radicalnorthbelfast

Loyalism, Republicanism, Sectarianism and the Good Friday Agreement.

When I was growing up, I was conscious of the heroic republican tradition. My Uncle had tried to take part in the 1916 Uprising and my mother’s cousin had been sentenced to death for the shooting of a police officer in Belfast in the forties. So I was well aware of the 800 years oppression from the British. My neighbors were Protestant and every July for a few weeks they would not talk to their Catholic neighbors until the Orange marches were out of the way. We grew up with the simplistic belief that when we had a united Ireland the unionists would see sense and become good Irish people. We had no sense of the importance to them of their sense of Britishness.

Republican ideology never really did take into account how to deal with unionism in the north-east of Ireland. Generally speaking, there were two approaches taken. One the benign approach simply felt that in the struggle for freedom unionism would be converted by the non-sectarian republican struggle against an evil British imperialism. The more malign approach saw the unionists as a ‘settler class’ or as planters who either would submit to the ‘Republic” or take the boat from Larne back to where they came from. Parallels were drawn by Michael Farrell of Peoples’ Democracy in the early 1970’s with the French settler class, or Colons in Algeria.

During the seventies and eighties, most republicans simply dismissed the loyalists as dupes of British Imperialism without any independent stance of their own. The large number of police agents in the ranks of the UDA and UVF only confirmed this belief for republicans. Subsequent revelations about ‘Republican’ agents somewhat tempered this belief. Individual republicans such as Daithi O’Connell tried to reach out to Protestants with concepts such as Dail Ulaidh and then the Eire Nua policy now the policy of republican Sinn Fein. However the rising tide of sectarian slaughter meant that any progressive ideas were not going to be listened to. In reaction to the military policy of the loyalists-ATWD (Any Teague Will Do) some republicans committed sectarian acts which only served to further drive more and more working class protestants into the shelter of the loyalist gangs.

Meanwhile some anti-republican socialists saw no distinctions between Catholic and Protestant working classes and with a narrow economistic perspective preached class unity while ignoring or down playing democratic issues. Nor did they try to grapple with the partition of the country with imperialism or with the plight of political prisoners. These all are key issues, which unfortunately divide the working class. Also the economistic left appealed to past examples of working class united actions in the North, such as in strikes 1907, 1919 and then during the outdoor relief riots in the 1903’s.What they forgot to mention was how few these were and how the fragile unity was so easily smashed by the waving of the Union Jack.

Now today in the wake of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement there has never been a more divided north. Catholics and Protestants feel safer living in exclusively single identity housing estates. Every advance towards a more democratic north is perceived to be a victory for republicans and a defeat for Unionism. Hence the recent call by loyalist paramilitaries, following intense violence on the streets of Belfast to end what they call the "suppression and containment" of Protestants in the North of Ireland. Loyalist gunmen opened fire on police and soldiers as petrol and blast bombers went on the rampage throughout the city and other parts of the north. Text messages to Protestant teenagers helped organise some of the heaviest rioting in recent years. This was all because the route of a parade by the reactionary Orange Order was moved away from a nationalist area of West Belfast. The UDA, whose overall leader, Jackie Mc Donald had only recently met the Irish president in a loyalist area of South Belfast said it would not

"Stand idly by and allow injustice and inequality to run rife through our community".

There has been a lot of talk about “ Protestant frustration and alienation" as being the reason for the riots. In response the British Direct Ruler, Peter Hain, has said that he wanted to embark on a programme of intensive engagement with elected representatives and civic leaders of the Protestant community and that more investment will be directed towards deprived areas. On the same day he also announced that he was going to take tough financial measures to extract higher rates and water charges as he claimed the North paid less per head than the rest of Britain for public services. So what goes into areas will also come out, as these charges will hit heaviest on the poorest working class districts, both Protestant and Catholic alike.

At the same time the DUP has indicated that it has no intention of taking part in early negotiations with Sinn Fein over power-sharing even now with the IRA (P) having total decommissioned its weaponry. This is negative leadership from the unionist leaders, saying no to talks with Sinn Fein and refusing to meet with representatives of nationalist residents affected by Orange marches. They claim all sorts of gains for nationalists and how Protestants are being discriminated against and this only perpetuates sectarian divisions and demoralises sections of protestant working class opinions. The Unionist politicians are happy to sit and talk with loyalist paramilitaries perhaps in the hope of using their muscle to force the British Government to cede to their demands and stop any further democratic advances.

It should not be forgotten that since last April there have been on average five sectarian attacks a day. These attacks are carried out in the main by murder gangs under the control of the loyalists. For example a Catholic man from north Belfast has been viciously stabbed by a loyalist gang under the direction of a young woman who yelled: 'Slice the Fenian bastard'. The Ardoyne man was stabbed at least six times in the attack. Also in Longlands in North Belfast a catholic home was petrol bombed.
A man from the Short Strand was severely beaten by a loyalist gang of 15 men full of sectarian hate, just prior to widespread loyalist rioting. A Catholic secondary school in Portadown was damaged in an arson attack. A blast bomb attack in Derry caused damage to a house occupied by two pensioners. The device was thrown into the predominately Catholic Upper Bennett Street from the mainly unionist Fountain area on a Friday night. The Fountain area itself has been frequently attacked by nationalist youths.

While the IRSP rightly condemns all these attacks and our comrades work hard to prevent them, it is a sad fact that these attacks are just the public manifestation of the sectarianism that lies beneath the surface of everyday life in the North. The Six County State was built on injustice, inequality and discrimination against Catholics and Nationalists. Believing they were superior many middle class unionists ignored the social economic deprivation and the anti-democratic nature of the state or worse still tried to justify it Their followers were lulled into a similar mindset and believed not only that they were superior but also that Catholics were lesser human beings. Hence the spread of sectarianism through out the body politic. In 1977 Seamus Costello founder of our movement, wrote the following about how the workers have been used.

In the North the Protestant working class were led to believe that the only way in which they could preserve the marginal supremacy which they held over their Catholic counterparts in jobs and housing was through supporting corrupt Unionist politicians and through them the Union with Britain. Their genuine and well founded fears regarding the preservation of their religious and civil liberties in the context of a united and clerical dominated Ireland were also exploited by the same corrupt politicians. At the same time the Catholic working class were conned into believing that their salvation lay in supporting green Tory politicians who, while hypocritically advocating the reunification of Ireland, as a guarantee of their ultimate salvation, completely submerged themselves in corrupt Unionist politics in exchange for favours for the class they really represented, the Northern Catholic middle class. As history has shown, the working class, North and South, Protestant and Catholic, have been victims of the so-called solutions to the 'Irish Question' imposed by Britain and her subservient native parliaments. (Seamus Costello)

There is no doubt that both Catholic and Protestant working class areas have a weak infrastructure, according to research (DSD) caused in the main by
??????????????A failure to invest in community development support;

??????????????The continuing impact of community tensions and paramilitary activities;

??????????????The dominance of local activities by a single agency; and

??????????????Cultural traditions and attitudes that discourage collective and inclusive activities.

However, recent claims by Unionist politicians that their communities are suffering in comparison with nationalist area is countered by all the economic evidence. They are perpetuating myths and misleading analysis about where and why deprivation exists. These leaders are leading their communities into self-destruction mode. They seem incapable of recognising the new political realities in the North. Under the GFA there was to be equality of citizenship. But unfortunately political Unionists while they knew the words of “equality” they never learnt the tune. The mindset of unionism is still stuck in the old colonial way of thinking. The few progressive unionists who began to talk about citizenship and the finer qualities of British democracy have little or no influence within the Unionist body politic.

The pathetic sight of the Orange leaders doing a Pontius Pilate ACT over the violence following their march on the Springfield Road in Belfast would have been funny if it had not been so sad. Sad because many loyalist working class areas suffered in the aftermath and the violence gave the gangsters and drug dealing thugs in the UDA and UVF the pretence that they were defending their communities from the police. The violence also has acted a s a pole of attraction for many young protestant youths who brought up o a culture of consumerism see the drug dealing membership of gun gangs as a short cut to wealth. Gangsterism now is in the process of ruining the lives of thousands of working class Protestants. Criminality is rampant. The greatest threat to the protestant working class comes not from republicans not from the many IRA’S or the INLA, but from their so-called loyalist defenders.

The journalist Tom Mc Gurk has compared heartland unionism to American white-trash trailer park. With vicious sectarianism, low educational achievement, unemployment, a huge increase in drug taking in all its forms and a failure to face reality, Ulster Loyalism is now “synonymous with poverty, dysfunctionality and social breakdown.” (McGurk)
What a comedown for a people who once were proud of their industrious nature and loyalty to the British crown!

However, republican socialists cannot be complacent. While our movement will quite rightly help defend nationalist areas from sectarian attacks we must never forget that the working class, Catholic Protestant and Dissenter is our class and without the support of that class we can not build socialism in Ireland. Only socialism will overcome the prejudices sectarianism and bitterness that permeates northern life.

The Good Friday republicans accepted partition when they signed the GFA. The organisation of a rally in Dublin to make partition history as part of their celebration of 100 years of Sinn Fein was pure theatre; a method to rally the troops while the cement was being poured over the arms dumps. We recognise that the Agreement in 1998 signalled the end of a phase in the dispute between Britain and Ireland over the issue of sovereignty. It was and is a moment of historic importance.

But republican socialists have argued and continue to argue that it is not a lasting settlement. It was a political compromise. In signing it, the GFA Republicans were working based on a pan- nationalist consensus that had underpinned their whole Peace Process.

The Dublin government, the SDLP and the Irish American lobbies in the USA were all seen as power points to be directed against the British government to make it become persuaders of Irish unity. However, when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas! The GFA republicans changed their view of the conflict following their tactical alliances with the Great and the Good. They began to manage the conflict and in so doing, they then began to reinterpret their republican principles and goals. That in itself was a tremendous victory for the British establishment.

Irish republicanism has traditionally seen itself as based on the principles of the French revolution and its rally cry of liberty equality and fraternity. All the famous republicans from Wolfe Tone onwards firmly rejected sectarianism. They regarded sectarianism as a tool used by the British to divide the people. Instead, Irish Republicanism embraced a universal view of the world. Republicans saw themselves as citizens of that world, in favour of tolerance and freedom of thought. Most of the republicans from the past who are honoured by present day republicans are generally seen as being radical, universal and on the left.

Sadly that position has now been undermined by the Peace Process. It has been argued and republican socialist s would agree that the view from the GFA republicans is “ethnically-centred.” (McGovern)

In essence this accepts that the conflict in the North is the result of a clash between “two hostile and mutually exclusive ethnic identities, Irish Catholic Nationalism and Ulster Protestant Unionism” ( McGovern)

The benefit of this analysis is that the issue of colonialism slips of the map. Britain can now be seen, as it always tried to portray itself, as the neutral referee between two warring sides, which for historical reasons of geography and kinship Britain had an interest in.

Instead of the question of imperialism and capitalism been the issue of discourse we now have “celebrations of differences”. All cultures and identities are to be seen as equally valid and legitimate. This multicultural approach in the North of Ireland in essence means that that there are two distinctly recognised traditions, which should be seen as of equal validity. Tolerance of each other’s position then becomes the norm. Organisations like the Community Relations Council then have a key role in persuading the community to accept the multi-culturalist approach.

The logic of this approach ends in the absurdity of giving a local dialect Ulster -Scots the status of a language on a par with the Irish language. Cultural parity is all very fine but who ever heard of Ulster Scots before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement? Furthermore the issue of parity has been used not for the sake of justice but as a political weapon against the ‘other side”.

So the Orange Order demand that local residents in nationalist areas recognise, respect and tolerate the Orange Order marching through nationalist areas while that order at the same time refuses to negotiate with the self same residents directly. That is certainly not parity of esteem. Nor can one be convinced by the loyal orders sudden conversion to human rights and sudden recognition of the existence of poverty in protestant working class districts.

What must never be forgotten is that those same districts suffered poverty deprivation and unemployment during the sixty years of Unionist control of Stormont. However, to complain or agitate for better conditions was to be labelled as “disloyal,” and a “rotten prod”. Nor should it ever be forgotten that from 1922 until 1972 every minister in the unionist one party Government of those years bar one were all members of the loyal orders.

