At 6.30 a.m. on 15 September I left Corrymeela on its stormy clifftop and crossed Torr Head with a gale behind me. To the north-east, just above a turbulent sea, the blue-green sky was scattered with pinkish shreds. Higher, shafts of golden light came streaming towards the water from between vast, torn masses of grey and purple cloud-banks – a wild and lonely sky it was, as restless as the sea. I thought, as I sweated up Torr Head, of the Children of Lir, changed into swans by their father’s jealous second wife, and swimming for centuries on the waves of the Moyle, awaiting the first ringing of a Christian bell. When they heard that sound they again became children – and died. Maybe Christianity never brought much luck in this part of the world.
My father remembered speaking a version of Scots Gaelic hereabouts, during the First World War, to the people of the Glens. From the road above the Head I could see Scotland clearly, less than thirteen miles away. Always the people of north-east Ulster have felt closer to Scotland than to the rest of Ireland. Before the coast road was built the locals brought many of their more cumbersome necessities by boat from Dunaverty, on the Scottish coast, instead of struggling overland from Carrickfergus.
At 9.00 a.m. I got to Cushendall, feeling very ready for breakfast, but the entire village seemed still asleep. When I finally succeeded in rousing a hotel the astonished-looking proprietress said breakfast was never served before 9.30. Plainly north-east Ulster is in Ireland, however many affinities it may have with Scotland.
One of the loveliest roads in Europe follows the coast from Cushendall to Larne and nowadays it is almost traffic-free. With the wind helping I sped along effortlessly. The sun was bright and noisy waves leaped at the nearby rocks, drenching me with spray; and away beyond the sparkling and glinting of the blue-green sea Scotland lay clear on the horizon. During such interludes the North’s tragedy seems merely a nightmare and its beauty the only reality.
In Larne I chose to have my pint in the town’s poshest hotel. I had by then become an expert on where and how to meet whom and Larne seemed a promising hunting-ground for Protestant businessmen. This ploy was only too successful. I was made to feel very welcome by a group of moderate Unionists, immoderate Orangemen and disgruntled ex-local government officials. The pint became countless pints and the afternoon slipped away. It was dark when I wavered into Belfast in a happy haze.
One of my drinking companions – Henry, a senior Ulsterbus official – told me that on the previous day his company had lost £54,000 worth of buses. These had been burned by the UDA who that week were running a campaign of violence to protest against the ending of ‘special category’ status for political prisoners. When I asked why the UDA has not been made illegal Henry shrugged and said, ‘How can you outlaw the most powerful organisation in a state? It may be psychologically desirable but it’s physically impossible.’
In fact outlawing the UDA would seem ‘psychologically undesirable’ to many within the Protestant community. Most of my Larne friends would resent it were the organisation made illegal, despite what one elderly businessman described as its ‘occasional regrettable excesses’. To the Protestant mind, the fact that the largest of the Protestant paramilitary organisations remains legal, no matter how subversive its activities, is a comforting (if confused and confusing) proof that the Protestant majority is still recognised by Britain as the rightful power in the land.
That night I stayed in Belfast with Catholic friends in what used to be a mixed middle-class area. A few years ago fifteen Catholic families lived on their road, now only four remain. The UDA decided to have ‘a clearance’ and a Protestant neighbour – a widow, living alone – told my friends that an armed man had called on her some months previously and ordered her never again to speak to any of the remaining Catholics. ‘We don’t want any publicity around here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got rid of most of them and we’ll just shift the rest quietly, one by one.’ Very bravely, the widow reported this to the RUC and along came two plain-clothes policemen and a representative of the Housing Authority. These men investigated in a ritualistic sort of way and then announced that there was really nothing they could do. So the widow it was that moved, to a country town. My friends showed me a letter in which she had written: ‘It is a great relief to be able to speak to anyone I like without being threatened by gunmen.’ The ambiguous role of the police is one of the most disconcerting features of the Northern scene.
Community workers often comment on the extraordinary capacity for self-discipline shown within No-Go areas from which the police have been completely excluded for years. A good example is the orderliness of many Republican drinking clubs. (There are also, of course, disorderly shebeens where fighting and heavy gambling are common.) I was taken one night to a newly built Green club which from the street looked not unlike a Khyber Pass fortress. The security check at the door was one of the most thorough in my experience – even our matchboxes were opened by a smiling, chatty, gimlet-eyed woman – yet within it was all very ordinary. Just a large, crowded luxurious pub with colour television in one corner – the volume up full, but nobody listening – and groups of non-sinister-looking men (and a few women) sitting around talking relaxedly. The drinks were blissfully cheap, presumably because they had come ‘off the lorry’. Soon after our arrival the double-doors swung open to admit a children’s fife and drum band, very smartly turned out in green kilts and white shirts. None of the children was over twelve and all their Provo fathers were ‘inside’. The television sound was turned off while they played traditional airs very professionally indeed and collected a handsome sum for ‘POW’ comforts.
