Ireland, by Leon and Jill Uris

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

     Ireland:  A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris.  They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
     The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake.  Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
     Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
     From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:

   "Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
     well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
       "From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill.  It was a
     blunt instrument of totalitarianism.  To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
     Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
     without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
     rights.  It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
     in Europe."  (176)

     Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required."  (220)

     Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:

   "[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
     the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
     exist."  (277)

Strong words.

     Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death.  "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)

     On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:

     "A rope, a rope,
      Tae hang the Pope!
      A pennyworth o' cheese
      Tae choke him!
      A pint o' lamp oil
      Tae wrench it down!
      And a big hot give
      Tae roast him!
      When I was sick,
      And very very sick,
      And very near a-dying,
      The only thing that raised me up
      Was to see
      The old whore frying!" (180-181)

A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport:  "We are about the land in Ulster.  Set your watches back 300 years."  (181)
     Page 214 is about  John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness."  Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics."  The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster.  This later happened.  I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
     A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry.  One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
     After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
     Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book.  On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar."  Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks.  Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
     Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it.  The event still weighs on Ireland.  We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
     Here are a couple pithy quotes:

    "The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
      Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."    
      (232)

     "[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)

     Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too.  Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked.  "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness."  (262-263)
     Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it.  At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families.  Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
     The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the  jackals." (277)
     The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly."  (281)
     The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts.  Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island.  Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
     The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A.  memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island.  "One island.  One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
     A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne.  After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
     Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says.  I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:

http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html

If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin."   The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
     Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans?  Does it matter now?  One could crack up obsessing about history.  I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.