Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

in areas where unionists were outnumbered. This involved the reorganization of boundaries within districts. The most famous example of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland – although by no means the only one – occurred in Derry, where a predominantly Catholic populace would consistently find itself returning a Protestant-dominated council. In the build-up to the 1938 elections, the number of council wards in Derry was reduced from five to three. Almost the entire Catholic population of 9,500 voters found itself crammed into the South ward, which returned eight councillors, while 7,500 Protestant voters were divided between the North ward and the Waterside ward, which between them returned twelve councillors. At a 1936 public inquiry into the arrangement – whose findings were ultimately ignored by the Northern Ireland government – the Catholic barrister Cyril Nicholson asked the unionist councillor James Welch how the arrangement looked to him. ‘It looks a bit slightly out of proportion,’ Welch admitted.

      Not only was gerrymandering a bit slightly out of proportion, but it laid the ground for future trouble. It encouraged the development of further segregation and all the disharmony this entailed. It also meant that when opportunities arose to build houses for Catholics within the ‘wrong’ ward, these opportunities were rejected, however badly the housing was needed. The need to maintain political control would always trump the desire to improve the conditions of ‘the other lot’.

      So it was that unionism remained solid – even as trouble was being stored up. But it would be wrong to think that the standard of living of most unionists was good. For the gentry and the professional classes it might have been, but, for the working classes of both traditions, poverty was a reality. Unemployment was high, incomes were considerable lower than those in Britain, and the standard of housing and public amenities was poor. Many country farmhouses and town terrace houses had no mains water or provision for gas lighting until well into the twentieth century. Protestants, you might say, were second-class citizens, while Catholics were a class below that.

      With regards to employment, though, it was better to be second- than third-class. Many firms employed almost exclusively Protestant workforces. An Englishman who came to Northern Ireland in the late Fifties to work as a personnel manager relates how a Ministry of Labour official taught him to distinguish Protestant names from Catholic names, and then advised him to select only the Protestants. Even within a mixed business certain jobs might be reserved for Protestants. I was told the story of a young Catholic, working in a shirt factory, who had taken his own life after being refused a position as a shirt cutter. Afterwards a friend remarked angrily, ‘He should have known he wasn’t ever going to be permitted to be a shirt cutter! Catholics don’t get those jobs!’

      So far as many unionists were concerned, the fact that Catholics did not ‘get those jobs’ was not a matter of discrimination at all. It was simply the way things were. Many of the ‘unionist jobs’ had been done by the same families for many years and when a position became available a worker would recommend a friend or relative. There was no question of Catholics even applying for these jobs. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, whose huge yellow cranes still dominate the Belfast landscape, is a case in point. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholics were expelled from jobs in the yard during periods of sectarian unrest. Over time they stopped applying for those jobs, and they became the natural preserve of unionists without active bias having to be applied.

      Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff in 1937. He described conditions in the yard to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘People used to earn their pay, or they didn’t get it, and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it. That meant working in all sorts of weather, where it poured all day, you got wet right through to the skin. You sat in the open, taking your tea from an old can, out between boats in the cold and wet. You only got a half an hour break, and there wasn’t much to do other than religious services, or playing rubby-dub with dice. If you went out, you had no sickness pay, there was no holiday pay, just the wages you had.’

      Murray explains how workers had to keep on the right side of the foremen: ‘The foremen were a queer lot. Hard. Some of them really took on the mantle of God. If they took a dislike to you, you were out for life. If they didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out. They seemed to be picked for their hardness, to be able to kick people up the backside. And there was a lot of things that went on that was very dishonest. One foreman used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job. In those days people were more humble than what they should have been because they were driven by management and by foremen. Even with getting the wages out of the shipyard, the wages weren’t great and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’

      Having experienced such conditions, some Protestants feel frustration at being told that Catholics were discriminated against. They look back on their own lives and wonder how they can be considered fortunate. But, in a place as economically deprived as Northern Ireland, even assured basic housing or the guarantee of a lowly paid job in industry could amount to meagre privilege.

      Higher up the ladder, the senior posts in the local authorities were filled almost exclusively by Protestants, as were the upper ranks of the civil service, and nearly all the judgeships. I was told of a Catholic lawyer who was passed over for a position as a judge because the incumbent Prime Minister had already nominated one Catholic judge for a judicial post ‘and couldn’t bring himself to nominate another’. The National Health Service was similarly blighted. A nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, which according to my tour guide had been a model of equality, remembers: ‘There was a vacancy for a sister. Someone said to matron that this very good staff nurse would make an excellent sister, and was told, “There can’t be two Catholic sisters in one department.”’ She also recalls a Catholic doctor who emigrated to Australia ‘because he wasn’t getting any promotion’.

      Finding routes barred to them, Catholics often had to use their wits to create work for themselves. According to a retired civil servant, ‘The Protestant community relied on the thought that the government was their thing, and it would look after them. Employment in the old days was very much on the lines that “Willie” is retiring after many years working in the workshop, and he says he’s got a nephew, “Sammy”, who’s very much the man. But things were different in the Catholic community. For many years Catholics thought we’d better get on and do things for ourselves. And nowadays the Catholic working class is more up and doing than their Protestant equivalent.’

      Some attitudes have clearly not changed a great deal over the centuries. In the seventeenth century the expression ‘nits make lice’ was used to justify the killings of Irish children by settlers. In the 1930s the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, warned the Australian Prime Minister to watch the Catholics in his country. ‘They breed like bloody rabbits,’ he said. And in 2009 I was told a story about a recent Protestant wedding in Armagh. Several guests had been sitting in a limousine in formal dress, when a group of Catholics spotted them and started shouting abuse. A girl in the back of the car leant forward and said to the driver, ‘You’d better drive into them! They’ll just breed!’

      These are variations on a theme – and they could be multiplied ad infinitum – but they reflect only one side of a mutual antipathy. Northern Ireland was built on sectarianism, both Orange and Green, with roots hundreds of years old. Sectarianism is the raw essence of today’s identities. Years ago it was expressed freely and without apology. Nowadays it is reserved for those who feel the same way, or else it is turned into a joke. Twice I was told the same joke, once by each side:

      Q. How do you know ET’s a Catholic/Protestant?

      A. Because he fucking looks like one.

      Probably the most shocking joke I heard in Northern Ireland was repeated to me by a Catholic man who had heard it from one of the Shankill Butchers when they briefly shared a prison wing:

      Butcher: What’s the difference between a Catholic and an onion?

      Man: I don’t know.

      Butcher: I cry when I slice up an onion.

      While I was in Belfast I met a man named Joe Graham. He is a writer, historian, storyteller, and a veteran of the civil rights movement. He is, above all, an old-fashioned republican and political