[A-List] Holy Cross

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Holy Cross – the hidden story" by Anne Cadwallader  (The Brehon
Press, Belfast, 2004) Reviewed by John McAnulty

10th December 2004

Holy Cross – the hidden story has one overwhelming strength. Written
by a journalist, it is made up of close-grained and exhaustive
interviews of many of the leading participants, providing in
meticulous detail a blow-by blow account of a truly extraordinary and
horrific episode.

Yet the book’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Rather
than the hidden story it repeats the revealed story all over again in
great detail. To tell the hidden story one would have to present
hidden facts or a new framework and perspective from which the
existing facts can be reinterpreted. There are few new facts and, as
in the original events, there is a curious blurring that overlies the
whole episode. Was the blockade of Holy Cross one of the crassest and
most animalistic examples of raw bigotry in the annals of the Northern
state, or was it a sad and deformed expression of community conflict?
Anne Cadwallader identifies, condemns and examines in forensic detail
the reality of an assault fuelled by sectarian hatred, but she finds
herself drawing a narrow focus on Protestant and Catholic communities
living in the immediate environment of the Holy Cross school and on
the police operation that took place at the time of the blockade, thus
adding to the credence of the ‘community conflict’ model. Yet there
are clues aplenty scattered about the book that indicate that the
responsibility for the ordeal of the primary school children was
distributed much more widely in Britain and Ireland.

The book has much of the feel of a post-modern novel. Different
perspectives are presented but not directly challenged. Much space is
given to the explanations of the Loyalists as to why they blockaded
the school but it is left to other participants to point out the
complete incoherence of the loyalist case, their inability to
formulate demands that stayed the same from one meeting to the next,
and how their positions boiled down to blind sectarian hatred. The
loyalists deny that the campaign was directed by the UDA and it is
again left to other participants to chart the movement of the UDA into
the area following loyalist feuding and to outline a UDA bomb attempt
at what was supposed to be a secret meeting between Glenbryn loyalists
and Holy Cross parents. Even the bomb attack on the children is
presented with a loyalist account of how it wasn’t really aimed at
them.

There are extensive interviews with the PSNI/RUC. Leading officers are
allowed to explain in detail, without critical questioning, how it was
impossible to prevent the howling mobs physically intimidating the
Holy Cross children day after day. It is left to the parents to point
out the almost non-existent arrest rate, the refusal of police to take
action when gross sectarian intimidation occurred in front of their
eyes. How UDA members banned from the area turned up the next day. The
ban on parent photographs is contrasted to the intimidatory recording
of parents by both police and loyalists. As with the loyalists there
is a lack of historical depth. The long history of bigotry and
collusion by the police is not contrasted with their explanations.

The parents make detailed and bitter critiques of both the loyalists
and police, but exhibit a great deal more confusion and uncertainty
when explaining the nature of their own predicament. Anne Cadwallader
listens uncritically as they explain that they are new to political
action, that the more seasoned political activists of Sinn Fein are in
the residents committee rather than the parents committee, as they
note in passing that Martin McGuinness was at the time the education
minister and had attended as they assembled one morning, but had not
joined the walk to the school to avoid politicising the issue. The
average primary school pupil, without using all ten fingers to
calculate, would quickly work out that Sinn Fein are leaving some
political distance between themselves and defence of the
schoolchildren, that the parents and children are being hung out to
dry, and their problems may start with loyalism and the RUC but extend
further to those they hope will represent and defend them.

The interviews end with the parents. There are no detailed interviews
with the British or Dublin Governments, although both were busy
offering to conciliate “community conflict” and the British, as state
power, were directly responsible for the conduct of the police
operation and for ensuring the human rights of the schoolchildren.
Neither is there any real chronicling of the role of the Irish trade
union movement, although ICTU made a major intervention, lobbied for
grants to be thrown at the loyalists, and claimed to have opened new
channels to loyalism that would resolve future conflict.

