Heavy traffic makes for joyless cycling on the wide, dull main road from Limavady through industrial suburbs to Derry. This morning a head wind kept my speed down to four m.p.h. and lavish broken glass along the verges gave Roz her first puncture of the trip. I passed closely guarded housing estates where the soldiers’ families live. Later I was told that they are ‘bussed’ to shop in towns where they are not identifiable. It seems unlikely there could be any such town in Northern Ireland; probably this is a delicate way of saying ‘To Unionist shopping areas in mainly Unionist towns’. What a life for those wives and young children! All the boredom and tension of being posted in a rebellious colony without the compensation of getting to know some exotic corner of the globe. In and around Derry one suddenly becomes very aware of soldiers speeding to and fro, always with rifles pointing at a population which feigns to ignore them completely.
Four miles upstream from the broad Atlantic inlet of Lough Foyle, Derry overlooks the river. On both high, steep banks its buildings rise in tiers from the water’s edge; warehouses, dwellings, shops, churches, new housing estates – and new ruins. The river is spanned by an unlovely double-decker steel bridge, opened in 1933 and named after Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, Lord Craigavon. I paused halfway across the bridge and looked back at the mainly Protestant Waterside. Wide shopping streets lead up to thousands of little working-class houses, quite recently built on the highest ridges; and to the south of these, on lower slopes, detached Victorian/Edwardian villas are now scarcely visible amidst the midsummer leafiness of tall trees. Turning west again, towards the old walled city, I gazed beyond it into Donegal. Derry is almost on the border and the Republic’s most northerly county forms an important part of its natural hinterland. No wonder so many apolitical foreign visitors, who know nothing of Northern Ireland’s problems, regard the partitioning of this tiny island as utterly nonsensical.
Despite Derry’s splendid setting, one’s first impression is of physical squalor. Uninspired new buildings contrast with scenes of destruction, demolition, reconstruction – and bare ugly sites awaiting further uninspired buildings. But this morning, as I explored many hilly streets, unexpected laneways and attractive unbombed corners, I found some ancient spell being laid upon me. Not that this city, as a city, can claim to be ancient. It was only in 1614 that a group of London guilds provided labour and cash for the creation of the last walled city to be built in Europe. In 1649 and 1688–89 this investment was justified when Derry withstood two famous sieges – hence ‘the Maiden City’ – and thus established itself in Northern Protestant folklore as a main source of communal pride.
Sieges apart, Derry’s history goes back to the dawn of Irish Christianity. In 546 St Columba founded his first abbey here on a tree-crowned hill; the Irish word ‘Doire’ means ‘a place of oaks’. And one quickly becomes aware of Derry as a city where – despite centuries of discrimination and discontent – the Catholic and Protestant strands within Irish Christianity have in some subtle way become interwoven. At present the city’s population of 51,000 is about 60 per cent Catholic and 40 per cent Protestant and within hours of my crossing Craigavon bridge at 8.30 a.m. I had been told by seven citizens that ‘Derry is Different’. By which they meant Derry people, whatever their religion or politics, are not temperamentally inclined towards Belfast’s brand of implacable sectarianism.
Approaching the battered Guildhall at noon, I found the open area in front cordoned off. There was some leisurely police and military activity and an elderly woman explained, ‘They had a wee bomb went off up Shipquay St last evenin’ and they think now maybe there’s another in that shop’ – she nodded towards a shoe-shop beside a military checkpoint and we watched a magnificent cream-coloured army Alsatian sniffing up and down the pavement in front while his handler exchanged quips with two young women traffic wardens across the road. ‘The soldiers always look more cheerful when there’s somethin’ goin’ on,’ observed my companion. ‘It’s the standin’ about all day doin’ nothin’ makes ’em mad. Bored, they gets. That’s what it is – plain bored. Then they’ll beat up anyone they can lay hands on. People say they’re vicious but I say they’re bored. I’ve six sons m’self – I knows all about young lads!’ She was the sort who would have made tea for the Brits when they first arrived in Derry and the Catholics ran to welcome them, waving tricolours and cheering in a delirium of relief at having someone to defend them from the RUC and the ‘B men’. Perhaps she would still like to make them tea, if she dared. But no Catholic dare, now. August 1969 seems a long way away; the Provos hadn’t been invented, then. Near us a few people were standing around waiting, perhaps also bored and hoping for a big bang to relieve the monotony. But most got on as best they could with their shopping and talked about something else. In the bookshop up Shipquay St – the steepest main street of any city in Ireland – I remarked to a friendly assistant that I found the public indifference to bombs extraordinary. She sighed. ‘It’s bad we don’t notice any more – we’ve got too tough.’
Slowly cycling into the Bogside I saw a huge proud notice: YOU ARE NOW IN FREE DERRY. To prove it, lamp standards and pillar-boxes are painted green, white and orange in horizontal stripes, and there are several crude life-size murals of heavily armed Brits with monkey heads and faces – unwitting shades of Hanuman! Many new rows of houses or blocks of flats already look irreparably neglected or vandalised and much black paint has been thrown at their walls – sometimes to deface large, carefully painted tricolours or Easter lilies, or legends saying BRITS OUT! REMEMBER 1916! UP THE REPUBLIC! Are these paint splashes the work of the Stickies? Or the Irps? Or do Tartan gangs from the Waterside across the Foyle recklessly steal into the Bogside at dead of night? In the midst of so much sordid vandalism the memorial to those shot on Bloody Sunday stands immaculate and inviolable – the visible sign of yet another powerful myth. And near by, painted in large letters across the front wall of the Bogside Inn – the main Provo pub – are the words INFORMERS WILL BE KILLED. For a moment I took this casually, as just another bit of swaggering adolescent graffiti. Then, with a chilly feeling inside, I realised that the slogan is nobody’s sick joke. It is a statement of fact. How free is Free Derry?
