Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
in a legitimate state, with a right to choose their own sovereignty.
There has been a long tradition of settlers arriving in Ulster, and that tradition has continued to the present day. Andy Park is a Presbyterian, born and raised in Glasgow, who decided to come to live in Northern Ireland in the early Seventies because ‘I was a loyalist, and I felt that my country was under threat. I felt that my culture and heritage was disappearing here.’ I went to visit Park at his smart home on a newly built estate in Lisburn. I arrived much later than I had intended, after setting off late and then being held up by a series of police roadblocks, but Park and his wife, Mary, could not have been friendlier. Park has a very cheeky, boyish manner, and I felt relaxed talking to him, but whenever I challenged him, he would stand his ground with a vehemence that made me wonder whether I was offending him. I don’t think I was, but his is the passion of a man who has devoted his life to a cause, and that passion is not easily switched off, even over tea and KitKats, while a cat snoozes on his lap.
Park had a ‘straight type of Scottish Presbyterian upbringing’ in Glasgow. ‘As a young teenager my Sunday consisted of Boys’ Brigade Bible class between ten and eleven. Then I went to church. After that I had the Church Youth Fellowship, and then I had Sunday School. I came home from Sunday School, had something to eat, and then me and a couple of my friends went to a wee Apostolic church Sunday School from three to four. At half past six I went back to the Fellowship, and that was my Sunday. And we weren’t allowed out to play. We had very clear guidelines on what was right and what was wrong.’ Members of his family had moved from Ulster to Scotland over the previous century, and Park was enlisted in the ‘Cradle Roll’ of the Orange Order before he was even born. He became a member of the junior Orange Order when he was about seven, and later joined an Orange flute band: ‘I learnt to read and appreciate music. I would never have got that at school.’ His father left the Order because of the friendships he had made with Catholics during the war, when he was fighting in Italy with an Irish regiment. ‘But,’ says Park, ‘he was still supportive, and he’d go to the Orange parades.’
Park began work in the shipyard in Clydebank, like his father before him, but the shipyards began to close and he found himself out of work, so he joined the Royal Engineers. ‘When the Troubles started, there were people in the army who held republican views, and I felt challenged, so I put photographs from the Belfast Telegraph over my bed on 12 July [the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne] and I was told to take them down.’ He was sent to Northern Ireland with the Royal Engineers: ‘I did three tours. The second tour was an interesting one because I was stationed in Lurgan, and I let it be known locally that I was an Orangeman, and I was invited to an Orange meeting that nobody knew about. I would have been in trouble if the army had found out.’ Soldiers were supposed to be impartial; their role was to keep the peace between the sides. Active participation in the Orange Order hardly constituted impartiality.
When he left the army, Park moved to Northern Ireland because he felt his country was under threat. I asked him what he means when he says ‘my country’. He explained, ‘I’m British and I will defend my right to be British. I believe in the British way of life, I believe in the sense of justice and fairness that British society gives me. It’s not religious, it’s not sectarian, and it’s not racist. It gives me my whole value system, the whole being and identity of who I am.’ Later in our talk Park was to describe his membership of the Orange Order in almost identical terms: ‘Orangeism is what gave me my value system, who I am today, gave me my roots, gave me my identity, my morals. It’s a camaraderie, a fellowship.’
The key words here are ‘camaraderie’ and ‘fellowship’. National identity is a very nebulous concept; Park’s sense of sharing values with others who describe themselves as British may to be enough to give him a British identity, just as sharing values with those who describe themselves as Orangemen gives him an Orange identity. But I wanted to dig a little deeper. If people across the United Kingdom nowadays describe themselves as Scottish, as Welsh, as Londoners, but rarely as British, does it occur to him that the unionists of Northern Ireland are becoming isolated in stressing this identity? ‘Yes, I’ve questioned this myself,’ he says, ‘Sometimes I feel more British than what the English do. I accept that. I think that’s because we felt under threat for the last hundred years, so we said, “This is who we are, and what we are, and you’re not taking it away from me!”’ Britishness in this context could be construed as a negative: as a way of saying that, whatever we are, we are not Irish. But Park is adamant that his Britishness is far from negative: ‘Britishness is about openness, it’s about giving freedom to all. That’s what William of Orange stood for – freedom for all faiths. It’s not just a bland “I’m British” and it’s not a white Anglo-Saxon thing either.’
When I asked Park how Scottish he feels, and how Northern Irish, he answered, ‘Being British doesn’t divorce me from my Scottishness, and it doesn’t divorce me from my thirty-seven years in Northern Ireland.’ He tells me the story of a loyalist politician who travelled to the United States several years earlier, where he was challenged by an Irish American on the subject of his identity. The politician said, ‘You identify yourself as an Irish American when you’re three or four generations down the line, and yet you say it’s wrong for me to call myself British! Why can I not identify myself as British Irish?’
I asked Park if he remembered what was in his head was when he settled in Northern Ireland in 1972. ‘I wanted to come over and fight the war. If I had any skills, I wanted to bring them over to Northern Ireland. There was no use me sitting in a pub in Glasgow, talking about it.’ What does he mean by ‘fight the war’? ‘I believed that the British army, for various reasons, wasn’t defending Protestant people, either by government restraints or in personal restraints. Some of the squaddies were, in my eyes, republican sympathizers. That challenged me very much, so I came over.’ He tells me that he did not join a paramilitary organization. Given that he had spoken of the need to ‘fight the war’, I asked him why not, and he told me, ‘You’re trying to make a distinction between being a member and not being a member. There’s maybe no distinction. I maybe have given tacit support – and maybe more than tacit support – without being a member. So don’t assume because I wasn’t a member that I wasn’t doing things.’
Park calls himself a loyalist. I asked him what this means. ‘A loyalist is somebody who wants to maintain the union with Britain and will go to lengths to maintain that union.’ What lengths? ‘Defending the community. Because we felt under daily threat.’ Park describes his politics as left-of-centre, and in recent years he has been an influential member of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which once represented the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but has proved forward-thinking in its policies. The PUP has strongly supported the peace process and attempted to forge links between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Its ideal is an inclusive socialist United Kingdom. I asked Park whether there was a contradiction between his loyalism – which would seem to have conservative overtones – and socialism. ‘Most of the victims and perpetrators of this dirty war came from the working classes. Not too many middle-class people got their hands dirty. I’m not part of any Protestant ascendancy! As a working-class Prod, where’s my ascendancy? I don’t own a big house! And my daughter can’t be Queen of England because she’s a Presbyterian! I’m a dissenter! I started off in a worse place than the Roman Catholics did – at least they had a title! Presbyterianism is the core in Northern Ireland.’
In January 1976 Park was badly injured in an explosion in the Klondyke Bar in Belfast. He tells the story: ‘People came from the IRA to bomb a pub in Sandy Row. The Klondyke was next to the bridge, and it was an opportunity for them because there were no visible guards, and they placed the bomb inside the door. I was standing just the other side of the door with my two mates when the bomb went off. I remember a flash; there was one of these gas fires in the pub and I had a vague thought something had happened with the fire. Up until a few years ago, I had a picture in my head of flying through the air – but I spoke to an ambulance driver who said, “Andy, it didn’t happen that way. We dug you out. The roof caved in and the bar came on top of you.” I’ve never read about the bomb, and I never saw a picture of it until recently.’
Park was in the Royal Victoria Hospital for almost a year. He lost part of his thighs and one