I remember discovering this 'open letter' during the height of the 'flag protests' in early 2013.
Belfast Telegraph 'My View' by Barry White....from 1972.
Dear Tartan Gang member, (‘My View’ by Barry White)
I don’t suppose you give a damn, but I think I know why you did what you did in East Belfast last week-end. You are young, it is spring, there is nowhere to go, nothing better to do, so you go looking for trouble. I’ve done it myself.
It’s not the pleasantest place to live, East Belfast. The houses are small, overdue for demolition, and the only playing fields are the streets. Youth clubs are fine, but they’re dull when there’s some excitement to be had outside.
It’s the people who make the place. They’re tough on the outside, but couldn’t be kinder to their own sort. They’re proud to come from the wee streets, and most of all they’re proud to be Protestant.
That doesn’t mean they go to church. (When did you last darken a church door?) It means they hold on fast to what Protestantism means to them – a job, or, failing that, the dole; the right to wave the Union Jack and march behind an Orange banner, and the right not to be Irish. It also means the right to see yourself as a cut above Catholics, and to regard them all as rebels.
It used to mean the right to regard the Government of the country as your Government, Stormont as your Parliament, and the R.U.C. as your police force. That’s what’s gone wrong.
Since those civil rights people started marching you’ve seen your little world crumbling. First they got their way by marching and rioting, and then – when the Protestants hit back – by getting their houses burned down. They couldn’t lose, and since the IRA took over, they’ve done even better. Nothing even slowed them down – certainly not internment – and by murdering, maiming and destroying they have succeeded in toppling your Protestant Parliament.
It was enough to make any Protestant blood boil, and it isn’t really surprising that you hit the top last week-end. Those two bombs in Castlereagh Street softened you up, and those pictures of the IRA in the Bogside and the internees getting out were the last straw, even if you don’t count the Vanguard rally in Templemore Avenue.
The message seemed clear, that violence pays, and when you tried to do your thing, you found that the police hadn’t heard of Protestant no-go areas. That’s what led to Saturday’s stoning, followed by shooting from the Catholic side – were you really surprised? – followed by looting and burning.
(When you watched your mums defending you on TV on Friday, you can’t have missed the comparison with the Bogside situation. Women shouting “SS RUC,” talking about you Tartans as their defenders and a Vanguard man playing the SDLP part, trying to cool you down after you had been whipped up.)
The trouble – and that’s why I started this – is that Protestant violence is different from Catholic violence. The Catholics (or those of them who are visible) are trying to destroy a system by violence, which is definitely not possible. For them, violence is a weapon to gain their ends, but for you it can only cause self-inflicted wounds.
The British you must understand, are beginning to look for ways out of the Ulster business. The people have reached that stage already, and the politicians won’t be long in following them, if they can find a way that doesn’t damn them in the eyes of the world. Remember that, before you lift a stone or a petrol bomb in anger. You could be responsible for giving them a way out and losing all the respect that your previous restraint has gained you.
My point is that I would like you to think, rather than just react, and I admit that your old politicians are not giving you much of a lead. (They didn’t help much about improving East Belfast, either.) They talk about three choices for Ulster – with its own strong Parliament, or totally integrated into Britain, or “going it alone,” as Bill Craig says it can. Leaving out the last, which everyone living under the shadow of the shipyard crane must, I’m sorry to tell you that neither of the other two has any chance.
The Unionists knew that, too, but they cannot say it yet, because they can’t talk about the only other choice. It will sound like high treason to you in your current mood, but if you see that the real choice is between a watered-down British-run Stormont a new kind of Ireland – propped up with British money for some time, and probably with dual nationality for a generation or two – you may yet see yourselves as the vanguard of the Protestant for the best deal in Ireland.
Obviously it is unthinkable that you or your friends would sit back and tolerate any kind of unification brought about, even 10 years hence, by IRA violence. But would it not be a totally different matter if Protestants stood together to twist Eire’s arm to the point to the point where it would look like she were surrendering to Ulster Protestant rule? It isn’t remotely on, of course, for years to come, and then not until the IRA has shown that it is prepared to accept less than its “socialist” independent Ireland. But keep it in mind, won’t you, just in case the Whitelaw initiative doesn’t work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Belfast Telegraph, Wednesday May 10th, 1972
