The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

The Apprentice Boys, being a mainly urban and working-class organization, attract some people who think the Orange is for wimps and the Black for old men. There have been problems with one or two clubs which are nothing more than fronts for paramilitaries and whose members turn up at parades in dark glasses and strut menacingly. (This was to be more evident the following year when two or three bands carried banners saying: ‘RE-ROUTE REPUBLICANS OUT OF NORTHERN IRELAND’.) Yet these represent a tiny fraction of the participants in a parade which is largely well-disciplined and brilliantly stewarded.

We headed for the Apprentice Boys’ HQ to look at some memorabilia, to find ourselves briefly caught, like the RUC, between drunken bottle-throwing loyalists and stone-throwing Bogsiders. A few minutes later, returning to the centre, we found tremendous RUC and media activity in a side-street. Cautiously peering around the armoured cars I saw the RUC extracting a dozen or so violent drunks from a pub while surrounded by perhaps twenty photographers and cameramen. At one stage a policeman almost fell over a TV camera. The yobs, of course, played up enthusiastically to their audience and obligingly created a small mini-riot with stones, glasses, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on. There was not an Apprentice Boy among them, for they had all marched over the bridge and were on their way to their coaches, but of course the violence was the scene that was shown on most news bulletins.

In 1997, the Apprentice Boys showed they were learning something about PR and began to speak of the parade as a pageant. There were lengthy discussions with politicians and residents and the nationalist SDLP mayor gave the Apprentice Boys his support. Reluctantly, MacNiallais agreed to allow the pageant’s participants on to the wall, so children dressed as King William and Queen Mary and assembled attendants walked along it in the morning. There was a difficulty about the flag outside the Apprentice Boys’ HQ: the union flag would be offensive. So the Apprentice Boys’ historian produced a green flag with a harp in the middle, which symbolized the unity of England and Ireland in 1689. The BRG did not identify it in time to object. They have since deemed it unacceptable.

Still, an accommodation had been worked out and there was no need to put a police line between the Bogsiders and the marchers. McNiallais and some colleagues came up to look at the parade and then some of their number began taunting the most militaristic-looking bands. A few bandsmen broke ranks and there was a scuffle.

I was at the same vantage point as the year before; exaggerated rumours were spreading about the level of trouble. That was a sufficient excuse for a couple of hundred drunks from the Fountain to start throwing stones and bottles and glasses at police: none of them was an Apprentice Boy. Television cameras were there again. Loyalists, as usual, were handing propaganda gifts to the enemy.

Having had the experience craved by all journalists of being hit by a stone that didn’t hurt but nevertheless gave one street-cred, I left that riot as it died down and with my English friend Mark proceeded to the Bogside. There was a crowd of children, mostly between six and sixteen, throwing stones at the police who were sealing off Butcher Gate and guarding the Apprentice Boys’ building. Standing in the middle of the kids, I could see how dehumanized are policemen in riot gear: they looked more like a 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.’

(#ulink_51695353-c5f0-53e6-9f22-f87e787fb1fb) 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.

(#ulink_131c2a7c-6045-5675-8aa2-c70263e14d89) 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 calls from deep within us, our little ritual to let the outside world know we’re still here.’

We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.

Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’

Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.

Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.

There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.

There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.

The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)

(#ulink_d193a29d-787e-5b10-b182-d12e3b25f0f1) was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.

Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time were uttering various threats. In the Foreign-Officespeak that has been adopted and popularized by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.

We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.

Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.

‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.

When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,

(#ulink_e3012225-7f6c-53c1-b404-a3f33fa7ecb8) a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’

Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,

Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below,

Who once saw winter into summer pass,

Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow

O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,

On the white walls of homestead and of byre

Loved beyond death, even as men love them now,

With a devotion burning like a fire.

Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth

To seek a better country than their own,

As Abraham from Ur once quested north

Obedient to the faith which led him on.