Letter from Ulster
Richard West
County Down In the Spectator this time last year, I sang the praises of the north Irish coast and in particular of two old-fashioned and friendly hotels in Antrim. Since then one of those two hotels has been tarted up find fitted with piped music, while the other has been blown up by the IRA, who succeeded in murdering one person and maiming another. I shall therefore, on superstition grounds, refrain from saying exactly where I stayed and went out sea-fishing — a sport of sombre connotations — except to remark on the amiability of the locals, and on scenery unmatched in these islands. Once again I would urge people to go on holiday in Northern Ireland, if only to show their detestation of terrorists; but 1 would not take children.
The coasts of Antrim and Down are still not much more dangerous than the coasts of Spain since the bombing attacks by separatist Basques, who sound even more loathsome and boring than are the IRA. According to one newspaper report, most of the small (thank goodness!) crowd at a resent IRA meeting in Derry was made up of 'Basque and Swedish supporters of the IRA'. There is something especially rich about that last phrase 'Swedish supporters of the IRA'. One would not go so far as to wish that someone might plant even one, harmless bomb in Sweden itself, but some sort of punishment is deserved by that race of pharisaic humbugs. The arch-foes of apartheid, the Swedes (through tourism) have managed to turn the pleasantest country in Africa, tiny Gambia, into a nation of touts and prostitutes, where black people are kept off their own beaches by uniformed, stick-wielding guards. The rich, peaceful Swedes who gave so generously to the North Vietnamese during the war, now refuse to give shelter and work to South Vietnamese refugees whom they • regard as 'economic criminals'.
Even Northern Ireland has offered a home to some of the 'boat people', if only on the dreaded Craigavon Estate, an imitation of Britain's worst new towns; the slum-dwellers of Belfast refuse to move there. The newspapers showed photographs of two of the Vietnamese at Craigavon, a bank clerk and an acupuncturist, who were posed looking suspici ously into glasses of stout. The locals no doubt wanted to know what religion they held: are Buddhists and Taoists more like Prods or Papishes?
One Ulster MP, our own Enoch Powell, has roundly condemned the admission of refugees from Vietnam. One of its European MPs, the odious John Taylor, is too busy inciting Protestant terrorists; another European MP, the Revd Ian Paisley, is too busy denouncing the Pope for his unwise plan to visit Ireland. It always puzzles me why the Ulster Protestant politicians and spokesmen — the kind of people you hear growling on television — are so much more bigoted and repulsive than those people who vote for them. Of course most politicians are crass, self-centred and power-mad; but Paisley's brand of religion may have something to do with it.
One Presbyterian, eighty years ago, said, 'It isn't a religion at all, 'tis a trade union it is!' He meant quite literally that Presbyterianism was a closed shop for jobs, position and privilege in those counties where it had a majority; he could have foreseen that Presbyterian politicians might also acquire the avarice and pomposity of trade union leaders. The same Presbyterian, John Bartley his name was, once answered a question put to him by a Catholic on the difference between Calvinistic and ordinary Presbyterians. He explained: T11 tall ye. A Calvinistic Prasbitayrian believes all you Papishes wull be domned because ye're predastined to be domned; but we or'nary Prasblayrians blieve all you Papishes wull he domned on yer mer'ts!'
Like so many Irish politicians, Paisley, quotes history to support his claim, and gets history wrong. The Papacy has seldom, if ever, been on the side of Irish rebellion against the English. The first invasion of Ireland by Henry II was carried out with the approval and probably on the instruction of Pope Adrian IV who hadibeen alarmed by reports of laxity in the Irish Church, and in particular of nepotism and fornication. It is true that Henry VIII, the first English king to break with the Pope, had prosecuted a war in Ireland to win authority over the local nobles, but Henry's Irish policy was maintained with equal force by the Catholic Queen Mary, (or 'Bloody Mary', as she was known to Protestants), who persecuted the English and Irish alike. When William of Orange, Paisley's beloved 'King Billy', defeated the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne, bells rang out from the Vatican which was allied with William against the French, The Irish rebels against the English during the 1790s were for the most part Protestants and included some of the Presbyterians. They were aided by revolutio nary France, whose anti-clerical, anti monarchical violence had offended the Irish Catholics. Most of the 'Wild Geese', the descendants of Ulster Catholics who had fled to France at the end of the seventeenth century, could not stomach the Revolution and went off to fight for England. When the French invaders landed in Mayo (near Knock, which the Pope is to visit on his pilgrimage), they were amazed that the Irish received them as guardians of Catholic liberty. One French officer said: 'God help these simpletons. If they knew how little we cared about the Pope or his religion they would not be so hot in expecting help from us ... We have just sent Mr Pope away from Italy, and who knows but that we may find him in this country'. When Maud Gonne, a century later, wanted to take up the Catholic faith the better to fight for Ireland's freedom, she baulked at the Pope's recent condemnation of Fenianism. Even today the radical chic of Dublin — the rich fellow-travellers of the IRA — profess to see in the Pope an agent or dupe of British 'imperialism'. Not so the mass of Northern Irish Catholics who were thunderstruck by the Pope's decision not to visit the Province after the murders of ten days ago. The extremists of both sides in Ireland, especially perhaps the men like Paisley, cannot comprehend that English policy towards Ireland over the centuries has had less to do with religion than with defence against enemies on the mainland, first Spain, then France, Holland (France's ally in 1798, as she was France's enemy in the time of 'King Billy'), France until the twentieth century, Germany in two world wars, and now Russia, which may be using the IRA. The Pope, as even Paisley must know, is the national of a country with reason to fear and dislike Russia. Talking of Russia: a few days after the Mountbatten murder, I went to a Belfast pub to conduct a 'vox pop', as radio journalists say. The first 'vox' turned out to be that of a man who described himself as a 'Catholic, Unionist member of the British-Irish Communist Party'. Still reeling from this, I asked him and his comrade what their relationship was with the Communist Party of Russia. 'The dif ference', he said, Is that we're Stalinists. We didn't like Khrushchev's denuncia • tion of Stalin in 1956 ... Our idea of a summer holiday is massacring the kulaks feelinI'gsmof oterldlining ry aylui we worrkernregsmeentw.the
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