In Nestor and again in Proteus, Stephen
thinks of the Ulster Protestants who harassed Catholic peasants in
the 1780s and 90s. In the latter chapter, Kevin Egan is
wearing what Stephen fancies to be "his peep of day boy's
hat"—odd, since Egan was not an activist of that stripe. The
Peep o' Day Boys were agrarian Protestants who staged raids on
Catholic cottages in the early-morning hours. Eventually they
were subsumed into the orange
lodges. Stephen earlier has thought about a massacre
that occurred at one of these lodges in 1795: "The
lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of
papishes."
The Peep of Day Boys initiated a campaign of ethnic
cleansing, seeking to force Catholics out of County Armagh.
Notices reproducing Oliver Cromwell's notorious phrase "To
Hell or Connaught" were posted on the doors of homes with a
date, and if the cottage was not evacuated by that date it was
burned down. Catholics organized a resistance organization
called the Defenders, but many thousands of Catholics left the
county in 1795 and 1796. When a group of mostly unarmed
Defenders gathered at "the lodge of Diamond"
on September 21, they were cut down by heavily armed
Protestants. The organized resistance has allowed Protestants
to remember the killings as a glorious victory over a
threatening mob: in Orange Order lore they are memorialized as
the Battle of the Diamond. In the Catholic cultural memory
that Stephen is drawing on, the killings in Armagh were a
massacre, and they hold much the same resonance that the 1972
Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry would later acquire.
A "papish," according to the OED, is a papist.
The phrase "Armagh the splendid," as commentators since
Thornton have noted, appears in 19th century Irish poet James
Clarence Mangan's translation of Prince Aldfrid's
Itinerary through Ireland, written by 17th century
Northumbrian King Aldfrid. The fourth of the poem's fifteen
stanzas reads:
I also found in Armagh the splendid,
Meekness, wisdom, and prudence blended,
Fasting, as Christ hath recommended,
And noble souncillors untranscended.
The phrase returns in Cyclops, and Gifford notes
there that "Armagh was the 'metropolis' of ancient Ireland,
the religious capital and a 'world-famous' seat of
learning."
