ULSTER SAYS MAYBE ! MARTY SAYS ZEIG HEIL

Loyalists to join Sin Fein

Loyalist bandsmen will participate in a Sin Fein Ard Fheis with the Loyalist Londonderry Band's Forum to make a presentation at the annual conference, in what McGuinness calls Londonderry, but which Irish Republicans call Doire, this weekend.

Loyalist Derek Moore, who is the co-ordinator, said, "We are taking the opportunity to speak for ourselves and to raise issues that are important to bands."
The two-day Ard Fheis is being held in the Millennium Forum in Derry.

It is just the second time Sin Fein's annual conference has been held in British Occupied Ireland. In 2011, Rev David Latimer, a former British army chaplain from Derry, who served with the British Army in Afghanistan, was the principal speaker, when the Ard Fheis was in Belfast's Waterfront Hall.

The Loyalist bandsmen will address the issue of educational under achievement, among young working-class Protestants. Derek Moore said, "We will be speaking about the educational under-achievements of young protestants. Only 20% of them are leaving school with enough qualifications to get an interview. It is a big issue."

Martin McGuinness welcomed the loyalist contribution, stating "I warmly welcome the fact that the Loyalist Londonderry Bands Forum will this weekend make a presentation to the Sin Fein Ard Fheis in the city. I think that leadership has been shown in the city of Derry, and is something that could be followed everywhere."


POW STATEMENT FROM ROE HOUSE 02.03.15


Director General's attempts to silence and cover-up Exposed

Sue McAllister's latest letter in The Irish News (25-02-15) with its usual plethora of 'safety and security' rhetoric is laced with deliberate inaccuracies and downright lies. In relation to Republican prisoners being assaulted in Roe House around the start of February, she claimed that there were no injuries inflicted during the incident, and that this was witnessed by a nurse. What she fails to disclose though is that the same nurse has been referred to in previous articles by us (Substandard Healthcare Oct. 2014) as a result of her unhealthy relationship with the very Riot Squad which continues to forcibly strip-search Republican Prisoners; the same Riot Squad that beat Martin Kelly. The S.E.T. and the Jail Administration are also presently dealing with a number of related complaints from us regarding her, some dating back months. The Republican wing had a regular nurse that day who was accompanied by another S.E.T. member. Why then was the Riot Squad's choice of nurse used in this instance?

Two jail staff members, identified in our subsequent statements and complaints, witnessed the results of Martin's injuries. Furthermore, Sue McAllister, along with Colin Ward (Governor), intervened and impeded a court decision to allow an independent doctor to examine him. This is an established practice within British Prisons in order to let injuries heal without being viewed by impartial and independent doctors. For all the hundreds of Republican Prisoners who have been beaten over the years, some being awarded considerable compensation, not one prison officer has ever been arrested, never mind charged. "Nor Meekly Serve My Time" would be an informative read for those who doubt prison brutality.

Another deliberate fabrication from Sue is on the issue of legal visits only being cancelled on Tuesday 3-2-15 because of a security alert. Solicitors were stopped from entering but were able to use video-link; however, Governors over-ruled staff that came to Republicans' cells to bring them to the legal visit area. Where was the 'security' issue in a video-link consultation? Did the Jail Administration not want first-hand accounts getting out? Also, on Monday 1-2-15 a number of legal visits were denied to us, with solicitors intentionally lied to (numerous solicitors can confirm this), stating that Republican Prisoners refused them. Why would we do this at a time when we were doing all possible to get the truth out; the Prisoner Ombudsman being one such avenue which was availed of via up-to-minute phone calls as events unfolded?

Sue refers specifically to the Independent Assessment Team (IAT) and their recent Stocktake which she points to in a bid to supplant the August 2010 Agreement. The IAT have stated that the work which has taken place since their Stocktake, which has led to the recent spikes in tensions and complaints, "is not what was envisaged in the Stocktake". Sue McAllister and NIPS have officially stated that this work was to "assist prisoner movement", yet David Ford contradicted this in his opening statement during a debate in Stormont on 3-2-15 stating: "NIPS will continue to pay the closest attention to Roe House and take action to protect staff. A clear example of the action that has been taken is the physical changes on the landing that were introduced for that purpose."