Then our table was approached by a man of about fifty, poorly dressed and very unwashed but perfectly sober. Fastening on to me, as a stranger, he began to air all the old obsessions; e.g. we should refer to the ‘Free State’ and never to the Republic of Ireland because there can be no Republic till the thirty-two counties are free. Tossing back his greasy grey locks he glared at me and announced, ‘But I don’t want reunification with those rats you have below in the Dail! When we’ve got the Brits out the twenty-six counties can join us!’ He pulled up a chair and sat beside me. ‘I’m not anti-Protestant – all those buggers who say this is a fuckin’ religious war are wrong! In a thirty-two-county Irish republic the Protestants could have all the religious freedom they want, and every other sort of freedom too. Mind you, I’m not for the Provo methods and I don’t care who hears me say it’ – he stared defiantly around and a tall young man with black hair and chestnut sideburns yelled from the bar, ‘Fuck off, Gerry! You’re on’y too old! You didn’t mind the methods in ’58!’*
‘Little youse can tell about ’58!’ retorted Gerry. ‘Still in your stinkin’ nappies! If I was out then ’twas because we were fightin’ a decent clean war and killin’ on’y the Queen’s men – not blowin’ up women an’ babies an’ anythin’ else that happens to be around. A bit o’ discipline we had then and real officers and a bit o’ humanity. I don’t hold with the present carry-on and I’ll say so anywhere to anyone!’ He turned to me again. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, suddenly anxious. ‘We’re all for Provo aims, even if we don’t fancy the way this lot is goin’ about the job. Brits out! That’s what we all want. Fifteen times I’ve been lifted by the troops – fifteen times! And nothin’ could they ever pin on me. I’m just lifted, and me and me family tormented, because of ’58. Eight hundred years’ torment from the Brits – small wonder we’re mad to see their backsides. All the best land they took off of us and that we must get back, which or whether. I could tell you where the land that was ours is, away below in the Co. Down – and rich planters gettin’ fatter on it every day and talkin’ all the time about the lazy Taigs who wouldn’t work for a livin’ but go drinkin’ on the dole!’
‘But isn’t it time,’ I suggested tritely, ‘to get on with living our own lives, instead of wrangling about our ancestors’ misdeeds or misfortunes?’ It was, however, quite impossible to unhook Gerry from the past; he seemed to need his grievance, to have built his whole personality around it. (Just as many in the Orange ghettos have built their personalities around an hysterical fear of Rome.) When he first began to talk I had felt only a mixture of exasperation and amusement. Then I began to feel pity and despair; and some fear, too. The combination of so much resentment – generations of resentment, forming the very marrow of the soul – the combination of that with the white-hot pseudo-patriotism cultivated by extreme Irish Republicanism prevents any glimmer of rationality getting through to the afflicted mind. When I asked Gerry how he proposed taking back ‘his’ land from the planters, while at the same time giving the Protestants ‘every sort of freedom’ he turned on me angrily and said, ‘ ’Tis easily known where you come from! Youse down South don’t know the way we’ve suffered up here – and youse don’t care! With a cabinet full of Creepin’ Jaysuses grovellin’ and whinin’ around Westminster …’
‘Pack it up, Gerry,’ interrupted my companion. ‘We know. We’ve got the message. You don’t love the Dublin Government …’
‘Does anybody?’ asked a new voice. It was very indistinct, the difficulties of a strong Belfast accent being compounded by a prodigiously thick, bright-red beard through which words came as though the speaker were far away in a forest. But there was nothing unclear about his views. He hated the Dublin and London governments, all the Christian Churches and every form of Communism. He believed only in Irish Republicanism and saw it being threatened on the one hand by Christianity and on the other by Communism, with a third force called ‘American materialism’ waiting to finish it off if the others couldn’t. But he was less clear about how Irish Republicanism might be made to work in an All-Ireland Republic containing a 25 per cent minority who abhorred it.
