Building bridges? Remembering the 1641 rebellion in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This essay explores the changing place of the 1641 rebellion in the memory cultures of Ulster loyalist communities before and after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Focusing on the loyalist centres of Portadown and West Belfast, I show that commemorative activities particularly flourished during periods of crisis in these communities as they moved (or were moved) towards compromise. The 1641 Depositions Project has argued that the ‘memory’ of 1641 must be replaced by ‘history’. The potential for the transformation or dissolution of loyalist memories depends on the willingness of these communities to forget a long-established element of the expression of a ‘besieged’ Ulster Protestant identity, which in turn depends on their investment in the peace process. Nascent attempts to accommodate the history and memory of 1641 in post-conflict Northern Ireland suggest that perhaps the fledgling peace is not yet secure enough for such divisive memories to disappear.

Keywords

1641 rebellion memory and history Northern Ireland Portadown Ulster loyalism

The 1641 rebellion first began in Ulster. Today’s date, 22 October, which marks its anniversary, ought to be known by every Ulsterman and woman as well as they know their own birth date. Alas, this is not so.

So said Ian Paisley at the launch of the 1641 Depositions Project in 2010. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader had gained notoriety as the self-appointed spokesman of an unyielding Protestant loyalism, but had recently made history by becoming First Minister of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Executive alongside Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness. Paisley thus embodied the enormous changes in Ulster loyalism that had occurred during the 1990s and 2000s as Northern Ireland moved tentatively towards peace. Since his propagation of divisive memories of the rebellion had helped fan the flames of sectarian hatred during the Troubles, Paisley’s invitation to speak at the launch of the 1641 Depositions Project was part of its attempt to place the history and memory of the 1641 rebellion within the context of ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland. ‘Building Bridges’ was the implicit theme of the launch, with the ubiquitous image of the bridge remembering one of the most notorious atrocities in Ulster – the drowning of Protestants in Portadown – while recalling its appropriation in anti-Catholic polemic through the centuries.¹ But by re-locating the bridge in the new context of transitional Northern Ireland, the image also suggested the possibility that the 1641 Depositions Project might actually help ‘build bridges’ between the divided communities of Northern Ireland by moving the rebellion from ‘memory’ to ‘history’ (Bowcott, 2010).²

A crude distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ also appeared in the academic discourse. The flagship essay for Ireland: 1641, the volume co-edited by the Project’s principal investigators, began:

The seventeenth century is alive in Ireland in ways like few other places in the modern world. People, places and events from that distant past – the Flight of the Earls, the 1641 massacres, Oliver and Drogheda, William and the Boyne – still have meaning in popular culture, still inform public debates and still elicit strong emotional responses. […] On the one hand, it gives historians of the seventeenth century real relevance and an opportunity to contribute to the peace process that has so profoundly improved the lives of both British and Irish citizens on the island. On the other hand, it makes history the handmaid of memory, trapping Irish historiography within a series of problems and paradigms that might better be left behind in favour of more productive avenues of exploration. Now, however, with the cessation of active hostilities in the 1990s, and with the slow easing of sectarian tensions in the early twenty-first century, there is a palpable sense that this anomalous condition may be ending. Ireland’s seventeenth century may finally be passing from memory to history. (Shagan, 2013: 17)

‘Memory’ and ‘history’ are here seen to provide fundamentally different versions of the past, with one associated with regressive and the other with progressive politics; one with violence and conflict and the other with peace and reconciliation; one stressing continuity with the past and the other discontinuity; and in relation to the 1641 rebellion in particular, one located within (Northern) Ireland and the other to be found elsewhere in the ‘modern world’.

Within this dichotomy of ‘memory’ and ‘history’, the 1641 Depositions Project is explicitly aligned with ‘history’ and thus identified with the Irish revisionist project, the declared purpose of which was to rid Irish history of its ‘myths’ (see Boyce and O’Day, 1996; Brady, 1994). The 1641 rebellion is a particularly powerful example of the so-called ‘mythologization’ of Irish history. The rising was led by a group of Catholic landowners who seized a number of strategic strongholds throughout Ireland to force concessions from King Charles I. In the wake of these successes, dispossessed Catholics rose against Protestant settlers whom they held responsible for their losses in the plantations. From the outset, there were charges of the systematic and widespread slaughter of Protestants – the legacy of which helped to fuel religious and political tensions in Ireland in the centuries that followed (Gibney, 2013). At the heart of this fraught history are the 1641 depositions, a collection of several thousand witness testimonies made by Protestant settlers in the aftermath of the rebellion.³ As the principal evidence of the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion involved the pre-planned, indiscriminate slaughter of Protestant civilians, the depositions have been central to protracted and highly contentious debates about the nature and course of the rebellion, one which focuses almost exclusively on the violence of the Catholic insurgents. Much of the controversy is based on a relatively small number of depositions that were first put into the public domain by Protestant polemicists of the 1640s and which represent the most lurid, extreme and horrifying examples of Catholic violence (Jones, 1642; Temple, 1646; see Clarke, 2011).