Sue is correct in that there are a number of bodies overseeing prisons. The CJINI is one, however; it has repeatedly labelled the regime in Roe House as excessively restrictive since 2005. There has been the criticism also by HMCIP, and by the Anne Owers’ Review Team who commented on the excessive security in comparison to maximum security units in England which hold suspected suicide bombers. Pauline McCabe, the former Prisoner Ombudsman, slated the Jail Administration repeatedly, and created voluminous reports and recommendations sign-posting the way forward. The current ombudsman has criticised the regime frequently, and has commented on DUP interference while exasperatingly stating that the situation "is political and needs a political solution". It must be remembered that the above bodies are not Republican bodies; they are all governmental bodies with the same paymaster as Sue.
In her reference to forced strip-searches taking place across the democratic world, it must be remembered that they do indeed take place, but they have also been condemned by human rights groups all over the democratic world. An alternative to strip-searching was found (as part of the August Agreement), and accepted, in the form of the BOSS chair in 2010, yet never fully implemented.

Sue McAllister is attempting to silence critics and return Maghaberry to the safety of freedom from public scrutiny. She is committed to subterfuge, conflict and cover-ups, not a safe environment. A Conflict-Free Environment will only be achieved by the full implementation of the August 2010 Agreement.

Republican Political Prisoners
Republican Roe House
Maghaberry
2.03.15

INDYMEDIA IRELAND Heil, mein Führer!

ROTHSHITES & GOBSHITES - Indymedia Ireland:

PRESSTITUTE CENSORED LINK ABOVE

The article above along with another recent article was censored by what purports to be Indymedia Ireland. Both articles are included below. This censorship of two factual articles, is an example of what is really happening under the guise of a failed Peace Process in Ireland, where fascism hides it's ugly face, even in what is known worldwide as Indymedia. I have my articles published worldwide in all of Indymedia outlets, in every country except Ireland. I'm sure fair minded people who read the articles below, can come to their own conclusions, about how little freedom there is any part of Ireland even among those who wear a liberal mask. Decide for yourself, but meantime I brand this excuse for a free press as the Presstitutes of Indymedia Ireland. Please help un-censor these articles by re-sharing and re\tweeting their links if you agree.


Senior Pentagon Official ;

“No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale, We bought them. They report to us.” Perhaps this explains Tony Blair’s $50 million fortune one year out of office."

We've suspected this for years in Ireland. Why else would Ireland and Britain's health systems, our national assets, built over many generations, with taxpayers contributions, change to U.S. private interests, the very same U.S. private interests which cannot provide proper health care to ordinary Americans. Why else would Shannon Airport, in a supposedly a supposedly neutral country, be handed over for NATO use?

We now have the story above, straight from the horse's mouth of the Pentagon, spilling the beans. Every Irish and European leader and past ministers alive, should be questioned and interrogated on this article, but the mainstream presstitute, whores, won't do it. They'll be allowed to walk away with the money as usual no questions asked.

Colonization was the theft of resources in places like Ireland, the only difference today, is a name change. Resources worldwide are now stolen through the IMF and corporations. Colonization is more prevalent than ever, with none of the wealth shared by average citizens, of even the wealthier states. Everyone is now colonized, enforced by police states, impoverished and brainfilthed by mainstream corporate whore houses of political porn.

How strange then, that Irish people who claim, they would do anything for their children, while at the same time selling out their country, that will be barely inhabitable for the their children. Scameron's other island of Orangemen, Blueshirts and Sellouts.

Speaking with many people from across the political divide in Ireland currently , the general consensus privately, is that Irish Peace Process, is currently dying a slow death. One of its principal architects Gerry Adams in a statement recently stated, “The political process is in trouble. I believe that the political process faces its greatest challenge since the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in 1998. The anti-Good Friday Agreement axis within unionism; the pro-unionist stance of the British secretary of state Theresa Villiers; the refusal of Downing Street to honour its own obligations, are combining to create the most serious threat to the political institutions in the North in recent years.

“The result of all this is directly undermining power-sharing and partnership government. The unionist leaderships have been encouraged in their posture by a British government that has not been fully engaged with the political process for four years.” He added, that traditional pro-British Unionist were unwilling to participate positively in any of the Agreement's institutions, stating that “Instead it has adopted a tactical approach aimed at serving the political agenda of a fundamentalist rump in their party rather than the needs of the whole community,”

Again yesterday, Adams made a veiled attack, on the current Fine Gael regime in Government in the South of Ireland, which has traditionally protected the Unionists in the North, stating, "An anti-agreement axis has now emerged. There needs to be a pro-agreement axis and the two Governments need to be very, very focused on delivering on the agreement.” 

