The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

4. Living the Limit

4 Living the Limit = Ballybogoin town’s center approximates the hub of a wheel. Streets and alleys radiate from the busy, elongated, rectangular space Ballybogoiners call “the square” and meander by sundry small shops, bakeries, bookies, pubs, and Protestant churches. The southeasterly roads follow past car parks (parking lots), the Masonic Lodge, a cattle market, gospel meeting houses, and the still-occupied mill village with its abandoned factories. The northerly roads pass some small shops, a hardware store, the social security of‹ces, a hospital, a large police barracks, the Roman Catholic “chapel,” state schools (Protestant), maintained schools (Catholic), and the local headquarters of the UDR.1 Outside the circumference of commercial, governmental buildings, the residential areas begin. Large single-family, red brick and stucco houses built by the rising Protestant bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sit back from the main roads close to the town. Their emerald green lawns and multicolored rose gardens appeared to enlighten the near permanently gray, north of Ireland sky. Just beyond these homes the roads, the old roads, diverge. New roads intersect them, wend their way around the government-run housing estates, swing into them, and come “to full stops,” dead ends, once you pass through the estates. If driving, you must exit these complexes from where you came. “These new roads, they go nowhere,” Ballybogoin ’s Irish nationalists said, “for security reasons.” 105 The older, primary roads do go somewhere. They roll along the drumlins, through the rural, Gaelic-named townlands. They pass through Ballybogoin’s hinterland villages and “go the length of,” lead to, the other provincial towns with which Ballybogoin has contact. They go places. These spots, “townlands way out the back o’ beyon’,” as mentioned previously, represent Irish nationalist peoples’ pasts and help form present identities in both town and country. Their Hiberno-English names roll trippingly from local tongues as they frame family histories and help people tell their stories. In the most distant of these places, Irish nationalists formed a clear majority. There, political sympathies to Sinn Féin were strong. Irish republicans predominated in the poor, sparsely populated hilly lands that are the outermost territories of Ballybogoin’s jurisdiction. From the top of Ballybogoin Square, the hill that rises from it, you can see these western hills. On the northeastern horizon, the depressed lough shore with its barren, boggy surrounds can be viewed. To the south can be seen a series of drumlins that run along the border, a boundary line created in 1921 that divided the island of Ireland into two states—the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. From spaces accessible to the public the east cannot be seen from the apex of the town. But the country beyond—the factories, mill villages, and “Protestant housing estates,” as the local Catholics called them—was easily imagined in the 1980s. In that direction lay fertile, ›at farmland whose vanishing point was as far away as the eye can see. “Aye, ye can see all from up here,” a man who introduced me to the hill said. Imaginary landscapes are easily perceived in Ballybogoin as this statement indexes. At this acme, however, the square, as a hub, was incomplete. The road heading into it from the west extended to the apex, the highest point in the area, but did not go up and over it. “The wee road,” as local people called it, stopped at the top, at the steps of the town’s Loyal Orange Lodge, one of the many Orange Order meeting places scattered throughout the district. This edi‹ce sat directly adjacent to a British security forces post, whose structures were the only ones that rose above the building that housed the meetings of Ballybogoin’s Loyal Orange Order. the troubles in ballybogoin 106 Time in Place The Loyal Orange Order, a worldwide organization, is dedicated to the defense of the Protestant religion, Orangemen argue. They claim the organization preserves political and religious liberties. Orangemen trace their ideological roots “back to the beginning of the rise of the Dutch Republic against the tyranny of the Spanish Sovereigns”(Dewar, Brown, and Long 1967, 9). They look upon their victories over the native Irish as one of the crowning glories of that tradition, a terribly misunderstood one in their view. In his foreword to the Order’s of‹cial history written in 1967...