Having already been so warmly welcomed in this city by so many total strangers, it surprised me to be at once made to feel uneasy within the Bogside Inn. The barman was disinclined to chat and I was pointedly ignored by the twenty-five or thirty men – mostly youngish, and no doubt mostly Provos – who were drinking at the long bar. Presumably they were unemployed (always one of Derry’s major problems) and I wondered where they got the money to drink so much on a Monday afternoon. It’s hard to describe the atmosphere. To say that it felt sinister is true but sounds ridiculous – though why should it? Given enough people with hostile attitudes, it would be odd if a place didn’t feel sinister. But I hadn’t been expecting any such atmosphere; everyone had assured me that Provos like a chance to put their case across to visitors.
When I was halfway through my pint an old man – the only person there of his generation – moved to stand beside me. Having found out why I was in Derry, he began to talk nostalgically about the good old days before The Troubles. He was twenty at the time of partition. ‘And the mistake then was the way our lot wouldn’t go up to Stormont and grab fair shares for us. Too many ideals we had then, with no sense to them.’ He was obviously a man of some stature in the Bogside, who could loudly say such things in a Provo pub. He went on to deplore every form of bigotry but warned me against going into pubs ‘across the bridge’ where the population is mixed. Reminiscing, he recalled that a few years ago in the Inn every man kept his gun before him on the bar-counter while he drank. ‘You should have come up then. We had journalists and book-writers and professors and Communists and anarchists and all sorts. From everywhere they were coming, to “study” us.’ He laughed aloud at the memory. ‘ ’Twas terrible easy to fool ’em – they’d believe any nonsense. Now they’ve all gone home – no more excitement. The commies got a terrible let-down. They thought Derry was the start of their revolution in Britain. But Irish Catholics aren’t Eyetalians. We’ve got our own ways of running revolutions.’
I have been trying to analyse my extreme unease in that pub. Why did I not feel free to try to break down those Green barriers, as I have been quite successfully tackling Orange barriers elsewhere? The answer must be ‘fear’. I was afraid of being suspected of gathering intelligence. ‘Informers will be killed …’ Informers have been killed. Melodramatic? Neurotic? Probably. I certainly feel rather down in my own estimation this evening. Especially as a Derry friend with Provo ‘connections’ has just assured me that even if I were suspected of spying I would not be killed, only beaten up or knee-capped. It seems the death-penalty is reserved for traitors from within the ranks.
I feel like a bloated sponge this evening, having spent the past two days ‘absorbing’ in the Bogside, the Creggan and Brandywell. These are Derry’s Catholic areas where, true to Northern Irish form, everyone has slightly different opinions and theories about The Troubles. It interests me that no one ever mentions the moribund (or is it dead?) People’s Democracy movement, which played such an important part at the start of The Troubles. In times of stress the present and the immediate future – or a past no more remote than last week – are all that matter to most people. And rumours multiply fast. Most seem not worth recording but I’ll jot down one to give the flavour; it was repeated to me today, with relish, on four separate occasions. Among the Brits in Derry there are said to be an average of two deaths a week from self-inflicted wounds – some straight suicides, some following on attempts to get an honourable discharge. Possibly this is fact, but I find it very hard to believe. Another popular story sounds like rumour but I’ve good reason to believe it’s true. A few days ago the Brits raided a Bogside house to lift a junior Provo and found a very senior Provo with him. They didn’t want to arrest the leader, having presumably been ordered not to do so, but he insisted that if the junior were lifted, so must he be. Neither was, and the Bogside is still laughing.
Nowadays it could – and very likely would – be fatal for a Catholic to fraternise with the army. Yet enlisting in the army can be more practical for a Catholic than joining the RUC. Quite a few Derry mothers would like to see their sons safely in a British uniform and away out of Northern Ireland, despite their being unable to return home freely on leave. Some parents only learn that their children are in the Provos when their home is raided or they hear that the youngsters have been ‘lifted’ elsewhere. (In other families everybody is involved, from great-grandad to the five-year-old learning to make petrol bombs.) When adolescents are picked up for trivial offences some parents are relieved because this may save them from serious crime.
One English community worker told me that there are many fine young men among the Provo internees – well-intentioned, genuine, intelligent. He also knows three top Provo leaders who took to guerrilla warfare not because of passionate patriotism but because their family life had fallen to bits. All three seemed good, kind, decent, normal men when he first knew them. He described the case of a devoted husband and father whose third child was born an idiot. The mother was so devastated that she refused to have any more children and being a rigid Catholic she also refused to use contraceptives. When her husband appealed for help to his local clergy, doctors and social workers he got little sympathy and no practical advice. Within two years he had left his wife, become deeply embittered and joined the Provos for whom he brilliantly organised some truly horrible crimes. Yet he remains devoted to his children and often sends them gifts through the ‘special messenger’ who told me his story.
Opinions vary widely about the behaviour of the Brits during house searches. Obviously this is partly because the behaviour itself varies widely – so much depends on the regiments involved and the officers’ attitudes – and partly because people’s feelings towards the Brits do likewise. Several Catholics assured me that many stories of military misbehaviour are pure Provo propaganda, though unfortunately of the sort that can bring into being what it alleges. A search-party may be provoked to misbehave by a hostile reception, itself provoked by Provo ‘incitements to hatred’. Another responsible informant described how the homes of innocent people were seriously damaged because the troops wrongly suspected they had been fired on from a particular house. One Catholic woman argued, ‘It’s all a matter of how you take them.’ Her home has been searched four times by different regiments but no harm was ever done. The first time the family was away so a glass panel of the hall-door had to be broken. Otherwise, ‘You wouldn’t know they’d been in the place – except they left it tidier than they found it.’ On later occasions they were received politely and behaved politely. This repeated searching Mrs A— blamed on the Provos, of whom she is a well-known, outspoken and sharp-tongued critic. In retaliation for her sort of opposition they often give the army an anonymous tip-off to raid so-and-so’s house.
