How do I sum up the centenary, or at least my own share of over 70 years of it, more than half them in England? I can’t ignore the itch to say something, can I? After all, this is a huge chunk of my life as it is yours, or many of you. Yet summing up is hard to do. A quotation from As You Like it, the first Shakespeare play I read at school seemed apt at first: “An ill favoured thing, sir, but mine own”. But finally too begrudging to describe the environment where my outlook on life and the world was formed.
The absence of a bland background has its advantages. Recalling the Protestant Derry of the 1950s and early 60s, while so much emphasis since has naturally been placed on structural discrimination and poverty, my little world was characterised by accommodations and a wary cross community civility. Traces of an old diversity lingered which today are being painstakingly recreated for a different future. The border was but one dimension of a more complicated personal reality.
I lived in the shadow of the Church of Ireland cathedral of the united diocese stretching from Glencolmcille in the south west Donegal Gaeltacht to Kilrea on the west bank of the Bann, a distance spanning distinct cultures even within the Church of Ireland. It was kept going by venerable clergy who were refugees from the newly independent south, and who I still think of as characters by William Trevor out of Anthony Trollope. My godfather was a C of I Dean, an Irish scholar who rendered what was required by the Caesar of where he happened to find himself at the time. The Catholic bishop of Derry Neil Farren had been a neighbour of my aunts’ as a boy when he attended St Columb’s College over which he later presided. They bowed solemnly at each other in the street. No quarter was asked or none given on religion though. Farren was a fierce Ne Temere advocate against religious choice in mixed marriages, a controversy that raged in my childhood. It has largely subsided party through discreet toleration but largely through rapid church decline. Was Paisley right after all? No, because of the beam in his own eye and his lack of basic human respect.
Catholics and Protestants played and sang classical repertoire at the annual Londonderry Feis, but Catholics only at the Feis Doire Colmcille the following week. I used to wonder why. Although I had a Catholic music teacher nobody explained.
My father rode his bike five miles to Bridgend there and back to buy his weekly stash of cheaper cigarettes. On the Buncrana Road, the border he crossed was barely visible (“Custaim Stad”) yet invisibly imposing. He left the UK, the Commonwealth and Nato for a neutral state. The Londonderry area was still home to a Royal Navy submarine training school, an RAF Coastal Command flight of Shackletons and a US forces communications base. I don’t recall him ever being stopped. In wartime a police car once gave my mother a lift into town clutching a basket of smuggled eggs. The border was more difficult for business of course. They had to present their paperwork at the customs clearing station on the Strand road. Although far from ideal the border was made viable by civility, not pushing your luck and turning a blind eye, qualities we may yet need in today’s international clamour and confusion.
We visited relatives who were subsistence farmers outside Donegal town though not the Catholic small farmers who were my late mother’s family in Inishowen. The split over religion before I was born ran deep and unreconciled. Somehow as a child I instinctively opted against sectarianism at first hand although it was all around me.
Differences within Protestantism loomed large in my upbringing. In Calvinist Coleraine where I went to school the enemy of conscience was fundamentalism. The study of English literature and Classics provided us with arguments and a wider view of the world, egged on discreetly by excellent teachers. Interschool debating and Queen’s interschool debates (presided over by Eamonn McCann) allowed us to vent. Rugby internationals were big deal. In Roy Foster’s memorable phrase, for young middle class Prods “Dublin was Mexico” where we learned to drink and carouse. For third level a regular choice then was Queens for science and Trinity for Arts, at a time when Trinity was still thought of as west Brit.
Londonderry was a Unionist city with a Catholic majority. I must have been about 10 before I became aware of the basic facts. The whole character of the old city where I lived were so Protestant – looking, meaning the locally owned businesses were festooned by Union Jacks and Derry Crimson banners for the big parade through the walled city on the 12th August.
My own awakening happened over the failure of the University for Derry campaign. Local unionists were split between the “faceless men” who opposed much that might have encouraged Catholic development, although the leadership supported it. The victory for unionist reactionaries was all too typical before final defeat engulfed them only a few years later.
While this is hardly the place to relive the history of the 1950s and 60s a few things can be said.
The border campaign of 1956 to 62 was just that – peripheral, though very nasty at times in Fermanagh. It was defeated less by internment on both sides of the border and deterrent border patrolling (though more feasible than often claimed) , than by lack of support from nationalists. The wrong lessons were applied after 1970.
Many of my generation, the boomers and older, are wont to indulge the ultimate counterfactual and say “if only we’d been more generous earlier, all the trouble might have been avoided.” Certainly timing was a big factor. A window of opportunity opened in the early sixties over the great Catholic council of Vatican 2. The introduction of the Mass in English represented a big change of basic communication. It encouraged interfaith dialogue and presented challenges to conservative Catholics who were content with church dominance over health and education in NI as well as the south. Although it has proved impossible to run a welfare state on sectarian lines, the old small c conservative Nationalist party were content to allow things to run on more or less how they were. The pressure of civil rights especially over housing and employment left them standing. The exceptions were the Belfast Irish Labour men like Gerry Fitt who kept banging their heads against the unionist brick wall to cut a few modest deals. The Nationalists presented little challenge to the unionist order. It was only taken up by the boomers that became the SDLP a crucial few years too late when Northern Ireland was already seething over civil rights.
Conservative Protestants and their loudest mouthpiece Paisley saw in Vatican 2 a fiendish plot to deceive them merely by speaking in English rather than Latin. Ecumenism became a term of abuse. Liberal Prods buckled. I remember how an ecumenist speech by George Reindorp the Anglican bishop of Guildford was tamely called off in the face of angry demonstration called by Paisley outside Belfast’s Anglican cathedral. It was this sort of spinelessness than crucially weakened the cause of reconciliation. The character of militant Protestantism switched decisively to politics only from the anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966.
If liberal Protestants and what became the SDLP had emerged stronger earlier might we have prevented the Troubles? Remember that the demands of civil rights were essentially granted in three months in 1969, but too little, too late. But if earlier?
My reason for doubt lies less in the policies than the structure of politics. A one party state, even one not forced to liberalise under pressure as in those few months of 1969 would always have found it difficult to hold the line against Protestant reaction to modest reform and the opportunity it created for those on the Catholic side who became the IRA.
But this is the verdict of hindsight. The 1960s saw many days of hope. Conditions deteriorated rapidly from 5 October 1968 to general shock and surprise. They only became “inevitable” later. Conflating the violent events that greeted the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921 with depressingly similar outrages half a century later fails to tell the whole story. It became a conflict dominated by a working class dispossessed on both sides although played out as an identity struggle. The middle class partly connived but largely stood apart from politics. That’s a large part of our problem today. Meanwhile familiar malign signs and sentiments are never far below the surface. We should have learned to read them better. Have we learned yet?
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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