The next visitor to our table was a young man with shoulder-length hair, a pale, broad, handsome face and large dark eyes that were brilliant and mad. (‘Charles II’s double,’ observed my companion.) He came and knelt before me on one knee and clasped my right hand in both his hands as though he were about to swear that he would love me for ever. Then he said, ‘The only way is to kill. Kill! Kill! Kill! Always in human history there was no justice without death. Goodbye.’ Quickly he stood up, and went. I looked at my companion. ‘An act he always puts on for journalists?’ I suggested hopefully. ‘Or was he just plain drunk?’ Tom shook his head. ‘Neither – he meant every word of it.’ I wondered then if being born into an unnaturally tense society drives some people mad who might otherwise have led relatively normal lives.
Next day I saw my first bomb explosion. At lunch-time I was sitting on the grass in front of the City Hall, eating a cheese sandwich and talking to two young shop-assistants from the British Home Stores. Then suddenly fire-engines began to arrive and the street opposite was cleared and the barrier at our end closed. Two elderly women who had been on their way to the shop next door to the bomb-target came to sit near us, fuming against the slackness of the security arrangements. One suggested that armies of unemployed should be recruited as searchers but her companion quickly pointed out that this would never do. ‘You’ve to be able to trust security officers and you wouldn’t know what sort a dole crowd might be. Provos themselves, most likely.’ It is not really surprising that bombs can still be smuggled into the supposedly closely guarded city centre. Trade would soon be crippled if the main shopping areas of a city of 360,000 people were effectively guarded.
The bomb went off with a loud bang which shook me ridiculously though I had been waiting for it. But there were no ‘earth-tremors’. ‘A controlled explosion,’ one of the shop girls explained knowledgeably.
I moved to the barrier then and watched the small fire being fought while corporation workmen quickly and efficiently swept up buckets full of broken glass. The assistants who worked in the damaged shop were patiently awaiting permission to re-enter the premises where business would at once be resumed in as much of the place as was left. The men and women of the security forces stood around looking benevolent and relaxed and an increasing crowd gathered at the barrier, waiting for it to open so that they could get on with their shopping. To me this seemed an extraordinary scene yet to those around me it was all part of the day’s work. Passers-by, or newcomers joining the crowd, asked anxiously, ‘Anyone hurt?’ Then, having been reassured, they went on their way or settled down to read their newspapers. Of course professional grumblers operate in Belfast as elsewhere. One woman remarked to her husband, ‘No other country would put up with it. We’ve had seven years of it now. Who could live with it?’ Her spouse did not reply. He had, I imagine, heard these remarks before.
A tall, middle-aged, pale-faced man came to stand beside me; he was out for his lunch-break from a City Hall office. ‘You’d wonder sometimes,’ he said, ‘how much of it is terrorism and how much sheer psychosis. Just think – the bomber could be anywhere in this crowd, watching and enjoying the turmoil he’s caused. The physical, visible destruction, the inconvenience to thousands of citizens, the cash-loss – all that stock gone up in flames – and the cost of paying all those extra security forces and firemen and corporation workers. And probably it’s all been caused by one or two cool teenagers who know their way about. Imagine the satisfaction it could give some nut-case with a lust for power, or a personal grudge against society, or just a craving for excitement.’
By this time an immense queue had formed at the barrier and in response to the urgings of two mothers with crying babies one of a group of soldiers opened the entry gate on his own initiative. As shoppers began to stream through a senior RUC officer swung around and sharply ordered the soldier to turn back the crowd and keep the barrier sealed. Spewing obscenities, the youngster violently kicked the gate until it clicked shut. Then he glared at the RUC inspector’s back with what seemed to me an altogether disproportionate degree of hatred. I could imagine how he would behave, while in that sort of mood, to someone even suspected of terrorism. Yet the incident had been occasioned by his soft-hearted response to the pleas of two harassed young mothers. Another mother with three small children was standing beside me. ‘He’s mad for being caught in the wrong,’ she observed. ‘They can’t stand each other, the army and the RUC. Always tryin’ to catch each other out.’
Later that day, near Queen’s University, I paused to watch a huge blaze destroying an antique shop and the three-storey dwelling above it. The few onlookers were remarking to each other that this was what you got if you stopped paying ‘the rates’. The shop had recently been bought by a devout Presbyterian from North Antrim who had told ‘them’ that it was against his conscience to pay protection-money. In this case ‘they’ were Loyalist paramilitaries. ‘It’s not sensible to argue with them,’ said one sad little man. ‘You’re better off paying quiet and regular and never mind your conscience. Isn’t it worse a lot to see all you’ve got in ruins?’
His companion nodded. ‘ ’Tis on’y a fool won’t pay. Nobody’s ashamed no more to give.’
