ULSTER AGAINST THE ENGLISH
Stan Gebler Davies on the Unionist conviction that England doesn't care a damn for them
Dromore, Co. Down WHEN and if Ulster has independence thrust upon it, the people will at least have a decent national anthem which they may sing. I mean `Lilliburlero', of course. At the moment, they are still singing 'God Save the Queen' with rare verve, as after the count last Friday in Mr Enoch Powell's constituency of South Down. Mr Powell's SDLP opponent, a solicitor called McGrady, is known to take exception to this song, and since he had gone to some trouble to insult Unionists in his speech acknowledging, grudgingly, his defeat, he was treated to a particularly raucous rendi- tion from the back of the hall. Some supporters of his, like vampires threatened by garlic and sunlight, attempted to flee but this had been anticipated and there was an enjoyable little scuffle as they ran into a phalanx of stout Unionists disposed by the doors.
The Sinn Feiners present seemed less upset, perhaps because they are harder men. There is something particularly vile about these people, which is of course their adherence to the doctrine of murder. One `Soon it will be full of bleedin' journalists ruinin' it all.' has to admire the restraint and forbearance of the Ulster people in tolerating these evil creatures. Imagine, please, their presence at an election, guarded watchfully and protected from molestation by RUC men and women whom their spokesmen de- scribe as legitimate targets.
The people are not in the least gloomy. I had not expected this. There is a wide- spread conviction, near universal, that the English will pretty soon cut and run, leaving Ulster to a devastating war, but that did not prevent the good citizens of Dromore, where the count took place, from celebrating later that evening in their rugby club, quite the best tarts and vicars party I have ever attended. The purpose was obstensibly charitable and quite a sum of money was raised for whatever charity it was (one does not ask); something, I think, to do with children.
It is an excellent place, Ulster, to throw a tarts and vicars party. There is such a variety of ecclesiastical costume to borrow, or copy, and an abundance of good- looking women with long legs to show off. There was a pope and a cardinal or two, several monks and a scattering of nuns, a Moravian preacher and a couple of Angli- can bishops. I suppose some of the vest- ments had been filched but it seems to be an easy matter to send the wife into Belfast to buy a dog-collar along with her garter and suspender-belt. If the same facility were extended to citizens of the Republic I do not doubt that there would be wholesale fraud perpetrated by conmen got up as priests, but I must say that any such party would be quite impossible in County Cork, where I live. Taking the mickey out of the cloth is quite simply not on in those parts.
This is the extraordinary thing about Ulster. These people have gone through hell and damnation for the last 16 years and have nothing to look forward to but more of the same, but they are still laughing. These are not the dour and narrow people the English imagine. I add here that the Dromore Rugby Club is a resolutely non-sectarian organisation and that much of the ecclestastical capering was conducted by Roman Catholics. And that their wives, should they choose to, could make an excellent living in any bordello where the medium of exchange was a gold American Express card.
I mean that these people are not only quite capable of living cheerfully with one another, they are doing just that. The mood of the people is much better than it was five years ago. That is because the murderers have been beaten or, at least, contained.
Ulster is still being messed about by the English. That is a pity, and it is a consequ- ence of the English attempt to govern part of these islands like a recalcitrant colony, over-ripe for abandonment. The pity is that the two Irish nations had, in the crucible of the North, come to understand one another very well just at the point at which a misguided administration (how very clever the INLA were to murder Airey Neave) chose to drive a wedge between them by granting Dublin a mea- sure of sovereignty. This has had the utterly predictable consequence of pushing the Nationalists into the stance known in Ireland as triumphalism. The SDLP will no longer even discuss with Unionists the possibility of a power-sharing administra- tion unless the Unionists, as a precondi- tion, accept the wretched treaty and all that goes with it.
Now power-sharing was the very specific which London had dreamed up as ultimate `solution' to the Irish problem. Unionists did not want it, perceiving the illogicality, and danger, of sharing office with a party, the SDLP, whose allegiance is to a foreign state. In the event, their fears prove to have been fully justified, but it was they who accepted the English formula, as their great-grandparents had accepted, 65 years ago, the nonsense of a devolved Northern Ireland. It was they who sat in the Assem- bly and the SDLP who boycotted it, but the SDLP it was to whom the English listened and the SDLP which created the present system of government, conducted in secrecy and supervised by Republicans from Dublin.
That is why these by-elections were held last week. The Unionists are still trying to be heard in London, but no one is listen- ing. What more eloquent gesture could be made by a politician than that he resign his seat without any certainty of getting it back? This some Unionists did (and one paid the price), but it had no more effect on the Commons than the explosion which blew up Airey Neave in its car-park. The Unionist vote was everywhere increased, and in terrible weather, but votes (or Ulster votes, at any rate) do not seem to matter at Westminster.
The people pretend that they do not know why, but really they do: it is because the English do not care a damn for them, and never did.
'Every time I vote,' says a Unionist friend in South Down, 'I know that I am voting for my passport. I don't mind McGrady as a man, but if ever he wins I know that I will have lost my passport and my country. Don't the English know that?'
No. They don't. And if they did, they wouldn't care.
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