To read the first chapter of this saga, please click here. Here are some more stories about how Irish Catholics in Belfast, unlike most dumb schmucks in America today, were willing to fight and die for the right to have access to civil rights, respect, jobs and education.
The Protestants in Belfast, on the other hand, appeared to be fighting and dying for the right to be consumed by hatred and fear.
And the third party involved here, the British, used Northern Ireland as yet another product focus-group in which to test their latest versions of "War as the Ultimate Consumer". Brits knew that they would always have jobs as long as there was war.
One more reason that The Troubles finally came to an end was that Nationalist militants began taking the War to London -- and War didn't seem to sell that well in Britania proper. Once Londoners started experiencing the same horrors that Belfasters endured daily, the British people started to back off. There's a moral here somewhere.
Chapter 2: Learning more about The Troubles
"Is there any place I can check my e-mail?" I asked our host over breakfast this morning. First things first.
"At the post office. I'll drive you there." Wow. How advanced. Internet connections at the post office! It turns out he thought I was talking about regular mail. But I tracked down the local library which as usual came through. Except it was closed today.
A local man gave us a tour of South Armagh next. "The Brits here think this is real soldiering, that they're serving in a war." What a joke. What do they think? That the cows are subversive? Armed Leprechauns? I've never seen a friendlier village.
"What is the educational system here like?" I asked.
"Higher education is prohibitively expensive now. When the Brits first arrived, they instigated free education for all. The Catholics went for it. The Unionist Protestants knew they had jobs for life at the shipyards so they'd quit school at age 14 and go to work. The result is that now many of the doctors, dentists and lawyers in Northern Ireland are from the Catholic underclass." What a unique situation. It would be as if most of the professional class in the U.S. were African-American.
Then we jumped into the van and drove off through a cow pasture and down a country lane to Annaghmere cairn, another 6,000-year-old ceremonial ruin. "Cezar, which way is east?" Cezar has a compass on his watch. The main passage faced north so it wasn't designed to catch sunbeams but it did form a T-shape with the eastside passage, doing an astronomical winter solstice thing.
Ashley found a frog and chased me down the lane with it. "Ugggh! It just pooped on me!"
"We are now passing an area called Whitewood," said our guide. "As you can tell, the British cut down the woods in the 1700s to build their ships with -- and also to defoliate the countryside so Irishmen had no place to hide." Just like what was done in Vietnam.
Then we stopped at a memorial to fallen Nationalists. "How did you build this without the British stopping you?"
"They tried. We'd just build it somewhere else. They destroyed roads. We'd rebuild them. They destroyed bridges. We dropped a lorry into the stream and built over it. They murdered one of ours a few years ago -- December 30, 1990 -- and there were so many witnesses that we formed a community court of inquiry. Brought judges in from America. The Brits said the guy's car had tried to run a checkpoint. 40 witnesses said he didn't. The Brits said he was running arms but nobody even bothered to check the car. The Brits said he killed a British soldier but there was no body. Finally the British settled out of court -- but it set a precedent. Soldiers can't just get away with murder any more.
Sam bought a penny-whistle and started practicing "Ode to Joy" in the back seat of the van. Are we cool or what!
Then we stopped at Fergal Caraher's memorial. "He was a mechanic come out to fix a doctor's car. The British crack troops -- like your Green Berets -- were apparently sent to poor little South Armagh to 'set an example' here. They were given carte blanche. Fergal was 20 years old, left a widow and a two-year-old son. But whenever we start getting too sad we tell ourselves that in Belfast, hundreds of innocents died in the same manner."
At this point, Ashley's CD player bursts out with the Cha Cha Slide.
"But after we took Fergal's killers to trial, arbitrary shootings lessened as other communities followed suit." The people of South Armagh, Unionists and Nationalists alike, have worked hard over the years just to keep their normal lives. Why are the British doing this? War is the ultimate consumer.
"How do people in this area support themselves?" I see Mercedeses and Beamers as well as Hondas and Fords -- although Mercedes are not so expensive over here as they are in the U.S. They are not an import, what with the European Union.
"Many go down and work in the Republic during the week. Many go to the U.S. to work then come back home. Some smuggle. Cigarettes, gasoline. The farmers and tradesmen all work together, exchange labor. It makes homebuilding cheaper."
We stopped by a lake and saw swans and used the restroom. Now we are parked in the middle of an old stone bridge over a small river, the Fane. "We are now halfway in Ireland and half in the North. This wee river is the boundary. And that old stone building next to it is the ruins of a flax mill. You can see where the waterwheel used to be. Terrible business, working flax. Lots died from tuberculosis."
Public transportation? "We got a bus that leaves for the next town on Thursday and comes back on Saturday. If you don't have a car, you're pretty much stuck."
1:30 pm: Pub food for lunch. "I'll have the vegetable soup, a burger -- with lettuce and tomatoes -- and lemon meringue pie." You gotta request vegetables especially. These Irish guys are meat and potatoes men. Fo' sho'!
We ate lunch with our guide's 15-year-old son Mick. "I'm going to be a tile layer (he said tiler, but I don't know how to spell it) when I graduate secondary school. For the last two years of school, I go to work two days a week and have only three days of school. On the job training."
"When do people get married around here?" The boy blushed. "I got married when I was 17," commented George. "Shotgun wedding. But it was okay because I got it over with when I was young."
"How many kids are in your class," I asked young Mick.
"46."
"And what about church? Do you attend?"
"I'm to go to church five times," he joked. "I've already done christening, communion and confirmation. All I got left is the wedding and the funeral."
Ashley's and my lunch at Ma Kearny's Pub came to four pounds sterling. That's $16.24 at the current 1.16 exchange rate. Now we are off to the local cemetery. I love cemeteries!