The (mis)use of the depositions was the broad subject of the Project’s historical revisionism, but it was specifically Northern Irish memories of the rebellion that gave the Project its platform in the peace process and its raison d’être. In public discourse around the 1641 Depositions Project, there was a distinct tendency to represent the 1641 rebellion as part of Northern Ireland’s past rather than of the island as a whole. This false impression is created largely because popular memories of the 1641 rebellion are (at least since partition) found largely in Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. But when Northern Ireland is the only significant lieu de mémoire of the 1641 rebellion, the 1641 Depositions Project’s differentiation between (regressive) ‘memory’ and (progressive) ‘history’ is revealed as not only conceptually naïve but also ideologically problematic. By ghettoizing 1641 ‘memory’ in Northern Ireland, and especially within its Ulster Protestant communities, the Project risks stigmatizing, belittling, ignoring and silencing those through whom such memories are preserved.

By connecting its historical revisionism to Northern Ireland, the 1641 Depositions Project contributed to the ‘propaganda of peace’ through which Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker (2010) have argued mainstream media and culture promoted the peace process. McLaughlin and Baker (2010: 96) maintain that the ‘construction of a peace process “consensus”’ in media and culture ‘somehow pre-empted the need or desire to question, re-imagine or propose alternatives at a critical moment of history’. Among those left outside the peace process ‘consensus’ were anti-Agreement Protestants. Despite the overwhelmingly favourable response to the Good Friday Agreement (71.1% voting in favour of the Agreement in the Northern Ireland Referendum), the figures hid a considerable split along religious lines, with an estimate of only 57% of Protestants voting for the Agreement compared to 93% of Catholics. The failure to take into account significant Protestant opposition to the Good Friday Agreement led to the series of crises and suspensions that bedevilled the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive until it collapsed entirely in 2002. By the time the Executive was reinstated in May 2007, the two political extremes (DUP and Sinn Féin) had replaced the middle ground. Far from seeing a decline in sectarianism, this period saw the hardening of sectarian positions, and it was in this context that the 1641 Depositions Project was launched.

In this essay, I explore the changing place of the 1641 rebellion in the memory cultures of Ulster loyalist communities in the years before and after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. I examine the ways the 1641 rebellion has been remembered in the loyalist heartlands of Portadown and West Belfast, showing that commemorative activities particularly flourished during periods of crisis within these communities as they moved (or were moved) towards compromise. Critically assessing the view that now is the time for the ‘memory’ of 1641 to be replaced by ‘history’ (and in the process laying bare the artificiality of that distinction), I suggest that the potential for the transformation or dissolution of loyalist memories of 1641 depends on the willingness of these communities to ‘forget’ an aspect of their cultural history that has long been part of the expression of a ‘besieged’ Ulster Protestant identity, and this is contingent on their long-term investment in the peace process. Paisley’s speech at the launch of the 1641 Depositions Project indicates his reluctance – even after his tenure as First Minister – to wholly abandon 1641 to ‘history’, and nascent attempts to accommodate the history and memory of 1641 in post-conflict Northern Ireland suggest that perhaps the fledgling peace is not yet secure or established enough to presume the inevitability of the disappearance of divisive 1641 memories in twenty-first-century Northern Ireland.

Remembering 1641 in Portadown

There is a significant memory culture of the 1641 rebellion in Portadown, as well as a vibrant local tradition of 1641 commemorations, due mainly to the notoriety of the mass drowning that took place in the town in the early weeks of the rebellion when a large number of Protestant settlers were thrown off the bridge to drown in the waters of the Bann (McAreavey, 2017). The strength of such local memories is largely attributable to the commemorative traditions of the Orange Order, founded in the nearby town of Loughgall in 1795 and established in Portadown a year later (Jones et al., 1995; Wolsey, 1935). Named for the Protestant William of Orange who, as King William III had defeated the Catholic King James II, the Orange Order was formed to maintain the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland in the face of rising demands for Catholic emancipation. Historians of the Portadown Orange Order explicitly link the establishment of Orangeism with the town’s ‘folk memory’ of 1641, which they suggest ‘must certainly have encouraged participation in the fledgling Orange Order for Protestants saw it as a bulwark against any future repetition of the massacres of 1641’ (Jones et al., 1995: 46). Known as the ‘Orange Citadel’, the town continues to be viewed as the heart of Orangeism in Northern Ireland (Bryan, 2000: 194), with the Orange Order itself seen as ‘the most visible expression of loyalism in Northern Ireland’ (Mycock et al., 2011: 116). Loyalism in Portadown is thus closely associated with the Orange Order, and the 1641 rebellion is one of its founding myths.

