ROYAL Hillsborough.
A village straight from an episode of Midsomer Murders.
Award-winning gastro-pubs.
Absurdly pretty vernacular terraces with feature basements.
A Main Street church with a sloping, manicured lawn.
Artisan shops.
High-end clothiers.
King Charles’s castle.
There’s a yawning chasm between the Twelfth (or the Thirteenth, as it is this year) in the city and in the sticks. In East Belfast Buckie-filled zealots gather round bonfires that are monuments to slackjawed racism and sing hateful songs about Catholics they’ve never met. Up the country, hymns from the Sunday psalter are played on wheezy accordions while elderly couples lounge on garden-centre-bought easy chairs, sip tea from tartan flasks and munch sandwiches from wickerwork picnic baskets.
Hillsborough – made Royal by the swish of a royal quill in 2021 – is the apotheosis of the Country Twelfth. But even here, the Brethren in their Magee suits and Barker brogues embrace the darker side of the union; the hearts of the ladies in their wide-brimmed hats and lace gloves flutter guiltily at the sight of a bit of loyalist rough from outside the village.
Look, there they are, passing underneath the hanging baskets overflowing with red, white and blue blooms: The Noel Clarke Memorial Flute Band, not exactly resplendent in their white polyester shirts, blue trousers and matching hats, but tidy in a vaguely military way. Here they come, emerging in step from the shimmering haze rising from the sun-sticky tarmac, their shiny flutes fluting and their big drums drumming.
Who is this Noel to whom they pay tribute on their drums? Who is this Mr Clarke embroidered on their breasts?
Well, since for the past few paragraphs you’ve been imagining yourself in a rural Co Down summer idyll, I should hand out an advisory: The following paragraphs contain material of a disturbing and graphic nature.
Noel Clarke was a member of Billy Wright’s notorious Mid-Ulster UVF. He hijacked the van used in the slaughter on March 28, 1991, of three young Catholics in a mobile shop in Craigavon. A gunman in a black balaclava approached the vehicle, prompting a number of locals to flee; inside the van he turned his Browning 9mm on two teenage girls – Katrina Rennie (16) and Eileen Duffy (19) – shooting them both dead. As he left, he encountered Brian Frizzell (29), who was making his way to the shop. The gunman ordered Brian to lie on the pavement and then shot him twice in the back of the head. Eileen’s brother Brendan was on the scene within seconds and he remembered: “Brian Frizzell was lying in a pool of blood. Katrina was still sitting on the crate. She was dead but her blue eyes were wide open and there was a bullet wound on her neck. Eileen was slumped on the floor, shot in the head. Her face was badly swollen and blood was pumping out of her head and ears. I tried to resuscitate her but in my heart I knew she was gone. I was so numb, I couldn't cry.”
One of the men responsible for this unspeakable atrocity was paid tribute to in the village on Monday. A man who will be forever remembered not for his faith or his loyalty, but for his part in a sickening sectarian slaughter, was front and centre at a parade attended by unionists who posted smiling selfies of themselves celebrating the Glorious Twelfth. Or Thirteenth. A cursory examination of the Parades Commission’s list of bands present at Royal Hillsborough reveals that the Noel Clarke band was far from the only outfit with a close connection to King Rat’s nest of killers. Some are regular participants in the annual Brian Robinson Memorial Parade, a September tribute to a UVF killer who shot a Catholic dead at Ardoyne shops in 1989. Others enjoy playing their music at the Trevor King Memorial Parade a week before the Twelfth, another tribute to a notorious UVF killer.
Because I’m a glass half full kind of guy I like to think that perhaps a few of the people enjoying the sunshine and ice-cream at Royal Hillsborough didn’t know who Noel Clarke was. But let’s not kid ourselves, the majority of people either knew what the Noel Clarke band represented and seconded the emotion, in the immortal words of Smokey Robinson; or they knew and didn’t care.
At this stage, as ever with me when the subject is loyalist bands, I reiterate my oft-stated position: I personally don’t care.
I do care that Noel Clarke was a UVF thug who helped take the lives of three innocent Catholics, but I don’t care if Loyal Ulster wants to celebrate him. As long as it’s done in a place where most people welcome or condone it. And while the price of houses in Royal Hillsborough is higher times infinity than it is in the places where Noel, Billy and their UVF comrades are usually lauded, it’s pretty clear that quaint, flower-scented Royal Hillsborough is as open in its own way to a bit of paramilitary fellow-travelling as the staunchest loyalist housing estate.
In the middle of that long weekend of sectarian and racist madness that passed for culture, First Minister Michelle O’Neill deplored the placing of racist symbols on bonfires and was met with a barrage of whatabout artillery: Didn’t she say there was no alternative to the IRA? But the two parties quickest to admonish Ms O’Neill were represented at the Royal Hillsborough parade. Both parties watched the Noel Clarke Memorial Flute Band pass by and said not a word about his foul deed or the innocent Catholic lives that he and his UVF accomplices took.
It may well be the unionist community has no alternative to welcoming bands connected to loyalist killers to their big day. It may well be that there’s no alternative to normally voluble political reps pretending none of this happens on the Twelfth. Or the Thirteenth. It may well be that a time will never come – and I strongly believe it won’t – when civic unionism stops talking out the side of its mouth about paramilitarism.
But if that’s the case then perhaps Loyal Ulster has no alternative than to shut up about IRA memorials.