"Cregan means stones," said our guide. "Everything around here has `cregan' in its name. The fields are all covered with stones. You clear the fields one year and the next year there are stones again. They just rise up from underneath the ground like bubbles floating to the surface of a pond." Cregan churchyard was as worth an eulogy as any I have ever seen. "There is a story of a poet who was taken around the world by an enchanted muse. 'Take me to Egypt,' he told her. 'Take me to Rome. Things in Ireland are not so good now, but when it comes time for me to die, bury me here in Cregan.' And they did." I could see why the poet would want to spend eternity here. There were rocks and trees and lots and lots of green. The weather today was overcast and gray.
"It's so depressing," said Ashley. "All these forgotten graves." It didn't bother me. I can't think of a nicer place to spend the next 10 million years.
Next grave site: The memorial to the 13 H-Block hunger strikers at Long Kesh Prison, also known as The Maze. Bobby Sands was the last to die -- after 66 days. Trial by hunger. "In the days of the Irish kings, there was the custom of going on a hunger strike to prove that one was willing to die rather than agree to a lie. Sands got elected to Parliament during the strike."
Then we drove around a lot and saw a lot of cows.
4:30 pm: We're up on top of the highest mountain in the area. Colingford Loch lies 2,000 feet below us; a great winding river that separates North and South Ireland. Suddenly we were in the middle of a cloud and could see nothing. "That reminds me of the Irishman who went to Spain," said our guide. "He wanted a certain Spanish lady to marry him. 'I own land as far as you can see in all directions,' he told her." Ha! Guess you know what the punch line is. A fogbound valley. "The Spanish lady died of grief." Oh well.
We just passed a sign, "Warning: Pedestrian activity ahead," followed by a sign that said, "Give way". Right-o. Then we visited another hilltop. Windy. "Here's another neolithic cairn." Megalithic stones form a chamber, with a row of monoliths leading up to it -- like a dragon's head and scales.
"They didn't build those thing as tombs," I told the guide. "They built them to get out of the freaking wind!" Then it started raining too. I can't even imagine what the winters are like up here. "One last question. How come most of the houses in this area are new?"
"The old houses were terrible." Oh. "No wiring, no plumbing, drafty...and the old folks were never willing to take out a mortgage, whereas the young people would." It also probably had something to do with the new money from smuggling but that would have meant a lot of cigarettes and gasoline to finance so many new and remodeled homes. In any case, I found it rather strange that hundreds of Brand New Houses were dotting the ancient landscape. But at least they weren't subdivisions! Each house seemed to have a minimum of five acres around it.
9 pm: Back at the B & B: Ashley did her nails and I read her Harry Potter book, saving Barbara Kingsolver for on-the-road reading. One cannot haul a three-pound book around in one's purse. "That was so funny today, what Mick said," said Ashley.
"You mean when I asked him what he wanted to be."
"Yeah. And he said, 'My dream is to be a tiler or a roofer' but that he really wanted to be a tiler because roofing was too messy."
"That was just so bizarre," said me. "Back in the 1950s, guys actually thought like that -- get some dull job, work at it for 50 years, retire and die. Boom. That was their life. Maybe a trip to Disneyland to add a high point. I can't even imagine a Berkeley kid saying that! First off, the question would be, `What college do you want to go to...'"
Mick had stopped me cold and made me realize there was a whole different world of people out there. And guess what? It was a good thing. Or we'd never get any bathrooms tiled!
That reminds me. Did I already mention that one of the strange things about Dublin is that their bus drivers, street cleaners, taxi drivers and maids are all white guys? Except the maids? It made me realize how racially polarized our jobs in the U.S. have become. I tried to apply for a job as a school janitor once. I figured, "What a neat job! Getting people to pay me to exercise!" That's like getting paid to go to the YMCA. But I didn't get the job which is just as well. You gotta like children to work in a school. I love children. But at a safe distance.
I'm going to bed early tonight. A pleasant change.
August 1, 2003: Here we are, driving through the world's most pleasant countryside. Cattle and sheep and horses and greenery like you wouldn't believe; on our way to Belfast. Zipping down the country lanes at 60 mph. Belfast is approximately 50 miles away from South Armagh and the border. "Exactly how is the population in the North distributed?" I asked Thomas.
"There is an Orange majority," he replied. "52% to 48%." Not much of a majority, that is. The Orangemen need to learn who to spell the word "cooperate". The whole human race needs to learn to cooperate. Human beings simply can no longer afford the luxury of war.
Driving through this peaceful countryside, it's hard to believe there has been 30 years of deadly animosity. "I think people in the North are much more friendly than people in the South," said our B & B hostess this morning. I agreed. Having gotten to know our hostess better, I realized that she wasn't as bad as I had first presumed and any oddness she had exhibited -- there was a sort of Stepford Wives quality about her -- probably came from living in a war zone for 30 years. Later I learned that many of the residents of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, dealt with The Troubles in the old-fashioned way: First Valium and Miltown and then Prozac.
That morning, when we had gone to the village of Crossgalen, picked up the boys from their pub and were watching them load their gear into the van, I realized that something was up. "Grab your purse and run like the wind," I yelled at Ashley, who was sitting in the van. "Follow me!"
"Wha..."
With only moments left before the van was to leave, I rushed her off to the village green where there was a flea market selling...hoodies! Good work, me. After seven days in rainy Ireland without a jacket, Ashley now has a powder-blue hoodie with "A.W.O.L." emblazoned across the chest in green camo letters.
After driving for a while we arrived in downtown Armagh, a good-sized city and an Orange stronghold. "See over there is the prison. It's closed down now. But they used to bring the Nationalist prisoners there. Human rights organizations cited them for torture," said Thomas. I find it bizarre that this charming city is world-famous for torture.
We drove past a church. "Ye must be born again!" the sign in front of it exclaimed. I keep forgetting that the early Christians believed in reincarnation.
"Armagh is also famous for its apple orchards," added Thomas. Look! More sheep. We're back in the countryside again, back to all those mysterious new houses. It reminds me of China, where all the cars are new. There are no old cars in China. Before the 1980s/1990s, there were simply no cars in China at all. Don't tell me that before the 1980s there were no houses in Ireland!
