by Paul Theroux
I did not believe that it was religion as Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of it all. Ulster was a collection of secret societies, to which only men were admitted. The men dressed up, made rules, beat drums, swore oaths, invented handshakes and passwords, and crept into the dark and killed people. When they were done, they returned home to their women, like small children to their mothers.
Anyway, this was how it seemed to me in Londonderry.
***
From a distance, Derry was lovely and familiar. It looked like a mill town in Massachusetts—churches and factories piled up on both banks of a river, the same sort of tenements, the same sleepy air of bankruptcy. But up close, Derry was frightful.
Some Ulster towns inspired fear the way a man with an ugly face frightens a stranger: their scars implied violence. Derry was a scarred city of broken windows and barricades; it was patterned with danger zones, and every few blocks there was a frontier: the Waterside, the Bogside, the Creggan, and all the disputed territories among them. And it was possible to tell, from the damage and the slogans, that this was the principal killing ground of Ulster, FUCK THE POPE was scrawled at the Protestant end of the Craigavon Bridge, and at the Catholic end, FUCK THE QUEEN, and now and then corpses were found bobbing in the pretty River Foyle, which ran beneath the bridge. Derry was also the headquarters of the most violent of the nationalist factions, the Irish National Liberation Army. It made the IRA seem a party of dear old Paddys, twinkling and fiddling in the Celtic twilight. By contrast the INLA was heartless and unsentimental—eager to establish a reputation for cruel tenacity. It was always easy to spot an INLA slogan on a Derry wall: PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER.
The geniality and filth of Derry, and its state of siege, made the city an interesting muddle. Here were old geezers being shifty and jaunty in an Irish way, and over there the British soldiers were tense and watchful and stiff with starch. They crouched in doorways, peering, rifles poised, while the women gathered at Foyle's Pork Store (nothing but sausages and hams) and the men strolled into the betting shop. The soldiers meant business. They wore helmets and face masks and they traveled in armored cars; they moved singly, covering each other; all their vehicles had wire skirts beneath the chassis so that fire bombs could not be rolled under them.
While I was in Derry the annual Foyle Festival was on. It was one of the paradoxes of Ulster that for many life continued as usual, and that everything happened at once—the festival concert and talent show and bicycle race and cooking exhibit, along with mass frisking, soldier patrols, bomb threats, and arrests. There was the traditional football game and a festival art exhibition; and on the opening day there was a grotesque killing.
It was a typical Derry murder, the Derry men said: A phone call reported a cache of stolen goods; the policemen arrived and examined the stuff—a television, a fur coat, clocks, radios. One man lifted the television, and it blew up. It had been booby-trapped—the policeman was torn apart. "They was pieces of the bugger all over the place." Two other policemen were badly injured, one blinded. Then a mob gathered. The mob was hostile. They howled at the injured men, they jeered at the corpse. They obstructed the ambulance and booed when it broke through. And while the men were put onto stretchers, the screams were "Let the bastards die!"
Two men described this to me with approval—it was not an atrocity story to them; it was a success story. Their attitude was "Look at the horrible things they make us do to them—sure, it's tragic, but it's their fault. Won't they ever learn?"
Those same men, Tim Cronin and Denny McGaw, urged me to go to Donegal.
"Ah, Donegal's a lovely place, like," Cronin said. He was seventy-five years old, as white-faced as Yeats and with the same black-rimmed glasses. And he boasted, "Sure, I've been there almost a dozen times."
He was speaking of County Donegal, four miles from where we stood.
"So it's not violent, like Derry?" I said. Call it Londonderry and they thump you for being English.
"Derry's not violent," Mr. McGaw said. "Belfast—that's the violent place. They fight each other there. Aw, Derry's a lovely old town. Have you seen the fine walls?"
"But the police," I started to say.
McGaw pointed behind me. "A policeman was killed as he stood right there, not two weeks ago. Two men in a van came up that hill and shot him and rode on."
"So people do get killed?"
"Policemen and soldiers get shot, no doubt about it," Cronin said. "But we don't shoot each other. Ah, sure, stay out of Belfast—that's a bad place!"
Many people called Eire "the Free State," but they were not particularly sentimental about it. The IRA was of course banned in Eire, and Irish soldiers at the border post had a reputation for harassing Ulstermen, getting them to empty their pockets and turn out their suitcases. But that was not the main grievance Ulstermen had with Eire: the main grievance was money.