Historically the loyal orders have been an instrument of the ruling class, to be used when the lower orders begin to question the system. From suppressing the United Irishmen, to strike breaking against the Land League to trying to suppress and drive the civil rights movement from the streets the Loyal orders have been a reactionary and sectarian force to keep the Fenians down But not only the Fenians but the ‘rotten prods” also. Many fine working class militants from a protestant background agitated for better social and economic conditions and came from not only of the Northern Ireland Labour Party but the Communist Party and the pre 1969 Republican Movement. Purges against these heroic people took place on a number of occasions when they seemed to pose a threat to Unionist hegemony over the Protestant masses Unfortunately not only were Unionists afraid of radicalised Protestant socialists. When a contingent of supporters of the Republican Congress attempted to march to Bodenstown to honour Wolfe Tone right wing republicans attacked them.

Even today, there is an attempt by the reactionary elements within loyalism and including the DUP to stop all contact by working class community activists within Protestant areas with working class nationalists or Catholics. The forthcoming rally by the Love Ulster Campaign planned for the end of October is just another attempt to re-unite all from the British tradition around what in essence is a sectarian mass campaign based on whipping up fears within the Unionists population. But there is also a more insidious campaign taking place against progressive radical or left wing activists within Protestant areas. The DUP are actively campaigning for control of community funding. They want the politicians to have the final say in which groups get funding. This would effectively mean that no dissent would be tolerated in areas under the control of the DUP. It is also in the community sector that there is a large body of progressive workers happy to reach out to other communities. If ever a local administration is restored then there would be a very high risk of funding under the control of local politicians be re-directed to their cronies and fellow travellers.

So in effect the multicultural approach would not have the effect of creating more tolerance but would create a situation whereby a monolithic view would be imposed on the working class and they would be forced to identify with competing nationalisms, Irish or British. In other words no change to what we now have.

If republicans accept the multiculturalism approach then they are in danger of retrospectively justifying not only the history of Orangeism but of acquiescing in a form of cultural imperialism. Not all cultures are of equal validity. Cultures arise out of certain socials economic and geographical conditions. Slavery was once considered as the norm, as indeed was cannibalism. No one today would defend these two activities so why today should people in the North of Ireland be expected to treat the Orange Order as merely a cultural expression of Protestantism when it is so blatantly not. It is certainly not an expression of being British today. Few people in Britain could identify with the orange order and its triumphalist posturing. The days of the Raj are long gone but the loyal orders do not seem to have understood that those days of converting the natives with a bible and a gun have vanished forever.

Multiculturalism is but another form of post nationalism and is a suitable vehicle for the Southern Ruling Class to impress upon the North because it helps reduce the northern conflict to ethnic conflict which can be ameliorated with the wider European context of the expanding European union. It also removes the Southern establishment from any concerns about solving the national question. In the new dispensation of the GFA terms or phrases like the National Question, Anti-Imperialism and Self -Determination become obsolete. The new buzzwords include “equality”, and “parity of esteem” and “A Europe of the Regions. Well integrated into the European union the Southern ruling class have a clear vested interest in putting the Northern question to bed. Instability threatens the Celtic tiger. The Southern Bourgeoisie has no wish for that.

Of course, all of this has the attraction of diverting people from real issues such as who has power and why does oppression continue. Instead, let’s just keep repeating the mantra of the buzz words equality, parity of esteem and human rights.

The problem about equality in the North of Ireland is that under the current economic system, capitalism, to create equality where there are inequalities means in effect taking from those who have, to redistribute to those who have not. In other words, take from the Protestants and give to the Catholics. The 50% quota for Catholics to the PSNI is a case in point. Traditionally the police, prison services and the military were overwhelming Protestant and many Protestants had a secure career path before them in those services. Now that has been taken from them. The closure of the traditional heavy industry which was also a main career path for Protestants has now all but vanished. Even the major universities in the North have a predominantly Catholic/Nationalist feel to them and many Protestants feel alienated. Hence, the flight of the protestant middle classes to English and Scottish universities. Traditionally the protestant working classes, guaranteed jobs in industry put little or no reliance on education and now are in grave danger of becoming an underclass or” trailer trash” to use McGurk's phrase as the low educational achievements in Protestant areas leaves working class youths the option of unemployment, low wages or a life of crime.

Despite over the last number of years all sorts of schemes including the Belfast Action teams, Belfast Regeneration Office and millions of pounds and dollars in peace money being poured into Belfast, poverty is widespread and there is a growing sense of alienation from the political process growing in Protestant areas. All that has happened in terms of equality is that now poverty is more evenly spread between the different communities. Rather than abolishing it, all the schemes have ever done is cause a slight redistribution of poverty. Not a recipe for abolishing sectarianism!

The in build sectarianism of the GFA means that those parties have to designate themselves as nationalist unionist or other. So the parties have an incentive to maximise the vote on their side of the house. That partially explains why both the DUP and Sinn Fein rose to the top. They maximised their votes on sectarian lines. However, the IRSP does not regard them as two sides of the same coin. Sinn Fein undoubtedly the more progressive party but they now have limited options in delivering progressive policies. The problem of power sharing under the GFA is that any coalition Government must deliver under the neo liberal agenda and the parties must appeal for electoral success to only one section of the population.

That is what the whole peace process was about. The peace process was underpinned by a belief that the conflict was ethnic and so the end result of the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement institutionalised communally based politics. That is not the way forward for either the Catholic or the Protestant working class.

Gerry Ruddy

References

Costello Seamus IRSP Broad Front Document. (1977)

Department For Social Development (DSD) “Research To Develop A Methodology For Identifying Areas Of Weak Community Infrastructure” September 2004

Irish Republican News September 16th-19 2005

McGovern Mark “IRISH REPUBLICANISM AND THE POTENTIAL PITFALLS OF PLURALISM” In Capital and Class Journal, no. 71, (Summer 2000).

McGurk Tom Sunday Business Post September 18th 2005

Interfaces in Belfast

Loyalist
Paramilitaries

Orange on the road
to nowhere

Loyalist Paramilitaries

THE PROTESTANT QUESTION: SOME REFLECTIONS

The majority of the Protestant population in the North of Ireland consider themselves to be British and are deeply hostile to Irish reunification and any threat to their position. The political expression of this is Unionism and Loyalism.
1) Republican Socialists are not sectarian and not Nationalists. We do not have a problem with people believing in the Protestant religion or considering themselves to be British. Our movement does not tell the Protestants ‘You are not British, you are in fact Irish’. We believe that everyone in Ireland has the right to hold on to their own identity, culture and perceived nationality. For example, there are Chinese people in Ireland who consider themselves to be Chinese and are holding on to their language and culture, the same with Polish or Nigerian people etc. So if the Protestant people in the North consider themselves to be British and not Irish, our movement has no problem with it.
2) There are lots of things in the British culture and history that Republican Socialists can identify with, think for example of the democratic tradition of the Levellers, the Chartists etc. However one of the objections our movement has, is that many Protestants who consider themselves to be British only hold on to one aspect/expression of British identity: the monarchy, nostalgia for the Empire etc. Republican Socialists would say that there are other ways of being British, why don’t they explore and appropriate for themselves all the progressive British heritage?
3) Republican Socialists distinguish the Protestant tradition from the Unionist and Loyalist traditions which call for the British state to rule the six counties. Our problem is with them. The Unionist majority in the North is not ethnic or religious but political in nature. There is something circular in saying that partition is democratic because a majority in the North desires it when partition creates that majority in the first place!
4) The Protestants do not constitute a nation apart (they never claimed it), they are either British or Irish, and in both cases Unionism constitutes a political minority. While Unionists are free to hold whatever opinion they want, they do not have a right to frustrate the wishes of the majority of the people in Britain (who favour withdrawal from Ireland) and in Ireland (who support independence).
5) There is no such thing as a unilateral right to union. Those who say that you can’t force one million Unionists into a united Ireland are not disturbed at the idea of forty million people in the British isles being denied their wish to see the Britain leave Ireland! Those who insist that there should be “unity by consent” don’t seem to have a problem with “partition by coercion”…

6) Our problem with Unionism and Loyalism has thus nothing to do with nationality (we have no problem with people considering themselves British) or territory (we do not say one island means one state). Our issue with Unionism and Loyalism is that they are essentially anti-democratic in nature. What we are in conflict with is the Unionist veto.

7) Commentators have recently talked about “Protestant alienation”. From a Republican point of view it is unfortunate how this crisis has encouraged so few Protestants to question the relevance of Unionism and Loyalism and explore progressive elements of their own Protestant and British heritage (think of the whole dissenter tradition for instance) which provides alterative resources. The problem is that as long as the British state guarantees that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom, the Protestant and Unionist population have no incentives to question and change their position. Unionist and Loyalist intransigence is proportional to the lack of resolve in confronting it. That leaves Republicans pessimistic about winning over substantial sections of the Protestant population…

8) In the meantime, there is a deepening crisis in Protestant working class areas in the North. Apart from poverty and unemployment, Protestant working class communities suffer the daily brunt of paramilitary oppression and gangsterism. Yet, those in positions of power and influence show little interest in their plight. The unionist middle classes have turned their back on the Protestant working class, preferring their golf courses in Bangor and Helen's Bay. This trend, hastened by the flight of Protestant middle class children to university in Scotland and England is set to continue.

9) It has not been a priority of Nationalist politicians to address the growing alienation of the Protestant working class. In addition, the British Government is trying to give recognition, influence, status and funding to the worst elements within Loyalist Para-militarism. That approach has underpinned paramilitary power and helped create the current crisis within Protestant working class communities.

10) Republican Socialists can advance some proposals to manage the decline of traditional communities of Protestant working class, and enhance what is good and positive about those communities. Because it should be emphasized that the IRSP believes that there are things that are good and positive in Protestant working class areas. The IRSP believes that the emancipation of the Protestant working class should be the work of Protestant workers themselves. However, the problem is that working class Protestant communities are characterised by a weak political culture, and this has had a major effect on its ability to develop outward and progressive looking policies capable of developing their positive potential. We believe that there are two spheres of Protestant civil society in which elements could emerge that could provide this.

11) Within the working class, a rudimentary trade union solidarity still remains, residue from the large scale Protestant working class participation in the manufacturing industry prevalent in the building of industrial Belfast-linen, textiles, engineering and shipbuilding. Every working class district had, until recently, many men and women who were involved at shop steward or convenor level within their union, and those organisation skills learnt in the unions lent discipline to the Protestant community.

12) In most predominantly Protestant districts today, most of the "social cement" is provided by, or within the sphere of influence of Churches. In many districts over the past twenty years, Churches have acted as intermediaries for Government training schemes. The influence of Protestant clergy in the resolution of community problems has been noticeable. The Rev Norman Hamilton, for instance, was to the fore in helping Protestant para-militarism to reconsider the wisdom of their sectarian campaign at Holy Cross School in Ardoyne. Methodist Minister, Rev Gary Mason was paramount in influencing the recent removal of intimidating wall graffiti across East Belfast. And the Rev Roy Magee has had a long-term role in negotiating the Loyalist ceasefire. At their best, the influences of church leaders and the labour movement were seen in the development of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. At its height, it had four Stormont MPs in the 1960's.

13) To prevent the worst effects caused by the decline of Protestant working calls communities, the IRSP demands the development centrally planned state services aimed at the people in need in the Protestant community and that these be channelled through universally available statutory services (e.g. statutory Youth centres, reading and writing schemes in neighbourhood libraries etc), established national charitable bodies such as Citizens Advice Bureaux, Mencap etc., or via the two main civilising bodies in Protestant civil society, the Churches (Church based influences, women's groups, sporting associations etc)and the trade union movement. The IRSP believes that as a general rule, partnership with these should be encouraged over schemes or programmes within the para-military sphere of influence.

14) Republican Socialists are not the only one to advocate such policies. These were first proposed by Rathcoole independent Labour Councillor Mark Langhammer. He recognised that this was the priority:

15) "The step now required is to enable civil society within the Protestant working class areas-notably those responsible for providing social and community services within the sphere of influence of Churches-to be enabled to occupy a central position in the public lives of their communities" This is necessary if Protestant workers are to move forward in their own emancipation.
16) On their own side of the sectarian divide, Republican Socialists should develop measures and do everything in their own power to combat Catholic/Nationalist manifestations of sectarianism.

