Wounds Still Burn in Quiet Irish Village

To understand why Northern Ireland’s conflict has defied solution for so long, take the road less traveled and meet the divided people of Moy.

The popular image of Northern Ireland is of urban Belfast battlegrounds, where high steel barricades daubed with tribal slogans make divisions between Catholic and Protestant immediate and obvious.

But most voters being asked to judge Northern Ireland’s peace accord in Friday’s referendum live in unassuming suburbs or in deceptively gentle places like Moy, 40 miles southwest of Belfast amid the blackberry hedgerows and rolling pasture of County Tyrone.

This thriving crossroads village, with a broad 18th-century square of shops and pubs and duplex houses, is free of sectarian graffiti. None of its curbstones are painted the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, nor the green, white and orange of the Irish Republic.

You might conclude that “the troubles” of the last three decades have bypassed this community near Northern Ireland’s disputed border.

But the issues of inequality, intimidation and shifting demography that drove Northern Ireland to desperation a generation ago have all found a painful home in Moy.

Here, some Catholics once turned to the gun to get what they wanted, but now openly question whether the bloodshed was worth it. Here, the Protestants who once ruled the roost are now in retreat, demographically, economically and politically.

The Protestants’ reversal of fortune, and the battle fatigue permeating both sides, did much to make possible the U.S.-brokered accord of April 10, which is likely to be ratified in referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

But the vote won’t quickly change the pervasive sectarianism of small communities like Moy, where communal divisions run silent and deep.

“There’s two sets of everything here: two chemists, two butchers, two supermarkets . . . one for each side of the community,” says the Rev. Lawrence Hilditch, the Presbyterian minister who, like many Moy citizens, isn’t sure yet how he’ll vote in the referendum.

“They say there’s 32 different ways to tell if you’re Protestant or Roman Catholic,” Hilditch says. “The last rule is what time in the day you’re buried: Catholics in the morning, Protestants in the afternoon.”

Moy’s segregated cemeteries testify to one of Northern Ireland’s most intense murder rates.

Twenty-two people have been slain in or near the village, starting with an orgy of tit-for-tat bloodshed in the mid-1970s and concluding with a second spasm early this decade.

The memories have scarred two generations, who cite their dead by rote. Each name is another reason why their community is the victim and the other the aggressor.

Killing at such close quarters means, too, that the man who murdered your loved one might be your neighbor.

She Sees Brother’s Killer All the Time

In her immaculate home beside the River Blackwater, Edie Elliott displays photos of her husband, William, a retired soldier gunned down at a cattle market 18 years ago, and her brother, John Donnelly, an off-duty soldier killed in one of Moy’s Catholic-run pubs 10 months later.

“The IRA gunman walked in and shot my brother point-blank. He wasn’t masked. People saw who he was, a Moy boy. But none of the people in the bar would tell the police,” she says, holding back tears.

“I see him almost every day now, my brother’s killer, whenever I walk into the village.”

Such slayings have made Moy, like much of Northern Ireland’s borderland, off-limits as a home for Protestants working in British uniform. The police barracks on the village’s north end has high fencing to block Irish Republican Army rockets and car bombs, and is staffed only by day.

The lone soldier on Moy’s main street today is made of white marble, a monument to British soldiers from the area who perished in the trenches of World War I.

The stone bugler immortalizes, too, a lost age of unity. The roll call of the dead includes obvious Protestant surnames: Allen, Carson, Irwin, Proctor, Walker. But Catholic-sounding names also have their place: Gallagher, McGuigan, Murphy, Meenagh.

“The men of Ulster, on many fields, have proved how nobly they fight and die,” reads the engraved tribute from King George V.

In June 1921, as the predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland rebelled successfully against Britain, the same king opened a Belfast Parliament for Northern Ireland, whose border was drawn specifically to create a new province with a solid pro-British Protestant majority.

A History of Repression

Since then, life in Moy has reflected Northern Ireland’s wider battle for stability.

As recently as the 1960s, Moy was predominantly Protestant, as were the businesses along the main road connecting the village to the towns of Dungannon to the north, Portadown to the east and Armagh to the south.

