Britain and Northern Ireland, but we believe that’s done and dusted. We try to be broad-based, and we stress the importance of health and education and real issues.’
Does he feel threatened by the possibility that Northern Ireland might one day become part of a united Ireland? ‘Where are we going to be in fifty years politically? If the present circumstances were to still exist, then yes, possibly I would feel threatened, and maybe wanting to take up arms again. But life changes. Everything’s up for grabs within politics, and the onus is on republicanism to persuade me that I’d be better off. One thing I’ve not heard in all the talk of a united Ireland is what will they do about the northern Prods? Do they think northern Prods are going to roll over, have our bellies rubbed, and we’ll be all right? I want to know where I am in this republican vision.’
Park fears a united Ireland in which unionists and loyalists would have little significance. He tells me of a recent attempt to mount an Orange parade in Dublin. ‘Remember our headquarters was once in Dawson Street in Dublin. So nowadays we’d get a wee corner of the road where we’re not significant? That’s not how I want to practise my culture, my heritage, my beliefs. We’ll get a wee corner, with another corner for the Moslems, and another corner for the Jews. That’s not what I want. I want my kids to be proud of who they are and what they are.’ So is he frightened of becoming a minority in his own land? ‘No, I’m not saying that. I am a minority in a certain sense. If Catholics and republicans want to be the majority, are they going to do the same things that the majority did to them, or they perceive the majority did to them?’
Despite his obvious concerns for the future, Park echoes the view of Ian Paisley about society coming together: ‘I see an “usness” creeping in. I see a “we” instead of an “us” and “them”. Maybe I’m being optimistic. But life’s made me pragmatic. If I think too much about the past, I get hurt and pain. Now the future is what’s important. I want to make sure that nobody else goes through that hurt and pain.’
As I say goodbye to him, Park tells me that there is stuff in his past that he will never divulge. ‘I’ll take it to my maker, and that includes people that I’ve talked to, and influence that I’ve had.’ Andy Park, with his enthusiasm for life, his sudden bouts of intensity, his simultaneous openness and secrecy, his desire for tolerance and understanding within an unrepentant ideological framework, has been a good introduction to the Northern Ireland state of mind. Six decades before the Troubles began, G. K. Chesterton wrote:
The Great Gaels of Ireland,
The men that God made mad
For all their wars were merry,
And all their songs were sad.
I thought about this ditty as I drove away from Lisburn. Chesterton may not have had the Troubles in mind when he wrote it but, still, having spoken to Andy Park, it bothered me. Park’s injuries, the deaths of his friends, and his part – whatever it may have been – in ‘fighting the war’ did not strike me as very merry. And no matter what God made the people of Northern Ireland, and no matter what the newspaper reports would have had us believe, it was surely not going to be possible to waive an airy hand, and dismiss them as ‘mad’. Passionate, prejudiced, charming, conditioned, self-important, victimized, stubborn, self-righteous. But mad?
The Wild Birds Protection Act, passed by the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1931, was a significant piece of legislation – for birds and for nationalists. For birds it created designated sanctuaries. For nationalists it was the only bill sponsored by their political party to become law between the creation of the state of Northern Ireland and the suspension of its Parliament in 1972. Northern Ireland was a strange democratic anomaly for the first fifty years of its existence, demonstrating more concern for the welfare of curlews than Catholics.
Throughout that half-century Northern Ireland was governed by a single party – the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). For almost all of that time the UUP had complete freedom to implement its policies. The Nationalist Party refused to participate in the 1921 Parliamentary election, believing the state to be illegitimate. This effectively left Catholics unrepresented, although four years later the party changed its policy and won a number of seats. Nevertheless, the Nationalist Party provided only slight opposition. It was disunited and ineffective, overwhelmed by the sheer determination of unionism to mould a state in its own image. As Britain looked the other way, unionists set about creating a democracy unlike any other in western Europe.
Fierce determination was not surprising among a Protestant people who had watched the extent of their authority steadily diminish on the island of Ireland. Brought up on folk memories of the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, events in which their ancestors had resisted Catholic challenges to their authority, they had lately watched their dominion shrink to just six of the nine counties of Ulster, while the Catholics received a Free State to the south.
In the first year and a half of its existence Northern Ireland was rocked by a level of bloodshed not to be repeated until the modern Troubles. Hundreds of people were killed, some by IRA incursions over the border, most by internal sectarian violence. The disorder added to unionists’ insecurities and hardened their attitudes. At political meetings they carried placards bearing such legends as ‘What We Have We Hold!’ and ‘No Surrender!’ They feared the Catholics in their midst, and they mistrusted the British government, which they believed would only act halfheartedly – if at all – to ensure their survival. In their suspicion and cautious aggression they were probably not very different from their ancestors who, hundreds of years earlier, had arrived in Ulster to stake their claim in the midst of a resentful enemy.
To ensure their survival, unionists introduced their own security measures. The mixed Royal Ulster Constabulary and the exclusively Protestant ‘B Special’ reserve were created to defend against insurrection, and the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, 1922, was passed, giving the right to intern suspects without trial and allowing juryless courts to order the flogging of a prisoner. Over and above these powers, however, that Act – which remained in force until 1973 – gave the Home Affairs Minister the right to ‘make any regulation at all necessary to preserve law and order’. These were desperate measures introduced by desperate people.
When the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble accepted his Nobel Prize for peace in 1998, he made a speech offering an insight into unionist thinking over the previous eighty years. ‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house,’ he said, ‘but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.’ It does not take much imagination to see why Protestants would have been happy to keep the house cold, even if some unionists still deny that the temperature was ever turned down. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2001, Gregory Campbell, the Democratic Unionist Party member for Londonderry, said that ‘the acceptance of that premise has done untold harm in the past 30 years’.
Yet the Northern Ireland government did employ some very brazen political strategies to retain its mastery. In 1923 the system of proportional representation, which had been introduced by the British government throughout Ireland to safeguard the interests of minority communities, was abolished for local elections. Nationalists were swiftly relieved of their majorities in over half of the councils over which they had control. Unionists were so pleased with this outcome that proportional representation was subsequently abolished for Parliamentary elections as well.
One factor that helped the unionist cause was the fact that only the owners or tenants of a house had the right to vote in local elections. Sub-tenants, lodgers, and others did not. Not only that, but for every additional £10-a-year valuation of a house after the initial £10, additional voters could be appointed up to a maximum of six. This meant two things: first, that poorer people could not vote at all, and second, that wealthier people could vote several times. And of course the poorer people tended to be Catholic while the wealthier