AN END TO HISTORY
Brian Keenan is best known for enduring over four years as a hostage of the Islamic Jihad, linked to Hezbollah, in Lebanon before his release in 1990. Keenan was raised among the Protestant working class of east Belfast. He lived close to singer Van Morrison, who grew up in an identical terraced house a few streets way, on Cyprus Avenue, and not far from where the Reverend Ian Paisley lived with his family in a Bible belt of evangelical missions.
After completing his A levels at Orangefield, a liberal secondary school, Keenan chose to study literature at the University of Ulster in Coleraine and to discover a different Ireland than the one he was born into in loyalist east Belfast:
I went to Coleraine because it was away from home and because it offered you a range of subjects within the literature department that Queen’s didn’t offer, where I could read the American writers. I studied philosophy, history, folklore and I even took a course in the European neo-realist cinema which explored the ethics of the post war world so imaginatively different from my own.
The majority of my friends were all Catholic. Before then, I didn’t know about Gaelic literature, about Irish music, but I got to know it, because I liked the people. In a sense you found what you didn’t know was stolen from you.
He discovered a sense of belonging to a community, a culture that was different to the one he had grown up with – an Irish culture:
At school, I was taught the birth dates and the death dates of a long line of English kings and queens, and I don’t remember any of them. My geography lessons were all about the shoe industry in Nottingham or wherever. I had to learn all the rivers that flowed down through England. But what I found at university was something that wasn’t being taught to me but was being offered to me in a sense. It was all there: music, culture, talk. You could sit down with a complete stranger and talk about something really meaningful in terms of books and writers.
After leaving college and working in temporary jobs in London and Brussels, Keenan went to teach English in the Basque country:
By that time, the Troubles were very hot and heavy in the mid-’70s. I came home and decided there was no point in going back. I don’t know why. I’m not politically motivated in that sense. Maybe to be witness to the catastrophe is better than being part of it. I decided to stay in Belfast, and I went back to teach in Orangefield.
The boys I was teaching for O levels had no more interest in WB Yeats than I had in a rubber bicycle tyre. They were able to talk about the politics of the streets. The atmosphere had changed totally in the school because of the atmosphere in the streets. I even remember some kid being pulled into the then headmasters office because he brought a gun into school, this boy of 14. I stayed there for the year and then I just thought, ‘What’s the point? There’s nobody interested here.’
On completing a post-graduate course in community development in Aberdeen, Scotland, Keenan returned to Belfast. He worked as a community worker for three years in his home turf of east Belfast and then on the Shankill Road in Protestant west and north Belfast. Soon after he started work on the Shankill, the chair of one community group asked him whether he was a Catholic due to his surname:
The man, who would have been in his 60s, he took me aside and he said, ‘Excuse me, Brian, can I ask you a question? Are you a Catholic?’ because of the name Keenan. And I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘I just needed to clear that up,’ he said.
The problems that I encountered as a community worker on the Shankill Road were kind of no different than they were on the Falls. Probably worse on the Shankill Road, actually, because, apart from Jackie Redpath [a prominent community worker and now chair of the Shankill Road Partnership], they didn’t have an articulate voice. There was huge unemployment. The housing should have been knocked down. There was a great sense of community, but it was rapidly undermined by an insidious sectarianism. If the nationalist areas got something, then the loyalists had to get something in return. Such attitudes only reinforced a ‘them and us’ division.
Some of those in leadership were members of the loyalist UDA and UVF, but efforts to improve their communities met with a wall of inaction at City Hall, where the city had been controlled for decades by the main unionist parties:
The members of the UVF (or UDA) wouldn’t tell you they were members, but I knew because everybody knew. These were their streets. You would kind of talk to them and if this is what they wanted to do, we could discuss, ‘How do you want to go about doing it?’ The problem was, when you got groups in these areas to be able to articulate whatever it was they wanted, they went to a council in the City Hall, which was just divided by sectarianism. The main attitude in the council was, ‘We’re not giving that to them because they’re Catholics.’
Community work definitely wasn’t getting anywhere, but the city also wasn’t going anywhere. It was almost as if it had blown up any kind of impetus for meaningful structural change. Any that was there was soon knocked on the head by those that didn’t want it. It was a city that was going nowhere, and I just wanted out. You were supposed to be doing this work and devising these programmes, but nobody really wanted them.
In the early 1980s, Keenan took a job teaching English in Beirut. The Lebanese capital was also struggling with a legacy of colonial rule, civil and religious conflict and recurrent invasions by Israeli forces along their border and into the sprawling Palestinian refugee camps in the city. In 1986, he was kidnapped. ‘I went from the frying pan into the fire,’ he said.