The Ulster Unionist Party and its affiliated fraternal society, the Orange Order, ran a security and political establishment designed to maintain Protestant control in the face of a “disloyal” Catholic minority.

They demonstrated their supremacy each summer with parades down every country lane and village boulevard, their fifes and drums reverberating into Catholic homes. Their Royal Ulster Constabulary was backed by an exclusively Protestant militia, the B Specials, drawn largely from local Orange lodges.

“The B men in their long black coats are one of my first memories,” says Francie Molloy, 48, a thick-bearded Moy man who represents the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party.

“I remember them stopping our car on our way home from midnight Mass, Christmas Eve. I didn’t understand why, but I could feel the panic in the adults as the lights were flashed in their faces and we were told to get out. It felt like they were going to shoot us.

“They just asked each of us who we were--even though these men were our Protestant neighbors and knew perfectly well who we were. But they had the guns, and you complied.”

As throughout Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionists drew electoral boundaries around Moy to minimize Catholic votes. Local councils controlled who got public housing. Property owners had greater voting rights.

“If Catholics did go to banks for a loan, if a piece of property was for sale, you’d often be turned down and hear later that a Protestant got the loan,” says Laurence MacNeice, 52, a Catholic whose father ran a prosperous apple orchard.

But in the 1960s, some things proved beyond Protestant control.

Britain’s state-subsidized education system produced a first generation of ambitious, upwardly mobile Catholic college graduates. They became teachers, lawyers and civil rights leaders.

In 1968, Molloy hadn’t managed the grades for university and was training as a welder. He had already joined a dormant, weak IRA. His aim was the same then as now.

“The goal was to smash the Orange state,” he says, referring to Northern Ireland, “as the first step to uniting Ireland.”

In 1968, Catholics began marching for equality in housing, jobs and votes, and came into direct conflict with Protestant power.

Riots in Londonderry and Belfast in 1969 forced the British government to deploy troops as would-be peacekeepers, giving Catholic militants their cue to form a new, tenacious Provisional IRA. In 1970, this new IRA started killing police officers.

Their fifth police victim, 20-year-old Roy Leslie, is buried in Moy. His headstone, like 300 others across Northern Ireland, bears the police symbol of British crown and Irish harp. His epitaph: “Murdered by terrorists. Faithful unto death.”

IRA Attacks Spurred Orange Retaliation

As Northern Ireland careened out of control, the British government disbanded the B Specials and stripped Protestants of power, the first steps down a slow road to reform.

The IRA thought an all-out offensive would force Britain to pull the plug on Northern Ireland. Instead, its bloodletting spurred Protestant gangs to retaliate by slaying Catholics at random.

Both by what it did and what it provoked, the IRA inflicted as much pain on its own embittered supporters as on anybody else.

No family better illustrates the three deadly strands of this conflict than the McKearneys of Moy: The IRA claimed one McKearney, the British army another, the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force two more.

“The IRA should have stopped what they were doing 25 years ago. It would have left so many homes so much happier,” says Maura McKearney, 70, cradling a framed picture of her four dead men labeled, “Victims of British Oppression.”

Her three eldest sons--Tommy, Padraig and Sean--all joined the IRA’s East Tyrone battalion in the heady early 1970s, when victory seemed close.

In 1974, Sean blew himself up trying to destroy a Protestant-owned gas station that served local soldiers.

Padraig escaped from prison in 1983, but British soldiers shot him and seven IRA comrades to death four years later after they blew up a village police station.

Tommy spent 17 years in prison for killing a mailman who also happened to be a part-time soldier. Today, he’s cynical of Sinn Fein leaders trying to sell the peace agreement as a steppingstone to a united Ireland.

The youngest McKearney boy, Kevin Jr., avoided the IRA and took responsibility for the family butcher shop. But he wasn’t spared either. In 1992, UVF gunmen murdered Kevin and his uncle, John, in the shop.

UVF Drew First Blood in Rural Moy

Just as the IRA used the nearby Irish Republic as a refuge from the British, UVF killers lashed out at Moy’s growing Catholic community from the neighboring Protestant stronghold of Portadown.