At dusk, as I was returning to North Belfast, I noticed an unusual number of UDR and RUC men lining the Upper Crumlin Road. In my favourite off-licence the owner’s wife announced, ‘There’s more trouble coming. It’s in the air.’ That off-licence has been blown up twice within the past four years and a few months ago the owner’s nearby home was badly damaged when a car-bomb went off outside the hall-door. Opposite the shop all the fire-engines from the local station were leaving for the city centre where yet another cloud of smoke was rising high.
It is now safer to live in a ghetto rather than in a mixed area which makes the task of the paramilitary ‘Housing Authorities’ much easier. So I was told when I visited Brendan and Bernie, a Catholic couple in their fifties who live in a still mixed street of working-class houses. For security reasons this couple share a bedroom with their four teenage children and every night draw a four-foot-wide wardrobe across the door. Many other families along the street do likewise. Within the past two and a half years there have been four assassinations in this small area. Last year, a few days before Christmas, the widower in the house opposite – a Protestant electrician, who often worked for government departments – was shot by the Provos in his hallway and died in Bernie’s arms while Brendan was telephoning for an ambulance. Nine months later, Bernie had not fully recovered from this experience. We tend to forget how many people are involved in the North’s violence, apart from the victim and his or her immediate family. Every death spreads its ripples of fear, grief and hate throughout a whole neighbourhood.
Brendan – a community worker – told me that one of his major problems is getting children’s social centres organised in such a way that they can remain social centres. Such places commonly start off well, getting government grants for structural alterations and attracting lots of youngsters. But they are often taken over by Orange or Green paramilitary groups who either close the doors completely to children and turn the place into a drinking club or use the centre as a recruiting agency. A few days previously I had met the Chairman of one Youth Club who was so badly beaten up eight months ago, when he tried to protect his centre from the local paramilitaries, that he is still on crutches.
Another of Brendan’s worries is how best to occupy schoolchildren during the summer holidays. After several years’ experience he has decided that it is not a good idea to send selected groups abroad for a few weeks. The majority find it hard to settle down when they get home and some, having tasted luxurious living, give their parents hell on finding themselves back in ghetto-land. Some of his colleagues, however, believe that those disadvantages are worth enduring for the sake of broadening the minds of the next generation. Most community workers encourage inter-denominational holiday schemes in Ireland, even if these are only day trips to the sea. One brave young Protestant, who works in a Catholic community centre where one of his colleagues was shot dead beside him last year, expressed the general attitude. ‘They may outwardly revert to type before they’re five minutes back in their home districts, but having shared ordinary childhood experiences will have sown the seeds of an inner recognition of the other side’s humanity. And inner changes are what we have to work for.’ That same young man told me that many of the teenagers in his club can remember playing with ‘the Oranges’ when they were small. And they wish those days were back, if only because they then had so much more freedom of movement.
When I first heard Belfast experts pessimistically discussing the long-term effects of violence on young people, I wondered if they were not underestimating the resilience of youth. By September I knew better. Almost every day I had met a child or adolescent who had been adversely affected by the poisonous atmosphere of the past seven years. For a time I tried to keep things in perspective by telling myself that the situation could be much worse, that after all Northern Ireland is not enduring a real war with hundreds being killed in a day. But I am no longer sure that a full-scale war would be worse than this long-drawn-out agony of communal tension and suspicion, and suppurating resentment and revengefulness. Physically a ‘real’ war would of course be much more dreadful while it lasted – and much more obvious to the outside world and therefore bad for Britain’s image as ‘the referee’. But nothing could be more spiritually destructive than the present situation.
Resilience is one thing – all the Northern Irish seem to have more than their share of it – but the young are very vulnerable to fear. In a quiet-seeming suburban home I met a mother who described what is by now a typical experience of Belfast parents. This educated sensible woman has done all in her power to give her three daughters a calm and happy home-life. Yet when the family went to London for a holiday the twelve-year-old became mysteriously ill and after a few days her elder sister discovered that she was terrified of having to walk past so many parked cars to get anywhere. Although she is an intelligent child it was impossible to reason her out of her terror, so profoundly has the car-bomb campaign affected her.
One of Brendan’s neighbours told me that when she took her teenage daughter and son to Dublin for a few days their greatest treat was strolling up and down O’Connell Street after dark, feeling free to go into any café for a hamburger or a coke. At least these two were able to relish their freedom; other parents told me that their youngsters, when taken on holidays, were too nonplussed by liberty to enjoy it. The understandable restrictions imposed on many middle-class children must do almost as much harm – of a different sort – as that freedom to vandalise which is so common in ghetto areas.