The Irish Government has been too passive in my view and the Taoiseach(Irish Prime minister) could well emulate the example of Albert Reynolds (Another Peace Process architect who died last week)  to get involved and press ahead but particularly to keep the British Government to its obligations.”

The traditional Unionist Leader in the north Peter Robinson statement in reply, "Once more we see the self-serving attempt by Sinn Fein to distract public attention from real problems by blaming everyone, except itself, for what it asserts is a crisis that impacts on the political institutions."

Last week Hilary Clinton 's aide “Today, too many in Ireland take two decades of a ceasefire for granted. They still focus on their own sense of victimhood of the past and fail to forge a new united community that can not only solidify the peace, but even build shared prosperity. A look back at the hard-fought ceasefire may encourage some broader thinking about the responsibility of leadership to build a better shared future for the people of Ireland.”

The British Conservative Government and their Vice Royal in Ireland, since coming to power, other than enforcing a heavy censorship of international media coverage of the ongoing low intensity war In Occupied Ireland, have irresponsibly taken a hands off approach with the Peace Process and essentially have failed to understand the critical small print of the dying Good Friday agreement.

In a recent statement the leader of Republican Sinn Fein, the traditional  Irish Republican voice, leader Des Dalton stated, "We are being asked to abandon the high ideals, that inspired that revolutionary generation of a century ago and instead embrace the mythology of empire. It is evident that in the decade of centenaries, the political establishments of Leinster House, Stormont and Westminster, are determined to draw a line under Irish history. By demonising and isolating Irish Republicanism and refusing it access to public debate, they hope, that it will simply fade from the public consciousness, robbed of historical or political legitimacy. Quoting from a Ronan Fanning article in the Irish Times, he added,  “…the propagation of a bland, bloodless, bowdlerised and inaccurate hybrid of history, which if carried to extremes, is more likely to provoke political outrage than to command intellectual respect, let alone consensus.”

The Freemasonry of the Orange Order are now front and centre in Unionist, Fine Gael and British politics. Its Chaplain, Rev Mervyn Gibson, the most influential person in all-party talks on flags, parading and the past, is even more influential after the DUP and UUP scuttled the talks by the recent US Government to try move the dying process on, with its envoys Richard Haas and Meghan Sullivan sent packing by the Orange Order, exercising its trump card, the Orange veto.This is one of many critical factors, that was not dealt with by The Peace process. Another was the issue of large numbers of political prisoners still languishing in British Gaols, in both parts of Ireland. This threatens to explode again at any moment, in the same way that, the Hunger Strike of Bobby Sands and the 11 other Irish Republicans, who starved to death on Hunger Strike, changing the face of Irish politics and giving the platform to Adams voice, to be serious player he now is in Irish politics.


Now however, as the Orange Order have demonstrated themselves to be the real voice of traditional Unionism, while  Adams clearly does not speak for traditional Irish Republicans. What Nancy Soderberg and the British Conservative Party in London have failed to grasp, is that the Good Friday Agreement will not stick, without a proper foundation, in the context of both the Orange and Green traditions of Ireland. These traditions are deep in the psyche of the majority of Irish people's consciousness. One of the principal lessons of the last 800 years of irish History which Ms Soderberg in the context of Ireland and many American citizens in the context of their own short history, fail to understand is "Old Europe."


In light of all of this, one does not have to be particularly bright to observe, that the Peace Process is past its sell by date on the ground in Ireland. It clearly needs to evolve into something more comprehensive and inclusive with respect to the matter of Orange/Green traditions and their real voices. Clearly again for a more permanent solution, the "Peace Process needs to evolve from a superficially contrived short term solution into a bedded down Comprehensive Settlement Process


Settlement Process


The English Oxford dictionary  defines "settlement"as "An official agreement intended to resolve a dispute or conflict." Obviously in any permanent settlement, compromise is critical and nobody is going to achieve their ideals.This needs to be first accepted by everyone at the negotiating table, however painful.The alternative is a war for total victory, the consequence of which, no sane mind can countenance. Most fair minded traditional Irish republicans will acknowledge, that the Orange tradition has made considerable sacrifices, with respect to their identity, particularly in the context of both World Wars and the recent ongoing war in Ireland, with tens of thousands losing their lives in all of this.This is a considerable factor in their tradition and identity. Any agreement that ignores this reality is doomed.


