Derek Lundy - The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland

[A]n enlightening book Lundy goes the distance in explaining the deep-rooted hatred and fear that has tortured Northern Ireland. The Bloody Red Hand is a superbly written book. Lundy has written a book filled with lessons not learned, a book that will break the heart of anyone who has a touch of the Irish in them.

The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

The Bloody Red Hand is an instructive book if you are keen to unlock the bewildering mysteries and histories of Northern Ireland. Lundy probes and questions the ambiguous corners of accepted history, while tapping into and explaining deep-rooted sectarian hatred and rage and fear.

The Globe and Mail

[Derek Lundy] has given us a hat trick with [The Bloody Red Hand]. A blend of meticulous research, storytelling, and memoir. It is a wonderfully clear-eyed investigation into The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Balanced and suggestive, his book throbs with intelligence.

The Vancouver Sun

History is [Lundys] forte. He draws out its complexities, offering masterful analysis with a personal touch. His clear, disciplined prose makes for pleasant page-sailing.

The Gazette (Montreal)

Using his own family as a springboard into Irish history, Derek Lundy brings a riveting insider-outsider perspective to the myths that created, then sustained, endemic religious hatreds. The Bloody Red Hand will enlighten anyone who has felt perplexed by the tragedy of Northern Ireland.

Erna Paris, author of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History

ALSO BY DEREK LUNDY

Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy
Godforsaken Sea: Racing the Worlds Most Dangerous Waters
The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail

For my uncle, William Lundy

Ireland is a little country which raises all the great questions.

G USTAVE DE B EAUMONT

THE STORY HAS TWO VERSIONS . In the first, a Viking war party in a lean, dragon-headed longboat closes with the coast of northern Ireland. It is hunting priests gold and red-haired, smooth-skinned slaves. The leader of the fierce Northmen urges on his warriors: the first man to touch the sweet Gaelic strand with his hand or foot takes possession of it. He gets to keep whatever is thereprecious metal, cattle, women, boys. There is a man aboard the longboat called ONeill. It is an Irish name and, perhaps, in the style of slithery allegiances in Ireland, he is a turncoat. He has abandoned his family and sept and gone over to the Norse raiders, wilder even than the wild Irish. This man desires plunder and the haven of his own piece of land. It seems he craves those things more than reason, certainly more than any Viking aboard. As the longboat approaches the shore, the crew strains for the jump and its prize. Then ONeill, the man from Ireland, lays his arm along the bulwark. He severs his hand with one swift sword blow and throws it ashore onto the sand before anyone else can make the leap. His Viking chief keeps his word. He gives that part of Ulster to his mutilated mercenary, and ONeill takes the bloody hand as his crest and symbol.

In the second version of the story, two rival Scottish clans race each other to Ireland across the twelve miles of the wind-whipped North Channel. They have agreed that whichever reaches the Ulster shore first will take the land. The leader of the MacDonnells lusts for it just as ONeill didlike the intense desire some men have to keep living when death comes to claim them. Hell do anything for it. But his boat lags behind and he sees beautiful, wild Ulster, rich in cattle and slaves, sliding away from him. He severs his hand with one swift sword blow and throws it ashore onto the sand. He claims the land for himself and takes the red hand as the crest of the MacDonnells of Antrim.

Ireland has a long and complicated history of conquest, rebellion, endemic violence, and political tumult. The Irish struggle against English invasion and occupation now has the aspect of an old storyof history. The people of the independent, and now prosperous, Republic of Ireland see it more and more in that way, too. But the severed red hand still seems to be a perfect symbol for the province of the United Kingdom known officially as Northern Ireland. Its six counties, with their Protestant majority, were partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1920 in the course of the Irish war of independence against Britain. In the North, the malignant motifs of the Irish past hung on: sectarian hatred, oath-bound private armies, guerrilla war, atrocity and outrage, riots, bombings, British soldiers on Irish ground, political dysfunction, walls and barbed wire, segregation of Protestants and Catholics, war drums and triumphalist parades, forced population movements, propagandathe whole apparatus of civil war.

Low-level conflict went on inside Northern Ireland and along its border from the time of its inception, but chaotic and terrible open war began in 1969. It went on for thirty years and is known, with quaint understatement, as the Troubles.therefore, a near-perfect expression of the strange, ambiguous claim by Ulster Protestantswhose roots in Ireland go back three or four hundred yearsthat they are British and not Irish.

Nevertheless, the bloody red hand is an apt symbol of what both Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland have done during the thirty years of the Troubles. Viewed from outside the province, the hard-liners on both sides (who, in Northern Ireland, constitute the majority) seemed to be acting out a part in some bizarre and bloody anachronistic pageant. Could this terrible hysteria really be taking place in Europe in the late twentieth century, among people who look just like us, in a region of Great Britain, supposedly one of the most civil of societies?

The Protestants, in particular, have created an appalling public image for themselves. They look like unreasonable and unreasoning bullies and bigots who refuse to share political power with Catholics, shout No Surrender! and What we have, we hold! loud and often, and insist on marching through Catholic neighbourhoods in peculiar parades that mix bowler hats and rolled umbrellas with the harsh, primitive rattle of the giant Lambeg battle drum. Many of them follow the preacher Ian Paisley, who isnt kidding when he calls the Pope the Antichrist. During the Troubles, they tortured and killed Catholics and set off bombs in Catholic pubs and sports clubs. On the gable ends of their mean little row houses they painted murals depicting a seventeenth-century Dutch prince called William, whom they idolize. They sprayed graffiti on walls that said No Taigs on our streets! (Taig is an abusive term for a Roman Catholic and is the insulting equivalent of Prod for a Protestant); Fuck the Pope! or just FTP!; Remember 1690! (the long-ago year of a battle on the River Boyne); and Still Under Siege! (referring to the Catholic siege of Protestant Derry three hundred years earlier). They formed numerous paramilitary militiasone of which called itself the Red Hand Commandos. They swore loyalty to Britain, a country whose people and government detested them and who thought they were just another bunch of violent paddies. For fifty years, until their sectarian regime went under in 1972, they ran a government that kept Catholics down, using a Protestant police force that looked like an army, with its heavy weaponry, and auxiliaries who were always ready with the truncheon and the gun.