BELFAST
We spent the first night high up on Finaghy Road North in streets completely devoid of light. IRA guerrillas waited in the darkness behind barricades made of sheet-iron and paving stones. The Falls Road, the main street of the Catholic district, was sealed off. There was heavy fighting in the White Rock Road. Finaghy was deadly quiet. There was no moon and occasionally the stillness would be punctuated by a distant burst from an automatic rifle.
The lads want the Army, an old friend said, they want to have a go.
Now, finally, everyone seems to want to have a go. The men of the IRA are fighting a civil war against 12,000 heavily armed British troops. In addition to the British troops there is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) built on the remnants of the old discredited B-Special militia. Since Saturday at least 25 people have died in the fighting, hundreds have been injured. Almost 4000 refugees have traveled across the border into the Irish Republic. Factories have been demolished, homes put to the torch. More than 300 men have been arrested and held without arraignment under provisions of the Special Powers Act, a law that the Greek or South African government would love to have for themselves. The city is in a shambles and still the fighting goes on.
Yesterday the fighting was sporadic. A light drizzle fell through the day. There was shooting from the Divis Street flats, a brief battle made more complicated by the presence of UVF snipers. Most of all it was a day in which all sides caught their breath. The English Prime Minister Edward Heath had finally finished the yacht race he had been on while his subjects died and was back in London. There had been a call from Dublin for a three-party conference and some wanted to see what would develop. But nobody had any real hope.
In the light of day the signs of the bitterness and blood were everywhere on the Whiterock Road which leads to the largely pro-IRA housing estate of Ballymurphy. The walls of the city cemetery had been torn out in big gaping piles for use as barricades. Along the wall of the cemetery one of the “lads” (frequently a euphemism for the IRA) had painted in two-foot-high letters the ultimate question of an oppressed people: “Is There A Life Before Death?” It stood there in the gray morning light at once very Catholic and very revolutionary while children played in the rubble which had been pushed aside by the British bulldozers. Is there a life before death?
The night before, sitting in someone’s parlor on Finaghy Road talking to the women, who were fearful for their men, one middle-aged woman burst out, “If I was a man I’d get a gun myself. I was never bitter before. I thought you could take this life here and hope for the best. Well, there’s a lot of us here now just won’t wait. The men on this street are all unemployed, every last one of them and they’ve got nothing to lose. They feel disgraced in front of their women and children. Now they’re fighting. They’re goin’ after something and even if it’s all bloody hopeless, at least they’ll go like men.”
The women have been extraordinary. In the afternoon on the Falls Road at the corner of Broadway about 300 women and a few dozen children gathered around a Saracen tank and battered away on it with the metal tops of garbage cans until it left. Across the street a knot of men gathered in front of the Beehive, an ornate saloon full of brass and wood. They wore the sullen masks of men who had been too long unemployed. But the women were firebrands, led by a red-haired, tight-lipped young woman who gripped a stick in her hand.
“If the nationalists was all together, see, they’d be able to do it,” she said tossing her hair in the drizzle. “Too many of the men are Jilly-Jaries. They wear the skirts. But the women, we’re not afraid to die for the country.”
She talked about the First Presbyterian Church, a great orange-brick pile that stood in silence a few doors away. “We haven’t done anything to the Protestants. We haven’t touched that church of theirs. They’ve burned our churches. They’ve driven our people out of their area. But we know it’s not the Protestants. It’s the politicians.”
“I don’t know where it’s goin’,” the red-haired woman said, “but they can’t put the best of our men in prison. They can’t keep doing this without a fight. It’s a war now and I don’t care because I’m not afraid to die.”
The clouds moved slowly through the sky. The rain fell. An empty hearse from O’Kane’s Funeral Parlor came down the Falls Road. Someone else had been buried at the cemetery up on the hill and standing in the strange chill you were certain that before it was over Mr. O’Kane would have a lot more customers.