The UVF drew first blood in Moy in 1973, murdering a couple in their rural cottage. They later slaughtered two other middle-aged couples nearby--one merely for being unlucky enough to have the last name McKearney.

In 1975, immediately after the UVF killed four Catholics in attacks on Moy pubs, the IRA retaliated, gunning down the Dobsons, two Presbyterian brothers who ran an egg-packing factory near the McKearney butcher shop.

Ask any Protestant today about the worst day in the life of Moy and he’ll recall the Dobson killings. Many took the shootings as their cue to circle their wagons elsewhere on safely Protestant turf.

As with much of Northern Ireland’s western half, Moy’s demographics have been upended within a generation. A village once 70% Protestant is below 25% today, and almost everyone expects the trend to continue.

Moy’s wealthiest man today is Mick Jordan, a Catholic developer who runs the swankiest pub. He builds houses bought by Catholics on land purchased from a departing Protestant.

For Protestants, it doesn’t go down any easier that the Catholic signs of success are so glaringly evident.

The Rev. Jim Stewart, a Protestant Church of Ireland minister, lives in the square across from the businesses owned by Jordan, the McKearneys and MacNeice.

“When I look at the homes around here, and they’re almost entirely occupied by Roman Catholics, I see a lot of BMWs and security gates that open when you press a button,” Stewart says dryly.

His Protestant parish has 177 families on the rolls, but he says only four live within the village itself, among them Edie Elliott, whose husband and brother were slain.

“When a Catholic moves next door, usually the Protestant moves out,” Elliott says. She will never leave, she says, because “that would be rewarding the gunmen.”

But if Northern Ireland is to enjoy a peaceful future, its 1.6 million Protestants and Catholics must do more than just coexist. They must learn to live and work together, just as the proposed agreement calls for.

The accord attempts a precarious balancing act between Protestant fears and a Catholic community grown too strong to marginalize.

For the first time, Northern Ireland would have a new administration designed to ensure that neither side can impose its will on the other. This government would formally cooperate with the Irish Republic--a long way from the unification the IRA seeks, but a huge departure from the old Protestant hegemony.

Outlawed groups like the IRA and UVF are supposed to disarm by mid-2000, and their last imprisoned members are to be freed. But new gangs of dissidents on both sides already vow to resist such honorable retreats.

“Oh, Lord, as the referendum draws ever nearer, we pray that we make the right decision that you want for our land,” Hilditch says at his Presbyterian church’s Wednesday night Bible study, where religious devotion mixes with political liberalism.

“The decision that you want,” the minister emphasizes. “Not the decision we might choose to make, influenced by our prejudice and fear.”

Even behind closed doors, such sentiments draw disapproving murmurs from some Protestants. “I’d never dare say such things from the pulpit on Sunday,” Hilditch admits afterward.

Many Protestants, fearful that compromise will only encourage more Catholic demands, are determined to vote no.

Some are gearing up to demonstrate that the old Orange dominance still controls the streets.

“We have a proud heritage to uphold,” says Alistair McMullen, 29, a cattle farmer and an Orangeman since boyhood.

Built like a fireplug, he has just joined a hard-line Orange faction that favors mob violence if police bar the group from marching through the only Catholic section of nearby Portadown. Confrontations there the last two Julys have triggered widespread rioting. This time around, they could tear Northern Ireland’s new government apart.

“It’s going to be a blood bath this year, no question,” McMullen says with some relish.

But his cousin, Derek McMullen, rejects such attitudes as an embarrassment to true Protestantism.

The 32-year-old father of two runs a hardware store and tiny gas station across the street from where the Dobsons’ egg-packing factory once stood. Unlike some Protestants, he shops at the Catholic-owned supermarket that now stands in its place.

Derek McMullen articulates a vision of his village that many more must voice if the peace agreement is to move from paper to practice.

“I don’t look at this place as if there’s a Protestant building here and a Catholic building there,” he says.

He is pumping gas for a customer outside his store. He knows her religion but is emphatic in his discretion: “That shouldn’t matter to anybody. And it’s not my business to say.

“The real trouble in this country,” he says, repeating a lament often heard on both sides of the divide, “is that we’ve too many Protestants and too many Catholics and too few Christians.”