Protestant Supremacy
Through all the reading I’ve done and been doing for this site, something that has continued to shock and disgust me, almost more then the bombings and shootings, is the Northern Irish State’s systemic “supremacy”, or in other words, racism, towards Catholics. It is not hard to find quotes from Protestant Politicians and paramilitary members that read like classical examples of extreme racists.
George Seawright, politician, UVF member, and assassination victim, not only praised a British neo-nazi group, but also reportedly said, during a school and library board meeting when funds for a trash incinerator for a Catholic Primary school was brought up, something along the lines of: “Taxpayers’ money would be better spent on an incinerator and burning the lot of them [Catholics]. Their priests should be thrown in and burnt as well.” That doesn’t remind me of anyone.
The leader and founder of the DUP, Ian Paisley, once said that Catholics “breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin” and called the Pope the Antichrist. He also founded about 4 small paramilitary groups.
There is a man named John Taylor, who actually has a peerage, meaning he is a Lord in the UK. He has many documented controversial quotes. Like when he told the President of the SGA for a Northern Irish college that “Since your name is clearly unpronounceable” referring to how he had a very Irish Gaelic name, that he was “Irish and not British.” and thus he “and those whom you represent, [should] apply for any necessary grants to the Dublin government.”
Perhaps not initially a very egregious example, but the fact that he opens by calling the man’s name “clearly unpronounceable” is extremely harsh, imagine saying that of a black person’s last name or something (though John here is also genuinely racist, having called Leo Varadkar, the current Taoiseach/Prime Minister of Ireland, “The Indian” multiple times), and also how he does not seem to care about what citizenship this man may actually have, let alone the identities of the other students he represents, and straight and simply tells him to bugger off. This clearly underlies some deeper opinions.
And here we have him stating those deeper opinions much more clearly: September 8th, 1993, he says that maybe increased fear among Catholics will help them begin to “appreciate” the fear of the protestant community.
September 16th, 1993 he says that the victims of Unionists paramilitaries were all “generally…members of organizations that support the IRA.” Note, many Unionists paramilitaries were killing random Catholic civilians, so he’s either trying to hand wave the multitude of senseless murders, or is basically implying that all Catholics are terrorists. Maybe even both.
He also once said that the Sean Graham bookmakers’ shooting, which killed 5 Catholics including a 15 year old boy, by the UDA, wouldn’t have happened if the Teebane bombing hadn’t occurred (where the IRA blew up a car of construction workers, killing 7 and injuring 4, who were returning from repairing a military base; the IRA repeatedly targeted such workers as aiding the “forces of occupation”). Crimes do not justify other, reprisal, crimes. They are still murders.
I would love to produce more quotes from him but unfortunately there’s a multitude of pay walls preventing me from accessing the necessary old newspapers to show you, so I’ll have to stop there.
Regardless, I think we have gotten at the gist. With the context of Catholic disenfranchisement as discussed in How The Troubles Started, a picture of this ideology of Protestant Supremacy is forming. However it is important to note, in brief at least, that there was also a class divide in Northern Ireland that permeated the Protestant community as well, poor Protestants who could not afford a home were also affected by the home ownership requirement of the franchise (the ability to vote). These patriarchs did not speak for all protestants, but they did speak as a ruling class (peers and politicians) who deeply favored Protestants in their decisions, and for the radicalized Protestants who joined the paramilitaries. They kept Catholics down before this, and they wanted to continue to do so. It is easily compared to the kind of “stay in your place” mentality of some American racism for example. ‘African-Americas are simply going too far when they ask to be treated better’. Conceptions like that, but here applied to Catholics, and multiplied by the conflict.
Of course, the IRA was not clean either, and neither was the ROI. For information about their ills and problems, and how that fed into Protestant radicalization, see Irish Republicans & The ’37 Constitution.
For how the Security Forces participated in Anti-Catholic actions, see ()
The Many Murals
There are other websites that more properly discus murals in Northern Ireland and attempting to replicate that would be redundant and beyond the scope of this site, so instead, I shall provide links to these resources and simply inform you about the topic in general here.
With such intense and deep rooted ideology in Northern Ireland, as we have just discussed with the Unionists, it is unsurprising that people would go out and express it in equal measure (outside of the violence that is). In Northern Ireland murals became the go to option for metaphorically shouting it from the roof tops (or walls in this case), while giving the option to presumably retain some anonymity as to which exact individual is doing that shouting.
And so, a great number of dramatized, romanticized, and propagandized depictions of things like King William III crossing the Boyne, the Siege of Derry, WWI soldiers, Paramilitary symbols and generic members, Martyrs, the 1917 Easter Rising, The Hunger Strikers, Bloody Sunday, and so on, adorn large plain walls in the cities and towns of Northern Ireland, especially in Belfast.
Some are as simple as words written on a fence, while others are elaborate, colorful, professional looking affairs, covering the whole side of a 2 or 3 story brick building, looming over the viewer (and often proceeding to bash them over the head with a hammed fist).
New murals are still created all the time it seems, though often they are less politicized or more tragic and anti-violence.
To speak specifically of the sectarian ones though,
Republican and Unionists did do some things in common, again, martyrs, generic paramilitary members, and their symbolism and slogans. As for particularities, the Unionists were big on scenes from British history. William III crossing the Boyne (a battle of the Willemite Wars, that, really, didn’t matter, but it has symbolic significance). The siege of Derry, from the same war, where a group of young men closed the gates before the Jacobites could get in (these were the Apprentice Boys, and an Orange Men style group would be named after them), and also WWI battles like the Somme. These are probably the more interesting to talk about because the reasoning requires some more explanation. [Black and Tans]
Some websites to visit to learn more and see some of the murals are:
https://billrolston.weebly.com/
A website with pictures of a good couple handfuls of murals, with their text often transcribed, and sorted by ideology and decade. It also includes pages on some non-Irish murals.
https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/mccormick/album34.htm
A page cataloging all the murals, new, old, and no longer there. It does not have pictures of even near all of them though.
https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/mni/search/page/3
Here’s a digital archive of mural pictures, with 825 pages, and it’s searchable, through text and tags.