Torn Apart
Page 40
As I write – in April 2018 – almost exactly twenty years have elapsed since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and an illusion of peace now exists in the six counties of Northern Ireland. Is it an illusion, or is this author being overly pessimistic? Is it a lasting peace or is it merely the British Government throwing billions of sterling at the Ulster economy, sweetening things for the Republicans of Sinn Féin in the hope that they will not take up arms again? Remember that the bombs in England in Manchester and the Square Mile of London cost the insurers well over £2 billion. There is simply no way that Lloyds or the incumbent Conservative Government will allow those economy-jarring explosions to rock the UK again.
Visitors to Northern Ireland today – for example the copious amounts of males on stag weekends or females on hen night celebrations – fly into Belfast’s George Best City Airport, seemingly unaware that more than 3,000 bombs exploded around the area of their route into the city centre. Or indeed in the streets and buildings of the pubs at which they will drink their fill of McEwan’s lager and cheap champagne in the Cathedral Quarter. How many, for example, will notice Palace Barracks to their left as they are ferried into Belfast? Will they notice armed soldiers on sentry-go; will they see the high fences of razor wire; will they, for example, even notice the armoured and sandbagged sangars along the perimeter? On a recent trip to Belfast, I saw numerous young women, with impossibly high heels, clicking along the paved area of the Cornmarket, drinking themselves towards a pleasant state of drunkenness; could they have an inkling that, forty-six years earlier, three young off-duty soldiers were lured to their gruesome deaths at Ligoniel by female PIRA operatives? Later on, I saw groups of revellers, complete with London accents, beers in their hand, strolling in front of the cathedral. Did they realise that they were walking over the very spot where a PIRA gunman, disguised as a rag day student, shot dead Trooper James Nowosad, as well as civilian searcher Norma Spence, on a March day in 1973? Their footsteps took them across the spot where his blood had once stained the ground, washed away by rain and snow over the next forty-four years.
Some tourists take one of the numerous, bright red buses that ferry the uninitiated around the ‘trouble spots’, pointing out incidents and places with the bias that is associated with their own particular affiliations; there will be a Loyalist perspective, while the next bus company will shout loud their Republican bias. If the tourist finds themselves at any of a dozen spots around Free Derry Corner at the edge of Londonderry’s Bogside, and joins one of the tours that proliferate around this symbolic spot, they will be assailed by a diatribe of anti-British, certainly anti-English, slogans. Inflammatory and derogatory phrases such as ‘British Crown Forces’, ‘British murderers and thugs’ and ‘child-killers’ will be readily translated into German, French, Japanese or a multitude of other languages, so that when the worker returns to his factory in Nuremberg or Osaka or Toronto or Philadelphia, he will be able to regale his workmates with the vitriol fed to them by Sinn Féin; sadly, this will be relayed as ‘fact’.
So, what of the former battlegrounds, the scenes where stricken soldiers and police officers fell, struck down by bomb or bullet? Leeson Street, where the Royal Green Jackets fought PIRA gunmen in 1971 in scenes reminiscent of the savage street-fighting in 1944’s Normandy, is now rebuilt and modern. Teebane crossroads, where Protestant workmen were killed by a massive PIRA landmine, is still there; still lonely and windswept, it has an oft-vandalised memorial to those men who were on their way home from work on a cold winter’s night to have their evening meal in 1992. Lepper Street in the New Lodge, where distraught comrades put a cigarette into the mouth of one of their dying comrades, Robert Curtis, in 1971, still stands; it still looks dirty and rundown, but there is no monument for the Republicans to deface. Lone Moor Road and Stanley’s Walk in Londonderry’s Creggan, where Sergeant John Haughey was fatally injured by a PIRA IED in January 1974, still reflects the malevolence with a wall marked ‘Informers will be shot’. The site of the Abercorn Restaurant, where in March 1972 a PIRA bomb wrecked the lives of more than 100 people, on Castle Lane, Belfast, is just a modern-looking shop. There is no evidence whatsoever of the explosion, the choking clouds of smoke, the red mist of blood nor the screams of those who had survived but were deafened and unable to hear their own screams. Finally, the soldier atop the Enniskillen war memorial is still there, gazing down on the square; the old reading rooms torn asunder by a PIRA bomb on Poppy Day 1987 have been rebuilt, but the swirling dark red haze and the moans of those too shocked by the blast to comprehend their lives had changed forever have all gone. In another century, will anything have changed?