The 1641 rebellion is commemorated by the Orange Order and other loyalist communities in Portadown through memorials, ceremonies, re-enactment, song and banners. At least two private lodges of Portadown District carry banners depicting the massacre of Protestants in the River Bann when they parade each year. The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge (LOL) 273 (Figure 1) is exemplary in its image of the mass drowning and explanatory caption, which addresses both a local audience already familiar with this particular history and a wider community who might not know 1641. This particular banner was unfurled on 25 June 1971 at a time when Orangemen were clashing with Catholic residents of Obins Street about their parading routes (Jones et al., 1995: 94), so the choice of historical subject matter may reflect the lodge’s fear for the erosion of their commemorative traditions in the face of Catholic opposition to parades in the town. Certainly, the representation of 1641 expresses the so-called ‘siege mentality’ of Ulster Protestantism, and the local community’s suffering in the past is used to suggest what might again happen if the Orange Order does not resist Catholic encroachment on what they see as their fundamental rights. The power dynamic between Protestants and Catholics is crudely drawn on the image, with the Protestant victims positioned on the ‘right’ and figured as naked and cowering women, and the perpetrators depicted as menacing Irish men dressed in black and wielding spears. With the rebellion similarly gendered in the banners of other lodges, the fact that the Orange Order is a male institution is important since the feminizing of Protestant victims in the past might help to ideologically preserve the strength and invulnerability of Orangemen in the present.⁴ The evocation of images of baptism and re-birth in the women’s watery deaths suggests that the ‘rising sons’ are emerging from the waters in which their ‘mothers’ were killed. The banner was of course designed to be prominently displayed during the annual Twelfth of July parade, which with its festive displays of colour and rallying soundtrack of pipes and Lambeg drum represents a defiant assertion of loyalist culture and identity against that backdrop of local Catholic opposition. In these circumstances, the image shrinks against the banner’s royal blue background, which is framed and mediated, and the past guarded, by more triumphal loyalist symbols including the Ulster flag, the Union Jack and the purple star of the Orange Order. As a result, the observer of the image is not allowed to dwell on suffering but is instead invited to focus on the Orange Order’s resilience and strength.

Figure 1.

Banner of Portadown District No. 1, LOL No. 273 (courtesy of David Jones).

On the 350th anniversary of the rebellion in 1991, there was a marked increase in commemorative activities in Portadown, with the flagship event the Orange Order’s Mini-Twelfth parade, which took the 1641 rebellion as its theme (Jones et al., 1995: 57). The Mini-Twelfth took place on the evening of Saturday 15 June 1991 (Jones et al., 1995: 95) when a re-enactment of the atrocity was staged at the River Bann, with a Co. Tyrone group, the Sword of Gideon Society, representing the rebels, and a group of Orangemen, Orangewomen and members of the Junior Order representing the victims (Jones et al., 1995: 57–58).⁵ A video was made of the re-enactment in which 1641 was explicitly compared to the Holocaust, and in which it was suggested that 1641 was crucial to understanding the ‘siege mentality of the Ulster Protestant’ (cited in Gibney, 2013: 154).

The 350th anniversary of the rebellion also saw the Orange Order commission two permanent memorials in Portadown. A commemorative stone to the memory of the Protestants who died in 1641 was unveiled at a ceremony on the banks of the River Bann, following which a lament was played by a piper while Orange brethren scattered rose petals in the water of the river in memory of those who had died (Jones et al., 1995: 58). The modest granite memorial looks like a gravestone corroded by time, which stages a belated Christian burial for the dead. Words fixed on the stone specify that ‘NEAR THIS SPOT OCCURED THE MASSACRES OF 1641 WHERE MANY PROTESTANTS WERE SAVAGELY MURDERED BY THE FORCES OF THE COUNTER-REFORMATION’. It is also stated that the stone stands ‘ AS A PERMANENT TRIBUTE AND A REMINDER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS OF THEIR FAITH, DEVOTION AND SACRIFICE’. Perhaps 20 ft away is a second stone commissioned by one of the Independent Orange Lodges (ILOL No. 51) to mark the planting of a tree by Paisley on 6 July 1991 ‘ In memory of the many Protestants massacred at the RIVER BANN and surrounding areas’. The tree symbolizes resurrection, but the stone that marks its planting resembles the first stone in looking like a gravestone. In both memorials, the victims’ identity as Protestants rather than English or Scottish settlers is emphasized, which not only simplifies the complexity of seventeenth-century colonial settlement but also collapses the distinctions between Ulster Protestants who are separated by 350 years. The obligation placed on Portadown Protestants to remember the suffering of their forebears is clear from both memorials, with the inflammatory ethno-sectarian language warning locals to be on their guard lest history repeats itself.

The two Orange Order memorials are located in the Pleasure Gardens on Bridge Street, and their proximity to Portadown Bridge is key to their affective power. The bridge has been an important lieu de mémoire for the 1641 rebellion at least as far back as 1669 when the founding father of Quakerism, George Fox, wrote in his journal during a visit to Ireland: ‘Then I passed over the water, where so many were drowned in the massacre’ (Nickalls, 1952: 544). The placement of the memorials allows them to draw upon local memories that centre on the bridge, including unverified reports that human bones believed to be of those who drowned were uncovered near the River Bann when the land was excavated in the 1920s (Portadown News, 1959). Direct access to the Pleasure Gardens from the bridge is possible, but the gardens are situated on private property, on the grounds of the Portadown Bowling Club, which is locked when the club is not playing.⁶ This means not only that the memorial is effectively closed off from the general public but also that the wreath-laying ceremony that continues to take place annually during the Mini-Twelfth must separate from the parade, making the ceremony small-scale and relatively private compared to the public revelry that characterizes the main event.⁷ The landscape of the Pleasure Gardens lends itself more to quiet contemplation than extravagant spectacle, which suggests that the commemoration of 1641 is a relatively niche concern, even within the Portadown Orange Order community.

