Northern Ireland: Stuck in the 19th Century

Northern Ireland is a very strange place. It's a place where sectarian violence is commonplace, where warring factions look alike, are of the same race, speak the same language, often have the same last names, and both claim to be Christian. It's a place where 400 year old grudges just won't go away, and where the words "Protestant" and "Catholic" take on meanings unlike those anywhere else in the world.

The warring factions in this odd part of the world are usually referred to as the Protestants and the Catholics; sometimes as the loyalists (Protestants) and the republicans (Catholics); sometimes as the unionists (Protestants) and the nationalists (Catholics); sometimes as the orange (Protestants) and the green (Catholics); but never as friends. Protestants in that strange part of the world think of themselves as British, Catholics think of themselves as Irish. No one, apparently, thinks of himself as Northern Irish.

In the summer of 1997, New Jersey-born John Hemsworth, an American citizen visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hemsworth was returning to his lodgings after a night out when a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) land rover turned onto the street, where he was walking, in pursuit of a gang of youths. Espying Hemsworth, the land rover stopped, and the RUC, apparently no longer interested in the youths, targeted the unfortunate Hemsworth and set about rearranging his head with their truncheons.

According to a statement given by Hemsworth to his lawyer shortly after the incident, he identified himself as an American citizen. "They were in front of me. One turned and came toward me. I said, ‘I’m just going home, I’m an American citizen.’ At that he hit me in the face with his truncheon. I fell to the ground. He called me a Fenian bastard. Another one was shouting, ‘Move, move, you Fenian bastard.’ He kicked me on the left side of the jaw. I started to get up. Another one hit me on the back with a truncheon."

Hemsworth had been mistaken by the RUC — what was then the overwhelmingly Protestant police force of Northern Ireland — as a Catholic, and consequently a Republican (a member of the IRA, or an IRA supporter), and a Fenian. He died of a massive stroke within months of the beating. This was not an isolated incident.

It was, however, an incident that took place a year before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, an agreement designed to stop the kind of thing that happened to Hemsworth. Brokered by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, the agreement called for, among other things: power sharing between Protestants and Catholics; dissolution of the awful RUC and establisment of a more representative police force; and the disarming of paramilitary groups on both sides of the sectarian divide.

For 12 weeks in 2001 — three years after the agreement was signed — Catholic schoolgirls, holding tightly to their mothers' hands, walked a gauntlet of epithets (like "Fenian scum" and "get back to your rat-holes and your pedophile priests"), bags of urine, rocks, and broken bottles hurled at them by mobs of Protestant extremists over riot police who stood between them and their destination. The Catholic schoolgirls, ranging in ages from four to 11, were on their way to the front entrance of Holy Cross Primary School, which is about 300 yards from the interface between the mainly Catholic Ardoyne and mainly Protestant Glenbryn areas of Belfast. It was built over 30 years ago on land attached to a Catholic seminary. To get to the front entrance of the school, the little girls from Ardoyne had to walk the 300 yards through Glenbryn, the gauntlet.

Earlier this year — five years after the agreement — Protestant extremists planted a bomb at the front entrance to the same school. To most Americans the Hemsworth and schoolgirl incidents — indeed, the entire mess in Northern Ireland — make no sense, which is probably why they received little, if any, media coverage in this country. Reporting the stories would have required someone to explain what a "Fenian" was, and why the mere suspicion of Fenianism would enrage the RUC to the point of nearly beating someone to death. And that would have required a history lesson, which is what most newspapers don't do.

In order to understand the conflict in Northern Ireland, one must first understand the history behind it — because, to the people perpetuating the conflict, the history of that conflict is all important.

The troubles in Northern Ireland have their roots in the Protestant Reformation, in the English King Henry VIII's break with the Pope, and in the reluctance of the Irish Catholics in Ireland, a fiefdom of the English throne, to forsake their Catholic religion. Annoyed by the intransigence of the Irish, Henry's successors, beginning in the latter half of the 1500's, began a plantation process in Ireland that was not unlike the early English settlements that displaced the Indian populations in the eastern United States. The natives, Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholics, were evicted from land they had lived on for two millennia by Protestant settlers from England who became the landlords of Ireland.

The Ulster plantation, in the north of Ireland, was part of that process. In 1610 the English overlords of Ireland and Scotland transplanted dissident Protestant Scottish lowlanders (the Scotch-Irish) to huge tracts of land in the Irish province of Ulster that had been confiscated from the rebellious Irish Catholic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel. In Ulster the Protestant settlers, mostly Calvinist, were given the land and privileged position over any of the Irish Catholics who remained in what is now Northern Ireland. The privileged position was furthered by nearly two hundred years of penal laws designed to impoverish and ultimately destroy the Catholic population of Ireland. It almost succeeded.

The Irish, however, never succombed to the tyranny. The history of Ireland, from the time of Henry VIII until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 was a continuous litany of outright insurrection, guerilla warfare, and political agitation. Irish rebels finally won freedom for most, but not all, of their countrymen with the establishment of the Irish Free State, while six counties of the predominantly Protestant province of Ulster remained under British control as Northern Ireland.

While the population of what eventually became the Republic of Ireland remains free and mostly Catholic to this day, nothing much has changed for the Catholics of Northern Ireland. The very modern Republic of Ireland is, in many respects, the United States with a brogue. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, is what all of Ireland was prior to 1922.

The Fenians, who count for a lot in the realm of Northern Ireland's Protestant hate rhetoric, were a group of Irish rebels who first organized themselves in the 1860s. They were disbanded over 100 years ago, during the 19th century, when the Protestant extremists of Northern Ireland apparently stopped thinking.

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