History's Walls: Northern Ireland

...The Falls Road area of Belfast is within easy walking distance of Malone Road and its little gardens...

...The day itself is an official government holiday...

...74 • DISSENT...

...The murders, purely sectarian, grew out of Catholic incursions into Protestant turf, but they did not stanch the migratory flow...

...Soon, well-muscled men will begin hoisting impossibly huge drums on their torsos, and soon great banners will be unfurled, bearing such legends as: "No Surrender...

...Far from disappearing, Northern Ireland's Catholic minority is growing to the point where it is possible to imagine a statistical tie with Protestants within a generation, and a majority Catholic province soon after...

...But the real barrier is history...

...Northern Ireland has given them nothing except, as O'Neill said with such contempt, National Assistance...

...So common is the sight of troops deployed in front yards, with smooth-faced soldiers training their weapons on passers-by, that children hardly notice them anymore...

...Catholics are Irish...

...To be a Catholic in North72 • DISSENT Northern Ireland ern Ireland is to be regarded, de facto, as an enemy of the state...

...Young men and women soon will be cheering their elders, waving to the drummers, saluting the banners, and, just to make everything all the merrier, singing songs containing crude references to the Bishop of Rome...

...In the private sector, in companies employing more than 250 people, Catholics made up 43 percent of jobseekers and 44 percent of those hired...

...Protestants are British...

...But the Falls is another world, one of desperate unemployment and drab flats...

...But when the British census of 1991 was published, it confirmed anecdotal evidence that SUMMER • 1996 • 71 Northern Ireland something had gone terribly wrong...

...But the numbers themselves do no justice to the human and sometimes violent drama well underway throughout the province...

...Ironically, if poor Catholics had reason to look closer at the place they call home, they would discover that their Protestant neighbors in the adjacent Shankill neighborhood are nearly as desperate...

...Journalist and author Jack Holland, a Belfast native who now lives in Brooklyn, said the signs of Catholic advances are everywhere...

...By keeping Catholics out of choice public housing developments, out of decent jobs in Belfast's shipyards, and out of political power, the Protestant majority attempted to be true to the province's sectarian founders...

...Catholics in Northern Ireland are regarded not as fellow citizens of the United Kingdom but as potential terrorists...

...Their accents sound the same, with the downandup cadence turning declarative sentences into lyrical interrogatives...

...For example, the once solidly upper-middleclass Protestant stronghold of Malone Road near Queens University in Belfast, a place of quiet, tree-lined streets, now is a neighborhood filled with Catholic middle-class homebuyers, many of them trailblazers in professions once thought of as exclusively Protestant...

...Although it is true that British troops also patrol Protestant areas, particularly after Protestant paramilitaries initiated a murder campaign against random Catholics in the early 1990s, the Catholic neighborhoods bear the brunt of the military's surveillance...

...Those who remain are left to deal with their own demons...

...There is another, more terrifying symbol of Northern Ireland's new realities on the Ormeau Road...

...It is not always rendered as a compliment...

...For Northern Ireland's Catholics, however, it is a day when it is best to be inconspicuous...

...Note the preceding formula, for it is the governing principle of Northern Ireland: to be Catholic is to be an Irish nationalist, or perhaps even a republican...

...Catholics, according to recent estimates, make up 43 percent of Northern Ireland's population, up from some 33 percent only a generation ago...

...The Shankill and Sandy Row, both exclusively Protestant, working-class neighborhoods, have begun to take on the look of communities in decline...

...As fire and brimstone go, Seawright's rhetoric was over the top, but only slightly...

...In the politics and sociology of Northern Ireland, Catholics automatically are assumed to be sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, and, whether they are middle-class nationalists or guntoting republicans, they are thought of as traitorous aliens who function as agents of the Irish Republic—the blood enemy of Northern Ireland's ruling elite...

...When middle-class Catholic politicians convened an eminently respectable forum to discuss Northern Ireland's future a decade ago, a Protestant politician named George Seawright called his Catholic counterparts "scum" and suggested that the "taxpayer's money would be better spent on an incinerator and burning the whole SUMMER • 1996 • 73 Northern Ireland lot of them...

...Because South Armagh is Catholic, it is perceived to be nationalist, too, a region separate from the rest of the county based on religion, a distinction that suggests a separate ethnicity and even a hostile national identification...

...If their eyes look south to the Irish Republic for relief, it has less to do with religion and more to do with economic desperation...