11 am: We stopped at Portadown, on the Derryanvil Road. Sweet little area. Large stone church on a hill surrounded by the obligatory graveyard. Little Stone bridge over a meandering country stream. Peaceful as hell. Lots of cows. This bucolic scene is the location of the notorious annual Orange Order march. People were killed on this spot as Orangemen marched down to intimidate the local Catholic neighborhoods. "But things have changed," said Thomas. "For the first time this year, when the Orange Order marched, they got arrested."
A little wooden placard on the road read, "We stand here. We can do no other," followed by a British flag.
On to Belfast. I'm hungry.
11:30 am: On the freeway to Belfast, we drove past the famous Long Kesh, aka The Maze prison. There it was! Scene of the hunger strikes and everything. It looked like that 1950s architectural style they used on my elementary school in California. Rats. I had been expecting some rat-infested stone monstrosity like Kilmainahan. Once again, the dark underbelly of the human soul is hidden within the mundane.
Coming up on Belfast, Thomas said, "See those watch towers next to the freeway? There are cameras everywhere. They're always watching you." I always wondered about that. Doesn't that take a lot of man-hours to keep an eye on every Catholic in Northern Ireland? Just like all the millions of man-hours it must take for dear John Ashcroft to read every single e-mail in America. So much for the neo-conservatives' promises to strip down the size of government. But I digress. Now we are driving up John F. Kennedy Road on our way to Thomas's house, where we will meet his wife and children.
Afterwards, I went for a walk around the neighborhood and looked at a 50-foot-long mural painted by the local Nationalist school children who lived in the rows of houses next to it. The mural was captioned with the Bobby Sands quote which I saw for the first time here and which deeply moved me. "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children."
1:30 pm: Now we are driving through downtown Belfast after consuming the most greasy lunch in the entire history of the western world. No vegetables. None. Zero. Zip. A pint of partially-hydrogenated on each chip. 2,540 chips and that was just for me.
"There's a tower with an army barracks on top. To your right is Unionist-dominated East Belfast with all its built-up and prosperous industrial parks. To your left are the Nationalist cemeteries and bogs." He also pointed out the Hotel Europa, "The most bombed hotel in Western Europe."
Graffiti: "The Loyalist village will not tolerate Republilians." They will not spell Republicans either. Obviously the whole cause of this conflict is too much oil in the chips. You are what you eat.
Regarding Belfast? Hell, it all looks normal to me. We just drove past the River Lagan. "There's the docks and the shipyards. That's where they built the Titanic. No Catholics were allowed to work on it. Now the docks are closed. Grass is growing there now."
We passed a mural. "Time for peace. Time to go." It showed British soldiers heading home. "To England."
Our next destination? East Belfast and the Short Strand Youth Center. What we did not know, as we drove into the Youth Center parking lot, was that we were about to embark on a ten-day-long political journey that would take us into the bowels of The Troubles in such a way as to put a mark upon our hearts forever. I had arrived in Northern Ireland uneducated and unprepared. I barely knew who Gerry Adams was, had never heard of the Falls Road and had no idea at all what the Good Friday Agreement was. Totally ignorant. All that was about to change. Bigtime.
The counselor we met with at the Youth Center gave us a tour of the facility before taking us out into the neighborhood. There were kids playing there and a computer room. E-mail! I jumped at the chance and started checking my messages like crazy. Later Ashley told me that when the counselor asked our group if there were any questions, someone answered him, "Sorry. The one who asks all the questions isn't here," and Ashley was sent off to find me.
Once I was in hand, the counselor gave us a quick briefing on the history of Short Strand. "This area is a small Catholic community located right in the heart of Protestant Belfast. This is valuable real estate and the Loyalists are trying to do everything they can to force us out due to the location. If you are a Catholic and you try to buy a house in East Belfast and they find out you are Catholic, your house will be burned and you will be shot at." He then took us on a tour of the area, approximately 6 to 8 blocks square. "See those houses over there? The Protestants would come over the fence and bomb them." I looked at the new fence. It was 30 feet high with spikes half-way up.
"Last May, the UVF raided this area -- totally unprovoked. 200 came through, beating anyone they could get their hands on. We have videos of it."
"You mean this just happened? Last May?" I asked.
"Yep." One of the main targets of the UVF was the local Catholic church. As we walked over to it, we saw a statue of St. Mary, surrounded by barbed wire. "The little metal crosses mark where Catholics were shot in front of the church. Even the funerals were attacked by the Loyalist paramilitary. They had to put British flags up on the other side of the fence to keep the paramilitary from attacking Loyalists by accident." What a swamp. Get your limbs blown off at any minute. "It was like a ghost town for kids. They were all sent away. But the last two days have been calm." The last two days? I looked at the area, composed of simple family homes and couldn't even imagine that two days ago I would have been hit by rocks at the very least. We stepped over various bottles and bricks and moved on.
"Insurance is a problem in this area." No sh*t Sherlock.
9 pm: I am just so bone tired. Too much to absorb today. Just too much to absorb. I would take the next plane home if I could afford it -- just so I could get ten minutes at home in my room alone. And to soak in a nice hot bath. God but I'm spoiled.
Today at noon, George announced, "Okay. Everybody out of the van. The door won't shut properly and if we get stopped by the police, they'll fine us for all we're worth." It's apparently like that up North. The cops give a lot of violations to Nationalists. Driving while Catholic?
So we all popped into Thomas's little Vauxhall and chugged off, looking for all the world like a little clown car in a circus. Plus we had two of Thomas's children with us -- bringing the total to nine.
Before going to the infamous chip shop, we visited Kieran Doherty's parents. "Kieran was one of the 13 hunger strikers at The Maze Prison H Block," said Thomas. "He lasted 72 days." I immediately bonded with his mother, a truly nice woman who hand-knit the most wonderful dolls.
"I have a son about the age Kieran was when he died," I told her. "I can't even imagine what it would be like to lose him like that." By this time I was crying.
"The pain never goes away," she said.
