Jonathan Swift

Arthur Chichester, mass murderer, thief and usurper whom his Belfast admirers have honoured by naming streets in his memory.

“It is famine and not the sword that is to reduce this country to what is expected”, he said 7^th May 1600, and later, in advocating destruction of the agriculture and beasts, “..a million of swords will not do them (the Irish) so much harm as a winter of famine”, what a charming man to have streets, etc, named in his honour, one would think by now that the Belfast Council would be so ashamed of Chichester’s tyranny and bigotry that they would change the names of anything that was created to ‘honour’ this ogre He obviously had a lot in common with Mountjoy who promised the dying Elizabeth that he would hand her over Ireland, which had been described as having nothing but “carcasses and ashes” .

William Orr, a noble Irish patriot , who died, "a persecuted Presbyterian for a persecuted country ", his aim was to "Unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter under the common name of Irishmen.. to break the connection with England", a noble cause indeed.

Here I am at Ballynure, once the site of an ancient Irish Catholic community , brutally and savagely put to flight in the early 1600's, by English and Scottish armies.

Above in the old local cemetery we are told that the ruins there were of an old anglican church and that Jonathan Swift , who wrote Gullivers Travels was minister there for all of two years, no mention is made that on the same site for centuries stood an ancient Catholic Church. In the vicinty too are some Holy Wells where it is said St. Patrick himself had visited. Back in the early 1600's the Catholic church and graves of the Irish people were desecrated and obliterated and those who  survived the vicious onslaught of the English and Scottish armies fled from the area. 

Let me just say something here, the reader may think I am being sectarian in mentioning those far off atrocities, but the fact it  it is those who re-write history who are being sectarian by omitting these aspects and thereby denying people an  opportunity of being aware of the past evil actions of those who ruled this corner of Ireland and so making them ignorant of why so many villages and townlands that I refer to in my writings are so sparsely peopled by Irish Catholic people, can they be seriously suggesting that Ballynure, Ballylinney, Carmavy, Ballycarry, etc, etc, are 'Protestant Ghettos' and that all that lush land just happens to be in those 'ghetto's' ? The reality is, the area and many around it  are peopled  massively by non-catholics  purely because the 'authorities' enacted  evil ethnic cleansing. The "success" of those far off days of  ethnic cleansing can still be seen today in so far as that the native Irish Catholic population  is still  under 2% in the greater Ballynure area. It has been said 'we can't change the past' but only an ignoramus or a bigot would refuse to try and take lessons from it .! 

This is Ballynure Presbyterian Church where the patriot William Orr was waked as his body passed through the village on its way from Carrickfergus for burial at Templepatrick in 1797. Orr was hanged at Carrickfergus for allegedly administering the oath of allegiance to two british informers  who swore his life away to a drunken jury . Eight months later the redcoats aided and abetted by local slavish trecherous yeomen burned the village to the ground following the 1798 Rebellion.

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