POLITICS

Ulster's Cup of Troubles is running over - and it is not yet full

BRUCE ANDERSON

Afive o clock last Thursday, I arrived at Ballymoney Orange Hall, to meet the local lodge returning from its 12th of July outing. The hall was deserted: 'They're not back yet,' I was told. But suddenly, the Lambeg drums were audible, though still over the horizon. The noise grew steadily louder, though nothing could be seen. Then, in a piece of choreography worthy of the Covent Garden stage, the lodge banner appeared on the skyline, though the marchers were still invisible.

Finally, the entire parade was in view, the three drummers pounding away, weary though they must have been after their day's exertions. The whole town reverberat- ed with the sound. Anyone who enjoys martial music but has never heard three Lambeg drummers giving of their utter- most should certainly do so.

Shortly afterwards, we were sitting down and chatting. These were decent men: good husbands and fathers, hardworkigg employees or small businessmen. And they were all bewildered at the failure of main- land Britain — especially England — to understand them.

All Irishmen use language far more expres- sively than the average Englishman does, and that is as true in the cacophonous North as in the mellifluous South. The accents of the Northerners may grate on Home Counties' ears, but harsh sincerity is surely preferable to silver-tongued deceit. The Southerners are rather too ready to use their verbal skills to sentimentalise homicide.

When the Orangemen of Ballymoney discuss politics, they unconsciously drop into a biblical idiom. All they sought was the right to walk the streets their fathers walked and to practise their fathers' faith. Their deepest earthly loyalty was to Britain and the Crown: so why did Britain spurn them; why did the Crown's ministers treat them so coldly, while happily fraternising with the Crown's enemies?

I cannot say that I gave them a satisfacto- ry explanation, and they would have been even more depressed if they had heard the conversation over dinner in Clubland on Tuesday evening. It is only a few hundred miles from Ballymoney to St James's, and the club where I was dining is full of mem- bers who have travelled to the ends of the earth. Yet when I said that I had just come back from visiting the Orangemen, I was the subject of awed fascination. It would have created less excitement if I had newly returned from a six-month sojourn with a tribe of headhunters.

In the first two decades of this century, the Orangemen were able to draw on a shared allegiance, a shared belief in Impe- rial Britishness. In those days, their values and mainland values marched in step. Then Ulster went to sleep for 50 years, while England changed. When the men of the North once again looked across St George's channel for succour and allies, they found only incomprehension.

Ballymoney is in the North Antrim con- stituency. Until 1974, its Member of Parlia- ment was Henry Clark, a typical example of the MPs the Unionists once sent to West- minster. They were mostly shrewd squires, who neither achieved nor sought headlines and eminence, but who were sound men. Over time, they might have been able to explain Ballymoney to Belgravia and vice versa, but in February 1974 they were swept away by a new Ulster political class born of Unionist militancy, with no links to the Tory Party and little understanding of it.

Mr Clark's successor was Ian Paisley, who has done to Ulster Unionism what Tony Benn did to the Labour Party. I tried to persuade the Orangemen of this view, but not many agreed with me. Few of them were enamoured of Paisley, but he had at least stood up for Ulster, just as the Orangemen of Drumcree had stood up for Ulster. If the deadlock at Drumcree had still been unresolved on Friday evening, my Ballymoney Orangemen would have gone there to join their fellows, come what may.

This should not surprise anyone, for this is Ulster. I was talking to men whose grand- fathers had all signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912, who all had copies of that docu- ment at home, who could recite portions the text and who were teaching their chil- dren to do the same. They had just finished commemorating a battle fought in 1690; 1912 was yesterday.

I then moved on to Belfast to meet aca- demics, most of whom had monitored every twist and turn in Ulster affairs since 1968, and had also monitored the depressing con- tinuities. Some of them were visibly suffer- ing from Province-fatigue; all of them were desperately gloomy.

When the peace process began, they had dared to hope. They had held their breath as that extraordinary combination of sub-

tlety, ambiguity and deception had actually gained momentum. Few of them were ever intellectually convinced, but they all wanted it to work, they wanted to believe: credo quia impossibile.

Now, to paraphrase Yeats: 'The night can sweat with terror as before/We pieced our thoughts into a peace process.' As of Wednesday morning, the ceasefire in Ulster had not yet finally broken down, and the interception of another IRA bomb attack in London may indicate that the Provos are still pursuing a mainland strate- gy. But we shall be very fortunate if the Loyalist paramilitaries do not retaliate for Sunday's attack on a hotel in Enniskillen. It was there that the Provos bombed a Remembrance Day service: there that the late Gordon Wilson lay under the rubble next to his daughter, holding her hand and praying with her until she died. The choice of an Enniskillen target was deliberately designed to be as provocative as possible.

The Unionist political leaders are mak- ing every effort to hold back the hard men, but this may not work. Even a week ago, some of the Protestant paramilitary leaders were afraid that they were about to lose control of their followers, and that was before Enniskillen. To adapt an 18th- century Dublin parliamentarian's comment about Ireland : 'Ulster's cup of troubles is running over — and it is not yet full.'

The restraint which the Unionist leaders have displayed is in contrast to the behaviour of the Dublin government, the SDLP leadership and the Catholic hierar- chy. If the gentlemen in question had set out to justify the IRA's return to violence, they could hardly have been more inflam- matory. As regards the North, Dublin seeks power without responsibility. We know whose prerogative that is.

But we are not just dealing with frivolity and loud-mouthery; there is a more sinister component. When the Chief Constable of the RUC stated that he was not prepared to order his men to fire on an unarmed crowd, Dublin did not say, 'Now we under- stand': a lot of Dublin said, 'Why not?' Some of the wild talk in Dublin at the end of last week stemmed from vexation at being denied the pleasure of watching British forces shoot Orangemen.

My Orange friends in Ballymoney under- stand that. But they cannot see why the English are being so naive.