Kieran's memorial was inscribed with his dying words. "It is not those who can inflict the most but those who endure the most who will win in the end." There's a sad truth in that because right now people seem to be either oppressors or victims. But someday all the human race will be free of all of that. And we shall all be friends. If I couldn't believe that, life wouldn't be worth living.
After Short Strand, there was more clown car activity and waiting and carrying on. The person we were to stay with wasn't home. Dinner took forever. Ashley went into the sulks because she was tired. "Can I just go check my e-mail and walk home?" I asked Thomas. There was an internet cafe across the street from the restaurant and our lodging was only about ten blocks up the Falls Road. It was like getting a pass from your kindergarten teacher to go potty! After waiting 45 minutes for everyone to actually get into the car, the internet cafe was closed, my new host family was busy and now I had the sulks.
"You owe me money!" exclaimed Ashley. "You never gave me my money!"
"How much do you have?"
"I've got $90. You owe me $200."
"What about the clothes I bought you in Dublin?"
"That was only $35." I got out my Franklin Planner. "Aha! You spent it all at Walgreens before we left!" I'm innocent. I did not steal Ashley's money. Whew.
Now I am safely ensconced in the top back room of a two-up two-down Belfast row house one block off of Falls Road where British troops and Loyalist paramilitaries have pretty much burned and shot and bombed indiscriminately for the past 30 years. What a strange vacation this is turning out to be.
August 2, 2003: Having barricaded myself in my room for an hour last night and swearing up and down that I would take the next plane home no matter what it cost, I started feeling better.
"You owe me money!" Ashley started in again as well. I guess she too was tired.
"No! I do not. I gave you a whole bunch of money. You had $300 to start with. I gave you $200 of it. I have one hundred of yours left. End. Of. Story."
"No, you owe me another $100!"
"I have one word for you, Ashley. Walgreens." Ha. "And Dublin." She didn't believe me. I couldn't remember. Had I stole Ashley's money? Do I look like a thief that would steal money from a child? Hadn't we gone over and over this already once today? When Ashley is tired, she likes to argue. I've finally figured that out.
Last night, our new hostess, who has lived just off Falls Road all her life, began to tell us stories. "We were young when The Troubles began. I was only 18. We only wanted to peacefully protest injustice; call a little attention to it. And they came down on us with everything they had."
We were sitting in Mary's front room. She was smoking a cigarette. It was 11 pm. "Had we known then what our next actions would lead to...." Her voice trailed off. "War is a terrible thing. We had no idea. We were young and we weren't going to let the Loyalists get away with it. My husband spent 18 years in jail. He was in every major prison in Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. I always say that jail was our contraception."
Mary loved the Good Friday Agreement. "We must compromise, cooperate and give-and-take. I think the other side sees that too. Having known war for 30 years...people just have no idea what a terrible thing it is. You talk, you dialogue, you negotiate. You do whatever you can to keep the Good Friday peace." She reminded me of the Bob Dylan song, "I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now."
Mary is now active in building a community from the ground up. "Before no one knew how to work a government. Not even the Orangemen. Neither of us had people on the Council. Now we do. We started from the bottom up. When the British do leave, we will know how to govern ourselves." That's what we are doing in America, I told her. We're stepping up against the "Stealing of America" -- stepping up to the plate one city at a time. One person at a time.
It's 9:30 am, Ashley is asleep, it's time for me to get up and do the wash and eat breakfast. Today is a free day -- except Eugene and I are going to go talk to a drug counselor at 3 pm. The bathroom is way down stairs. A hundred miles away! I thought about, in the spirit of roughing it, going without a shower today. Nah. I'm spoiled. Hell, I already gave up taking baths. There's only so much a person can sacrifice for World Peace!
"Bring me your laundry, dear, and we will get that taken care of," Mary called up from downstairs. A traveler's favorite words. She won my heart forever. "And after that, we will take a tour of the bog." Bog? I want to tour a bog? Why not.
"In America, this place is what you would call a wetland." Oh. Lovely. "Migrating birds stop here now on their way to Africa. The community organized and made this happen. This used to be the local garbage dump." The bog was a conservationist's dream. Clear streams and duck-infested pools and cattails and brambles and lots and lots of sky. Hurray for the bog.
"Through here is the Milltown Cemetery, where the fallen of The Troubles are laid to rest" said Mary. "In 1969, Bernadette Devlin was a young student at Queen's University and she and some others introduced the idea of `one man, one vote'. Up until this time, it was `one property, one vote'. If a Protestant landlord owned 15 properties, he got 15 votes -- and his Catholic tenants got nothing." This was in the 1960s? You gotta be kidding.
"They organized a protest parade, using Rosa Parks and MLK as their model. The next thing we knew, the Falls Road was on fire and they were killing us. Actually killing us. Our shock was bottomless. And we started to organize to fight back."
Then we stopped at some graves. Kieran Doreghty, Bobby Sands. The hunger strikers. Volunteers. Rows and rows of Volunteer graves. How sad. Mary cleaned some graves and rearranged some flowers. "I knew many of these people. I went to all of the funerals. It seemed like a time there all we did was go to funerals."
In the last few days, I had made various futile attempts to make internet contact here. After Mary's unofficial cemetery tour, I found an internet cafe in the local shopping plaza up the road from the cemetery. It was called The Kennedy Center, presumedly after John Kennedy. The Irish loved John Kennedy. As did the Americans! The cafe was buried upstairs behind a chips shop. I had just settled into jpstillwater@yahoo.com when Thomas came and dragged me away to hear about drug pushers in Belfast.
"The Loyalists bring the drugs in," said the drug counselor, "and the IRA is trying to get the dealers out. The Loyalists began to develop contacts inside the Catholic community so they could get in and get out." Wide-spread drug misuse is relatively new here. But alcoholism is a big problem. Both sides have a large temperance movement. There is a drinking culture here; the round system where each mate buys a round. So if you are out with five people you have to drink five rounds. "People here drink to get drunk."
Prescription drugs are a big problem also. "Stress. After a shooting, doctors just repeat the prescriptions. Older people are taking them. We're having a `Dump all Drugs' campaign."
