`What d'ya mean? We're not Irish!'
Holland, Jack
more sophisticated, political scrutiny and government regu- present welfare-state apparatus may be inefficient, cumber- lation. some...
...Protestants unreflecting of Northern Ireland's Protestant...
...Their flag was the Union Jack...
...Hayakawa's route and virtue...
...turn the lads loose...
...Photo, from Time It is not the first time that the Protestants of that northeastern magazine, show Protestant youth demonstrating in 1972...
...have started questioning their traditional political beliefs...
...then they fought and died for an Irish recently in the report based on their findings...
...some and oppressive, but to throw it out without a clear idea of 3. The sacrifices must be distributed equitably, always how to maintain its commitments is irresponsible and imdistinguishing between the necessities of life with dignity and moral...
...chips of its tall life fragments in the snow security That, at least, is a welcome development...
...The solution they are now advocating, an violence independent Northern Ireland, is a step in the right direction...
...he way " This- refers to an incident in August, 1969, when a In deep recesses, patches of limb and twig have to Catholic street was razed to the ground by mobs of Protestants Suggest (absurdly) superstructure to softnessin Belfast...
...Looking out the window it was just possible to perceive the British flags flapping in the small gardens, or painted in garish TEN YEARS ago few Protestants would have admitted having colors on the gable walls of the working-class houses, any doubt as to whom ' they owed their allegiance, or alongside the anti-Catholic graffitti and the Protestant whether or not they were British or Irish...
...Tyrie went on to government, which permitted the local Protestant-controlled warn: "Eventually maybe someday the Protestant parliament outside Belfast to run a blatantly sectarian state, paramilitaries are going to turn their guns on the British soldenying equal opportunities to Catholics in housing and jobs, diers as well...
...They feel let down by England, abanProtestants) in the north of the city...
...and have at least temporarily stopped chanting the old pro- that gave my wall its morning play of grace the year alound and made leaf, branch and bird British slogans which have stultified Protestant political thinkotestant ing for so long...
...a slight mist of Irish rain was as many in Northern Ireland's so-called "loyalist" community falling, which ii built-up areas has a most depressing effect...
...We're not land's Protestant majority-one million people caught Irish...
...After the creation of the Northern say, oh, he is Irish...
...It was a similar Many Catholics are rightly asking, "Why the change of pprentice Boys march, an annual celebration of Protesheart...
...He said Rhodesians went in 1966 when they established an independ- to Congressman Fish: "There has been no sectarian violence ent, minority-controlled state in defiance of the Westminster from the Ulster Defence Association for the last two...
...I am one of the black Irish...
...According to Tyrie's companion, Glenn Barr, who :RA...
...spondent for The Irish Press and Hibernia...
...inflation rate on necessities is double that of other com- The era of limits demands discipline, sacrifice and civic modities...
...Congressmen Hamilton Fish land, they have several times found themselves at odds with and Joshua Eilberg met UDA leaders in Belfast during a their political guarantor in London...
...and Catholics...
...What I have done and what the Council loyalists have seemed close to taking such a step...
...He did not say it, but the doing what the Protestants want it to do...
...I dream myself He said between boasting about their violent acts and denying that they Falling down into it, out of it riolence ever did them...
...they have expressed their loathing of anything from that history of needless bloodshed...
...The ing for and against what the limits limit us...
...A mechanisms, wage controls and cuts in governmental service voluntary asceticism might be welcomed in Marin County but are inherently regressive and become even more so as the not in Watts...
...as British...
...We are saying, let's go for a The elm at the corner is- down...
...fact-finding trip to Ireland...
...As a paramilitary organization we can Elm Tree and Other Shadows say...
...the majority of Protestants were "If I was to take you [Congressman Fish] to Bradford, or firmly on the side of the British crown, which promoted their Birmingham, or London, or anywhere in England, you would economic interests over that of their fellow citizens, the mostly be accepted as an American...
...In 1977 a planned UDA move to paralyze the about their identity and their future, that they have often area failed...
...A major confrontation between the UDA and the British ports a Roman Catholic football team...
...sh solLittle trip, up along Bombay St./ And burned out all the shit...
...Congressmen, "We the wee believe there has to be a starting point [for reconciliation...
...His two companions SEVERAL YEARS AGO I was in a train traveling north from looked at him, and he almost blushed with embarrassment...
...Now this profound t such a Whether it will get much further is to be doubted...
...Most of the songs Heavy with late summer, racks of full feathers ton to celebrate the'killing and humiliation of Catholics...
...But a few pages on we read, in another reference to As if clouds effaced reveal their chalky wires I to stay the same event:, "Intimidation cried the Provies [IRA] / After Or a gust might whisk a breaker from its lath...
...And, paradoxically, they have dished committed their violent acts in the name of law and order...