(Liam O’Ruaric)

Social Housing Stock abandoned in Manor St. by loyalists

Protestant Alienation
Daily Ireland 6-10-05

Protestant alienation – the republican socialist view

The Irish Republican Socialist Party’s ardchomhairle rejects the idea that working-class Protestants are being suppressed and argues that gangsterism is ruining their lives

Republican ideology has never really taken into account how to deal with unionism in the north-east of Ireland.
Generally speaking, there were two approaches taken. First, the benign approach simply felt that in the struggle for freedom, unionism would be converted by the non-sectarian republican struggle against British imperialism. The more malign approach saw the unionists as a ‘settler class’ or as “planters” who either would submit to the Republic or take the boat from Larne back to where they came from.
Republican Socialists are not sectarian and not nationalists. We do not have a problem with people believing in the Protestant religion or considering themselves to be British. We believe that everyone in Ireland has the right to hold on to their own identity, culture and perceived nationality.

For example, there are Chinese people in Ireland who consider themselves to be Chinese and are holding on to their language and culture – the same with Polish or Nigerian people etc. So, if the Protestant people in the North consider themselves to be British and not Irish, our movement has no problem with it.
There are many things in the British culture and history that republican socialists can identify with. There is the democratic tradition of the Levellers, and the Chartists. However, one of the objections our movement has is that many Protestants who consider themselves to be British only hold on to one expression of British identity – the monarchy and nostalgia for the Empire etc. Republican socialists would say that there are other ways of being British.
Republican Socialists distinguish the Protestant tradition from the unionist and loyalist traditions which call for the British state to rule the six counties. Our problem is with them. The unionist majority in the North is not ethnic or religious but political in nature.
Our problem with unionism and loyalism has nothing to do with nationality or territory. Our issue with unionism and loyalism is that they are essentially anti-democratic in nature. What we are in conflict with is the unionist veto.

Every advance towards a more democratic North is perceived to be a victory for republicans and a defeat for unionism. Hence, the recent call by loyalist paramilitaries, following intense violence on the streets of Belfast, to end what they call the “suppression and containment" of Protestants in the North of Ireland.
The pathetic sight of the Orange leaders ‘doing a Pontius Pilate’ over the violence following their march on the Springfield Road in Belfast would have been funny if it had not been so sad. Sad because many loyalist working-class areas suffered in the aftermath and the violence gave the gangsters and drug dealing thugs in the UDA and UVF the pretence that they were defending their communities from the police.

Gangsterism now is ruining the lives of thousands of working-class Protestants. The greatest threat to the Protestant working class comes, not from republicans, not from the the INLA, or any of the many IRAs, but from their so-called loyalist defenders.
In response to “Protestant frustration and alienation" the British direct-ruler Peter Hain, has said that he wanted to embark on a programme of intensive engagement with elected representatives and civic leaders of the Protestant community and that more investment will be directed towards deprived areas. On the same day, he also announced that he was going to take tough financial measures to extract higher rates and water charges. So what goes into working-class areas will also come out, as these charges will hit heaviest on the poorest working-class districts, both Protestant and Catholic alike.

There is a negative leadership from the unionist leaders, saying ‘no’ to talks with Sinn Féin and refusing to meet with representatives of nationalist residents affected by Orange marches. They claim all sorts of gains for nationalists and how Protestants are being discriminated against and this only perpetuates sectarian divisions and demoralises sections of protestant working-class opinions. The unionist politicians are happy to sit and talk with loyalist paramilitaries in the hope of using their muscle to force the British government to cede to their demands and stop any further democratic advances.
Cultures arise out of certain social, economic and geographical conditions. Slavery was once considered as the norm. No one today would defend it, so why today should people in the North of Ireland be expected to treat the Orange Order as merely a cultural expression of Protestantism when it is so blatantly not. It is certainly not an expression of being British today.

In the new dispensation of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) terms or phrases like the national question, anti-imperialism and self-determination have become obsolete. The new buzzwords include “equality”, and “parity of esteem” and “a Europe of the regions”. Well-integrated into the European union the southern ruling class has a clear vested interest in putting the Northern question to bed. Instability threatens the Celtic tiger. However, the problem about equality in the North of Ireland is that under the current economic system – capitalism – to create equality where there are inequalities means in effect taking from those who have, to redistribute to those who have not. In other words, take from the Protestants and give to the Catholics.

The closure of the traditional heavy industry, which was also a main career path for Protestants, has now all but vanished. Even the major universities in the North have a predominantly Catholic/Nationalist feel to them and many Protestants feel alienated.
Hence, the flight of the Protestant middle classes to English and Scottish universities. Traditionally the Protestant working class, guaranteed jobs in industry put little or no reliance on education and now are in grave danger of becoming an underclass.
The peace process was underpinned by a belief that the conflict was ethnic and so the end result of the peace process, the GFA institutionalised communally-based politics. That is not the way forward for either the Catholic or the Protestant working class.
The IRSP believes that the emancipation of the Protestant working class should be the work of Protestant workers themselves.
The IRSP ardchomhairle

Dummy of Catholic atop bonfire
as seen from the Catholic side
of interface at Manor Street

Loyalism's rage against the fading light of Britishness

Loyalism's rage against the fading light of Britishness

Northern Ireland's recent riots are a sign of irreversible decline within the Protestant working classes

Stephen Howe
Monday October 10, 2005
The Guardian

The murder last week of the former Ulster Defence Association "brigadier" Jim Gray is the latest symptom of militant loyalism's desperate malaise. It is the most recent in a horrifying sequence of killings arising from multi-dimensional feuds and rivalries, and comes on top of riots and paramilitary assaults. The mayhem that swept Northern Ireland in the second week of September was the worst for many years.
The events involved, almost exclusively, working-class loyalists battling the police and army. It was hardly the first time that "loyal" organisations had been in violent confrontation with the state. But the depth of hatred and alienation on display still strikes many observers as unprecedented.

Much media and political comment has explained it in terms of bigotry and criminality, of archaism and atavism. Defensive unionist politicians speak of Protestant disillusion, even desperation, at a peace process they think has favoured Catholics. None of those labels is entirely wrong. Yet what lies behind the events of recent days engages the whole nature of Britishness in Ireland and beyond, and the very ideas of identity and community, modernity and tradition. And the songs loyalists sing, the pictures they paint, even the tattoos they wear, tell us a lot about what is going on and what might happen next.

The riots are part of what happens when the decay of one modern culture - the northern Irish variant of urban, working-class Britishness - clashes with the rise of a globalised popular culture. What formed in Belfast and other northern Irish urban centres in the course of 19th-century industrialisation was a variety of Britishness, not only in its stridently proclaimed nationality claims, but in the texture of everyday life. Belfast, its youth and its working class had a great deal in common with similar cities "across the water". Many of its characteristics were shared with English, Scots and Welsh industrial centres. It was intensely localised, with social networks and loyalties focused on small, usually densely inhabited urban neighbourhoods.

It was often seen as an anti-educational culture: even more so than was the norm for English or Scottish working-class communities reliant on heavy industry, where the expected post-school route was not social mobility via education but a secure position within the community through apprenticeship in a skilled manual trade. It has been a profoundly masculinist culture, in ways that decades of violence could only reinforce. Both the partial ending of paramilitary violence (which threatens to deprive "hard men" of their raison d'etre and aggressive youths of their role models) and the precipitous decline in industrial employment must intensify the crisis of masculinity that commentators identify as a more general post-industrial phenomenon.

In the later years of the "Troubles" there were signs of hope in those communities. Crucially, some influential ex-gunmen came to feel that they had been manipulated by unionist politicians who had incited their violence, then indignantly disclaimed it. Perhaps that realisation came too late. Working-class loyalist communities are in a probably irreversible retreat. Paramilitary warlords and drug barons fight over the ruins. Deindustrialisation, demographic decline, the tendency of the more enterprising or successful to move out, low rates of educational achievement and very high ones of family breakdown, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse - all these are features that the poorer Protestant districts of Belfast, Portadown or Ballymoney share with those of Liverpool and Glasgow.

Yet these are crises also of collective identity. Irish Catholic identity seems more stable, secure and all-embracing than that of loyalists, while affluent Protestants can more readily assimilate to contemporary Britishness. On the Shankill and Sandy Row, in Portadown and Carrickfergus, in the bleak housing estates where grievance festers and violence rarely hides far beneath the surface, the cultural response has been a kind of pastiche. The worlds of paramilitarism and pop culture mingle. Songs, murals, dress adopt fragments from the whole gamut of Atlantic entertainment industries - but most startlingly from black American forms. Politically, loyalist paramilitaries and their political spokesmen adopt scraps of everything from an "old Labour" brand of social democracy to neo-nazism. Political Protestantism is no longer a sustaining force. But nor, increasingly, is Britishness. Indeed, Ulster loyalism seems doomed to imprisonment by a terminally declining form of Britishness.

What remains will inevitably seemincreasingly negative. Loyalism is a culture ambivalent about Irishness. Yet, whatever else loyalism is, it is distinctively an Irish culture, one that grew only on the island of Ireland, with off-shoots in Scotland and Canada. The essential cultural difference between loyalism and its foes is indeed that while Republicans conceive of themselves as having an inherited, densely woven tradition, loyalists have to make it up as they go along. These are the fragments they shore up against their ruins.

· Stephen Howe is professor of history and cultures of colonialism at the University of Bristol. This piece was first published at greater length on www.opendemocracy.org

MAD DOGS AND ULSTERMEN: THE CRISIS OF lOYALISM(PART 1)

Mad Dogs and Ulstermen: the crisis of Loyalism (part one)
Stephen Howe
28 - 9 - 2005

Behind recent violent unrest in Loyalist working-class communities in Northern Ireland is a story of promiscuous cultural borrowings attempting to shore up a collapsed political identity, says Stephen Howe. In the first part of a two-part essay, he examines their manifestations in music, visual display and political rhetoric.

The riots, paramilitary assaults, car-hijackings, road-blockings and widespread mayhem which swept Northern Ireland in the second week of September 2005 were the worst for many years. They involved, almost exclusively, working-class Loyalists in Belfast, Ballymena and other parts of County Antrim battling the police and army. It was hardly the first time that “Loyal” organisations had been in violent confrontation with the state. But the depth of hatred and alienation on display still struck many observers as unprecedented. There is no sign that any political development in Northern Ireland – including the report of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning two weeks after the riots that the IRA had put all its weapons beyond use – is working to diminish it.

“For some years now, a complex, sophisticated discussion has been proceeding about the nature of modernity in Ireland…(but) northern Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists, are simply absent from the debate.”

openDemocracy publishes part two of Stephen Howe’s major essay on Friday 30 September

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Much media and political comment has “explained” the profundity and rootedness of this feeling in terms of bigotry and criminality, of archaism and atavism. Defensive Unionist politicians speak in terms of Protestant disillusion, even desperation, at a peace process which they think has invariably favoured Catholics. None of those labels is entirely wrong – yet what lies behind the events of recent days goes much deeper. It engages the whole nature of Britishness in Ireland and beyond, and the very ideas of identity and community, modernity and tradition most of us use so routinely. And as I’ll try to show, the songs Loyalists sing, the pictures they paint, even the tattoos and t-shirts they wear, tell us a lot about what’s going on and what might happen next.

Back in August 2000, the excellent Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole reflected on the cultural significance of a notorious paramilitary figure, Johnny Adair. He argued that:

“A culture is a more or less coherent set of values and assumptions. A tradition is an array of skills, images or beliefs handed down more or less intact from history. In the kind of analysis that tends to be applied to the Northern Ireland conflict, people like Johnny Adair are regarded as stuck within a particular Protestant culture, and their tendency to violence is seen as an expression of their need to defend that culture...

Yet what is most obvious to anyone looking at the symbols in which Adair has wrapped himself is that ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ are somewhat beside the point. What you see in Johnny Adair is an extraordinary mish-mash of confusion and amnesia.”

