NORTHERN IRELAND: At the Drop of a Hat

The six counties of Northern Ireland are overlaid with ancient mysteries and poetic myths. Last week, renewed religious bitterness also hung like a poisonous mist over the lovely loughs and dales.

Some 400,000 voters had elected a new Northern Ireland House of Commons. The issue on which every candidate stood was whether to keep the boundary by which Britain had divided her predominantly (65%) Protestant northern counties from predominantly Roman Catholic (92%) Eire. It was a foregone conclusion that those in favor of keeping the border would win. The surprise was that the Unionists (Protestants) increased their popular vote to 63% and rolled up a better than 3-to-1 majority in the House of Commons over the Republicans (Catholics).

This huge Unionist victory was due in no small part to a continuous campaign of vilification of the North, conducted in the Republic south of the border. “How can I hold out the hand of friendship [to Eire] when [she has] a dagger in one hand, a pistol in the other, and a jemmy in her pocket?” complained the North’s Prime

Minister Sir Basil Brooke, as his people went to the polls.

The Woman on the Hill. A few months ago, the Tory government of Prime Minister Sir Basil Brooke had little reason to count on such a triumph. Last December, when Eire passed the Republic of Ireland Act, which claimed jurisdiction over the Northern counties, Sir Basil saw a chance to bolster his own position by calling a general election. In the ordinary course of events, Northern Ireland would not have had a general election until next year. By rushing the election through on the issue of partition, Northern Ireland’s position as a part of the United Kingdom would be affirmed, and the Tories would be made secure, in one strike.

For years the Protestants have magnified the effect of their strength by a shrewd drawing of district boundaries, to pile up the votes where they counted the most. The Catholic party bitterly resented such gerrymandering. “See that woman pushing her pram up the hill with two babies and bundles, and her pregnant?” asked a Londonderry Republican. “Those houses she’s going to could have been put up down below on as level a piece of land as ever you saw, but it might have risked a Unionist majority, to put working-class Catholics in that district.” He snorted. “So the poor woman has to climb the hill to save a Unionist vote.”

Below the border in Eire, Prime Minister John A. Costello took up his coreligionists’ cause with more will than wit. High-handed Costello played straight into Sir Basil’s hands by calling together a committee which ordered collection boxes set up in front of every church, Catholic or Protestant, in Eire. The money was to be sent up North to help the Republicans.

Protestant churchmen were outraged. When police refused to take the boxes from his church, Canon Walter Simpson of St. Bartholomew’s cried: “The law was invoked to compel me to submit to treatment which was an offense to my conscience as a citizen and a Christian priest.” Costello’s boxes gleaned about £51,000, but the collection so outraged the Orangemen that they poured out to the polls as never before. Dublin’s Protestant Irish Times crowed that Costello’s collection was worth 60,000 votes for the Unionists in the resentful North.

By the “Lake of Shadows”: Last week, on the four sides of Lough Neagh, whose waters, they say, turn the legs of fishermen to stone, in Londonderry, Antrim, Armagh, Tyrone and County Down, streets echoed to the old song:

Work and no surrender!

We’ll come when duty calls.

With heart and hand and sword and shield,

We’ll guard old Derry’s walls.

As the old enmities sprang to life, Protestants went to the polls, united for the King. When it was over, a Catholic from Deny stood on the shore of Lough Swilly, the “Lake of Shadows,” and gazed moodily over the border. “How quiet it is,” he murmured. “How peaceful. Yet at the drop of a hat, anything could happen. We don’t want bloodshed, but if the South should move, we would be ready to help.”