A few years ago, at the height of the Provos’ anti-Brit propaganda campaign, the UNA provided a community worker whose task it is to act as a neutral witness during house searches; his word is usually accepted by both sides when disputes arise. Soldiers are searched before and after a raid to eliminate friction about the planting of evidence and petty thieving. Yet even now a regiment has to be more strictly disciplined towards the end of its tour. When thinking. ‘This time next week we’ll be in Germany’ the troops tend to become indifferent to local reactions and, sometimes, to work off long-suppressed grudges. The Brits versus Paddies feud frequently makes grown-ups behave like not very bright five-year-olds. Two nights ago, when the weather had just broken and it was raining heavily, an absurd incident took place at a nearby army border checkpoint. Soon after 1.00 a.m. a young Catholic couple were asked to get out of their car while it was being searched. The husband explained that his wife was ill and could not stand around in a downpour. While arguing the point he tossed an empty cigarette packet on to the road and was accused of breaking the law by littering the public highway. This wrangle continued for over four hours until the two soldiers concerned went off duty – by which time the unwell wife must have been feeling a lot worse than if she had stood for ten minutes in the rain.
Irrationality flourishes in this climate. Recently the Provos organised a riot at MacGilligan Camp, for which purpose they and their UDA and UVF fellow-internees declared a truce. Mattresses were thrown on to the wire barricades and set alight with the aid of boot polish; the central heating was disrupted; the new kitchen was burned. The catering staff, however, promptly improvised in the old kitchen and continued to serve hot meals on time. Yet the Provos were outraged because their mattresses had not been immediately replaced and threatened to go on hunger-strike.
I had a long talk this evening with a distinguished citizen who knows every physical and psychological corner of Derry. He said that a powerful underworld is developing fast here because the drinking and betting industries are being taken over by the Provos, just as they were by the Mafia at the end of the US liquor war when he himself was living in America. Also, as the normal discipline of society weakens more marriages are breaking up, the illegitimate birth rate is rising fast and alcoholism has become an acute problem.
Traditionally this is a city of masterful women. For generations the main local industry was shirt-making and while wives went out to earn, husbands stayed at home with the children. One can still clearly see the results of this in many families where women vigorously insist on their menfolk either supporting or not supporting the Provos. As The Troubles have progressed, from the first fine careless rapture of necessary self-defence to the founding of an efficiently run underworld, more and more women, even in strongly Republican families, have tried to restrain their sons from ‘joining the lads’.
It seems there has never been much foreign influence in Derry though at first the People’s Democracy Movement attracted (having itself been inspired by) left-wing students from many countries. The media tended to exaggerate this student solidarity until it became – to some newspaper readers – of Sinister International Significance. I was told a glorious true story which is well-known but still seems worth writing down. To Derry during the thick of The Troubles came a keen young English press photographer, intent on a scoop. A Provisional told him that for a substantial consideration this could be arranged and next day the two met at a place from which the photographer was driven (blindfolded) to a field above the Creggan. There he spent an ecstatic hour photographing very sinister ‘Foreign Influences’ training local boys. When he had been reblindfolded and driven away his Provo friend took the rifles from the Chinese waiters’ nervous hands, helped them to remove their unfamiliar paramilitary uniforms, paid them a meagre percentage of the scoop fee and sent them back to their restaurant in the city centre.
In real life, many Provos join either the British or the Irish Army for their training. Some also join the Irish Army on their release from prison if they wish not to resume a guerrilla career; but many voluntarily continue the fight, having been made more ruthless by their time inside. Others leave Ireland and either work for the cause in Britain or settle down there to a normal life. According to a Protestant informant the pattern is rather different on the Orange side. All but the most extreme of the Protestant paramilitaries ‘retire’ on being freed, which often means having to emigrate.
This afternoon, in a small Bogside pub, I met two young men who were obviously longing to talk to someone new. (Many young Derry people tend to be wary of strangers though their elders have more than their share of informal Irish friendliness.) They introduced themselves as Sean and Liam; both are philosophy graduates of Queen’s and have been on the dole, living with their working-class families, for the past year. I asked could they not get jobs across the water and they said, ‘Only on building-sites, or driving buses.’ Besides, they don’t want to be too far away from their families at present. Sean’s mother is a widow and as he has two younger brothers and three younger sisters he reckons she needs him around to help her impose discipline. I would reckon so, too. Liam’s father is a semi-invalid (a TB leg was removed), and his mother’s nerves have gone since 1969, when a gang of RUC men on the rampage badly beat up her three sons in her presence. Liam said that his family had always been moderate Nationalists, totally opposed to the IRA in all its manifestations, and there was no conceivable excuse for the RUC’s invasion of their home. Beside him on the bar-counter he had a paperback copy of my favourite novel and when I remarked that nowadays not many twenty-four-year-olds read Middlemarch for fun he pointed out that George Eliot makes a nice change from the Bogside of the seventies.
Neither Sean nor Liam needed much prompting to reminisce about the heady days when this part of Derry became ‘Free’. As teenagers they went out to watch the rioting, as their contemporaries elsewhere might go to a football match, and they often became hoarse through cheering the rioters on. ‘From a safe distance,’ they added wryly. They had grown up very aware of the importance among their peers of physical skill and courage but obviously they were philosophers before ever they went to Queen’s. Liam said his most sickening memory was of three small boys hysterically seeking the autograph of a Provo who had just killed a Brit. That quenched his enthusiasm for cheering. Sean’s worst memory was ‘The day an eighteen-year-old on the dole showed me ten £10 notes – his fee for shooting a Brit – and said “Easy money!” He didn’t even pretend to give a damn about Irish freedom or Civil Rights. Maybe at the time I was a wee bit inclined to join the lads but that put me off for ever.’
