Harryville seemed an unlikely name for a part of an Irish town, more like a nickname, but there it was. I took the main road passing through, with no plan but to look out for other journalists who would know me from events we had covered. The dangerous part would be walking to the church from wherever I would park my car, and walking back to it later. There would be police cover at the actual confrontation; there always was.
There was a town car park on my right. Was I not too exposed if I parked in the obvious place? Before I got out, I rigged up my microphone and mini disc recorder, setting it to record with the pause button on. There would be no fumbling. I knew people would be aggressive and it was their aggression that I wanted to record. It would be pointless to introduce myself and get chased, or worse, kicked, and have no broadcastable sound at the end of it.
Further along the road, I saw what the alignment of forces. The other journalists were in the church grounds, with their cameras and recorders, safe behind the police lines. About two hundred policemen and women stood with their backs to the church, facing the mob across the street - about thirty men, women and children gathered on the footpath, shouting abuse and trying to be heard inside the church itself.
The soft lighting behind the stained glass windows suggested a demure service inside.
I had seen before how dangerous occasions like this evolve into manageable patterns. Here the police would be content, so long as the road was kept clear for traffic and the church itself was safe. The mob would know the rules governing them, rules imposed by their own controllers, not to throw anything lethal or give the police occasion to attack them, for instance by blocking the traffic. The logic was simple; it wasn’t just about keeping the stand-off calm, it was about reserving definable steps of escalation and withdrawal.
I went first to introduce myself to the police.
“I am a journalist. I take it I am free to move about as I please here.”
“Of course, Malachi. Just don’t block the road.”
I was getting used to people knowing me. I appeared occasionally on television and I had a photo by-line in the Belfast Telegraph.
I crossed to the crowd then, before I had time to lose my nerve. They were soon surrounding me.
“Hello, I am a journalist from the BBC. I’m working with the Sunday Sequence programme.” Much of my journalism was in Religious Affairs, and in Northern Ireland this included some of the most violent and contentious stories. I had been drawn to religion by accident, but it suited me, not just my interest in following sectarian conflict, but also a curiosity about those who were believers. This extended even to the fanatics, for I had known religious fanaticism as something normal and close all my life.
I had grown up in the fundamentalist Catholicism of the 1950s and I had lived for four years, before taking this work, in an ashram in India, drawn I suppose by the same curiosity that had me here. Now religion was less an experiment on myself and more a field of work in the world. I wasn’t looking for God, and if I was following those who did, it was not in order to be more like them - as I had followed my Indian guru, Swamiji - it was just to get good quotes from them for reports that I made for Sunday Sequence. I didn't define my interest in religion, but just followed it. I rationalised it as simply an area of journalism that was as interesting for me as sport or theatre might be for someone else, but then journalists who specialise in sport or theatre tend to engage for personal reasons beyond the ability to earn money and merely enjoy themselves. I liked religious journalism because the God question - in whatever form - seemed to go to the heart of what people found important.
Your God says a lot about you. In India I had found that Hindus have a huge range of god images to draw on, and that is is perfectly acceptable to devote yourself to the elephant headed god Ganesh or a goddess riding on a swan, Saraswati, and that none of these are in competition with each other. They are picked for their gifts, in the way Catholics pick saints to offer special devotion to. Northern Ireland Protestants exercise similar choices, between tgods which are judgemental and strict or merciful and tolerant.
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| Holly Shearer (QUB Student) |
Often my reports had no religious people in them at all. An early one covered an Orange Ceilidh that Loyalist paramilitaries helped organise in Moneymore. They felt they were losing the argument with Irish Republicans, who had a language and a culture and said that it was in defence of this that the IRA shot policemen and bombed shops and bars. Paramilitaries with a culture could more easily make the argument that they were fighting for the self determination of their oppressed people. The Loyalists wanted to be able to put up that kind of argument too. They were taking on culture, the way I was taking on religion, without feeling much at home in it, but with a sense it would ennoble them anyway.
I was remembering how that story developed when I approached the Loyalist mob at Harryville. I had learned from it that some of the nastiest sectarianism can incorporate a sense of fun. That night, in Moneymore, I had been called to draw a raffle ticket. The prize was a clock made by a Loyalist prisoner. The winning ticket had been bought by my producer, Terry Sharkie, who had invited me into this work.
“The taigs have got the clock! Fenian fix!”
The crowd were stamping their feet and yelling at us. Leaders of an organisation which routinely killed Catholics to express political protest gathered round us, assuring us we were welcome to stay. A woman even asked me to dance.
This humourless Harryville crowd only wanted rid of me.
“What the fuck do you want?”
Perhaps I was putting too much faith in the sense of humour I had observed before in violent people.
“Who’d he say he is?”
Swamiji was my model of restrained response. Faced with a direct threat, I would still express something like honest curiosity.
“He’s a fucking fenian.”
