“It was in people’s minds in ‘68 when the civil rights movement came on. They were campaigning for issues like housing conditions, jobs and votes – which the Protestant working class didn’t have either.”
Those are the words of a young Gregory Campbell speaking on a documentary on the Civil Rights marches in Derry. Words, that in all honesty, stuck with me to this very day after watching the documentary about four years ago. They stuck with me because I was surprised at just how easily those words slipped off Gregory’s lips and just how false they were. On the 5th of October 2018 Gregory Campbell repeated those same words in a newspaper, then went on to describe his childhood family home in Derry’s York Street, approximately seven hundred metres from Duke Street. “We didn’t have a kitchen, we had what we called a scullery – it had cold water and you could heat up a kettle to either bathe or wash. The scullery was about ten feet by ten feet, a tiny little box”. Gregory goes on to say that neither he nor his family were politicised nor were they politically minded. This was a Unionist family, living in the predominantly Nationalist Derry. Gregory claims he didn’t take part in the Civil Rights march because of the IRA and their 1956 – 1962 campaign.
Simply put, Gregory Campbell was talking pure and utter hash. Yes, some Protestants and Unionists did live in poor conditions, most people did at that time, apart from the well-to-do. However, more Protestants lived more comfortable lives and owned more property and land than Catholics and Nationalists in Derry, and indeed in many places like Belfast and Larne…and that’s a fact. Gregory mentions “conditions, jobs and votes – which Protestant working class didn’t have either”. I call ‘bs’ on that too Gregory. The Civil Rights Movement was literally protesting the fact the Unionist Stormont Government, which Unionists supported, was withholding those very rights from Catholics and Nationalists. It was one of the very foundations of their power. They were in power to keep Nationalists and Catholics at bay.
Jobs were very hard to come by for Catholics with many men having to leave for London, Liverpool, Manchester to find work. Many Catholics only got a job if a Protestant didn’t want it. If you were an Orangeman it was even easier. Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast was a prime example of a sectarian workforce and employer. Catholics were regularly removed, sometimes by force if and when a Protestant needed a job. Some were beaten so badly they couldn’t walk out by themselves and some simply didn’t make it out. There are stories of Catholic workers being thrown from the docks into the River Lagan and pelted with rocks and heavy rivets used for building the ships.
Even today, Catholics and those from Nationalist areas spend nine months longer on average than Protestants and those from Loyalist areas, on housing lists. That’s a long way from the twenty odd years some Catholics once spent during the Civil Rights era, waiting for a housing allocation, while Protestants spent on average, six months to a year waiting for a house.
Entitlement? “Curry my yoghurt”. Taking the much-loved language of your neighbour and slandering it, making fun of it and insulting 184,898+ of your fellow countrymen, 4,130+ of whom use the Irish language as their first language in their own homes, and English as their second language…and that’s just in the North of Ireland. It shows the utter disdain Unionism has for anything so much as resembling Irish or Catholicism, even in culture. Even the Queen of England has more respect for the Irish and the language, and that’s saying something.
A young Unionist ‘influencer’ not so long ago complained that Loyalists were not being permitted to celebrate their culture in the same way Nationalists were celebrating theirs. I genuinely had to do a double take for fear I had mistaken a parody. This was a Unionist, and a young Unionist at that, telling us that in excess of 3,000 Loyalist parades per year, is eroding their culture. That a flag, and sometimes multiple flags on almost every lamp post across the North is withholding their right to express their culture. That Ulster-Scots events in every other town and village across the North in discriminating against their Loyalist heritage and culture? Pull the other one, said I.
The epitome of entitlement is thinking a minority of Northern Irish Unionists can deny a surge of support for a united Ireland, or at very least a border poll. Unionism is most definitely a minority in the North of Ireland. Yet Unionists still feel entitled to force their Britishness and Unionist culture, some of it downright sectarian, on people who quite simply have had enough of it being thrown in their faces. From enabling Brexit while the North voted to ‘Remain’, to Catholics and minorities being put out of Loyalist housing estates – Unionism still feels it is superior to everyone else in the North. It’s about time Unionists and Loyalists woke up and smelled the coffee. Unionism has a place in Ireland, a new Ireland. However, enough of the entitled yearning for what once was a Unionist state for a Unionist people. It’s time to join the rest of us in a new Ireland. An adventure which could prove to be the ride of our lives.
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