Buried Lives Read online

  Prior to that, with tensions rising in the North, business improved at the weekends in Letterkenny, with customers crossing the border. But word spread and few came to buy meat in the Pattersons’ shop. Joe heard a woman outside his shop saying, ‘We can’t go into that Protestant shop, they are the ones who sacked the Roman Catholics’.

  Before he first went to Canada his father, who was unwell, said, ‘Joe, go to Canada, have a look around and then come home and take Margaret and the three children with you. There is nothing left here for you in Donegal.’ He was to start a new life in Canada, as the de Burghs in Co. Limerick had done in 1924, as well as other Protestant families who had been driven out of the South, as detailed earlier in the book. Not one politician in the Irish Republic has tried to get justice for the Pattersons.

  Sectarian acts were not confined to the Patterson business. There is a small confectionery manufacturer in the town called Oatfield, exporting worldwide, and particularly to Commonwealth countries. Joe explained:

  After our closure, many townspeople were shocked that this could happen to such a long-established business. There was some trouble at the Oatfield Sweet Factory (McKinney’s). IRA slogans were painted all over the wall facing the main road. All the do-gooders, politicians in the town were given big publicity when it was washed off. At that time there were 9 or 10 Protestant-owned businesses in the town.

  A year after closing, Joe’s solicitor pursued the case for a possible breach of contract, sending Mr Liam Hamilton a brief. Hamilton, a Senior Counsel, specialised in labour law but refused to act as he was on an annual retainer from the ITGWU. Instead he referred Joe to Diarmid, a fellow Senior Counsel, whom Joe met along with his solicitor in Malahide Hotel.

  Arising out of this legal consultation, Joe was advised to pursue a claim and wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office in Dublin. But there was no investigation. Joe refused to be silenced.

  More recently, a Dublin-based solicitor, Greg Ryan, made inquiries through the Freedom of Information Act to the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and Department of Justice on Joe’s behalf, but all were refused. Joe explained that, ‘Greg cannot go any further with this.

  I next paid a visit to Jim McCracken, a retired schoolteacher from Donegal, now Development Officer with Derry and Raphoe Action Group, a cross-border group which seeks to encourage greater community involvement by the country’s Protestant population. He has responsibility for Donegal, and he explained much of the background and findings of their report entitled Protestants in Community Life. Jim seemed anxious to portray Donegal Protestants as almost their own worst enemies. He thought they failed to engage thoroughly enough and often had a false perception of being neglected.

  He explained that the Derry and Raphoe Group was funded from the North, a Development Officer being appointed in 1997. The Protestant community is scattered across Donegal, with concentrated areas and other settlements of very low numbers. The objective of the research was to find out what the Protestants want and how they really think.

  The EU’s special support programme, the Peace and Reconciliation Fund, funded the research for a 6-month period. A research director, Ruth Moore, was appointed in May 2000, with Pamela Smyth as her research assistant. Because most of Co. Donegal is rural, and people work in the summer months, it was not until September that the research started, meaning that there were less than 3 months for the project to reach completion.

  During the group interviews, only one answer was permitted to each question, so the entire group had to agree. Consensus was essential, so nuanced replies were perhaps distorted by the necessity for concise answers. Ruth Moore submitted an 80-page report, which was greatly condensed in the University of Ulster by In Core, a professional body, and the resulting published report was just 12 pages. They attempted to distribute a copy to every Protestant household in Donegal.

  Unlike some group members with whom I spoke, Jim believes that the findings were not watered down and faithfully reflected the views of Donegal Protestants. They took the report to five centres after publication: Dunfanaghy, Remelton, Saint Johnson, Glenealy and Rosnowlagh. At all meetings they asked for views from the different churches and no evidence of State sectarianism was apparent.

  I referred to the report by Stephen Mennell, Professor of Sociology in UCD, and by Mitch Elliott, psychoanalyst, on Protestants in the South, which concluded that Protestants were an ‘established outsider group’. I also mentioned that many Protestants resented the fact that to be considered truly Irish you had to be Roman Catholic and nationalist. Jim’s reaction was that this is a ‘perception’ which when repeated ‘over and over again’, becomes a ‘belief’.

  We talked about why there were so few Protestants in the civil service, and Jim mentioned that he had been told that there were only seven Protestants in the Gardaí, which is completely wrong. It was a ‘manufactured fact’ to support a certain view. He considered that Protestants had exaggerated their plight and to illustrate his point he quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.’

  Jim illustrated the lack of local government discrimination by pointing out that when grants were going through in a rush, and Donegal County Council awarded sixty-four grants in a recent round, sixteen went to Protestant groups, which is ‘far in excess of our overall representation’ and a ‘positive discrimination’.