Until the ages of seventeen and eighteen, respectively, Sean and Liam had never once conversed with a Protestant; and this was normal for boys of their generation. As students at Queen’s they at first felt themselves to be in an alien world; segregation was spontaneously kept up despite the liberal academic atmosphere. This was not through overt hostility or bigotry but because it seemed the natural thing to do. ‘I’ll never forget the sense of jittery isolation,’ said Liam. ‘There are thousands of Catholics at Queen’s, but somehow knowing 75 per cent of the population of Belfast is Protestant got me all unnerved. During my first year I came home as often as I could. Yet I was ashamed of myself for feeling like that in my own country. It seemed so absurd. I saw then how you could trace it straight back to separate schools. Not to bigotry in my home – there wasn’t any. And apart from that we’re not sectarian-minded here in Derry, the way Belfast is. Derry is different.’
‘But where do you begin?’ said Sean. ‘Even if integrated schools could somehow be opened in the morning they wouldn’t do a damn bit of good while so many parents keep on about Orange thugs and Fenian bastards.’
These two young men, like many other Derry folk, admit that by 1968 the constitutional status quo had been accepted by the majority of Catholics and reunification had become an idol which was worshipped ritually at certain times, such as Easter Week. ‘Just the way the English go to church on Christmas Day,’ explained Liam. Now, among the young, Provo propaganda has to some extent revived anti-partition fervour. Sean believes that many Provos have built their individual identities on the ‘Freedom from Britain’ ideal and therefore can’t give in without losing themselves. He sees this as a much more important motive for keeping going than ‘material profit’.
Though the Catholic areas here are No-Go for the police – in that lies their Freedom – one sees many army foot patrols with the last youth of four walking backwards to cover his companions. The pale, immature faces are usually tense and angry; it is more manly to look angry than to look what you feel – fearsick in your stomach because you may be shot in the back any time from any window of any one of those identical dreary little houses. In fact a Brit is unlikely, now, to be shot at in the Bogside. But Provo policy might suddenly change, or an unruly ‘volunteer’ might have a grudge of his own. And however unlikely, the possibility is enough to scare an eighteen-year-old with
D
MAM
D
tattooed on his skinny forearm – a boy who may well be in the army only because he couldn’t get a job at home.
As I cycled past one patrol, under a deep blue sky with the sun glinting merrily on the glass splinters strewn across the street, I suddenly felt nauseated by the sheer mindlessness of the violence that has erupted here. That young Irishmen and young Englishmen should be trained to be able and willing to kill each other, in 1976, seems intolerably barbarous. I’ve never been a pacifist but maybe Northern Ireland is making me one. Somehow this afternoon the thought of a responsible government legally training and arming its young men to kill seemed even worse than a gang of paramilitaries doing the same thing. By 2076, will our legalised killings seem as outrageous to Europeans as hanging for the theft of a sheep seems now?
Fortunately these depressed moods never last long and I am on the whole finding Derry the reverse of gloomy. It seems exhilarating, stimulating and curiously exciting – almost intoxicating, even before one has visited the Bogside Inn. It is exciting not in any morbid sense (at least not nowadays) but as a city of lively people trying to restore their communal self-respect through their own efforts. Almost everybody I’ve met has been involved in some sort of community work. Nor is this because I’ve been seeking out do-gooders. Any chance contact is liable to interrupt a sentence, look at his or her watch and disappear in a flurry of apologies to edit a community newspaper, or direct an inter-denominational drama group, or attend a meeting on Summer Playgroups or Tenants’ Rights or battered wives or homeless old people or deserted children or alcoholics or prostitutes. The Maiden City’s recent ordeals have certainly not broken her spirit.
In Derry, Belfast is referred to with shuddering horror. Today an apparently level-headed man told me that he wouldn’t dare walk alone through certain areas of his capital city. It’s odd how it goes; some English people think it’s dangerous in Co. Waterford, some Co. Waterford people think it’s dangerous in Derry, some Derry people think it’s dangerous in Belfast – and I wonder what Belfast people think?
This morning I had a long talk and many cups of tea in a small terraced house with a Catholic mother of eleven. Her oldest son is in the British Army; her second son is with the Officials in Belfast and won’t speak to the rest of the family; her oldest daughter is engaged to a Provo. ‘We were always quiet folk – never no trouble, me husband’s a Pioneer – and now look at us!’
The last time the soldier son came home on leave (rashly, I would have thought), the prospective son-in-law was on the run and staying for a few days; so the two young men had to share a bed. ‘I was afraid they’d get irritated and do damage. Maybe just start some disagreement over a pillow or somethin’ and tear away at each other. There’s so much hate around now – and all them young fellas is used to killin’.’ It occurred to me that, for next time, there was an alternative solution to the bedding problem which might not prove unacceptable to either the Provo or his betrothed. But such a suggestion would have been ill-received in that decent Catholic household. Personally I rather like the idea of a Brit and a Provo tucked up snugly together. It speaks well for Derry; it surely couldn’t happen in Belfast. When the betrothed joined us she told me her mother was just talking silly. The two young men get on very well though her brother is a perfectly genuine ‘Brit’ who intends to serve Her Majesty faithfully for as long as she’ll have him.
