THE plain, old, Catholic church in the suburbanised countryside near Portadown was burnt down so recently that it still has a sickly smell of heat and water. A scurf of ash and broken slates surrounds its roofless walls. Cars are still pausing on the road for the people inside, in whatever frame of mind, to gape up at this surprise in the soft spring landscape - the fierce rib cage of black rafters. The interior of the church burnt so completely that "you wouldn't even know there were seats in it," the parish priest in Mullavilly, Fr Kieran MacOscar, says wonderingly. "There isn't even the shape of anything left. I heard the fireman saying it on the radio that when they were coming out they knew from miles away that the place was past redemption. They could see the glow in the sky."
Seven miles away, in Lurgan, Brownlow House - former stately pile of the Lords Lurgan, then acquired by the Orange Order, and now headquarters of the Orange Order's more religious associate order, the Royal Black Institution blazed as strongly on the windy night it was burnt down in August of last year. The level of the artificial lake in front went down two feet because the fire brigades pumped out so much water to try to control it. The half ruin has stopped smelling burn outside. But inside, even the heavy polythene covering where the roofs and ceilings were burnt away hasn't stopped the rain getting in, and the odour of rot is everywhere. The huge echoing rooms are lit by a few bare bulbs because the wiring, like the lead cupolas, like the ornate woodwork and the stained glass and the fine carpets and the chandeliers, melted on the night of the fire. Brownlow House is still the largest Orange hall in the world, and every night of the week it is busy with lodge and preceptory meetings. But the members sit on job lot chairs in the bare, smoke streaked rooms, their former High Victorian sumptuousness gone up in flames.
In Mullavilly church the heat burst the door of the tabernacle, and then it buckled, and jammed. Someone managed to lever it open and the priest took the ciborium with the consecrated hosts back to the oratory in his house.
The terminology is no doubt strange to the Protestants who did their best to save things as precious to them in Lurgan.
A bible is the centrepiece of any lodge or preceptory: their bibles were burnt. Their collarettes and banners. Their boxes of lodge records. That night, the senior fire officer present spoke to Sam Gardiner, OBE, Worshipful District Master of Lurgan Orange District, County Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution, many times Mayor of Lurgan and party whip of the Ulster Unionist Party at the Forum and Chairman of the Management Committee of Brownlow House. "I forbid you to enter that tower," the fireman said, meaning the lanterntower that dominates the mock Elizabethan edifice. As soon as he had gone, Mr Gardiner got up to the tower and flew the Union Jack horn it.
"The Union Jack speaks of Calvary," Mr Gardiner says. It is made up of three crosses St Patrick's cross, St George's and St Andrew's. And the main cross is red to symbolise Jesus dying on Calvary." Since Black men progress upward through 11 degrees of brethrenhood to reach the status of Red Cross Sir James Molyneux is a Red Cross this is intensely meaningful to them, though it might not be to the congregation at Mullavilly. And things natural to Mullavilly the pious exclamations, for instance, inscribed on a tombstone: "O Immense Passion, O Profound Wounds," and the promise of 400 days' indulgence for repeating them would be strange to the Black men.
They have a common reaction to arson attacks. The more often they are attacked, the more strongly they feel their own particularity. And both church and mansion had been under threat for a lone gime. The steel security shutters had been taken down from the front of Brownlow House as a mark of faith in the IRA ceasefire: as if to show their contempt for such gestures, the arsonists went to the back, prised off a shutter that had not yet been removed, and got in. The successful one was the sixth attempt to burn the place down. And the enraged still can't stop. This week, the path up to the entrance is marked with green streaks where home made bombs consisting of green paint, sugar and petrol were thrown in the last few days.
In Mullavilly, the parish priest is practically an expert on claims for compensation for malicious damage. The other church in the parish also a church from the end of Penal times, a church that would have had a thatched roof and an earth floor to begin with, and was still a humble place was burnt to the ground a few years ago. The grandest thing it had was a window given by Cardinal D'Alton to mark the Marian Year.
That went, of course. The first Community Hall of the parish was burnt. The school was burnt in the 1970s. The house where the priest of the time lived was bombed at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. He got into his car and gave chase to the car from which the occupants had thrown what he thought was a rock into his house. While he did, the rock, which was in fact a bomb, went off and destroyed half the building.
In the bungalow which replaced it, incendiary devices were left in the porch and in the fireplace. An incendiary device was left in front of the altar in Mullavilly church before it was finally successfully destroyed: the women who help clean and decorate the church were shown the marks of it by the priest as recently as this Good Friday.
A sacred building on this spot managed to last since 1771. Mullavilly church even played its own little part in community reconciliation - it was a favourite for mixed marriages for people from Portadown because "it was that bit out of town, you know. If you wanted to get married quietly, without too much publicity, it suited". But only a crooked silver lamp, still hanging by one chain from a rafter and swaying in the breeze, recalls all that.