Baikbre DeBruim, a Sinn Fein health minister, set up a drug strategy team to deal with all aspects of the problem; health, education, social and economic factors. "We need to get jobs for the dealers," the counselor stated. "We have about six million dollars in funding. It's a start. On the ground, we have drug education and rehabilitation." The program's goal is to keep addicts out of jail and to give them a sense of future. "We try to give them alternatives. Life skills. Positive reinforcement whenever jobs are well done. Weave them back into the social fabric of the community."
Working with the police has been unsuccessful. "The drug dealers themselves are part of the Loyalist police intelligence-gathering network so we don't work with the police." The probation system in Belfast could be preventative but in order to qualify for their programs, you have to become a criminal. "Nothing goes into prevention in terms of criminal justice funding."
One result of The Troubles is that we have one of the strongest community infrastructures ever. The old IRA members have become politicians and community activists. The Loyalist army members have become criminal gang leaders and drug dealers. The IRA fought for justice and still does. The Loyalists fought for hatred and they still do. They tried to subdue the Catholics. Now they are trying to subdue their own people. And the Loyalists who want to do what we are doing are blocked by their own people -- whereas almost everyone in West Belfast is politically aware." Interesting.
8 pm: Sean and I are sitting in the Cineplex, waiting for an Irish movie to begin. We passed on Terminator, Spy Kids and Legally Blonde 2. How's that for taking tourism to the extreme!
We had just gotten out of Saturday evening mass. "Sorry if I cross myself wrong and elbow you," I told Mary. "I'm a Byzantine Catholic. We're under the Pope but we do the Eastern Orthodox rite and we cross ourselves from right to left instead of from left to right." It was nice going to mass in a Catholic country. Or at least in a Catholic half of a country that just got done recreating the War of the Roses.
The priest did a great homily. "A man baked four really big loaves of bread. Five pounds each. He took the first loaf to London and put out a sign next to it saying, `This loaf of bread for one hour's work.' No takers. People jeered at him. Then he tried the same thing in New York City -- and got arrested for soliciting and thrown in jail. He did the same thing in Legos, Nigeria. Ten people there offered to work three hours for the loaf. Then, when he went to the poorest section of India, 100 people offered to work all day for the loaf." That's deep.
Then Sean and I went off to see the Irish movie; about an investigative journalist who was done in by the Dublin drug lords she was trying to expose. Based on a true story. Veronica Guerin. Then we walked home in the dark through the Milltown graveyard. That experience alone was worth the whole trip to Ireland.
August 3, 2003: This memoir is getting out of control! There's so much to write about here in Catholic Belfast. And so much to see and do during the West Belfast Festival. Did I mention that all the Michael Moore tickets got sold out in just two hours? The festival is famous all over Europe, involves plays and concerts and speeches and tours. One play, about the heroic Black Taxis that took over running up and down the Falls Road when the buses were being boycotted, described the taxis as being "hijacked, targeted by Secret Service spooks, attacked by gunmen -- driven by lunatics."
Mary was still trying to educate me. Over the mandatory sausage, toast, bacon and eggs, she told us stories. "Gerry Adams and John Hume met in secret for two years before the truce was declared. One day a Sinn Fein rep from the neighborhood saw Gerry going into a monetary and a few minutes later they saw John Hume going in too. This was the first we knew that some sort of settlement might be in the works." That's one story right there.
Everyone else on the Falls Road has a story. One woman told me how her husband was an IRA bomber. "He tells me I need to take a vacation. Then, while I'm gone, he tries to blow up the Queen." And while another man quietly talks to us about recreation programs for the kids, I look down and see he's missing a finger. And yesterday I went to a talk tying the Spanish Basque struggle for freedom with all the other freedom struggles -- most of them labeled as "terrorism" by the powers that be. And then I turned on the TV to images of Liberia and Iraq in flames. Half of the world wants freedom and justice and the other half of the world wants money and power. So far, money and power seem to be winning out but in West Belfast such is not the case. These people are highly politicized here and they know what they want.
"I'll tell you what we don't want however," said Mary. "We don't want another freaking war."
I talked to my son Joe over the phone last night. "Can you bring me a T-shirt?" he asked. "Something Gothic." Today I will look for Gothic T-shirts, do the Falls Road Fun Run (Ha!), watch the Festival's opening parade and attend a comedy show entitled, "Israel and Me: An Irishman goes to Palestine".
There's a long day ahead of us. But we were up for it after a stupendous amount of bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, Wheatabix and more stories from Mary. "I was looking for work and the Labor Council had me scrubbing floors," she said. "It's either scrubbing floors or going back to school and getting my GED." Or whatever they call it in Northern Ireland. "I can't do that! Go back to school like some clone!" Mary is a wonderful storyteller. "When I was a wee girl and misbehaved at school, they'd throw me in the storeroom and unscrew the light bulb. Well, after the first time, I brung me own light bulb. Here's me. `Oh please teacher! Don't throw me in the storeroom!' And I'd bring me comic book with me."
Go Mary!
"So I says to the Labor Council teacher, `You have one month to teach me something.' And he did. He told us to write an essay on our earliest memory. Well, my earliest memory was breaking me nose after falling off a swing. And I'd seen a dog be hit in the road and be taken off by men in white coats to put it to sleep. So I saw the men in white coats coming for me and I thought they were coming to put me ter sleep too."
To make a long story short, Mary got her GED. I don't know if she went to university after that because it was time for Ashley and me to leave to run in the West Belfast Festival Fun Run. "Ashley!" I said. "Time to go!"
"I'm not going and you can't make me." I stole her CD player. She poured cold water over my head. We were ready. I came in 20th out of 20 and got my picture taken for the newspaper and got a free bottle of Evian at the finish line. All of West Belfast came out to cheer me on. Go me!
