The Sixty-Five Years’ War
Ireland was Britain’s first big colonial plaything, and many of the techniques the English kings used to keep the Irish in line were used again in more distant colonies. At the beginning of the 17th century James I introduced a policy that would prove valuable in Palestine and Nigeria: playing one people off against another. The Plantation of Ulster, as it was called, granted the lands of the northern province of Ireland to English and Scotch Protestants in 1000 to 2000-acre lots. The Irish were forbidden to be on the land except as menial laborers.
The rest of Ireland was tenanted by the Irish, but all of it except the wilderness of Connaught was under British ownership. By 1672 three quarters of the land and five-sixths of the houses belonged to one quarter of the population.
Many of the Scotch planters moved on to America where they formed the Scotch-Irish population of the Appalachians. Those who stayed had an understandable loyalty to the British Crown and a hatred and fear of the Irish Catholics they had displaced. Their situation gave a fanatical political edge to their old-fashioned Protestantism. Memories are long in Ulster: The defeat of the Catholic King James II by William of Orange [“Good King Billy”] happened 280 years ago, but the Orange Order’s yearly celebration of the victory can often stir up another round of the old war.
When in the decades between the two World Wars Ireland slowly exacted its independence from the Crown, scare stories of a terrible fate for the Protestant in the case of Home Rule (“Home Rule is Rome Rule”), spread by fanatical clergymen like today’s Ian Paisley, fostered a move to partition Ulster from the self-governing Irish Republic. The struggle between Republic. The struggle between Republicans and Unionists caused a civil war in 1922, but the six counties of the North stayed part of England.
The Catholics of the North, one-third of the population, live in conditions of oppression and discrimination that shock the modern European: The poor are not allowed to vote, voting areas are outrageously gerrymandered, and there is clear-cut job discrimination against Catholics. They even have begun to shock the British Government, now that shipping and linen industries of the North have gone downhill, while the industries of the South have made Ireland England’s third largest export customer.
The freedom movement in Northern Ireland is well known – or at least Bernadette Devlin is. What is less well known is that the Conservative government of Heath has begun to reverse the Labor policy of concessions to the Catholics. The infamous Protestant B Special police force, once fired, has been rehired in almost identical form. The first arrests in an “anti-extremist purge” months ago have been acquitted. The British Army’s increasingly “tough” tactics have driven more and more Catholics to turn to the Provisionals, a split-off of the Irish Republican Army who want to fight it out with guns.
BELFAST – At four in the afternoon, Belfast’s children are coming home from school. This is what they see:
Cars full of police. Lorries full of soldiers. Wooden barriers entangled with black barbed wire. Guardpost shanties of metal roof siding sandbagged against the buildings.
In every doorway and garden gate, in every indentation in the wall, no matter how slight, the places where in New York City, you’d fear a drunk or a junkie – a uniform, a gun, a guard. Authority.
The police are the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They are unarmed and content to stand on corners and lean against buildings the way cops do, with their arms clasped behind them or hidden inside their greatcoats.
The soldiers are British, and armed. Thompson sub-machine guns, long 303 rifles, short widebarrel revolvers that fire rubber bullets. The rifles are carried at arm’s length, muzzles pointing straight out, ready for use. The sub-machine guns nestle in the crook of an arm. The revolvers are held in the hand, dangling at the side. No one shoulders their guns in Belfast.
The children move down Shankhill Road, through the Protestant section. Some go further, on to Falls Road, which runs through the Catholic area. Three burnt-out municipal buses stand like skeletons in an empty rubbled lot. All the shops are boarded up, the boards postered over. Streetlights are shattered and hang like jagged broken teeth. Nights when there is no moon, the streets are dead black.
On Duffy Street, a small dirty boy plays in the mud by a British outpost. Over his head is a ladder that leads to a dugout where a young Scottish soldier sits, the snout of his machine gun jutting out. The little boy is armed with a wooden slat and string rifle. He kills the soldier maybe three hundred times a day.
The Sixty-Five Years’ War, Page 1 of 5