I have returned a further seven times since that emotional pilgrimage of 2008, staying in solidly Loyalist areas, although there are several areas of even those parts of the country in which I will certainly be unpopular because I have never pulled my punches when dealing with the paramilitaries of either side. There are pubs along the Shankill Road where it might not be overly safe for the stag party revellers to drink in, for fear of upsetting the Loyalist mentality, however innocently. Similarly, it would be unwise for the same drinkers to pay a visit to the Felons’ Club on Andersonstown Road, or to McEnaney’s on the nearby Glen Road – the odd wrong word, one misjudged or naïve remark, might easily lead to a beating, or worse. It would certainly be foolhardy for a former British soldier to go into one of those establishments or into the Bogside Inn in Londonderry, making it known that he was a former member of the Crown Forces.
Belfast is still a divided city; it has been since the ‘Berlinisation’ of the 1970s and ’80s; the so-called ‘Peace Line’ at Cupar Way is one of four in Belfast alone, with other walls such as Springmartin Road, which even has an armoured police station at one end. They range in length from a short 200 yards to more than 3 miles in length; they are as high as 25ft (7.6m). A survey taken in 2012 showed that almost 70 per cent of residents on either side believed that the walls should remain. Belfast City Council is committed to removing them by 2023, as are other councils where these walls exist, in Portadown and Londonderry.
It is reasonably safe for people to walk through the hard-line Nationalist estates in West Belfast; places such as the Ballymurphy, New Barnsley, Turf Lodge and Andersonstown are cleaner, tidier and much better presented than they were during the Troubles. The murals are colourful – certainly interesting, if only barely credible – although some of the dead terrorists are often presented in a manner that is part Archangel Gabriel and part Jesus Christ himself. One must remind oneself that James Bryson, who is portrayed as a brave and resourceful urban guerrilla, dressed in an Aussie-style bush hat, was actually a known and cold-blooded killer who terrorised his own Ballymurphy. He holds a Lewis gun resting against his right hip, looking for all the world a volunteer in the French Maquis.
Demographically, the various estates of Belfast, Londonderry, Newry and Strabane remain as before: in West Belfast, most of the west, adding Twinbrook and Poleglass to the aforementioned locations, are predominantly, if not 100 per cent, Catholic. Equally so, the Ardoyne and New Lodge in North Belfast and the Markets, as well as the Short Strand, remain the same as their West Belfast counterparts. In the same context, one would be very hard-pressed to find a non-Protestant on the Springmartin, Woodvale, Shankill or Crumlin Road areas of North Belfast, unless they were part of the growing Muslim immigrant population. North of the city, Tiger’s Bay and Newtownabbey, including Rathcoole and Rathfern, are predominantly Loyalist/Protestant. In the broad secular dichotomy, things have not noticeably changed since the Troubles; Republican/Nationalist areas still boast the Irish tricolour while their Protestant neighbours fly the Union flag or the ‘Bloody Red Hand’ of Ulster. The Irish (Gaelic) language is becoming increasingly used in Catholic schools as part of the reported Sinn Féin agenda to make the North more ‘Irish’ as a precursor to what they see as the fait accompli of reunification. Indeed, in every Nationalist area visited by this author since 2015, the str
eet names are mostly bilingual: the English name translated underneath into Gaelic. The sprawling Ballymurphy is Baile Uí Mhurchú; Glenalina Pass is Bearna Ghleann An Leana; and Ballymurphy Parade is Paráid Baile Uí Mhurchú. On a point of interest: in Irish Republican circles, a ‘Glenalina’ was local parlance meaning a person afraid of the police, and someone not to be trusted, i.e. a potential tout.
