The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Paisley and his ‘attendant voices’ did more than anyone else in Ireland over the entire period of the troubles to ‘block the way’ to a constitutional solution of the problems.

Paisley too formed his own church, the violently anti-Catholic Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, with himself as its moderator.

proselytising of a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl, Maura Lyons, who was kidnapped from her home in 1956.

He derived more valuable publicity amongst the north’s anti-Catholics through getting himself arrested in Rome for protesting at the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.

He refused to be bound to the peace in subsequent court proceedings and earned for himself the martyr’s crown of a three-month jail sentence, whose value could probably be translated into votes at the rate of a thousand a week.

Part of Paisley’s anti-Catholicism has sexual overtones.

Certainly Paisley can mix sexual imagery with incitement to hatred and fear of eternity in the most extraordinarily potent fashion.

Rome is always described as the painted woman out to seduce the innocent Ulster Protestant youth. His sermons are full of sexual innuendoes about priests and nuns.

‘The Church of Scotland drunk with the wine of the fornication with the Roman whore’.

‘And the trouble is, no one can say a word to him. He does all this with the Bible in his hand.’

The work, the fictionalised ramblings of a deranged woman who ultimately died in prison, was one of the foundation texts of the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic nativist movement that convulsed America circa 1835–60. Maria described how she ran away from her convent because the reverend mother forced her to ‘live in the practice of criminal intercourse with priests’. Nuns who did not were murdered. The children born of such couplings were baptised and strangled. Maria enjoyed a brief period of respectability after her story appeared, being taken up by a committee of Protestant clergymen. But both respectability and credibility vanished when her mother revealed that Maria had never been in the convent she spoke of.

In his early years as a preacher, Paisley produced ‘nuns’ at his church meetings, who, the congregations were informed, had also run away from convents rather than submit to unspeakable happenings.

But there is another overtone to Paisleyism: a patina of violence which tinges his presentation of popery and the bogus connection he forges between the papacy and the IRA.

Oath:

green white and orange

These Protestant robbers and brutes, these unbelievers of our faith, will be driven like the swine they are into the sea by fire, the knife or the poison cup

towards the destruction of all Protestants and the advancement of the priesthood and the Catholic Faith until the Pope is complete ruler of the whole world…

that a former supporter of his who took part in an effort to kill a prominent Republican, and instead ended up shooting an apolitical Catholic barman, should have been quoted at his trial as saying: ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him.

As his church grew throughout the fifties so did another creation of his, the Ulster Protestant Action group. The object of the group was the familiar one of keeping ‘Protestant and loyal workers in employment in times of deep depression in preference to their Catholic fellow workers’.42 The UPA also campaigned against the allocation of public housing to Catholics.

One of the arrows in Unionism’s quiver of defence against Nationalism was the Flags and Emblems Act which prohibited the showing in public of the tricolour. No one troubled too much about its provisions when it came to displaying the flag in Nationalist areas only, particularly in a dingy, inconspicuous little back street like Divis.

Next day scores of RUC men were sent to break down the door of the Sinn Fein office and remove the flag. Accordingly, instead of holding the march, Paisley staged a meeting outside City Hall, well away from the Falls Road.

The night after the bus burnings a Sinn Fein meeting broke up in rioting and baton charges. Two days later the tricolour was again displayed and the RUC smashed their way into the building with pickaxes to remove it.

The removal was the signal for the worst rioting in Belfast for thirty years. Petrol bombs began making their appearance as the RUC deployed armoured cars and water cannons.

Hundreds of helmeted police backed up by armoured cars drove protestors off the streets and some ...

The tension spread to Dublin where a crowd marched on the British Embassy...

In Belfast, Nationalist leaders appealed for peace. A compromise was worked out whereby the rioting stopped and the RUC did not interfere when the tricolour was carrie...

The increase in Orange fervour, however, benefited the Unionist cand...

‘Today certain Republican candidates, many with backgrounds in the IRA… appear to be using a British election to provoke disorder in Northern Ireland.’

Paisley’s rhetoric was particularly directed at the Protestant working class. Again the wretched state of Northern Ireland’s housing stock was a potent political issue. He made capital out of the fact that O’Neill and his like lived in ‘Big Houses’, while many poorer Protestants lived in ‘kitchen houses’ with no flush toilets.

