Joining the Marching Season in Derry
A trip to Northern Ireland coinciding with their Marching Season is an eye-opening experience for Jill Worrall.
The weather forecast for the northwest of Ireland during a week of high summer, while not promising, was a supreme example of inventiveness. Monday – scattered rain. Tuesday – spotty showers. Wednesday – some showers. Thursday – showers followed by a shower.
Friday – cloudy with a shower in spots.
Saturday – rain with a chance of some bright spells.
Sunday – cloudy with a brief shower.
‘‘How,’’ I asked Frank, from County Kerry, ‘‘do I know when we have reached the shower that follows the shower? And what is the difference between a spotty shower and shower in spots?"
Even Frank, never short of a lightning fast response, was a little fazed when faced with the hard evidence on my cellphone of the dire extended weather forecast. But not for long.
‘‘It’s to give us all a sense of optimism,’’ he said, ‘‘This way we have some hope that every day is not going to be the same.’’
I wasn’t convinced, especially as the ‘‘rain with a chance of some bright spells’’ was due to fall on a day I and a small group of Kiwis were scheduled to tackle the highest section of the Blue Stack Way walking route, the 415-metre slog up through the raised bogs on Cloghmeen Hill in County Donegal.
Much of Ireland had just experienced its wettest and coldest July in decades so the thought of trying to swim uphill in the rain was not an attractive proposition. We needed a Plan B.
‘‘Why not go to Derry?’’ suggested Frank, ‘‘There’s lots to see even if you don’t manage to hit the ‘bright spells’.’’
Despite having driven through what in the Republic of Ireland is often referred to simply as the North, I’d never actually set foot in Northern Ireland.
‘‘And you’ve chosen a grand day for your first visit,’’ grinned Frank, a staunch believer that the six northern counties currently part of the United Kingdom, should be reunited with the rest of the island.
He was far from one-eyed however. Owing to a divergence of parental beliefs he had grown up in what he suspected was one of few homes in Kerry to have a photo of the current pope on the wall alongside that of Queen Elizabeth II.
And so it came to pass that I took five New Zealanders to Derry on the day of the Apprentice Boys’ Relief of Derry march. It was perhaps akin to taking overseas tourists to a Gay Pride Parade in Arkansas. If you’re going to get to grips with the political heartbeat of a country, there’s no more exciting way to do it than when local pulses are racing.
The Derry parade is one of the largest conducted in what is known as the Marching Season, a series of events mostly in July and August. Officially Derry on the River Foyle is known as Derry/ Londonderry, a politically correct mouthful of a name that has led to it being nicknamed Stroke City.
The marches are a Protestant celebration of victory over the Catholics and are known as the Orange processions, a reference to the Protestant William of Orange whose armies defeated the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne near Dublin in 1690. The victory cemented Protestant rule in Ireland for centuries to come.
In 1969 the Apprentice Boys’ march in Derry sparked three days of rioting that were widely regarded as the beginning of what is rather euphemistically known as The Troubles – more than 30 years of sectarian bloodshed in the North, which at times spilled violently beyond its borders. However, since the 1998 Peace Agreement and the Irish Republican Army’s formal declaration in 2005 that it had ceased armed conflict, the parades have been largely peaceful.
Peaceful they might be these days, but it was obvious during a walk around Derry’s 17th-century city walls that the authorities still don’t take any chances. From the vantage point of the walls that rise up to 8m and in places are 9m wide we surveyed preparations for the parade.
Armoured police vehicles accompanied by police in bulletproof vests were dotted along the parade route. We stood on Ferryquay Gate and looked out over the Fountain, the largest Protestant neighbourhood outside the walls. Smoke from a bonfire partly obscured the words of a mural on a boundary wall: ‘‘Londonderry West Bank Loyalists Still Under Siege No Surrender’’. Union Jacks and the Ulster flag fluttered from flagpoles.
Further around the walls we could look down on the city’s famous murals in the Catholic area known as Bogside. One featured IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and Nelson Mandela, another, a rather crumbling but vast mural, that stated: ‘‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry’’.