BELFAST
From 8000 feet it looked like the same old Ireland; the green, placid rectangles running off to the Atlantic, as if the earth were celebrating its own sweet order; farm houses and hedgerows and cattle decorating its face; mists lacing the low hills. But as we descended into this hard northern city, that old Ireland began to fade, as the cold smoke of revolution twisted up from the red-brick streets, and the faces of the other passengers tightened into masks. The Belfast face is an anthology of masks.
“Too long a sacrifice,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “can make a stone of the heart.” And moving into Belfast in this desperate week, you saw that too long a sacrifice had already taken place: too many years of bigotry, too many years of being offered humiliation or exile as the sole choices of a life, and finally too much blood.
Instead you saw the skeletons of transmitting towers rusting in the countryside; suburban houses reduced to rubble; great gaping holes in the once tight-packed walls of the downtown avenues; plywood and tin covering a thousand shattered windows. Belfast was a town at war, its heart turning to stone.
And as we walked into customs, at Aldergrove Airport, for a long and tedious search, everyone there knew that the crunch had come. The day before, 13 Irishmen had been returned to the Irish earth, while 20,000 people stood in lashing rain and sleet outside St. Mary’s Church in Derry. Inside the church, the bishops and lord mayors and aldermen sat in silken mourning beside the families of the dead. But Ireland flowed up the hills of the Catholic ghetto called the Creggan, made up of men with cloth caps, women with worn faces, the working people of Derry, scattered under umbrellas holding off the rain. Bernadette Devlin stood outside in the rain, with Ireland.
That ceremony was at the heart of the crunch. Those 13 had been shot down on Sunday Bloody Sunday, and the Irish tragedy hurtled forward in a series of jump cuts: Bernadette Devlin slamming Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons; the British Home Stores in Belfast being blown apart at dawn; the Republic withdrawing its ambassador from London and sending Foreign Secretary Hillery to New York; and then 30,000 people in Dublin burning out the British Embassy. After Sunday there was more happening in Ireland than the IRA.
In the afternoon we went to the Lombard Room of the Royal Avenue Hotel, where officers of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Assn. announced to a packed smokey press conference that Sunday’s march in the border town of Newry would go on as scheduled. The British reporters practically interrogated the civil rights people as if simply showing up in a public place in Northern Ireland was a guarantee of violence. But in Derry last Sunday the only dead were Irishmen, none of whom were armed. If this Sunday’s march turned violent it would be the British Army that turned it violent, not Irishmen asking for civil rights.
At nightfall, a dense brown fog mixed with the smoke of burning buildings seeped through the city. We started to move towards the Catholic ghetto in the Lower Falls Road. British soldiers edged their way through the fog, their blackened faces looking as blank as the nose of a machine gun. In the distance, we heard a burst of automatic weapons fire, muffled shouts, and men running in the fog. There was no edge to the buildings, no conventional geography in those darkened streets.
We were put up against a wall and searched. There was the tap-tap-tap of a rifle again. Up ahead, a mangled pile of vehicles burned an orange hole in the brown fog. The British were trying to clear the barricades, which had been built to prevent them from having easy access to the area, and from the Divis Street flats, Irishmen with guns were shooting back. A knot of young people, grim and almost insanely courageous, heaved rocks and curses at the Saracen light tanks.
“Bastards, murderin’ bastards,” someone shouted from the darkness. There were more voices in the dark, running feet, smashing glass, isolated shots, and still the fog moved down the Falls Road. The British laid down a barrage of 4-inch-long rubber bullets from grenade launchers and the young people scattered. More shots came from the Divis Street flats. Two rounds slammed into the plywood covering of the shuttered bar where I was standing. And then suddenly it was quiet. The fog covered everything, and the British soldiers started to withdraw.
It was Friday morning and the night belonged to the IRA.
BELFAST
You see them shopping along the Shankill Road in the dull grainy Northern afternoons: tidy women pushing baby carriages, men in wool suits, children playing with plastic guns. The side streets are bristling with Union Jacks and red, white and blue bunting, and you can see the gray iron wall of the “peace line” at the end of some of the streets, and the spray-can graffiti of the Protestant ghetto: “IRA Beware” and “No Pope Here” and “Home Rule Is Rome Rule” and “No Surrender.”