I lunched in a pub with two Catholic couples, all secondary school-teachers, and towards the end of our session an amount of hostility to the South showed through. General amazement was expressed at the Catholic hierarchy’s continuing to imagine it necessary for the state to buttress Catholic moral law. It was pointed out that in Northern Ireland, where contraceptives are freely available, the birth rate among both Catholics and Protestants is higher than in the South where our constitution forbids the sale of contraceptives. One teacher declared that Britain’s unwritten constitution is a far more satisfactory foundation for a civilised state than our written, dogmatic effort; and this was generally agreed. Again I was told that the Unionist distrust of Catholics was partly the Catholics’ own fault for refusing to recognise the state of Northern Ireland when it was founded. The Southern Protestants’ cooperation with the Dublin Government was mentioned admiringly as an example of how things should be. Nobody stopped to consider the vast difference between the two situations; the cooperation of the Southern Protestants was encouraged by the Dublin Government’s tolerance, which was fostered by the unthreatening size of the Southern Protestant minority.
At one stage we were joined by a Dublin man who has lived in Belfast for twenty years and seemed a lot keener on Irish unity than my four Northern companions. When I asked what he would do with one million resentful Protestants, after Irish unity had been forced on them, he replied crisply, ‘What they did with the Taigs over the past fifty-five years.’ But he was at once angrily shouted down; among the North’s minority many now seem as much anti-South as anti-British or anti-Unionist. The Protestant hurt at what is interpreted as Britain’s indifference to Loyalist loyalty is paralleled by the Catholics’ awareness of Southern indifference to Northern woes.
When our Republican hard-liner had moved on we were joined by two of Derry’s most active community leaders, Des and Mike. They talked enthusiastically for half an hour but the Derry political scene, whether official or unofficial, is too much for me. It is teeming and seething with plans, ambitions, ideals and schemes produced by dozens of creative, constructive people. However, Des did help by explaining the origins and functions of Northern Ireland’s many community groups.
These began to mushroom during 1969–70 and soon there were about 400 of them in Belfast, Derry and Dungannon – and scores elsewhere. They were inspired by popular distrust of the police in Catholic areas, by dissatisfaction with political parties – Orange or Green – and by impatience with an increasingly inefficient administration at both local and central government levels. Based on the belief that ‘God helps those who help themselves’, they at first concentrated mainly on protection, then began to work on employment and social amenities. The Provos could be said to have started as a badly needed defensive community group which grafted itself on to the IRA tradition; the UDA and other Protestant paramilitary organisations grew out of the failure of the security forces to protect Protestant areas from Provo bombs in 1970–71. But now there is (or should be) a sharp distinction between community groups which are helped by the government’s Community Development Officers, and paramilitary organisations. In certain areas community vigilante patrols still operate and the paramilitaries sometimes attempt to take over these readymade reinforcements. Des said it is hard to judge how effectively Belfast’s big community groups have been infiltrated by extremists.
Over the years, as the politicians have become more powerless, discredited and divided, community groups everywhere have gained strength. Originally they were strictly sectarian but now they are beginning to cooperate and to form Community Associations, of which Derry’s is perhaps the strongest. Within these Associations each group retains its local character and there has been talk recently of forming a Northern Ireland Federation of Community Groups. Des finds this idea very exciting. At least a certain number of working-class people – Orange and Green – are sharing their common problems and trying to get on with their own thing. But this development is so much against the interests of Unionism/Orangeism that it may well be sabotaged.
Des – a Catholic – incidentally made one very interesting point; if he is in a London pub and hears Northern accents he goes to join the group feeling sure of a welcome and not inwardly asking the involuntary Northern Ireland question – ‘Which foot do they dig with?’ But he never equally spontaneously approaches a group of Southern Irish.
Every day in Derry I hear several sad little stories. One of the teachers told me about going to visit her sister in a notoriously ‘Orange’ town for a niece’s First Communion day. Near her in the Catholic church knelt a little girl of seven whose veil was all askew; she was with her Protestant father because her Catholic mother – a constable in the RUC – had been blown to bits a few weeks previously by a Provo bomb. The congregation greatly admired her father for having had the courage to go to Mass – a form of worship abominated by Orangemen – on this very special day in his daughter’s life. But they were apprehensive, with good reason, about his future safety.
Most Northern Catholics are intensely (sometimes I’m tempted to think obsessively) conscious of job discrimination. I asked this group if Direct Rule has helped here and all agreed that slowly things are improving. They believe the Ombudsman is trying hard but quite often, in certain areas, Catholics refuse to work for Protestants when given the chance because of their well-founded fear of intimidation. Also, action can be taken only when people complain and many won’t for fear of the consequences. Des gave a good example of how ruthlessly discrimination was applied under Stormont. A classmate at his Derry school tried to get a post-office job but was failed in a simple examination. Subsequently he won a scholarship to Queen’s and he is now a very young professor of some abstruse branch of science at the Royal Institute in London.
Des invited me to go with him to the Waterside on one of his community projects so Roz was put in the boot and off we went across Craigavon Bridge to a sprawl of new housing estates high above the east bank of the Foyle. Although the Waterside is often thought of as ‘Protestant Derry’ one-third of the residents are Catholics – or were, until very recently. There is now a two-way cross-Foyle movement because so many feel safer in exclusively Orange or Green areas. This is the sort of thing that could soon undermine everybody’s proud boast that ‘Derry is different’.
Certainly much of the Waterside looks Protestant. It is far tidier than the Green districts, many of its electricity poles and kerbs are painted red, white and blue and its walls say UDA RULE, UVF HERE, FUCK THE IRA. Yet its pale small children seem no less numerous than the Catholic young and have just as many sweet-rotten first teeth and lollipop-stained chins. These new housing estates were atrociously planned; they have no shops or post office within reasonable reach and no playing spaces. We listened to many complaints about the local Tenants’ Association and the women seemed just as dominant and vigorous as their sisters across the Foyle. Several parlour mantelpieces were adorned by what appeared to be life-sized phallic symbols; eventually I identified them as rubber bullets mounted in brass at the relevant angle – an indication that the Waterside people either have exceptionally clean or exceptionally dirty minds. The former, Des insisted, because if the latter they would have doctored the pointed tip. It is horribly easy to see how these objects could kill a person if they hit a vulnerable spot.