8 pm: I'm at the Palestinian thing. "Be sure to take a Black Taxi," Mary told me but I thought it might be nice to take a wee walk instead. Three miles later, all straight uphill and most of it spent lost, I finally got to the Roddy McCouley Club up on Glen Road. Magnificent view. It turned out that the event was a movie about a British television personality's experiences in Palestine, called "Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army". Sam and Cezar were there. Sam was his usual bratty self. I got a free orange juice at the bar because I got in a discussion with the barman. "Palestine may still be the issue," I told him, "but so is Belfast and American schools, jobs, social security and freedom." He liked my "Clinton and Gore in '94" button.
Yikes. Everyone smokes in Ireland. Everywhere. All the time. But the cigarette boxes all read (in big, big letters), "Smoking kills." Ashley's favorite is "Smoking causes infertility and decreases the sperm count."
They brought the wrong film to the showing and now we are watching a scuba diving documentary in Finnish! But it does have subtitles.
10 pm: All over West Belfast are signs in support of the Palestinians opposing Israeli occupation. They are everywhere. But I only have seen one (1) reference in opposition to America's brutal occupation of Iraq. Why is that?
They finally found the right movie. It was a graphic portrayal of Israel's brutal occupation of Bethlehem. As a Christian, I really resent that tanks and APCs are driving up and down the streets where Christ was born and shooting at women and children. And the Catholics of Belfast do too. What is going on in Palestine reminds them too much of The Troubles.
Is it time to walk home to St. James Road and Mary's rowhouse? Or is it time to stay a little longer at the Roddy McCouley Club and have a Guiness? Guiness? Yuck! The guy next to me is drinking Carlsberg.
Jeremy Hardy himself had been at the event and answered questions from the audience. What was the best way to get to Israel/Palestine? "The best way to go is on British Airways," he replied. "The security on El Al is insane. And when you get there, expect a six-hour interrogation. And lie like crazy! Never ever mention the `Peace' word." Several people in the audience suggested that America was the puppet master that is controlling Israeli foreign policy and that a boycott of American goods might be in order. There was also a lot of talk about "America" as being the bad guy. It's not America. It's Bush and his neo-cons. And then finally someone asked, "What about the bloody disgraceful war in Iraq?"
Also, one Palestinian in the audience got up and said, "The Israelis have made every effort to humiliate Palestinians. Tell people that we are being crushed and oppressed and humiliated." Self-esteem is as important as food and water to human beings. When they are humiliated, they cannot help but resist. "If Arafat had accepted the Camp David agreement, there would be no Palestinian people today. If the Second Intefada hadn't stopped Arafat from agreeing to the accord, Palestinians would be a just a footnote in history." Oh. So that's why he didn't sign.
11 pm: I care deeply and truly about justice. And I'm really, really hungry. Justice -- with ice cream.
August 7, 2003: Well, my two days without Thomas ordering me about are over. "Why are you taking so long? Come on, we're late." Ha! We arrived ten minutes early. "And you can't take all that stuff with you. What do you need all that for?"
"I'm a lady," I replied. "I need my stuff so that I can look all refined and beautiful." That shut him up. But he got his revenge. When I went to get into his teeny tiny little Vauxhall, he threw me in the very back and then squashed the seat in front of me back so that my knees were up at my chin.
Last night as me and Cezar and Sam were walking home around midnight, we ran into one of the neighbors on the block where they stayed. "The Festival in the park ended in a brawl," the neighbor told us. "100 drunks stole a police van and started throwing rocks at the Peelers." It hadn't been political. It had been a good old-fashioned drunken Irish brawl. Heads were cracked. Police heads too apparently.
On the way home, at midnight on the most balmy night in the history of Northern Ireland, we walked among the sleepy rowhouses with occasional young family men sitting on the front steps. I could tell these were young roofers or tilers or whatever -- 25 years old and already the father of two or three children. It is a working class community of the old school. America in the 1950s when a man's only dream was working the same job for 50 years and maybe buying a house. Same as Mick's dream. My dream? World Peace!
I said goodnight to the boys and walked down the row to Mary's house. A big German shepherd cornered me behind a Ford Escort and we circled round and round the car, him looking for a tooth-hold on me leg. "Grrrr," he said.
"Nice doggy," sez me.
"Rarrrf! Rarrrr. Grrrr! Growl. Bark!" Lots of hackles raised.
"Nice doggy." Then Sam and Cezar came to the rescue!
11:00 am: Now I am at a women's health clinic. "Come this way," said the director. "Do you want a foot massage or a neck massage?" My kind of health treatment!
"This is better than spending $100 on a psychologist!" I exclaimed. "Sometimes just a gentle friendly touch is what is needed." Sometimes what is missing in our lives is merely human contact.
"Would you like a facial and a manicure too?" Better than a shrink! Much better than Prozac! I'm going to start one of these women's clinics in America! They gots an instant convert in me. And then they loaded me down with hydration-plus moisture lotion with essential surface protection and anti-ageing properties as well. Oh my God. Cezar is getting homeopathy and Bach flower remedies! Me too! Me! Me!
1 pm: We're on the road to Londonderry, called "Derry" by the Catholics. 71 kilometers stuffed in the Vauxhall. We can do this! "Wait! Thomas!" I cried. "I forgot my nail polish!" Another one of Thomas's famous glares.
Michael Moore will speak at the Festival on Saturday at 5:30. "You may not be able to get into the venue, but you can sit in the Milltown Cemetery next to the grave of Bobby Sands and hear every word," I told the boys. Doesn't get much better than that.
We just passed over the bridge of Toome. "That's where Roddy McCourley was hung in 18-something-or-other," said Thomas. "Francis Hughes, the IRA Volunteer who later became a hunger striker, attacked a barracks there. He operated out of Ballaghy and was later captured in the full uniform of the Irish Army." So The Troubles were not just limited to urban areas and South Armagh. They were spread throughout the North. As we neared Londonderry, we passed a sign where the "Derry" part was crossed out. Usually they cross out the "London" part. "It's a preemptive strike," joked Sam.
We entered Dungiven, home of hunger striker Kevin Lynch (71 days). "There's the Dungiven Castle -- or what's left of it. We'll stop for a sandwich here." It was a small quaint country town. Pizza Palace. KFC. "I want pancakes!" shouted Ashley. And she actually found them too.