These are the Protestants of Northern Ireland, and seldom has a majority ever acted more like a minority; these are people who inhabit a fortress, their minds in a state of siege.
“We’re British,” a man told me one afternoon, standing angrily on a corner of Sandy Row, with the stunted slum houses of the Protestant working class ghetto spread out behind him. “We’ll remain British, even if Heath sells us out, even if Faulkner sells us out.”
The man was a welder in the Harland and Woolf shipyards (in which there are only 100 Catholics in a 9000-man work force). He spoke in the hard, heavy accents of the Belfast working class; his tone, with all its cargo of intractable resentment and suspicion of betrayal, was unmistakably Irish. In London, he would be labeled “Paddy” along with the rest of the Irish. But here in Belfast, this city strangling on the stale meal of history, he was insisting that he was British; it was as if a can of tomato soup, through some act of pop alchemy, could describe itself as a ham sandwich.
“The basic confusion here,” a British reporter said to me one night, “is that they’ve got their notions of lunatic patriotism mixed up with their notions of lunatic religion. They’re sick with religion.”
The phrase was apt. If Belfast is not precisely sick with organized religion, it is certainly sick with churches (the buildings, not the faiths). The churches are everywhere: 55 for the Church of Ireland (Anglican), 65 for the Presbyterians, 35 for the Methodists, 4 for the Reformed Presbyterians, 17 for the Baptists, 9 for the Congregationalists, 6 for the Evangelical Presbyterians, 24 for the Roman Catholics, 4 for the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, 8 for the Elem Pentecostals, 1 for the Christian Scientists, 13 for the Salvation Army, 2 for the Society of Friends, 2 for the Moravians, 5 for the Apostolics, 1 for the Plymouth Brethren, 2 for the Emanual Mission, 5 for the Free Presbyterians, 3 for the Church of Latter Day Saints, 1 for the Seventh Day Adventists, plus 1 Railway Mission, 1 Coalmen’s Mission, and a number of smaller gospel halls. There is one church for every 1000 adults. And in the 1961 census, only 64 people in all of Northern Ireland (pop: 1,500,000) described themselves as atheists.
The result of this overdose of organized Christianity has been destruction, bigotry, fear, hatred, paranoia and death. Walking the streets of this town, where the smoke from the bombed-out buildings hangs in the air for days while church spires stab at the skies like the spears of pagan armies, it is difficult to understand what Christianity thinks it is doing here.
There are, of course, thousands of Protestants who are neither bigots nor Bible-thumping fundamentalist lunatics, and a number of them have finally begun to talk about the inevitability of a 32-county Ireland. But down in those Shankill churches, many of the less educated are continuing to lock themselves into the prison of dogma.
The phrases have the high keening tenor of apocalypse about them: “Roman Catholicism is the Anti-Christ, Greatest of all Harlots, and Cause of all Our Present Discontents. Bernadette Devlin is the Pope’s Whore.”
The mixture of lurid sexual metaphor with statements of moral purity laces the language of the Protestant ghettoes; the language is accompanied by an almost touchingly naive belief in the now-forgotten slogans of the past. Consider the words of one Protestant battle hymn (“Ye Loyalists of Ireland”):
Ye Loyalists of Ireland
Come, Rally round the Throne!
Thro’ weal or woe prepare to go,
Make England’s Cause your own;
Remember your allegiance,
Be this your Battle Cry,
“For Protestant Ascendancy
In Church and State we’ll Die!”
It’s a measure of how removed some sections of this city are from the rest of the world that grown men can still sing that song and mean it, in the last third of the 20th century. They can still march in the great Protestant parades on the 12th of July, festooned with orange sashes, crowned with bowler hats, in some pathetic imitation of their old rulers, talking as if the Battle of Boyne, when the Protestants smashed the Catholics, had taken place the week before and not in 1690.
“Rem. 1690,” of all things, is still scrawled on the crumbling walls of the Protestant ghettos, and wonderfully decorative paintings of William of Orange appear everywhere.
