News comes of renewed tribal riots in Northern Ireland, occasioned
by the traditional July 12 marches when the Protestant Orangemen go around with big drums jeering at the Catholics because Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on this date in 1690. Such news dismays but doesn't surprise. I've never really believed in the Peace Process. It's a good idea, but naive: tribalism is inimical to peace, and Northern Ireland is Europe's tribal Bantustan.
Here's a memory of the place, excerpted from "Intimate Revenge," my essay on Northern Ireland:
I remembered my first venture down the Shankill Road, a working-class Protestant enclave in Belfast; remembered how, as I attempted a casual saunter (mistake: only the hard men had the confidence to saunter), I became aware of sidelong glances that, I was convinced, could interpret my features as unmistakably Catholic, or alien in some way, although everyone I saw on the Shankill looked like me, and they were indistinguishable from the Catholics across the way on the Falls Road: pasty, doughy, hard-bitten, hungover. “Ey, where ya goin’?” inquired a boy, confirming my fears that, in a neighborhood where everyone was known, the news of a stranger’s arrival would spread like infection. “To the bus,” I replied, I knew not why, but hoped I sounded like a native—a Protestant native... But I fooled no one. “There’s no bus here,” said the boy, who shouted for others to take notice. Praise God at that moment there was a taxi. It was a Protestant taxi, of course (you could tell by the driver’s name on the door: Protestant “Sammy Wilson,” for example, instead of Catholic “Sean Kelly”), but the driver made no objection to driving me to the Europa Hotel, where I had a drink before taking the train back to Coleraine, with some relief. It was with even greater relief, mingled with horror, that I learned from that night’s TV news that a bomb had gone off in the Europa lobby about half an hour after I had left.