Likewise within the "green tradition" millions of Irish have died, as a result of British colonialism. This reality cannot simply be airbrushed out of Irish history by revisionism because it is deeply embedded, consciously or unconsciously, within the Irish psyche, on the same scale as the Jewish Holocaust is with Israelites. It also must be addressed within any credible settlement.There are  many other pressing, critical social issues within Ireland, such as a Bill of Civil Rights, People before Profit, transparent genuine Immediate Democracy, with modern technology, such as the internet democracy, with checks and balances, that ensure ordinary people have real voting power against unregulated Corporate monopolies hijacking the constitutional process with political bribery and the current endemic corruption of the present sytem, in all parts of Ireland


To any objective political view, of the small island of Ireland, with its current political realities, it is crystal clear, that a Federal solution similar to many other European countries, is really the only feasible solution to the current reality with an arrangement where Unionists in Ulster keep their identity and traditions, within a British Commonwealth arrangement, customized specifically to facilitate their specific traditions and arrangements and possibly protect them along with their British brethren form the creeping, fascist monopoly of Europe. This of course will be anathema to many traditional Irish republicans, but it will take compromise, fair mindedness and sacrifice, in any credible settlement, that is based on reality, as opposed to the horrific alternative.

Of course many will argue, that the changing demographics on the ground will change this, but in a Spirit of true reconciliation all minorities, including immigrant aspirations, must be respected in any genuine modern democracy. Traditional Irish Republicans like Ruarai O'Bradaigh, recognized this and presented drafts for a comprehensive agreement that factored in much of this compromise, in a Spirit of Genorosity, which has traditionally been a much acclaimed Irish characteristic, at least until recently. It is time for everyone to get real, put their ego's and personalities to one side and make this comprehensive, inclusive, settlement a reality, based on civilized principles of human progress.

The author formally does not belong to any political organization and offers this proposal in a spirit of unity not division. Because of fascist censorship in Ireland presently, I also ask  those readers who agree with the outlines of this proposal, to share it wherever you can. If you belong to a political party, trade union or political forum or platform, please take up this proposal and make it as inclusive as possible. If you are overseas or non Irish, we still need your help for a comprehensive, inclusive settlement.

by Brian Clarke

ZEIG HEIL OUR QUEEN ! #BoycottBritish

Ulster loyalism; lost and without a real friend.

A map highlighting the areas subjected to British plantations in Ulster, using modern county boundaries. (Photo credit:Wikipedia)

‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as intractable as ever and politicians would once more have to pay attention to the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’.

Fifty years and another world war later, Ulster remained a needling presence in British political life. At the time of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974, which helped bring down the cross-community power-sharing executive agreed at Sunningdale in 1973, a peeved Harold Wilson openly denounced Ulster Protestants as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy’. The prime minister’s accusation riled the Protestants, who thought themselves harder-working than their feckless Catholic neighbours, the real spongers in their eyes. Incensed Ulster Unionists began to sport sponges on their lapels.

Are the people of Ulster – as its Protestant champions claim – an integral part of the British nation? Or is Northern Ireland rather, as Irish nationalists insist, a relic of empire, whose close proximity to Great Britain obscures the otherwise bald fact that British colonialism is the ultimate cause of the modern Ulster Question? Both claims are valid, while neither tells the whole story. Certainly, the Northern Irish problem has its roots in a colonial project, the Ulster Plantation of the early 17th century. Yet with the passage of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls off the ferry at Larne, the proliferation of Union Jacks along roads and at roundabouts is alienating. Unintentionally perhaps, the puffed-up hyper-Britons of Ulster exhibit colonial insecurity and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’.

A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s University and the Ormeau Road where the streets, built by a biblically minded Victorian Protestant, are named for Jerusalem, Damascus and Carmel. Originally, Protestants lived here, and later, the area became more mixed, with young lecturers bringing in a dash of counter-culture; but in recent years the Holy Land has become a place of student-dominated multiple-occupancy housing and raucous anti-social behaviour, which tends to culminate in riotous stand-offs with the police on St Patrick’s Day. The authorities would rather not confront the fact that many of the rioting students – ‘culchies’ (yokels) from mid-Ulster – wear Celtic tops or Gaelic Athletic Association shirts, and are asserting an instinctive quasi-sectarian command of what is now their territory. Protestant students prefer to rent accommodation further south in Stranmillis.