Keenan travelled on his Irish passport to Lebanon, and his family and friends found a more willing ear in Dublin during their four-year campaign to free him from captivity than they received from the British government. Although reluctant at first, the Department of Foreign Affairs was more active in seeking Keenan’s release through various diplomatic channels and by promoting his Irish citizenship.
Following his return in 1990, Keenan wrote of his hellish experience in the beautifully written and extraordinary book An Evil Cradling, which recounts the mistreatment and torture he and English journalist John McCarthy endured at the hands of their captors. Keenan settled in Dublin, where he has since lived with his wife, Audrey, and two children. A regular visitor to Belfast and to his sisters and their families, Keenan noted the continuing failure to improve the educational and living standards for young people in east Belfast and other working-class loyalist communities despite the various peace agreements over the decades since he left. ‘The people in these poor communities really never got anything,’ he said. ‘Some leaders in whatever paramilitary organisation were bought off to become community organisers and they got jobs set up for them, which was fair enough. But it didn’t work.’
There is, in his view, a deeper cultural malaise that affects many Protestant people in the communities he left behind all those years ago. It also confirms for him the imperative of creating a new society on the island, which reflects its diversity and can realise its vast potential, not least for those who constantly fear that their identity is being threatened.
In the Protestant community and the Protestant people – what I know of them anyway – there is this inherent sense of precarious belonging. They know they belong there, but they don’t know why, or they don’t know how. They don’t know where their roots are, so they’re not too sure; they just know they come from Ulster or whatever. But this sense of precarious belonging is always subliminal. When you ask would-be Protestant loyalists who they are, they define who they are in the negative. They say ‘I’m not a Republican,’ or I’m not this, but they’re not positive about who they are and if they try to say where they want to be or where they’re going it’s not very far.
There’s the same politicians kicking around Ulster now that were there when I left it and that says an awful lot about progression being stopped, or someone throwing a cloak over things and calling it British, or calling it whatever they want without examining it. It’s that sense of defining yourself in the negative which I think is a big burden.
If there’s going to be … well I don’t call it a ‘united Ireland’ any more, I call it an ‘integrated Ireland’, it is one where everybody belongs. One where everybody has a feeling and emotional attachment and also has some sort of vested interest in its future. I talk to loyalists now who have all retired from the game, or whatever, and they have a very real sense of being misled, of not getting their emotional inheritance to belong.
Maybe that’s got to do with the very poor education system, things I was never taught I now know an awful lot about; the things that were withheld from me for certain reasons, I decided to reclaim. My needs to be a whole person were very urgent. The only person who could fill up the emptiness was yourself. So, apart from travelling geographically a lot, I travelled in mind and I experienced a lot because I felt I needed to.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s and 50s that I realised that there were some very, very good Protestant writers and there always have been. But most of them that I know of became writers because of a sense of disenchantment.
The idea that a British identity covers the experience of being a Protestant person from the North does not explain the sense of precarious belonging to which Keenan relates:
I’m not very sure about this thing, British. When I was working in London – it was one of these temporary jobs – it was myself, there was a guy who was Caribbean and another guy who was a kind of proto-Scots nationalist. The two of them said they were British, and I said, ‘He’s from the Caribbean and you’re a rampant rebel from the Highlands.’ I think it’s just a term of convenience, covering something. It’s like a conjurer’s cape, it’s thrown over things to cover them and you don’t know what’s happening underneath but you’d be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat when you take it away.
Keenan’s view is that young people across the island, including those he meets on his visits to Ulster University in Coleraine, where he is a lifelong and honorary president of the Student’s Union, want to see a new society of equals, a bill of rights, a continuation of the progressive social changes of recent years. They are also concerned with finding a decent job and home, and too often still look to the UK or further away for their future. Keenan said that there is already a significant integration between North and South, with over 70 million border crossings each year and a growing all-island economy. He asked:
Is this country not already integrated? People are crossing the border because they want to, to an extent that it doesn’t exist. I kind of think if people would concentrate on what’s happening now, not what was … What was, we can talk about as calamitous, a disaster, a mistake. It was probably relevant in its time, but we are in a time of fast-moving change; the nation state has long since been washed away.
Writers talk about the end of history. I like that term because I think we need to put an end to history. That’s not to say cast it into the oblivion, not to say it should be forgotten. The one thing missing in the declaration of human rights is the right to memory, so have your memory, cherish it and it might make you more whole, and empathetic, but I think we need to move on and grasp change. Memory is only meaningful when it is shared and understood. Shared memory is the way of empathy and that is the single most important element in being human.
I think Ireland is on a cusp and it depends on what attitude you bring to it. If you think about change as being something positive, we could create something better, instead of thinking we have to adjust this part of history and we have to balance this with that. We are at the edge; we could be, if we choose to be, a renaissance. It is a new lease of thinking, a new lease of attitude. This united Ireland or integrated Ireland, or new Ireland cannot be a political decision, it has to be a public one. We have to be very careful about the nature of the dissemination of information around this. We need to create a critical mass of questions which can have the effect of splitting the atom on our understanding and releasing a new world of possibility.