O’Toole pointed out that a slogan which Adair, despicably, employed about Catholics, "Kill 'em all. Let God sort them out", actually derived from a medieval Catholic bishop’s words about proto-Protestant heretics in southern France. Obviously, Adair and his fellow gunmen must be unaware of this. O’Toole went on:

“In anything that can be called a culture or a tradition, this phrase can only be heard as a warning about the consequences of a religious intolerance that generates insane violence... That it can end up as a slogan on the wall of a self-styled defender of Protestant culture is a sign, not of the persistence of a historic tradition, but of the idiocy that comes with a fragmented culture that has lost both memory and meaning.”
What political gangsters like Johnny Adair represented, then, was not immersion in cultural history, but “a mind shaken free of any real connection to any coherent set of cultural connections”. As O’Toole pointed out, Adair did not march down the Shankill Road to the tune of God Save the Queen or Rule Britannia, but to the sound of Tina Turner:

“The slogan on their T-shirts isn't ‘For God and Ulster’ but ‘Simply the Best’, the title of Tina's gooey pop hymn to some standard-issue fantasy man. Over this T-shirt, Johnny's sweatshirt proclaims, not the dignity of Protestant Britain, but the virtues of Nike Athletic. The tattoo on his arm isn't of Carson or Paisley, but of Mickey Mouse.”
So, O’Toole thought, the cultural influences at work were “not Britishness and Protestantism, but Hollywood, Top of the Pops and the Sun… the flotsam and jetsam of movies, pop songs, brand names and tabloid TV…a jumble of commercial clichés and meaningless slogans.”

Fintan O’Toole has latched on to something important, which surprisingly few other commentators have noticed. I want to suggest, however, that he is wrong to dismiss the phenomena he discusses as “commercial clichés and meaningless slogans” and counterpose them to “proper” traditions and cultures (though the anger and scorn towards sectarian gangsters which leads him to make those judgments is not, of course, in the slightest wrong.) They are, rather, part of what happens when the decay of one form of cultural modernity (the northern Irish variant of an urban, working-class Britishness) clashes with the rise of another (a north Atlantic, if not global, popular culture) and the resultant hybrid is refracted through an intensely local, territorial, violent and sectarian milieu.

Stephen Howe is professor of the history and cultures of colonialism at Bristol University. His most recent books are Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso, 1998), Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Also by Stephen Howe in openDemocracy:

“Edward Said: the traveller and the exile” (October 2003)

“American Empire: the history and future of an idea” (June 2004)

“An Oxford Scot at King Dubya’s court: Niall Ferguson’s Colossus” (July 2004)

“Dying for empire, Blair, or Scotland?” (November 2004)

“The death of Arafat and the end of national liberation” (November 2004)

“Israel, Palestine, and campus civil wars” (December 2004)

“Boycotting Israel: the uses of history” (April 2005)

If you find Stephen Howe’s informed, acute, and fair-minded analyses of contemporary global issues valuable, please consider donating to openDemocracy to help us keep our content free

What ensues is truly an “alternative modernity” which, however unattractive it may appear to most observers, almost disconcertingly echoes the cliches about what is supposed to characterise the culture of postmodernity. This is a world marked by the collapse of old certainties and grand narratives: one of marginality, fiercely asserted locality, obsession with identity, difference, otherness; united only in its fragmentation, its assertion of multiple, unstable identities; finding expression via pastiche, bricolage, promiscuous cultural borrowings of all kinds.

Fintan O’Toole thus misses a crucial point. The features of Adair’s, or the lower Shankill’s “culture” which he finds both so feeble and so objectionable are just those which make it contemporary – or even postmodern – from top to bottom. It may be a portent, not a relic, in the terms Tom Nairn once applied to Northern Ireland’s political culture as a whole.

Landscapes of identity

What formed in Belfast and other northern Irish urban centres in the course of 19th-century industrialisation was a variety of Britishness, not only in its stridently proclaimed nationality-claims, but in the texture of everyday life. Belfast, its youth and its working class had a great deal in common with similar cities “across the water”. Many of its characteristic features were shared with English, Scottish and Welsh industrial centres. It was intensely localised, with social networks and loyalties focused on very small, usually densely inhabited urban neighbourhoods.

It was often seen as an anti-educational culture: even more so than was the norm for English or Scottish working-class communities reliant on heavy industry; where the expected post-school route was not to social mobility via education, but to a secure position within the community through apprenticeship in a skilled manual trade. Equally evidently, it has been a profoundly masculinist culture – again perhaps even more so than its equivalents elsewhere, in ways that decades of violence could only reinforce. Both the (partial) ending of paramilitary violence, which threatens to deprive “hard men” of their raison d’etre and aggressive youths of their role models, and the precipitous decline in industrial employment, must intensify the “crisis of masculinity” which many commentators identify as a more generally pervasive western, post-industrial phenomenon. This has, as yet, been little analysed in Northern Ireland.

It could be seen as an utterly stifling environment. The pressures to conformity were intense: anyone inclined to question the shared truths of the community found themselves labelled a Communist or a Fenian. Loyalty to the crown, to Britishness, and to the Ulster Unionist Party (which repaid its working-class supporters with total indifference, perpetuating some of Europe’s worst social conditions) was almost unquestioning. Traditions of military service were strong: yet the liberalising influence of the Northern Ireland Labour Party – surely the unsung heroes of modern Ulster history – was also felt, as were ideas further left. And there were, at least before the late-1960s eruption of violence, more links with neighbouring Catholic communities, including ones of marriage, than outsiders often think.

Despite such connections and cross-currents, there was a dreadful naturalness, even inevitability about young men in working-class Loyalist areas seeing any manifestation of Catholic discontent as an IRA plot, and hitting out at it. In that environment it is not the early violence or bigotry of such men that is remarkable, but that some later repudiated it. Crucially, some influential ex-gunmen came to feel that “respectable” Unionist politicians had manipulated them by first inciting their violence, then indignantly disclaiming it. The people of the Shankill and other poor Protestant districts, so it was ever more assertively, even bitterly said, must no longer act brutally at others’ behest, but start thinking for themselves.

Perhaps that realisation came too late. The working-class Loyalist communities of west and north Belfast are in a probably irreversible territorial, demographic, economic and political retreat – hence, in large part, the rage and fear of those who mobilised in autumn 2001 against the “threat” of Catholic schoolchildren passing through their streets, who repeatedly battled over Drumcree, and who have fought the police and army in recent days. Paramilitary warlords and drug barons fight over the ruins. De-industrialisation, demographic decline, the tendency of the more enterprising or successful to move out to the suburbs if not further afield, low rates of educational achievement and very high ones of family breakdown, petty crime, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse – all these are features which the poorer Protestant districts of Belfast, Portadown or Ballymoney share with those of Liverpool, Glasgow or Swansea, and indeed those of Dresden and Detroit.

On that level, their crisis is generic, a variant on the crisis of socio-economic modernisation which afflicts large sectors of the older industrial economies everywhere. Not only has “globalisation”, in many of its aspects and especially those which enthusiasts hail as positive, enabling, freedom-enhancing, never fully penetrated those sectors, but in a sense it has already been (it was there, for instance, when Belfast could truly claim to be at the centre of worldwide networks of trade and manufacture), offered its tantalising promises, and then gone again.

Thus we should perhaps even speak of such districts as undergoing demodernisation, in tangible and socially damaging ways. Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe writes well of how Belfast’s nightlife (and, one could add, its consumption patterns) “is today indistinguishable from Bristol or Birmingham, or, for that matter, Temple Bar. We all live, more or less, in the same postmodern heaven.” But in Belfast, as in Birmingham or Dublin, many people resentfully find they cannot afford a place in postmodern heaven. The syndromes of “Protestant alienation” and defeatism, including their additionally intense, working-class Loyalist versions, are in these senses phenomena of and explicable in terms of Charles Taylor’s and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s “acultural”, socio-economic modernisation processes.

Yet their culturo-political origins and expressions are, of course, more obvious and more widely remarked. These are crises also of collective identity. Dawe’s essay goes on to remark that, simultaneously with the globalised “postmodern heaven” of Belfast nightclubs or shopping malls there flourishes, or festers, “a lifestyle based upon the conscious pursuit of cultural identity; a pursuit, if you like, of authenticity, of ‘Irishness’, or ‘Britishness’, or ‘Ulster-Scots’ which are no longer the preoccupations of the fathering or mothering homelands.”

This operates across communities and classes; but it is generally agreed that the pursuit of “authenticity” is most fraught, even desperate, among working-class Protestants. As Marianne Elliott summarises the conventional wisdom: “Catholic culture and identity is far more secure and all-embracing than that of Protestants”; while more affluent Protestants, with transferable skills and very often experience of non-local education or employment, can more readily assimilate to contemporary kinds of Britishness. Indeed almost three decades of direct rule from London greatly furthered that middle-class assimilation, in a variety of both material and less tangible ways.

On the Shankill and Sandy Row, in Portadown and Carrickfergus, in the myriad bleak housing estates where grievance festers and violence rarely hides far beneath the surface, the cultural response has been the kind of pastiche which Fintan O’Toole identified, but whose complexity he greatly underrates. In the first part of this essay, I shall explore this by looking in turn at three Loyalist culturo-political expressions: Loyalist songs, visual imagery (especially murals) and bodily self-fashioning, and its racial imaginings.

The music of Loyalism

The musical subcultures of Loyalism remain – to my knowledge – almost entirely unanalysed. Their best-known aspect is of course the “tradition” of marching bands, which accompany the numerous annual summer parades of the Loyal Institutions. They feature in much reportage on Northern Ireland; but discussion centres almost exclusively on their political and ritual significance rather than the content of their performances. Indeed they are generally viewed as being, in strictly musical terms, a limited and uninteresting phenomenon.

This is not entirely unjust, especially in relation to the mostly young, technically unaccomplished and often overtly sectarian “Blood and Thunder” or “Kick the Pope” bands, which have been in the ascendant in recent years. Clearly, music itself is only a small part of the point and the appeal of such ensembles – as is made clear in the numerous and rapidly proliferating websites maintained by such bands in both Ireland and Scotland, where material on repertoire, instrumentation or technique very rarely features.

The main focus is on generalised, and often highly belligerent, culturo-political assertion (with the sites maintained from Scotland often appearing more aggressive and sectarian than the Northern Irish ones). The older-established bands, however, often still feature an intriguingly eclectic repertoire, drawing sometimes on specifically Scottish themes, on Irish traditional airs, on a wide range of popular forms, on hymn tunes, and on the influence of British military band music.

The relationship of Ulster Protestants to Irish traditional music has been much debated, as has the extent to which music whose origins and essential character are in no way religiously specific has come to be associated almost entirely with one community. Some attention has also been given to pop and rock music’s treatment of the Ulster crisis, including the work of local artists: but very little has addressed pro-Loyalist sentiments in this music, for the good and simple reason that few such sentiments have been expressed.

The past three decades’ Northern Irish rock music has included some that is explicitly pro-Republican (most notably, Sean O’Neill’s That Petrol Emotion, which emerged from the determinedly non-political Undertones); much that insists on “not taking sides”, in the sense of espousing a sharply anti-sectarian, non-partisan politics (much Belfast punk music, the best-known instance being Stiff Little Fingers); but only one band which achieved even the most minimal public success espoused pro-Unionist sentiments – Paul Burgess’s Ruefrex.

Some of the most admired and accomplished performers from northern Protestant backgrounds, indeed, have entirely eschewed any explicit local references at all in their music, let alone political ones. Thus Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy – arguably the wittiest and most literate songwriter to have emerged in Ireland in decades – has never included either “Irish” or “Ulster” allusions in his work (unless, that is, the delightful “Oh Danny Boy the pipes are blocked”, from Through a Long and Sleepless Night on the 1996 album Casanova is included). He has, though, featured a mock-heroic performance of Wordsworth’s ultra-patriotic lines from Lucy: English-patriotic, that is.

Loyalist song as such, however, has received only one substantial published discussion: and that a sharply hostile one, by Bill Rolston. One should not perhaps be surprised at that fact; for this Loyalist musical culture is an almost entirely self-contained one. The bands and singers perform almost exclusively in specifically Loyalist venues; often social clubs which are linked to paramilitary organisations.

The CDs and tapes sell only to the faithful, through specialist outlets: they are not even sold in Northern Irish branches of the major international music retail chains. They receive no radio play (even the local community station Shankill Radio largely eschews such material); and even if any of the performers involved had ever made a video, one doubts if MTV’s producers would be beating a path to their doors. It is, of course, an amateur culture, and a markedly limited one. Apart from some of the older-established marching bands – who are usually also those with the broadest, and least sectarian, repertoires – the only group in this milieu striking this listener as even minimally competent is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)-linked Platoon.