Yet there is no doubt that such commemorative practices have a long tradition in the town. A folksong called ‘Portadown’ (Allen, 1961) that takes as its subject the River Bann drownings might be traced back to the nineteenth century; the song’s use of the term ‘fenians’ certainly places it no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, but it may be of a later vintage ( OED Online, 2017 ). The lyrical content can be traced to the 1641 depositions, at least as they were mediated in print, since it implicitly draws upon Elizabeth Price’s (1643) testimony of the drowning of her five children (fol. 101v). Price’s deposition was liberally cited in Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646), a highly influential text also responsible for popularizing stories of the Portadown drownings and which remained in print throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a new edition published as late as 1812. It is therefore likely that Temple directly or indirectly influenced the composition of ‘Portadown’. Some of the details are skewed, however. The O’Shane named as responsible for the atrocity was actually named as Manus O Cane in Price’s deposition, and this ‘Chinese Whispers’-style mutation of some of the details of Price’s story demonstrates the role of oral and folk traditions in preserving 1641 memories in Portadown.

Remembering 1641 in Belfast

There is no such commemorative tradition in Belfast, in part because no major atrocity is known to have occurred there in 1641. Yet in the summer of 2000, there appeared on Hopewell Crescent in the Lower Shankill a mural commemorating the 1641 rebellion (Figure 2). A mural of Oliver Cromwell, which referenced the rebellion and bore significant visual echoes of the 1641 mural, was also painted on nearby Shankill Parade (Figure 3). A Protestant area of West Belfast ‘synonymous with social deprivation, irredentist loyalism and endemic paramilitary violence’ (Gray, 2014: 169), in 2000 the Shankill became the centre of a violent internecine feud between the two largest loyalist paramilitary organizations – the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and its nom de guerre, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). By the end of the 4-month feud in which seven people were murdered and over 500 left homeless, the Shankill was divided into distinct UDA/UFF and UVF territories (Gallaher and Shirlow, 2006: 150; McCormick and Jarman, 2005: 64). The 1641 and Cromwell murals appeared at the peak of the feud and reflect the deep fractures in Ulster loyalism at this historical juncture, as well as illuminating the particular place of 1641 memories in the sectarian culture of Northern Ireland.

Figure 2.

1641 mural, Hopewell Crescent, Lower Shankill, Belfast (courtesy of Bill Rolston).

Figure 3.

Cromwell mural, Shankill Parade, Lower Shankill, Belfast (courtesy of Bill Rolston).

The Shankill feud was closely connected to the actions of C Company (one of four UDA/UFF ‘companies’ in West Belfast based in the Lower and Mid Shankill areas), which at the time was led by Johnny Adair (Gallaher, 2007: 135–144; Shirlow, 2012: 108–132). Along with Billy Wright, who had founded the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) in Portadown in 1996 when he was expelled from the UVF after breaking their ceasefire, Adair was one of the most prominent ‘wreckers and spoilers’ of the peace process. Like Wright, Adair opposed the loyalist ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement and continued to engage in violence as mainstream loyalism was advocating for peace (Shirlow, 2012: 114). The LVF survived its founder’s assassination in December 1997, and by 2000, Adair was actively building relations between C Company and the LVF. Whereas the UVF were trying to move towards political compromise, power-sharing and peace, such ideals were anathema to members of the LVF and C Company who, ideologically driven by a regressive loyalism defined by ethno-sectarian hatred, continued to attack and murder Catholic civilians.

The Shankill feud came to a head on Saturday 19 August 2000 when Adair and C Company hosted a ‘Cultural Parade Festival’ on the Lower Shankill to unveil 13 new UDA/UFF murals (McCormick and Jarman, 2005: 64; Shirlow, 2012: 119–123). Perhaps with a nod to the kind of cultural activities for which Portadown was better known, the event was billed as a ‘celebration of Protestant culture’ and attended by an estimated 8000–10,000 people (Shirlow, 2012: 119). Among those invited to the event were members of the LVF, and a mural dedicated to the memory of their founder, Billy Wright, was among those unveiled (see Rolston, 203: 48). The close association between C Company and the LVF had already been widely advertised the previous month when Adair led over 30 supporters to Drumcree Church in Portadown for the fifth year of the standoff between the Portadown Orange Order and the Catholic residents of the Garvaghy Road (Shirlow, 2012: 118) – a dispute that had already claimed the lives of six Catholic civilians, including three young boys. Adair used Drumcree to bring the Shankill feud to a wider stage, and in doing so proclaimed his dominance of Ulster loyalism in defiance of the UVF. At his ‘cultural parade festival’ the following month, C Company, the LVF and their affiliated marching bands paraded from the Lower Shankill to the main Shankill Road where their provocation of the UVF led to fighting, and that night, 30 families with links to the UVF were driven out of their homes (Shirlow, 2012: 119–120). The murals unveiled earlier that day mark the ascendancy of C Company on the Shankill Road.