There are some 10,000 vandalised empty houses in Belfast, according to an official Housing Authority estimate. On a few occasions I have watched the ghetto vandals at work. Most of them are in the eight to thirteen age-group, old enough to have considerable physical strength but too young to be in any paramilitary gang. They hunt in packs, armed with a variety of tools, and swarm all over a building taking a wild delight in demolishing it. They smash windows, break down doors, rip walls asunder, chop up staircases, shatter bathroom fittings, pull down ceilings and pull up floors. They pay not the slightest attention to anyone who tries to stop them and their parents, if aware of what the wains are up to, often choose either not to notice or to abuse any outsider who may have attempted to intervene. This is among the most harrowing of Belfast’s many vicious circles. All these youngsters need help, yet as things are it is virtually impossible to reach them either physically or emotionally. A lot could be done if an army of social workers were to replace the soldiers on the streets; but for that to happen the British would have to adopt a new philosophical approach to the whole problem.
There is nothing fundamentally amiss with such vandals. They are ordinary children who have been born into extraordinary circumstances. Watching them being mindlessly destructive, it is easy to forget this and to feel outraged by their deeds rather than by the society which has bred them.
One afternoon, in the grimmest of the Catholic ghettos, I was cautiously cycling along a glass-strewn street when I noticed smoke pouring through the smashed windows of a comparatively new but thoroughly vandalised two-storey house. Squeals of childish laughter came from inside, inspiring a ghastly vision of tiny charred corpses being found a few hours later. I went to the gap where once a hall-door had been and peered through the smoke. Amidst the rubble, ten six-to-eight-year-olds (including three girls) had made a bonfire of doors already chopped up by slightly older vandals. They recognised ‘the lady with the bike’ – I had been that way before – and greeted me delightedly. One little girl offered me a squashed and dust-impregnated peppermint cream and politely invited me to sit on the floor. When I suggested that the whole building – and the occupied houses on either side – might soon go up in smoke, everybody giggled happily at the prospect. Then suddenly they lost interest in their bonfire and spontaneously followed me outside to talk. Their questions – of a sort with which, as the mother of an eight-year-old, I am only too familiar – revealed a pathetic ignorance and an even more pathetic longing to learn. In that group there was only one dull child; the rest had nimble, eager, hungry little minds. And it is significant that the moment an outsider arrived, to provide some mental stimulus, they lost interest in their destructive play. This is the age at which they need to be rescued from their circumstances. Within three or four years they will be confirmed, professional vandals, proud of an anti-social life-style and scornful of attempts to change it. What better breeding-ground could there be for the paramilitaries of 1990?
We had been sitting chatting on the broken pavement for about half an hour when one little boy begged to be allowed to ride on Roz. He was much too small to reach the pedals from the saddle but none the less went happily whizzing off around the block. When he returned everyone else had to have a go and until I had firmly laid down the law there was some dissension about whose turn it was next. Then all went well until a tough-looking fourteen-year-old joined us. (His father, I afterwards discovered, is serving a life-sentence for killing a policeman.) This lad wanted a ride at once and ignored my protests that the little ones must first have their turn. When the seven-year-old who had just taken over Roz tried to pedal away, the newcomer knocked him to the ground and then picked him up by the shoulders and before I could intervene had cracked his head three times, hard, on the road. Four other adolescents then arrived and the largest of them – he could have been seventeen – attacked the fourteen-year-old with his fists before himself taking off on Roz.
As I cuddled the whimpering seven-year-old I realised what a sheltered life I lead. Presumably this sort of thing goes on all over the world in urban slums but my travels do not normally take me into such places. So now I was trembling in reaction to the sheer brutality of these boys’ behaviour. It was not at all like the usual sort of male adolescent horseplay; afterwards, trying to analyse the difference, I decided that it lay in the purposefulness of this ghetto violence. For these boys, there is only one way to get what you want – through force. Restraint and negotiation are so foreign to them that they are not prepared to wait five minutes for anything. And outsiders feel shaken by such scenes because they are reminders of how close violence is to the surface of human nature – everybody’s nature. When one has been brought up in an environment which inhibits physical violence almost from the moment of birth, it is easy to forget this.