The terrible thing, of course, is that when all the festive marching has finished, and the dread invasion of the Papists has been repulsed, and all the defiant songs have been sung, the men of the Orange Order retreat back to Sandy Row and the streets off the Shankill Road, and they are poor again and wondering whether their sons will have to quit school and go to work, and whether their daughters will go off to England, and whether this week they might actually have a piece of steak.
There is much talk now in the North about the possibility of a violent Protestant backlash. In effect, there has been no fighting here between Protestants and Catholics since 1969; the fighting has really been between the IRA and the British Army. All arms searches have been in Catholic areas; no members of the Protestant militant groups — the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Tartans and others — were interned last Aug. 9th.
One reason for the ferocity of the Catholic and Republican resistance here is that the British Army’s task appears to be to disarm the Catholics, thereby leaving them at the mercy of a heavily armed Protestant majority. There are 100,000 licensed guns in the hands of Protestants, and one Belfast reporter told me that the number of unlicensed ones might be double that.
“This is what the backlash is supposed to be about,” the reporter told me. “It won’t actually happen, of course. You won’t get 100,000 Protestants fighting the Catholics any more than you ever see 50,000,000 Arabs assembling to fight Israel. But it serves the political ends of the people in power to keep talking about a backlash. They might, though I doubt it, actually talk it into happening.”
BELFAST
On the last day, the Saracens still moved through the city with their guns bristling and the eyes of the soldiers alert for sudden movement, while people stood on the streets in sullen hostility. The prisoners were still behind the wire at Long Kesh and Magilligan; there were still Irishmen stuffed in the hold of the prison ship Maidstone, standing in the Belfast harbor, within sight of the country they loved so much they were willing to die or be jailed for it.
A department store had been blown up, a bank raided, soldiers fired on in some country town.” Once again, it became devastatingly clear that reporters are essentially tourists at other people’s tragedies.
And yet when you prepare to leave this tragic country, there is always a sense that the story has not been fully told, that there is neither language nor sufficient compassion to properly spin the tale. The country hurt Yeats into poetry. It has not changed. Not in 50 years. Not in 300.
I wish I had been able to tell it all better, to explain that what is happening in the northeast corner of this island off the shores of Western Europe has something important to say to those of us who live in America. All the big abstractions are in it: the need for justice, the oppression that can lead men to violence, the destruction that always follows when decency and human goodness are set aside with contempt and bitterness.
But this is also about men who cannot feed their children and have seen them go off to Australia and America and Liverpool for five generations, and have decided at last that no more children will have to abandon the country in which they are born.
If that takes the Thompson gun, if it takes gelignite in the night, if it takes membership in the IRA, no matter; in Andersonstown, the Belfast stronghold of the Provisional IRA, there is 41 per cent unemployment among heads of families; but they are not leaving. They are prepared to die on their feet in their own land.
The story is also about women: easily the most extraordinary group of women I’ve ever met. Their men are in the concentration camps, or on the run. But go down into the Bogside in Derry, move through Ballymurphy and Andersonstown and Ballymacarat in Belfast, and you will see women holding it together; they paint the walls white in the afternoons to make the British soldiers better targets at night; they bang the garbage can lids when the soldiers approach, to warn the IRA men that the soldiers are coming and the arms must be stashed or used. They manage families, and have time for tea and gossip; but they are the iron of the Irish rebellion. In Edward R. Murrow’s phrase (used about the British in 1940), they are people who have decided to live a life, and not an apology.
Northern Ireland means something to Americans because much of what is happening here is happening in other forms in the United States. “We’re the blacks of Northern Ireland,” one young Irishman said to me. And there are of course parallels to the black experience in America. In Northern Ireland, Catholics are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The artificial barrier of religion is used in the same way that the artificial matter of skin color is used in the United States, to separate working men from each other, to the advantage of a few.
In fact, since 1969 there have been no direct clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. There has been an urban guerrilla war between the IRA and the British Army; there has been much destruction of property. But there have been no true religious riots, no more than there were actual race riots in America during the late 1960s.
