Backstop Land by Glenn Patterson

Author:Glenn Patterson [Patterson, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838932039
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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One sure way to take the temperature of loyalism is to glance up a lamppost, in a Protestant district of any Northern Irish town, or even townland, starting around the beginning of May.∂ If you want to know what loyalists are thinking, look at the flags they are flying in the run-up to the Twelfth of July.

This year’s Twelfth flags are mainly Union Jacks and huge – the size of bedsheets, some of them – which seems likely to be tied in with Brexit and the conversations it has kickstarted about a (near-)future Border Poll. At times in the past when there has been major dissension between Unionists and the British government of the day, the ‘Ulster’ Flag has predominated: a red cross, a la St George, ‘defaced’ (is the heraldic term… guys, I’m using the heraldic term) by a six-pointed white star, with a red hand at its centre and a crown perched on the uppermost point of the star.

The old, perpetually Unionist, Stormont government adopted this as the de facto Northern Irish flag in the 1950s but the official ‘national’ flag was and remains the Union Jack. Our contribution to that is the St Patrick’s saltire (red on white background), or presumably 6/32 of it, its incorporation occurring post-Act of Union and pre-Partition.

There are flags celebrating the UVF, which those who put them up are adamant refer to that anti-Home Rule militia that, when the First World War broke out, morphed into the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British Army that suffered such huge casualties at the Somme, and not to the revived, clandestine group that in 1966 – three years before the Troubles are generally assumed to have started – began murdering Catholics, or Protestants who they mistook for Catholics, or who stood too close to Catholics at the bar, or who otherwise crossed or peeved them.

On its publication in 1999, the book Lost Lives documented 3,637 Troubles-related deaths. The first (John Patrick Scullion), second (Peter Ward) and third (Matilda Gould) murder victims died at the hands of the UVF, in May and June of 1966. The 3,633rd (Frankie Curry), in March 1999, was murdered on the street where Peter Ward died. Curry’s uncle had been jailed for that murder and it was, apparently, to Curry’s own childhood home that the gang had gone after the shooting. In the thirty-three years between then and his death, Curry had at one time or another been a member of practically every loyalist paramilitary grouping and on his own admission had killed upwards of sixteen people, mostly Catholics, but other loyalists too, in internal feuds, as the result of one of which, finally, he himself died.

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