A young Protestant man who was beaten up on the Shankill area in Belfast because he did not know the words of The Sash My Father Worehas insisted that while the incident scarred him physically, it would not scar him mentally or affect his non-sectarian, peaceful view of life.
Mark Boyd (18) from Ballysillan in north Belfast was assaulted as he lay injured on the Shankill after he was the victim of a hit-and-run driver. He sustained a fractured leg when he was struck by a car and, to his horror and disbelief, then suffered more injuries from men he thought were coming to his aid.
In his grandmother's house off the Shankill this week, Mr Boyd was just home from hospital after having a second cast put on his fractured right leg.
He said he had been staying with friends in another part of Belfast but decided to ride his motorbike to the home of his grandmother, Lilian Boyd, in Cambrai Street, off the Shankill Road. She had been unwell and Mr Boyd regularly looked after her. "Now she's looking after me," he said.
As he was travelling along the Shankill at about 4am on Sunday, a Citroen car driven by what he thought was a woman in her 40s cut across him, knocking him off his Honda 125.
"When I got up I looked at her and she looked at me, then just did a three-point turn and drove away again," he said. "As she was driving away two fellows came running up, saying 'Are you alright, mate?' I said, 'Aye' and that I was just in the middle of phoning the ambulance. So I handed the mobile phone to one guy and said, 'Will you tell them where we are here?'
"I said to the other guy, 'Is it all right if I lean on your shoulder? I've hurt my leg in some way, I'm not sure what's wrong'. He said, 'Yeah, that's no sweat' . . . And then of course the questions came about where I was from. I explained that I was just from the street opposite. They persisted to ask questions and one of the fellows was getting aggressive, throwing digs at me while his mate was trying to hold him back.
"They asked, 'Who do you know from round here? Are you a Taig [Catholic]?' Could I sing The Sash?
"I thought they were only messing about at that point. I just rhymed off a few lines that I knew and he said, 'No, not that, the real Sash' . . . he knew I didn't know it.
"Eventually his mate just let him go at me and when I tried to defend myself they just said, 'You're just going to make it worse, we're going to beat the bollocks out of you if you try to fight back'. So that's when I decided to run. So I ran up the street to the Chinese and it was lucky that it was open at that time of the morning."
As he fled his assailants shouted they would wreck his bike, which they did. "It's now a write-off." As for the motivation for the attack: "I think to be honest the guy just wanted a fight.
"It's the combination between the crap these guys are taught throughout their lives from parents and peers and then the drunken rage that goes with it."