Cover
story Northern Ireland memoir
By MICHAEL J.
FARRELL NCR staff
On a slow day in 1968, as I drove to
Dungannon Hospital to visit a sick friend, I encountered at a crossroads a
rowdy, excited procession coming in from small Coalisland five miles away.
There were hundreds, as I recall, but this was an Irish event and therefore
disorganized and stretching back forever -- I remember being mad about the
delay. Later I realized I had run right into history: Northern Irelands
first civil rights march.
The parade lurched on cheerfully into Dungannon Square where a few
speeches were delivered until local Protestants threw stones at the marchers.
Nothing serious -- that would come later.
Northern Ireland is at a crossroads, one of a series of crossroads
going back for centuries. There is euphoria at this particular juncture. The
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to John Hume and David Trimble has been widely
applauded. It confers another seal of approval on the peace process that is
aptly named after Good Friday. It hints at hope even amid the reverberations of
the recent Omagh massacre.
But a cloud will linger long over the North. So much was lost and
so many suffered and so many of them were innocent. It would be a betrayal to
ride into the future forgetting them.
Because I was there for part of it, and knew some of them, I wish
to mark this moment by writing a few fragments in their memory.
I am, frankly, happier for Hume, now head of the Social Democratic
and Labor Party, than for Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists and first
minister of the new Northern Ireland Assembly. Its not so long since
Trimble danced, literally, with the notorious Rev. Ian Paisley at Drumcree as
both tried to rub Catholic noses yet again in William of Oranges victory
at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Yet Trimble did make amends, seized the
moment.
But Hume goes back to the beginning, bore the heat of the day. I
drank tea with his large family in their tiny house in 1969. Our paths crossed
only a few times. Not everyone knows he went to the same high school as that
other Nobel winner, poet Seamus Heaney.
I was at the time prior of a large priory, which I shall not name
lest the place should ever need deniability.
Irwins story
A young man named Irwin was waiting in our parlor one evening. A
Protestant, he wanted to become a Catholic -- to convert, as we
used to say. It wasnt clear how noble this was or how pious the
aspiration: He was planning to marry a Catholic girl. In many parts of the
world this would be a more indifferent circumstance than in Northern Ireland
where ancient history and hate were usually part of the picture.
Irwin was the only person I ever instructed in this manner. For
several months we met weekly. He read the books I suggested, asked many
questions. We became friends. When he was ready, I arranged for the local
pastor to hear his confession and baptize him. It was done without fanfare.
This was not Paul thrown from his horse.
The two were married. The girls family attended the wedding
in large numbers. No member of Irwins family was there because they were
not only Protestant but Orange, and bitter. Behind the merriment, it was a sad
old day.
A couple of years later, Northern Ireland did one of its small
political maneuvers. As the violence got out of hand, the all-Protestant,
ruthless, part-time militia, known locally as the B-Specials, was suppressed by
Britain in favor of a bipartisan force, the Ulster Defense Regiment, that, the
government promised, would show equal justice and tolerance to both sides. Even
the leading Catholic politicians endorsed this new force. Irwin, an idealist,
joined: He had more motive than most to bridge the wretched divide.
The new force never quite managed to be nonsectarian. The few
Catholics who joined were threatened by the IRA. Irwin stood firm, doing the
usual patrol duties. Then the IRA kidnapped him. They gave him a month to leave
the country. But Irwin made no move to leave. One afternoon, as he drove home
with his two small children, gunmen shot him twice in the head.
He had gone down more than one hard road. One might have thought
it enough, even for the IRA, that he made the wrenching move away from an
Orange family, crossed to the other side.
I remember vividly the last time I saw him alive. I was stopped by
a military patrol late one night on a country road -- such road
blocks were common then, in the early 1970s. It was a dark and very wet
night. As the commander poked his flashlight through the car window, I saw
Irwin at the back of the patrol of six or eight. He did not speak to me nor I
to him. To this day Im not sure why. Instinctively we both knew it would
be easier for all of us not to know each other. In a matter of months he was
dead.
The funeral created its own surreal ambience. Though there was a
Mass for Irwin in the Catholic church, it was soon clear the Protestants were
claiming him back in death. As a huge crowd of Catholics lined the streets, it
was the Protestants, led by the Orange Order, who lined up, in rows of eight,
to march behind the body down the wide streets of Portadown.
This caused me a brief personal dilemma. Though unsure of the
protocol, I was determined to pay tribute to Irwin. So I stepped into one of
the wide rows of marchers as the Lambeg drums spread their doleful sound across
the town. I soon found the Orangemen wouldnt march with me. They moved
forward or back, so that I was always the odd one out, I in my telltale Roman
collar, they in their Orange sashes and hard black hats, ours was a weird
liturgy that did little honor to Irwins memory yet was a fitting end to
the hard road he had chosen more than once.