Walking around the walls among the smattering of visitors were members of the various clubs that together form the Associated Clubs of the Apprentice Boys’ of Derry. Smartly turned out in suits with crimson collarettes (sashes) emblazoned with insignia, members of the fraternity were happy to outline the parade route to us and to explain who exactly the Apprentice Boys were.
During the 1690 siege of Derry (the longest in British military history) the Catholic forces of James II of England blockaded the Protestant supporters of William of Orange in the walled city for 15 weeks. It was 13 apprentice boys who shut the gates as the Catholic forces drew close to the city. By the time the siege was lifted several thousand inhabitants had died of either starvation or disease, with the survivors reduced to eating dogs, rats and horses.
We left the walks to watch the start of what was to be a parade of 400 bands. Northern Ireland is synonymous with its bands – even the smallest village will almost certainly boast its own band. The first 320 or so we watched marching into the Derry’s main square (known in genuinely Irish fashion as the Diamond) were predominantly fife (flute) and drum, a sound that despite never having heard one live before I immediately associated with the military.
The various Apprentice Boy club members in their suits, bright collarettes and even highly elaborate cuffs and white gloves marched solemnly to the Diamond, where Union and Ulster banners and the various lodges’ own banners were lowered and the bands were silent, other than the steady, funereal beat of a lone bass drum.
At this point of the parade, the police presence in the square outnumbered the onlookers. We in turn were being watched by the camera on top of an armed police vehicle, its lens panning the open spaces.
I found it all a rather anachronistic, unsettling, graphic reminder of Ireland’s history, ancient and modern. The faces of the men who had so warmly invited us to take a look inside their hall were now fixed and grim; the fifes seemed unnecessarily penetrating.
The authorities say that the marches now are more commemorative than provocative, but clearly the owner of the small cafe we retired to after our fill of bands thought differently. While we waited for bowls of hot soup and soda bread, one of our group was reviewing video footage shot on his phone. The strains of fife and drum issued forth, albeit at very low volume.
The cafe owner, whose authority was not diminished in any way by him wearing a floral apron, appeared quickly at our table. ‘‘Would you mind turning that off,’’ he said quietly. ‘‘It’s drowning out our CD.’’
When we left, unable to finish an enormous wedge of apple pie, the proprietor asked another of our group to wait while , unasked, he dashed into the kitchen, returning with a container and sent her forth with ‘‘something later for your tea’’.
We left Derry and followed the Lough Foyle towards Northern Ireland’s only World Heritage Site, the Giant’s Causeway. Geologically, these 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns are the result of the contraction of cooling molten lava.
I much prefer the legendary origins in which Irish giant Finn McCool builds the causeway so he can fight an equally giant Scot. As one version of the story goes, Finn, when he discovers the Scottish giant is bigger than him, runs home in fright and is hidden by his wife who disguises him as her baby. When the Scottish giant arrives in search of him and is shown the baby in the cradle he panics at the thought of what size his father must be and escapes home, destroying the causeway en route.
By now the weather forecast of ‘‘some bright spells’’ was appearing just as much a fable as the story of Finn McCool. I battled through the throngs of other visitors and then gingerly clambered out across the rainslicked columns to the water’s edge, cursing the plethora of selfietakers who cluttered every view.
The almost perfect hexagons are, despite the crowds, an arresting sight; sunken ones filled with sea water and tiny marine life, like perfect geometrical garden ponds. Frank, who had visited the Causeway a year earlier for the first time, was a little underwhelmed and had quoted Dr Samuel Johnson: ‘‘worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see’’.
On our way ‘‘home’’ to Donegal two men in bowler hats and white gloves stopped our van in a narrow country lane. While traffic banked up for kilometres a band came marching down the road, returning to its clubrooms after their day out in Derry. They stopped outside their headquarters, oblivious to the traffic mayhem and played God Save the Queen.
What a Kerryman, albeit one who grew up under the watchful gaze of the Queen as well as the Pope, would have made of it I could only imagine.