In a high-pitched voice of complaint, Paddy Dineen said, "Do you know what a beer costs in the Free State? Twenty-two shillings in the old money. Twenty-two shillings for a pint of beer!"
I said, "Is that an argument for staying British?"
"It is!" he said. "You can get a beer for half of that in Derry."
So much for Irish unity. But the notion of unity was very blurred by all the contending groups. In fact, the most nationalistic ones, like the IRA and the INLA, seemed to want to sweep both the British government and the Irish government away, and start all over again with the People's Republic of Ireland.
***
The hatred for British soldiers in Derry was extraordinary. Soldiers raided houses and, searching for guns, tore up floors and broke cupboards—they were vandals. Soldiers took money and personal effects, and did not give them back—they were thieves. Soldiers drove through the streets in Land-Rovers, shouting abuse at women and children—they were brutes. Soldiers timed their visits to Catholic areas to coincide with children getting out of school, in order to coax them into starting riots—they were criminal-minded. Soldiers shot innocent men—they were murderers.
This was how the Derry Journal portrayed the soldiers. And one day the paper announced, "The Army are now adopting Cromwellian tactics—destroying Catholic homes."
I stayed in a boarding house in Derry that was the Catholic counterpart to Mrs. Fraser Wheeney's pokerwork paradise in Lame. Instead of Bible mottos, Mrs. McCreadie had portraits of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and statuettes, too, the shape and size of Oscars. "Mothera God," Mrs. McCreadie was always saying while Joe, her only other lodger, told her what terrible things he had seen the night before in the Bogside.
They were great readers of the newspaper, these two. It was not the Falklands news. They were ignorant of the fact that British soldiers seemed about to recapture Port Stanley; but they knew every bit of the Ulster news, because the Ulster newspapers printed everything—rumors, hearsay, gossip, "witnesses saw," "it is believed," and sentences like "He alleged that the soldiers called him a 'Fenian bastard.'"
The most popular page at Mrs. McCreadie's was the one—or sometimes two—that contained the In Memoriams. It made me think that there was a sort of cult of death in Ulster. There certainly was one in Derry. It was not merely a list of obituaries, saying "So-and-so died yesterday"; it was a sheaf of tributes to people who had died years ago. "nth Anniversary," one read, and another, "15th Anniversary," and I saw one that commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of a parent's death. And with each tribute was a poem:
The mother is someone special, patient, kind and true,
No other friend in all the world will be the same as you.
Or,
Sweet are those memories, silently kept,
Of a mother I loved and will never forget.
Or,
We never fail to think of you
We never cease to care
We only wish we could go home
And find you sitting there.
There were hundreds of these in the paper every day, often a dozen or so
to the same person, invoking the prayers of St. Columba—the sixth-century Irish missionary—and "Mary, Queen of Ireland." The Virgin Mary had been elevated to the Irish throne. Mothera God, as Mrs. McCreadie said.
There were always tributes to men who had been killed in the Irish cause. This one was typical:
4th Anniversary
Vol. Dennis Heaney
Shot dead by'S.A.S. on 10th June, 1978
"Life springs from death; and from the graves
of patriot men and women spring living nations."
Proudly remembered by [a long list of names]
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him
St. Columba, pray for him
Mary Queen of Ireland, pray for us
One day I left Mrs. McCreadie's and kept walking. It was a lovely morning—clear skies and warm sunshine. I walked on a boggy path along the River Mourne, which was the border between Eire and Ulster—though you would never have known it. The grass was just as spectacularly green on this bank as on that one. I walked ten miles, and the weather changed. The rain came down, flattening the buttercups in the fields. So I caught a bus into Strabane.
Strabane was said to be the poorest town in Europe—it had the highest murder rate for its size, and the highest unemployment rate, and the fewest pigs, and the dimmest prospects. It was smack on the border, and it had the curiously unfinished look of a frontier town—like a house with one wall missing. It was sorry-looking, with men propped against storefronts, whistling, and a number of cracked windows. But it was not noticeably more decrepit than other towns I had seen in Ulster. I considered staying the night, but the Control Zone and all the soldiers and police complicated the mildest stroll. And when I thought it over, I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strabane in the rain.