All Derry’s social workers are deeply worried about a problem to be found now in cities all over Europe – the psychological effects of uprooting slum communities and rehousing them in comparative luxury. People who have been ‘dropping in’ on each other all their lives no longer visit, or depend on each other in emergencies, though they are still neighbours. Keeping up with the McCanns has suddenly replaced the old values and countless respectable families, who before always managed to pay their way, are in debt. During times of tension neighbourly support becomes more important than ever and its weakening here has contributed to a spectacular increase in mental illness and alcoholism among women.
Des and I talked at length to an elderly widow in a hideously carpeted little room strewn with expensive broken toys and crammed with shoddy new furniture; the large television, on spindly legs, supported a variety of seaside souvenirs. Annie lives with her married daughter who works in a factory and the five children are at school all day and the son-in-law ‘had to go across the water because when he was out of a job for a long while he got tangled with the UVF. They pay regular, like the Provos. Then the RUC was after him and he’ll hardly come back – ’twouldn’t ever be safe.’ Annie is very fond of her son-in-law and was most upset when she accidentally discovered his connection with ‘that lot’. She began to take a drop more than she should and when he went off and she was alone every day she only had the drop to cheer her up. ‘Everything got worse for us all when there was no string on the doors.’ She meant that in their new housing estate you could no longer put your hand through a letter-box, pull the key out on a string and enter a friend’s house without knocking. ‘No one ever needed to be worried or lonesome or in want in my old street. Now it’s gone – all pulled down.’ And what to some town-planner is a triumph – one slum less – to her is a disaster.
When Des had driven off to a meeting about disabled children I cycled slowly across the Waterside to a mainly Catholic housing estate where I was to meet one of the Community Centre leaders. From this height Derry looked very lovely in the light of a cloudless summer evening. Across the smooth, wide Foyle lay the Bogside and Creggan and the big Republican graveyard on a steep green slope scattered with white tombstones. The clear strong Atlantic air must contribute quite a lot to the Derry people’s aliveness. Around me were miles of unhuman new council estates and yet – somehow – no part of Derry is depressing. It embarrasses me now to remember what I expected to find here: a city of sullen, suspicious underdogs, slouching and lounging through ruined streets.
Bernie was sitting in the sun outside her little house, waiting for me. A cigarette hung from her mouth as she rapidly knitted a winter woolly for her two-year-old son – the youngest of sixteen children, four of whom died as babies. She is aged thirty-nine, looks much younger and is expecting the next in December – ‘a free Christmas present for the lot of us’. She dresses neatly and smartly and keeps her raven hair glossy – ‘Jimmy wouldn’t like a streel.’ (Clearly Jimmy appreciates her deference to his viewpoint.) The two eldest girls, aged nineteen and seventeen, have been working in a factory since they were sixteen, but the best-loved (I suspect) eldest boy, aged eighteen, has never been able to get a job. For the past year his mother has been torn between sensibly urging him to go across the water and selfishly keeping him at home on the dole. (Jimmy, I gathered, doesn’t have much say in these matters.) Every day Bernie worries more about the lad – ‘with nothin’ to occupy the mind and no pride from earnin’, you wouldn’t know but he might end up in the Kesh’. Hoping I wasn’t being tactless, I asked what in fact the lad did do with his time. Bernie chuckled. ‘Don’t you fear he’s idle! With Jimmy and meself out workin’ all day, and the two youngest not at school yet, he have plenty to occupy him in the house! And right good he is, too, with the wains. Like another father to them.’
We were joined then by Jimmy’s sister, Bridge, whose husband was one of five men killed a few years ago in an indiscriminate machine-gun attack on a local Catholic pub. Bridge was left with nine children – the eldest aged twelve, the baby with Down’s Syndrome – and she did not look younger than her years. Together the three of us walked to the Community Centre, a shoddy but adequate building paid for and constructed by the locals. In the hallway a wall-plaque commemorated the ‘Five Innocent Victims’ of that pub attack. At all times the strong outer door is kept securely locked and only opened when the ‘porter’ is quite sure of the identity of those seeking admission. Last year the Provos tried to take over this centre by ‘getting at’ the younger members. They manoeuvred a man on to the committee but when he failed to gain control he was ordered to resign. Power-sharing is not part of the Provo way of thinking, either. The only Protestant involved in this centre – he is almost the only Protestant on the estate – has been elected to the committee four years running by popular vote. I separately asked six people would this be likely to happen in a reverse situation – if a Protestant Community Centre had one Catholic member – and they all reluctantly said ‘no’. They seemed almost ashamed to admit to an outsider this defect of Northern Irish society. My question might have been used to launch an attack on Protestant bigotry in general but instead everyone briskly changed the subject. Many little details are accumulating to reinforce my unexpected first impression of the greater virulence of Orange bigotry. This morning I was told by a Protestant minister that Derry’s inter-church meetings can take place only in Protestant or neutral buildings. Many Northern Protestants have such a superstitious fear of Catholicism that a minister seen visiting Catholic territory could get very rough treatment from his parishioners.
