[Irish LGBTQ campaigner Joseph Healy joined the Pride march in his
home town of Newry. He explains how life on the border has changed -
and the stakes of Brexit installing a hard border between Northern
Ireland and the Republic.] [[link removed]]

PRIDE IN AN IRISH BORDER TOWN  
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Joseph Healy
October 9, 2019
Red Pepper [[link removed]]

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_ Irish LGBTQ campaigner Joseph Healy joined the Pride march in his
home town of Newry. He explains how life on the border has changed -
and the stakes of Brexit installing a hard border between Northern
Ireland and the Republic. _

,

 

I had not been to Newry, a small city in County Down, since I was a
child in the 1960s. In those days many people from the Republic,
including Dublin where my family lived, used to cross the border to
buy what were then perceived as exotic English products. My mother
would drive through the border checkpoints with the contraband –
including brands of biscuits unavailable in the Republic – hidden
under a blanket in the boot.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and others say that there never
was a hard border. Yes, there was. I drove through it on many
occasions, customs searches included. Those were in the days before
‘The Troubles’, which simply stopped many people from the South
visiting the North again until after the Good Friday Agreement – a
period of 30 years!

On a late August day this summer, I was making the journey back to
Newry on a train from Dublin to Belfast, packed with American and
English tourists. Only the SMS messages from my mobile phone operator
indicated that I had crossed from the Republic into the North. This is
exactly what the border communities and most people in the North of
Ireland want to maintain, whatever happens with Brexit – an open and
seamless border.

At the time, I was travelling to Newry for UK & Ireland Pride. In
2018, Newry won the chance to host the annual event which gives a
different geographical focal point for the Pride movement each year.
The announcement was greeted by applause at the joint conference of
the London Irish LGBT Network
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step in the progression of equality for Northern Ireland’s LGBTQ
citizens.

At the conference, speakers from Love Equality
[[link removed]] (the LGBT organisation campaigning for
marriage equality in Northern Ireland) and the Northern Ireland TUC
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region follow the DUP’s refusal to allow marriage equality and
blocking of legislative moves at Westminster to legalise it. There
were calls for supporters to go to Newry and support the Pride event
and my union, UNITE, answered it. The national LGBT Committee agreed
to send delegates from all of the regions.

My regional LGBT committee (London and Eastern) strongly supported
delegates from our region not only in solidarity with the LGBTQ
community in Northern Ireland but also to support the many Irish
members of UNITE (both North and South) living in our region. The
other reason for going was to support the border communities in the
North of Ireland who would be heavily impacted by Brexit. Newry only
lies three miles from the border. I was enthusiastic to represent my
union in Newry.

A historical event

On the morning of UK & Ireland Pride 2019, UNITE delegates gathered
beside the canal. This canal was the source of Newry’s wealth in the
18th and 19th centuries and carried coal and other goods to the town,
where they were transferred on to sea going ships. Its path was now
festooned with Pride flags and virtually every shop window had a sign
welcoming people to the event. I later heard that the Pride was
estimated to have contributed £10 million to the town’s economy.
Talk about the Pink Pound!

I met with the other UNITE delegates, all of them members of the
national LGBT Committee: an air steward from London, a disabled woman
from Birmingham, a Glaswegian who was very active in the Labour Party,
and the two local reps, a Belfast bus driver and an education worker,
also from Belfast, who was an activist in the Green Party.

As we took photos, I heard that the Royal Black Preceptory had been
marching through the town the night before and armed police had
stopped the traffic to divert cars and buses away from the parade. The
police in the North of Ireland are always armed, a norm in Irish
policing dating from when the British first introduced a paramilitary
police force in the 1820s to deal with unrest. It was to be the first
of three parades by the Black Preceptory, who are essentially an upper
echelon of the Orange Order – a protestant, unionist order. The
parades were not connected with the Pride, but reflected the fact that
it was Black Saturday, the last Saturday in August, which marks the
end of the marching season. The Pride parade was sandwiched between
two of them during the Saturday.