A Buddhist saying hangs on my wall. It reads, ‘Yesterday is history and it is gone. Tomorrow is a mystery, yet to be. Today is a gift, receive it.’ If we seize the gift of today, looking towards a new horizon, the mystery of tomorrow reveals itself as a prism of infinite possibility.
The first priority in any new configuration of the workings of this island is to put the idea of social justice at the very kernel and pumping heart of a bill of rights. Maybe we could have a convention of international jurors and legislators to advise on and draw a sample constitution that everybody can feel that they are no longer part of nineteenth-century political structures that don’t solve twenty-first-century imperatives. The nation state is gone. We are connected to a global world that was never envisaged a century ago, we have a profound responsibility to the future which we never had before, and we should grasp it now.
In many respects I think we are already in an integrated Ireland. We should talk more about it. The conversations have to take place all over Ireland. We have to understand that partition and sectarianism are ghosts of our past who don’t know that their time has passed. They should be left in ghost land. Partition needs to give way to pluralism. The vision needs to give way to diversity. And not just the mixing of two different things. Diversity and pluralism is a multiple thing, it’s non-binary. We’re taking in a lot here. We’re already starting to do it in changes in gay laws and marriage equality and all of that.
Keenan insisted that change is both necessary and is coming but that people, North and South, and not just the unionists, are not prepared for it:
I’m not just talking about the North, because down here has to change drastically too, really drastically. If we’re in this, we’re all in this together and change is what we all participate in. We all drink from the same goblet. I do think things are naturally falling apart but that’s where my worry is. There’s nothing there to rebuild, there’s no vision there, there’s no idea, vision doesn’t come easily to unionists.
Keenan proposed a major programme of spending, including on big, island-wide projects, with funding sourced from the EU, the US and Britain in the context of its departure from Ireland. These would include the construction of new rail links, such as between Derry and Cork (as proposed by John Hume three decades ago and others more recently), a national park, forestry, waterways and climate change initiatives.
The plans must commence now, Keenan said, and involve civic society making detailed proposals on how a transition to an integrated Ireland could take place. A lot of the fears among unionism have been deliberately instilled, among them the myth that the Republic is about to annex the North against its wishes. It has to be based on a common vision:
I remember years ago talking to Gerry Adams, and he said to me that he might see a united Ireland in his lifetime, but if it does come about, it won’t be the type of united Ireland that traditional nationalism or republicans have always thought about. And he was the first to admit that.
We’ve a small island. It’s uniquely established; it might have all sorts of different people but so what? That’s all the better because it fertilises ideas, and we have the capacity, small numbers and land mass. We’re unique within Europe that we can affect real meaningful long-term change and start the dominos falling and let the initiative or energy that comes from that happen.
The word ‘revolution’ to me still has meaning but it’s a revolution in thinking I’m talking about, and we can do that. It’s really, really possible to do that. You can do it brick by brick, like you’re building a new house. I’m quite convinced that the possibilities here are greater than anywhere else. We just have to find the will. There’s people who just won’t budge and I’m not just talking about the North but people down here too.
I think there’s a very rich culture here and it’s not tainted by politics or history. We win awards for movies, for scriptwriting, for actors, for music. I don’t ask or know who’s Catholic or who’s Protestant. The talent is very rich here and growing. Look at all these new books coming out of the North, including by young women.
For Keenan, change can hurt but the question is how it is managed to ensure the best outcome for the most people. More imaginative political and representative structures, including an all-island senate, with members chosen for their ability and talent, are required. Recent decades have shown how transformational change can happen when sufficient energies and resources are dedicated to it. The dismantlement of the RUC upset many of its former members and their allies, but it was essential to build a new and acceptable policing service for everyone. For decades, the British government insisted there was nothing wrong with policing in the North and then, following the political settlement in 1998, conceded ‘that the RUC was rotten’.
During our discussion, Keenan concluded:
I’m not so sure about time healing. What it does is it leaves a scar. Those scars don’t go away. Let people have their right to memory, I have no objections to that. But I do think, for example, if Chris Patten can come into the RUC and restructure the whole thing in a short time surely any change is possible?
Choice is the crown of life. Not to activate choice, and thus change, is not to be alive. It is the antithesis of life. We are born with eyes in the front of our heads so that we can always move forward. If we make some mistakes, so what? That is how we learn to make things better.
Following the Scottish election of May 2021, the SNP returned to power and as a result, many nationalists, including prime minister Nicola Sturgeon, now feel confident about the outcome of another independence referendum. Eddi Reader, one of Scotland’s most popular performers, voted for the SNP in the election and has publicly supported the efforts by the Scottish people to gain independence from England.