Some ten minutes had passed before it occurred to me that I might never see Roz, or my luggage, again. My luggage consisted of a sponge-bag, a beloved flea-bag which by now has acquired mascot-status and several expensive new books. However, Roz was my main worry; you can get an artificial leg or a new bicycle but it’s not the same thing … For the first time I felt the full implications of a No-Go area. Apart from his inherent honesty, there was no reason that I could see why that boy should return my property. (When I remarked on this later to a ghetto friend he said dryly, ‘People have been knee-capped for less. We may be a No-Go area but we’re not lawless. Those lads all know what they would get if they stole from a visitor.’ A comment that reminded me of Afghanistan.) For whatever reason, Roz was safely restored to me after half an hour. Whereupon I decided that enough was enough and left my young friends stirring up the embers of their fire.
On the following morning I had my only personal encounter with paramilitary violence. The UDA were still running their protest campaign, against the abolition of special category status for political prisoners, and as I was cycling towards West Belfast I saw a roadblock some hundred yards ahead of me. To have taken an alternative route would have made me late for an important appointment and punctuality is among my few virtues. A solitary RUC man stood at the junction where I had paused to consider the situation; he was diverting all the traffic to avoid confrontations between angry motorists and the UDA. When I asked his advice he said, ‘They’ll probably let a cyclist through.’ So I continued towards the line of apparently unarmed ‘volunteers’ who were turning back those cars and taxis which had approached them through streets where no police were on duty. Most of the taxis were packed with women, small children and push-chairs; it was a Saturday morning, when many go into the city centre to do their weekly ‘big shop’. In that area the victims would have been mainly Protestant and as they were ordered to leave the taxis and walk home they did not hesitate to tell the UDA what they thought of them, often in terms not fit for the ears of small children.
As I approached the ‘volunteers’ I was waved back and a man shouted angrily, ‘Can’t you fuckin’ see this is a roadblock?’ At that point I should have wordlessly vanished. But suddenly an obsessional punctuality was reinforced by an indignant impulse to assert my right to use the Queen’s highway. Although assert is much too strong a word; I merely asked politely if I might go around the edge as I had a very important appointment near by.
The moment he heard my accent the leader switched his attention from a taxi, pointed to the spot where I stood and said curtly, ‘You stay right there. We’ll have to think what to do about you.’ To emphasise his order, he stepped forward and kicked Roz’s front wheel with a large boot, breaking five spokes. He looked ridiculously like what one would have expected him to look like – a short chunky man with coarse features and small bloodshot eyes.
For the next twenty-three minutes – I was very time-conscious that morning – I stood in the middle of the road being pornographically insulted at intervals by those thirty men. This was an extraordinarily effective method of mental torture. It eventually reduced me to tears of humiliation though by normal standards I am a tough old boot. I would have far preferred a beating-up. As it was, I knew that if I did or said nothing provocative I was in no danger. The anti-censorship advocates of ‘porn for all’ might profitably reflect on such examples of the connection between porn and violence – something I had often heard about without ever expecting to observe it.
Altogether this was an enormously instructive incident. I recognised one of the ‘volunteers’ as a man with whom I had spent two hours drinking pints a few days previously. He gave no indication of ever having seen me before; indeed, he was one of the most foul-mouthed of the gang. In a devious way, this consoled me when I thought about it afterwards. Here ‘gang’ or ‘herd’ is the key word. As an individual, this man is not evil. He is not even truly bigoted or he would never have talked to me as he did in that pub. But he is a man of low intelligence and minimal education and therefore he is susceptible to every sort of social and moral infection. He, too, is a victim – as who, in Northern Ireland, is not?
Other victims were near by, as I stood waiting for my ordeal to end. Twenty yards beyond the UDA were six armed policemen who could hear some of the obscenities that were being shouted at me. And thirty yards beyond them a military patrol stood around near their armoured vehicles. But nobody dared move forward to interfere; had they done so – I was later informed by a local Protestant clergyman – they would have been surrounded within minutes by hundreds of well-armed UDA members.
When the ‘volunteers’ became bored they contemptuously signalled to me to pass their barrier; why they did not then turn me back is just another of the many minor mysteries of Belfast life. I paused by a policeman, nodded towards the UDA and asked, ‘What do they think they are doing?’ The sergeant, his eyes narrowed with rage, glared at the roadblock and said, ‘They’re trying to be big boys – and succeeding. Because we can’t lay hands on them to break their fuckin’ necks!’ (It was only afterwards that I appreciated this anatomical inexactitude.) Approaching the army patrol, I realised that the young lieutenant had been observing my experience through binoculars. He looked embarrassed and apologetic and offered advice about the nearest bicycle shop. His men looked tense and angry. No wonder the security forces so often misbehave. They have too much frustration in their lives to be able to exercise the sort of ideal self-control required by the situation. If youngsters are armed and trained to fight, and then are curbed hard in situations that would seem to call for action, naturally they become more and more aggressive. And so violence spirals, every day drawing newcomers into its savage vortex.
