IN THE dim, atmospheric light of Trinity College’s majestic Long Room, a child of the Ardoyne and a big man from Ballymena greeted one another warmly amid glass cases of old documents.
The meeting of President Mary McAleese and Rev Ian Paisley, now Lord Bannside, might be unremarkable except for the voices that reached over the centuries from those documents, telling stories of a Friday in October 1641, reports of such barbarity that they played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/British identity in Ulster.
It might have been a slightly awkward occasion. After all, as President McAleese put it, facts and truth had been casualties along the way in the “wildly divergent accounts in both the Catholic and Protestant historical narratives”, of the events of 1641.
But there was a sense of ease as Lord Bannside listened along with his wife, his son Kyle and daughter Sharon, in a room filled with academics and representatives from the National Library, the National Gallery, as well as the Indian ambassador, PS Raghavan, Andrew Staunton of the British embassy and Aurelie Bonal, of the French embassy.
They stood silently while President McAleese set that other October 22nd in context – “Ireland was a powder keg . . .
in the wake of the Elizabethan conquest . . .” – and described a rebellion intended by the instigators as a “conservative coup, spun out of control”.
She said there was “everything to be gained from interrogating the past calmly and coherently, in order to understand each other’s passions more comprehensively . . . to help us transcend those baleful forces of history so that we can make a new history of good neighbourliness . . .”
Lord Bannside, occasionally fading almost to inaudibility, also focused on what the exhibition could teach us.
“Our fellow countrymen and women in the 1600s knew trouble as we have, thank God, never known it. The testimonials before us in this exhibition tell in graphic detail the losses they sustained and the crimes carried out against them. These troubles were not borne by one social class, or another, or by one gender or another. They were not limited by age, nor limited by religious belief.
“Perhaps the most telling aspect of this material is that it bears witness to the scale of the wrongdoing while at the same time individualising it. Here lie tragic stories of individuals – here too is a dark story of our land.
“To learn this story, I believe, is to know who we are, why we have had to witness our own trouble, and why we live in a divided island . . . May we really learn what this exhibition can really teach us.”
He graciously thanked those who had invited him to the event and in a rather benign reminder of the Rev Ian Paisley of old, he asked God’s blessing of everyone in the room, adding, “and in the words of Lord Carson, who was a great man – he was well known to Trinity and to this city – what did he say? He said God save Ulster”, to a room that erupted in clapping and laughter.
“I would be willing now to just stretch a bit harder and I would like to say God save Ulster and the three other . . . eh . . . [laughter] parts of this island. Being a Ballymena man, I’m putting Ulster first . . .”