A book that relied completely on the facts to speak for themselves
would be unreadable, so there is some attempt at analysis but, rather
than any global political analysis we get some rather quirky and
partial observations from two local academics with studies based on
the area. Perhaps the most penetrating remark in the book is made by
local academic Peter Shirlow of the University of Ulster, who observes
that loyalism is not an ideology, but rather a defensive tribalism
that really doesn’t have a political programme and thus can’t be fully
conciliated. In another section he adjudicates on an argument by
loyalists that the Holy Cross blockade was the result of local
frustration and the nationalist view that it was sparked by the
arrival of the UDA following a Loyalist feud. Shirlow argues that a
UDA contingent did arrive, but simply acted as a catalyst for a
sectarian logic already deeply ingrained.

Perhaps the most superficial part of the book is a potted history of
North Belfast. It chronicles the flight of younger workers from the
loyalist areas, the gradual decay of the areas, and the use of
boundary walls
(so-called peace lines) to defend ‘Protestant territory’ against a
growing Catholic population constrained in tiny ghettoes. It then
draws on work by Shirlow interpreting an anatomy of Loyalist
grievances and fears and arguing that they are too complex to be
reduced to simple sectarianism. A study by Neil Jordan of the
Institute of Conflict Research recounts Protestant fears of a shift
from majority to minority, seen as part of a republican conspiracy.
Despite many useful insights into the locality, any impartial observer
would simply snort in derision. The ‘complexities’ are the outgrowths
of sectarian logic, no different from the fears of the ‘poor whites’
in the U.S. deep South with little but the illusion of supremacy to
cling to.

It is at this point that the blind spot of Holy Cross rises up to
engulf the whole book, the world view on which it is based and,
indeed, the whole illusion of a new and more equal society in the
North of Ireland. In the potted history of North Belfast the author
seems blind to the fact that the sectarianism may belong to the
Loyalists, but the peace walls and the defence of ‘Protestant
territory’ are the task of the state forces.

And Cadwallader and the whole of the media and political class seem
blind to the elementary observation that a sectarian society is not
defined by the bigots, but by the willingness of the state, media,
churches, political parties and trade unions to support the sectarian
logic on which the bigots operate. Yet the Holy Cross blockade was a
classic example of the willingness of almost everyone outside the
parents themselves to regard ferocious sectarian assault as community
conflict.

The Good Friday agreement is mentioned in passing in the concluding
pages of the book. It is suggested that Dublin held back from support
for the parents in order to save the deal and that Blair wanted to
protect Trimble from a loyalist backlash. There is no reflection on
how a deal that it was claimed would end sectarian conflict could not
be used to resolve the blockade. Almost as an aside the book
chronicles the collapse of the Human Rights Commission following the
chair’s endorsement of police collaboration with the loyalists, yet
this endorsement is in tune with the central plank of the agreement,
which is not about human rights, but about ‘equality of the two
traditions’.

The hidden story of Holy Cross does not lie in the detail, no matter
how shocking. It does not lie in crude sectarian abuse that the
children were unable to understand. It does not lie in the gobs of
loyalist spittle running down the faces of five year old girls. It
does not lie in the bags of urine flung at them daily. It does not lie
in the pornographic pictures displayed before them, some with their
mothers and fathers faces superimposed. It doesn’t even lie in the
blast bomb that endangered their lives.

The hidden story of Holy Cross lies in the Good Friday agreement. It
lies in ‘equality of the two traditions’ that allowed the children to
go to school and allowed the sectarians to abuse them as they went. It
lies in all the forces of society colluding to define sectarian
intimidation as community conflict.

Holy Cross defined the political settlement in the North on the
streets. It indicated that the new society resembled nothing as much
as the old sectarian society. It told us that British imperialism,
despite protestations of disinterest, still acts to protect the
sectarian monster that guarantees its presence in Ireland and that
Irish nationalism and republicanism have proved unable to defeat the
that monster.

Faced with this reality Irish nationalism loses focus. No one is able
to look closely at Holy Cross and say what it means. This blind spot
defines the instability and contradiction of the settlement in the
North. Anne Cadwallader provides us with much of the evidence, but is
unable to provide the instrument that would enable us to decipher the
hidden story of Holy Cross.

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