  I mentioned my discussions with the man from the Ulster-Scots Association in Monaghan, explaining that he had difficulties when applying for grants on the basis that they had to be for cross-community activities. Jim’s reaction was that funding organisations ‘cannot be seen to be promoting any particular religious organisation and that they have an all-funders charter’, whatever one’s religion. In the Protestant religion, by and large, each parish has a church hall:

  [This is] essential to the survival of the Protestant community … to maintain a witness and identity to the Protestant community. The Catholics do not have community halls in the same way so when they apply they do not mind if it is cross-community. Protestants do not want this and they certainly do not want bingo, gambling nor alcohol in the buildings. But Catholics might find this positive, rather than negative, as the environment would be properly controlled for their children.

  I asked if céili music would be acceptable in Protestant halls and he could see nothing wrong with this. I mentioned that some Protestants rejected the GAA and céili bands as not being part of their culture. He responded that ‘lots of Protestants’ were into GAA and ‘there was a Protestant President of the GAA for a number of years, Jack Boothman, Church of Ireland’.

  Contrary to Jim’s claim, practically no Protestant national schools play GAA in Donegal and very few – if any – Protestants have represented the Donegal team. But Jim did concede that it was difficult for church groups to get funding ‘purely for the church hall’. As far as he is concerned, there is no question of the management of church halls being cross-community as the halls were owned by the vestries, but if the Catholics wanted to use it for, say a quiet social meeting following a funeral, it should be made available within the ethos of the Protestant religion; for example no alcohol would be permitted.

  I told Jim that there were Protestants who would not accept money from the Lotto on the basis that they disapproved of gambling. ‘All monies go into the Department of Finance income tax including speeding fines, lottery money, etc.’, he responded. ‘It is then distributed among the different departments. Lottery funding covers many things other than sports and recreation, like medicines, money for free transport.’

  I asked him about the Donegal Protestants’ attitude towards what some thought was a Roman Catholic, green, anti-Protestant State. He thought Protestants were ‘holding back’ and not applying for enough grants; in his opinion, they needed to be more forceful.

  In the Donegal findings, 96 per cent of Protestants indicated that they socialise with their Catholic neighb
ours, ‘maybe selling bullocks down the mart or in a farmers’ group’. But Jim did emphasise that Roman Catholics do not realise that there are important and fundamental doctrinal differences between the various Protestant religions. They tend ‘to lump them all together on the official forms under the catch-all word “Protestants”’.

  We spoke about the Orange Order, particularly the peaceful parade at Rosnowlagh every year. Of the 12,700 Protestants in Donegal, Jim estimated that approximately 500 were Orangemen. He thought ‘the voice was in excess of the number … I do have a big problem with the Orange Order saying, “We demand Protestant rights” when they are demanding Orange rights’. He has problems with how the Orange Order ‘see their Catholic friends’. I mentioned that David Trimble was a proud Orangeman, but he considers that a big problem for the unionist party. ‘The Donegal Protestant will vote for any party, including Sinn Féin’, he noted, but he emphasised that there is a strong Fine Gael affiliation and ‘Paddy Harte was Fine Gael and represented very well all sections of the community in Donegal’. Jim White, a Fine Gael Protestant in south Donegal, also represented the Protestants successfully.

  I mentioned the Ne Temere decree and he thought that it was not as rigidly enforced in Donegal as in the rest of the country. He claimed: ‘Overall it has not made any major differences to Protestant numbers, but this is controversial and will be challenged by people in Donegal … in east Donegal anyway’. I was told later by a Donegal Protestant that ‘No Protestant in Donegal would agree with this analysis. We used to be 20 per cent of the population and the Ne Temere left us halved in numbers.’

  I finished my research on Protestant experiences in Donegal by interviewing someone who lived there for most of his life and now works in Dublin. He is in his 30s, married to a Roman Catholic, and comes from a Protestant background. I will call him John. He started by emphasising that in society south of the border, there remained ‘certain things that are divisive’. In terms of politics, the Protestant community did not have any allegiance to any party and if people talked about the civil war they would look on blankly, as they did not care one way or the other about the outcome. Not that this meant there was any less interaction with the majority community. It made no difference in people’s day-to-day life.

  He was surprised at some of the findings of the Derry/Raphoe report and felt that its most compelling finding was that a high percentage of people – 20 per cent – believed that their religion prevented them from getting on in their careers, despite the fact that they got on well with their neighbours. According to John:

  … you do not give any view which is divergent from the nationalist one. Because your view is divergent and because people view it as disloyal, I think you become self-censoring but we express them when we are gathered together. People who are neighbours and in business do not want the hassle of expressing their views.

  This struck a chord with me – we are back to Hubert Butler’s summation of southern Protestant social behaviour being manifested through ‘amiable inertia’.

  He described a scene in a bar where a news report comes on about some topical incident:

  … you might be in mixed company and you can just see people eyeing each other up and down but not in a confrontational way; the Catholics are thinking ‘I know that these Protestant people who sit here with me have a completely different view on this, but they’ll never express it.’ If you asked Roman Catholics in Donegal how they view the Protestant community, do they think they are absolutely and totally behind the Irish Republic, I think even the reasonable ones would say, ‘Well, they are not disloyal but they are not as keen about it as we are.’ Do they view them as being less Irish? I think they believe Protestants have a way to go to persuade them that they are fully behind the country. Among the Protestant community there are those who see that and work very hard to blend in. They’re not all quite ‘Uncle Tom Prods’ but there’s an element of that present. There are those who say I am Irish, and they think of Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell who were Protestants, and these people were nationalists. Finally there are those who say, ‘I have a different heritage, I didn’t come from a nationalist background, there are elements of it I find distasteful.’ But they hold that view in private because to do otherwise would be social suicide, they are not going to fall out with anyone.’

