance of health and education and real issues.’

Does he feel threatened by the possibility that Northern Ireland might one day become part of a united Ireland? ‘Where are we going to be in fifty years politically? If the present circumstances were to still exist, then yes, possibly I would feel threatened, and maybe wanting to take up arms again. But life changes. Everything’s up for grabs within politics, and the onus is on republicanism to persuade me that I’d be better off. One thing I’ve not heard in all the talk of a united Ireland is what will they do about the northern Prods? Do they think northern Prods are going to roll over, have our bellies rubbed, and we’ll be all right? I want to know where I am in this republican vision.’

Park fears a united Ireland in which unionists and loyalists would have little significance. He tells me of a recent attempt to mount an Orange parade in Dublin. ‘Remember our headquarters was once in Dawson Street in Dublin. So nowadays we’d get a wee corner of the road where we’re not significant? That’s not how I want to practise my culture, my heritage, my beliefs. We’ll get a wee corner, with another corner for the Moslems, and another corner for the Jews. That’s not what I want. I want my kids to be proud of who they are and what they are.’ So is he frightened of becoming a minority in his own land? ‘No, I’m not saying that. I am a minority in a certain sense. If Catholics and republicans want to be the majority, are they going to do the same things that the majority did to them, or they perceive the majority did to them?’

Despite his obvious concerns for the future, Park echoes the view of Ian Paisley about society coming together: ‘I see an “usness” creeping in. I see a “we” instead of an “us” and “them”. Maybe I’m being optimistic. But life’s made me pragmatic. If I think too much about the past, I get hurt and pain. Now the future is what’s important. I want to make sure that nobody else goes through that hurt and pain.’

As I say goodbye to him, Park tells me that there is stuff in his past that he will never divulge. ‘I’ll take it to my maker, and that includes people that I’ve talked to, and influence that I’ve had.’ Andy Park, with his enthusiasm for life, his sudden bouts of intensity, his simultaneous openness and secrecy, his desire for tolerance and understanding within an unrepentant ideological framework, has been a good introduction to the Northern Ireland state of mind. Six decades before the Troubles began, G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The Great Gaels of Ireland,

The men that God made mad

For all their wars were merry,

And all their songs were sad.

I thought about this ditty as I drove away from Lisburn. Chesterton may not have had the Troubles in mind when he wrote it but, still, having spoken to Andy Park, it bothered me. Park’s injuries, the deaths of his friends, and his part – whatever it may have been – in ‘fighting the war’ did not strike me as very merry. And no matter what God made the people of Northern Ireland, and no matter what the newspaper reports would have had us believe, it was surely not going to be possible to waive an airy hand, and dismiss them as ‘mad’. Passionate, prejudiced, charming, conditioned, self-important, victimized, stubborn, self-righteous. But mad?