...They were exuberant-it doned by the state to which they have looked since 1921, when was Friday, payday-dressed in the uniform of the British and Northern Ireland was created, as their protector from Catholic Irish working class: jeans, short boots and short, heavy black IRA subversion...
...a presence in my room...
...It is an area started another round of distracting activity...
...So, Sister Ellen Murphy he sup- we have two options...
...Tyrie is a shrewd and capable man who has managed to stay Since 1969, however, the Protestants have made it clear that on top of the UDA longer than any of his predecessors, most of their loyalty has its price-that it is conditional on Britain whom fell victim to internal feuds...
...Through empty panes of light ailar terested, it is hard to see how the UDA's initiative can develop...
...re often some hope to be derived from the fact that Protestants like The substance of the shadow's branch is gone om they Tyrie are now searching for new kinds of political solutionsirity...
...Council But Tyrie was right in his discussion with Fish and Eilberg: 'ou feel the UDA has stopped blatantly sectarian murders since about in, fight 1977...
...One leading Catholic politician in Belfast, Paddy 5,000 Protestants marched through Londonderry under Devlin, has come out in support of it...
...One throwing litter out the window and threatening to throw each sign is the recent moves by the Ulster Defence Association, the other after it...
...If they are like any other paramilitary group, it is fears and frustrations of working-class Protestants, is not a i Fish perhaps the Ku Klux Klan...
...Many of their victims have been very reassuring one on the matter of restraint...
...This was the land Northern Ireland's of them have (for over a century at least) regarded themselves Protestants have traditionally sworn will remain "British...
...With two of the particistraight shadows of themselves rider pants in Northern Ireland's bloody triangle opposed or uninin sun...
...This Richard A. Hawley has meant that, like their national identity, their attitude to the 3rotesviolence they perpetrate is frequently ambivalent and Aloft :e this: confused-as if they want to believe deep down that they have )rd, or not done it...
...If you want to fight the IRA fight the IRA .. . British troops and threatening an all-out civil war unless the but don't shoot the wee man that is going to work or the wee Westminster government acted more effectively against the man just because he is a Roman Catholic or because he supIRA...
...of low, rolling hills, and between them and the sea, a jumble of Somewhere, not far under the surface of even the most factories, red-brick houses and warren-like streets...
...dilemma that recently has assumed a certain political urgency It was a wet, winter's evening...
...that organization, which has for nearly a decade expressed the 31 August 1979:461...
...In Congressmen and two UDA leaders, Andy Tyrie, the Supreme 1798 it was the liberal Protestant middle classes of Ulster Commander of the organization, and Glenn Barr, who somewhich struck a rebellion against the British that spread times acts as its spokesman...
...There is also scattered at random from those rings of years...
...Throughout the years, Undulating like seaweed: ;n here, Northern Ireland Protestant militants have frequently swung Lull and lure...
...The wide window of this loft would There is a curious example of this schizophrenia in a little Frames nothing but leaf and light, id they handbook of songs put out by a UDA man interned in the Maze Eave to eave, a medium of maple...
...gunmen running loose against Catholics...
...what are we fighting for, and why are we killing each other and On three occasions over the last ten years, Northern Ireland who is gaining from it...
...In 1972 of the organization has said to the membership is if you feel 50,000 hooded men from the Ulster Defence Association took that you want to have a war with somebody then, damn, fight control of large areas of Belfast, blocking the movement of yours properly...
...In a caring and humane democratic order, we cannot luxuries...
...land...
...many believed it was a first step toward a coup...
...Some indication of what the UDA is now saying England by the English, who drove the native Irish off the was given last fall, when U.S...
...I ask, parliament...
...Currently, many of them are angry enough to jackets...
...Let them go out and shoot all the ey were Catholics and lot's have a civil war...
...It is all too easy to take S.I...
...The "Battle Rise and fall slowly with the breeze, :estant of Bombay Street" begins: "On the 14th of August we took a/ Hushes overwhelming hushes...
...It seems that they cannot reconcile their identi.. I ask, fication with law and order and their responsibility for violent Sudden as an apple ther and and criminal acts which that law condemns...
...tant frustrations with British rule in Northern Ireland like this: almost completely died out...
...but the . . . " The songwriter, no longer boasting about "burning out Secrets of a leafy walls on the the shit," now claims that the Catholics burned their own Lovely and alien as coral, But the houses and blamed it on the Protestants...
...more sophisticated, political scrutiny and government regu- present welfare-state apparatus may be inefficient, cumberlation...
...But it also demands equity, social and economic jusdismiss the effect of radical gasoline price-increases on the' tice, and a clear, tenacious vision of just what we are sacrificpoor by pointing out that the poor "don't drive anyway...
