Fortnight Publications Ltd.

The British PresenceAuthor(s): Henry McDonaldSource: Fortnight, No. 431 (Dec., 2004), pp. 12-13Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25561342 .

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D Henry McDonald / culture

An extract from Henry McDonald's book, Colours published by Mainstream Press.

The British presence

Every Sunday morning I encounter the British Presence in Ireland in a dialogue with the dead. There are no armed soldiers or stern faced men in bowler hats and sashes or lines of Union Jacks but simply gravestones, shrivelled and withered poppy wreaths, the odd insignia with Crown above Harp and the regimental badges of long since defunct military units; only ghosts whose fates follow the trajectories of rebellions, riots, political crises, world wars and civil conflicts over the last three centuries.

My companions through the four seasons are teenage Orange bandsmen,

British Army captains, Spitfire pilots, Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and Naval reservists. They all lie at rest in a cemetery on the south side of Belfast,

which commands a panoramic view of the city.

Knockbreda graveyard is divided into two zones with the upper half close to the local Anglican church and home to tombstones containing the remains of

men, women and children from the 18th century onwards. My weekly walk up Church Road, through the newer half of the cemetery towards the church, ends at the old stone wall where, if you look north beneath the mountains of Belfast, you can clearly see even in the winter gloom the

main combat zones of the Troubles in the distance: north and west Belfast with their housing estates and tower blocks alongside local landmarks like the black facade of the Mater Hospital or the sprawling complex of the Royal Victoria

wedged between the MI motorway and the Falls Road.

ROAR The cemetery is a time capsule, a place of

peace and reflection co-existing beside the roar of 21 st century commerce. One of the busiest roads in Northern Ireland, the traffic clogged Ormeau runs parallel to it; Sainsburys and the Forestside shopping centre are just a stone's throw away.

The place is also physical history providing lessons from the past amid the tombs and the graves of the departed. The oldest resting places are the most imposing and impressive, twelve-foot ivy-covered

gothic tombs with spikes and pepper pot shaped urns protruding from the top. They contain the great and the good from 18th century Belfast such as Thomas Greg Esq 'who departed this life in the 10 day of

January in the year of our Lord 1796 aged 75 years.'

Relatives of Thomas Greg are also entombed there. All of them died between 1796 and 1830 after living through

momentous times in Irish, British and world history: the 1798 United Irish Rebellion, the 1801 Act of Union, the

Napoleanic Wars, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Great Reform Act three years later.

STONEWALL Directly behind Thomas Greg's tomb, up against one of the sides of stonewall surrounding the cemetery, is the grave of one Robert Henry McDowell. The epitaph on his gravestone is a reminder that disputes over Orange marches - territorial struggles and violent counter-protests -

were not invented in the 1990s in places like Drumcree.

'Erected by the members of the Purdys Burn flute band as a token of respect to the memory of Robert Henry McDowell Aged 17 years who met his death by an attack on the band in Belfast on 11th September 1880.'

Amid the forest of stones containing the surnames of Protestant Ulster -

Mcllveen, Bell, Harbison, Crooks, Oxer, Neil, Nixon - are the resting places and memorial tablets to soldiers who fought and died in the Great War. They include

'Harry "Chappy" Lynass, 2nd Lieutenant Royal Irish Rifles, killed in France 2nd

September 1916, aged 20' who is

commemorated on the gravestone dedicated to his father who died just six

months before the First World War broke out.

SHADOW Even below in the modem end of the

graveyard with its giant tree that casts a

permanent shadow beneath a mop of branches and leaves are to be found other little corners of personal tragedy colliding

with great world events. One of the most

touching epitaphs is dedicated to a young fighter pilot from Northern Ireland shot down during the Battle of Britain. It begins with his wartime serial number 816023 and is in memory to 'Sergeant P.C. Hanna, Pilot, Royal Air Force, Auxiliary Air Force, 3rd September 1940, aged 23.' And then it ends with a quote from the scriptures: 'Lord of life, be ours. Thy crown, life for evermore.'

In a neatly maintained memorial garden to the left of the church is a brown bench erected by the mother of a victim from Ulster's last conflict. On 18 July 1991 gunmen from the Irish People's

Liberation Organisation ran into McMaster's DIY shop in Belfast's Church Lane and shot dead John McMaster at point blank range. The terrorists' excuse for murdering this defenceless shopkeeper

was that he had served in the Royal Naval Reserve, which had been deployed earlier that year in the first Gulf War to eject Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.

McMaster was a popular character in Belfast's commercial centre, a man known to be extremely helpful, courteous and tolerant.

Sitting as I often do on the seat dedicated to his memory (the church nearby was where he worshipped) the words of the man who ordered and organised that squalid murder still chill my blood.

'Our friends in the Middle East will note this,' said Jimmy Brown.

I am not only chilled but angry because I knew the IPLO leader who offered up such a pathetic reason, such a ridiculous rationale for the death of a decent man.

Jimmy Brown sat in the living room of a house in the Lower Falls area and

without irony. let alone regret, sought to

justify the McMaster murder. For Brown 'the British presence' meant imperial

conquest whether in Ireland, Kuwait or

Iraq. For him John McMaster was just 'collateral damage' (to borrow a phrase in

vogue at the time of the 1991 Gulf War) in Brown's grand march towards the Irish Marxist revolution, a utopian experiment

that ended not in the Workers Republic but rather a series of feuds and murderous turf

wars that would take the IPLO leader's life

PAGE 12 FORTNIGHT DECEMBER 2004 HENRY MCDONALD

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just under a year after the shopkeeper's murder.

Haunted by the loss of my own grandfather in World War Two, drowned in a U-boat attack on his Atlantic convoy, I often find myself standing over these

memorials, imagining how these men, mostly young, met their end, and sometimes whispering not so much a prayer but a few words of tribute and remembrance.

There are cemeteries like this one scattered all over Ireland, north and south, that within them house the remains or

memorials to people killed in the service of Britain. One of my favourites is located on an incline overlooking Killybegs Harbour in the churchyard of St. John's Church of Ireland. Among the gravestones is a tablet dedicated to a Private Thomas

Chestnutt who was killed in action on the Somme in 1916 serving with the Royal Inniskillings. On all my visits to the Co.

Donegal fishing port over the last 19 years I have seen virtually no one inspecting the gravestones or laying flowers or poppies at the site dedicated to Thomas Chestnutt's

memory. We - the Irish, Catholic, Nationalist,

Republican tradition of this island - were never shown what 'the British Presence in Ireland' actually meant.

The soldiers with the boot polish rubbed onto their faces kicking down our doors and tearing up the floor boards, holding my family and me under house arrest, slamming their armoured personnel carriers into the front of our home, this was 'the British Presence' not the 900,000 plus Protestants in the north who insist they were and are British, nor the clandestine Brits, (or West Brits as nationalist Ireland labels them so contemptuously) who submerged their tradition in the official Ireland of Eamon de Valera's constitution with its stress on the Gaelic and the Catholic.

If nationalist Ireland wants to understand what it really means to be British on this island they should come to places like Knockbreda cemetery.

For it is here where that sense of service to the British State is so evident through the unbroken lineage of loyalty,

from the young bandsmen beaten to death in a Belfast street during the Home Rule

Crisis, to the twenty year old officer killed in the fields of France, to the fighter pilot shot down defending not only Britain but the free world at a time when Hitler and

his war machine looked invincible. If genuine national reconciliation is

ever to take place on a 32 county basis it could begin with history classes in these Protestant resting places.

* A CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD?

CULTURE FORTNIGHT DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 13

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