He was also my model of someone who kept his mind on his objectives. I wasn’t there to defend my dignity but to record Loyalist aggression on tape without actually getting kicked or head butted. This was working so far. I didn’t need sensible answers.
“What is the purpose of this demonstration?”
“You’re lookin’ a kickin’, I’m telling you.”
I could select no single interviewee. I would have felt safer if I had identified the man in charge and gained his attention. On the night of the Orange ceilidh I had kept as close as possible to Andy Tyrie, the moustachioed boss of the Ulster Defence Association, reasoning that befriending one killer might not save me from others, but that befriending the man in charge would save me from all of them. That night Tyrie knew that I was nervous, and toyed with me. Some of the heavies close to him - men who had killed Catholics - made crass banter, like little boys bragging in front of their father, but it was a night off from violence.
I trusted that similarly here in Harryville, someone was in charge and had defined the limits. The men kept jostling and more would push from behind to get close to me and start again with the same question.
“Who the fuck is he?”
“Show us your press card.”
I wasn’t going to risk losing a press card, but I had business cards I could give them. These didn’t have my home address on them, just phone numbers and an e mail address. I gave them one of the cards. It told them the most important thing they felt they needed to know.
“He’s a fuckin’ fenian.”
“You’re one of them, you cunt.”
“What is the purpose of your demonstration?” I asked.
“Fuck off.”
I looked down then and saw that the cable from my microphone was no longer plugged into the mini disc recorder. One of them had pulled it out. I should have had the sense to wear headphones, and then I would have known when I was recording and when not.
We had spilled out onto the road now, and this was what the police were here to prevent. There was a loud bang, like a shot. They were cheering before I understood what had happened. One of them had dropped a firework near my feet. He could as easily have stuffed it down my shirt or trousers.
“Fuck off. Is there something you don’t understand?”
So I crossed the road, away from them, and they did not follow me. They were like trained dogs who knew the boundaries within which they were free to move.
The senior police officer was clearly amused, but asked me not to draw them onto the road again. I went into the church grounds to meet Alan and John and Moira and half a dozen other journalists and camera people that I knew. They were soon round me to ask if I was all right.
“You’re a braver man than me”, said Alan, who fed stuff to CNN. Then I listened to the disc and realised that I had very little of their abuse recorded. I would have to go back into the mob.
I could hear the mass inside the church and worked out that it was about half over. The mob across the road was shouting swear words, and occasionally a name, presumably the name of someone in the congregation. When they saw me, they shouted louder, and I realised it was better to stay out of their line of vision, if only for the sake of the people trying to have a mass within hearing range.
It was a cold evening. A large drunk man arrived to speak to the protesters. He stood in the middle of the road and some of the others came out and gathered round him. Alan said he thought this was a senior Loyalist, a key player. The police appeared to have calculated that it would be less fuss for them if they did not try to move him. I checked my equipment was ready, checked my heart for fear, and went over to try and interview him. The crowd started shouting, ‘Fenian bastard’ at me, but the man seemed to be trying to listen and to understand me, and when the others saw this they dropped their voices out of respect for him.
“Why have you chosen to picket this church?”
I knew the answer already. It was a counter-protest to pickets on Loyal order parades in Dunloy, fifteen miles away.
“Uh?”
“Why have you decided to picket this church?”
A little boy of about ten was hanging close, enjoying the glory of standing beside one of the big Loyalists. “Fuck”, said the boy. Then he shrieked the words that would make mine the best report of the night’s events: “It’s not a church, it’s a fenian hole.”
With that, I didn’t need to record more voices, so I let the drunk Loyalist mutter some nonsense into the microphone, thanked him and concentrated after that on recording background noise and colour. I went up to the porch of the church when the congregation was singing the communion hymn. It was a good spot. I was safe. The shelter of the porch kept the wind off my microphone. There was a nice echo there. And the mob was still yelling. By moving deeper into the porch, and out a little again, I was able to find the point of balance at which I could record both the music and the shouting. I stood there, with my headphones on and listened, first as the careful expert, thinking about sound quality and editing problems. For instance, I wanted a good clean passage of music with plenty of abuse, but with no audible fucks. I did not want to have to bleep over any of this, and I did not want to have to make cuts in the noise of the rabble that would break the rhythm of the singing, recorded on the same track.
Then I was listening, not as a professional monitor, but with emotion. I am wary of religious feeling in myself, having overindulged it in youth and in later religious phases I’ve gone through, like my spell in India with Swamiji. I wonder if it only comes over me when I am vulnerable. I have a sense of the tone of indulgence, the pitying whine that betrays mock piety, and I refuse to seek out wonder or reverence, only accepting them when they overtake me, despite myself.
I had made myself emotionally impregnable to face the mob, and now that I was safe in the porch, I relaxed into a sensitivity that surprised me, as a child might, weeping in bed after a hard day, not quite knowing why.