The day after I left Strabane a man walked out of a motor accessory shop where he worked. He was thirty-nine, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment—a hated paramilitary force that had come into existence when the Protestant B-Specials were disbanded. A car drew up; the man was shot four times; the car sped away. The man died immediately. He was the one hundred and twenty-third UDR man to be gunned down since the regiment was formed ten years before.
Every town and village was deserted by six or six-thirty, and it was eerie, because the summer evenings were often sunlit and long, and the desertion was obvious.
"There's a dread of trouble," Sean McLaughlin said. He lived in Omagh, where I went after Strabane. Omagh was also funereal. But Sean's solution was to get out of town on a bus to Belcoo, on the border of Eire. There was a fleadhceoil being held there that weekend—a "flah," he called it—a festival of fiddles and flutes and concertinas. Sean got on the bus, with only his fiddle for baggage. He said that three days of drinking and singing in Belcoo would put him right.
That was the real paradox of Ireland. The dimple-chinned fiddler heading down the road to the "flah" at Belcoo—as warm-hearted and unsuspicious an Irishman as ever plucked a shamrock; and on the same bus as Sean (though I did not speak to him until we got to Enniskillen), the gray-browed Morris Grady Smith, who also knew Belcoo.
"I was driving out of Belcoo towards Garrison in the van." (Morris worked for the Public Works Department in Enniskillen.) "There were eight of us in the van, and I was at the wheel as usual. Suddenly there was a blue flash right in front of me. The windscreen burst open and all the glass fell on me. It was an explosion, and then there was shots! I kept driving, though I felt some pain in my arm. I was shot seven times, but the bullets just passed through my arm—not one of them struck a bone!"
He offered to show me his scars, but I said that I believed his story. He kept talking.
"Three of my men were dead—hit with small slugs from an M-Sixty rifle. One of the men was a Catholic. See, they were shooting across the border—that Belcoo-to-Garrison road passes right along the border. They must have mistook our van for an army vehicle and thought we were soldiers. We were just men with shovels, fixing the potholes in the road."
***
Someday all cities will look like this, I had thought in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a Control Zone, with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the Control Zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large Control Zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.
In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the Bomb Squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens—an appropriate Gaelic word—but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: How were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?
Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately—no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.
"What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him."
He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families—the wife and children watching.
I asked him how he felt about it.
He said in the same even voice, "Why, you wouldn't do it to a dog."
"So what do you think of these gunmen?"
"I hate them," he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.
He said, "We're eighty percent British here. We couldn't have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn't get a job."
So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.
"But I don't think the IRA want union now. They don't know what they do want."
From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, "The weather's being kind to us." There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders—fishermen.
"I have to check you for bombs," Alice, the room girl, said.
She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.
"I'm not sure what a bomb looks like," she said.
"You won't find one in there," I said. "It's just old clothes—"
"And books," she said. "And letters."
"No letter bombs."
She said, "I have to check all the same."
I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.
"The English started to believe what they saw on television," Bob Ewart said. "They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!"
He himself was from Nottingham.
"I've lived here fourteen years and I've yet to see an angry man."
That night the movie on television was The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It
was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous—like someone saying "Boo!" The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, peoples' hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth—unlike the Hollywood monster movie—it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.
And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas—cattle-maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows' udders.
***
On my map of Lough Erne I saw there was a hotel at Carrybridge, about four miles away by water. The man who let me have a rowboat said, "It's a fair old pull. Your arms are going to be screaming." This was John Joseph Skerry, who hadn't rented out a rowboat for years. He waved to me as I rowed away, down the narrow lake, to have lunch at Carrybridge. I saw herons and terns and curlews and a circling flock of swans. My boat was a shallow dinghy—two hours it took me to row the four miles, and I arrived at the hotel at about three o'clock. "We just closed," the girl at the bar said as I entered. "I can't sell you anything." But I was glad to have a chair. I went into the lounge, where a television was on—a tennis match. "You can't sit here if you're not a resident," a young man said. "You'll have to leave." I went outside and saw that the hotel was the whole of Carrybridge. This was the middle of nowhere, on the lake! It was beautiful, but I was hungry. Then it started to rain. And there among the yellow irises and the cows, on the bridge at Carrybridge, it said, no surrender—1690 and on a pillar, no pope here. I cast off and rowed four miles back, thinking: This is just a row on an Irish lake for me, but it's their whole life.