...Religion has not shielded them, as promised, from the hammer blows of postindustrialism and global competition...

...Although Protestantism still has its privileges, they are becoming lost on the Protestant working classes...

...and "Remember 1690...

...Catholics in Northern Ireland have known systematic discrimination in housing and employment, and have suffered the everyday scorn of security forces and politicians, but the July 12 parades may well be the ultimate indignity...

...Ironically enough, in mainland Britain Northern Ireland's Protestant and Catholics are known by a more-inclusive label: Irish...

...It is a formula as critical to Northern Ireland's way of life as Jim Crow was to the Deep South's a half-century ago...

...O'Neill, it should be pointed out, was driven from office because he offered concessions to Catholics who were on the march for civil rights...

...Not long after first light, men in bowler hats leave their flats in Belfast or their little homes in the countryside, some of them wearing great orange sashes that designate them as grandees in the Protestant-only Orange Order...

...And, of course, Northern Ireland's Protestants consider themselves to be British to the core...

...The priests should be thrown in and burned as well...

...But now there is no turning back, despite the blatant bigotry of some of the local politicians, who see power and privilege slipping from their grasp...

...By midday, the parades have begun snaking through the narrow streets of the villages and fine boulevards like Great Victoria Street in Belfast...

...Or so it was thought...

...In a replay of American white flight of a quartercentury ago, Protestants are fleeing their old neighborhoods rather than live side-by-side with their newly empowered fellow citizens...

...Northern Ireland's Catholic minority would seem downright invisible, at least to untrained eyes...

...King Billy, as he is known to the Protestant locals, ensured that the British monarchy and indeed Britain's very soul would continue to be Protestant to the core...

...Twin symbols of changing times stand on the Ormeau Road: a Presbyterian church and a lodge of the Orange Order, abandoned and left to rot...

...In some portions of the Falls, unemployment is said to run well over 50 percent...

...In 1994, 41.5 percent of public-sector job-seekers were Catholics, as were 41.1 percent of those hired...

...The question is not whether a Catholic Northern Ireland will be reunited with the Irish Republic, but whether a changed Northern Ireland will tear down history's walls...

...Paisley and his followers regularly condemn Catholics as "idol-worshippers" and worse...

...Hiring practices are monitored closely by a Fair Employment Commission, which issues regular reports...

...Public agencies and private companies with eleven or more employees are required to submit annual reports showing the religious breakdown of their workforce...

...However much the poor Catholic of the Falls has in common with the poor Protestant of the Shankill, the marchers of July 12 serve as a reminder of everything that has divided them...

...Northern Ireland's Protestants, as a result, find themselves increasingly pushed into a small corner east of the River Balm, ever closer to Scotland, whence many of them came generations ago...

...Although neither group targets people because of their religion, most—though not all—of their victims are Protestant, and often they are ordinary citizens caught in an ancient crossfire...

...Nevertheless, it is a fact of life in Northern Ireland that the province's hundreds of thousands of Catholics are often thought of as so many suspects awaiting arrest...

...But if a Roman Catholic is jobless and lives in a most ghastly hovel, he will rear eighteen children on National Assistance . . . . If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness, they will live like Protestants and in spite of the authoritative nature of their church...

...But increasingly, theirs is a losing battle...

...The line of march is mapped out with all the care and strategy of a military campaign, which is only appropriate, because the parade commemorates a battlefield victory...

...But the IRA, in Toolis's estimation, is no more than a mere six hundred strong...

...Of course, some Protestants are fleeing for reasons other than bigotry...

...The churchgoers and the Orangemen (there are no Orangewomen) have fled to what they believe to be friendlier confines...

...Captain Terence O'Neill, a tepid reformer who served as Northern Ireland's prime minister in the 1960s, revealed more than he would have liked when he complained about the attitudes of his fellow Protestants in the late 1960s: "It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbors with cars and television sets...

...Protestants and Catholics are various shades of pale, and, thanks to the province's experience with postindustrialism, even the two groups' neighborhoods look the same, at least in hardscrabble sections of Belfast...

...When Ireland was partitioned seventy-five years ago, Britain's mapmakers saw in the north's six counties a permanent and overwhelmingly Protestant entity, one that would remain happily within the United Kingdom...

...Not only are Catholics more numerous, some are even prosperous, thanks to the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and the demands for fair employment— fueled in part by Irish-American political activists—in the seventies and eighties...