A number of blacks employed violence against property and against authority, an authority they believed was corrupt and oppressive; but there were never any large confrontations between blacks and whites. The IRA men are now essentially doing the same thing, with the large differences being that they are fighting in a much smaller country and they are a much larger minority in Northern Ireland than the blacks are in the United States. But their basic motivations, like those of the blacks, are economic. They are poor; they are the men of no property, and they want to live decent lives.
At present, the IRA are winning their guerrilla war. Even with internment, even with the presence of 15,000 British troops, the men and women of the Provisional wing of the IRA are continuing to fight. It is not just the killing of British soldiers by which you measure their effectiveness; they are also destroying the economy of the country.
They are winning because they are not losing. When a band of urban guerrillas can hold off the British Army and provide protection for their own people while causing extensive damage to the opposition, they are winning.
When I first went to Northern Ireland in 1963, the IRA were considered a tiny band of dreamy fanatics. That is no longer the case.
The two most recent events that insured their continued existence were the start of internment on Aug. 9 last year, and the killing of 13 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. Those killings ended any possibility that the general Catholic population could ever accept the authority of the Northern Ireland government at Stormont, and destroyed any vestigial belief that the British Army was there in a spirit of fair-minded good will.
After Bloody Sunday, it was up to the IRA to fight on forever, if necessary, because there seemed no other choice.
They will not have to fight on forever, of course, because the British government will not be able to sustain the Northern Ireland situation much longer. Public opinion polls show that a majority of British people want the troops out of Northern Ireland.
The Heath government is floundering around in multiple crises: Rhodesia, the miners’ strike, the great power shortage, and unemployment that has passed 1,000,000 and is climbing. Before this year is out, and probably sooner than later, the war in Northern Ireland will go to a conference table.
At that conference table, everyone who might upset a settlement must be represented. The IRA will be there, because, like the Viet Cong, they have bled for the right to be there. The militant Protestants will be there, so that their suspicions about the motives of the Catholic South can be eased; in talks with literally hundreds of Catholics in Northern Ireland, not one ever said that he or she would like to do to the Protestants what the Protestants have been doing to the Catholics for so many years. Not one argued for union with the Catholic South on terms dictated from Dublin.
Such a peace conference must lead to the final end of the British presence in Ireland and the creation of a new state. The tough, hard people of Northern Ireland have fought for too long to see their fight usurped by the comfortable middle-class bureaucrats of Dublin.
They want a new Ireland, not simply an Ireland in which the six counties in the North are tacked onto the South. A peace conference would almost certainly lead to an all-Ireland constitutional convention, with full representation for every possible point of view, from right-wing fascist to the Maoists and the great majority in between. And from that convention will come the new Ireland, shaped and led by the Irish.
All of this assumes that there is reason and compassion in London, which might be a false assumption. But if Heath and the British government keep on this way, there is no prospect for anything except more killing and more destruction. Until the day when reason prevails, the fighting will go on.
There are no Saint Patrick’s Day parades in the Ireland of Gerry Adams. There are no leprechauns. There is no green beer. There are few toora-loora-loora sentimentalities, no room for sure-and-begor-rah stage-Irishmen. Gerry Adams lives in the real Ireland, and it’s a very dangerous place.
“I suppose there’s a 90 per cent chance I’ll be assassinated,” Adams said in early 1984, “and that upsets me on a human level.”
On March 14, 1984, some of the people who would like to permanently upset Adams on a human level made their move. In broad daylight in the shadow of the Victorian city hall in Belfast, three members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Protestant paramilitary group, came roaring from a side street in a gray Cortina and fired nine shots at a car carrying Adams and three friends. Adams was shot in the neck, right shoulder and upper arm. But this time, to the dismay of his enemies, Adams would live.
At 38, lean, bearded, tweedy, he is the head of Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Party (IRA) in its fight for a unified Ireland. He is the elected member of the British Parliament from West Belfast, although he refuses to swear an oath of loyalty to the British Grown and formally take the seat. Adams is a republican, with a small “r,” and a socialist. And though he is capable of self-mocking laughter, dark ironies, private humors, Gerry Adams is a very serious man.