We ate lunch at a family-run cafe. "Can I use your restroom?" It was off what was obviously the family's kitchen. The kids were eating lunch at the kitchen table. The family members were really nice. The thrift store across the street was closed. "Bank Holiday" said the sign in the window. Oh. 17 km further to Derry.
3 pm: "There's the hospital where they took the bodies after Bloody Sunday," said Thomas. Meanwhile, the news headlines on the paper I picked up in Dungiven screamed, "Gerry Adams receives death threat from IRA dissidents." Interesting. But doubtful. Threatening Gerry Adams is like threatening George Washington. Everybody likes him. Why bother.
As we approached Derry, Thomas reminded us what various Protestant initials stood for. "UDA stands for the Ulster Defense Association. They are the paramilitaries. DUP stands for the Democratic Unionist Party. They are politicos." That's our next stop. Now we are in Loyalist territory.
Across from the DUP office was a giant British army watch tower and base. The DUP is the political arm of the Loyalists -- just as Sinn Fein is the political arm of the Nationalists. We were visiting a Londonderry district councilman who had agreed to met with us and tell us the Loyalist side of the Northern Ireland story. He was friendly and polite. He didn't have horns. In fact, he was really very nice.
"One and a half million people live in the North," he told our little delegation. "More than half live in Belfast. The River Bann separates East from West. Northern Ireland has six counties, 26 district councils." Apparently the District Councils run the areas around them. This man was the District Council representative from Londonderry.
"The Council elects the Mayor. Since The Troubles, the Council's powers have been restricted. The split has caused a lot of problems but despite that, the bread-and-butter politics of street cleaning etc. go right along. You get people venting on things like what to name the city or whether to break with the UK."
Sometimes when a issue is being blocked, councilors may go to "the other side" to get a majority. "95% of the Protestants live in the waterside area. Protestants send their children to government schools but the schools are open to Catholic children as well." Being a councilor is a part-time job. "I work in this office as well as downtown. Our salaries are about 4,000 pounds a year."
The councilor told us that all the Bloody Sunday events are still going through the courts. "It is a slow process. But then we still remember what happened in 1690 -- and the Billies who were forced to move to the American South because they supported King William."
With regards to Ireland, "I think we should trade with Canada but we want to remain a part of Britain. Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales. Add Northern Ireland and you get the United Kingdom. I thought Londonderry was a beautiful name, using the best of both shapers of the area. Most of our former industries, the shirt factories, have moved to third world countries." Ten-year-olds willing to work twelve hours a day for peanuts are too hard to resist. "Companies can't afford to stay here. Companies say, `If we don't move offshore, somebody else will and then we'll go out of business.'"
As for the Good Friday Agreement, "You would have to be crazy as a Nationalist not to vote for it. But the word that caught the Unionists was peace. They didn't want their children to go through what they went through. I personally didn't vote for it, however, and more and more Loyalists are unhappy with some of the provisions. But nobody wants to go back to war. There must be a way for all of us to live together. You can't run roughshod over people's shoes whichever side you are on. There can be no mandate for murder. We all have to sit around the table. The paramilitary or the IRA -- a terrorist is a terrorist whichever side they are on." The way to stop violence is to have it stopped from the roots of the community up.
"Maybe 5% of Catholics like being under the Queen. But mainly the Catholics want to join Ireland. There is a religious aspect. And also an economic factor. But the Protestants weren't as well off as the Irish Catholics. My parents' generation put up with the poverty in order to not join Ireland." Someone in our group asked a question. Apparently, Ian Paisley, the DUP's candidate for some national office -- I'm not clear exactly what -- appears to be bigoted towards Catholics. "I think he's not. And we need to move on from the Good Friday Agreement, to modernize it." He said that politics, in the end, is how you deal with people's differences. "Concentrate on the things you can agree on."
Many use Unionism as a cover for bigotry and violence? "There are still extremes on both sides but you can't always go to your lowest common denominator. It's time for them to go on with their lives."
Sometimes the things that I think the people we talk to mean to say aren't what they say at all. I may not have gotten things right but from what the Councilor was saying I gathered that the demand for civil rights by the Catholics in the 1960s was misunderstood by many of the Protestants -- who in fact wanted many of these same rights themselves but were afraid to make waves because it might wreck the country. And sometimes their fear of change just got out of hand.
"As for drugs -- there wasn't any when I was a child. When the drug dealers came along, paramilitaries dealt with them by kneecapping and murder. But it turned out they were just clearing the territory for themselves."
Cezar requested a tour of the inside of one of the police towers. And by God the Councilman picked up the phone to see if he could get us one. Tomorrow at 2 pm.
On the way to the car, we saw a Unionist mural which said, "There must be no retirement with our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. We determine the guilty. We decide the punishment." Underneath this bold statement there was a terrible skeleton guy charging out at us with murder in his eye; like some Grateful Dead dude gone psychotic or like something seen on a very gothic T-shirt or a medieval depiction of the Black Death. I got a picture of Ashley standing in front of it. Next to it was a mural of the queen. How Gothic can you get?
5 pm: After dumping our stuff at a high-class antique-laden bed and breakfast in the heart of old Derry, our group went out for dinner. On the way, we stopped here and we stopped there. I could see that it was going to be another one of those evenings that took forever. "I'm sorry Thomas," I finally said, "but I just need to flake." There's only so much group activity I can endure. I left Ashley with the guys and wandered off by myself, found an internet cafe, ate a sandwich and blanked out my mind by reading e-mail. "I feel better now." Ice cream, Jane? Don't mind if I do.
By accident I ran into the group after dinner and we all trudged off to a screening of the sad Derry tale, "Sunday," based on the horrors of the Bloody Sunday massacre. Ashley, however, had seen the movie the night before on TV with Mary and had no desire to see it again. Apparently, she had cried the whole way through it. Accordingly, she trudged back to the B&B. Trudging alone at night was perfectly safe in the olden-days section Derry.
