HOW do you tell the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic? A Protestant’s eyes are closer together. We used to believe that when we were children because that’s what everybody said.

I didn’t know any Protestants apart from my piano teacher from the Largey, Stephen Wilson, who we nicknamed “Sahurday man” because like the Protestants in North Derry (or Londonderry as he had it) he spoke with a slight Scottish burr and didn’t pronounce the ‘t’ when he said “See you next Saturday Joe.”

We also knew Davy McArthur, a Protestant man from the Burnfoot who was a modern day Huckleberry Finn. Davy spoke pidgin English in a singsong voice, had a huge smile and very few teeth, laughed “hee hee hee hee heee” and lived out of a poitin bottle. He lived alone in a tumbledown shack in the country, had a huge fireplace where he “jibbled” (as he put it) parafin on the fire to keep it roaring on freezing nights, and ate infrequently. He wheezed with laughter and smoked and communicated more with his facial expressions than language.

My father used to bring him to ours for Christmas dinner, where he was reverentially polite and bore the expression of a man who was amazed that anyone would invite him anywhere.

Twenty years ago, when my mother was the Mayor of Limavady, she turned on the Christmas tree lights in the Burnfoot, causing great upset in the loyalist village. She was heckled as she made a speech about peace and the importance of Christ’s message and no sooner had her back turned than a local man emerged with a chainsaw and to huge cheers, cut the 40 foot tree to the ground, ruining it and smashing the coloured lights that festooned it.

A few days later, council workers came out, salvaged what was left of it, and the 40 foot tree became five foot, since only the top bit could be saved. Limavady Council released a short statement saying they appreciated residents “may be disappointed that they now have a somewhat shorter tree but the council’s resources are not unlimited.” There is an Irish Times article on the incident which you can easily find online. Our Proinnsias and me have spent the week laughing about the “somewhat shorter tree.”

There were some Protestants in Dungiven but they disappeared altogether during the Troubles. Once, during the snow, the Unionist MP for the area Willy Ross appeared on the main street to do an interview with the BBC about the closing of the Protestant school (whose numbers had dwindled to a handful of pupils from surrounding areas) only to be pelted with snowballs. Even the lollipop woman, a relation of my own, dropped her lollipop and joined in. Willie abandoned the interview and ran for it as snowballs came in on him and the TV crew like the Persian arrows raining down on the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

The result of this segregation was like that throughout my formative years, I had set views which were never challenged. When I went to Trinity as an 18 year old, it was my first experience of the outside world.

Trinity was a religious, racial and cultural melting pot, where people had sex, you could smoke pot and debate was king. My fixed views quickly invited the ridicule and laughter of my peers and the humiliation I endured forced me to the realisation that I would have to up my game. It was the beginning of my awakening.

The kids of East Belfast will not have to wait so long. On Saturday morning, I was honoured to be invited by the East Belfast GAA club to the launch of their underage division.

After just one year, they have 400 adult playing members (a total of 13 adult teams spanning ladies and men’s football, camogie and hurling) and are already spending £1,000 a week on renting pitches all over the city.

On Saturday, the pitches were filled with the happy sounds of children from all religions and none, mingling and having fun as a dozen coaches gave it their all. It was a particular delight to find that Brian McGuigan, formerly of Dungiven, was energising the youngest hurling group with his extraordinary personality.

For the ladies’ first ever league game (against Newry Mitchel’s in the 2020 season), nine of the team had never seen a Gaelic pitch before. Richard Maguire, one of the club’s founding members, takes up the story. “Better than that Joe, at our first full board meeting, Dave McGreevy said ‘we need to get players onto a pitch so they can see what a GAA field and posts look like.’ Kimberly Robertson, our vice-chair said ‘I’ve never seen a GAA pitch either.’ Ian Black, vice-secretary, said “me neither.”

Richard works with the East Belfast Community Development Agency. They work in some of the most deprived areas in the North, where homelessness, hunger, drug addiction and unemployment are rife. The committee members all make the same point, that political leadership is absent and that the real work is being done at grassroots level.

Dave McGreevy, standing beside me looking out over the coaches and kids, says “this club is basically an opportunity to bring people together. That’s all we are. We don’t care about religion or traditional politics. We don’t ask who you are or what you are. This is about people getting to know each other and building communities. In the end, that is the only thing that really matters.”

The club crest is instructive. It contains Irish, English and Ulster Scots. There is a Red Hand of Ulster and a shamrock. The backdrop is Samson and Goliath, the legendary Harland & Wolff cranes. On Saturday, those gigantic structures formed the backdrop to the kids’ training session.

At its height, Harland & Wolff shipbuilders employed 35,000 men. In ‘Titanic Struggle: Memory, Heritage and Shipyard Deindustrialization in Belfast’, historian Pete Hodson documents the savage sectarian history of the shipyard.

On July 21, 1920, 7,500 Catholics and what were dubbed “rotten prods” (Protestant workers seen as sympathetic to, or friendly with their Catholic colleagues) were expelled from the shipyard. They were beaten into the lough and chased through the city centre, never to return.

A news report from the time describes how “at least a dozen were injured and taken to Royal Victoria Hospital. A number of men who were attacked were able to escape by hurling themselves into Musgrave Channel and swimming across to the Sydenham shore.”

Another report describes how “men armed with sledge-hammers and other weapons swooped down on the Catholic workers in the shipyards, and did not even give them a chance for their lives’, on July 21. There was no provocation, or no ‘rebel’ cries.

The gates were smashed down with sledges, the vests and shirts of those at work were torn open to see were the men wearing any Catholic emblems, and then woe betide the man who was. One man was set upon, thrown into the dock, had to swim the Musgrave Channel, and having been pelted with rivets had to swim two or three miles, to emerge in streams of blood and rush to the police office in a nude state.”

Over the next 50 years, a few Catholics were admitted into the workforce and survived by keeping their heads down. However, after the Troubles ignited, in July 1970, all 500 of them were forcibly expelled.

Now, the shipyard is a tourist attraction, a symbol of the huge transformation in Northern society. Its past will soon be forgotten, save for Leo diCaprio, Kate Winslett, a museum and a nice new hotel. The notion of expelling anyone from their workplace because of their religion is extinct in the North and will never return.

Belfast is a beautiful and peaceful city now and nothing will change that. Last week, a new loyalist grouping called for street protests in seven different locations on Friday. No one showed up.

Sam McBride, the editor of the NewsLetter, said the column he wrote about it was the most surreal thing he had ever written.

“The loyalist group that called for the protests is now taking credit for the fact that not a single person turned up. The organiser has admitted to me that “to an outsider looking in this doesn’t make entire sense.”

Sam wrote another column this week where he described the tiny pockets of rioting mostly by kids as “anarchy, with no hint of political protest. Violence has become an end in itself.” A reporter asked one young man at Lanark Way why he was rioting. He said “because they won’t let us bury Bobby Storey.”

As the kids of East Belfast GAC will learn very quickly, Protestant and Catholic eyes are exactly the same distance apart.