In Belfast the urban motorway – something that has done much to blight city life across the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a bleak cordon sanitaire between some of the rival sectarian ghettoes in the west of the city. Moreover, as the security forces were quick to recognise, the limited number of crossing points for vehicles meant that the centre of Belfast could be more effectively secured against disturbances spilling over from the Shankill and Falls Road areas. This estrangement persists, long after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Peace did not bring the ‘peace walls’ tumbling down, or strip away the protective netting which covers tiny back gardens within lobbed-bottle distance of the other community.

Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised microgeographies – of small urban pockets such as Sandy Row or the Short Strand – provide the matter of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’.

Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call Great Britain, quickly learns not to call the nearby larger island ‘the mainland’, while apparent synonyms for Northern Ireland – such as ‘Ulster’ or the ‘Six Counties’ or ‘the North of Ireland’ – betray the politics and religion of the speaker. Where, indeed, is Ulster? This seemingly straightforward question opens up a rich seam of history. Ulster is one of the historic provinces of Ireland, and comprises nine counties, six of which – Armagh, Down, Antrim, Londonderry (or Derry), Fermanagh and Tyrone – are today in Northern Ireland, and three – Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed Donegal (then known as Tyrconnell), Londonderry, Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

During the Home Rule crisis of the early 20th century, Sir James Craig, the founding father of Northern Ireland, envisaged hiving off the four most strongly Protestant counties – Antrim, Down, Londonderry and Armagh – to form an Ulster statelet. In the event, Fermanagh and Tyrone were added to the new self-governing province of Northern Ireland established under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, but Article XII of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, between the United Kingdom and the Irish Free State, was deliberately vague on the future resolution of the border. In the event, the proposal of the Boundary Commission of 1925 to shave off southern Armagh for the Free State and transfer parts of eastern Donegal to Northern Ireland was much too controversial to implement, or even acknowledge in public.

Certain areas near the border in Armagh became notorious for atrocities more than a century before there even was a border. Uncanny congruences of this sort reinforce the assumption of outsiders that Ulster is a land of memory, where the horrors of an inescapable past forever haunt the present. However, as Sean Connolly notes more precisely in Belfast 400, memory is all too often selective memory, if not ‘historical amnesia’. When 19th-century Belfast became ‘the capital of Irish Unionism’, its citizens conveniently forgot that in the 1790s the city had been ‘the birthplace of a United Irish movement committed to the establishment of an independent Irish republic’. At the centenary of the Rebellion of 1798, the leading officials of the Orange Grand Lodge of Belfast misremembered the largely Presbyterian rising in Ulster as ‘a series of most foul and cowardly murders and massacres of innocent men and women whose only offence was their Protestantism’. James Loughlin notes in his essay in Ulster since 1600, that ‘former Presbyterian rebels’, keen in the early decades of the 19th century to reinvent themselves as loyal Britons, were ‘only too ready to frame the rebellion through the lens of 1641 as a vast Popish conspiracy’. In other words, although Ulster Catholics had been largely quiescent in 1798, the supposed history of the rebellion was cunningly – but convincingly – turned upside down to fit with an existing memory of the Ulster Catholic rising of 1641 (and, to be fair, with the strikingly different pattern of hostilities in other parts of Ireland during 1798).

Moreover, an entrenched rhetoric of civility and barbarity, which dated back to the Ulster Plantation, and beyond, appeared to confirm such perceptions. After the flight to the Continent in 1607 of the harassed Gaelic earls – Hugh O’Neill, Second Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, First Earl of Tyrconnell, along with Cúchonnacht Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh – the Plantation of 1609 was designed to bring civility to these rude parts. The new king, James VI and I, had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such sentiments still persist in the expected quarters. Ian Paisley claimed in the early 1980s that the forebears of the good Protestant folk of Ulster had ‘cut a civilisation out of the bogs and meadows of this country’, while the Gaels ‘were wearing pig-skins and living in caves’. These Yahoo Gaels were not only uncivilised, but so addicted to violence that it had permeated their entire culture. Paisley’s daughter, Rhonda, at one stage a Belfast councillor, complained that the Irish language itself ‘drips with their bloodthirsty saliva’.

