would do if she found out, Boyle took up McCann’s offer to stay with him in Derry rather than head straight home to Newry. The two teenagers enjoyed a carefree couple of days in the city. They ran around shouting their heads off and leaping up aiming to hit street signs with their hands. When a policeman put a stop to their antics, Boyle followed McCann’s lead and gave a false name. The highlight of Boyle’s visit was a trip to the cinema to see Victor Mature in a ‘sword and sandal’ movie – a genre that was at the peak of its international popularity.1
McCann and Boyle were far from the only members of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community to possess complicated and contradictory identities. An attitude survey conducted on the eve of the Troubles found that three-quarters of Catholics described their nationality as ‘Irish’. This did not mean, however, that they embraced a Dublin-designed identity and abandoned all others.2 The minority population was made up of Republicans, citizens of Derry, members of the working class, Roman Catholics, and so on.3 Moreover, what was understood by ‘Irish’ might differ for each individual. For the dominant figure of twentieth-century nationalism, Eamon de Valera, God had ordained that the island of Ireland should be one nation. This sacred land must once again be filled by a frugal, Gaelic, Catholic peasantry. De Valera’s 1937 constitution committed the Southern state to this goal. In turn, many Northern nationalists committed themselves to Dublin. Londonderry Corporation’s Nationalist councillors refused to attend a Battle of Britain commemoration service because ‘Our Government in Dublin declared its neutrality’.4 De Valera, however, was a consummate politician. By presenting Fianna Fáil as a national movement that transcended social divisions, he pushed mere political parties to the margins of public life. But when de Valera said Ireland, he meant only the South. Indeed, almost all politicians did.5 The Nationalist Party repeatedly asked for the right to be seated in the Dáil and the major parties repeatedly refused.6 Such experiences provoked a prominent Nationalist to remark that Northern Catholics were ‘the bastard children of the Republic … sometimes they needs must acknowledge us, but generally speaking they try to keep their distance’.7 By the end of 1967, opinion polls were finding that the great majority of these children were hoping that London and Dublin would finally agree to share custody: a united Ireland with a link ‘of some sort’ with Britain. In the space of four decades, ‘Ourselves Alone’ had become Ireland should not be ‘going it alone’.8
Léon Gambetta, the nineteenth-century French republican leader who had escaped from Paris by balloon during the Franco-Prussian War, said of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, ‘Let us think of it always; let us speak of it never’. Instead, the recovery of the lost provinces became something for French nationalism to rally behind and something that no government ever thought of fighting a war to achieve. A wit reversed Gambetta’s maxim: ‘speak of it always, think of it never’.9 In post-war Europe, Southern Irish parties were not alone in following this injunction. The idea that Germany would one day be reunified was the Lebenslüge, ‘life-lie’, of the Federal Republic. Almost half of the West German population during the 1950s and 1960s felt that reunification was the most important political issue, while almost all of West Germany’s politicians felt that reunification was neither possible nor desirable.10 Dublin and Bonn were not prepared to risk the hard-won political and social stability of their states by embarking upon foolhardy nationalist adventures.
An independent Dungannon councillor sadly concluded in 1964 that ‘the official attitude down South is … that they no longer want us’.11 Rejected by Dublin as well as Belfast, Northern Ireland’s Catholics were given a home by Rome. The Church hierarchy had been convinced during the early 1920s that either the new Northern state would collapse, London and Dublin would force Belfast to treat the minority fairly or Catholic territory would be transferred to the South. When all these hopes had failed, the Church set about providing the faithful with a state within a state.12 Since the 1850s, Rome had battled against the Kingdom of Italy, the French Republic, and the German Empire. The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church had no intention of capitulating to the Northern Ireland statelet.
The nineteenth-century ‘culture wars’ had not been fought in Ireland. British governments had accepted the dominant position of the Irish Catholic Church and had tried to avoid provoking a conflict with it.13 Readers of The Tablet, however, were able to follow in detail the struggles of their co-religionists on the Continent as the ‘two Europes’ – Catholic Europe and liberal Europe – clashed. The Holy See believed that it was fighting the ‘criminal machinations of the evil ones’ who ‘set about devouring the foundation of the Catholic religion and of civil society’.14 By contrast, Gambetta observed that ‘bad times for our country are always good times for the Jesuits’.15 The Society of Jesus and other religious orders were supposedly standing in the way of progress. They were teaching children to be superstitious, submissive and, above all, unpatriotic – a grievous crime in the era of nation-building. Through schools, armies, railways, bureaucracies, and newspapers, the states of Europe were turning peasants into Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans.16 Although the Catholic Church was seen as a major obstacle to these transformations, it was also undergoing a process of modernisation. Like the other great capitals of Europe, the Vatican was centralising power and imposing uniformity in its realm. Both sides in the culture wars sought to rally the masses to their respective banners. The resulting mobilisation and polarisation led to the formation of parallel societies: Catholic versus liberal, Protestant, or anti-clerical.17 While the rise of socialist parties at the end of the century pushed liberals and Catholics into a coalition of convenience, these divisions persisted into the inter-war period.18
As the German army swept towards Paris, a state schoolteacher and a Catholic priest met in a small Alpine village. ‘So, this is it then,’ the instituteur remarked to the curé. ‘Well, we’re friends, we only hate the invader now.’19 In Ireland, however, the First World War brought an end to the Act of Union rather than a union sacrée. Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, culture wars had flared up after significant constitutional changes had taken place. Both sides recognised that an expansion of the franchise or the creation of new institutions presented opportunities and threats.20 Partition and devolution sparked a similar struggle in Northern Ireland. London had appeased the Catholic Church; now it was believed that Dublin would defer to it and Belfast would persecute it. In the ‘Swiss Ireland’, the Bernese Jura, clerics who endorsed the dogma of infallibility agreed at the Vatican Council of 1870 were driven from their offices and replaced by priests loyal to the state. Catholic parishes that resisted the Protestant canton came under military occupation.21 The culture wars in Northern Ireland were not as fierce: Protestants wanted to control the state, not for the state to control the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the result was the same: a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society – although the lines that separated them were never clearly defined.
Schools were one of the main battlegrounds in Europe’s culture wars. In Northern Ireland, the Church was able to remain responsible for educating Catholic children. However, voluntary Catholic schools received less financial support from Stormont than they had received from Dublin Castle. The Church periodically campaigned for increased state funding – with some degree of success.22 Nevertheless, the consensus within the Catholic community was that the spiritual reward of having its children raised in the traditions of the Church was worth the material sacrifice required to support the schools. As well as receiving religious instruction, Catholic children played Gaelic games and were taught ‘Irish’ history. A civil rights activist observed that pupils in Northern Ireland’s state and voluntary sectors ‘were all learning the same things, the same events, the same periods of time, but the interpretations … given were very different’.23 This was what the 1968 attitude survey had found: half of all the Catholics interviewed remembered having teachers with explicitly nationalist views.24 One such teacher later described how the Church, ‘being greater than Northern Ireland, part of the whole island, of Europe and the world’, ‘lent an ability to think outside the immediate context’.25 This mental world was reflected by the Catholic community’s newspapers. For example, the Derry Journal reported upon the city, the north-west of the island, Catholic organisations and societies, Southern politics, and the latest occurrences at the Vatican.26 Newspapers helped their readers to bring together all the different threads that
