They usually began at around 11.30pm on 11th July, with crowds of people gathering round a large stack of pallets, tires, old furniture, mattresses, and anything else that would burn. All of it drenched in petrol. At the stroke of midnight, someone would approach the pile, throw on some lit matches, and with a "yooo" from the crowd the giant stack would be rapidly engulfed in flames.

The children at these events would have enthusiastically participated in the recruitment of materials for, and building of the bonfire, raiding local factory yards and anywhere else with wood and tires. And seeing their efforts go up in smoke, they stood and gazed at the bonny blaze, or scampered around daring each other to jump over mini-bonfires dotted around the main event, or tried to steal stray cans of lager. Or, holophrastically blurted out slogans like, "fuck the Pope" (pron. "fawck the Poop"). Or, in a sing-song voice, "fuck the Pope and the IRA, doo da, doo da". Or tried to remember some lyrics from 'The Sash'.

There was always an ugly contingent of pissed Loyalist spides hanging around with the local UVF family who organised the blaze. And they were the organisers, or friends of the organisers. They were the ones who knew what they were there for, what the bonfire was all about, what 'R.E.M. 1690' meant, why "No King Barry Rule", and why it was necessary to "kill all taigs". Some of them might even have a certain, mythical, sense of history. They played dreary, murderous anti-Catholic songs, celebrations of the 'Volunteers' and of their proud history going back to William of Orange, while sinking can after can from stacks of 24 packs, followed by bottles of whisky and vodka. They worked themselves up for a night of petty terror. This might involve bricking the windows of some Catholic residents, for example. There was a family next door to us, whom we were good friends with, who never came out for bonfire night. Sometimes, I think, they made sure they were away for bonfire night. 

There was also the Parades next day to think about. Some of these young men were band members, after all. I remember one year, members of the Murray Memorial Flute Band found a Catholic bus-driver, and stabbed him repeatedly and left him lying on the roadside. An elderly woman tried to save the man: she just kept wrapping him in towels, ten or a dozen of them, whatever she had in her house. Of course, he bled to death in her arms before the ambulance got there. These people, our bonfire companions, were the scum of the estates: the psychos, the bullies, the bigots, the refuse. They terrified everyone, some more than others. They ignored us as we played, huddled in groups; we occasionally looked with fear and fascination at them.

It's hard to be sentimental about the working class when you've seen this side of it. Perhaps you can call to mind those ghoulish images of Southern lynchings, where there are white children, white parents, local notables, sheriffs, men and women, gathered around the hanging body of a black man, smiling for the camera. They have the atmosphere of some sort of macabre festival of supremacy, celebrating the confirmation of white dominance, the plenitude of white being, by means of a human sacrifice. On bonfire night, people were burned in effigy -- the IRA man, the Pope, the fenian, the fenian's fleg -- while the actual terror was carried out somewhere off-stage, out of the bright glare of the consuming fire. But no doubt it served a similar affirming purpose, only it's the British crown that is affirmed.

This culture, long-term, is on its way out. Younger people in Northern Ireland are increasingly anxious to get out of the cultural, political and economic sump. The exodus of people from the six counties every year tells its own story. Local councils, anxious to attract multinational investment, are increasingly embarrassed by the outward signs of Loyalism. Some of them spend a lot of time trying to erase its hallmarks -- the red-white-and-blue kerbstones, the bunting, occasionally the murals. It is not that they have stopped being sectarian, but there's a desire for respectability, and one really wants to go back to the war.

But there are quite a lot of desolate urban backwaters in Northern Ireland. Places which never had much to begin with, and have been losing hand-over-fist for decades. Places which, insofar as they had any life, were supported by a local factory that has long since gone out of business, or by small businesses which have given up in the face of out-of-town malls (shappin centres), or by army barracks or giant police stations which have been closed.

Now these are not even necessarily the poorest parts of the six counties. The proddy-gerrymandered eastern half has always been the more affluent half. It's where the infrastructure is built, where factories are built, where employment is concentrated. But there's less of what little there was to go around. There are a lot of dead town centres. And there are a lot of people who want 'their country' back. They want Britain to mean what they once thought it meant. They want to be British. They're beginning to think they lost the war. In a way, they're right, of course: but they lost to the extent that their side won. They lost because they're stuck in a polity which they fought to preserve, but which has no raison d'etre other than to be at war.

What would you do with this cultural rubble, this debris? Maybe you would expect me to advocate a salvaging operation. To go looking for tiny slivers of salvation right there in the DUP's fiefdoms. Maybe, because I'm like this, you would expect a bit of ecstatic nature writing, carolling the coast road, pine forests, volcanic causeway, Norman-era castles, county-sized lough, braids, six mile waters, round towers, irregular, poky hamlets and villages, viciously wind-whipped countryside, mountainscapes lined with ancient walls where you're apt to suddenly find yourself surrounded by rushing heavenly clouds. Why not, indeed, go up to the mountaintop?

But I have a better idea. What I suggest we do is this. We take the flegs. The guns. The balaclavas. The murals. The Britishness. The sombre, violent Orange pubs. The wee hard man prototype. The provincial evangelism. The bowler hats and sashes. The small town politics of respectability. The concern for "traditional mawrridge". The twenty-four packs. The smug, 'our wee country' attitude. The platitudinous veneration of community, and the lamentation of their 'division'. The pompous UTV newscasters. The under-serviced, jobless sink estates with their faded red-white-and-blue.

And we get it all together. In a neat, conical pile. And, at the stroke of midnight, as 11th turns to 12th, we burn it, with holy fire.