The Roots Of Modern Sectarianism

Few published histories in recent memory have been as authoritative, definitive and comprehensive as Carlo Gebler’s astutely-wrought new tome The Siege of Derry: A History, written with an invigorating combination of passion, cool-headedness and wit. Filling something of an unexplained black hole in the documenting of Irish history, Gebler’s account is a timely corrective to the astonishing under-reportage of a seismic event, the repercussions of which are still felt today.

"For such an extraordinarily pivotal and controversial event in Irish history, it’s never been copiously documented," Gebler concurs. "As ever, the history was written by the winners, in a rather black-and-white fashion. There was a loser’s history too, which of course was itself somewhat slanted, so you essentially have two skewed histories. Neither is accurate. The defender/loyalist victors’ history was of being doughty, invincible, stoical, noble under fire, a self-perception that continues to this day, while the enemy were unscrupulous, barbaric, murderous, savage in the literal sense.
"The loser version was that they were robbed, by the British coming – ‘we were swindled’. Whereas, in fact, what you discover when you look into it is that the officer class among the loyalists behind the walls knew they were in a very perilous position, knew they had a city that was very difficult to defend, knew they didn’t have enough weapons or enough food.
"Surrender was being discussed as late as the end of July, and the relief didn’t come until August. They were on the verge of surrender, and the Jacobites almost won, and would have won if they’d been a little more flexible in the negotiations they conducted. They would have got the city, no question."
The author is sceptical as to how much of an ultimate difference that might have made to Irish history.
"It may not have in the long run, because it was the last bastion of Protestant resistance – once it went, Ireland had been completely Jacobitised, and William of Orange wasn’t going to tolerate his father-in-law ruling the kingdom of Ireland. He would have just got a bigger army, it would have been more complicated but it would have come. What would have changed was you would have deprived the colonial Protestant ascendancy of their most significant point of convergence, the archetypal story that described how they broke the law but by doing so did the right thing, and defended themselves from perdition and extermination.
"It’s always been a story around which people can mobilise their identity, one which served to help people work out what their identity was, and it’s definitely integral to present-day loyalism. But they were only so willing to defend themselves come-what-may because they were so frightened, and fear is a great motivation. They were terrified because of what had happened in 1641, with Protestants being hurled off bridges over the River Bann – they interpreted all those massacres as being motivated by sectarian animus, which fed into all those other fears of the time.
"All over the continent, Catholics were in fact perpetrating massacres, between the Huguenots and the Spanish Inquisition – if you were a Protestant, you had very good reason to be frightened. So what happened in 1641 filled them with terror. Then, of course, Cromwell came and redressed the balance by slaughtering masses of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford, and by the time you get to the end of the 17th century they were so worried about the payback they all more or less expected to be murdered.
"That was what motivated the ordinary rank-and-file so fiercely. For sure, the first documented atrocities were committed by natives. Beyond that, who knows? People were barbaric at that point in history, people were exceedingly violent. So there’s no point now investigating who threw the first stone."
Another notable feature of Gebler’s Siege of Derry is its downplaying of the ‘holy war’ element of the conflict – rather, Gebler presents the struggle as primarily a straightforward battle over land rights. "Absolutely," he confirms, "to put it very crudely, all the people inside the walls were people who’d acquired land by unjust means. It had been expropriated by various British administrations and given to them. And the people outside the walls were invariably people who’d lost land, more or less. Whoever won was going to get the land, and in the 17th century, land and status were directly related – the more you had, the bigger a deal you were, basically.
"The obsession with religion was more a feature of the colonists, the English and Scottish settlers in the early 1640s. They believed that when the Irish turned on them, they did it for sectarian reasons. And indeed, some of them had burned bibles and ransacked churches. They didn’t want, unconsciously, to accept that the Irish gripe was actually about land."
Resignedly, Gebler agrees that this situation persists 300 years later, in that loyalists are still far more prone to fixate on the sectarian dimension of the conflict, while republicans view partition as a straightforward case of robbery that requires restitution, however long ago it happened.
"You must draw a distinction, of course, between what the republican movement tells itself and what it tells the public, which are two completely different things. I think what it tells the public is that a great wrong was done, that institutions which were corrupt and iniquitous and fundamentally anti-Irish were set up and need to be done away with. All of this is demonstrably true. Privately, they just want to run our lives, it’s that simple.
"I’ll never forget reading Sean O’Callaghan’s account in The Informer of the moment at which his head turned – he’d just killed a policewoman, who was pregnant, and the man with whom he’d killed her turned around and said ‘that’s absolutely fucking brilliant, we got two for the price of one'. At which point he thinks, hang on, what has this unborn child done, did it ever decide to join the RUC? Something very awful and very clearly sectarian was going on.
"Better still is Eamon Collins’ Killing Rage – the account he presents is a mixture of rage, frustration, his own personal family dysfunctionality, his own marital discontent, and the ambition to be powerful and to take control. The most interesting moment is when he gets on the train, he sees the daughter of the man he’s just helped to kill, and thinks to himself ‘I’ve just killed your father’, simultaneously feeling both appalled and delighted at what he’s got away with. Power corrupts."
How might Derry most appropriately commemorate the siege today?
"Well, what they’re trying to do, which is probably the right thing, is to go back to the centenary celebrations at the end of the 18th century, which were ecumenical and were for everybody. The only possible way you can celebrate such an event is collectively, and by acknowledging that this was a cataclysmic event for everybody concerned, it was extremely horrible.
"Think about what happens when a four-pound cannonball goes into your stomach and you take eighteen hours to die. It was a living hell, whichever side you were on – the childbirth, the septicaemia, no proper lavatories servicing twenty thousand people, you couldn’t wash, there was no water to drink, no food, eating rat, endless rain, no shoes, no medical care…it doesn’t bear thinking about."
The infamous ‘Depositions’, widely-published Crown investigations into the initial outbreaks of strife in Ireland, had exaggerated the extent of Gaelic savagery in a manner that spread paranoia and paved the ground for Cromwell’s retribution.
"There’s no doubt that they were hugely exaggerated, or that they were pivotal to the subsequent Cromwell backlash. In history, it doesn’t matter exactly what happened, what matters is what people think happened, and that is dependent on the account that’s presented to them. The Depositions were informed initially by an even-handed spirit, the guy who did them in the first place also collated accounts of atrocities on Catholics by Protestant settlers. What happened then was that various people took the accounts and selectively edited them beyond recognition, turning them into these extraordinary accounts of wholesale slaughter like Sir John Temple’s wonderfully-titled An History of the Attempts of the Irish Papists To Extirpate The Protestants of Ireland Together With The Barbarous Cruelties And Bloody Massacres Which Ensued Thereupon.
"In that climate, attitudes were unlikely to soften. Milton didn’t like them either, well he was Puritan, and very frightened of what Catholicism represented. These accounts of Irish blood-thirst were then regurgitated and embellished by the 17th-century equivalent of the British red-top press, so you can imagine how they were conflated until it became a tsunami of horror.
"Then you’ve got to bear in mind that what the Irish had done, by killing the men, taking the women, stripping them and making them walk naked across Ireland – not pleasant, in December, and thousands of them died on the road – when they got to Dublin, they boarded boats and returned to England, and can you imagine the effect of the stories they told when they got home?
"All of that helped to harden feelings. People don’t understand complex motives, they have short memories and they respond to visceral emotion."
Indeed they do.

Carlo Gebler’s The Siege of Derry: a History is published by Little Brown.