There are many creeds in Northern Ireland, many sects, infused with tribal animus and regional memory. They all have their heroes and their foes, which they gather to revere or to curse in the strange covens of that place. But there is a seldom-mentioned sect which cures those it recruits of all sectarian taint. It blesses with the magic wand of enthusiasm and personal loyalty, and its brotherhood are bound by rules which are barely a century old.
Their church is the workshop, their communion host the carburettor, the communion wine the cylinder oil in which they spend their days. They might be illiterate in politics and history, and their vocabulary in ordinary English less comprehensive than that of an average 10-year old Swede. But what they know, they are experts in; and their understanding of the dialect and liturgy of the internal combustion engine is as exhaustive as the College of Cardinals' mastery of the complexities of Thomism.
Enormous loyalty
Joey Dunlop was their pope, their moderator, their archbishop, their pastor. Like all binding religions, this creed's hold on its adherents is quite mystifying to outsiders; but as with all great religions, outsiders could see and be impressed by the effect that it had on those who worshipped within its rules. And those who gathered around the dismembered engine parts of Nortons, BMWs, Kawasakis, BSAs, were bound by an enormous loyalty to one another, and to the secret scripture of their creed: the motorbike manual.
The internal combustion engine has a remarkably ecumenical effect on those drawn to its influence, and its loyalties are curiously regional. Cork, for some reason, is one such area where worship of the motor-car is very powerful. Henry Ford's family were poor Protestants from Cork, and Ireland's most distinguished car magnate, Sir Patrick Henessy, was from an equally poor Catholic background. You must go to the opposite corner of Ireland to discover an internal combustion engine culture as strong: to Antrim, and the tiny, hill-locked communities where the particular form the worship takes is in an obsessive dedication to the species of beast first created by Gottlieb Daimler 115 years ago.
North Antrim has a reputation for sectarianism, not least because it is the heartland of Paisleyism. Yet the complexity of loyalty, the subtle nuances of local tolerance and respect within a broader picture of what to the outsider seems like intolerable bigotry, means that even the most divided communities find an everyday modus vivendi. Differences are concealed; strategies of language are invented to avoid points of conflict. People agree to differ by not talking about their differences.
Immune to conflict
But that is not how the brotherhood of the motorbike conceal their differences. Simply, there are none. All those Herbies and Wilburs and Wesleys, the Seanies and Seamies and Paddies, with their spanners and their wrenches and their oil-saturated overalls and with fingernails which haven't been clean in 10 years - they have found their grail of commonality, and not merely are they not participants in the sectarian conflict of the past 30 years, they are so absorbed in the mysteries of the poppet valve and camshaft that they are barely aware of the sectarian gale which has been howling outside their garage doors for so long. Philip Allen and Damien Trainor, murdered in the Railway Bar in Co Down two years ago, were fine examples of the carburettor innocence which has managed to survive amid so much death.
That was what made the local tributes to Joey Dunlop so very striking. Normally, when such an eminent person dies, testimonials refer to "both sides of the community". Not in Joey Dunlop's case; there was only one community, which worshipped around engine block and crankshaft: small town working class, highly skilled technically and conservative in its ways. Its members have their dinner in the middle of the day, they drink alcohol sparingly or little at all, and their few non-motorbike conversations will probably be in conducted in a singular and largely incomprehensible variant of Lallans.
They know their own community, and their own community knows them, and they are content that it is so. That their heroes are the most technically skilled, physically courageous sportsmen in the world is beyond doubt. Their incomprehensible addiction to speed unites them as it eliminates all subsidiary difference. There is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor birth when motorcyclist meets motorcyclist, though they come from the ends of the earth.
Every TT racer knows of the certain annual cull in his profession, sudden death or terrible, life-shattering injury. Were racers drawn from a higher social bracket, as grand-prix drivers are, Joey Dunlop would long ago have been Sir Joseph Dunlop, and he would not have owned a wee bar in a North Antrim village but would have been a tax exile in Monte Carlo, with long-legged blondes simmering gently beside a blue swimming-pool.
World leader
But he was in fact Joey Dunlop, of Ballymoney, Co Antrim, the greatest sportsman Ireland has ever produced, not merely five times world champion in the most terrifying sport of them all, not merely world leader in his sport for 30 years, not merely such a technical genius that he understood the witchcraft of his motorcycles' carburetion better than Honda's experts, but a kindly gentleman of Olympian modesty.
Those who worship in the church that Joey Dunlop led will wipe a tear or two away with oil-impregnated hands, say not a great deal, and will return to their poppets and their cams. That was Joey Dunlop's way. It is their way too.