The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

2. Dividing Space and Making “Race”

2 Dividing Space & Making “Race” = “Race consciousness,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men.” In 1973 I was amazed to hear a member of the House of Lords describe the differences between Irish Protestants and Catholics in terms of their “distinct and clearly de‹nable differences of race.” “You mean to say that you can tell them apart?” I asked incredulously . “Of course,” responded the lord. “Any Englishman can.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1985) In Ballybogoin on the last Sunday in May 1984, eleven-year-old Patrick, a Roman Catholic, knocked at the door of my one-room cottage that stood adjacent to his home. He uttered, “it’s a blistr’n hot day,” as he entered the door, but he, like most Ballybogoin people, was glad of it. “I’d rather it than the blustr’y days,” the windy, rain-chilled days common in Irish summers, he said. Despite the good weather, boredom had the better of Patrick. It was a typical north of Ireland, Presbyterian, Sabbatarian Sunday, “the longest day of the week” many young people in Ballybogoin called it. Patrick’s “ma and da” were visiting his “grannies,” aunts, uncles, and cousins in “the hill country” to the west of the town, and he chose to stay home. He told me, “I just called for a chat,” so I offered him a chair.1 61 D [I had been writing at my little dining table desk when Patrick “called.” Having just returned from a long walk around Ballybogoin, I was jotting down thoughts on the Sunday sermon I had heard at St. Columbanus ’s Roman Catholic Church that morning. The local campaigns for the upcoming European parliamentary elections were under way, and the candidates had passed through the town the day before. I was also thinking about the signs of social and cultural renewal beginning to appear in the Protestant neighborhoods throughout the area, the way they recon‹gured those social spaces and, it appeared, transformed the people who resided in them. Writing now, I realize that the symbolic revivi‹cation that took place was tied to the elections. The posters of the two unionist parties, those who wanted to maintain the union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain and had an almost exclusively Protestant membership, had red, white, and blue Union Jacks and “Ulster is British” imprinted upon them. The aura of patriotism they evoked seemed to spur a premature preparation for what many Protestants in the town referred to as “the glorious twelfth,” the Twelfth of July, the annually celebrated “national holiday” in which unionists and loyalists remembered and ritually celebrated the victory of King William of Orange over King James II, the Pretender, and his Irish supporters at the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, a historical site now in the Republic of Ireland. Already people in the Protestant neighborhoods were tidying up their streets for what one Protestant shopkeeper told me was “our day.” They painted their “pavements” (curbstones) red, white, and blue; assiduously swept and washed their sidewalks; and hoisted the Ulster ›ag along with the Union Jack from their homes and places of work.2 The ‹fe and drum bands, what Ballybogoin’s Catholic nationalists called “kick the Pope bands,” could be heard during the evenings. One of the main roads out of the town, near the entrance to a large, exclusively Protestant housing estate, had a six-line jingle written across its entire width. It recalled the Protestant might of 1690 and reminded people that the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a Protestant paramilitary unit, could muster the same strength in 1984, should the situation warrant it. Many Catholic nationalists read these signs as triumphalist and exclusionary. Patrick’s parents, among other Catholics with whom I spoke, interpreted these acts to sigthe troubles in ballybogoin 62 nify that “the Protestants are in high dough,” a phrase they repeated often during those days. They warned me, as they did their children, to stay out of the Protestant territories demarcated by British symbols. Patrick’s older brother and I stopped playing tennis in the town’s one public court, on the Protestant east side of town, because of his mother’s worry. This national holiday and its symbols signi‹ed danger for many local Catholics. Although Catholic neighborhoods did not respond with tit-for-tat symbolic acts, the signi‹ers that one nationalist party displayed, in...