After the meeting we returned to Bernie’s house for tea and Swiss roll. Jimmy was standing on the doorstep – two foot over a jampot and stoutish, with thick fair curls and an air of being constitutionally content. He had the two-year-old in his arms and, as we came round the corner, was gazing devotedly at him as though this were the first instead of the sixteenth product of his loins. On the step below him sat his eldest daughter – slim, dark, good-looking – leaning affectionately against her father’s legs. This happy family picture would have made a most moving anti-contraceptive poster. Bernie had just been telling me that a few years ago, after a tricky confinement, her doctor advised sterilisation – and at the memory of this attempt to deprive her of her rights she flushed with rage. In the loving atmosphere generated by this enormous family the slick idea ‘only two and do well by them’ seems meretricious. It all depends on what you mean by ‘doing well’, I suppose.
Today I visited ‘The House’, a touching example of the sort of practical Christianity that flourishes in Derry. It is in fact two old two-storeyed terraced houses, just under the Walls of Derry overlooking the Bogside, and it shelters twelve homeless, hopeless men who would otherwise be sleeping out. No government department or charitable foundation supports it; it was thought up by and is entirely the responsibility of the not rich local people. They provide food, furniture and fuel, do the laundry, mend clothes, clean rooms – and, most important of all, give affection, sympathy and understanding. Most of the men are winos but a few are ‘mended’. Any resident can wander in and out at any time he chooses, up to 11.00 p.m., and cook his own food and make his own tea. When I arrived unexpectedly everything was neat and tidy and five men were sitting around the Rayburn watching the antics of a tabby kitten. I was given a pint mug of very sweet stewed tea by a fifty-year-old with a sad, vague, kind face. He told me he has been ‘dry’ for the past two years, because the Lion of Mary had made him feel he’s ‘wanted’, and now he is the unofficial but generally accepted warden of The House. Beside him sat an old man with a tidy, pointed beard, thick spectacles and very beautiful hands. He was not quite sober and had a difficult accent but I gathered he had recently been in hospital and had only decided he wanted to get better because nuns from the local Mercy Convent visited him every day. ‘Angels, they are,’ he declared indistinctly. ‘Angels without wings.’ There is more to Northern Ireland than meets the headlines.
Mrs C— came in then; she is one of the founders of The House and visits it daily to do various domestic chores. She remarked of the Brits, ‘These lads will go home the cleanest men that ever left a war.’ A few young women from strongly Loyalist areas are given passes to visit the military barracks for dances; otherwise there is no mixing between troops and locals.
I spent most of the afternoon with Brian, a Catholic in his early thirties who is a skilled mechanic, a part-time voluntary community worker, a trade unionist and a shrewd commentator on local affairs. He has straight, shoulder-length shiny fair hair, a long strong face and plenty of self-confidence tempered by modesty. If the North’s community groups are throwing up many such leaders the future is not without hope.
An ardent Republican in his youth, Brian ‘got off that scene when the guns came in’. But he still has many Provo friends and believes the ordinary people should maintain their personal links with the paramilitaries. ‘Nothing can really change unless we communicate, discuss, argue, explain viewpoints. No matter how much we disagree with the other chap we must talk to him – and not just about the weather or the racing.’ He thinks it ‘bloody silly’ of the British Government ever to be toffee-nosed about meeting the paramilitaries of either side. ‘These guys have already proved they can bring the state to its knees. You must talk to them, you must admit nothing can be sorted out without their cooperation. It’s bullshit to talk about “beating the terrorists” as though they were a sort of foreign element in the community. They’re part of it, they grew out of community needs and discontents in the first place and no matter how much people may hate and fear them now they’re still part of it. It won’t ever be possible to “isolate them” effectively. That’s typical, half-baked political pie-in-the-sky – maybe fit for consumption in Westminster but just a joke here.’
Brian bases all his hopes on the paradox that now the Northern Irish, Green and Orange, are slowly drawing closer to one another. He feels that already most Catholics would prefer an independent Northern Ireland in which some neutral agent (the UN?) kept a watch-dog force, rather than an independent thirty-two-county Republic. Some qualified sort of independence has to come, he is convinced, eventually. But what the Catholics have to resist is any manoeuvre that could lead to UDI without firm safeguards for them; some extreme Loyalists now yearn for this as the only constitutional rearrangement that could restore the Orange top dogs to their previous position.
Many Northern Catholics argue that violence had to be used to overthrow a thoroughly corrupt and unjust régime, that no number of non-violent marches, protests or demonstrations could have demolished Stormont. One jibs at this but, as Brian said, the sequence of events from 1963 to 1972 makes it hard to deny. ‘And so,’ he went on, ‘we’re all being a bit hypocritical when we condemn the Provos. They did a lot of the dirty work and the whole Catholic community is enjoying the benefits. It’s just a pity they’ve caused so much grief to innocent people. If they’d been clever enough only to destroy property and kill civilians and avoid racketeering they’d have a lot more support today. As it is, people have forgotten their real achievement. Since they forced Britain to take over, things have improved a lot. London just won’t tolerate discrimination. And this is having a good effect on Catholic morale. Can you imagine what it feels like to be a second-class citizen in your own country? We’re always being told we’ve no sense of civic responsibility but we’ve never before had the chance to get on, or to feel free and equal members of society. Being ambitious and industrious wouldn’t have done us any good – and then the people who kept us in that position blame us for being shiftless and lazy. I’m happy enough with Direct Rule.* For the moment it’s the only solution. There has to be an awful lot of reconciling all round before anything else will work. And it gives us time to sort ourselves out. At Britain’s expense, of course. But that’s fair enough. She did a lot to get us into this mess.’
Brian reckons that the dividing line between crime and patriotism is becoming increasingly blurred in Derry. A spell ‘inside’ confers status on an unemployed youngster; the gaol-bird is a folk-hero and no one enquires too closely into the reason why he was gaoled. Among the Provo volunteers one now finds both witless riff-raff and seasoned criminals willing to do anything for money. Such types are never admitted to the Inner Circle and so have no worthwhile information to give if caught. Brian reserves his deepest contempt for the ‘fireside Provos’ who never risk anything themselves but egg on local youngsters. These include certain priests – one of whom I met yesterday, though Brian was not aware of this and expected me to be shocked by his information.