Yet it is a remarkably vigorous “subculture”. The “Union Jack Shop” on Belfast’s Newtownards Road, to cite just one retail outlet, currently advertises over 200 cassette tapes and CDs for sale. In the sense of being a musical culture produced by, for and remaining within a relatively restricted public, with almost no intervention from large-scale commercial concerns or communications media, it fits oddly well into the conventional, indeed even the restrictive, definitions of “folk music” – more so, indeed, than its Republican counterpart, which attains rather greater commercial and international exposure, not least through Irish-American support networks. But it contrasts intriguingly with Republican music in another respect. Whereas Republican song mainly reworks a well-defined repertoire of “traditional” airs, Loyalist song involves a remarkable, sometimes bizarre melange of old and contemporary idioms.

Bill Rolston notes this hybridity, recognising that “loyalist songs come in a range of styles: from folk, through country and western, to pop, and what is termed in the United States ‘adult-oriented rock’.” He might have added that today, trance, rave and other dance-oriented (not to mention recreational-drug-oriented) remixes – albeit often painfully amateurish ones – can also be encountered. In so doing, he raises the possibility which I am exploring here, only summarily to dismiss it:

“It could be argued that such hybridity is a healthy sign, revealing loyalism’s postmodernist credentials or its multiculturalist ideals. However, there would be great difficulty in sustaining such an argument. Instead, the range of styles in loyalist tunes is in fact symptomatic of a more general problem within loyalism: that of defining identity. As a result, there is often great incongruity in loyalist songs.”
The antithesis is surely false: while few would wish to argue that militant Loyalism is “consciously” inspired by postmodernist, let alone multiculturalist, theory, the instability of identity-claims and the internal formal “incongruity” to which Rolston points are often in other contexts thought characteristically, classically postmodernist.

Undoubtedly, though, the mixture of styles and genres in this music is striking, as on occasion is the seeming lack of “fit” between tune (or the memories evoked by the song’s original words) and lyrics. A “shock of misrecognition” may be evoked by hearing the young Bob Dylan’s anthem of generational revolt, The Times They Are a’Changing transmuted into:

“Come on you young brethren and listen to me And pledge that your country stays loyal and free And step proudly forth each 12th of July And let Dublin know now that Ulster won’t die.”
It might be yet more surprising to hear John Denver’s sentimental country-pop ballad Take Me Home, Country Roads reworked into a bitter litany of Ulster’s sufferings from the IRA, or a well-known Republican rallying cry like The Men Behind the Wire drastically reshaped to appeal for solidarity with Loyalist prisoners (one of several examples of green “party tunes” being repainted bright orange).

The diversity of themes is as great as that of styles. If some Loyalist songs evoke a broad sweep of the past – often visualised in terms of eternal recurrence, with nationalist threat, siege and fear of British betrayal reappearing, essentially unchanged, across the generations – the very point of others is their topicality. Some, indeed, are regularly updated. Thus Thatcher-era references to “Maggie’s” treachery in the 1980s become allusions to “Blair” in performances after 1997. Each new Loyalist “martyr” will be mourned and celebrated in a rash of rewritten ballads: most recently, those in memory of Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) leader Billy Wright.

Maudlin sentiment abounds, some of it in older ballads, some in the numerous songs about dead comrades. Songs relating to the experience and sacrifice from the “Great War” of 1914-18 are numerous, especially from performers associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force. There such anthems serve, among other purposes, to strengthen the (largely fictive) bond between the “original” UVF which lost so heavily at the 1916 battle of the Somme, and the modern incarnation.

By no means all are unquestioningly jingoistic. Anti-war songs like Eric Bogle’s famous modern ballad No Man’s Land (also known as Willie McBride) about the useless sacrifice of the western front are performed, alongside more expectedly vainglorious invocations of the Somme. They appear especially in the repertoires of performers linked to the UVF. These, and the song lyrics reproduced on websites associated with that group, differ substantially though not absolutely from the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters ones: the former are more prone to evoke tradition, suffering and self-sacrifice, while overt belligerence and sectarianism is more evident in the latter’s music.

Pro-UVF performance also appears more often to adopt ballad forms and traditional tunes – whether Orange or generically Irish ones – with UDA songs drawing on a more promiscuous and contemporary range of sources. These are accompanied by differences between the organisations’ cultural repertoires in relation to visual imagery and to political rhetoric, which are explored below.

Some of the modern heroes are multiply invoked. Ballads about assassinated Loyalists like the UVF’s Trevor King and Brian Robinson, the UDA’s Joe Bratty and Lindsay Mooney, or the Loyalist Volunteer Force’s Billy Wright each exist in several different versions. Among the most remarkable transcultural borrowings in Loyalist song commemorates UVF “Colonel” Trevor King in an adaptation of Marvin Gaye’s civil-rights anthem Abraham, Martin and John – which becomes “…and Trevor”.

But sometimes even in these works of ostensible remembrance one is stopped short, and chilled. A UVF song, The Battalion of the Dead, celebrates numerous fallen members of the organisation. Some died in the course of what were, by the UVF’s own lights, legitimate operations: killed by Republicans or in a few cases by British forces. But the names of nakedly sectarian murderers, supposedly repudiated by the group and, indeed, probably killed or “set up” by fellow Loyalists, are also there. Lenny Murphy, Robert Bates and other unequivocally sinister figures are part of the battalion of the honoured dead. By what foul magic have they been assimilated into the pantheon?

Here, far more than in Republican song – with which the parallels are otherwise, again, very evident – the sordid is transmogrified into the heroic and elegaic. Elsewhere, different kinds of sentimentalism – the pop-cultural and the “traditional” British military – are mingled. It is reported that at the funeral of murdered UFF man Jackie Coulter in August 2000, the public-address system blared songs by Percy Sledge and Take That, followed by a lone bugler playing the Last Post.

And alongside this sentimentality – and especially in UDA songs – is a swaggeringly in-your-face glorification of violence, which goes far beyond that to be encountered in Republican song. In the latter, the actual business of killing, and especially any hint of overt sectarianism, is euphemised, poeticised, hidden. In some Loyalist song, it is asserted with a kind of desperate bravado. The attitude is, as in the reported slogan on a Loyalist t-shirt: “No one likes us – and we don’t give a fuck”.

Bands carry names like The Young Guns, The Battalion, The Armagh Brigade. Some lyrics do not commemorate the honoured dead or the sufferings of Loyalist prisoners, but glory in their own menace and brutality:

“Their time will come for, mark my words, they’ll pay the price one day, They’ll be cut down like mad dogs by the men of the UDA.”
The final minutes of Peter Taylor’s impressive BBC television history of Protestant paramilitarism, Loyalists, are shot in a west Belfast drinking club. (The occasion, though not stated in the film, is a post-parade celebration by the Shankill Protestant Boys, a marching band closely linked to the UVF – and apparently heavily involved in the September 2005 events.) Two songs are featured – and they mirror two dramatically contrasted sides of the Loyalist musical world.

First, behind Taylor’s commentary, can be discerned Daddy’s Uniform: a sentimental though also militant celebration of the Ulster Volunteer tradition being handed down through the generations, which ends with the ageing father commanding:

“So take this gun, my only son, And join the Volunteers!”
Seemingly the entire packed room – including a well-known west Belfast political figure – sings along with the rather plodding two-piece band. Then, though, a hulking, shaven-headed, black-clad figure takes the little stage. He begins, in a tunelessly roaring voice:

“I was walking up the Falls With my fucking tommy gun I grabbed a Taig and told him There was fuck all that could stop me. Then I shot him. And I watched that bastard die.”
The room erupts in applause; in which this time the politician, perhaps aware of the cameras, apparently does not join.

Some sources for Stephen Howe’s critique and overview of the crisis of Loyalism:

Colin Crawford, Inside the UDA: Volunteers and Violence (Pluto, 2003)

Gerald Dawe, “Re-Imagining the Urban Landscape” (Fortnight 385, May 2000)

Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (HarperCollins 1999)

Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster (Penguin, 2000)

Roy Garland, Gusty Spence (Blackstaff Press, 2001)

Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race (Routledge, 2004)

Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (Indiana University Press, 1995)

Billy Hutchinson, Hard Man, Honorable Man: My Loyalist Life (Dublin, 2003).

David Lister and Hugh Jordan, Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and ‘C’ Company (Mainstream, 2003)

James McAuley, The Politics of Identity: A Loyalist Community in Belfast (Avebury, 1994).

Jim Cusack & Henry McDonald, UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror (Penguin, 2005) ? Fintan O’Toole, “When Bigotry Takes on a Life of its Own” (Irish Times 29 August 2000)

Bill Rolston, “Music and Politics in Ireland: The Case of Loyalism”, in John P Harrington and Elizabeth J Mitchell (eds.) Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Massachusetts University Press / American Conference for Irish Studies, 1999).

Michael Stone, None Shall Divide Us (Blake Publishing, 2003)

The visual imagery of Loyalism

Contemporary Loyalist visual display is marked by the same heterogeneities, incongruities and promiscuous cultural borrowings as the musical. Mural painting in Northern Ireland is, as is well known, itself a modern rather than a “traditional” phenomenon, first emerging in the early years of the 20th century. The images depicted were, before the 1970s and the contemporary conflict, drawn from a very limited range of Orange motifs: most obviously and frequently, William III at the 1690 battle of the Boyne.

Murals were also, until the 1970s, an almost exclusively Loyalist phenomenon. As Republicans adopted the practice, however, a far wider range of themes and images began to be employed; and it was not long before Loyalists began in their turn to respond to this diversification. What has developed since, though, indicates an intriguing difference in the kinds of cultural resources drawn upon by the two sides.

The majority of Loyalist paramilitary-related murals have continued to adopt a fairly restricted set of explicitly militaristic motifs: uniformed, often masked gunmen, accompanied by slogans urging defiance, naming members who have been killed, or simply identifying the “battalion” or “company” whose territory the mural’s location is claimed to be. A high – though not quite so high – proportion of Republican murals are in similar style.

Beyond that, there is sharp and apparently increasing divergence. Nationalist and Republican wall-paintings are almost invariably realist in style – sometimes, indeed, as with several of the most famous Derry murals, taken almost directly from photographs – and depict scenes from the Nationalist pantheon of Irish history, the past three decades’ conflict, or invoke international solidarity with the IRA’s struggle. Allusions to or images of contemporary popular culture are very rare.

Although cultural theorist David Lloyd sees use of the “icon

ULSTER BRITISH
OR
NEO NAZI'S?

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Nazi slur threat to peace process
Good hopes apology will be accepted

By Alf McCreary and Chris Thornton

13 October 2005
The storm over Fr Alec Reid's comparison of unionists to Nazis threatened to diminish the impact of IRA decommissioning today, in spite of a church leader's hope that the row would not harm the peace process.

Former Methodist President, the Reverend Harold Good, who witnessed decommissioning with Fr Reid last month, said today that he hoped that the fall-out would not permanently damage the progress made towards decommissioning and peace.

But the DUP weighed in to attack the Redemptorist priest's comments, with East Londonderry MP, Gregory Campbell, saying his comments made unionists question why "some of our nationalist neighbours have arrived at a position whereby sectarianism is endemic among them".

Mr Campbell and other DUP members also linked Fr Reid's outburst to similar comments earlier this year by the Republic's President, Mary McAleese.

She was forced to apologise after comparing unionist hatred of Catholics to Nazi hatred of Jews.

In a heated exchange with members of the audience during a public meeting at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church last night, Fr Reid said: "The reality is that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community. They were not treated like human beings.

"It was like the Nazis' treatment of the Jews."

He later apologised, saying that he "found myself being strongly provoked and offended by many of the comments made about my integrity and my church.

"In the heat of the moment I lost my temper," he said.

"I deeply respect unionists and I feel that they are a gifted and dynamic community".

Mr Good told the Belfast Telegraph this morning: "I hope the incident may blow over, but I am concerned that the fall-out might damage the progress we were making.

"The process was tender and it had been going well, and I hope what has happened will not damage it over much.

"We will have to wait and see to what extent Fr Reid's apology will be accepted."

The Rev Good disassociated himself overnight from the comments. "I identify fully with the hurt and anger felt by many within the audience and within the wider community," he said.

"However I sincerely hope that Fr Reid's unqualified apology will be heard and accepted and that this incident will not be allowed to overshadow the significance of the decommissioning which was overseen by Alec Reid and myself."

McAleese: Protestant children taught to hate Catholics
27/01/2005 - 19:04:42

President Mary McAleese was at the centre of a sectarian row tonight after claiming Protestant children in the North were taught to hate Catholics in the same way Nazis despised Jews.