Although there was a Scots presence in the north-east of Ireland from the early 17th century, Scots Presbyterian culture wasn’t consolidated there until the arrival of General Robert Munro’s Scots Covenanter army in the 1640s. The Scottish famines of the late 1690s brought a further exodus to Ulster of Scots, particularly from the south-west, the stronghold of Covenanting Presbyterianism. The Scots Covenanters were decidedly not republicans; they preferred to be governed by kings, but owed them a highly conditional allegiance. If the king failed to uphold the community’s Covenant with God, then the people were entitled to take up defensive arms against his malignant rule, and in certain circumstances even to execute divine vengeance on the apostate ruler. It is ultimately from this branch of the Scots Presbyterian tradition that Ulster inherits the peculiarities of loyalism, a commitment to queen and country so anarchic and tenuous as to be downright disloyal.

Loyalism has taken different organisational forms. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was set up in the mid-1960s by a former British soldier called Gusty Spence, as a proactive means of combating the upsurge in IRA activity which, it was expected, would follow the fiftieth anniversary in 1966 of the Easter Rising. The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) emerged in the early 1970s as a form of vigilantism by the Protestant working class against the insurgency of the Provisional IRA (which had split in disgust from the torpid Marxism of the Official IRA in 1969). The UDA used a proxy, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), for its terrorist activities. So self-defence was followed by the unprovoked sectarian killing of Catholics – regardless of whether they had any links with the Provos – and eventually, in some areas at least, by psychopathic gangsterism. Clearly, there is a major cleavage within Ulster Protestantism between Unionism and loyalism, but it’s not easy to trace its course.

Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) once stood on very uncertain terrain between the ‘big house Unionism’ of the old Ulster gentry, from which it recoiled, and a proletarian loyalism it sometimes appeared to court. How was one to interpret Paisley’s night-time rally on a hill in County Antrim in 1981, at which five hundred supporters waved their firearms licences? The Paisleyites’ reckless disregard for the rule of law, for Westminster and for British constitutional norms earned them the contempt of Enoch Powell, a Conservative turned Ulster Unionist, who favoured the full integration of Northern Ireland into the UK. Powell claimed Paisley and his followers were ‘Protestant Sinn Féin’.

The distinction between Unionism and loyalism revolves not only around violence and the nature of Ulster’s commitment to the British state, but also around class – that omnipresent yet largely invisible factor in Northern Irish politics. Loyalism has been an underappreciated expression of working-class consciousness. Andy Tyrie, the supreme commander of the UDA between 1973 and 1988, admitted that challenging the dominance of Unionism was an important part of being a loyalist. Of course, loyalism was an uninhibited demonstration of anti-Republican hostility, but it was also a form of resentment against the middle-class Unionists in their leafy suburbs, who seemed content enough to let their proletarian co-religionists bear the brunt of the internal struggle with the Provos.

Why, an outsider might ask about the situation in Ulster, did the region fail to develop the same class-based politics as the rest of the UK? Northern Ireland seems to be stuck in a conservative limbo, with voters preferring to vote along religious lines without regard to their material interests. But this analysis is oversimplified. Ulster is, in fact, rather left-wing. In one of the most surprising essays in Ulster since 1600, Graham Brownlow calculates that, factoring out coal and iron and steel manufacture, which the province lacks, Northern Ireland was ‘much more strike-prone than the UK average’ between the 1940s and the mid-1980s. UK trade unions enjoy considerable support, in spite of the divided national allegiances of the workforce. Indeed, Northern Ireland has a higher density of trade-union membership – that is, actual membership divided by total potential membership – than other parts of the United Kingdom, including Labour’s heartlands in Wales and Scotland. The Northern Ireland Labour Party, established in 1924, had offered an appealing alternative to ethnic politics, but just as it had emerged as the official opposition in Stormont it was overwhelmed by the onset of the Troubles. Similarly, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) – formed in 1970 out of various groupings, including the Republican Labour Party, and supported by some former members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party – shed its Labourite origins under John Hume’s leadership, but could not present an Irish enough identity to see off the electoral challenge of Sinn Féin. In any case, people in Ulster might wonder whether they needed class-based political parties. Sectarianism had done more to protect the working class in Northern Ireland than a powerless Labour Party had achieved in Britain after 1979. The Troubles helped to keep Thatcherism at bay, so that in 1989 the journalist Ian Aitken could describe the province as ‘the Independent Keynesian Republic of Northern Ireland’.

