Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  There was a march on the British army base at Magilligan. The troops in the base fired on the crowd with CS gas and rubber bullets. John Hume, who’d been on the march with Ivan Cooper, described the soldiers as ‘beating, brutalizing and terrorizing the demonstrators’.

  Nevertheless, another march for civil rights was planned in Derry. This time people were killed and lawyers were talking to witnesses decades later in the Guildhall about what exactly happened – and Ivan Cooper, crucified, was trying to have his breakfast. A bacon sandwich and a pile of crisps.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say’ He looked at me.

  ‘Cholesterol?’ I suggested.

  He laughed. ‘You can say that all you like, but at my time of life, I’m past saving.’

  Martin told Ivan what I was doing, coming back to find my roots and writing about them. Ivan looked unimpressed but asked me where my roots were. I explained there was a bit of Belfast and a bit of Strabane, although everyone had left Strabane and moved now… I mentioned the tiny place near Portadown where some of my relatives lived. Ivan looked surprised and said, ‘That’s a very Loyalist area.’

  I said I didn’t know about that, but my Catholic family had lived round there for years and survived.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, suddenly immensely irritated. ‘That’s what people don’t realize about Northern Ireland, especially in rural areas, people have lived side by side happily for years. Particularly in rural areas, people sharing farm equipment and helping each other out. People can get along just fine.’

  All said as if I’d been the one who’d implied the opposite.

  Still, I made allowances for his recent crucifixion and his generosity to Martin.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it for anyone but Martin,’ he said, ‘but he does a tour by special arrangement where people can walk the history of the civil rights movement, meet me and have what happened explained to them. Martin deserves support for what he’s trying to do.’

  Martin’s phone was ringing. Apologetically, he said he had to meet a tour group.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to chat.’

  He gave me a pile of leaflets about his tours and told me to phone him any time, constantly if I liked, if I had any questions.

  Left alone with me, Ivan was uneasy. He made small talk about how many cousins I had, what they did. I tried to ask him about the tours he did with Martin. I was curious to know what he told people. Curious to know what it felt like to be a live local monument. But my attempts at a tactful lead into his soul were way too obvious for Ivan.

  ‘You’ve misunderstood. Sometimes I let him bring select informed groups to have a chat with me, that’s all. I’ll have to go now’.

  He went very rapidly. Busy man under constant mental siege. And far too fly to give an impromptu interview to the likes of me.

  I hesitated about going into the Saville Inquiry. Bloody Sunday had been pawed over by writers, journalists, filmmakers… Part of me didn’t want to go into the inquiry because then I’d have to say I’d been and get sucked into having an opinion about it all.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Sally, my new friend from the Creggan, told me. ‘It’s nearly over and I’ve never been there myself.’

  In her fifties now, Sally had lived around the Bogside and Creggan all her life.

  ‘There were times in the seventies when I just wouldn’t go down the town for weeks. We didn’t have these kind of nice shops then, but even so… I’d get what I needed at the corner shop. Things will never go back to the way they were. People went through things that we’re only just hearing about. A woman I’ve known for years had a cup of coffee with me last week and said she’d decided to tell me she was a Protestant. I said that was fine by me. She said she’d been terrified living in our estate for years. Only her own husband knew. She’d go up to visit her Protestant relatives in secret and they’d never come down here. Now she feels terrible that she did that, you know, denied them. I said to her people would have accepted it if they’d known. She told me I was forgetting how it used to be. Maybe I am forgetting. A case of wanting to, you know.’

  My new friend Sally was so warm and open, she didn’t feel new, but I’d only just met her. Gerard, from the shop near me in London, was her brother. When I’d told Gerard I’d be passing through Derry but didn’t know anyone there, he phoned Sally immediately and told her to save me from a lonely visit. She did.

  Typical Derry woman, Sally’s progress through town was somewhat slow, always having to talk to the next clump of women in her path.

  Outside the Guildhall she introduced me to one of the families who’d been campaigning for a full inquiry since the shooting of their son, over thirty years ago. Along with other families bereaved that Sunday, they went into the Guildhall every day and gathered at lunch breaks in the Bloody Sunday Centre over the road. This campaign centre had a room for family members to recuperate and talk in; it had an exhibition about the campaign and a slide show reconstructing the events of Bloody Sunday. It had the feeling of a chapel of rest and seeped with sadness.

  The woman I was introduced to just nodded politely when Sally excitedly told her I was writing a book. I didn’t know what to ask this tightly held woman. She asked me, ‘Will you include this?’

  I said I hoped I could.

  She nodded again. We stood on the steps in the rain. I didn’t know if the woman wanted to leave or not.

  ‘It’s taken a long time to get here,’ Sally said to her.

  ‘I’m pleased to see it’s all being conducted with such decorum,’ she replied. ‘We’ve all given our evidence, the families, and had a thank you letter. So I’m reassured that they feel we conducted ourselves with decorum.’

  It seemed an odd thing to say.

  ‘Well, good luck to you. I wish you success in your endeavours,’ she said to me, as she went with her family across the rainy Guildhall Square.