The murals shed significant light on C Company’s particular brand of loyalism, as well as the role of 1641 memories in the construction of loyalist identities generally. Commentators have argued that the imagery favoured by Adair and C Company was of a strongly ethno-sectarian nature, aiming to ‘solidify purpose and present practices that were, with regard to the ethno-sectarian “other,” offensive and purposefully exclusionary’ (Shirlow, 2012: 157). According to C Company members who co-ordinated the group’s murals, ‘the aim was to resurrect images that were suggestive of a “proper Protestant history of suffering and resistance”’ (Gallaher and Shirlow, 2006: 159). ‘Religion and the persecution of the Protestant community became central themes within which suffering was tied to themes of resistance to both Republicanism and Catholicism’ (Gallaher and Shirlow, 2006: 159). The C Company murals that took as their inspiration key moments in seventeenth-century Irish history – the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne were also commemorated – are broad depictions of Protestant suffering and resistance. However, the 1641 rebellion is unique in only representing traumatic suffering.

The rebellion is remembered on the mural as ‘ethnic cleansing’, and genocidal violence is represented through a desolate, apocalyptic landscape. There are two burning buildings, one a church, with the suggestion that Protestants are perishing within. In the background, there are four hanging bodies; there is a figure lying dead in the foreground; another figure is about to be impaled with a pike; and at the front, there is a Christ-like figure dressed in a loin cloth and drawn by a horse. In this depiction of the total annihilation of the Protestant community, the mural misdates the rebellion to 1600, which since it appeared in 2000 erroneously suggests that the mural is commemorating the quatercentenary of the rebellion. This is a fitting move in a mural that makes such a bold and inflammatory connection between Catholic violence in the past and present in its assertion that ‘the ethnic cleansing still goes on today’. And as a piece of C Company propaganda, it may also mark the point in history at which Protestant suffering is supposed to end with the ascendancy of Adair and C Company. The mural showcases C Company’s violent opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, perhaps figured as the tortured Christ, and makes a strong political statement against peace-making by ‘resurrecting’ dying memories of sectarian violence in the seventeenth century in order to incite retaliatory violence in the present.

Retribution is depicted in the mural of Cromwell, which references suffering during the rebellion in the quote (‘Our clergy persecuted and our Protestant churches desecrated. Also our Protestant people slaughtered in their thousands’) but subordinates this traumatic memory to the celebration of armed resistance through the memory of the seventeenth-century ‘Defender of the Protestant Faith’. There are strong resemblances with the 1641 mural. Adopting a similar colour palette, the Cromwell mural seems to represent the same landscape, albeit a very different scene; the scorched earth on which the massacre of the Protestant people is staged is replaced with the lush landscape that heralds Cromwell’s subjugation of the Catholic Irish. The chronological gulf between past and present is handled differently in the two murals. The atrocities of 1641 are distanced from the viewer through the use of perspective, the historical actors (both victim and perpetrator) seen but unseeing, which has the effect of hermetically sealing what happened in 1641 from the present. In contrast, Cromwell’s soldiers look out from the mural directly into the eyes of the observer, cultivating an understanding with their co-religionists of the twenty-first century, and this affinity is reinforced by the prominent display of flags (of St George and the Orange Order) that are immediately recognizable to the twenty-first century loyalist. The pairing of the two murals acknowledges Protestant suffering in the 1641 rebellion, but by locating that trauma in the past places the emphasis on Protestant forbearance in past, present and future. The mural also imagines Adair as Cromwell’s successor on the streets of West Belfast, Shankill’s new ‘Defender of the Protestant Faith’. Adair appropriates words attributed to Cromwell (‘Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I’m led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed’) to radically oppose the conciliatory politics that underlined the Good Friday Agreement.

The mural of the 1641 rebellion is not only paired with that of Cromwell but also with a mural of Drumcree Church and two Orangemen, one of whom holds a ‘Portadown District LOL No. 1’ banner (see Rolston, 2003: 38). Superimposed on the mural alongside a UDA/UFF flag is the statement, ‘Shankill Rd supports Drumcree’. The same words were emblazoned on t-shirts worn by Adair and C Company when they attended the Drumcree protests. The Drumcree mural not only reiterates support for the Portadown Orangemen but also provides an important context for reading the mural of the 1641 rebellion that it appeared alongside. I have already suggested that the 1641 mural materialized on the Shankill despite the lack of a significant 1641 commemorative tradition in Belfast. Such a tradition clearly existed among loyalist communities in Portadown, however. It therefore seems likely that C Company’s decision to commemorate the 1641 rebellion on one of their new murals was made to reinforce their connections and affiliations with the Portadown loyalists who shared their regressive ethno-sectarian vision at a critical juncture in Ulster loyalism. The 1641 mural is thus an example of cultural appropriation, as the Shankill Road UDA/UFF borrow Portadown’s memories of the 1641 rebellion in order to forge an alliance between anti-conciliatory loyalists and paramilitaries and cement their opposition to the loyalist ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement.