For all of the UNITE delegates, apart from the Glaswegian, this was a
rude awakening to the reality of political life in the North of
Ireland. The Scottish delegate was sympathetic to Sinn Féin and
indeed, while we were there, reported that sectarian riots had broken
out in Glasgow because of an Irish republican march there – proof
that the issue of Ireland has long tentacles and its impact can be
felt throughout the UK. The fact that the Black Preceptory chose to
march through an Irish town with a 90 percent Nationalist population
was a provocation. It demonstrated the disdain for the Nationalist
community held by such institutions whose visible political
representative is the DUP.

The Pride march was however well received as it passed through the
centre of town. A moving example of this support occured when a
middle-aged woman approached our delegation and took a rainbow flag
from her handbag. She told us that she lived in the nearby Mourne
Mountains but although she was not LGBTQ she had come to express her
solidarity. When I lived in the North of Ireland in the early 1980s it
would have been inconceivable that someone from a rural area would
have expressed open support like that. In those days the main LGBT
club in Belfast had been down a small backstreet with a secret
entrance for security reasons. Now, in 2019, I was in a Pride prade
following a group advertising a helpline for gay farmers.

Following the march, the celebratory mood continued onto an outdoor
party in Albert Basin Park. Families came out in large numbers and
there were lots of children among a diverse crowd. Sinn Féin MP,
Mickey Brady, arrived with a delegation.

North Down is traditionally a commuter belt for professionals who work
in Belfast – the drag queen, and the main MC, with whom we had
breakfast that morning quipped that coming from North Down she was
very posh! On the other hand, a group of LGBTQ activists with their
shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘LGBT support the ship workers’
reminded us that the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast was under
threat of closure and emphasised the strong historical links between
the unions and LGBTQ movements
[[link removed]]. The significance
of the Pride for Newry was immense and I felt that I had been to an
historical event.

If they shut the border

All around the town there are reminders of Newry’s role in Irish
history. The Catholic Cathedral built in the 1820s is the earliest in
Ireland. Catholic Emancipation was only granted in 1829, so most
Catholic churches from that period are only found in back streets. The
history of discrimination against the Catholic population and
partition in Northern Ireland is a living memory. The issue of Brexit
has made it even more intense. Outside the Catholic Cathedral, there
is a plaque commemorating a member of the IRA shot by the police in
the 1920s, shortly after partition. For towns like Newry, an open
border with the rest of Ireland is paramount. The town’s economy has
already been visibly hit by the slow draining away of business because
of Brexit fears.

On the morning we left Newry, our B&B host Geraldine told us that, as
a young woman, she had marched in the Civil Rights Movement of 1969
against the gerrymandered and discriminatory state that was Northern
Ireland. ‘If they shut the border, I will be out on the street
marching again,’ she told us.

Recently, bombs have reappeared in border areas. There are growing
waves of violence in some places, like Derry, driven by Brexit and the
refusal of the Tory government to recognise the significance of the
Good Friday Agreement and what is has achieved for peace in the North
of Ireland. Ironically, Newry lies literally on the border with the
adjoining constituency of South Down – once a traditional Unionist
seat that was won by Sinn Féin at the last general election. Enoch
Powell was once MP for South Down, and the current Brexit ideology
being espoused by Johnson, Rees Mogg et al has always been close to
hard line Unionism. All of this is creating a toxic brew with very
dangerous consequences for the North of Ireland.

As I bade farewell to Newry and headed back in the bus to Dublin, I
noticed a young man sitting in front of me with a ticket for the All
Ireland football final which was being played that day in Dublin. For
him, travelling to Dublin for a football game was an ordinary trip
that did not involve any border formalities. He was not old enough to
remember, as I do, the border posts and customs officers, which were
later followed by the army checkpoints and watchtowers. The words of
Geraldine rang in my ears as I travelled south – that she and many
others would take to the streets to defend the open border and their
right to travel freely on the island of Ireland. Newry Pride was an
indication of what could happen in a new united Ireland, where all are
considered equal citizens.

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