A Not-so-Peaceful Day of Calm for N. Ireland Town

When the parishioners of the Church of Our Lady came together here Sunday morning, it was not to hear Mass or utter more prayers for peace, but to listen to their priest tell of his struggle to make sense of the past few days in Northern Ireland.

“Yesterday, I visited the homes of those who were petrol-bombed the night before,” Father Eamonn Cowan told his Roman Catholic congregation of about 200 mostly middle-class townspeople. After consoling the three terrified families, he said, he drove home and turned on the news to hear glad tidings: that July 12--the most dreaded date in this summer’s “marching season” of Protestant parades--had passed without incident.

“I had such difficulty reconciling these two pictures: hearing that it was a ‘peaceful’ 12th of July, but knowing what had happened to those people’s homes,” the priest said.

What lessons are to be drawn about the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland now that the feared date--when Protestants celebrate a 1690 battlefield victory--has passed with no dead lying in the street?

Just one year ago, after all, the ritual Protestant parades of July--and Catholic opposition to them--touched off a week of the most widespread rioting in a generation, causing two deaths, more than 100 injuries and about $30 million in damage.

This year, the violence was expected to be worse. But at the last minute, leaders of the Protestant Orange Order--the men who put on ceremonial orange collars every summer and hold hundreds of parades all over Northern Ireland--agreed not to march in the four Catholic neighborhoods where their presence was most likely to trigger mayhem.

This stunning, out-of-the-blue concession defused the immediate crisis, won praise from many sectors of British and Irish society and raised these questions: Was it a sign of more concessions to come? Might it be a harbinger of progress in Northern Ireland’s deadlocked peace talks?

Part of the answer might be found in Ballymena--a town about 25 miles northwest of Belfast so strong in its Protestant loyalties that it is sometimes called the buckle of Northern Ireland’s Bible Belt--and in nearby Dunloy, a 98% Catholic village of feisty, outspoken country people.

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Here in Ballymena, on a rain-swept Sunday morning, the only colors to break the unremitting gray are the red, white and blue of the Union Jacks strung up and down the streets by unionists loyal to Britain.

A quarter-century ago, Ballymena had a more visible Catholic presence, but demographic shifts have left it overwhelmingly Protestant. The remaining Catholics form a tiny, embattled minority, and the Church of Our Lady looks like a bunker under siege.

The churchyard, paved over with asphalt, is surrounded by an ugly metal fence topped with spikes. Anything that might be smashed or stolen--the church sign, planters, light fixtures--has long since been removed, but that hasn’t stopped vandals from ripping off one of the door handles. Off to one side, the rectory stands encased in anti-bomb mesh.

Worse yet, every Saturday evening for 42 of the past 45 weeks, Our Lady has been encircled by hundreds of Protestant toughs singing “kick the pope” songs and peppering the arriving worshipers with eggs, firecrackers and sectarian taunts.

“These are old people and families with young children,” laments Cowan, who has long since given up sleeping in the rectory and has taken shelter elsewhere. On the worst nights, it has taken 600 police officers--with riot gear, armored cars and dogs--to get the parishioners safely into their pews.

Finally, three weeks ago, the Church of Our Lady suspended Saturday evening Mass, a casualty of the marching season.

Orangemen have been marching in Northern Ireland for slightly more than two centuries, and they are as passionate about their right to parade with flags, drums and ceremonial dress as some Americans are about protecting Old Glory.

But Catholics, meanwhile, remember that the parades commemorate Protestant victories over their kind and say they are a way of rubbing modern Catholic noses in their forefathers’ defeat.

Catholics have long complained about the parades and even physically attacked them, but it wasn’t until 1995 that they had the leadership and confidence to challenge them in an organized way. The Irish Republican Army was observing a cease-fire that year, and with its political wing, the Sinn Fein, bogged down in bilateral talks with Britain, the idea was born to create “residents groups” in militant Catholic neighborhoods and block the parades.

The goal was to force the Orangemen to negotiate with the IRA supporters, and in some places it worked that first summer. Impressed Catholics elsewhere decided to form new residents groups and try the tactic themselves.

That brings us to Dunloy, a tiny farming crossroads just 10 miles from where the Church of Our Lady stands. While the minority Catholics of nearby Ballymena tends to be reserved and moderate, the majority Catholics of Dunloy long ago lost their interest in turning the other cheek.

Dunloy has an Orange Lodge on one of its two streets. Last year, the new village residents group announced that area Orangemen no longer would be marching up to it with flags flying and drums pounding. From now on, the villagers declared, the Orangemen would have to travel in a quiet, “non-triumphalist” way.

And just what does “non-triumphalist” mean? To decide that, there would have to be talks. But the Orangemen took one look at the Dunloy residents group, saw the hidden hand of the IRA and refused to come to the table.

With no room for dialogue, clashes were inevitable. Again and again, the Orangemen tried to march into Dunloy; residents felled trees and built barricades to keep them out. At times the thudding of rubber bullets rang out across the sheep pastures as police were called in to restore order.

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Finally, at the end of last summer’s marching season, the defeated Orangemen fired off a parting shot: If the Catholics of Dunloy wouldn’t let them march to their lodge, then the Protestants wouldn’t let the Catholics of nearby Ballymena go to Mass.

Nevermind that low-profile Catholics in Ballymena have little or nothing to do with the defiant Catholics of Dunloy. The siege was on, and that’s where things have stood for the past 11 months.

Militant Dunloy’s victory has turned out to be innocent-bystander Ballymena’s loss, and if the situation in the two communities shows anything, it is the futility of hoping for easy, painless solutions to Northern Ireland’s complex, long-standing troubles.

The faithful still come to the Church of Our Lady, turning out for Sunday morning Mass, while the Saturday night goons are absent.

The church housekeeper hurries inside; her home was one of those firebombed Friday. Her windows, Cowan explains, have been smashed every July 12 for eight years.

“I have great difficulty hearing on the BBC that this weekend was peaceful,” says the priest. “People keep clutching at straws of hope, and certainly the decision the Orangemen made not to march was very significant. But whether it’s a harbinger, I don’t know.”