It provoked outrage among unionists who accused her of vilifying an entire community.

President McAleese assessment came during ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation.

Anti-Semitism that existed for decades had been built upon by the Nazis, she said.

“They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour and all of those things.”

Unionists were astonished and incensed by the comparison from a head of state who has cited strengthening cross-community relations as a key aim of her Presidency.

She has held talks with Ulster Defence Association representatives in some of Belfast’s most staunchly Protestant districts.

But the efforts of Mrs McAleese, a working-class Catholic once burnt out of her home in the west of the city by loyalists, appeared in jeopardy tonight.

Ian Paisley Jr, a Democratic Unionist Assembly member, said: “So much for bridge-building Mary.

“Her comments are completely irrational and are designed to insult the integrity of the Protestant community and damn an entire generation of Protestant people.

“Her mask as being a healer of divided peoples has slipped.

“She is spewing out hatred of the Protestant community, whilst accusing those same people of hating Catholics.”

Mrs McAleese, who had joined survivors and over 40 heads of state for the memorial ceremonies in southern Poland, has courted controversy in the past.

In 1997, during her first term in office, she stirred up an unholy row by taking communion at Dublin’s Anglican Cathedral.

The city’s Catholic Archbishop, Desmond Connell, described it as a sham.

Unionist fury is still raw over Sinn Fein claims that the IRA gang who abducted and secretly murdered west Belfast woman Jean McConville were guilty of no crime.

One of the so-called “disappeared”, the mother of 10 was seized from her home in 1972 after going to the aid of a wounded soldier.

Her remains were finally found on a Co Louth beach 30 years later.

With Sinn Féin chairman Mitchel McLaughlin insisting Mrs McConville’s murder was not a criminal act, Mr Paisley challenged the President to be as critical of IRA violence.

“I don’t know of any Protestant community that teaches hatred of Catholics,” he added.

“I know of a community that teaches Love Thy Neighbour, even though for the last 34 years they have been tortured, tormented and murdered by violent republicanism.

“The same republicanism that this week said murdering a defenceless woman is not a crime.

“Her silence on Mitchel McLaughlin’s definition of the IRA being legitimate is in stark contrast to her wanton abuse of the Protestant people on this issue.”

A spokesperson for the President’s office tonight declined to make any further comment.

Reid: Nationalists treated like Jews in Nazi Germany
DAILY IRELAND 13/10/05

A priest who last month witnessed the IRA putting its weapons beyond use has compared the unionist community to Nazis for their treatment of Catholics in the North.
Fr Alex Reid was involved in angry exchanges with several members of the audience at a public meeting in south Belfast.
The priest said: “The reality is that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community.
“They were not treated like human beings. It was like the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.”
William Frazer, of the group Families Acting for Innocent Relatives, claimed that Catholics had butchered Protestants during the Troubles. He then stormed out of the meeting at the Fitzroy Presbyterian Church on University Street.
Tempers flared after an audience member began talking about restrictions on Orange marches as he asked a question.
A number of people interjected as Fr Reid attempted to answer the point.
The Redemptorist priest raised his voice to tackle his detractors and said: “You don’t want the truth.”
He was heckled by some of the 200-strong crowd after he made his Nazi comparison.
As the debate continued, one audience member told Fr Reid: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

WHO'S SORRY NOW?

‘I’M SORRY’

"I deeply regret the comments I made. I found myself being strongly provoked and offended by many of the comments made about my integrity and my church. In the heat of the moment I lost my temper and sincerely regret my comments. I deeply respect unionists, as I said, and feel they are a dynamic and gifted community. Once again I apologise for the hurt my foolish words will have inflicted." Fr Alec Reid

Jarlath Kearney

Good asks unionists to accept apology

Former Methodist Church of Ireland president, Harold Good, has appealed for unionists to accept Fr Alec Reid’s apology after he compared unionist treatment of Catholics with the actions of Nazis.
A storm of controversy surrounded comments made by Fr Reid at a public meeting in south Belfast on Wednesday night.
Fr Reid was attending a meeting organised by Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, which was also attended by Reverend Good.
Both clerics had been asked to give their views on the recent disarmament of the IRA which they oversaw alongside General John de Chastelain and the Independent International Decommissioning Commission.
However, after a heated exchange with some members of the audience, Fr Reid commented that “the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community”.
“They were not treated like human beings. It was like the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.”
However, yesterday Fr Reid issued a full apology for his outburst, citing provocation and offence caused by members of the audience.
“I deeply regret the comments I made. I found myself being strongly provoked and offended by many of the comments made about my integrity and my church. I lost my temper and sincerely regret my comments,” Fr Reid said.
While disassociating himself from Fr Reid’s original comments, Reverend Good expressed hope that unionists would accept Fr Reid’s apology.
“I wish it to be abundantly clear that I reject and disassociate myself from Fr Reid’s comments. I identify fully with the hurt and anger felt by many within the audience and wider community,” Reverend Good said.
“However, I sincerely hope Fr Reid’s unqualified apology will be heard and accepted and that this incident will not be allowed to overshadow the significance of the decommissioning which was overseen by Alex Reid and myself,” he added.
Attacking Fr Reid, Ian Paisley Jr of the Democratic Unionist Party said the comments were “deeply offensive”.
“His description of life in Northern Ireland over the last 35 years will not be recognised by unionists as being factual or accurate,” Mr Paisley Jr said.
“It is deeply disappointing that someone who has been attempting to convince unionists that all IRA weapons have been decommissioned would insult an entire community and show such disrespect by comparing them to the Nazis.”
Sinn Féin assembly member Alex Maskey said he appreciated that “many unionists have had difficulties with the language used by Fr Alex Reid”.
“But, by the same token many of these same unionists and indeed church leaders have used language that has denigrated and demonised nationalists and republicans.”
Calling for everyone to “be careful” about what language they use, Mr Maskey said: “If we are going to meaningfully challenge it then we need have an honest debate about the true extent, nature and causes of sectarianism within our society. Unionist leaders are in denial about the history of the state, their own responsibility for this and for the conflict which resulted from this. The Good Friday Agreement contains equality, human rights and policing agendas precisely because there has been institutionalised discrimination, sectarian policing, injustice and repression.”
Reg Empey, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party questioned how Fr Reid’s word could be taken seriously after his comments on Wednesday night. Mr Empey described himself as “absolutely appalled and deeply shocked” by the affair.
SDLP senior negotiator Seán Farren said it was clear that Fr Reid “acknowledges that many people will have been offended by what was said”.
“The truth is that there was widespread denial of civil rights directed against the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. But this was not the same as the ruthless persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.”

IAN KNOWS A THING OR TO ABOUT FACISM

ANNE CADWALLADER, DAILY IRELAND 19/10/05

Anne Cadwallader with Fr. Aiden & Fr.Gary

Ian knows a thing or two about fascism
Anne Cadwallader
Baroness May Blood and others are correct in one sense. It's a reasonable assumption to make, after both President McAleese and Fr Alex Reid compared unionist domination to the Nazis, that this is a sub-conscious psychological thread in the minds of many Northern Catholics.
I suspect it is one that is internally rejected after rational contemplation, however, and that it only emerges in public after intense provocation and with immediate and genuine regret.
No sane person could possibly equate unionist political, social, economic and cultural discrimination against Northern Catholics with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Both Fr Alex Reid and President McAleese are intelligent, thoughtful, Christian people and neither rationally believes the literal truth of what they said.
Most of those on their high horses, including both DUP and Ulster Unionist politicians, cannot either believe, in private, that either individual genuinely meant what they said. Many Catholics, however, subliminally believe some aspects of how they, their families and their forebears were treated by unionism bear a resemblance to the way the Nazis treated the Jews. But are there any real similarities?
The Nazis blamed the Jews for all the economic ills of the pre-World War II German state. They believed in an international Jewish conspiracy against the Teutonic people. They herded Jews into ghettos and regarded them as sub-human.
In our case, some unionists blame an alleged Catholic/Irish “fecklessness" for their lower economic performance. An inability or reluctance to work. A lack of the Protestant work ethic. That is racism, nothing less.
Some unionists say the economic miracle south of the Border only came about not because of hard work and intelligent planning but because the Irish “held their hands out" to Brussels and were amply rewarded. That is racist too.
The Orange Order operates a shady loan and land-bank scheme to prevent Catholics getting their grubby hands on “Protestant land". Until fair employment laws stopped them, some Protestant employers were reluctant to hire Catholics.
In religious matters, some Protestants, certainly those of Ian Paisley's ilk, believe in an international Vatican-driven conspiracy to return them into the clutches of Rome.
Catholics have most certainly found themselves living in ghettos (west Belfast, the New Lodge, Ardoyne, the Short Strand) for reasons of safety after repeated loyalist pogroms dating back to the 1920s.
When Protestants vacate land, such as in north Belfast at this time, unionists use every trick in the book to prevent Catholics, who desperately need homes, from moving across the peaceline into “their" territory.
This is not to call unionists Nazis. It is, however, to point out that there are more than passing similarities between the way the 1930s German political elite treated Jews with the way Catholics have been treated in this state, into which they were abandoned by the South.
Like many others, I groaned internally when I heard what Fr Reid had said. I had been turned down for an interview many times over the years. Then, after a lifetime's discretion, he appears to have blown it at a meeting where he had, ironically, hoped to encourage unionist confidence in his status as an honest broker over decommissioning.
In his defence, he had been subjected at the meeting to ridiculous accusations that the Redemptorist Monastery at Clonard had been “a haven for IRA men" and “used to store weapons in the 1970s".
Leading the charge against Fr Reid was Ian Paisley’s DUP. Ian Paisley’s own past does not stand up to much scrutiny when it comes to moderation and respect for other creeds and cultures.
Has he, for example, ever apologised, or been asked to apologise, for his words of June 1959?
“You people of the Shankill Road," an eyewitness heard him say (quoted in Paisley by Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak), “what's wrong with you? Number 425 Shankill Road. Do you know who lives there? Pope's men, that's who.”
“Fortes' ice cream shop. Italian papists on the Shankill Road," he said, adding that Catholics now lived at 56 Aden Street and 38 Crimea Street. His followers duly attacked Catholic shops and homes.
An elderly lady from Newington in north Belfast, now passed on, once told me of how her family home on the Old Lodge Road had been daubed with a cross one afternoon in the 1950s after one of Paisley's meetings in the area.
They knew what it meant and immediately moved out to live in a house offered by a Protestant gentleman in Glengormley. As they left, they saw the mob torching their old home. Shades of Kristallnacht.
In 1968, after loyalist attacks in Belfast, Paisley said Catholic homes had caught fire because they were “loaded with petrol bombs". The disparity in Catholic/Protestant unemployment rates, he said was because Catholics bred like “rabbits" and multiplied like “vermin".
After the UUP decided to run a Jewish candidate, Harold Smith, he said: “The Unionist party are boasting he is a Jew. As a Jew, he rejects our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament, Protestant principles, the Glorious Reformation and the sanctity of the Lord's day.”
Has anyone even thought to ask Mr Paisley to apologise for words he wrote in a Free Presbyterian booklet in 1982? Words such as the following: Rome is “a debauched, degraded, filthy, incestuous, adulterous monster. Her popes, her cardinals and her priests all lived in a state of the most monstrous villainy.”
The Vatican is a “murderess, the Antichrist" and the papacy is “the seed of the serpent, the offspring of Belial and the progeny of hell. Her eye gleams with the serpent's light. Her clothes reek of the brimstone of the pit.”
“There is no night as dark as papal midnight. No dungeon so loathsome as that of the Woman of Babylon. No chains so fettering as the chains of the Antichrist of the Seven Hills. No slavery so degrading as the slavery of the Mother of Harlots.”
“The dog will return to its vomit. The washed sow will return to its wallowing in the mire, but by God's grace we will never return to Popery.”
Let's come right up to date. On May 24 this year, Mr Paisley referred to the SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, as “another apologist for terrorists. He has mixed so long with the fascists of Sinn Féin, built up into their present strength by the helping hand of the SDLP, that he is blotched with fascism himself.”
Any apology sought for or given to Mr Durkan? Not as far as I know. Or to David Trimble, of whom Paisley said in a 2001 annual conference speech: “If David Trimble is a unionist, then Bin Laden is an American patriot.”
Fascism, Paisley once said, is the “child of Romanism". Knows a lot about fascism, does our Ian.
Anne Cadwallader is a freelance journalist, broadcaster and author of Holy Cross – The Untold Story published by The Brehon Press.