Here the middle classes flourished during the Troubles, their high-living maintained by a bloated public-sector-cum-security-state. The North Down constituency is a haven of peace and material amplitude, though notorious in cliché for its all too stark social division between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-yachts’. Nothing is as likely to shock the preconceptions of the visitor who comes to view the grim locations of ‘Troubles tourism’ as the sight of Ulster Tatler on newsagents’ shelves. Middle-class life in the province has its own variations. South Belfast has a multicultural bohemian flavour, as obvious in the boutiques of the Lisburn Road as around Queen’s University itself. This is a world captured with deliberately baroque exaggeration in Chris Marsh’s comic novel A Year in the Province (2008), whose humour comes from a pitch-perfect rendering of the cadences and sing-song inverted repetitions of Ulster speech. Ian Sansom’s deadpan novel Ring Road (2004), on the other hand, explores the dour and parochial absurdities of Ulster’s less flashy middle classes in the dormitory towns around Belfast.

While the Troubles did very little to threaten the middle classes, events have recently taken a potentially worrying turn. The recent spasm of unrest was provoked by Belfast City Council’s decision in December to restrict the flying of the Union flag at the City Hall – it had always flown there year-round – to selected dates in the political calendar, such as the Duchess of Cambridge’s birthday. The decision was not just the doing of Sinn Féin, but was supported by the somewhat priggish middle-class do-gooders of Alliance, a political party which has traditionally floated consequence-free above the streetfighting of proletarian Ulster. On this occasion, however, loyalist protesters chose to single out Alliance for facilitating the outrage. The party offices and the homes of prominent Alliance politicians became targets. The riots which have followed have been blamed – rightly – on loyalist recidivism.

There is, however, another unexpected side to loyalism, as Peter Shirlow’s book demonstrates. Whereas middle-class Unionist Ulster was for decades happy enough to say no, time and again, to changes in the government of the province, working-class loyalists – despite their own reputation for intransigence – could not afford to indulge in the same endless rejection. Shirlow distinguishes between the ‘idiocy’ of rejectionist loyalism and an avant-garde of ‘progressive’ or ‘transitional’ loyalism willing to engage with the demands of the Catholic community and to think imaginatively about conflict resolution. Working-class loyalists experimented – long before their snooty Unionist cousins – with a ‘non-sectarian mode of Unionist politics’, which recognised the shared sufferings of working-class Protestants and Catholics alike.

In 1979 the UDA-backed New Ulster Political Research Group published a report called Beyond the Religious Divide, which explored the common ‘Ulster’ identity of the province’s Catholic and Protestant peoples. The UDA also flirted with the idea of an independent Northern Irish republic as an ingenious solution to the underlying cause of the Troubles, namely the rival British and Irish claims of sovereignty. In 1987 the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), which would become a front for the UDA, put out Common Sense, which called for power-sharing and equality across the sectarian divide. The hard men of the UVF also caught the peace and reconciliation bug. In 1984 the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), the political wing of the UVF, proposed a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, which was too daring for the authorities, and followed it up with an ecumenical document entitled ‘Sharing Responsibility’. Needless to say, not all loyalists were impressed. Transitional loyalists were seen by traditionalists as ‘lundys’ (the Ulster Protestant term for ‘quisling’). Another grouping, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, denounced the PUP as ‘atheistic communists’ determined to impose ‘a socialist ideology over a conservative people’.

This is, of course, to beg the question. Ulster has an ingrained conservatism, to be sure, but also an old-fashioned socialism about which it often seems to be in denial. The future remains uncertain. The dispute about the flag shows how much symbols matter in Northern Ireland, and unfortunately Ulster has just embarked on a ‘decade of centenaries’. Some are uncontentious, such as the four hundredth anniversary of Belfast’s receipt of a royal charter in 1613 and the Titanic centenary of 2012; others are pregnant with menace. The contrasting blood sacrifices of Dublin’s Easter Rising and the Ulster Division’s losses in the Battle of the Somme loom ominously in 2016. And, if we get past them without incident, the centenary of the Protestant statelet itself and the partition of Ireland arrive in 2020-21.

By Colin Kidd.

Winston Churchill wrote: “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.”