Remembering and forgetting in transitional Northern Ireland

The Cromwell mural survived Adair’s expulsion from Northern Ireland until 2011 when it was one of 10 contentious murals removed from the Lower Shankill under the auspices of the Re-imaging Communities Programme, funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. It was replaced by the sculpture, ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’, created by Northern Irish artist Lesley Cherry in collaboration with the Lower Shankill Community Association, and was formally unveiled in December 2011 by Peter Robinson, Paisley’s successor as DUP leader and First Minister. The sculpture consists of three 15-ft-high stainless steel pillars, chiselled with the words ‘REMEMBER’, ‘RESPECT’ and ‘RESOLUTION’ (see Figure 4). The stated aim of the Re-imaging Communities Programme was to ‘engage local people and their communities in finding ways of replacing divisive murals and emblems with more positive imagery’ (cited in Rolston, 2012: 454). The artist said that in developing plans for the sculpture, she ‘led a series of workshops, site visits and discussions with the community to create this work’ (Cherry, 2011). Her website includes photos of the process, and they showcase the involvement of women and children in the early stages of the project as they created a Blue Peter-style prototype for the sculpture using cardboard boxes and tinfoil.

Figure 4.

Remember/Respect/Resolution, Shankill Parade, Lower Shankill, Belfast.

Those involved with the ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’ sculpture spoke of its positive message. Cherry spoke of ‘the clean simple lines’ that ‘add to the positive and clear message that the sculpture conveys’ (Arts Council, 2011). A spokesperson of the Lower Shankill Community Association commented, ‘The words reflect the community’s feelings regarding the past, their respect for others [sic] views and ultimately a positive vision for the future’ (Arts Council, 2011). Robinson favourably compared the sculpture with the imagery for which the Shankill is better known: ‘It doesn’t make the place a cold place for people from other sections of the community. There’s no fear in walking down a street that talks about respect or resolution or tolerance’ (cited in Hocking, 2015: 1). With the sculpture aimed at tourists for whom the visit to the Lower Shankill is one of the highlights of the local black taxi tours, government sponsorship of the sculpture is abundantly clear. On the museum-style plaque on which a photo of the old mural is placed are the logos of the institutions (mainly local government departments) that supported both the erection of the sculpture and the removal of the mural, and these highlight the extent to which the sculpture’s ‘message’ is sanctioned by Northern Ireland’s transitional government. The Cromwell mural is thus made to speak for Belfast’s troubled past, the ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’ sculpture for its hopeful future.

Pioneering researcher of political murals in Northern Ireland Bill Rolston (2012) is critical of the Re-imaging Communities Programme. ‘Overall, the impression from viewing the range of re-imaging murals is that their sting has been pulled; they have been sanitised, de-politicised’ (p. 460), he argues, claiming, ‘the way to the future is through remembering rather than enforced forgetting, through display rather than whitewashing, through mature contestation rather than bland reconciliation’ (Rolston, 2010: 304). Yet Shane Alcobia-Murphy (2016) suggests,

Cultural responses to the peace process do not tend to obey the imperatives to forgive and forget, or stress the need to enter into the seductive embrace of cultural amnesia; rather, they focus upon the dangers of forgetting the past. (p. 203; see also Dawson, 2007; Frawley, 2014).

He has shown that even artworks commissioned by the Northern Ireland government to promote its values ‘are marked by, and foreground the deleterious effects of, traumatic recall’ (Alcobia-Murphy, 2016: 203). Certainly, there is considerable resistance to the pressures of ‘enforced forgetting’ in the text and material form of the ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’ sculpture, not least because the word ‘REMEMBER’ is chiselled into a 15-ft-high stainless steel pillar. Along with ‘respect’ and ‘resolution’, these are words that have been overused (and under-examined) during the Northern Ireland peace process. In the sculpture, they lack a reference point, so they provide no insight on what or how one is to remember, what is to be respected and how, or what a long-lasting resolution to conflict might look like or how it might be achieved. The ambiguity of individual words is deepened by the grammatical asymmetry of the three (‘remember’ is a verb, ‘respect’ might be a verb or noun and ‘resolution’ is a noun), which makes it difficult to align them and decipher their collective message. The sculpture is also at odds with its immediate physical environment. Its size makes the already compact streets of the Shankill seem smaller, and enclosed by a high metal fence with padlocked gate, the sculpture takes for itself and then fences off valuable shared space, separating itself from the community who created it. Cherry’s production photographs document the dwindling grassroots involvement of women and children as the project advanced (Cherry, 2011). And as workmen took over the manufacture and erection of the stainless steel structure, the homely domesticity of the cardboard prototype gave way to something else as tinfoil-covered cardboard was replaced with stainless steel, and towers of boxes were exchanged for metal spikes. The choice of stainless steel makes the sculpture literally and metaphorically cold, and the overall cut of the metal makes the structure resemble a set of Stanley knives. Overall, the sculpture hardly provides a warm welcome to locals or tourists. Thus, despite the conciliatory message of its three supposedly simple words, ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’ raises more questions than it provides answers about the role of memory in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland.