...But, he added, so are the signs of Catholics being left behind...

...But in their cultural autobiography, the Protestants are fighting an eternal siege against creeping Catholicism, a battle they believe represents the true spirit of their British heritage...

...Brooke spoke in 1934, but his sentiments live on in the raw and bigoted oratory of the province's chief rabble rouser, Ian Paisley, a Presbyterian minister and politician who was once ejected from a sitting of the European Parliament because he heckled the guest speaker—Pope John Paul II...

...A more striking sign of the times, however, is in Belfast's Ormeau Road neighborhood, once filled with workingclass Protestants, many of them employees of the giant Harland & Wolff shipyards—long a preserve of Protestant working-class privilege...

...The provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) is back in business after a seventeen-month truce, and so is the more violent Irish National LiberationArmy...

...Not surprisingly, Sinn Fein has an office on the Falls, and the British troops patrol the area with extra caution...

...An Invisible Minority...

...The new Catholic middle classes have even dared to move into traditional Protestant neighborhoods, an unimaginable development twenty years ago and one that has not passed without bloodshed...

...The minority Catholics—descendants of the native Irish whose land was taken by the Anglo-Protestant colonists—would either leave or would be so repressed that they could hardly interfere with the north's club-like governance...

...While the Catholics who have made the leap to the middle class may have reason to believe the system, however flawed, can work, the unemployed and hopeless Catholics of the Falls have no such hopes...

...Belfast, the Protestant rock upon which Northern Ireland was founded, may soon follow the province's second city, Derry, in having a Catholic city council and a Catholic majority...

...While Catholics remain underrepresented in the managerial classes and some of the professions, progress—thanks to the courageous actions of young activists in the 1960s—is undeniable...

...During the IRA's ceasefire, the helicopters were not so omnipresent, the armored cars not so intrusive, but they were redeployed when the truce ended...

...A betting shop in the neighborhood became an instant killing ground in the early 1990s when a Protestant gunman opened fire, killing five Catholics...

...As revolution proceeds, birth by birth, in Northern Ireland, politics inevitably will change with it...

...There are approximately 645,000 Catholics and 855,000 Protestants in the north...

...Just in case the Catholics don't get the point, many of the parades are routed through the vanquished minority's neighborhoods...

...But it is becoming increasingly difficult for Catholics to fade into the national woodwork once a year, just as it is increasingly difficult to miss the look of grim desperation in the eyes of the July 12 marchers...

...From the days when one of the founders of Northern Ireland could describe the province's now-disbanded legislature as "a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people," Northern Ireland in 1996 is teetering on the edge of a demographic, and thus a political, revolution...

...A huge fence separates the Falls Road and the Shankill...

...When smaller companies are counted and statistics broken down by gender, Catholics make up 35 percent of employed men and 39 percent of employed women...

...A former prime minister of the province, Basil Brooke, once advised his fellow Protestants "not to employ Roman Catholics, 99 percent of whom are disloyal...

...They will refuse to have eighteen children...

...It is a demonstration of naked ethnic triumphalism akin to a parade of white supremacists marching through the black neighborhoods of urban America or of the descendants of frontier families marching through the reservations of South Dakota...

...Many Catholic neighborhoods, particularly poor Catholic neighborhoods, function under virtual military occupation, as journalist Kevin Toolis, author of the book Rebel Hearts: Journeys Inside the IRA's Soul, noted...

...For, as J. Bowyer Bell, author of The Irish Troubles, noted: "Every civil rights demonstrator with a banner was a lethal and intolerable threat to be beaten back—not dissuaded with a kindness, not rerouted by logic, but beaten back...

...The Protestants of Northern Ireland march on this day every year to demonstrate their hegemony over Northern Ireland's Catholics, a dominance seemingly solidifed on July 12, 1690, when the Protestant King of Britain, William III, defeated the Catholic King of Ireland—and formerly of Britain—James II, in a battle near the River Boyne south of Belfast...

...Small wonder they would retreat to what they believe are safer neighborhoods...

...It is understandable, perhaps, because the IRA is nearly exclusively Catholic...

...For a tiny ministate whose founding principle was overwhelming Protestant dominance, these figures are a proverbial fire bell in the night...

...Three of the province's six counties—Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh—now have a Catholic majority, and so Catholic is the southern portion of County Armagh that it is known, half-jokingly, as the Republic of South Armagh...