Language please Arlene…

So grateful to you Eamonn and your other contributers for the common sense articles – easy to read and understand. Thank you so much.

Yes, Language please Arlene . . . and Gregory Campbell, Sydney Anderson, Jonathan Bell, Mervyn Storey; not forgetting Danny Kennedy, also a Minister for all the people and a rep for the people of Newry & Armagh, a Minister whose use of language is not subject to a DUP whip but who still saw fit to categorise Kingsmills and the IRA campaign as “amounting to ethnic cleansing”. Give Jim Allister his due, he managed to avoid making the charge – mainly, I suppose, because he was keeping some distance from his old DUP mates while contriving to skewer them and the Deputy First Minister on the same roasting spit.

Eamonn is right to home in on Arlene. She seems to have made the ethnic cleansing charge her own. She used it three times over in her brief contribution to the debate, combining it with her other emotive phrase: “the targeting of Protestant only sons in ethnic cleansing”.

Applied to a border farming community, whether in South-East Fermanagh or South Armagh, that phrase is doubly loaded. Arlene stressed again that one of those “Protestant farmer only sons” was her late father, Johnny Kelly. By good luck and the grace of God Johnny Kelly survived his January 1979 shooting, living to a good age until late last year. As a loving daughter, recalling an idyllic childhood in the hayfields of Roslea or Aghdrumsee as well as the attempt on her father’s life as he locked up the cattle one evening when she was eight years old, she has every right to remember him as her only father, but not necessarily to use the ‘Protestant only son’ tag to influence the selective call for a Dublin apology for or acknowledgement of anything.

Johnny Kelly’s very name hints at the complexity of farming communities either side of the border. Communities where, to borrow Eamonn’s familiar phrase, our people have not only lived and worked ‘through each other’, but sometimes ‘coorted’ and married through each other, for all that church or chapel might say, and in some happy places like ÚirChill a’ Chreagáin lie buried through one another. ‘Johnny Kelly’ is a name that would be at home on a gravestone not only in Creggan, which holds at least nine Kelly burial plots, but in Crossmaglen. In such communities, as no doubt in Fermanagh, “ethnic cleansing” would be an obscene but maybe just now convenient misnomer.

Arlene’s Johnny Kelly was not only a Protestant farmer’s only son. He was a member of the ‘B-Specials’ in the 1955-’62 period and, in the two decades following, part of the RUC Reserve. No crime in defending one’s home or ‘province’, you might say. Many of us might wonder: defending what for whom against whom?

My own, yes ‘selective’, memory of that time is of my primary school classmate, Michael Owen K. of Clonalig, having his legs shattered by a trigger-happy Special who defended his province by shooting at Michael’s front wheel. The 14-year old’s crime: cycling home without a light from Cross’ picturehouse, but maybe his brakes weren’t too good either. Or, for those of us who ‘got the 11+’ and went off to boarding school in Armagh, the frequent and deliberate aggravation of being held up in freezing fog on a godforsaken crossroads on the Blackbank or by the Primate’s Wall as we tried to get back in time after the Christmas holidays. The Specials were in no hurry. They had tyres to kick and things to search for. They needed to protect their Province from the friends of Fergal O’Hanlon and Sean South by going through our paltry provisions slowly. Minor irritations, as I look back, but an advancement of learning to the effect that RUC A or B-specials with guns didn’t have to try very hard to keep young croppies from Cross’ or Culloville in their place. Later, our dormitory mates from Irvinestown, Roslea and Aghdrumsee related their similar adventures. I’m sure if Johnny Kelly was on patrol those winter nights he might have proved himself a kindly ‘B-man’. Well, so Arlene would have told us had she been around at the time, though we were pretty sure what the ‘B’ in ‘B-man’ really stood for. Kindly neighbourhood policemen rarely get shot at for just being ‘only sons’.

Danny Kennedy must know, better than any of us, that ‘Kingsmills’ didn’t happen in a vacuum. The murder of ten Protestant millworkers on 5th January 1976 followed the murder of six Catholics the previous night at the Reavey and O’Dowd homes, and the murder of five other Catholics on 17th December 1975 at Kay’s Tavern in Dundalk and Gerry Donnelly’s Bar at Silverbridge, in the corner of Eamonn’s own townland of Legmoylin. The latter all the more poignant for the murder of Michael Donnelly, the owner’s 14-year old son, and that of his unrelated namesake, Patsy Donnelly, my young neighbour from the far side of the parish.

All twenty-one who died in that Christmas and New Year fortnight were the victims of selectively sectarian murder. No bomber or gunman needed to ask, ‘Who are the Catholics?’ or ‘Who are the Protestants?’ when a Catholic home or bar had already been pre-selected. Equally four decades later, no Minister or Newry & Armagh MLA should casually drop a weasel phrase such as “amounting to ethnic cleansing” into an assembly debate just to keep pace with those of the dominant DUP. Unless, of course, all twenty-one victims were pawns in a murky British ploy to get the SAS into South Armagh. Danny Kennedy knows that the last word cannot be said on Kingsmills till the full truth is excavated on the ‘Glenanne Gang’.

Meanwhile, if the DUP and UUP or even the TUV want to screw a very selective ‘apology’ out of Enda Kenny for something Jack Lynch or Charlie Haughey or Neil Blaney did or didn’t do in August ’69, maybe they should first contact some of the thousands of Belfast Catholics who left hurriedly – as many as 6,000 in one week alone – for a luxury holiday in the army camps and schools of the Free State between July 12th and August 20th that summer and never returned. Some of those ‘refugees’ or IDPs might be tempted to whisper “ethnic cleansing”. Strictly speaking, they too would be guilty of a misuse of language as the concept wasn’t really current at the time. And sure, I’m only indulging in a bout of whataboutery.