The estates still retain their divisive, siege-like mentality where strangers are watched with suspicion, dickers at the interface areas still report sightings of unfamiliar cars to local Sinn Féin leaders and those who linger too long are questioned. More than twenty security force members were killed on Baile Uí Mhurchú, both soldiers and police; the figure was even higher on the Ardoyne and New Lodge, where the local PIRA volunteers used the rat-runs allied to local knowledge of the labyrinthine housing to their best advantage. They were able to rely on an intimate familiarity with the estates on which they had been born and were unlikely to ever leave; on occasions when they failed to reap the benefit of this intimacy, they knew that they could rely on the ‘safe houses’ of their supporters to escape the patrolling soldiers or RUC. There was almost a mystique about these places, as soldier after soldier was maimed, scarred or died in a pool of his own blood, shot down by hidden gunmen from an unseen bedroom window, or the corner of a street. While the stricken man’s comrades reacted to the contact, professionally taking up defensive positions, others rushing to drag the wounded or dying squaddie to safety, the gunman would have escaped through a pre-arranged back door; the weapon would be handed to a local supporter, as the gunman ran off to a nearby house. Once indoors, he would jump fully clothed into a prepared hot bath, thus destroying any forensic evidence. Convictions for the murder of a soldier from Bristol, Manchester, Cardiff or any number of towns and cities throughout the UK were few and far between.
The murals and national flags apart, there is little to distinguish these estates from any other of a hundred or more similar housing estates in Britain. The author’s cousin, John Leighton, a soldier with the Royal Artillery (TA) of fifteen years’ service, had this to say on his first visit to the Turf Lodge: ‘So what; it’s just another housing estate like the ones I’ve lived on all me life; what’s different about it?’ The difference was that unlike the estates of Hunslet in Leeds, places such as Andersonstown and the Turf Lodge held only hatred and sudden death for the SF. The people of South Leeds and West Belfast were separated by not just their accents, but by a bitter acrimony for a decision made by politicians some fifty or sixty years earlier; they still clung to the dream of a united Ireland – an unrealistic dream, but one that they could keep alive by vitriol alone. The people of Hunslet, where my cousin grew up, could have little knowledge of this vitriol; how could they?
For many Loyalists, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was a necessary evil – one that they have come to bitterly regret. It might be that although their own paramilitaries – men such as Michael Stone – would be released, Republican terrorists such as ‘Bic’ McFarlane, Sean Kelly and Jim McVeigh were also on the streets again. There was another ‘sting in the tail’ when, some fourteen years later, it was revealed that the former Labour Prime Minister of the day, Tony Blair, had ‘mistakenly’ issued what Loyalists have coined ‘get out of jail free’ cards to the on-the-runs (OTRs) on the Republican side, who although never convicted, were known to have carried out acts of terrorism, including murder. A classic example is John Downey, who while it remains only an allegation, is very much suspected of planting the bomb that killed UDR soldiers Alfie Johnston and James Eames on 25 August 1972 at Cherrymount, Enniskillen. He is also widely considered as being responsible for the Hyde Park bombing on 20 July 1982 that killed four soldiers of the Blues & Royals as well as seven horses. It is thought that the Blair Government mistakenly gave him a letter of immunity, despite his alleged involvement in those six murders. At the time of writing, families of the dead soldiers were seeking leave to bring a private prosecution against Downey. It would seem highly appropriate, given the current ‘witch hunt’ against former soldiers who are being prosecuted for the lawful killing of Provisional IRA volunteers in incidents passim over the last fifty years.
Institutional sectarianism perhaps no longer exists, but it does still beat loudly within the hearts of many people, Catholic and Protestant alike; the prejudice, like the ‘Peace Walls’, still remains. I once asked a close friend what would happen if a Catholic moved into his Protestant area; he told me that the locals would soon force them out. I enquired if, in his opinion, the same would happen to a Protestant unwise enough to move onto a Catholic estate: ‘Oh, aye, they would force him out right enough.’ While this continued ‘Berlinisation’ persists, one can only envision a troubled future for Northern Ireland – a future in which the past can never be forgotten and in which enmities dating back more than 500 years will always take priority over conciliation. This is not to suggest that there are not tolerant Protestants or Catholics who would like nothing better than to mix with the ‘other side’ or know that they would be safe if, as a Protestant resident of Tiger’s Bay, they found themselves after a night’s drinking crossing the sectarian interface into the Catholic New Lodge, and, of course, vice versa.