Conclusion

The launch of the 1641 Depositions Project by Irish President Mary McAleese and recently retired Northern Irish First Minister Ian Paisley represented the culmination of the Project’s attempt to position itself within the Northern Ireland peace process. In addition to representing each of the two Irish states, McAleese and Paisley were more importantly figures from opposing sides of Northern Ireland’s religious and political divide. Their meeting represented the coming together of two Irelands: one nationalist, the other unionist; one Catholic, the other Protestant; one ‘Ireland’, the other ‘Ulster’. The contrast between their speeches was striking, with Paisley appealing to pathos (emotion) to emphasize continuity with the past, and McAleese using logos (logic) to stress the need to leave the past to history. ‘We are, even after the publication of the Depositions, unlikely to agree a common version of history’, McAleese (2011) said, ‘but we can agree that to have a common future, a shared and peaceful future, there is nothing to be gained from ransacking the past for ammunition to justify the furthering of hatred and distrust’ (p. 281). Paisley (2010), however, responded: ‘A nation that forgets its past commits suicide’, and describing the 1641 depositions as ‘THE REAL HAND OF HISTORY!’ he added, ‘Let us grasp that hand and hold fast to it’. He concluded his speech by reasserting the importance for ‘Ulster’ (by which he meant unionist Northern Ireland) of remembering the past by quoting the words of the unionist hero, Edward Carson, who was the first signatory of the Ulster Covenant that opposed Home Rule in 1912: ‘God save Ulster!’

The debates between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ in which the 1641 Depositions Project positioned itself were thus rehearsed again in the launch speeches, with McAleese broadly advocating for ‘history’ and Paisley for ‘memory’. While she emphasized the otherness of the past, he stressed its role in the present; while she suggested that the past was something to be scrutinized, he presented the past uncritically; while she acknowledged the complexity of the history of 1641, he implied its transparency; while she stressed the partiality of the depositions, he suggested their representativeness; while she cultivated openness and inclusivity, he used partisan language and references. In short, while she spoke for a progressive post-conflict ‘Ireland’ from which she was able to offer an objective ‘history’ of 1641, he spoke for a regressive, stubbornly sectarian ‘Ulster’ from which he continued to promote a flawed ‘memory’ of the rebellion.

But such an ideologically inflected opposition between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ is of course deeply problematic, particularly when it is located within the cultural history of the Northern Ireland peace process, and in particular its unsympathetic representation of Ulster loyalism (see Burgess and Mulvenna, 2015; McKay, 2005). For it seems that the debate between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ that the 1641 Depositions Project invoked became part of a struggle between two competing political models for Ireland – one a globally marketable ‘progressive’ cross-border nationalism and the other a supposedly insular and ‘regressive’ Ulster unionism. Since 1641 memories only survive among loyalist Protestant communities in Northern Ireland, the stigmatization of ‘memory’ by the 1641 Depositions Project might be seen as an attack on the very communities for whom such memories continue to be important. For 1641 memories are important to some Ulster Protestants who like Paisley see it as part of the experience and expression of their identity. They are not important to the likes of McAleese who admitted that until she was invited to launch the 1641 Depositions Project, she had never heard of the rebellion (History Ireland podcast channel, 2013). The potential for the 1641 Depositions Project to play a significant role in re-shaping such ‘memory’ is dubious anyway. The decision not to modernize the spelling of the depositions limits the engagement of the non-specialist reader. More importantly, the persistence of religiously segregated communities in Northern Ireland, many of whom are socially deprived and politically disenfranchised, are likely to sustain the conditions in which sectarianism – and sectarian ‘memory’ – thrives. This was seen with the eruption of the flags protest in 2012/2013, just 2 years after the launch of the 1641 Depositions Project and a year after the unveiling of ‘Remember/Respect/Resolution’ sculpture. In the context of what remains a delicate peace process (with the impact of Brexit yet to be seen), disparaging the memory cultures of marginalized communities risks hardening sectarian identities and thus doing the opposite of promoting peace.

Northern Ireland has begun to grapple with the question of how to represent the 1641 rebellion to a new generation of visitors to 1641 massacre sites, including Portadown. At the bridge, there is now a publicly funded memorial plaque outlining the ‘History of Bann River Bridge’, which for 1641 states, ‘Bridge destroyed by Toole Mc Cann during a rebellion when many settlers were drowned in the river’. This politically neutral account of the mass drowning at Portadown caused some controversy among locals when it was placed at the bridge by the Department of Regional Development in 2005 since it refused to identify what happened in 1641 as a ‘massacre’, resisted the pressure to put a number on those killed and avoided popular ethno-sectarian interpretations of the 1641 rebellion, instead attributing blame to a particular person (who is named) rather than a whole ethno-religious community. In these ways, this state-sanctioned memorial is markedly different from the two commissioned by the Orange Order 14 years earlier and indicates the political pressures placed on local memory practices by the Stormont government post–Good Friday Agreement, as well as local resistance to that pressure. For the continued privileging of their own memorial during the Mini-Twelfth parade testifies to the Portadown Orangemen’s ability to withstand such assaults on their commemorative practices and their role in preserving and propagating their particular memories of the 1641 rebellion.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Naomi McAreavey specializes in the literature and culture of early modern Ireland, particularly women’s writing and the memory cultures of the 1641 rebellion, and has published a number of articles and chapters on these topics. Her co-edited book The Body in Pain in Irish Culture (with Fionnuala Dillane and Emilie Pine) was published in 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan). Current projects include a co-edited book (with Julie Eckerle), Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland (University of Nebraska Press), and a monograph, Remembering the 1641 Rebellion in Ulster.

References

Alcobia-Murphy

(2016) Recovery and forgetting: haunting remains in Northern Irish culture In: Dillane

McAreavey

Pine

(eds) The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199–215.

