Sectarianism, and the denial of it, remain huge obstacles in Northern Ireland, writes Susan McKay
M ore than two months have passed since 15- year-old Michael "Mickybo" McIlveen was beaten to death in a sectarian attack in Ballymena, Co Antrim.
His murder made headlines around a world which had thought such things no longer happened in Northern Ireland. Some of the media tried to find a hopeful story in a miserable one - on the day of his funeral some headlines were saying that Ballymena had "united in grief". But it had not, and it has not, since.
Yes, the huge crowd at the funeral included boys and girls wearing blue Rangers tops, but they were few and far between in the sea of Celtic green worn by the Catholic youth of the town. No senior DUP representative attended the funeral to hear Father Paul Symonds calls for a "new vision" for Ballymena, and the Bishop of Down and Connor, Patrick Walsh, calling for justice and equality. (One DUP councillor had already implied the teenager would be going to hell because he was not a saved Christian.)
Downtown Ballymena went about its ordinary weekday business. In Ballykeel, loyalists held a demonstration about the persecution of Protestants. A car full of mourners took a short cut through the estate on the way to the graveyard for Michael's burial and was attacked.
In the days following the attack, the McIlveen family appealed for calm. Michael's mother, Gina, played over and over from the windows of her house, Cara Dillon singing the Tommy Sands song, There Were Roses. The song celebrates a friendship between a Catholic and a Protestant, one of whom is murdered in retaliation for the murder of the other. It includes the line, "And the tears of the people fell together".
Criticised last year for claiming there was more to the sectarian expulsion of Catholics from villages near Ballymena than met the eye, the PSNI stated in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Michael that the motive was sectarian. However, the longtime MP for North Antrim, the Rev Ian Paisley, claimed republicans had been provocative for failing to honour an agreement about flying flags. "There's problems in Ballymena when people don't keep their word," he said.
Gina McIlveen, determined that her son's death would bring Protestants and Catholics together, generously invited Paisley to the funeral. He visited her, prayed with her, but said he had to attend parliament that day. Then he stood up in the House of Commons and muddied the waters with the claim that, "there is a strange significance to this particular murder because those who are charged cross over the religious divide".
Ian Paisley junior has since drawn attention to the fact that Gina McIlveen has a past conviction for affray. (She and others got suspended sentences.) DUP politicians have referred to the "alleged murder". Around the town, an ugly and false rumour had it that Michael hadn't died as a result of the attack at all, but from a subsequent fall at his home. (Similarly squalid rumours went around after the Quinn murders, when three children died after being trapped inside their petrol-bombed home in the Co Antrim town of Ballymoney on July 12th, 1998.)
At the first meeting of the local council after the murder, the DUP, (which has 13 councillors to the UUP's five, while the SDLP has two and Sinn Féin one) rejected motions from the SDLP and Sinn Féin calling for anti-sectarian programmes of action for the town. Although the PSNI has said that the majority of sectarian attacks are againt the minority Catholic population (80% of the population is Protestant), unionists insist it is the Protestant people who are being "ethnically cleansed."
David Tweed, a supporter of the 1996 loyalist blockade of Harryville Catholic church, claimed in 1998 that the murders of the Quinn children that summer were not sectarian. At the council meeting, he accused the SDLP of spilling out hatred of Protestants. He said the "pan-nationalist bandwagon" had started to roll after the McIlveen murder. His colleague, Maurice Mills, said people were "ganging up" on Protestants and that unionism was "in a battle to save our country". Some local Protestants say this sort of talk is only what you'd expect of the DUP's "dinosaurs", and that most unionists in the prosperous town just want to live and let live. Sectarianism is only a problem for elements in the housing estates, according to this view. However, what is happening in Ballymena bodes ill for the restoration of the Assembly. The DUP insists it is behaving democratically in the town, though it hoards all the power.
Ballymena's loyalists, meanwhile, having been recently cajoled into removing a huge UDA mural which for years overlooked Harryville church, are issuing dire warnings. The Ulster Political Research Group (which is "close to" the UDA) warned last month that despite its efforts to keep the lid on things, "chaos" was only a step away. Loyalists had been pushed to "breaking point" by republicans.
"We are not far away from some serious, serious violent scenes," said spokesman Darren Smyth.
At the June meeting of Ballymena council, the single Sinn Féin councillor, Monica Digney, was appointed to a committee dealing with cultural affairs. It took a long hour of hard wrangling by the combined forces of Sinn Féin and the SDLP to persuade the DUP to agree. When she speaks in council, some unionist councillors ostentatiously ignore Digney and talk among themselves. The atmosphere, according to the SDLP's Declan O'Loan, is "absolutely poisonous".
It was moving to see Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren from Ballymena going together to Stormont to meet Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern during their recent visit. Good work is, quietly, being done.
However, sectarianism and denial about it remain huge and formidable obstacles. Tom Paulin has a poem which starts with the assertion that during the 51-year existence of the old Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont, only one bill by a non-unionist member was ever passed. This was the Wild Birds Act of 1931. He describes a bird called the "notawhit" rapping out a sharp code sign, "like a mild and patient prisoner/pecking through granite with a teaspoon". The poem is called Of Difference Does it Make.
How things politically are in Paisley's heartland should act as a warning to those optimistic that good sense, and a recognition of the need for justice and equality, will prevail.