Only by transposing the Northern Ireland security situation to Britain can one appreciate its ‘through the looking-glass’ quality. Imagine a Hampshire regiment helping The Angry Brigade to acquire arms and military training – covertly, yet with the tacit approval of large sections of the population. Then imagine that organisation regularly obtaining protection-money from thousands of helpless citizens, and occasionally setting up roadblocks throughout the Home Counties, and hijacking and burning dozens of London Transport buses as a protest against those of their members who were in gaol being treated as common criminals. Next, imagine that Brigade telling the police and army – as the UDA did in September 1976 – that they would call off their campaign of disruption and destruction if none of their members was arrested. Finally, imagine this bargaining being effective, though the police knew exactly who had planned and directed the havoc. One simply cannot imagine such things happening in Britain. Yet in theory Belfast is just another city of the UK where Her Majesty’s subjects are no less entitled to the blessings of democracy than the inhabitants of Manchester or York.
On a late September day as hot as midsummer, I boarded a Protestant ‘Peace Ladies’ bus. The young Presbyterian minister – dark-suited and dog-collared – welcomed me warmly but distractedly; five of his ladies were missing and it was almost time to leave for a distant town. His colleague, if that is not being over-ecumenical, was an even younger Church of Ireland curate in a T-shirt and jeans. Much later, when my Presbyterian neighbour and I were on first-name terms, she confided her dislike of clergy who look like Teddy-boys. (A quaint term, yet somehow not surprising from an elderly Belfast lady.)
Everybody had a picnic basket and was in an ‘outing’ mood to match the weather. Halfway to our destination we stopped for lunch on a wide verge of yellowed grass. When other Peace buses passed, their labels telling us from which Belfast district they came, we waved and cheered and clapped; and the cheering was that much louder for a Catholic bus. Long before we got to the rallying point a tremendous atmosphere of unity and hope had been generated. It was a very happy feeling. Even on sweet thermos-flask tea my spirits rose.
Among my companions there was much predictable anti-Paisley talk and some less predictable criticism of the Reverend Martin Smyth who had recently abandoned ‘exploratory’ talks with the SDLP. Nobody was impressed when I suggested that Mr Smyth might not be personally responsible for the break-down – that he has to cater for the mob behind him and cannot be considered his own master, even if he is Grand Master of the Orange Order. ‘They’re all rotten, them politicians!’ said one young woman with a thin, lined face. That evening, when she and I were on our own, searching for the right bus, she told me that her UVF husband got a ten-year sentence in 1973. Their four children hardly know him. ‘I went to see him yesterday and he told me, so he did, “If I was out of this place I’d be Peace Marching with yous.” But he can’t say that where he is. He’d be beat up if he did.’
There were an estimated 20,000 Peace People at that rally and it was very moving, as we marched through a largely Catholic town, to hear many of the local onlookers cheering especially loudly as Protestant groups passed by. (Each group marched behind its own enormous banner.) Of course other onlookers did not cheer but merely stared impassively. And there were a few small boys and pimply youths who treated us to obscene gestures and Provo slogans. These youngsters provoked several minor scuffles, one of which I witnessed. It started after the march, during the hymn-singing and praying. Three Provos on a high grassy embankment just behind me began to shout abuse which the crowd drowned by chanting. ‘We want Peace! We want Peace!’ Then one Provo recognised an Andersonstown woman beside me and yelled – ‘You fuckin’ bitch!’ while giving what is I believe now known as the Harvey Smith sign. (An odd way of achieving immortality, when one comes to think of it.) At once the woman’s adolescent son hurled himself on the Provo and in the ensuing mêlée three old ladies were knocked to the ground. A nearby television reporter was busy filming the scene and one woman put her headscarf over the camera and begged him not to show violence. He swiftly removed the scarf, saying coldly, ‘Our editor will decide what to use.’ All around me, as young men were tussling with the Provos, women exclaimed, ‘They’re not well – be easy on them!’ ‘Leave them alone – they can’t help it!’ ‘Don’t call the police!’ Then a girlfriend of one of the Provos, who had been among the marchers, abandoned her fellow-Peace Women to try to defend her boyfriend. As he broke away from – or was released by – his opponent she flung her arms around him and he quickly kissed her. Together they scrambled a little way up the embankment before turning to face the crowd. Still clinging to each other, they flung hysterical defiance at us – and then burst into tears. They were very young.