He was able to pull the Pope, O’Neill, the communists, and later the IRA, out of those closets like a conjurer plucking electoral rabbits from a hat. 1966 was a big year for Paisley, and a bad one for Northern Ireland. He went to jail and a number of people went to their graves. This was the year which saw the first deaths of the Troubles.

The new UVF was a long way from the force which in Carson’s day was supported by earl, general and mill-owner. Its predominantly working-class membership consisted, in Michael Farrell’s description, of ‘…a small group of Paisley supporters who, alarmed by his denunciations of the Unionist sell-out, had set up an armed organisation’.44 It was an inefficient, confused, but deadly organisation which, apart from the fears of the sell-out trumpeted by Paisley, wanted to strike in some way at Republicans in the year of the rising’s commemoration.

The UVF did this by mounting a series of petrol bomb attacks on Catholic homes, schools and shops throughout the spring of 1966.

The attack followed the issuing of a statement on 22 May which said: ‘From this day on we declare war against the IRA, and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation.’

On 27 May a UVF gang set forth after this declaration to find and kill a well-known Belfast Republican, Leo Martin. Failing to find him, they shot the nearest convenient Catholic, John Scullion, who died of his wounds on 11 June. By 23 June stories about both the UVF and the UPV had become so commonplace in Loyalist areas that a Labour MP, Tom Boyd, publicly urged the Government to take action.

Here they discovered a group of off-duty Catholic barmen having a drink. They ambushed them leaving the pub; one, Peter Ward, died of his wounds.

He had to interrupt his trip to France to return to Ireland to ban the UVF under the Special Powers Act, a grave shock to the Protestant psyche, which regarded this piece of legislation as being for use against Catholics only.

But the main focus of attention in that fatal year of 1966 was not what those associated with Paisley were doing, but what he was doing himself.

Carson said that O’Neill was leading the statelet to the ‘destruction of Ulster’s hard-won constitution and liberties’.

He wanted the commemoration parades banned, but though he failed in this objective he succeeded in having a prohibition issued against allowing trains from the Republic to transport people to the Six Counties for commemoration ceremonies.

Then, on 6 June he led a highly provocative march through the Catholic Cromac Square area of Belfast, which provoked a riot between the RUC and local residents who tried to block his parade.

Brian Faulkner supported Paisley’s behaviour in the teeth of demands from the Moderator of the General Assembly, Dr Martin, that his violent demonstrations be stopped. Protestants, said Faulkner, had the right to protest. Dr Martin’s request was ‘an unwarrantable interference with the right of free speech and free assembly’.47 Paisley reciprocated by telling his supporters at a meeting in Castlewellan, Co. Down: ‘Thank God for Brian Faulkner’.

On 22 July vicious clashes occurred outside the jail between Paisleyites and the RUC. The following day there was further rioting as Protestant mobs, several thousand strong, rampaged through the city, smashing windows and trying to damage businesses owned by Catholics.

The RUC were empowered to ban all meetings involving more than three people, and all Belfast meetings and marches were banned for three months.

Not only was O’Neill under attack from Paisleyism in the streets, he was also assailed within the Unionist parliamentary party by Paisley’s ally, Desmond Boal.

He had reckoned, correctly, that O’Neill would survive Boal’s onslaught. Boal himself was one of those who left before the vote was taken.

O’Neill staged something of a counteroffensive the following year when he sacked one of his opponents, Harry West, the Minister for Agriculture, over a somewhat malodorous land deal in Co. Fermanagh where West farmed extensively.

This unfamiliar intrusion of principle into Unionist politics caused Brian Faulkner to remark on the BBC that the deal was ‘…a situation in which Mr West is certainly absolutely blameless’.50

Let us, however, first examine the British reaction since it was, potentially at least, the more significant, and had implications for the Labour movement in both Britain and Northern Ireland.

…the government very sensibly said we are not going to get involved in this when we are not welcomed by the Northern Ireland government.

everybody knew what would happen if we did intervene and nobody wanted to get into the situation that if we once got in there we would never get out.

But for historical reasons there was a tradition within the Labour Party of taking an interest in Ireland. Harold Wilson used to boast to Irish prime ministers that he had more Irish in his Liverpool constituency than they had in theirs in Ireland.