  ‘This has been her whole life since, you know,’ Sally said. ‘Campaigning for this.’

  Over dinner the previous night Sally had told me about another friend whose husband had been killed on Bloody Sunday. ‘Then her son, named after the husband, was killed in a car accident a few years ago. That poor woman.’ Sally reflected. ‘She describes herself now as dead inside.’

  So many people stranded in pain in the wake of the Troubles. In a culture that had no habit of forgetting.

  Sally’s husband, Dan, said, ‘The trouble with us here is we’re obsessed with the past.’

  ‘Haven’t people said that about the Irish for hundreds of years?’ I asked him.

  Dan made a face. ‘You wonder what the hell they all did on day one when they hadn’t got a past. Sat around and waited for day two so they’d have something behind them to go on about.’

  Dan had recently survived major surgery. ‘The miracle man’, his family called him. And the experience had left him determined to see nothing but the seasides and lakes of life.

  He certainly wouldn’t be going down to the Saville Inquiry. ‘For one thing, it’s all steps up to the public gallery. That’s no good for me. And for another thing…’ He shrugged and went back to serving dinner.

  Most of the population of Derry had not been anywhere near the public gallery of the Saville Inquiry. There had been spluttering from Unionist leaders about this… They’d used words like ingratitude. Maybe cynicism was more appropriate. There’d been inquiries before and there’d been no squeak of an admission of fault – why would this one be different? Or was it common sense. If, as the guest-house landlady said, the population of Derry was struggling to cope with success, why would they want to look back to the point where the population, on all sides, had abjectly failed?

  The Guildhall’s rich stained-glass windows had been restored after bomb damage to them in 1972. They told the story of Derry’s history in coloured light, making the interior of the red-brick building seem surprisingly bright and cheerful.

  ‘It’s such a lovely building,’ Sally said as we went up
the broad oak staircases.

  I’d always seen the Guildhall on the horizon as the landmark of Derry, as we’d driven through to Buncrana. The wide, solid stone bridge we’d crossed had gone. There was a harshly modern double-decker bridge in its place; it looked like a car transporter lorry and felt very precarious to drive across.

  ‘Oh, just look,’ Sally said, gathering her coat round her as we gazed down from the Guildhall public gallery. ‘It’s like Houston mission control.’

  The floor of the Guildhall was crammed with people at computer screens. There were banks of recording equipment, cameras, relay equipment; there were giant screens to show enlarged forms of the evidence being examined to the family and public galleries.

  ‘It’s cost millions,’ Sally whispered. ‘When you think that every person down there is some kind of lawyer.’

  Dozens of people down there – lawyers, clerks, technicians…

  A lawyer with the tone of a particularly nasty public school headmaster was cross-examining a man who’d been vaguely in the IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday. The lawyer upped the level of intimidating sneer in his voice; the witness was intimidated.

  The witness had admitted he had a stone in his hand when he was at the barricades. Then, when the soldiers started firing, he’d fired at the soldiers.

  ‘You fired? So you had more than a stone?’

  ‘No, I fired the stone.’

  ‘Were the soldiers firing stones?’

  ‘No, they had guns.’

  ‘So did you then, you had a gun, when you fired?’

  ‘No, I had a stone and I threw it.’

  ‘You said fired not threw.’

  ‘I meant I fired the stone.’

  ‘Fire a stone?’ the lawyer sneered. ‘Surely one fires a gun not a stone.’

  ‘You can fire a gun or a stone in my way of thinking.’ The witness had begun to stammer.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes. I’d say fire a stone.’

  ‘Yes, yes, so you’ve said,’ the lawyer snapped at him, then sat down, a contemptuous expression on his flushed face as if to say, ‘Look at these people, they can’t even speak English.’

  This kind of bullying went on and on. Money and cruel expertise defending the attitude that the people in the Bogside were liars, had always been liars and not one British soldier had done the impossible and panicked in a crowd.

  After a tea break we came back to hear a witness on the stand talking about Ivan Cooper, which felt a bit odd. The witness was an IRA man who’d been subpoenaed to appear and granted immunity from prosecution. A surprise addition to the witness list, he was the man who’d actually been in charge of the IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday – everyone had always thought it was Martin McGuinness. But no, it had been this now quite old man, referred to as PIRA 24. He said he’d ordered the IRA not to carry weapons on that Sunday and they’d moved any weapons they had out of the city, as they expected the soldiers would raid houses after the march.

  The public gallery began to fill. Word had got round and a lot of people were curious to see who PIRA 24 was. He was small, skinny and nervy. From further remarks it sounded as though he was too proud to admit that he’d been losing control to tougher elements at the time of Bloody Sunday. This was a key thing I noticed with all the IRA witnesses – they didn’t want to admit to doing anything, but didn’t want to admit to not being a force to be reckoned with since way back when.

  PIRA 24 was also denying a conversation with Ivan Cooper in which Ivan had asked him for assurances. He said he’d warned Ivan that the situation might get out of control, something Ivan had apparently denied.

