COMPARED with the sectarian murder of a taxi driver and the reckless bombing of the Killyhevlin Hotel in Enniskillen, its a small obscenity. A hijacked cement mixer was driven at a memorial pillar on the road between Omagh and Cookstown and then set alright, inflicting severe damage on the monument.
A piece of stone is never as important as a piece of flesh, and it might seem odd, after a week in which flesh was torn apart by bullets, scorched by petrol bombs and ballered by plastic bullets, to worry about a mere inanimate object. Except that this particular monument commemorated the eight Protestant workmen murdered by the IRA at Teebane Cross four years ago.
Someone, in other words, made a deliberate and organised attempt to wipe out the public memory of one of the worst sectarian massacres of the last 25 years. Not content with the obliteration of eight lives, the people who attacked the monument decided to scrub them from the record, to leave no public trace either of their names or of the vile act that annihilated them.
In doing so, they came up with an apt symbol for an appalling week. The Drumcree march was supposed to be an act of remembrance, recalling the Battle of the Boyne, the survival of Ulster Protestantism, the long tradition of walking the Garvaghy Road. It was actually about not just forgetfulness but a kind of willed amnesia, a deliberate disremembering of the dead of 25 years.
It showed yet again that the task in Northern Ireland is not so much to overcome the past as to remember it clearly, to cling as vividly as possible to the memory of what happens when opportunistic politicians choose to exploit the worst instincts of their own tribe. It was sickeningly apt, indeed, that the images of the week induced a nightmarish sense of deja vu.
The RUC batoning Catholics with what seemed a mixture of relief and relish. Protestant hard men, drunk on cheap lager and cheaper rhetoric, kicking in the doors of Catholic homes. Catholic hard men, the mask of republicanism slipping to reveal the brazen face of sectarian hatred, attacking Protestant homes and hotels. David Trimble transported back into his old Vanguard self. Martin Smyth no longer the decent, avuncular clergyman of recent years but the Orange Grand Master of 1972 who "inspected" the ranks of the UDA at Omagh and addressed men in paramilitary uniforms in Ormeau Park. Public opinion in the Republic slipping with alarming ease back into a sneaking regard for the IRA as "defenders" of Catholic areas, forgetting the almost 500 Catholics killed by the IRA and the INLA since 1970.
IT WAS as if two decades of murder and maiming had never happened. To get down the Garvaghy Road, the Orangemen had not me get through a few hundred living demonstrators but also to step over the memory of 3,000 dead men, women and children. The leaders of mainstream unionism, and those on the Catholic side who tried to match them for bigotry, dishonoured the dead by acting as if they had never existed, as if they didn't know that the price of symbolic victories is paid in blood and tears.
That they did so on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, when the Ulster Division was wiped out for king and country, merely adds a final dimension of sacrilege. In the cruel irony of honouring the dead by showing yourself willing to add to their numbers, they made a mockery of their own past.
Did anyone in the Orange ranks at Drumcree remember that 80 years ago, there was no Orange parade down the Garvaghy Road or elsewhere because their forefathers believed that it was more appropriate to honour the dead with a quiet and dignified church service than it was to keep up a "tradition" of walking a certain road?
Did any of them remember that when the Portadown war memorial was unveiled in 1924, the ceremony was conducted jointly by the Catholic parish priest and by Protestant clergymen, and that wreaths were laid by the Ancient Order of Hibernians as well as the Orange Order?
Did any of them blush when they uttered the traditional Orange prayer of thanksgiving for the victory at the Boyne. "Let truth and justice, brotherly kindness and charity, devotion and piety, concord and unity, so flourish among us that they may be the stability of our times and a praise in the earth?" Or have words like kindness and charity, unity and concord, joined the savage murders of 25 years in some bleak graveyard where meaning itself is buried under impenetrable layers of ignorance and spite?
Did Ian Paisley remember that the Independent Orange Order to which he is affiliated proclaimed in its first manifesto in 1905 that its members once more stood on the banks of the Boyne, not as victors in the fight nor to applaud the noble deeds of our ancestors ... but to ... hold out the right hand of friendship to those who, while worshipping at other shrines, are yet our countrymen bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh"? Did David Trimble, an academic lawyer, remember the ground breaking legal case of 1824 when, on July 12th, the Orangemen took to the streets of New York's Greenwich Village, where they were opposed by angry Catholics. Harsh words led to blows, blows to injuries, riots to arrests.
When the rioters were brought to court, the Catholics were defended, as the legal historian, Walter Walsh, recalls in a new book, The New York Irish, by an Ulster Presbyterian, whose own ancestors had fought for King William at the Battle of the Boyne the former United Irishman, William Sampson. Addressing the jury, Sampson asked them to "avert the arm of the sanguinary bigots who would drench your country in blood", a precise description of the task that David Trimble as the elected leader of Ulster Protestants, should have accepted last week.
THE judge, Richard Riker, also a Presbyterian, denounced in equal measure the Orange and the Catholic rioters and observed that "religious persecution was the deadliest scourge that had ever been inflicted upon man, and that wherever a religion arrogated the right of dictation, persecution was the natural consequence". He ruled that although the Orangemen had a perfect right to march on July 12th, they had to do so peacefully. "It is irrational for Irishmen to go back so far into history for causes to perpetuate quarrels and bloody affrays with each other.
William Sampson and Richard Riker are part of Protestant history too, the literal and intellectual heirs of the Williamite victory at the Boyne and the beginnings of modern democracy. What we saw last week was the active abnegations of that history by those who claim to be its inheritors.
All the protestations about the need to break the link between unionism and Orangeism, all the aspirations to make the defence of the union a political rather than a tribal position that we have heard in recent years, were shredded. In that sense, the idiots who desecrated the memorial to the Protestant dead at Teebane Cross were wasting their time. The leaders of unionism had already done the job much more effectively.