There is a Nazi analogy to be made
Danny Morrison
Fr Alec Reid, a quiet, self-deprecating and normally circumspect man, was thrust into public life recently when it was announced that he and the Methodist Minister, the Reverend Harold Good, were the two independent witnesses to the IRA putting all of its weapons beyond use. Both clerics appeared at the same press conference as General John de Chastelain and his two commissioners on September 26, when the announcement was made.
Fr Reid, of course, is also the Redemptorist priest from Clonard Monastery who acted as a mediator in various republican feuds (and helped end those between the IRA and the Workers Party in 1975 and 1977). He also brought Sinn Féin and the SDLP together for talks in 1988, and acted as a conduit between Charles Haughey, when he was Taoiseach, and the republican leadership. He was famously photographed giving the kiss of life to the two plain-clothes British Army corporals who were killed after they inexplicably drove into the funeral of IRA Volunteer Kevin Brady in 1988.
He is not a supporter of armed struggle. In fact, he never gave up trying to persuade the IRA to abandon its campaign, but he is an Irishman who believes in Irish independence and would like to see his country reunited, as is his entitlement, but with the consent of the unionist community.
He and the Reverend Harold Good set out to persuade the sceptics about the historical importance and decisiveness of IRA decommissioning and came to address a public meeting of about 200 people at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast last Wednesday night.
There were heated exchanges and some unionists, according to Fr Reid, slighted and insulted his faith and the Catholic Church. He was interrupted and he lost his temper. He said that there would have been no IRA but for the way unionists treated nationalists.
“They were treated almost like animals by the unionist community. They were not treated as human beings… they were treated like the Nazis treated the Jews.”
There was shock in the audience and it triggered a shouting match and a bit of a walkout. Fr Reid apologised almost immediately, an apology that was accepted - albeit his remarks were regretted - by many of his friends in other denominations, including the Reverend Ken Newell whose church had hosted the meeting.
There was also an immediate outcry at his remarks from unionist leaders, including the leading party in unionism, the anti-Agreement DUP, which rubbished the affidavits of Reid and Good in regard to decommissioning and still seeks pretexts to avoid sharing power with Sinn Féin.
Father Reid’s remarks certainly smarted many unionists. He should not have demonised an entire community. You cannot compare the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis, and their genocide, to the nationalist experience in the North, however unpleasant that was.
Nevertheless, Fr Reid, a moderate, must have said what he said out of frustration and desperation – a natural human reaction. Prior to those remarks, the last person not of the republican physical-force tradition to have said something similar was President Mary McAleese earlier this year. During ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp she suggested that Catholics in the North suffered like Jews during Hitler’s war on Europe. Of the Nazis she said: “They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics – in the same way that people give their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour.”
Within 24 hours she too apologised and said she was “deeply sorry”. McAleese’s and Reid’s comments represent something visceral which even most nationalists believe but only express in unguarded moments for fear of being regarded as sectarian, but the analogy with fascism is in fact legitimate and rooted in certain fact.
The evidence is that the traditional unionist establishment has strong anti-democratic and fascist tendencies.
Firstly, unionists, who had no problem with a united Ireland when they were in political ascendancy, opposed the extension of the franchise to the Irish working class and opposed a measure of devolution, Home Rule, because they would lose their sectarian supremacy. They opposed ‘lawful’ authority, organised the first right-wing paramilitary army of the 20th century, the UVF, threatened civil war, got their way and set up what was basically a state of one-party government.
To ensure they maintained control they used terror. They gerrymandered constituencies. They discriminated in employment and investment and reinforced the traditional ghettoes in which Catholics had gathered for safety. They used the Orange Order to keep nationalists in fear. At the foundation of the state they drove the few Catholics that had work in Protestant industries out of their workplace. In 1921 alone 9000 Catholics were driven from work, 30,000 were rendered destitute and thousands were rendered homeless. Catholics were in a minority but made up the majority of those who emigrated. Unionist newspapers regularly carried job advertisements with the unashamed pronouncement that ‘No Catholics Need Apply’.
Loyalist paramilitaries boast of their connection with neo-Nazi groups, including Combat 18. The ‘18’ in their name is derived from the initials of Adolf Hitler, A and H are the first and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet.
To this day Ian Paisley uses insulting and derogatory language when he refers to ‘Papishers’ and ‘Romanists’. His party displayed fascist tendencies in its Ulster Resistance mode, Third Force rallies and when it united with loyalist paramilitaries in the UWC strike. One of Paisley’s councillors, George Seawright, said of Catholics in 1984: “Taxpayers’ money would be better spent on an incinerator and burning the whole lot of them. The priests should be thrown in and burned as well.”
Former Home Affairs Minister, William Craig, set up the Vanguard Movement as a pressure group within the Unionist Party. At Vanguard rallies unionist leaders arrived flanked by motorcycle outriders. At one rally in Ormeau Park, Craig addressed 100,000 people, which included serried ranks of masked men carrying cudgels. He said: “We must build up a dossier of the men and the women who are a menace to this country… it may be our job to liquidate them.”
Commenting on these rallies, the veteran British journalist Peter Taylor wrote many years ago: “To nationalists they represented a menacing display reminiscent of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies.”
So, yes, there is an analogy to be made, though not on the same scale as the Nazis. Unionists are genuinely appalled that nationalists should think this way of them and they reject such a view. They do so because they themselves are in denial about their part in the origins of the conflict. Certainly, the IRA’s campaign devastated them, led to a litany of loss, pain and bereavement, and a sense of great victimhood, but that sense of victimhood is also conveniently used to mask some of the real truths about their own ethos and their attitude to Catholics.
For them it’s more comforting to view the IRA as completely ruthless as to examine the darkness at the heart of unionist supremacist values.
Unwittingly, Fr Alec Reid’s outburst has done just that.

OPEN LETTER TO UNIONISM / LOYALISM

An open letter to unionist/loyalist and Protestant leaders from Fermanagh priest Joe McVeigh
The Good Friday Agreement provides the possibility of bringing about the reunification of this island by peaceful political means. It offers us a way of healing the wounds of history.
Fr. Joe McVeigh
The historic statement from the IRA in July declaring an end to all armed actions and the recent decommisoning of the IRA's weapons afford a real opportunity to put the past behind us and to work together for a better future for all the people of this island.
It was disgraceful to see the escalation of loyalist attacks on Catholics resulting in the killing of Thomas Devlin in Belfast and the attacks on Catholic homes throughout Co Antrim. I applaud those community and church leaders who have tried to highlight the situation and to stop these attacks. I would also condemn attacks on Protestant places of worship and on Protestant homes that have occurred in recent times.
Since my young days growing up in Co Fermanagh, I have been aware of the political division in our community, as well as in our country. This division in the local community followed religious lines as well but the religious differences were not as pronounced where I lived as they were in other places.
Since my earliest days growing up, I have always had friendships with ordinary Protestants. I have had friendships with my Protestant neighbours and with Protestant clergy — men and women. I have occasionally officiated at the weddings of Protestants and Catholics. I have preached in Protestant churches. I have debated with Protestant churchmen, publicly and privately, about our political situation. I have found all of them courteous.
Over the years, I tried to reach out to the working-class Protestant people, through some of the political leaders. I have great admiration for those Protestants who are tolerant and conscientious. I have a problem with those who denounce the Catholic faith and use derogatory language when speaking about Catholics. I do not deny your right to defend the Union but I do not accept that you have the right to denounce Catholicism in the terms that you do.
I know many Protestant families and people who have been hurt in the war in our country, many by the IRA. Some Protestants would regard the IRA as “a Catholic organisation”. Many Protestants have suffered most grievously. I think of the victims of the Enniskillen bomb in 1987. I think of Gillian Johnston, who was killed by the IRA that same year. There are many others. I offer them my deepest sympathy.
Many in the Catholic community have been killed by loyalists and state forces. They have shown remarkable restraint and tolerance. I myself have been insulted by those in the armed forces, in the RUC, the Ulster Defence Regiment and in the British Army. I was subjected to harassment and intimidation because I was a Catholic priest and because I dared to speak out according to my conscience about injustice suffered by Catholics. Some members of the forces went beyond being peacekeepers. They murdered some of my friends and relations.
There are a lot of wounds to be healed. I hope they will be healed in time. The loyalist/unionist Protestant church leaders can make a big contribution to the healing process and to the creating of an Ireland where everybody is accepted and welcomed.
We who live in the northeast are victims of history. Our lives have been deeply affected by policies and decisions taken in previous generations, especially by successive British governments.
The Good Friday Agreement offers us the possibility of a peaceful way forward — a way out of the logjam we were in. It provides the possibility of bringing about the reunification of this island by peaceful political means. It also offers us a way of healing the wounds of our history through co-operation at all levels in promoting the wellbeing and economy of this part of Ireland.
We need laws that will provide justice and fair play for all. We need a new culture of tolerance towards all, including immigrants. There is no place for racism and sectarianism. We need a new appreciation of the centrality of respect for human rights. We must be able to live together on this island on the basis of equality, justice and fair play and be able to work to bring about a country that is outward-looking, forward-looking and economically sound.
The most important thing now is that we make sure that violent conflict never happens again and that we can resolve our difficulties by peaceful political means. This will require leadership and co-operation. We may need a forum or facility for people to express their hurt and their grief and their regrets.
I know we have a way to go before we have a just and lasting peace on this island. I know there is a great gap in understanding not just between people in the North but between North and South. I think we have come a long way thanks to those who have worked to bring us this far along the way to peace and justice.
We will go a lot further and learn better how to work together and enjoy life together. We will learn to discover our common identity and to respect each other.
I would like to see that all of the people on this island of Ireland will some day in the not too distant future be able to manage our own affairs efficiently and fairly. That is my hope for a truly democratic country that allows a place and a voice for everyone on the basis of equality.
For the sake of all the young people growing up in Ireland, we must now work together to end sectariansim and racism in all its ugly forms. We must always show respect for one another even if we often disagree about theology and politics.

Fr Joe McVeigh
Muine Mhuiris, Ederney,
Co Fermanagh

Priests reject FAIR statement on monastery
Brothers angry at Frazer allegations
Ciaran O’Neill
Priests at a Belfast monastery have reacted furiously to claims that they were instrumental in creating the IRA.
Members of Clonard Monastery yesterday issued a letter denouncing a statement on the website of the unionist victims organisation, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR), following recent comments by Clonard priest Father Alex Reid.
During a public meeting at Fitzroy Presbyterian Hall in Belfast on October 12, Fr Reid, who was one of two independent witnesses to the recent decommissioning by the IRA, said unionists had treated nationalists in the North like animals, and compared their actions to those of nazis. He made the comments during a heated confrontation with FAIR spokesman Willie Frazer.
Fr Reid apologised for his comments after the meeting, claiming that he had been provoked.
However, in a statement currently being run on the FAIR website, Mr Frazer makes serious allegations about the work of Clonard Monastery.
“The clergy of Clonard Monastery have blood on their hands as it was they who sanctioned and supported the use of violence and, by both acts of commission and omission, were instrumental in the creation of the PIRA,” he wrote.
Clonard Monastery is home to a community of Redemptorist priests and brothers, who have been living and working in west Belfast for more than 100 years.
In the letter released yesterday, Father Gerry Reynolds and Father Adrian Egan, two of the senior priests at Clonard, condemned Mr Frazer’s statement.
“From this comment of his, your readers can now see for themselves why Fr Alex Reid, and others who were present, found William Frazer’s insinuations at the Fitzroy meeting so provocative,” said the letter, the full text of which appears today in Daily Ireland.
The Belfast-based priests admitted they were “shocked and embarrassed” by the comments made by their colleague last week, particularly because it hurt people within the Protestant community who have great affection for him.
But they said it was vital that Fr Reid’s key role in the peace process was remembered.
“In what he said during the Fitzroy meeting last week, Fr Alex was in no way denying the unionist nightmare. He was trying to convey a sense of the nationalist nightmare and he himself apologised for the hurtful way he did it,” the priests said.
“Much of the strong emotional reaction that we felt in response to the confrontation between Fr Reid and Mr Frazer at the Fitzroy meeting was due in part to the very raw truths being exposed before us.
“When faced with such truths we become defensive and aggressive and lose the opportunity for respectful dialogue and thereby perpetuate the nightmare.
“Through his unyielding efforts over the years of conflict to persuade the IRA to forego the armed struggle, Fr Alex has sought to end both nightmares. And many Protestant people hold him in the highest esteem because of his patient life-long ministry for peace.”
The priests also invited anyone with concerns about the work of Clonard monastery to meet with them.

