Still our ghosts visit: Garvaghy Road, founding myths and the dangerous fantasy of victory

I’m sitting on the edge of Donegal with a glow that comes from walking the tiny acreage my family tilled into life with lime, kelp, graft and sweat over five generations. In the 70s, we prayed for the people of the north, all the people, not just some, many miles to the south.

In August ’69 I was here with my brother and my dad when the border closed, leaving my mum to tend to our bar in Holywood (my sister sleeping upstairs). Outside Letterkenny fhe Irish Army set up a field hospital to treat wounded coming in from Derry.

In Holywood, my mum held the fort in our Catholic owned (though not by us) pub when a gang of loyalists came in from Belfast for a spot of RnR after burning Catholic owned pubs. A gun was spotted in the ladies toilets, a local customer informed her.

The strangers asked, is there any Catholic owned pubs in Holywood? Our largely Protestant customers asked if they were joking? This was a Protestant town they were told, there’s no Catholic pubs here (8 out of ten were, and everyone local knew it).

A taxi was called and the ‘lads’ were put in it and so the danger passed. For our family at least. Not for others. Catholic pubs (an easy target then as they existed in most communities) were burned out for real, and with them the mixing of communities.

At about the same time, the public housing in Ballyoran, Garvaghy Park and Churchill Park estates along the Garvaghy Road (like many in Belfast) had started out mixed. But when the Troubles broke out, Portadown sorted itself along sectarian lines.

Catholic families intimidated out of mostly Protestant parts of town, or who no longer felt safe there, moved into the Garvaghy Road estates, and Protestant families moved out. Within a few years the area was almost entirely Catholic and nationalist.

If you’d not lived through this, you may think that would be that, but the trauma provided a founding myth about the dangerous nature of society beyond safe bounds of community, that endured even as peace brought more ease to life in the town.

Unlike most neighbourhoods, the myth was formed within a few years by people arriving for the same reason, making its origin story a shared family history: such that many current residents will be the children and grandchildren of those who moved in.

What’s happening today is that that terrible story is now being renewed. Since the dispute was never formally resolved, and the Orange Order has continued to protest the ban, so that early narrative has retained an ongoing present-day reference point.

When people suggest that the sight of 35 Orangemen walking down the road they’ve been trying (entirely civilly) for years  shouldn’tt trigger a community into a paroxism of loathing and fear they have a point. But it ignores this power of myth.

A founding story takes hold because it organises real experience. People intimidated out of their homes needed an account of what had happened to them and what it meant to them. The community story is the form that fear and loss took once shared.

That’s not a situation anyone with an ounce of emotional intelligence should expect should be mediated by law (which I suspect the judiciary understands only too well, thus the reserved judgement). Indeed, delay might the only signal hope of resolution.

And it behooves those of us who’s lucky experience with the other community was entirely different and almost entirely positive to understand what might, at first face, look like an extreme overreaction. Rather it’s lack of engagement that’s brought us here.

The modern human rights approach invites limitless ‘grazing’ on society: consuming without creating resources or without working politically towards resolution. It tends towards a war of all against all refereed by the state and the courts.

One irony that should not be lost on any of us is the fact that some of those on the side of the Orange are also advocates of taking the ECHR out of UK statute. And some, the right of communities elsewhere to burn stolen pallets on the 11th night.

Yet the law itself is pretty clear. The Order has a right to walk back down Garvaghy Road from a church service that took place almost a generation ago. But it too must deal with its own past and the myths it has generated and which reverberate today.

The idea that it can stuff a legal judgement into its back pocket and use it as an entry ticket to a future of boundless freedoms and entitlements is exactly the opposite of it’s own tradition where rights were always coupled with civil responsibilities.

The troubles’ most debilitating legacy is the concept of ‘separate development’: the pretence that we don’t all belong to the same society, subject to the same conditions and are not co-dependent on joint political action on roads, schools and hospitals.

And there’s another related story emerging. Political nationalism, which has struggled over three decades to grow its vote by cven one percent (Claude reckons a border poll is 600 years away at current rate of growth), has retrenched to pre troubles arguments.

Standing out amongst the many column inches (much of it meaningless drivel) over the last week or so from people who should know far better, Patrick Murphy in his Irish News column on Saturday was both clear, incisive and forthright.

Not least at the start:

DRUMCREE Church is where the Presbyterian Young Irelander John Mitchel was married in 1837. His bride, Jenny Verner, was the daughter of James Verner, Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Order.

Although critical of the order, Mitchel wrote: “Religious hatred has been kept alive in Ireland… for the simple reason that Irish landlords and British statesmen found their own account in it.”

His analysis might be regarded as a core principle of republican anti-sectarianism.

If only. And yet I don’t believe the traducing of the Orange Order, it’s traditions and often inscrutable and idiosyncratic culture that we’ve seen in Irish media over the last week has endangered the bringing forward of a politically united Ireland.

The voting figures show that that work is yet to begin. Nationalist politicians should have backed residents but then urged calm and a legal compromise. Instead, in fear being outflanked, they rushed to Portadown to needlessly stoke tribal feeling.

Tribal feeling is the enemy of unity. As is the fantasy of victory, which in the prisoner’s dilemma that both sides find themselves trapped by, is not so much dangerous as inimicable to the outcomes either side wants. Yet the shackles of myth are tough to throw off.

I write this close to where, on my uncle’s old 1950s Ecko radio, and six years after the onset of the Troubles, we heard the bleak news of the Miami Showband massacre. We should not mistake the outcropping of old fears and nightmares for the real thing.

That bare famland where the Irish army once camped now hosts a privately built estate where the best houses go for between €319,950 to €375,00, while Northern Ireland is now the fastest growing economy in the United Kingdom. Still our ghosts visit from the past.

There’s a place beyond nation states, beyond fear, beyond even nostalgia.
Let’s meet there.

– John Kellden