By Jack Holland
In one of Seamus Heaney’s early collections, "Wintering Out" (1972), there is a poem about Belfast called "Linen Town" which takes its inspiration from a sketch of High Street in 1786. (The original sketch hangs in the Ulster Museum.)
It’s twenty to four
By the public clock. A cloaked rider
Clops off into an entry
Coming perhaps from the Linen Hall
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Or Cornmarket
Where, the civic print unfrozen,
In twelve years’ time
They hanged young McCracken —
This lownecked belle and tricorned fop’s
Still flourish undisturbed
By the swinging tongue of his body.
Pen and ink, water tint
Fence and fetch us in
Under bracketed tavern signs,
The edged gloom of arcades.
It’s twenty to four
On one of the last afternoons
Of reasonable light.
Smell the tidal Lagan:
Take a last turn
In the tang of possibility.
In 1786, Belfast was a mercantile town, liberal in its politicks and socially progressive, where scientific groups and debating societies flourished. Belfast’s first Catholic church, St. Mary’s in Chapel Lane, was built in the 1780s, partly paid for from donations by local Protestants. Its first parish priest, Father O’Donnell, sent a letter of thanks which appeared in the Belfast News-Letter.
"Whilst such perfect concord distinguishes the Irish nation," wrote Fr. O’Donnell, "what moderate demand founded in truth and right can it ever make that can be long refused?"
This Belfast is truly a lost city. What Heaney describes, and what the sketch depicts, is a place that may as well have been the lost continent of Atlantis for all the relevance it seemed to have to the citizens of the 19th Century city. In the grim, riot-torn streets of Victorian Belfast anyone who spoke of "concord" and "moderation" would probably have been laughed out of town — or lynched.
The poem foresees the coming metamorphosis in the vision of the corpse of the executed United Irishman, Henry Joy McCracken, hanged in Cornmarket (near High Street) in July 1798, after the failure of the republican rebellion. His body swings like the "tongue" of a bell, marking the passing of "one of the last afternoons/Of reasonable light."
This is the most haunting line in the poem. It could, perhaps, be paraphrased as "one of the last afternoons when the light of reason" prevailed in Belfast. The light of the 18th Century did not go out at once — it dimmed through the early decades of the 19th Century. But by the middle of that century sectarian rioting, increasingly vicious, had become a part of city life, replacing the concord and moderation so celebrated in 1784.
How did this happen and so quickly?
The first recognizably sectarian riot took place in 1812, according to the historian A.T.Q. Stewart. By that time, the Catholic population of Belfast had increased to 4,000, compared to 1092 in 1784. A more serious outbreak occurred in 1832, following an electoral contest between Whigs and Tories for seats in Westminster which took place under new voting rights extended by the Reform Bill of 1832. The Whigs were the party of reform, and lost badly. Nearly the entire Protestant vote went to the Tories, who won easily. Their supporters celebrated by launching an attack on Hercules Street (now Royal Avenue), which was mainly inhabited by Catholics, who had backed the Whigs. The police fired down Hercules Street and killed four people. The pattern had been established, and it repeated itself, with increasing bloodshed, throughout the 19th Century. Serious rioting occurred in 1841, ’43, and ’52. Things got worse in the years following the Famine.
According to Stewart: "In 1857, riots on a larger scale and of a more serious character laid the foundations of Belfast’s baleful reputation, for this form of major eruption recurred periodically throughout the rest of the century, in 1864, 1872, 1886, with lesser disorders in 1880, 1884, and 1898. The riots of 1886 were so serious as to assume the character of civil war."
Historians generally agree that the changing character of the city was caused by the influx of huge numbers of poor, rural Catholics, mainly in the wake of the Famine. By 1861, the city’s Catholic population stood at 41,000. The newcomers found themselves in competition for jobs and houses with poor Protestants. Belfast had attracted them from the 1840s onward with the prospect of jobs in the mills. By 1846, the city had some 24 mills which spun yarn into linen, laying the foundation for rapid industrial growth that would transform it into a boom town.
Both the poor Catholics and the poor Protestants brought with them the traditions of rural militias and secret societies. Their tactics of violence and intimidation quickly found fertile soil in the city’s streets and took root there. And there they remain to this day. The rapid growth of the Catholic population made the formerly liberal Protestant community insecure. In 1857, a Catholic bishop worried that discrimination against Catholics would increase with their rising numbers "because of a Protestant presumption that their flourishing represented a threat to the future of the Protestant community."
Politics also played a key role in creating friction between the two communities. The Belfast of 1784 was a republican town for the most part, supporting the fledgling American republic against the authoritarianism of the English monarchy, and celebrating, later, the triumph of the French Revolution. But the events of 1798 alienated and frightened many Protestants. This insecurity increased throughout the 1800s with the rise of Daniel O’Connell. Many liberal Protestants supported his first campaign to allow Catholics to vote. But his campaign to repeal the Act of Union with Britain helped turn Irish Tories into Unionists and set the stage for the formation of the politics of conflict that has dominated the North ever since. And the epicenter of that politics was, and is, Belfast.
By the 1880s the light of reason had been more or less extinguished in the Northern capital, and instead ranters and anti-Catholic bigots such as the Rev. Henry Cooke and the Rev. Dr. Drew made the city their soapbox. In the meantime, Irish nationalism identifying ever more strongly with Catholicism, had replaced secular republicanism, which had emphasized the nature of the means of government of the state rather than the ethnic identity of the people who constituted the state. The rise of nationalism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries effectively eclipsed rationalism not only in Ireland but, more catastrophically, in Europe.
After that "last afternoon of reasonable light," Ireland was plunged into a sectarian twilight from which it is only now beginning to emerge.