"My congregation is saddened, not angry, the parish priest says. That's what they say in Lurgan, too That they're sad, not angry.
But someone's angry. Whoever burnt down Mullavilly's sister church brought bales of hay, put one in front of the altar, one in the sacristy, dowsed them, and set them alight. In the middle of the night. Their actions and the noises they made must have been like something out of medieval times. The parish, a commemorative booklet says, "suffered frequently in tribal Warfare". There have been Vikings, Cromwellians, Penal times priests disguised as laymen. Father O'Coigley, who was beheaded for a rebel in Maidstone in 1798, was a native of this parish. "We're one per cent up against 99 per cent in this area," a local Catholic said this week. "That's why we don't say anything at all."
Drumcree is four miles away. "The Battle of the Diamond" - the decisive confrontation in 1795, between Protestants and Catholics in this area, on the night of which the triumphant Protestants founded the Orange Order, is along the way. Enmities are local. The Irish Times stopped to ask men building a house the way to the Diamond. "What are you going there for?" "To learn some history." "No Surrender," the two man standing on the building site shouted after the Dublin registered car. Laughing, but loud and determined.
"No Surrender."
ALL over the North fires are being set. Sectarian resentment seems to need expression all the more when military and paramilitary activity is muted. Within the last months, Orange halls, Baptist chapels, Church of Ireland property in Derry and Dungiven - an attack on furniture still in store after the last attack - Catholic churches and schools, have all been set on fire. Above all, schools, and above all in Belfast. Arson is more clearly a simple, brutish weapon of intimidation in an urban setting. Used to judge by newspaper reports, far more often against the Catholic community than Protestant.
Outside the city ghettoes, sympathy can be expressed and even felt across the community. "It's not churchgoers that do this," a parishioner in Mullavilly says. "No indeed," says her friend, "nor workers, either." "My neighbour the best of neighbours is a Protestant," says a third. "I'm ashamed of whoever did this," she said to me, and I said "Don't be ashamed, for it's not the decent Protestants that do things like this There is ecumenism on the level of the clergy," the priest says. Who does that leave out?
On the top of the slope above Mullavilly church there is a block of functional Housing Executive - local authority - housing. It is a bit of a city in what is still country. It looks down on the tiny Catholic enclave. And at the chimney of a defunct mill, with faded red, white and blue coping across from it. If the mill and its like were still working, would the locality be less tense? What kind of place is this, anyway? Who controls it? It is so near to its rural past that hens pick in the gravel of a hacienda style bungalow.
But people people with jobs and money, anyway - can be in the spanking new shopping mall in Portadown in minutes. The local general store is for sale. The pub was bombed to extinction. "Why?" "Because it was Catholic." Yet a few fields from the burned out church a sign offers "Classic Homes for the connoisseur. An impressive development of five bedroom, three reception Queen Anne style residences including double garage ..." A prosperous modern civilisation overlays the burning bales of hay on the altar steps in the dead of night, but some people don't belong to the prosperity.
Some people never did. In the town hall in Lurgan there is an exhibition about the Great Famine in this district, and its aftermath. One 19th century photo shows the back of a slum tenement behind the Main Street. The caption says that diseases were rife in such courtyards, which had no water or sanitation. "Things have improved since then," the cheery voice of a local man, looking at the photo, said. And then he added sharply and as if he could not prevent himself from saying it "And still they're not satisfied." Lurgan has disadvantaged Protestants. An area of Housing Executive flats and terraces is covered with loyalist murals and graffiti: "Lurgan B Company Ulster Brigade." "Free Billy Wright." But it is not the poor Protestants, it is understood, who are the ones "still not satisfied".
"We got not so much as a word of sympathy from anyone except our own people," a Black man says about the Brownlow House fire. "It was a hurt. There were nuns living in the nearest house to the fire. That night they didn't offer as much as a cup of water, much less a bucket of water." He adds: "The whole thing certainly didn't do much for community relations," but then - what does he mean by community? Mr Gardiner says earnestly: "Brownlow House wasn't just a house - it was part of the heritage of Lurgan." The chair Lord Lurgan sat in, carved with "God Save the King"? Portraits of Queen Victoria? Back staircases which Grade A servants one shilling a year and all found could use, and others which Grade B servants could use? Mementoes of the signing of the Ulster Covenant at the house during 1912?
The idea that there is an uncontested Ulster - that the whole of "the" community can be made to cherish such symbols - survives the destruction of Brownlow House. Just as the Catholic congregation that worshipped at Mullavilly is no less a congregation because it has no church to worship in. A man who has been a member of it, for instance, is very ill. A few days alter the fire, a Mass Bouquet was brought to his wife. "The whole parish is praying for him," it said. The parish survives the chapel. Loyalism survives its physical symbols. Both sides would say that nothing of any real importance went up in the flames. They were just pure waste.