An Independent Voice on Ireland
 
Malachi O'Doherty is a freelance journalist who writes frequent commentaries on Northern Irish politics. He is the author of The Trouble With Guns, published by The Blackstaff Press, in Belfast.
 
Every week Malachi O'Doherty contributes columns and comments from Northern Ireland for a range of media outlets, including BBC, Radio and Television, The Belfast Telegraph and The Scotsman.
He is a popular writer of features and reportage as well as political analyis.
His book, The Trouble With Guns was given favourable reviews in most British and Irish National Newspapers.
This site will carry samples of Malachi O'Doherty's writings on Northern Irish political affairs.
His voice is completely independent and represents no political party or institution.
 
This is how Malachi O'Doherty responded to the Drumcree crisis this year for the Inter Press Service
There is a popular joke among Northern Irish Catholics which says that God is a Protestant. The proof for this is the beautiful weather in which the Protestant Orangemen routinely parade every twelfth of July in their tens of thousands. By contrast, the most popular Catholic festivals of St Patrick's Day and Hallowe'en, occurring in Spring and Autumn, are often rained on.
But this year, God Himself seemed to have turned his back on the Orangemen. In their long processions they tailed through all the towns of Northern Ireland, under skies as dark and ponderous as the mood of most people here, horrified by the murder of three small boys in a fire bomb attack on their home in the early hours of Sunday morning.
The attack has been described by the police as sectarian. It was carried out, apparently, by men who had been out on the street protesting in support of the Orangemen of Drumcree, in another part of Northern Ireland. There thousands gathered each night last week, confronted and fought with police on a hillside. They went there to insist on the right of a banned parade to march through a Catholic area.
The Commission governing parades had ruled that the Drumcree Orangemen could not proceed while they refused to discuss their plans and intentions with their Catholic neighbours.
The Northern Irish police force yesterday disclosed figures for the scale of violence that accompanied the protest by the Drumcree Orangemen. It is included the stark figure that 130 Catholic homes had been attacked.
In one of these, a petrol bomb set the staircase alight and generated a fire that killed three small boys, Jason, Richard and Mark Quinn.
The miracle is that the occupants of so many other homes survived and escaped. Tossing a petrol bomb at a private home seems to come as thoughtless second nature to angry thugs in Northern Ireland. Perhaps the thrower is often drunk, and that is why the damage and the deaths are so low, in relation to the murderous effort involved.
Yet most of Northern Ireland yesterday accepted that the deaths of the three small boys was an overdue price to pay for the sectarian madness of the past week.
Some Orangemen, on the other hand, insisted on arguing that the protest they raised, and their call for support on the streets, had nothing to do with the incineration of the children.
Through the towns they filed in their parades. In Belfast, the biggest parade snaked through the city centre, and out of the town to a field by the river Lagan.
Militaristic bands swaggered in front of groups or lodges of sombre middle aged and old men, dressed in their best suits and bowler hats. The men of the lodges wore their decorated Orange collarettes and marched in even respectful strides, while the men and women of the bands, preened themselves like a rabble army.
That is the paradox about the Orange Order, the mix of conservative well mannered, business people and farmers, and the snarly brats that lead them to their field.
When they get to the field, one section gathers for picnics and listens to sermons; the other gets the beer out and gets drunk.
There was a sombre mood over the Belfast parade, not just because of the weather, but because the Orange Order feels itself to be under closer scrutiny and more severe criticism than ever. It affects not to see the connection, but to some extent, many in Northern Ireland blame the Order's conduct for the deaths of the little Quinn boys.
When the parades gathered at their fields the members took pledges to govern their attitude in the coming year.
They reaffirmed their "devotion to the Throne and Person of Her Most Gracious Majesty". They pledged "to try much harder to ensure that our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and the high standards of conduct enshrined in Orangeism are honoured by each of us".
They committed themselves again to their motto: "Civil and religious liberty for all".
There is something uncannily self contained about the Orange Order. It's estimation of itself is far higher than the opinion most others have of it. They proclaim high ideals that contradict the simple fact that they brought Northern Ireland back to the brink of chaos when most others had felt that peace had been secured.
After the Monday parades, the protesters at Drumcree waited to see how many would come and join them. The fear all last week was that the numbers would be so great that the police backed by the army would be unable to cope.
Hot dog stands in the field prepared to feed a huge invasion.
But the weather and dark mood of the country was against them.
God might not have become a Catholic, but he appeared to be a very different kind of Protestant than the Orangemen.
 
