Our Only Crime Is Loyalty

These are the boards at the chip shop (formerly a Spar and before that a Mace) in the centre of the Mourneview estate, Lurgan.

Above, and in detail below, are the pieces from the front of the shop, in Pollock Drive. Anti-clockwise from bottom-left:

First: “Believe, we dare not boast,/Believe, we do not fear/We stand to pay the cost,/In all that men hold dear.//What answer from the North?/One Law, one Land, one Throne/If England drive us forth,/We shall not fall alone!” Kipling’s poem Ulster.

The first stanza also appears in a Belfast RHC mural, and other lines from the poem have been used elsewhere: We Perish If We Yield | The Terror, Threats, And Dread.

Second: YCV

Next (tall piece): A company, 1st battalion, Mid Ulster brigade UVF – Lurgan as well as Broxburn (outside Edinburgh) and Thornliebank (near Glasgow).

Next: PAF plus (out of frame in the wide shot) “When injustice becomes law resistance becomes duty.” The same panel was seen in Ballyclare, though for the 1st East Antrim battalion rather than the Mid Ulster brigade.

Above: A tribute to the Ulster Volunteers from the area: the 9th battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers joined the 108th brigade in the 36th (Ulster) Division; the 5th battalion joined the 31st brigade and the 10th (Irish) Division. This board goes back to (at least) 2011.

Finally (top left), a UDU/UDA board, to 1 company, D battalion, South Belfast. All of the remaining pieces are UVF/PAF.

Around the corner, in Mourne Road, a gallery of photographs of the Craigavon Protestant Boys (Fb) past and present, with a plaque in memory of Victor Stewart. “Our only crime is loyalty.”

In the adjacent Spelga Park: “Unbowed & unbroken – our only crime is loyalty – Mourneview/Gret estate bonfire” with an unusual combination of shamrock and Orange lily.