Three generations ago, I was a teenager in the sixties in a rural community which had a mix of Catholics and Protestants. The older generations had interpretations of the role of each faith based on tradition, sometimes leading to disagreements. The teenagers though, relied on reasoning and made it a non-issue. Recollection of this rivalry was inspired by a person who asked a nonsensical question, “Can you assume it is a Catholic or Protestant family on the basis of their children’s first names?”
I grew up in Westmeath, a mix of both, while Lapasse, six miles to the west had not a single Protestant whatsoever residing there and Beachburg, the same distance to the south had no Catholics. Was someone of the ‘wrong’ faith prevented from settling in those towns and possibly offered an incentive to reside In Westmeath? I also believed back then that Catholics and Protestants grew different coloured beans – my Dad told me that! To survive in Westmeath I had to be wily. Eighty percent of the kids around my age were Catholic and I desperately wanted friends. What it boiled down too: there was little difference between them and myself. We were all gas and no brakes, they used the same cuss words and we all thought our parents didn’t know dick-all about real life. Sundays were tough. Living next door to the Catholic Church, I could see most of my friends going in and coming out of Mass from my window. Why couldn’t I have been born of that persuasion? Not a chance of that as my maternal grandfather was a man of the cloth. After he died when I was 12, my mother said, “Remember, your grandfather can look down and see everything you do – like pee outside.” For years, I was mindful of him observing my every move.
The subject of ‘those versus us’ only popped up when a parent might be overheard to say, “Stay away from those Catholic kids, they will try to convert you.” Of course they never did! I felt terribly insulted one evening. Seven or eight of us were walking by the Catholic Church in a group. One girl didn’t make the ‘sign of the cross’ as she was expected too. Seconds later, her older brother from down the street noticed and screeched at her, sounding like a siren in the heart of the night, “Those Protestants are making you lose your faith.” I glanced around and realized I was the only Protestant in the bunch. So much for his anxiety! We had enough boys one year for a full patrol and joined the Beachburg Boy Scouts. First, a form had to be completed — one question asked our religion. I had no idea how to spell ‘Protestant’, so happened to ask one of the Catholic guys, who knew. As for the other three Beachburg patrols, 100 percent Protestant, they didn’t give our Crow Patrol much pushback – the small remarks in jest.
Two brothers next door and my good friends were so lucky. They had fish for supper on Fridays. I liked the menu and got a standing invitation to eat with them. I also envied them at Christmas Eve. I went to midnight mass so I could watch them open their presents afterwards. Damn, at my house it wouldn’t be for another six hours. One more anomaly was their father, a proponent of the Orange Lodge, yet his family were ‘green’. The lodge held a traditional parade in Westmeath on the twelfth of July to celebrate King Billy for some reason. Despite being controversial, the parade with all its regalia, drums, flutes and a white horse in the lead was impressive but I was unsettled about its pomposity. However, everybody lined up to see and not once was a rock thrown at that white horse or any vile name-calling but I suspected it was on the minds of many.
The sixties witnessed the banned book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” being finally released. I lifted a copy from my uncle and squirreled it away without him any the wiser. My Catholic friends had been forewarned in church that it was a mortal sin to read it. I asked, “Was there any warning about hearing it?” The answer was a ‘No’; so an arrangement was struck. One warm summer evening, four of us slept in a half-finished house where I spent much of the night reading the expurgated parts of that book to them. We all felt so cool getting away with that antic. We now had a heads-up about sex that we couldn’t comprehend anyway!
Back then, no one at our age had an issue with or were actually conscious of the Catholics versus Protestants rivalry, despite our parents and grandparents warnings of being led astray. We accepted their biases but left them at home with them. Friends were more important.
Next week: [Part 2: Rivalries with Lapasse, a narrow-minded grandmother, politics, etc.]
