Hate Replaces Hope In Londonderry In Northern Ireland Too Many Remember The Past Too Well

Eight months ago President Clinton told a jubilant crowd of Protestants and Catholics that he saw Londonderry as “a peaceful city; a safe city; a hopeful city.”

Back then, Londonderry was a town hoping it was free of the hatred that boiled over in 1969, when Catholic protesters tried to stop a Protestant march along the city wall and then fought with police for three days before British troops intervened.

Today, soldiers and barbed wire top the limestone wall encircling the city - put there to enforce the British government’s decision to stop the very same march.

Londonderry is back to the familiar landscape of siege and sacrifice, fleeting hopes and unforgiven horrors. And once again in Northern Ireland, those who remember their past too well seem condemned to repeat it.

“It seems like a million years since Bill Clinton was here, telling us we’d turned the corner. His scriptwriter didn’t tell us it was a cul-de-sac,” said Sarah Maguire, behind the cash register of her shop within the town walls.

On Saturday, the Apprentice Boys, the town’s Protestant fraternal order, plans to march on top of those walls. The procession will commemorate a potent event in Protestant folklore: Londonderry’s resistance against a 17th-century siege by the forces of the deposed English Catholic king, James II.

But a critical, quarter-mile stretch of the wall overlooks the Catholic Bogside district, and residents vowed to block the march when it skirts their neighborhood.

To them, the march is a demonstration of Protestant dominance in a town where Catholics long were denied equal rights in housing, employment and political power, even though they are a majority.

A similarly contentious Protestant march through a Catholic neighborhood in the city of Portadown touched off widespread violence in July. Anxious to avert riots, the British government on Wednesday banned the Apprentice Boys from the section of the wall nearest the Bogside.

Protestants accused the British government Thursday of caving in to Catholic threats, but Sir Patrick Mayhew, the minister responsible for governing Northern Ireland, stood his ground in an hourlong meeting in Belfast with Apprentice Boys leaders.

Catholic protesters, meanwhile, confirmed they intended to march into central Londonderry tonight - and would stage a second march Saturday afternoon while the Apprentice Boys were still marching.

As many as 15,000 Apprentice Boys and their supporters are expected at the march, which for them recalls the town’s triumph after a 105-day siege by the army of James II.

Protestants draw from bitter folklore of the 1689 siege - their hungry forebears shouting “No Surrender!” from the ramparts while English naval forces idled for months on the nearby River Foyle.

The Apprentice Boys are named for 13 young apprentices who took the initiative of closing the settlement’s gates as James’ forces approached.

“An Apprentice Boy knows better than to trust an Englishman. They’ll always betray us to the enemy when it suits them, as they have again this week,” said Alistair Simpson, leader of the Protestant group.

In the Fountain, the last Protestant neighborhood in central Londonderry, residents have metal grills over their windows. Many said they felt pressure to move across the river, joining 10,000 other Protestants who have left since the 1970s.

“The Roman Catholics have got rid of the Apprentice Boys parade. They’ll want rid of the Fountain - we’re next on their list,” said Rosemary Holland, who, like many in the district, sent her four children to stay with relatives outside the area.

Catholics in Londonderry expect violence this weekend, too. They recall a very different town - one where Protestant politicians and police discriminated against them, where police arrested their friends without charge, where soldiers murdered their neighbors.

Paul Campbell was a young boy when his father and friends fought police after the 1969 Apprentice Boys march.

“I remember it was an exciting time for a young fellow… Since then it’s just been a continuous struggle against the soldiers and the RUC,” said Campbell, referring to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the province’s mostly Protestant police force.

The 1969 unrest prompted Britain to send in troops, a deployment which sparked the rise of the modern Irish Republican Army, which has since waged a violent campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Campbell, 35, spent two years in prison after being convicted of membership in the youth wing of the IRA. He now works in a Bogside bar near a memorial to 14 Catholic protesters killed by British paratroopers on “Bloody Sunday” in 1972.

Nearby is the headquarters of the Bogside Residents Group, led by Donncha MacNiallais (pronounced DON-ic-uh Mac-NEAL-ish), a former IRA member organizing opposition to the Apprentice Boys march.

“People shouldn’t forget their past. That’s asking them to forget what they, their parents and grandparents endured,” MacNiallais said. “The new generation is more determined than ever to change things in this country. To do that, you have to know what it is you’re changing.”