row of Darth Vaders than human beings. But then you can’t withstand stones and petrol bombs in a woolly cardigan.
Out from the Bogside with MacNiallais came Gearóid Ó hEara, chairman of Northern Sinn Féin. He walked up to the middle of the crowd of children, put his arms around two of the littler ones and said: ‘Away now down to the Bog. You don’t want the international TV cameras to be seeing you behaving like Orangies.’* There was a diminution in the stone-throwing and some children drifted back through the gate. Then the television cameras went away. So did Ó hEara and MacNiallais. It was a dull, grey afternoon as well whiled away by stone-throwing as by anything else, so the children went back to work vigorously. A dog, who was clearly a seasoned rioter, rushed up and down between the children and the police barking, until he got hit by a stone and hobbled off whimpering. The children went on throwing stones: no grown-up came out of the Bogside to try to stop them.
MacNiallais was busy elsewhere, explaining to the media that nationalists had been assaulted during the parade and there would therefore now be no tolerance for the December Apprentice Boys’ parade; it would not now be allowed to go around the Diamond in the commercial centre of Derry.
Simpson had offered to halve the normal numbers in December but the BRG were not prepared to compromise. The day before the parade, which the police refused to ban, republicans went around shops and restaurants in Derry telling them to close: this form of intimidation is carried out by republican and loyalist thugs on special occasions and few businessmen are strong enough to withstand it.* So MacNiallais was able to complain that the parade had closed down the commercial life of Derry on a Saturday before Christmas to the inconvenience of everyone.
A well-orchestrated Bogsiders’ riot began behind the police lines that separated them from the Apprentice Boys. The complaint was that because Butcher Gate was closed off, they were being hemmed in; the alternative, longer, route to the city centre was unacceptable. The television showed Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin being denied permission by the RUC to go through their lines. The riot followed shortly afterwards. There was a rare slip-up when a Sky camera took a shot of McGuinness smiling broadly at the stone-throwing Bogsiders. Later in the evening, a phalanx of youngsters arrived at the city centre from the Bogside wheeling shopping trolleys full of petrol bombs, of which about 1,000 were fired at police.
The allegation that this had been a spontaneous riot resulting from the disruption of the commercial life of the city at Christmas time did not convince on this occasion. The general conclusion was that the republican leadership had thought it useful to allow some of their hotheads to let off steam: the bill for the city was five million; the damage to the reputation of Derry abroad incalculable.
6. Glenageeragh, 15 June 1997
‘Like migratory birds, we return to the same scene every year,’ said Henry, as we headed towards his Orange Lodge’s annual service. ‘Whole families come together from elsewhere in the province or overseas. Like Christmas, it’s a time for family bonding. We tread well-trodden roads that our own blood have walked for many generations, be it to a country lane, to a rural church or through a little village or down a main thoroughfare into a town.’
Of all my Northern Irish friends, Catholic or Protestant, Henry has the greatest sense of place. A farmer who believes in working with rather than against nature, he has a view of the land that takes account of beauty as well as utility. Because he spends so much of his life in physical labour, his mind and his imagination have plenty of time to roam free and much of his intellectual energy is devoted to devising ways of making his people comprehensible to the modern world. A typical phone call from Henry will begin: ‘As I was graiping the silage this morning, I was thinking that another thing that makes my lot [i.e. his people] so cussed is …’ Or he might be in fatalistic mood: ‘Well, don’t worry about it: whatever we do, the rivers of destiny will find their own way into the sea of history.’
Henry had decided it was time I engaged with a past not focused on King Billy or the siege of Derry. ‘We’re going to where my family come from, where my blood flows, and to the burial ground of my people, Presbyterians all,’ he said, as we drove along the Clogher Valley. ‘Look at it. Picturesque, quiet, typical south Tyrone countryside, with its rolling hills and green grass.’
Of Scots planter stock on both sides, Henry’s lines can be traced back in Ulster to the late 1700s. He stopped to point upwards. ‘At the top of that hill, that’s where my great-grandmother McMaster was reared, looking on to the Clogher Valley. This water here goes into the Blackwater system which runs into Lough Neagh: the Blackwater is very fertile, warm ground. The bottom end of the Foyle is good ground too, which is why in Derry there are so many Presbyterian churches along its banks. As the seagull follows the plough, the Presbyterian follows the good land. Not that my people were gifted with the best of fertile land, but slowly we kept labouring on, always trying to improve ourselves.’
A few miles down the road he had shown me, with unconcealed emotion, the remains of a small building in a tiny overgrown patch of green, which once had been a thatched house. It was there that Henry’s paternal grandfather and at least seven siblings were born between 1880 and 1890. Two boys became farmers, one boy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the girl married. And like so many Ulster Protestants before and after them, three of the boys emigrated, one to Canada and two to the United States.
In 1932, Henry’s grandfather had taken a huge risk. He had sold this 17-acre small farm to a Catholic neighbour and bought a 120-acre farm near Omagh, twenty miles north, which had been in the hands of a bank for five years. In 1923, it had been sold for £3,500, but farm values had been plummeting and the bank ended up repossessing it. ‘Grandfather gave £1,050 for it – huge money for him – and since an earlier owner had bought it from a landlord under a government purchase act, there was an annuity of £50 a year due on it too. The house was in rotten condition, with rushes six feet high, but grandfather was strong, gutsy and determined.’
Henry’s maternal grandfather took an equal risk. Descended from a family of small farmers who came from Ayrshire in the 1600s, he moved from Keady in County Armagh, intended by his father to buy a particular sensible property, ‘but he took a shine to a place no one else would take. His father was annoyed and wouldn’t give him any financial help. But he bought the place anyway, stayed there alone for years before he married, farming, making his own bread, washing his own clothes and hanging food off the rafters at night so the rats couldn’t get it.’
The Second World War put farmers on their feet, so both grandfathers prospered. The maternal grandfather wasn’t as physically strong as the paternal, but he had a gift for figures, so he branched out. ‘He always did his sums first before he attempted anything.’ On retirement at seventy he had a lot more land as well as other businesses. We saw the farms of Henry’s aunt and Henry’s cousin and the house his maternal grandfather was supposed in the first place to buy but had ‘taken umbrage against’. Henry knew every twist in the road. ‘This is home. Even if you had no blood connections to Clogher Valley, you’d feel attached to it: it’s homely. It’s always good to come back to it, irregardless of how far you go in the world. And the fact that it’s green, deep land and that most of your blood comes from it, I suppose is something that endears it to you as well.’
Then in front of us was Glenhoy church. ‘When Presbyterians were eventually given permission to build meeting houses, there wasn’t much good land left. When we got round to getting our own piece of land around here we drew the short straw. It’s damnable to dig graves here because it’s pure rock a foot down: they have to bring in compressors to bust it.
‘My paternal ancestors lie here. And they were all in my Orange Lodge, LOL 908. And there’s the new hall we built last year.’ He stopped at the top of a hill and pointed down. ‘If you stepped back to 1848 (the year the church was built) you would find my great-great-grandfather walking in procession on the same country lane I now walk in one of the glens of the Clogher Valley to our little kirk on the hill. It’s in the blood and