Some of that seriousness is evident in the major facts of his life. Consider just one: from 1970 to 1980, Gerry Adams, the son of a day-laborer, spent 4V2. years in British prison camps without ever coming before a jury. During that same decade, he was on the run for 14 months, always moving, wary of informers, hunted by British Army agents and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which is the British-financed police force in the six counties of the North.
It was a heartbreaking decade in modern Irish history, and Adams was an intricate part of its numerous tragedies. He was a close friend of Bobby Sands, who died in a hunger strike, and he knew most of the others who followed Sands to the martyr’s grave. Many of Adams’ other republican friends have been killed, maimed or imprisoned in the grueling war that started in August 1969. Some have given up, left the field of battle, stepped away from the movement, emigrated. Adams struggles on. Dismiss him as a romantic revolutionary, say that the dream of a united Ireland is hopeless, that Irish nationalism is an anachronism, but you must give Gerry Adams this: he has not chosen to live an easy life.
“Adams speaks with the authority of his experience,” a Dublin newspaperman told me. “That’s his advantage over all other politicians in this country, north or south. He has paid a stiff personal price for his beliefs, and that can’t be taken away from him.”
In the years since the 1981 hunger strikes, Adams has led Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone” in Irish) to a prominent place in Irish politics. Sinn Fein has broadened its base, rolled up large votes, and begun to build a Tammany-style service organization, with six advice centers in West Belfast alone. It now seems possible that Adams might supplant John Hume, of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), as principal representative of the Catholic nationalist side of the northern political equation. At the same time, Sinn Fein has become more active in the 26-county Republic to the south, battering heroin peddlers in the slums of Dublin, trying to channel the anger and disillusion of unemployed Irish youth into politics, presenting an alternative to what Adams calls “the tweedledum and tweedledee” of the Republic’s two major political parties.
“I think we’ll do all right in the next elections,” Adams says. “We’ve got a few things going for us.”
There are a number of people who believe that Adams is a mere front man for the IRA, if not its actual leader. Since membership in the IRA would send him to jail, the truth might not be known until the war is over. But to some extent, the question is academic; Adams frankly, warmly, openly supports the IRA.
“If a section of the Irish people chose to resist by use of arms the British presence in Ireland, as needless to say they have chosen to do, generation after generation, then politically I will, of course, defend their right to do so.”
He is obviously aware of the terrible excesses of the war, the often murderous stupidity and carelessness, the outrages of the bombing campaigns. “I would certainly not attempt to justify any action in which civilians are killed,” he has said. “I naturally regret very much all such deaths. But since it’s not the policy of the IRA to kill civilians, I could not condemn them for accidental killings. In any war situation, civilians unfortunately suffer and die.”
And he adds: “The presence of the gun in Irish politics is not the sole responsibility of the Irish. The British were responsible for putting it there in the first place. And they continue to use it to stay in Ireland. No amount of voting will get them out.”
When Pope John Paul came to Ireland and delivered a homily on the need to end the violence, Adams said:
“I believe the Pope left a bigger, greater challenge to the Catholic Church than he did to the republicans. In principle, most republicans would agree with what the Pope said, but republicans don’t see themselves involved in violence. They see themselves involved in a perfectly legitimate struggle. I’m sure that if the Pope was asked for an opinion on an armed Communist takeover of some country, he would say it was quite legitimate to use force to resist it, and our opinion is that it is quite legitimate to resist the armed takeover of our country.”