After the showing, both filmmakers gave us a talk about making the film. "We had a 2.6 (did he say thousand or million?) pound budget which isn't much when it comes to making a film. We started out in 1997, seeking the approval of the families of the victims. They all approved of the project and, in fact, one of the actors portraying a slain marcher is a nephew of the dead young man." Judging by photos, he looked just like him too. We also got a history of the march. "Plantations' were granted to English lords during Queen Elizabeth I's time and the lords threw the Gaelics off their land. Even despite this, there have always been more Gaelics in Derry than Protestants. However, gerrymandering and voting by property-owning only gave the Unionists political power. Some of the claims in this movie seem outrageous but it has all been meticulously documented and researched."
It was strange -- sitting in a theatre in the middle of the ancient part of Derry and listening to a tale of its more recent history. "Every year the Unionists would march through the Bogside area and stone its residents. One year the Gaelics fought back." The protest demonstrations were non-violent but everyone got shot at by the police and the British nonetheless. "On January 30, 1972, there was a peaceful civil rights march in Derry. So many people -- men, women, children, families -- turned up for it that there was an expectation that the sheer size of the march would make a difference and that there would be a change in the way Catholics were treated in Derry. Instead, the British Army opened fire on the peaceful marchers and continued to fire into the fleeing crowd."
You need to go out and rent this movie for yourself. It was a drama! Based on facts but drama just the same. I cried. A lot. I'm never been one to give the ending of a movie away -- but it was definitely bloody. British Special Forces went to Derry with the deliberate plan to provoke resistance by killing everyone they could shoot so that they could seize the area -- like Ariel Sharon provokes the Palestinians so he can move in and take more land. The Bogside was primo real estate. Three months later, the Brits moved in and flattened the Bogside. (That would be Bloody Sunday 2, The Sequel.)
11 pm: Despite it's bloody history, Derry is a fabulous tourist town. You have no idea! "After the movie," I told Ashley when I got back to the swank B&B, handing her a carton of carry-out Chinese food, "We went for a walk on the city wall." At 10:30 at night, it was still vaguely light out and so we walked placidly around, content to stay up late. The ancient city of Derry is rimmed with an ancient stone wall 20 feet thick, looking for all the world like it had the same architect as the Great Wall of China. "It is 20 feet wide and 30 feet high, with spaces cut out to dump burning oil on attackers or shoot at them; your choice." We passed the ancient cathedral and Bishop Berkeley's house -- the same bishop that my hometown is named after.
"The cathedral used to be Catholic," said Thomas, "but after the Reformation, the Protestants took it over. Down to your right, you can see the Bogside. Over to your left are Loyalists." The Loyalists had painted a sign there, "Londonderry West Bank. Still under siege. No surrender!" What were the Unionists under siege about? I have no idea.
Walking further, we came to the ancient Guild Hall, now serving as City Hall. Impressive. And the food in this city is cheap too. Why aren't the tourists flocking to Derry? The B&B we are staying at would make even the most picky tourist absolutely drool.
It was a magical night, walking around the walls. Everyone in our group actually behaved themselves. Even me!
August 5, 2003: Tuesday. Only six more days until we fly home. I started thinking about Berkeley, ie, what can I do to make my job better, easier, more interesting, more effective when I get back? "Hey, Ashley. Will you come help me straighten out my office when we get back?"
"No."
The church bell carillon played at 8 am this morning. Lovely. The B&B we are staying at was built in 1870 -- relatively new for Derry. What a charming place! Except of course for the "No surrender" and "We decide the punishment" parts. Don't they know that punishment always leads to resistance?
I found an optician around the corner from the B&B. They've got nothing! What's with the world's frame selection? It sucks. Getting our schedule for the day from Thomas is like prying state secrets out of the neo-cons but I did manage to get out of him somehow that we would be leaving immediately. Translation: I have at least another half-hour. Currant jelly and Earl Gray tea and fresh canned fruit for breakfast. This is a high-class B&B.
Next stop. "The Pat Finucane Center is working with the Derry families to get a straight-forward acknowledgment of the Bloody Sunday murders and cover-up," said the rep we met at the Center, located in the top floor of a Victorian-style house that overlooked the Bogside. The center was named for a Belfast human rights lawyer who was murdered in front of his wife and children by the UDA in 1989.
"So far, after all the work we've done to try to bring the Bloody Sunday perpetrators to justice, we only have one man convicted of manslaughter -- but only after he changed his story five times, finally saying that he shot someone who was shooting at him. When we investigated, we found that the soldier couldn't possible have seen the location of the so-called shooter from his own location, which was around a corner."
Apparently murder of Catholics won't get you kicked out of the British Army. "Murderers in Derry are now serving in Iraq under the same circumstances." The rep told several more stories. "You can get kicked out of the British Army for DUI or marijuana but it's okay to shoot unarmed Irish civilians." And the Derry police force isn't much better. The force has many gross abusers of human rights still high up in their ranks.
"As for plastic bullets, 17 people have been killed by them recently. They are supposed to be fired from 20 meters or more." Ha. "125,000 or more plastic bullets have been used since 1980 in the North of Ireland. They have only fired 50 bullets outside of here -- including at Kosovo." He passed some bullets around. Four inches long, one-and-one-half inches in diameter. "One man was killed at 16 meters. Most were killed at point-blank range. One was shot in the back of the head, execution-style." Most times the Center cannot even find out the names of the soldiers.
"One woman was killed standing in her doorway on the Falls Road. The soldiers gave sworn statements of being under fire. Someone got it on film that they were lying through their teeth. The shooter got decorated by the Queen."
Now Derry has a police ombudsman with great powers on paper. "We have yet to see if the office will be allowed to practice its powers however." The object is to hold the police accountable. "Our goal is to eliminate lethal weapons as a means of crowd control. Mostly young children are killed by the plastic bullets used here. They are more lethal than even the ones used by the Israeli Defense Force." The Center is taking the murder cases to court one by one.
To be continued....