In the previous paragraph, we have discussed how ‘institutionalised sectarianism’ no longer exists; for example, it is no longer legal, and certainly not acceptable, to ban a Catholic from applying for a job purely on the grounds of his religion, and the reverse is also highly illegal. However, that sectarianism exists is not open to debate; no matter how much of a microcosm of it still exists, it is there. Like racism, it is not a one-way process, and just as it is incredibly arrogant for whites to think that a racist attitude is their sole province, so is the notion that Protestants considering themselves the only faith that can be either overtly or covertly sectarian. Catholics too, or certainly the more extreme of that religion, can be extremely discriminatory. I have heard jibes about Prods from Catholic contacts: words such as ‘Huns’, ‘Blue-noses’, ‘proddy dog’ and ‘Orangie’ are but a selection. The common Protestant epithet for a Catholic is ‘taig’, but others include: ‘Fenian’, ‘left-footer’, ‘mackerel snapper’ and ‘papist’. As stated, sectarianism is not the exclusive domain of the Protestant, by any stretch of the imagination. Distrust and suspicion are still part of the psyche, and caution is the watchword in the hearts and minds of both communities. On recent visits to Ulster, I have had reason to call for a taxi to collect me to go to or from the Loyalist heartland of Rathcoole; I have jokingly asked the driver to take me to the Ballymurphy estate and been greeted – good naturedly, one hopes – with a derisive and decisive ‘no’.
Because of the centuries-old tribalism of Northern Irish society – even as one country, prior to partition, the two religions lived and developed as separate communities – it is generally very easy to guess the faith to which an individual belongs just by asking where he or she lives. For example, no Protestant would offer up an address in the Ballymurphy or the Short Strand, and equally, it would be highly unlikely to find a Catholic with an address in Tiger’s Bay or on the Shankill Road. It might, however, be a little more difficult if the address was in the leafy suburbs to be found off Malone Road South in Belfast, which is very much a mixed area; in such areas, the tribal template doesn’t operate from an academic viewpoint.
Positive discrimination now exists in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland, particularly in the Civil Service, where the discrimination of the past has been reversed; perversely, a Protestant may find his nose put out of joint by this ‘positive discrimination’, as an employer’s hand might be forced by compliance to the GFA and post-GFA legislation. In politics, too, as previously discussed, the replacement of the traditional ‘first past the post’ electoral system with proportional representation has ensured that permanent Loyalist majorities are no longer automatically achieved; moreover, with a few nods, winks and handshakes in smoke-filled pub backrooms, Sinn Féin can achieve a c
oalition with the other Nationalist or neo-Nationalist parties such as the SDLP, Alliance and even the Greens, known to Loyalists as the pan-Nationalist coalition. To the bitter chagrin of the majority Unionists, they are forced to play second fiddle to Sinn Féin in council affairs as their attempts to govern are thwarted by the coalescing of the anti-Unionist forces. See comments passim by this author in relation to the banning of the Union flag over Belfast City Hall.
So, fifty years later, it is considered safer to shop in Belfast city centre, which from 1970 onwards the Provisional IRA attempted to bomb back into the Stone Age; it is considered safe to walk past parked cars in an area where, on 20 July 1972, the IRA detonated twenty-one bombs in very quick succession, planted in such a haphazard and random manner that thousands of terrified shoppers literally ran from bomb to bomb as nine were killed. It is considered safe to shop in Parnell Street, Dublin, where on 17 May 1974, the UVF exploded three bombs, killing twenty-seven people, including a full-term unborn baby. No longer is there a risk of soldiers being murdered, as was soldier Gary Barlow of the Queen’s Lancashire Fusiliers on 5 March 1973 near the Divis Street flats. He was abducted, beaten and taunted before being forced into a garage where a Provisional IRA gunman shot him dead. It is now safe to shop along the Shankill Road in Belfast, where on 11 December 1971 the IRA killed four people including two babies, when they bombed Balmoral’s furniture shop, or twenty-two years later, when one of their bombs killed ten innocent Protestants at a fishmongers close by. It is also safe for lone Catholics to walk to their homes late at night without the fear that Lenny Murphy or his Shankill Butchers will abduct, beat and then stab them to death. It is safe for Catholic taxi drivers or food deliverymen to take a late-night booking without the fear of being the next victim of ‘dial a Catholic’ with a UFF or UVF murder gang lying in wait for them. Of course, sectarian beatings still occur, but the risk of being cold-bloodedly murdered for being the ‘wrong’ faith diminishes by the hour.