There was one other wrinkle in the Irwin story. I knew an old
woman, Ellen, a paraplegic, who lived alone on the banks of Lough Neagh. She
was mildly famous for reading tea leaves. People would drive out to her house,
with varying degrees of credulity, give her half-a-crown, and Ellen would read
their cups.
Irwin, his wife and another couple had gone to visit Ellen. She
read their cups, amid the usual banter, until she came to Irwins. She
refused to read the cup. The banter soon stopped. The more she refused, the
more he insisted. You will be killed, she eventually told him, or some such
words. It was in the tea leaves -- she told me so herself after he was
dead.
Pat Johns story
Another young man, Pat John, used to come to our door. He had a
mental disability and was, as far as I know, mute. He stank to high heaven. He
would sit on the concrete steps outside, rain or shine, and eat the sandwich we
would bring him. I regret, now that its too late, that I never took him
inside, nor sat him down with some of the swanks who came to our place for
various purposes, nor ever gave him an outrageous dinner, a once-in-a-lifetime
feast he would never forget.
One day British soldiers beat him, no doubt because he was unable
to answer their questions. So, next time he saw them he ran. The soldiers
riddled him -- that was the local expression when the bullets were too many to
count -- because, they said, he did not halt when ordered.
Pat John was a member of a sad little family, parents and four
children, all mentally handicapped, who used to walk our neighborhood. I gave
last rites to the mother a few minutes before she died. She was lucky enough to
be gone before her son was riddled.
Americans, as well as others, are puzzled by Northern Ireland.
They ask the big question: Why all the fighting? Then most glaze over long
before I can get to Irwin or Pat John. I usually start with the Ulster and
other plantations, in the 16th century, when Irish Catholics were sort of
kicked out of the North and Presbyterians from Scotland and Northern England
brought in. It was presumed this would create a more compliant population loyal
to London, but it never worked. The original Catholics never altogether went
away.
So when the outlawed Catholics got rambunctious, the Protestants
founded the Orange Order with the slogan, What we have, we hold. An
Orange toast from the 19th century gracefully combines its members
political and religious aspirations:
To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of King
William III, who saved us from rogues and roguery, slaves and slavery, knaves
and knavery, popes and popery, from brass money and wooden shoes. And whoever
denies this toast, may he be slammed, crammed and jammed into the muzzle of the
great gun of Athlone, and the gun fired into the popes belly, and the
pope into the devils belly, and the devil into hell, and the door locked
and the key in an Orangemans pocket.
Young men with a cause
One morning, at two oclock, a colleague and I were lingering
over a last cup of coffee in the kitchen when the door bell rang. Pat answered
the door while I put away the mugs. When I reached the long corridor, Pat was
approaching, followed by two boys, members of the IRA it turned out, ages 16
and 17, their guns pointed at my colleague and then at myself. We took them to
what we called the breakfast room.
Three of them had been in a fight with British soldiers in the
next village three miles away, they said. It was all quite complicated, like
war. They had first enticed the army out to investigate a fabricated ambush, a
common ploy. In the real-life ambush that followed, one of the three was
captured. The remaining two had hijacked a car, had then run smack into a road
block. They had fired shots directly into a police car and now feared their
comrade might have been in that car and possibly killed. They had run across
the fields, chased by a helicopter, which now hovered above our priory, its
powerful searchlights scanning the dark fields.
The two were scratched and bedraggled. They had raced to our place
not by accident but because one had made a retreat there the previous year. It
was all very Irish Catholic.
For an hour we argued. We were prepared to put them up for the
night -- to save their lives or the lives of others -- but only if they gave up
the guns. Their orders were not to part with the guns until they were dead --
at the time new recruits were easier to find than guns. In the end a compromise
was reached: They would give up the guns, but we would return them after a
month. The whole thing was too farfetched for a movie script. A code word was
agreed upon for future communications. It was a night of tough choices. Had we
insisted, they would not have forced themselves on our hospitality but would
have risked the night amid great danger because there were road blocks
everywhere.
So we fixed them a meal about 3:30 in the morning. They were
starving. There was no bravado. In arguing his case to keep the guns the older
one had pulled a holy card from his inside pocket, with a Prayer to St.
Joseph for a Happy Death on the back. I say it every day, he
said.
After eating, we had to find them old clothes and burn what they
were wearing because of the telltale gunpowder. It was routine. For a few hours
they slept soundly. Getting them off our hands was a whole other story. We
never learned their names. The young one had phoned home. I overheard him make
the lame excuse of being delayed at a friends house, so he would not be
at school. It is likely that when he returned home his family would ask no
questions. It is certain that, back at school, this kid would have dropped no
hint of what had happened. Kids with swagger and a loud mouth were not
recruited. Rather, the Republican strain ran in quiet, deep families, and one
could never be sure who was in and who wasnt.