Coming from a working-class family in Glasgow, Reader, like her father before her, had been a Labour voter. In an interview with this author in September 2021, she said:
I was a Labour voter, my family worked in the shipyards and I went to all the Christmas parties organised by the trade unions. That’s our background. None of us knew anybody who was anything other than that. … Later, I was asked, Do you want an independent Scotland? Yes or no was the answer. It was only then I realised I was paying the same tax, living the same life, contributing the same but we had no influence over the decisions made for Scotland. I realised it wouldn’t have mattered a fig what I voted for in Scotland – even if Scotland as a whole had voted for Labour – if England didn’t want it.
In 2014 she campaigned for Scottish independence in a vote that was narrowly defeated by those supporting the union. Many of those who campaigned were convinced that a late, and carefully orchestrated, intervention by the Queen, who was staying at her Scottish estate in Balmoral just before the referendum, halted the nationalist tide. Reader recalled:
When we had the chance for independence, for me it felt like getting the keys to a new home: you’ve just stepped away from your father’s house and for the first time you have to rely on your own ingenuity, your own creativity, your own money, your own pitfalls, and you had to go and experience it. On the day of the referendum, everyone felt buoyant. The Yes movement felt friendly and loving, peaceful. There was no grievance in it. The next day the unionists in England got their way. They managed to get the Queen to whisper at the church gates: ‘Well I hope people will think very carefully about the future.’ She’s not supposed to get involved but she did.
Reader was in Glasgow the next day when gangs of mainly men waving the Union Jack harassed and assaulted Yes supporters on the streets. ‘The day after the vote,’ she said, ‘I saw the rain, and I saw the aggro, and I thought, that’s what the union does. This unfair, unequal, archaic, pre-democracy structure has given all of us this sense that there’s a war rather than peace between us all. Across the UK, the prospect of change has forced many working-class communities to turn to the Tories, in what she described as the politics of fear:
They’re very frightened and anything done with fear needs therapy, everything that is unlike fear is a loving direction, but all that fear has to come out and it has to be understood. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing that you are not a magnificent conqueror, it can be all right to like your Queen that smells of roses and is a nice woman. It can be alright that you celebrate a thing which means you won a war sometime; that’s okay, you can love it all. You’re not dismissing one by being respectful of the other. That’s what has to be taught. The young will get it before we get it, they have the opportunity to get it. As Leonard Cohen says, the crack is in their soul, the light will get in.
Some years ago, Reader discovered that her great uncle Seamus, a trade unionist and socialist from Glasgow, had delivered detonators and other weapons to James Connolly in Liberty Hall, Dublin in advance of the 1916 Rising. She has collected his extensive writings and is planning to publish a book on her uncle’s activities, which eventually forced his exile to Dublin, where he died in 1969.
I went through all my uncle Seamus’s stuff which recounted how he was involved in the 1916 Rising. He was born Episcopalian in 1898 and had no Irish background. After the authorities found out what he and his comrades in Scotland were doing to help Connolly, they were in trouble on both counts. They were in trouble with the Free Staters after 1922, as well as with the British government. My uncle had to hide in Dublin from then until his death in 1969.
It was never acknowledged that all those workers in Glasgow had filled their lunchboxes with detonators to send to James Connolly. It has not been accepted by Ireland or by Scotland. Seamus always stood up for the independence of small nations and obviously for a free Ireland. Nobody questioned it in 1916. It was just Ireland, there wasn’t any north or south, it was just Ireland in entirety. It’s kind of interesting we’re still talking about it 100 years later.
The same people who made the totally disastrous partitions in Pakistan and India and all over the world were responsible then. Even now with Scottish independence, a lot of the unionist mouthpieces will use the words ‘partition of the UK’ to describe what they think Scottish independence would be. It’s a total distortion of what’s going on.
The majority of English people are not responsible for the narrow-minded nationalism that has surfaced in recent years and led to the self-destructive Brexit vote, she said: ‘The majority of English people don’t have that feeling of superiority. It’s a small minority that are very loud. The voice of the decent English person is very quiet.’
After independence, Reader said, the Scottish people will decide what type of society they want and, in her view, it will be one where no one is left behind:
All we need is a key to the door and that’s what the SNP will give us. I think if you guys in Ireland get your referendum, you get the key to the door. You can choose to be in love with any god or royalty or lordship or elitism that you want, but it will give people the chance of making that choice.
We need safety nets in society because we can tell everybody; ‘We love the fact that you’re here and we’re going to look after you from the cradle to the grave. No one is better than you and no one’s worse than you.’ When you say that to a child, that child will provide for you; that child will go to the ends of the earth loving you back and that’s what you do with society. You nurture it that way. At the same time, human beings grow with challenge. I have faith in that at least.