“Sweet heart of Jesus, make us know and love thee ...”
Make us know and love thee? As if the condition of knowing and loving God could be foisted upon me, as abruptly as a shove from a thug. It was decades since I would have thought myself a Catholic. Was I religious at all? I was sometimes. I had been as devout in India as I had been as an eager little boy. I still had the imprint of that in me. My heart knew the responses of a devout person, even if I had no theology.
“Sweet heart of Jesus, font of love and mercy, Today we come ....” That is what the congregation was singing, and the mob was shouting louder when the church door opened.
“Fenian bastards! Fuck the Pope.” Some of the congregation were moving to the door and the mob recognised individuals.
“Declan O'Loan. Fuck Declan O'Loan. Fuck Malachi O'Doherty. Fuck the Pope. Kuckin' bastards. Fuck yis."
They were shouting randomly, not chanting, so most of the actual words were indistinct. I was able to mask the fucks in my recording by moving deeper into the porch and closer to that beautiful absorbing music. This was music which had moved me before I was old enough to question faith and which none of my questioning since had made me immune to.
Sweet Heart if Jesus, make us know and love thee ...
I do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the saviour of souls. It seems to me that my freedom to feel anything spiritual depends on my not assenting to any plain statement of dogma. That need cuts me off from my Catholic roots as it cut me off later on from the Hindu culture that I sought some refuge in. Yet something conditioning? habit? of what a religious background gave me remains to be awakened.
On an ordinary day I would not have sought comfort in that church with that music, and its power to move me in my adulthood would have embarrassed me. Here it was the answer to barbarism.
... O touch our hearts, so cold and so unfaithful ...
The survival of the music was important. Never sure that I believe in God in a way that I could communicate to another person of faith, - if we got down to comparing Credos these people would probably take me for an atheist - I still believe in faith, that it is a decent and beautiful thing.
I was remembering how that story developed when I approached the Loyalist mob at Harryville. I had learned from it that some of the nastiest sectarianism can incorporate a sense of fun. That night, in Moneymore, I had been called to draw a raffle ticket. The prize was a clock made by a Loyalist prisoner. The winning ticket had been bought by my producer, Terry Sharkie, who had invited me into this work.
“The taigs have got the clock! Fenian fix!”
The crowd were stamping their feet and yelling at us. Leaders of an organisation which routinely killed Catholics to express political protest gathered round us, assuring us we were welcome to stay. A woman even asked me to dance.
This humourless Harryville crowd only wanted rid of me.
“What the fuck do you want?”
Perhaps I was putting too much faith in the sense of humour I had observed before in violent people.
“Who’d he say he is?”
Swamiji was my model of restrained response. Faced with a direct threat, I would still express something like honest curiosity.
“He’s a fucking fenian.”
He was also my model of someone who kept his mind on his objectives. I wasn’t there to defend my dignity but to record Loyalist aggression on tape without actually getting kicked or head butted. This was working so far. I didn’t need sensible answers.
“What is the purpose of this demonstration?”
“You’re lookin’ a kickin’, I’m telling you.”
I could select no single interviewee. I would have felt safer if I had identified the man in charge and gained his attention. On the night of the Orange ceilidh I had kept as close as possible to Andy Tyrie, the moustachioed boss of the Ulster Defence Association, reasoning that befriending one killer might not save me from others, but that befriending the man in charge would save me from all of them. That night Tyrie knew that I was nervous, and toyed with me. Some of the heavies close to him - men who had killed Catholics - made crass banter, like little boys bragging in front of their father, but it was a night off from violence.
I trusted that similarly here in Harryville, someone was in charge and had defined the limits. The men kept jostling and more would push from behind to get close to me and start again with the same question.
“Who the fuck is he?”
“Show us your press card.”
I wasn’t going to risk losing a press card, but I had business cards I could give them. These didn’t have my home address on them, just phone numbers and an e mail address. I gave them one of the cards. It told them the most important thing they felt they needed to know.
“He’s a fuckin’ fenian.”
“You’re one of them, you cunt.”
“What is the purpose of your demonstration?” I asked.
“Fuck off.”
I looked down then and saw that the cable from my microphone was no longer plugged into the mini disc recorder. One of them had pulled it out. I should have had the sense to wear headphones, and then I would have known when I was recording and when not.
We had spilled out onto the road now, and this was what the police were here to prevent. There was a loud bang, like a shot. They were cheering before I understood what had happened. One of them had dropped a firework near my feet. He could as easily have stuffed it down my shirt or trousers.
“Fuck off. Is there something you don’t understand?”
So I crossed the road, away from them, and they did not follow me. They were like trained dogs who knew the boundaries within which they were free to move.
The senior police officer was clearly amused, but asked me not to draw them onto the road again. I went into the church grounds to meet Alan and John and Moira and half a dozen other journalists and camera people that I knew. They were soon round me to ask if I was all right.