The two young IRA men had grown up in the shadow of their own
pantheon of heroes, especially, at least back then, Patrick Pearse, a gentle
and religious barrister and teacher who had a high regard for sacrifice.
Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, he wrote, and
the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.
By executing Pearse and others after the insurrection of 1916, the
British created patron saints for idealistic Irish youth for the rest of the
century.
The Norths tattered history
One fact long forgotten by the world is that when the present
troubles started, the IRA was about as potent militarily as the Flat Earth
Society. Whatever remnant remained from earlier skirmishes threw in its lot
with the nonviolent civil rights movement, which was consciously following
Martin Luther Kings American model and whose modest original demands were
as rudimentary as one man, one vote.
The Protestant-Unionist majority, after a century of domination,
was not in a giving mood. Since the border with the Irish Republic was created
in 1921, the more sophisticated Unionists, many of vaguely aristocratic blood
through connections across the water, had relied on the more thuggish element
in their midst, especially the notorious B-Specials, to keep the minority
Catholics in their place. And there has generally been a demagogue to hijack
the thuggish element for Unionist purposes. In this recent descent into hell
the role was played by Paisley, who, if there is such a thing as evil people in
the world, must surely be a hot candidate.
The peaceful protests soon gave way to cities on fire. Then one
day John Gallagher was shot. I dont remember who was second or third, but
I could point out the spot where Gallagher died in Armagh because he was the
first, innocent and by accident. A fateful threshold was crossed. Soon there
were too many to be household names. We each had our own little list of those
we had known.
In my callow youth I played Gaelic football in Armagh. Fred was a
member of our team. Small and wiry, he was more a psychological irritant than
physical threat to the opposition. A nondrinker, he visited a pub one evening,
his first such visit in more than 20 years. Protestant extremists came in and
sprayed the Catholic pub with bullets, and Fred was riddled. Gaelic, as it
happens, wasnt his game. He grew up a Protestant playing rugby until he
converted to marry a Catholic girl. In Northern Ireland there are
bitter ironies everywhere.
Jim was a better football player, a star and household name. In
1969 I wrote a passion play performed outdoors. Jim played Christ carrying the
cross. But before each performance, if you watched carefully, you could see
Jesus breaking all the rules, drinking a six-pack hidden in his pickup
truck.
As he drove home one evening, Jim, too, was riddled, along with a
couple of his children.
Everyone has stories. Some are in a lighter vein. When a major
politician came to our place for a debate, he handed me the handgun the British
government had issued to all ministers of what was then a lame parliament in
Belfast. Since I was moderating the debate, and didnt wish, either, to be
encumbered with the surprisingly heavy gun, I ran upstairs to my bedroom and
hid it under my mattress.
And some are light stories turned terrible. Barney was a good
friend for many years. A character, he laughed his way through life. He drew
the dole but worked on the side, frequently getting caught, but fervently
devoted to outwitting the authorities. Every week or so, a couple of us would
visit Barneys lively and happy family, drink tea, listen to his stories.
He was an operator, a doer, never far from the spotlight: master of ceremonies
at concerts, referee at football games. When our seminarians played and Barney
was referee, he considered it his sacred duty to ensure they won by any means
necessary. Football apart, he was not political.
Years passed. I had been on a visit to South Africa for NCR
and had an hour to wait in New York between flights, so I bought The New
York Times to catch up on the news. After glancing at the front page, I
opened the paper at random. My eye fell on a small news item, no more than two
inches, that said Barney had been blown to pieces by an IRA bomb gone
wrong.
He had been calling the numbers at bingo that night. Afterward, he
was driving his niece home. The usual IRA warning phone call did not arrive in
time. As the car passed the local police station, the bomb shattered the car
and its occupants.
As the local people gathered, they were confronted by an awful
sight. One of Barneys sons was soon on the scene. There was a leg in the
ditch.
Its my da, the son said.
A local priest, prior at the time, as it happened, tried to
reassure the son -- he might be mistaken.
No, the son said. Id know the
leg.
Bombings and shootings that are so impersonal from a distance are
very personal close up. One might wonder how communities could ever recover.
There are approximately 3,200 dead since John Gallagher, each a personal
story.
At first we all thought we had solutions, then we ran out of
solutions. But the people carried on, because they had to. Its poignant
how such a small thing as the Nobel Peace Prize could cheer them up.
Everyone is tired in Northern Ireland and needs a rest. May the
dead and living all rest in peace.
National Catholic Reporter, November 13,
1998
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