This is a column he wrote in August 1998 for The Observer.
I have often wondered at the description of Northern Ireland's
conflict as inter ethnic. Until about five years ago, no one ever described it
in those terms, and then suddenly, against the background of the Balkan
wars it seemed simply obvious.
I look at the face of my friend who is a Protestant and was once an
Orangeman, and I find little difference between us that I could describe as
ethnic. We are both of us more secular than religious, though traces of
religious thinking survive in us. Certainly there is nothing racial to divide
us.
No where on earth would we be taken as ethnically distinct from
each other but on our home ground. Tell it to a West Indian in London
that my friend and I have an ethnic division coming between us, and he
would laugh at you.
Some people believe that there are fundamental differences between
Catholic and Protestant, born out of their separate religious conditioning;
that Catholics are eloquent, fun loving people and Protestants dour and
literal, or to make the same point with reverse emphasis; that Catholics
are extravagant and lazy while Protestants are responsible and judicious.
The cultural conditioning however, which perhaps does affect them
in different ways, in no way explains the depth of suspicion between two
communities here.
There was an horrific week last January, when Catholics were
being killed in Belfast every night. Then it became perfectly obvious what
was different between my friend and me. He could walk the streets
without fear, I could not.
If I went across the road for a bottle of wine, I had to consider that I
might get shot, as I passed the corner where my taxi driver got shot the
night before. If I decided it was better to stay in and be safe, then I was
letting the bastards run my life, and that was a problem too.
My Protestant friend had none of these complex thoughts at that
time. It was an ordinary working week for him, in fact a very productive
one, because he is a newsman.
If we are walking side by side towards a burning barricade, one of
us will feel fear and the other will not, depending on which category of
people the men at the barricade have opted to hate.
Some of those who promote the sectarian violence effect to be more
political than ethnic. It is not your religious background that offends us,
they will say, but your political stand, or your service of the state.
But I have encountered people in Northern Ireland who would like,
I think, to crush my head under foot, for no better reason than that I am a
Taig. (By the way, "Taig" is the only appropriate word for placing me in a
sectarian category, for I am neither a Catholic nor a Nationalist by
personal conviction).
Certainly, the believing Catholics can find much around them to
affront their faith, but these are put up not to engage them in theological
discourse, but often just to hurt the Taig in them.
There are Catholics too who think Prods are stupid, bitter, narrow
and irredeemable. When Martin McGuinness sneered at Unionists in the
West Belfast Festival as "sad and pathetic", he was expressing a
contempt for the people rather than the ideology.
You could see it in the first meeting of the assembly too. He
lectured them with pointed finger: "You people .." And they sneered back.
This is more than an ideological dispute over how Northern Ireland
should be administered, that can be resolved with institutions of
partnership; it is a deep loathing across a communal divide, of one type
for another. But it is one in which distinctions have to be insisted on if
they are to stick, there being so little of actual substance to them.
The West Belfast Festival itself, as a celebration of a Republican
community, conflates the people of an area with a predominating political
mythology and challenges the rest of the world simply to take it on its
own terms. This recreates a Greenworld, reminiscent of Irish town life in
the 1950s, at a time when modern Irish towns like Sligo and Galway are
animatedly cosmopolitan.
There are two broad theories for explaining violence in Northern
Ireland. One is the Sick Society Model, which holds us all to account for
what has happened. This theory sees the seed of the killer's rage in the
heart of the pastor and the school teacher, and makes no distinction,
except in degree, between the passion of the politician and the flames that
follow.
The other theory is the Few Bad Men theory, which argues that it is
a few hundred crazed loons who have imposed peace lines on us all. The
walls are erected out of fear rather than hatred, and small numbers can
make many afraid, as the UDA did in January.
The Few Bad Men theory is, hopelessly discredited now, but it is
plain that small numbers of people in positions of paramilitary power
have it within their reach to provide the kind of assurances that would
clear the way for rapid political change. A society denied that, might
return to putting much of the blame for its ills on their shoulders.
 
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