Adams has spent most of his life in resistance to the British presence in Ireland. He lived as a child in Leeson Street in one of the worst Belfast slums, went to St. Finian’s primary school, St. Mary’s Christian Brothers School, and first saw action in 1964, when he was involved in the Divis Street riots. These were triggered by the display of a forbidden Irish tricolor in a window, an act that provoked a brutal attack by the RUC in which many civilians were injured. Soon he was deeply involved in republican politics, reading the literature of Irish revolution while working as a bartender at the Duke of York pub on Donegal Street. In those same years, he joined committees trying to alleviate housing and employment problems in Belfast and became a founding member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. At the time, there were almost no IRA members in the North; the organization had virtually ceased to exist. Then in August 1969, Belfast exploded, and Adams joined the self-defense teams in the Catholic ghettos. In March 1972, he was interned without charges, along with hundreds of other young Irishmen, and sent to the prison camp at Long Kesh. He soon found himself in the notorious Cage 11, from which many IRA leaders were to emerge. Adams does not, however, agree with the widely held theory that Long Kesh was the university of Irish republicanism.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said one recent morning. “But I think that aspect was very much exaggerated. They’ve got to explain this so they say, ‘Well, they were all stupid, they all got arrested, they all went to jail, and in jail they all got very clever, and then they got out and caused all this trouble.’ I don’t agree with that.”
But for Adams and his friends, much of the time in Cage 11 was well spent. “It was really a matter of putting in order whãt people already knew. That was my experience. Cage 11 was actually a wee bit different from all the other cages, because it was a wee bit crazy. It was sort of a M* A*S*H camp. The rest of the camp was militaristic, regimented, like a British Army thing, with officers of the day and so on.” Adams smiled. “Cage n didn’t have any of that.”
Today, Adams works most days in Connolly House, the headquarters of Sinn Fein in the Andersonstown section of Belfast. In a large room on the ground floor, local people wait to see Sinn Fein volunteers for help with problems. Sometimes the problems involve domestic disputes, erring husbands, disturbed children, other casualties of the war. Some visitors might have problems with government agencies or conditions in government-owned housing.
“We always did some of this work,” Adams says. “But now, with electoral legitimacy, we can call up on behalf of a constituent and do the same work with some clout.”
Connolly House is located in a small area of shops and two-story houses, and it was here that Martin Galvin of Queens came to speak last year in defiance of a British ban on his presence in the northern democracy. As soon as Galvin appeared at the side of Adams, the RUC charged, smashing into Irish and American members of the crowd. One RUC man fired a plastic bullet at a 20-year-old Irishman named John Downe and killed him. The American visitors, most of whom were members of Irish Northern Aid, which supports Sinn Fein and the IRA, were shocked by the viciousness of the assault. Adams was not.
“That’s the way they are,” Adams says. He likes to point out that the British have “a political code disguised as a moral code; they can use force and nobody else can.” Noting the current discussion of “widespread alienation” in the North, Adams says, “Thatcher’s way of dealing with alienation is to shoot the alienated.”
Adams clearly wants the support of Irish-Americans, but doesn’t believe Sinn Fein or the IRA should alter their goals to please potential supporters. He is, for example, frank about being a socialist, and doesn’t accept the conventional analysis that the Northern Ireland struggle is just a tribal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. He certainly doesn’t want a “Catholic Ireland” and has clashed on a number of occasions with the Catholic hierarchy. The Sinn Fein vision of a united Ireland is decidedly nonsectarian.
“Historically, the church was always in the position of being fairly divorced from the people and not being involved with them in any social issues,” Adams says. “There are all sorts of examples of absolute stupidity here. Ballymurphy, here in Belfast, has a fantastically high rate of unemployment and poverty, and it had visited upon it a multi-thousand-pound church that the people had to pay for, which didn’t even have dwellings for a priest. So now they have this big mausoleum in the middle of Ballymurphy, but the priest is still two miles up the road.”
As it did in 1916, the church has repeatedly come down hard on the IRA. “It’s a conservative church, there’s no doubt about it,” Adams says. But there have been some changes — in Irish terms, very big changes. The fact that so many priests could come out against the Reagan visit, so many nuns and sisters oppose the Central American policies — that’s a change, a big one. And there are a sprinkling of radical priests about the place. But you have to distinguish between the church and the hierarchy. I mean, I’m a member of the church, as is every other Catholic in Sinn Fein; the hierarchy is only part of the church, too.”
Religion is not, however, the critical problem. Adams says the first order of business is independence, and from that would flow an independent Irish foreign policy, built on “positive neutrality,” unaligned either with NATO or the Warsaw Pact: A socialist economy would include nationalization of natural resources, banks and major industries; limits on the ownership of large tracts of land; most of all, a planned economy.