Reid's sectarian slur
EAMONN McCANN

Reid's sectarian slur

(Eamonn McCann, Sunday Journal)

It's been widely conceded that Fr. Alec Reid's remarks at a meeting in south Belfast on Wednesday evening were offensive to Unionists. This seems to me wrongly put. The remarks were offensive, full stop.

The reason they were offensive was not that he referred to the fact of Catholic oppression but because he defined this oppression as akin to Nazism and then laid the blame for it, not on sectarian institutions or political bosses, much less on British overlords, but on the mass of the Protestant people. He indicted the Protestant people of the North as Nazis.

No reference to the intensity of the debate or to insults apparently hurled at the Catholic Church by members of the audience can justify this. It was an ignorant, sectarian slur. People who defend Alec Reid on a "Yes, but" basis speak volumes about their own attitudes

Orange rule from Stormont was characterised by systematic discrimination against Catholics and contemptuous disregard for human rights. The civil rights movement was both inevitable and entirely justified. But Orangeism wasn't Nazism and it is an insult to the victims of Nazism to imply that their suffering was on a par with the pain of any section of the North's people under Stormont.

The plain Protestants never denied a Catholic a job or a house or anything else. They didn't have the distribution of these commodities in their gift.

Did the Protestants of the Fountain, Rosemount, Bishop Street etc. run Derry Corporation as a bastion of bigotry from the inception of the State to the onset of the civil rights movement? Hardly.

In all of that time, there was scarcely a woman and fewer than a dozen men of the working class on the Unionist benches in the Guildhall.

It's sometimes said that the clique in control in Derry was drawn from only a third of the citizens. In fact, about a fifteenth would be more like it. In suggesting that the majority community had control of the levers of power, Alec Reid vastly exaggerated the degree of democracy in the North.

He was singing counterpoint to the old Unionist tune. The sleek professionals, larded businessmen and landed elite who ran the North depended for the survival of their rotten system on persuading the mass of the Protestant people that their interests were served as long as the Catholics were kept down.

In every generation, thousands of Protestants broke from this decrepit alliance to make common cause with Catholics seeking a progressive way forward. This happened mainly, although not exclusively, in the context of the labour movement. Invariably, Protestants who took this path were denounced by the Unionist bosses as deserters. Not infrequently, too, they encountered hostility from Catholic conservatives urging their own community to stick together and not allow any split along class or other lines to develop. It is not possible to understand the sectarian history of the North, and particularly of Belfast, without taking these factors into account.

The smirk of bigotry on the face of the junior Paisley on Hearts and Minds on Thursday night suggested that he well understood how neatly Reid's remarks and reaction to them had fitted into the twisted, sectarian perspective of the DUP.

October 18, 2005

Belfast Telegraph

Loyalist guns must go: Empey
Sir Reg's plea at his first party conference as the UUP leader
22 October 2005
ULSTER Unionist Party leader Sir Reg Empey today urged loyalist paramilitary groups to decommission all their weapons.

Sir Reg, who addressed his first party conference as leader, said that he would help groups including the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force to disarm.

"My door is open to you. But you must realise that you cannot continue as you are," he said.

"Political unionism cannot wash its hands of what happened 20 or 30 years ago.

"But if you agree this chapter can now be closed, you will find in me a politician who will assist in that transition to a better future."

Addressing party activists at the Ramada hotel in south Belfast, Sir Reg told them that unionism was facing its biggest threat in 20 years, with the prospect of its worst period of isolation since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Sir Reg was also bluntly telling members that there was no denying the party's "awful" electoral performances.

THE RISE OF NEW MILLENIUM LOYALIST NATIONALISM

Ireland - The Orange Swastika: The rise of new millennium Loyalist Nazism
An Orange Swastika is now fluttering over the red-white-and-blue of supposedly loyal Ulster as the far fight makes a concerted bid for power in an attempt to copy the recent British National Party council successes in England.
It has led to the development of a two-pronged assault along social class lines which first found its roots with the start of the new millennium. The term Loyalist Nazi has come to symbolise those working-class Protestants who have become involved in political activity mainly in urban loyalist districts of Northern Ireland.
Their vehicles of recruitment have been the BNP itself, the National Front, the British Nazi Party (also known as the 9th November Society), but especially the White Nationalist Party.
The far right’s secondary tactic is to infiltrate respectable middle-class political parties and clubs. They are known as Unionist National Socialists.
This is not the first time the far right has tried to cross the Irish Sea in a bid to establish a power based in Ulster. It has always had limited success in the past because it has been competing for supporters and members with the loyalist paramilitary groups, especially the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association.
Politically, too, the far right has found itself in direct competition with the Ulster-based parties that speak for the UVF and UDA, namely the Progressive Unionist Party and the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party.
Essentially, the far right attempted to cash in on the Northern Ireland Troubles with an anti-Irish Republican agenda portraying the IRA as the enemies of the United Kingdom. The NF’s bid to capitalise on the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974, which brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing executive between Unionists and Nationalists, ran aground because the NF could not break the political grip of the United Ulster Unionist Council.
The NF tried again in the aftermath of the November 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which saw considerable Unionist opposition to the Dublin accord. During this period, the NF National Directorate member John Field was posted to Ulster, a shop was established in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast, and David Kerr, a leading Ulster activist, contested a council seat as an NF candidate, but secured only a handful of votes.
In the 1980s, the NF tried to push the theory of an independent Ulster, the favoured stance at one time of the Ulster Vanguard movement of the 1970s during the UWC strike era. The 1980s NF campaign fizzled out as the mainland organisation ripped itself apart in internal power struggles.
In the early 1990s, the BNP, the nazi terror group Combat 18 and the National Socialist Alliance – a political umbrella for minuscule groups that supported Combat 18 – all tried to find footholds in the North. But they could not compete, let alone provide a radical street alternative for young Loyalists, with the hardline bootboy tactics of the paramilitaries.
Apart from isolated individual members, the far right lay largely dormant in the North until a series of confrontations within Unionism’s mainstream parties in the new millennium provided the opportunity for both the overt and covert wings to begin street activity and recruiting.
One of the first events that sparked this new wave of activity was a row in Ballymena Borough Council in County Antrim between councillors from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and the borough’s Muslim community. The DUP members initially refused to accept a gift of an Islamic brass replica that the Muslim community had presented in friendship. The WNP and NF seized upon the controversy and embarked on a sticker and leaflet campaign across the town, with the WNP eventually accused of putting up their flags in potentially provocative areas.
In Craigavon in County Armagh, a controversy surrounding planning permission for a mosque has allowed the WNP to raise its profile in the borough. The British Nazi Party is also thought to be preparing to target Dungannon and the area covered by South Tyrone borough council, where there is a growing population of Portuguese migrant workers.
Given the small percentages in the North’s 1.7 million population of the ethnic communities, which consist mainly of people of Chinese, Asian, Muslim, traveller and Jewish origins, one might wonder why the extreme right would want to organise in a part of Ireland where no previous serious racial tensions existed
The far right is planning to build on two future fronts. First, the Irish Republic has voted to accept the Nice Treaty, paving the way for the creation of a much-enlarged, 25-member state European Union. There is now a very real danger that the perceived asylum-seeker problem, which has dogged mainland Britain and parts of France, will mushroom in the North in spite of the religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants in certain areas. Ironically, it was the internecine sectarian conflict within Northern Christianity that deterred the creation of large-scale ethnic communities during the Troubles in Derry and Belfast like those that now exist in English cities such as Birmingham and Bradford.
Whether the North is governed by a devolved Assembly at Stormont, direct rule from Westminster, or even through joint authority between Dublin and London, a peaceful solution to the Ulster crisis will spark a sharp increase in European asylum-seekers attempting to settle in Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Tactically, the far right wants to be in place and ready to capitalise politically on any explosion in the number of asylum-seekers entering the North. The far right’s key date will be the summer of 2005 when local government elections are scheduled, with speculation that the NF and WNP will try to repeat some of the election successes of the BNP.
However, while the BNP, NF, WNP and British Nazi Party represent the explicit face of neo-fascism in the North, there is also a underlying potential threat posed by implicit Nazi sympathisers within mainstream unionism. Nevertheless this threat should not be seen as more serious than is justified.
Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the Conservative Party, has already suspended the hardline right-wing pressure group, the Monday Club, in face of allegations concerning its position on race and asylum-seekers. The Ulster Monday Club was once one of the most influential pressure groups within the Ulster Unionist Party. Boasting 40 activists in many of the North’s constituencies, it had four UUP MPs in its ranks. However, the Ulster Monday Club, unlike the national organisation, was never dogged by any allegations that it had been infiltrated by fascists or neo-nazis.
There is no doubt that the scandal surrounding the national Monday Club was a contributory factor in its Ulster branch becoming defunct a number of years ago. However, it must be clearly emphasised that none of the serving and former MPs connected with the Ulster Monday Club at that time had ever been linked to racism or fascism.
That is no longer the case in the new millennium and a far-right faction within the UUP would like to see the Ulster Monday Club rekindled. Before the Ulster Monday Club disbanded, membership was only open to card-carrying members of the UUP. A key reason why the modern far right is targeting the Ulster Monday Club name is the esteem in which the Club was once held in Ulster Unionist circles.
One such long-time far-right sympathiser and card-carrying UUP member in an interview with the Irish Daily Star said: “The UUP is not really party in the true organisational sense. It is really a federation of organisations. The UUP is full of cliques, cabals and factions, and we on the far right are just one of them.
“We would like to see the Monday Club reformed in the UUP again, but there is the false impression that anyone on the far right has got to be dogmatically opposed to the Good Friday Agreement. The faction I represent, whilst it would certainly be small, would be classified as far right, but pro-Agreement. We have enough political maturity, experience and common sense between us to realise that the only way to advance our ideology is through mainstream politics.
“The good thing is that the BNP and NF will take the heat off us. We eventually want to organise within the UUP in much the same way as Militant successfully did within the Labour Party and the trade unions in Britain. The hard reality is that whilst they will make a lot of noise in the coming years, the BNP and NF will never be anything more than a ‘two men and a dog outfit’. But they are correct about the threat which the asylum-seekers will pose in Ulster – and in the South – within the next generation.”
The other major danger comes from the Ku Klux Klan, which is recruiting well-educated, middle class Protestants in a conspiracy to expel all asylum-seekers and the Irish travelling community from Northern Ireland. Klansmen from the reformed Knights of the Invisible Empire have been cashing in on anti-Islamic feeling to hand-pick activists from unionism’s traditional educated middle class, dubbed the fur coat brigade.
A spokesman for the Invisible Empire, who wished only to be identified as a “well-educated, middle-class, white graduate from County Antrim”, said his organisation had “permanently binned the movie-reel images of Klansmen in white sheets brandishing American Confederate flags and burning Black Baptist churches”.
He claimed he held the position of “Grand Dragon” in the Invisible Empire and that the rise of “Klan policies” was a “direct consequence of working-class loyalist reaction to the growth in the immigrant and gypsy races in Ulster”.
It would appear the Klan is trying to build a group of nazi intellectuals similar to the League of St George organisation in England, which is one of the main UK representatives in the European nazi network.
The Knights of the Invisible Empire were one of the largest Klan groupings of the last century. “As our title states, we will operate as an invisible empire within the political community. People are selected to join the Knights; to be a member of the Invisible Empire is by invitation only.”
The Invisible Empire, according to the Klan source, is organised along the structures of revolutionary cells in some of Ulster’s 18 Westminster constituencies. It takes its racism from the writings of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and its initiation ceremonies resemble the blood-curdling oaths of Irish Freemasonry.
There can be no doubting that the working and middle-class far right groups are working to a common agenda – preparation for the expansion of the EU and a potential increase in asylum-seekers coming to Ireland, especially to Ulster. The existing Irish travelling community is another target. There is a real danger that generations of sectarian violence in the North could be replaced by racial violence.
© Searchlight Magazine 2003

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