Pierre Ranger: 'Tis the Season to March in Belfast
[Pierre Ranger is a teaching assistant in the history department of Queen’s University Belfast.]
To an outsider, even a sympathetic one, Northern Ireland feels strange at the height of the marching season. The zenith comes on July 12, when tens of thousands of Protestant men, wearing sober suits, bowler hats and orange sashes, parade through the streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne....
Two days later, a quieter celebration takes place in Belfast. In a pub called Kelly’s Cellars, supporters of the Irish Republican cause mark Bastille Day, seeking to fuse their political movement with that of revolutionary France. Wine and cheese are served, and a group of men — tippling Guinness rather than Beaujolais — sing the Marseillaise. In a surreal touch, bits of red, white and blue bunting — used two days previously to celebrate Britishness and the Union Flag — are recycled to recall the French tricolor....
The frustrating thing, especially to an interested outsider, is that Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics do have a common history. They have all undergone a unique sort of suffering, the kind that goes with urban war in a small, introverted place where everybody has some connection to victims and perpetrators of violence....
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To an outsider, even a sympathetic one, Northern Ireland feels strange at the height of the marching season. The zenith comes on July 12, when tens of thousands of Protestant men, wearing sober suits, bowler hats and orange sashes, parade through the streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne....
Two days later, a quieter celebration takes place in Belfast. In a pub called Kelly’s Cellars, supporters of the Irish Republican cause mark Bastille Day, seeking to fuse their political movement with that of revolutionary France. Wine and cheese are served, and a group of men — tippling Guinness rather than Beaujolais — sing the Marseillaise. In a surreal touch, bits of red, white and blue bunting — used two days previously to celebrate Britishness and the Union Flag — are recycled to recall the French tricolor....
The frustrating thing, especially to an interested outsider, is that Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics do have a common history. They have all undergone a unique sort of suffering, the kind that goes with urban war in a small, introverted place where everybody has some connection to victims and perpetrators of violence....