...All people must bear proportional burdens, and those surrender the public goals of providing the necessities of food, better able to bear them should bear more...
...Through leaves and leaves, indifferent as air...
...It is a which most of them regard as part of the United Kingdom...
...For it is Government-the only such government ever to include unfortunately another characteristic of Protestant insecurity Catholics in it...
...The vast majority paramilitary slogans...
...But the history of the substance of the elm to set it down...
...Republic, a concept now anathema to most of their descen- Andy Tyrie explained the dilemma and the current Protesdants...
...For it is solution now rather than fight and then look for a solution...
...They were play-acting, fighting among themselves, consider a drastic revision of their old political position...
...it already has removal changes everything in sight...
...preme Catholics in the same excremental rhetoric reserved for those some- believed to be racially inferior...
...me as Prison (formerly Long Kesh) in 1974...
...We're not Irish!' JACK HOLLAND shouted, breathlessly, "No wonder they say the Irish are mad...
...They are uneasy about British intenghetto towns on the outskirts of Belfast...
...population, lies have always dominated the industries in this comer of Ireland, the same dilemma: the problem of their national identity...
...THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF ULSTER'S PROTESTANTS `What d'ya mean...
...SINCE THEN, however, there have been changes...
...It has murdered over 400 people, most of them ordinary Commonweal: 460 saying comparison...
...Now the talk of independence-mostly coming from the UDA-is TROUGH THE UDA has often been called the Protestant not accompanied by threats of massacre and mayhem, but by counterpart of the IRA, a brief look at the kind of violence assurances and promises that Catholics will be safe...
...The discussion was published throughout Ireland...
...joined in the interview with the U.S...
...expressed it with a terrible vengeance against those whom they see as the enemy-Northern Ireland's Catholic minority...
...In the middle of the mayhem one of the youths largest of the Protestant paramilitary organizations, to pursue the idea of an Independent Northern Ireland-cut loose from JACK HOLLAND, a Belfast poet and journalist, is American corre- London and from Dublin...
...They [the English] don't treat me as Ireland state, that relationship was cemented by the British British...
...Because if Britain continues to treat us the way and maintaining a system of economic privilege that until they have been treating us, you know, we are going to have to recently sufficed to assure the loyalties of Protestants to Eng- take a stand somewhere...
...The next few ring a tortured and degraded, in a way typical of racial violence, months might well indicate whether or not they have learnt enthe before being killed...
...But they hear my accent and they impoverished Catholics...
...The UDA, after all, has been responsible for more ascendancy in Ulster, that led to bloody fighting in sectarian violence in Northern Ireland than any other organiza- ogside, Londonderry's Catholic section ten years ago...
...A discussion was held betweenthe The two groups' interests have not always been identical...
...But since 1969, and In the battered railway carriage were three Protestant the start of the latest Irish-British conflict, disquiet among youths, obviously returning home from work to one of the little "loyalists" has grown...
...corner of Ireland have made radical noises...
...Two years later, the UDA pushed The list of "wee men" shot by the UDA because they were Northern Ireland to the brink once again when they organized Catholics is a very long one, and it contains some of the worst the overthrow of the Northern Ireland Power-sharing brutalities committed since the current troubles began...
...Belfast city, through the heartlands of Northern Ire- Then the biggest one said: "Hi, what d'ya mean...
...But by the end of the 19th century, that radicalism had...
...As soon as the British UDA has already, on several occasions, turned its guns on the appeared to be yielding to demands for reform from Catholics, British army and police, and killed several of them...
...There was a sudden silence...
...Even here, have threatened, in other words, to go the way the white however, according to Tyrie, there have been changes...
...At the end of the day we ie worst have still got to find a solution...
...my random memories gather shade on shade...
...ght security but without incident...
...We're British...
...In fact, they have perpetrated over the years will not support such a UDA figures have been attempting to win Catholic support for their program to get the idea of Northern Ireland independence On August 11, after three days and nights of violence, promoted...
...most of burning their own homes/ In Bombay Street, and Lower Falls...
...army was narrowly avoided...
...For two years the UDA has been largely able to stop its ago...
...The window frames become been denounced by the IRA, and the British, of course, will rice, have nothing to do with it at present...
...Since the 17th 31 August 1979: 459 century, when they were first settled there from Scotland...
...But the the Protestants have threatened civil war and coup d' etat . They vast majority of their victims have been Catholics...
...They all grinned at each other and up in Ireland's age-long conflict with the British...
...Aes- If it collapses, as is likely, what next for Ulster's Protesig in tants...
...Reliance on pricing shelter, education, health, work and hope for all citizens...
...I guessed they were tions, insecure about their own future and their status within apprentices in one of the big factories (which only, employ the United Kingdom...
Vol. 106 • August 1979 • No. 15