‘She came on the March because she wanted to get him outa the Provos,’ explained the woman beside me who had known both since they were in push-chairs. ‘But now he’s got her feelin’ ashamed for desertin’ so instead of him leavin’ the lads I suppose she’ll be joinin’ them.’ At that point, I felt my euphoria evaporating. It is too easy for the uninvolved to be Peace Marchers, publicly proclaiming their abhorrence of violence. For the people of the ghettos, life is not so simple.
During the march we had heard a mighty explosion in the direction of the nearby border and seen a huge pillar of smoke against the cloudless sky. As we dispersed, to look for our buses, word spread that an oil-truck had been hijacked at the border, loaded with a bomb and the driver ordered to take it to a depot where it went up according to plan. What must that driver’s feelings have been as he wondered how accurate was the timing-device?
After the rally, the town suddenly seemed full of army vehicles and foot-patrols in combat dress with weapons at the ready and camouflaged faces. Soon my spirits were rising again; never before had I seen troops looking relaxed in Northern Ireland. Instead of being surrounded, as they usually are in Catholic areas, by a public which likes to show how much it hates them, they were moving through throngs of Peace People who smiled at them kindly. For me their response was the most memorable feature of that day. Instead of the hostile expressions they so often (and so understandably) wear, their black-streaked faces were split by delighted white grins as they returned the Peace People’s friendly greetings. At one stage a girl from a Catholic ghetto was walking with me. As we passed a tall young soldier she smiled at him and said, ‘We’ll soon have yous out of a job!’ The soldier smiled back. ‘I hope so!’ he said – with a depth of feeling which gave those three syllables an extraordinary eloquence. Had that girl dared in her home district to treat a Brit as another human being she would have been ‘suitably punished’. I felt then that the Peace Movement was worthwhile, even if it never achieved anything more than these small gleams of humanity through the clouds.
Not many hours later this sentimentality – if such it was – was being scorned by a clinically cool mind in Belfast. ‘Did you not notice,’ said Susan (originally from Dublin), ‘that most of your fellow-marchers were not real grass-roots but the next layer up?’ (I had noticed.) ‘Of course you can be more optimistic about it all after you’ve been out feeling benign with 20,000 others. But don’t forget that for many a Peace Rally has become something to do on an otherwise humdrum Saturday afternoon.’
We tried then to imagine the Peace Ladies at home, urging their local paramilitaries to pack up the guns and ‘go political’. Susan agreed that being aware of the moral support of so many others might give some people more courage for this task. But we both had to admit that we found it hard to imagine any paramilitary paying the slightest attention to such advice. And without anything to show for their efforts, could the Peace People be expected to sustain their enthusiasm?
‘I’m afraid it’s no good,’ said Susan. ‘If Peace is to be anything more than a symptom of exhaustion, it must be preceded, or at least accompanied, by other things. Like justice, as the Provos so rightly say.’
Susan has been living in Belfast since before The Troubles began and I asked her if she thought belonging to the Peace Movement would make it easier for people to cooperate with the security forces. ‘Already there’s more cooperation,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think it can ever be enough to make a great difference. Bowing to intimidation has become a mental habit with most people, even when there’s not much risk. They feel superstitious about informing, as though it must inevitably draw bad luck on them. And often they feel dependent on the paramilitaries – a feeling that’s going to get stronger the longer we’re left without our own government. In Protestant areas you’ve people who hate and fear the UVF or whatever and will march their shoes off for peace every week – and yet won’t inform because they believe they may yet need their paras for protection. This is especially so in East Belfast. The RUC have a very bad name there for thieving and looting after a fire or a bomb. And of course you get the same feeling in Catholic areas.’
Next day I met a government-employed psychiatrist who explained a further convolution of the informing issue. As a government servant he feels doubly bound to pass on any information that comes his way yet as a social worker it would be almost impossible for him to achieve anything without the cooperation and trust of the local paramilitaries. By now, he said, there is a vast No-Man’s-Land between the legal and illegal worlds of Northern Ireland. And anybody who works in that region has to forget his ‘obligation to society’ and keep his mouth shut.
This dedicated man looked as though he had long since lost the knack of relaxing. He mentioned having recently attended a football match in England to study crowd behaviour. ‘The difference there,’ he said, ‘was that when a gang turned rough the crowd withdrew, isolating them for police attention. Here it would have advanced to join them. That’s what we’re up against. And even if some wizard found a political solution in the morning we’d have that sort of problem on our plate for generations to come. But at least if less was being spent on security more would be available for rehabilitation.’
* In 1958 the IRA were running an anti-Brit campaign in the border areas.