  I mentioned that Ian McCracken had said that Protestants had themselves to blame for not integrating more successfully. John’s response was that when the State was formed, the minority’s views were totally at odds. There were the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteers:

  … many people who live near me, their grandfathers were in the Ulster Volunteer Force and overnight they were betrayed, cut away from that and their whole political currency was rendered completely disloyal, virtually overnight. In that context there is a responsibility on the majority community, as it is the powerful entity, to assimilate, to reach out and allow those people to play a full role as citizens. I think there was a failure of the Irish state in this respect. It was a Catholic state for a Catholic people and there was a small minority of people who did not fit into that, and the Irish state did not give a damn about it.

  He went on:

  [If there was to be] any settlement in Ireland, it was going to have to … embrace aspects of Irish history that is associated with Britain. The British connection can’t always be negative, we were British for hundreds of years. There are people in Ireland, north and south, who believe that an element of British interaction doesn’t necessarily always have to be something that is viewed in a negative way.

  He thought things had changed significantly.

  The bottom line is that nationalists in the South are beginning to realise that their nationalism is going to have to be redefined to be more soft and open to people who view themselves currently as British. People realise that’s the only way to achieve a united Ireland. That means that the small minority in the South, who still feel they have elements of British heritage and sympathies, will be regarded more sympathetically.

  We discussed the way Irish history is taught and John recounted the story of a holiday with a well-educated friend. They had a few late-night drinks and his pal said that many Irish people are taught that ‘the Famine was genocide by the British’. John’s reaction was forthright, describing such views as an example of knee-jerk nationalism and historically inaccurate. The British did react to the Great Famine in various positive ways, from shipping in maize from America to setting up public works and workhouses in the worst-affected areas. He pointed out that there had been a real genocide in Armenia, and 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust; two governments had calculatedly set out to eliminate two races. It was simply untrue that British politicians, however misguided and prejudiced towards the Irish, did this in Ireland during the famine. John believed that the first thing the new Irish State did was ‘to seek a justification for itself. It expressed itself as the Ireland of the Gael and if you weren’t a Gael, you weren’t really Irish’.

  I brought up Hubert Butler’s ‘amiable inertia’ description of Protestant behaviour. John’s reaction was that this is hardly surprising if you look at the reaction of the majority community to those few who stand up.

  Noel Browne called the Protestant community “acquiescent Uncle Toms”. It was a wish and a fear of not being accepted that it led to the minority population in the south suppressing their views and not talking openly and taking stuff lying down. Let’s face it, there were incidents like Fethard-on-Sea and such realities weren’t widely appreciated until the 1990s when someone made a film about it. I have Catholic friends who could not believe that happened, but I knew about it and so did my Dad. Unfortunately, the Protestant community did not really rise up and say this is outrageous.

  He had read about the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to evangelists in Limerick, such as the Mormons.

  Catholic priests were assaulting them on the streets and evicting them. Protestant people in the
south of Ireland have felt afraid to react to anything, afraid to express a view, kept their heads down, the consequence of that is they have no sense of self worth. That is reflected in the fact that their numbers have ebbed so drastically so in a mixed marriage they would not assert themselves and their children were brought up as Catholics and that is the reason there are so few of them left.

  We went on to discuss the border counties, particularly Donegal. He described these counties as ‘unusual’, because they have the highest number of Protestants in the 26 counties.

  Because Donegal is close to Northern Ireland, it held on to its particular heritage. In Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, they have a more distinct view of themselves as a minority community. The Orange Order is the most radical anti-nationalist expression you can get. The fact that it exists in the border counties more than 85 years after partition is proof positive that there are people of a different hue there.

  John had no wish to hold a British passport: ‘As long as the State recognises my Protestant heritage and the fact that I don’t have to be a raving Brit-hating nationalist to be Irish, an Irishman is how I feel.’

  We moved on to discuss sports and he mentioned that there are cricket, hockey and badminton clubs, as well as many Orange Order meeting halls in Donegal.

  Then there is the GAA. As the Protestant population is 14 per cent, then 14 per cent of the people who play GAA games should be Protestant. To the best of my knowledge, in 100 years a Protestant has not played Gaelic football for Donegal. If they have, then it’s no more than maybe 1 or 2 and certainly not in the last 30 years. They say Protestants are welcome but the GAA is organised along parish boundaries in the Catholic Church. Protestant schools don’t play GAA games, and the GAA never went into Protestant schools in an attempt to persuade them of the merit of playing Gaelic games. There has been no [Protestant] clergymen involved in the management of the GAA.