“You’re a braver man than me”, said Alan, who fed stuff to CNN. Then I listened to the disc and realised that I had very little of their abuse recorded. I would have to go back into the mob.
I could hear the mass inside the church and worked out that it was about half over. The mob across the road was shouting swear words, and occasionally a name, presumably the name of someone in the congregation. When they saw me, they shouted louder, and I realised it was better to stay out of their line of vision, if only for the sake of the people trying to have a mass within hearing range.
It was a cold evening. A large drunk man arrived to speak to the protesters. He stood in the middle of the road and some of the others came out and gathered round him. Alan said he thought this was a senior Loyalist, a key player. The police appeared to have calculated that it would be less fuss for them if they did not try to move him. I checked my equipment was ready, checked my heart for fear, and went over to try and interview him. The crowd started shouting, ‘Fenian bastard’ at me, but the man seemed to be trying to listen and to understand me, and when the others saw this they dropped their voices out of respect for him.
“Why have you chosen to picket this church?”
I knew the answer already. It was a counter-protest to pickets on Loyal order parades in Dunloy, fifteen miles away.
“Uh?”
“Why have you decided to picket this church?”
A little boy of about ten was hanging close, enjoying the glory of standing beside one of the big Loyalists. “Fuck”, said the boy. Then he shrieked the words that would make mine the best report of the night’s events: “It’s not a church, it’s a fenian hole.”
With that, I didn’t need to record more voices, so I let the drunk Loyalist mutter some nonsense into the microphone, thanked him and concentrated after that on recording background noise and colour. I went up to the porch of the church when the congregation was singing the communion hymn. It was a good spot. I was safe. The shelter of the porch kept the wind off my microphone. There was a nice echo there. And the mob was still yelling. By moving deeper into the porch, and out a little again, I was able to find the point of balance at which I could record both the music and the shouting. I stood there, with my headphones on and listened, first as the careful expert, thinking about sound quality and editing problems. For instance, I wanted a good clean passage of music with plenty of abuse, but with no audible fucks. I did not want to have to bleep over any of this, and I did not want to have to make cuts in the noise of the rabble that would break the rhythm of the singing, recorded on the same track.
Then I was listening, not as a professional monitor, but with emotion. I am wary of religious feeling in myself, having overindulged it in youth and in later religious phases I’ve gone through, like my spell in India with Swamiji. I wonder if it only comes over me when I am vulnerable. I have a sense of the tone of indulgence, the pitying whine that betrays mock piety, and I refuse to seek out wonder or reverence, only accepting them when they overtake me, despite myself.
I had made myself emotionally impregnable to face the mob, and now that I was safe in the porch, I relaxed into a sensitivity that surprised me, as a child might, weeping in bed after a hard day, not quite knowing why.
“Sweet heart of Jesus, make us know and love thee ...”
Make us know and love thee? As if the condition of knowing and loving God could be foisted upon me, as abruptly as a shove from a thug. It was decades since I would have thought myself a Catholic. Was I religious at all? I was sometimes. I had been as devout in India as I had been as an eager little boy. I still had the imprint of that in me. My heart knew the responses of a devout person, even if I had no theology.
“Sweet heart of Jesus, font of love and mercy, Today we come ....” That is what the congregation was singing, and the mob was shouting louder when the church door opened.
“Fenian bastards! Fuck the Pope.” Some of the congregation were moving to the door and the mob recognised individuals.
“Declan O'Loan. Fuck Declan O'Loan. Fuck Malachi O'Doherty. Fuck the Pope. Kuckin' bastards. Fuck yis."
They were shouting randomly, not chanting, so most of the actual words were indistinct. I was able to mask the fucks in my recording by moving deeper into the porch and closer to that beautiful absorbing music. This was music which had moved me before I was old enough to question faith and which none of my questioning since had made me immune to.
Sweet Heart if Jesus, make us know and love thee ...
I do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the saviour of souls. It seems to me that my freedom to feel anything spiritual depends on my not assenting to any plain statement of dogma. That need cuts me off from my Catholic roots as it cut me off later on from the Hindu culture that I sought some refuge in. Yet something conditioning? habit? of what a religious background gave me remains to be awakened.
On an ordinary day I would not have sought comfort in that church with that music, and its power to move me in my adulthood would have embarrassed me. Here it was the answer to barbarism.
... O touch our hearts, so cold and so unfaithful ...
The survival of the music was important. Never sure that I believe in God in a way that I could communicate to another person of faith, - if we got down to comparing Credos these people would probably take me for an atheist - I still believe in faith, that it is a decent and beautiful thing.
Copyright: Malachi O’Doherty
Originally published by Marino Books
Originally published by Marino Books
Video by: Sean Heffernan and Paul Marner (QUB Students)
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