Allen

(1961) Portadown. In: Charters

(Recorder) The Orangemen of Ulster. Washington, DC: Folkway Records, Track list 102.

Arts Council NI (2011) Remember respect resolution. Available at: http://www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/remember-respect-resolution (accessed 25 August 2017).

Bowcott

(2010) Witness statements from Irish rebellion and massacres of 1641 go online. The Guardian, 7 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/07/irish-rebellion-archive-online (accessed 25 August 2017).

Boyce

O’Day

(1996) The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy. Oxford: Routledge.

Brady

(1994) Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

Bryan

(2000) Drumcree and ‘the right to march’: Orangeism, ritual and politics in Northern Ireland. In: Fraser

(ed.) The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 191–207.

Burgess

Mulvenna

(eds) (2015) The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cherry

(2011) Respect remember resolution. Available at: https://lesleycherry.wordpress.com/community-public-artworks/the-3-rs-sculpture/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

10.

Clarke

(1986) The 1641 depositions. In: Fox

(ed.) Treasures of the Library, Trinity College Dublin. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, pp. 111–122.

11.

Clarke

(2011) The commission for the despoiled subject, 1641–7. In: MacCuarta

(ed.) Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700. Dublin: Four Courts, pp. 241–260.

12.

Cranford

(1642) The Teares of Ireland. London: John Rothwell.

13.

Dawson

(2007) Making Peace with the Past? Memories, Trauma and the Irish Troubles. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

14.

Frawley

(2014) Memory Ireland: The Famine and the Troubles. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

15.

Gallaher

(2007) After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

16.

Gallaher

Shirlow

(2006) The geography of loyalist paramilitary feuding in Belfast. Space and Polity 10(2): 149–169.

17.

Gibney

(2013) The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

18.

Gray

(2014) ‘A thrilling beauty’? Violence, remediation and the Shankill Butchers in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man. Nordic Irish Studies 13(1): 169–187.

19.

History Ireland podcast channel (2013) The 1641 depositions, 27 September. Available at: http://www.historyireland.com/podcast/the-1641-depositions/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

20.

Hocking

(2015) The Great Reimagining: Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

21.

Jones

(1642) A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdome of Ireland. London: Godfrey Emerson and William Bladen.

22.

Jones

Kane

Wallace

et al . (1995) The Orange Citadel: A History of Orangeism in Portadown District. Portadown: Portadown Cultural Heritage Committee.

23.

McAleese

(2011) Remarks at the launch of the 1641 depositions exhibition. In: Building Bridges: Selected Speeches and Statements. Dublin: History Press, pp. 279–282.

24.

McAreavey

(2017) Portadown, 1641: memory and the 1641 depositions. Irish University Review 47(1): 15–31.

25.

McCormick

Jarman

(2005) Death of a mural. Journal of Material Culture 10(1): 49–71.

26.

McKay

(2005) Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, revised ed. Belfast: Blackstaff.

27.

McLaughlin

Baker

(2010) The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of the Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Mycock

McAuley

Tonge

(2011) Loyalism, Orangeism and Britishness: contemporary synergies and tensions. In: McAuley

Spencer

(eds) Ulster Loyalism after the Good Friday Agreement: History, Identity and Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 116–131.

29.

Nickalls

(ed.) (1952) The Journal of George Fox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

30.

Ó Siochrú

Ohlmeyer

(eds) (2013) Ireland: 1641 Contexts and Reactions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

31.

OED Online (2017) Fenian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

32.

Paisley

(2010) Speech at the launch of the 1641 depositions website. Available at: http://1641.tcd.ie/learning/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-1641-depositions-Legacy-Original-Documents.pdf (accessed 25 August 2017).

33.

Portadown District LOL No 1 (2016) Facebook post on annual Mini-Twelfth parade. 11 June. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/events/533748040131469/ (accessed 25 August 2017)

34.

Portadown News (1959) Massacre on the bridge. Portadown News, 14 April.

35.

Portadown Times (2012) Crowds turn out for Mini Twelfth. 14 June. Available at: http://www.portadowntimes.co.uk/news/crowds-turn-out-for-mini-twelfth-1–3953118 (accessed 25 August 2017).

36.

Price

(1643) Deposition MS 836, ff. 101r-105v. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin. Available at: http://1641.tcd.ie (accessed 25 August 2017).

37.

Rolston

(2003) Drawing Support 3: Murals and Transition in the North of Ireland. Belfast: Beyond the Pale.

38.

Rolston

(2010) ‘Trying to reach the future through the past’: murals and memory in Northern Ireland. Crime Media Culture 6(3): 285–307.

39.

Rolston

(2012) Re-imaging: mural painting and the state in Northern Ireland. International Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5): 447–466.

40.

Shagan

(2013) Early modern violence from memory to history: a historiographical essay. In: Ó Siochrú

Ohlmeyer

(eds) Ireland: 1641 Contexts and Reactions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 17–36.

41.

Shirlow

(2012) The End of Ulster Loyalism? Manchester: Manchester University Press.

42.

Taylor

(1770) England’s Bloody Tribunal. London: J Cooke.

43.

Temple

(1646) The Irish Rebellion. London: Samuel Gellibrand.

44.

Wolsey

(1935) Orangeism in Portadown District. Portadown: Portadown Times.