HISTORICAL EVENTS which continue to divide scarcely merit inclusion in our decade of commemorations. The Ulster Covenant, signed 100 years ago, threatened to use “all means which may be found necessary” to defeat Home Rule. It was a ratcheting up of the strategy unveiled by Lord Randolph Churchill in Belfast on February 22nd, 1886: “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”
With prescience the Annual Register described his incitement as “an epigrammatic encouragement to treason . . . He left behind the seeds of danger which soon grew into open riot. An attack by some Orangemen upon a body of Catholic workmen, one of whom lost his life, was the beginning of a series of desperate riots in which Protestant and Catholic waged fierce war on the streets of Belfast . . . houses were sacked, men and women killed . . . The police and military were made the subject of fierce attacks by the Orange party, who applied the epithet ‘Morley’s murderers’ to the constabulary.” The predominantly Catholic Royal Irish Constabulary was mistrusted, while John Morley was Gladstone’s chief secretary for Ireland and one of the architects of the Home Rule Bill.
The defeat of the first Home Rule Bill was followed by 20 years of mainly Tory rule. The reckless playing of the Orange card paid dividends.
GB Kenna dedicated his book, Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom, 1920-22, “to the many Ulster Protestants, who have always lived in peace and friendliness with their Catholic neighbours”. At Finaghy on July 12th, 1920, however, Sir Edward Carson declared that loyalists were in imminent peril from Sinn Féin; he was losing confidence in the British government; they must defend themselves. He added: “And these are not mere words; I am sick of words without action.” The London Times described the Twelfth celebration as a “parade of anachronistic intolerance . . . Upon Sir Edward Carson lies largely the blame for having sown the dragon’s teeth in Ireland.” On July 21st all 5,000 Catholic workers – one-fifth of them ex-servicemen – were driven out of the Belfast shipyards. A dozen or two Protestants who refused to join in the intimidation were also expelled. “Those who could get quietly away accepted the inevitable. Hundreds were surrounded and kicked. Several were thrown into the water and pelted with bolts and other missiles. Nearly a score of seriously injured were conveyed to hospital, and large numbers of others were treated at home.”
After this ethnic cleansing the military arrived to be “received with cheers and the singing of loyal choruses”. At the unfurling of a Union Jack ceremony in the shipyards in October, Sir James Craig said he approved “of the action you, boys, have taken”.
In April 1922 Michael Collins suggested to Craig, now Northern premier, “that it would be much better for the peace of your area, and the general welfare of our country, if you devoted your energies in co-operation with us towards establishing civilised conditions in Belfast”. A pact between the two leaders failed.
Bartholomew Francis Murphy has been airbrushed out of history. Stationed in Belfast, head constable Murphy retired when the RIC was disbanded 90 years ago. Before leaving he was presented with an address of gratitude from the Catholics of south Belfast. For two years, it stated (with hyperbole), they had endured a reign of terror “equal to, if not more cruel than, that waged by the Turks against the Armenians. Thousands of Catholics have been driven from their work, their homes attacked by mobs of infuriated bigots, looted and wrecked, hundreds burned to the ground . . .
“During all this time you found yourself in one of the few positions where a Catholic could help his persecuted brethren.” As head constable in charge of the police stations in south Belfast, Murphy’s “watchfulness and tactful handling” of his men saved many “from serious, if not deadly, injury. We know you have on several occasions risked your life at the hands of the ‘Sandy Row Lambs’ by your courageous stand between them and their intended victims. How many valuable lives were saved by you, your Catholic and better-disposed Protestant men; and how many helpless families and homes were protected when, but for you, they would have been destroyed?” Little realising that the North was about to be abandoned as the South plunged into civil war, the address ended with the hope that “their dismembered but beloved Ulster will by God’s blessing be once again a peaceful province in a happy, emancipated Irish Ireland”.
On his way home to Kells, Co Kerry, Murphy was accosted by armed men at Killorglin railway station. (Opponents of the Treaty were causing mayhem at the time.) In an act of cultural vandalism, his diaries were confiscated; written in Irish, he had intended using them to write about his experiences. The address (illuminated by James Dempsey) survived because it had been placed in the guard’s van for safe keeping.