July 22nd, 1969:THE MAIN news of the day 40 years ago was the moon landing but back home tensions in the North were building up steadily and would erupt in August with the siege of the Bogside and the arrival of British troops on the streets of Derry. The annual Orange marches had added to the sectarian atmosphere and an Orange hall in Dungiven, Co Derry, had been burned. Andrew Hamilton went there to interview an outspoken Catholic priest about what was going on.
The Rev George Doherty, one of Dungiven’s Catholic curates, has looked for answers to the violence of his own people. He did it at a parochial record hop the other night.“They surrounded me. There was the idea of one fellow that if the situation deteriorated and there was chaos and confusion, [taoiseach] Jack Lynch would come up here with his troops. And then one of them wanted to know why the Orange hall couldn’t be turned into a factory.”
The violent instinct of some young people in Dungiven was there again last weekend when they stoned the police station.
Fr Doherty said he was shocked and ashamed but thought that a small handful of extremists in the town might have had something to do with it.
“The first Protestant I met after the Orange hall burning, I said to him, ‘What is going to happen down here?’ He said: ‘We just don’t know.’ Then I rang the leader of the [Orange] lodge and I told him that it was my conviction that the lodge men should maintain the hall: that if the forces of law and order are to prevail this hall must be seen to be maintained. He told me it took a terrible lot of hard talking to prevent his people from coming in and wrecking around the town.”
Fr Doherty is unequivocal about the extremists in this 90 per cent Catholic town. The tail, he says, is definitely wagging the dog. “This small handful come up with a plan without any consideration of the consequences and they speak to the young people who have no political maturity.”
Solid friendship, never mind ecumenism, hasn’t rooted itself in Dungiven, a straggly little town on the Benbraddagh slopes. One of Fr Doherty’s predecessors may have had something to do with it: he was a firebrand priest and the Catholics in Dungiven say themselves that he threatened the Orangemen with machine-guns if they marched through the town.
The Protestants never really forgot those days of 20 years ago and the Catholics and Protestants have settled into an absolute apartheid. The Catholics who are such a big majority never really felt the loss of their Protestant brethren, a tiny minority.
“This again shows what happens when there’s a strong concentration – or ghetto – if you like,” says Fr Doherty. “We need a more cosmopolitan sort of society here with Catholics, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian all living amongst each other.
“Of course we have the ordinary educated cross-section of Catholics in our community. But because they are so silent they don’t have their voice heard.”
In Co Derry they say that in Dungiven and on the cold slopes of Benbraddagh there is a republican tradition. Fr Doherty says they would certainly stiffen for the Irish national anthem but they couldn’t sing it in Irish or says three Hail Marys in Irish.
Dungiven, then, hasn’t much to shout about. But Fr Doherty says that liturgically they are in the forefront. “Do you know we are virtually the only church in the diocese doing congregational singing? Mind you, we still have to touch the whole fabric of life, that’s more important.”
Fr Doherty’s parish newsletter . . . dated July 13th has a homily which says: “Woe to us if our instincts take over control.”
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