“The present economy,” he says, “which is called a free-enterprise economy, is actually a planned economy, but it’s planned in favor of the small minority who control the wealth.”
He says charges that Sinn Fein and the IRA plan to create “another Cuba” in Ireland at the point of a gun, or institute some sort of totalitarian government on the Eastern European model, are absurd. The IRA gunmen are here for the moment, Adams says, “but once independence is secured, armed struggle is finito. Sinn Fein would then figure in an Irish democracy — which is denied us at present — for the things we want. But it would be up to the Irish people to say yea or nay. If the people accept it, fair enough. If they accept part of it, fair enough. If they reject it, fair enough.”
Adams doesn’t believe that such independence will come easily. The British, in his analysis, will not leave the North of Ireland quietly because “many of the reasons why Britain colonized in the first place still stand.”
One major reason, in Adams’ view, was national security. “She was always concerned that her opponents like France and Spain would form an alliance with the Irish and come in through the back door. That still comes up with NATO, still comes up with some of the right-wing Tories.” Adams believes there was also an ideological reason for the initial British conquest; Britain at the time was a feudal society, while Ireland was decentralized, somewhat radical, with communal ownership of lands and sharing of labor.
“That’s what they fear now,” Adams says. “A victory for Irish freedom, if it led to the radicalization of Ireland, would have an effect on Britain itself. You can see what the Tories are afraid of in the way they’re treating their miners. They would just have nightmares if people like me had something to say about the way this country is governed.”
In addition, there is British jingoism and racism. “We are the first and the last colony of Britain. And there is almost a racist attitude about Ireland. It probably would be simpler if we were black. We’re only 20 miles from their shores at some points. If we were in Cyprus, or Rhodesia, or Hong Kong, it would be much easier. And finally, although everybody doubts it, I believe there’s an economic factor, too. We are a market for their goods. Whatever industry is here is still majority-owned by the British. All the clothes I wear, the wallpaper on the walls, the tea I drink, everything comes from Britain.”
But what about the Protestants in the North? They represent at least 60 per cent of the population of the six counties, and their leaders have vowed to fight if they are forced into a union with the South. If the British pulled out tomorrow, as the Belgians once pulled out of the Congo, wouldn’t there be a bloodbath?
“I think there’d be a violent reaction, for understandable reasons, from some of the loyalists,” Adams says. “The reaction from loyalist paramilitaries, or what we call unofficial paramilitaries, would be fairly minimal, because they are small forces. The hard reaction would come from the official paramilitaries: the RUC and the Ulster Defense Regiment, which is kind of militia. We maintain that they are actually British forces, and it would be the British responsibility to disarm and disband them.”
Adams says it is crucial for Irish nationalists to assure the loyalists that they want them as part of the united Ireland, with full civil and religious liberties. But a separate Northern Ireland state, or statelet, independent of both Britain and Ireland, is “no go.”
“I think, at the end of the day, that people only fight, and only use physical force, when they think they are going to win, and when they have something very meaningful to fight for,” Adams says. “That’s what sustains the republicans. The Unionists, too, think they are going to win, and they think they have something very worthwhile to fight for. But they’d be fighting to persuade a power [the British] that’s withdrawing, not to withdraw. And what would they be fighting for? A 21A-county statelet?”
In June 1983, Adams said: “The ordinary Protestant needs reassurances and full guarantees of civil and religious liberties. But they cannot be expected to move away from their position of marginal privilege while there is no reason to do so. The British prop is what maintains this privileged position. It is the prop which created and maintains the sectarian division. Only when that prop is removed will Protestant, Catholic and dissenter be able to sit down and work out their own destiny.”
Adams obviously believes that the old dream of a united Ireland will come to pass, perhaps not soon, certainly not easily. But eventually. On this winter afternoon, he lights a small cigar, glances about the cramped cold room in Connolly House, and smiles.
“It’ll come,” he says. “I might not see it. You might not see it. But a united Ireland will come.” He pauses. “Would you like some tea?”