  He was cross-examined about his relationship with Cooper. Of course, they knew each other well. ‘Derry’s a village,’ he said.

  More questions about the command structure of the IRA at the time. A lawyer representing Martin McGuinness got to his feet objecting to something that might compromise his client. Heaven forbid Mr McGuinness be distressed by the proceedings in any way. There were discussions about geography, how people couldn’t have been in places they’d been said to be… I began to wonder if Saville was on medication, he was constantly calm and constantly appeared to be listening carefully to endless repetition and verbal blind alleys.

  It wouldn’t end in Derry that week. Crates of evidence were going to be taken away and expertly examined for months.

  I don’t think anyone will ever know who fired the first shot. No one is going to tell the truth, or remember accurately. There was no forensic evidence to show that gunfire had come from the Bogside. There was something dubious about there being a claim to justifiable panic among the paratroopers – for one thing, if it had been more than a couple of soldiers losing their heads, wouldn’t more people have been killed? There were conspiracy theories that the IRA saw the whole civil rights movement as an opportunity to gain themselves mass support. And they’d manipulated the situation toward violence, to isolate the Catholics into needing them. But the Catholic civil rights movement had erupted when vociferous demands for civil rights were being made all over America and Europe. With Derry being a Village’ it was easy for a grass-roots movement to spread. And how would the IRA have manipulated the Protestant police forces to brutally suppress peaceful demonstrations?

  The conspiracy theory running the other way was that the British government wanted to do something drastic to end the civil disorder and send the Catholics quaking back to their slums. They’d already been drastic, beating and imprisoning the civilian population without trial. Would they have thought they could get away with just killing people?

  There were lots of theories, lots of opinions.

  Gerard from my corner shop in London said, ‘I was there at that time. Nobody was even talking about the IRA, they were an irrelevance, barely functioning at the time. We were interested in our rights. We were interested in people like Bernadette Devlin. She was brave. A lot of people took against her just because she was a wee girl with a big mouth, Northern Ireland was old-fashioned like that. But she used words well. We wanted some basic rights and that’s what she was articulate about. You should have seen the house my family were brought up in, a crumbling, overcrowded slum. Things were so bad for Catholics that when the American troops left their bases in Derry after World War Two, people rushed to live in their old prefab buildings. Things were no better by the sixties. We were the majority, but the Unionists didn’t want us in the city and that meant giving us nothing. That’s what we wanted something done about. That’s all.’

  Under cross-examination, PIRA 24 was becoming increasingly vague and evasive. To me it didn’t matter what he’d done; British citizens were shot dead by British soldiers. ‘We didn’t start it’ seemed to be the army’s line of defence and it was pretty pathetic. Millions of British tax-payers’ money were being spent, my money was being spent, arguing over something that shouldn’t have been done, whatever the reason. If soldiers didn’t do their job properly, they should have been punished decades ago, not protected in a pantomime of counter-accusation.

  What struck me as not decorous about the witnesses – IRA, army, whoever – and their lawyers was that no one on any side was going to say to the poor woman on the steps, ‘It was my fault. And I’m really sorry.’

  I listened to the inquiry for hours – Sally came and went. She had things to do and people to see about town. As the cross-examination of PIRA 24 was coming to an end, she slipped in beside me with a bag of shopping.

  ‘My wee grandchildren’s school usually have their end-of-term concerts in this room,’ she whispered, as she settled herself to keep me company again. ‘Up there on the stage where the recording equipment is. It’ll be nice when all this is over and we can have the Guildhall back to ourselves.’

  12. The Men of Crossmaglen

  It was a card-playing night for Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen.

  ‘Have fun,’ I said, as they went out, shortly after ten at night.

  ‘Whether it’s fun or not
is immaterial,’ my uncle said. ‘It’s our work and it has to be done.’

  I don’t know how they managed this work, this night shift. Aunt Helen had been childminding and baking at Veronica’s all day. Uncle Joe had played golf, visited a sick friend, been to a credit union meeting and had a long hour discussing credit unions and the state of the world with his niece.

  Uncle Joe believed that a little bit of thrift went a long way. He felt that, culturally, Catholics hadn’t been encouraged to aim high or have confidence in themselves as entrepreneurs. But building savings and a small line of credit enabled people with small means to make small steps forward.

  ‘It’s not master of the universe stuff, but credit unions handle money in language people not accustomed to organizing money understand.’

  He had always encouraged people to join and was a long-trusted founder member of his local branch.

  Credit unions were simple financial co-operatives, owned and controlled by the members. The credit union movement was believed to have started in Lancashire in the nineteenth century. Usually they were formed by people who worked together, were in the same church or lived in a small community. Uncle Joe’s was a community credit union.

  People saved their money in a credit union and could take out loans at reasonable rates. The main difference between a credit union and a bank was that these organizations were non-profit-making. They were made up of people who knew each other, or could give references for each other. There were forms to fill in, but the union members would know the person as well as the bald facts on the form.

  ‘When you look at the old ledgers you see why a credit union’s needed. My favourite was an old boy who’d written under the question “How long employed?” “Since birth”.’