Repeatedly Brian revealed the contradictory feelings aroused among Northern Catholics by the Provos. A person of great integrity, he has a natural respect for law and order – but not when the forces of law and order are used to uphold injustice. As a humane man he abhors brutality but as a realist he appreciates the improvements the Provo campaign has indirectly secured for the Catholic underdogs – and therefore, as an honest man, he cannot unreservedly condemn them. Many people with less strength of character tend to resolve this inner conflict by shutting their eyes to one aspect of the Provo phenomenon and becoming implacably ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. Only a few weeks ago I was full of self-righteous scorn for the ambivalent attitudes of so many Catholics to the IRA; now I find myself sympathising with them.
Since crossing the border I have several times been asked if I feel no patriotic involvement in the Northern conflict, despite my ancestry; and I am able honestly to answer ‘None whatever.’ Yet occasionally an atavistic sort of patriotism shows through, flashing out like the fire in a diamond when it is caught in a certain light. The day I crossed the border and saw the Union Jack flying in the grounds of a factory near Lisnaskea I felt a spurt of irrational resentment. This reaction had its source far below that thinking level on which I accept that Northern Ireland’s Unionists have every right to fly the British flag in their own corner of Ireland. Then again, a few days ago, I felt a surge of exultation when a prominent Unionist declared that he sees a thirty-two-county Irish Republic as ultimately inevitable, however undesirable.
The Northern Protestants’ insecurity is perhaps in part a result of their lacking any primitive patriotism – an emotion that can be wonderfully strengthening if kept under control. But to take root firmly patriotism possibly needs a more temperate climate than was ever known in post-Plantation Ulster. Three hundred years has been long enough for the Unionists to feel that Northern Ireland is their homeland, yet the emotion it inspires looks less like patriotism than like an aggressive sort of modern nationalism. My definition of patriotism is an awareness of loving and belonging to a place, whether or not the vagaries of politics decree that it belongs to you at any given date. Thus I can feel patriotic about Northern Ireland – as I never could about England – without feeling possessive. People feel and think and react in such various and often contradictory ways on different levels – and maybe politicians made such messes because they try to get everybody neatly operating on only one level.
Just a few days in Derry make one appreciate how stunted its social evolution has been. There is a striking difference between a working-class population that is so by nature, because of the general level of intelligence of its members, and one that has simply not been given the opportunity to develop its talents – or to use them in an appropriate manner if they have been developed. It has become a cliché to say that the North’s present troubles began with Britain’s Education Act of 1948 and since arriving in Derry I have seen for myself, several times a day, how true this is. Before 1948 the vast majority of Catholic children had to remain part of an uneducated, inarticulate mass. Whatever their abilities, they could not hope to get to secondary school – much less university.
Tomorrow I leave for Belfast. So often I’ve fallen in love with a place and been heart-broken when the time came to go, but here I can look forward to coming back quite soon. Derry feels such a friendly little city, despite all the soldiers, policemen, civilian searchers, security officers, street-barriers and checkpoints. One very quickly gets used to the abnormal. Today I found myself cycling up a steep hill in the Creggan right behind an army Land-Rover with two guns pointing directly at me – and I was halfway up the hill before I registered them. Derry motorists prefer not to drive near army vehicles lest they might be involved in a stoning; but for a cyclist it’s a relief to be in a city where motor traffic is so restricted. I’m astonished, and slightly alarmed, by the casual security approach to bicycles. Although Roz could carry a ten-pound bomb in her large saddle-bag she is never thoroughly checked. Yet today, crossing the bridge, I saw a most respectable-looking gentleman standing beside his car while two soldiers removed all the hubcaps. Had he been unable to satisfy them about his identity and ‘purpose of visit’? Or were they just miserably bored and giving themselves a job?
Repeatedly here one asks oneself, ‘Who is afraid of whom – and why?’ At first I was bewildered by the apparent non-existence of shops in parts of the Bogside. Then I realised that they are all tightly shuttered and reinforced against – whom? In the dimness of one big grocery store, which from outside looked like an abandoned building, a friendly proprietor asked jokingly (or half-jokingly?) how it is I’m not afraid to go wandering alone through Provoland. (He had sent his youngest assistant out to guard Roz while I shopped.) I could give no coherent reply and the question made me realise that I don’t fully understand my own reactions to Free Derry. Illogically, I feel safer there than in those areas where I’m protected by the RUC. Is this because the average Bogsider would identify me as a Southern Catholic and therefore not an enemy? Whereas in other areas there are Tartan gangs, UVF gunmen and lone Orange wolves who might see a Southern Catholic as their natural prey? Yet that doesn’t make sense, for to counteract the ‘average Bogsider’ one has the Provo, who sees himself as the rightful ruler of Free Derry and might choose to see me as a spy of some sort. Perhaps the answer is that I’m unduly suggestible and that Free Derry exhales an atmosphere of light-heartedness. Whatever the Provo intimidation, the people have at least got out from under the oppressive Orange cloud. And however uncertain the present and future may be, there is in the air a tremendous sense of having been released.
* In Violence in Ireland: A Report to the Churches (published September 1976) the anonymous authors – a working party appointed by the Catholic hierarchy and the Irish Council of Churches – make strenuous efforts to prove that Republican violence was not responsible for the fall of Stormont. But in the end they have to admit that it was, ‘indirectly’, though they rightly emphasise that ‘the main objectives of Republican policy have not been achieved by violence or the threat of it … It would probably be widely agreed that the events of 1968–76 have removed any possibility that might earlier have existed of the re-unification of Ireland in the foreseeable future.’