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Who are you, brother, and which side are you on in the troubles of Northern Ireland? • Part Five of a series By
Bryce Petersen Jr.
Some call this town Derry, about 45 percent. The rest call it Londonderry, its official name since 1609. If I guessed wrong, it never went without a correction, though it seemed I could be forgiven for my ignorance The trucker had a full-size Confederate flag in his truck. The image driving out of the flag was a Kenworth, one of those "American lorries." They have big engines, refrigerators, beds, digital dashboards, the works, he tells me. I know, my neighbor owns one. I drove to California and back with him one time. It took us half a week. He can't believe it. He drives home every evening after driving from one end of the country to the other. He also has a Kenworth model on the dashboard next to a leprechaun and a stuffed bunny representing the one he left at home. The flag is a coincidence, I decide. I wonder if he realizes the irony. But I don't ask. Here's his joke: "The Yank's in Dublin for a visit. He's looking at one of their wee graveyards and this wee Paddy comes along. The Yank says, 'This is a nice graveyard, very lovely, you know.' Heh heh heh. The Paddy says, heh heh heh, 'There's a very important man buried in there.' Yank says, 'Yeah?' 'Yeah, the man who invented the crossword puzzle is in there.' Heh heh heh. The Yank says, 'Yeah? Well, Pat, where can I find this grave." Heh heh heh. 'Well,' says Pat, 'it's just four down and three across." The annual Orange Order parade was scheduled to start in Belfast, on the other side of Northern Ireland, within the week. In a strong reversal, the English government announced it was banning the order from marching through two staunchly Catholic neighborhoods. The marches have been a source of contention, threats and bombings for years. I assume the lorrie driver was Protestant. He semi-emphatically called it Londonderry after all, but we were busy talking about his daughter, -- "She's lovely, but she's a little slow," he says -- his bunny -- "He's gotten himself a limp, stepped on a thorn or something" -- and his job. Other times, however, the subject just comes up. "They have no business marching down that road in the first place," argued one Belfast native in the Derry hostel after replacing the phone. She had been telling her brother to get out of there before all the roads were closed. The Orangemen were lining up at the barricades, determined to wait until they could march. Threats of violence were heard from the Protestant majority, in a rare position of being discriminated against. That night, the pub is full. England is playing Argentina in the World Cup's Round of 16. The old man next to me listens to the rowdy cheers of "Go, England," "Yay, England," as they score the first goal. "Never worked a day in their life, those lads," he tells me. "Don't listen to 'em." The cheers are just as loud as Argentina evens it. The news reports, the stories of riots, bombs and, to me, baffling hatred, between two groups that are indistinguishable to my untrained eye, lend the jovial scene an air of tension. I can't tell if it's in my head or not but I decide to move to the other room where the younger generation laughs at the World Cup, chooses Budweiser over Guinness every time and looks at The Troubles like a darkly amusing sideshow. Two girls talk about the time, a few years ago, when they were walking home from school, laughing at each other, talking about, perhaps, the drunkard who tried to end his life by flinging himself off an overpass and onto a road but instead flopped over a street light a few feet below and had to wait until someone came to get him. "By then he was sobered up and really embarrassed," she said. It was a really funny story that day, until they noticed the street was very quiet. They looked around and saw a man on the ground in an alley being kicked by two others. They noticed a small fire in a shop across the street and ran for home. Derry's version of the Orange parade is not until July 12, two weeks hence. That is the day, in 1688, when 13 apprentice boys shut the city gates on Catholic forces, starting a siege that lasted 105 days. The Protestants bought enough time in the siege to help ensure their victory in the conflict. So, this month, it's relatively quiet here, though the murmurings from Belfast can certainly be heard. The next day, I am relaxing on the bed in the hostel, reading a book, contemplating the next journey -- "Brother Bryce!" It's Chris. He found me and drags me out of my slumber to the streets of Derry in search of a key chain with a ship on it, maybe the Titanic, I don't know. In the streets, Chris is laughing about Protestants, Catholics, the Orange parade, etc. and I am ducking my head in a vain attempt to hide while at the same time looking about me warily in case anyone is taking offense. The last shop we come to still doesn't have the right key chain. He could order it, he says, it would arrive in a few days. Chris makes conversation:. "I'm thinking of taking a lawn chair to a hill over Falls Road to watch the action," he says. The owner of the store looks back sober but unperturbed. "You won't be alone. You'll have someone to talk to. People go down with their news cameras and say, 'Here's 20 pound, go throw these petrol bombs.'" I'm a little more nervous than Chris. I don't know on which side of the fence these people sit. So I am careful to sit right on the fence. Now, in the South, it's easy. You know who's side they're on. In the South, the town is always called Derry. Some will tell you the Protestants are crooks and thieves. Others will say the IRA is nothing but organized crime. Many won't visit the North. I can't figure out why, it's not scary. That's not the point, I'm told. It's like a boycott of apartheid South Africa. Three young boys died in their home just north of Belfast, in a bombing blamed on Protestant extremists. That was a week after I left Derry. Their mother was Catholic. Their father was Protestant. In the South at the time, the news was shocking, disturbing. The Carlow Presbyterian Church, which was known as Scot's Church in 1849 when my great-great grandfather was married, condemned the actions during services the next Sunday. The Rev. Stephen Johnston prayed for the boys, their parents and an end to the fighting. North and South, Protestants and Catholics united, for once, in the condemnation of the act. The Orange Order, the popular tide welling against it, reluctantly gave up its siege on the parade route. It's like the American South or the Old Western frontier. Senseless wars over meaningless differences. Keith, in Dublin's O'Grady's, says no one wants the Northern Irish Protestants. "The Protestants are a people with no home," he said. "The English don't want 'em. The Irish don't want 'em. They are a people with no home." As a white male from the Western United States, I wonder where my home is. My ancestors have lived in Utah for 150 years. Protestants have been in Belfast for almost 400. Isn't it their home? "If it was your grandpa's land and it was stolen from him, it is still your land," Keith says. Ask the Shoshone. The Southern white man. The sharecropper's family. The Irish potato farmer. The Confederate flag, symbol of prejudice and separation, still flies -- in the cabs of Northern Irish lorries as well as over Southern statehouses.
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