‘Polite sectarianism’ still remains in the North 40 years after massacre of Protestants at prayer

Monday, November 20th, marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most notorious sectarian atrocities in Northern Ireland: the murder in 1983 by hardline republicans of three Protestants at prayer in the small, wooden Mountain Lodge Pentecostal Church near the Border in the village of Darkley in Co Armagh.

Seven others were injured in the attack, which caused widespread revulsion.

The degree to which republican and loyalist paramilitaries were motivated by sectarianism continues to be debated. The late Catholic Primate Cardinal Ó Fiaich has frequently been quoted as saying that in Northern Ireland Protestants were more sectarian in religion while Catholics were more sectarian in politics.

The Darkley murders were carried out by an offshoot of the INLA. Almost six months after the atrocity, in May 1984, Alan Gourley survived a car bomb in Newry in which a friend was killed and another seriously injured, all Protestants.

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“I don’t think it was sectarian,” Gourley says in the recently published book Dirty Linen, written by Irish Times journalist Martin Doyle. “I think sectarian’s more if a Protestant goes out and kills a Catholic for absolutely no reason or vice versa. But ours was probably more political because they assumed, not because we were Prods or this or the other, but because, they thought, members of the British security forces.”

Gourley and his two friends were members of the Territorial Army, not the security forces, and he had joined the reserve force because it had a pipe band.

‘You pick any year in, say, the 1980s and you discover that maybe half to two-thirds of those who were killed and murdered were civilians, either Catholic or Protestant, targeted specifically on account of their faith, their religion or their community identity’

—  Archbishop Eamon Martin

Anthony McIntyre believes that many IRA killings, particularly in the 1974 to 1976 period, were sectarian. The former IRA member, who spent 18 years in prison for the murder of UVF member Kenneth Lenaghan in 1976, pointed to the January 1976 Kingsmill massacre in Co Armagh in which 10 Protestant men were murdered as an example. He believed such sectarian IRA killings ended when Gerry Adams was released from prison in 1977. “Adams was opposed to it,” he said of the former Sinn Féin president, who has always denied being a member of the IRA.

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The two archbishops of Armagh – the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland since the fifth century, and just a 20-minute drive from Darkley – the Primates of All-Ireland, and leaders of the island’s two main churches are in no doubt as to the sectarian element in republican murders at the time.

Asked whether he believed there was such sectarianism, Catholic Primate Archbishop Eamon Martin says: “Of course, yes, I think there was, clearly. There are many examples.

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“Just scrape the surface and it was pure sectarianism in some cases. You pick any year in, say, the 1980s and you discover that maybe half to two-thirds of those who were killed and murdered were civilians, either Catholic or Protestant, targeted specifically on account of their faith, their religion or their community identity.”

As to whether Protestants in Northern Ireland saw the republican paramilitary campaign as sectarian, Church of Ireland Primate Archbishop John McDowell replied: “I think many of them did.”

Neither archbishop considered the Orange Order a sectarian organisation and both supported integrated education as a way of bringing communities together in Northern Ireland.

It was “a case that many people from the republican tradition simply could not understand how anybody could be a unionist. It was as though all that was needed was a degree of re-education,” he said.

“For a long time in the ‘70s and ‘80s there was a feeling within the Protestant community that they were being driven into the sea, as it were, unless they conformed to a certain understanding of Irish history or of the future they were going to be obliterated and they did see that as a sectarian war in many ways.”

There were “still people who feel ignored and deeply hurt by what has happened in the past and there is no sign, as far as they can see, that anybody really wants to try to understand them. They see themselves as being looked upon as a bit of an embarrassment that need to have a line drawn under them,” he said.

Neither archbishop considered the Orange Order a sectarian organisation and both supported integrated education as a way of bringing communities together in Northern Ireland.

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Of the Orange Order, Archbishop Martin said: “I don’t regard it as a sectarian organisation but, like many organisations, both within the Catholic family and the Protestant and Reformed tradition, things can easily be manipulated.” He added: “Nowadays the Order itself will be very, very quick to condemn, very, very quick to ensure that those things are stamped out.”

Archbishop McDowell, while acknowledging that the Orange Order was “an organisation exclusively for people from the Reformed faith,” felt that use of the word ‘sectarianism’ in the context was “a kind of a poisoned view of another community. It’s an absolute aversion to it and I don’t think that is the case with certainly many, many individual Orangemen that I know. It’s the sort of sea that you swim in, in certain parts of Northern Ireland but you’ll meet very, very many people from either community having good friends in the other community,” he said. “So, no, I don’t think it is [sectarian] in those strict terms.”

On education in Northern Ireland Archbishop Martin said: “I think that we all recognise that a greater integration of education would, more than likely, help to continue to break down these barriers.”

Those, like himself, “who are passionate and who are great believers in faith-based education” would also “accept the responsibility to ensure that faith-based education never becomes sectarian”.

But it was the case that in “communities which remain divided, particularly if neighbourhoods remain divided and housing remains divided, it’s extremely difficult to find ways of placing integrated schools into divided communities.”

Archbishop McDowell agreed.

“Parents at the minute choose to send their children usually to single identity type schools,” he said.

‘Young people tend to be less attached to the old pieties of every sort, whether they’re political or religious, than their parents are’

—  Archbishop John McDowell

In parallel “with any advance in integrated education you will also need an advance in integrated housing which, of course, is now worse than it ever was. When I grew up in 1950s and 60s there was much greater integration in the working class estate where I grew up than there now is, and that’s a huge job,” he said.

Meanwhile, figures published last month revealed that there were 1,238 sectarian hate crimes recorded by police in Northern Ireland in the year to March 2023, the highest number in the seven years since 2016 when there were 1,352 such incidents.

Archbishop McDowell felt it was “very easy to look at Northern Ireland and see it as a chronically divided society, as though there are groups of people who never communicate with one another”.

That was “not really the case,” he said. “Young people tend to be less attached to the old pieties of every sort, whether they’re political or religious, than their parents are. But they’re living in the same families, they’re living in the same communities as those who hold much more conservative, much more self-identity attitudes and those discussions go on all the time.”

He felt that “what is needed in the public square are spaces for those discussions to take place in a rather more structured way than they once did”.

What was needed was “to create spaces for people to come together to have those dialogues which really is the only way, long patient dialogue to break down these identity problems and sectarianism problems”.

Archbishop Martin thought it “very important for us to make sectarian words, language, songs attitudes as taboo or as unacceptable as we do make some of the other things like misogynist comments.”

He warned against “polite sectarianism” where “we give permission to each other to use a sectarian term or when we’re in company where we believe everyone around us shares our tradition and culture and we kind of allude to something about the other.”

Incidences would include “jokes, to sing songs – there’s been a lot of coverage of this recently about songs being sung at sporting events or after sporting events,” he said. It all was “something we need to guard against and point to whenever we see it, to name it and shame it”.