This is the last post about my trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland. It's been the most difficult and most personal to write. And it's long. Apologies in advance.
Growing up in England in the 1970s I hated the Irish. Or at least that's how I probably would have explained it to someone who asked how I felt back then, as if a boy of 10 or less could even express what it was like to really hate. I thought Irish people killed English people. I thought they were scary. And stupid. All the "stupid people" jokes we told back then as kids had an Irishman in the punchline, just like after we moved to the United States we found people told "stupid people" jokes about Polish people.
Growing up in England in the 1970s I hated the Irish. Or at least that's how I probably would have explained it to someone who asked how I felt back then, as if a boy of 10 or less could even express what it was like to really hate. I thought Irish people killed English people. I thought they were scary. And stupid. All the "stupid people" jokes we told back then as kids had an Irishman in the punchline, just like after we moved to the United States we found people told "stupid people" jokes about Polish people.
In all reality, I understood very little of the conflict going on between some Irish people and the UK government. All I thought I knew was Irish people were mailing letter bombs to British people and exploding cars and dustbins in cities every now and then and that was scary. We knew all this because it was on the television and the people reading the news seemed to be talking about it all the time. Either that or that was one of the few news stories I could comprehend back then.
As if it weren't bad enough to hear all this stuff on the news, sometimes we got mail from Ireland and I feared the worst. Every time we got an envelope with an Irish stamp on it I thought it had to be a letter bomb. After all, weren't all things Irish dangerous? Back then I didn't really understand that a bomb couldn't realistically fit inside a standard envelope.
We never ever received a letter bomb that I know of. I mean, why would we?
As if it weren't bad enough to hear all this stuff on the news, sometimes we got mail from Ireland and I feared the worst. Every time we got an envelope with an Irish stamp on it I thought it had to be a letter bomb. After all, weren't all things Irish dangerous? Back then I didn't really understand that a bomb couldn't realistically fit inside a standard envelope.
We never ever received a letter bomb that I know of. I mean, why would we?
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| Murals are everywhere in Northern Ireland. These from the catholic neighborhood in Derry. |
America made my feelings about the Irish worse. When we moved to New England we found a general hatred of the English, something held on to by kids and teachers from two wars both about 200 years old in a time and a political environment that was very different from the late 20th century. It made no sense.
That enmity towards Britain that we found when moving to this country seemed to translate to the conflict going on in Northern Ireland. We found pretty much everyone living around us identified as having some Irish ancestry (which also made no sense and still doesn't) and their take on the British government vs. the Irish Republican Army (or IRA) was that everyone living in Ireland and Northern Ireland was Catholic, didn't want to be governed by Protestants and that Britain should just give Ireland back to the Irish. I at least understood enough to know that the conflict wasn't that simple. And I was only 11.
That enmity towards Britain that we found when moving to this country seemed to translate to the conflict going on in Northern Ireland. We found pretty much everyone living around us identified as having some Irish ancestry (which also made no sense and still doesn't) and their take on the British government vs. the Irish Republican Army (or IRA) was that everyone living in Ireland and Northern Ireland was Catholic, didn't want to be governed by Protestants and that Britain should just give Ireland back to the Irish. I at least understood enough to know that the conflict wasn't that simple. And I was only 11.
I figured a trip to Northern Ireland might be an opportunity to understand a little bit more about the conflict that I lived through as a child, albeit really just as a spectator through our television set. From my perspective growing up in the midlands of England, the IRA was an organization that had formed in the 1970s and started trying to get Northern Ireland wrested from the clutches of the British. Of course, it wasn't. It was formed decades earlier and the conflict had been going on way longer than I understood as a child and way way before the IRA was involved. And what they were fighting for was not a simple thing at all. Most conflicts like this aren't.
Oh, and of course, Irish people are not stupid, just like Polish people aren't stupid. The only thing that's really stupid are the biases we carry around with us. Sometimes when we are kids we can't help it that much. As adults we can't continue to do that to ourselves and others, particularly our children.
Before I set foot in Northern Ireland (or Ireland for that matter), I thought I better get a little smarter on the history of this whole conflict, which to me decades removed from my English childhood now seems to be all about power and less about Protestants vs. Catholics. I'm not saying the fighting isn't or wasn't happening between Protestants and Catholics; I'm just not sure that's what it was really about. It seems to me that the poor (meaning not wealthy) Protestants have way more in common with the poor Catholics than they do with the Protestants in power. Although I will say that those who have the power seem to do an awfully good job of pitting the people they are governing or ruling or whatever you want to call it against each other along religious lines. Better keep us in power or the Catholics will be in charge!
Call me ignorant here but I assumed that the split between Ireland and Northern Ireland had been in place for a long, long time. It hasn't. Try since December of 1921. For many Irish people, that agreement was a long time coming. For some, it came way too soon. The event that precipitated that split was the Easter Rising of 1916, although really it had real tangible roots a couple of years prior, just before the outbreak of World War I.
In 1914, the British Parliament approved the idea of home rule for Ireland, all of which at that time was under control of Great Britain. Home rule isn't independence; it means that the country would be legislated by a separate governing body (a separate Parliament) located in the country itself, rather than being legislated from London. Scotland and Northern Ireland have this same arrangement today. Then war broke out and the enactment of home rule was forgotten in favor of stopping Germany from taking over all of Europe. Priorities, right?
Of course, the postponement of home rule didn't sit well with some of the Irish, and on Easter weekend of 1916, revolution was declared. Seven men signed a proclamation setting up a provisional government of the Irish Republic which was read aloud on the streets of Dublin right before bullets between their supporters and the British government started to fly. It didn't last long. The rebellion was crushed and the leaders, including all seven men whose names were at the bottom of the proclamation, were executed, just like Britain had done to end uprisings throughout the empire for decades or centuries. Want to crush a movement for independence? Cut off its head. Execute those responsible.
The executions didn't work. Instead of making people afraid, they seem to have steeled their resolve. Some Members of Parliament elected in Ireland after the Rising refused to sit in London. Instead they set up their own Parliament in Dublin and authorized mobilization of guerrilla-style warfare against Great Britain. The group carrying out the war was the Irish Republican Army, formed from a number of different militant groups and re-branded with a new name. Less than six years later, they had won. And Ireland became an independent country.
Mostly, that is. Not the whole island. Six of the thirty-two counties in the north of Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland (initially the Irish Free State) had been created, just not as everyone wanted. But instead of carrying on the fight to get those last six counties, the newly created Irish Parliament devolved into bickering between themselves about whether they should or should not have agreed to the 26 in the first place. Eventually they moved on.
Northern Ireland didn't.
By the 1960s, the Ulster Unionist Party had controlled Northern Ireland's Parliament since it was formed following the split of Ireland in 1921. They had done this behind a population that was about 60% Protestant, but they also had their thumb significantly pressed down on the scale.
Unlike in the rest of the United Kingdom, the right to vote in Northern Ireland resided with property owners only. Property ownership was in part granted through Government-directed housing allocations, which favored Protestant applications over Catholic applications. How did they do this? Simple. Most of the government employees were Protestant. By design, not by accident. And if there was any other assistance needed, voting districts were carefully gerrymandered to ensure that the votes of the Catholic population were marginalized to the greatest extent possible. In the city of Derry, for example, the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants by about two to one, yet the Ulster Unionist Party was in charge.
Don't like that if you're Catholic? What can you do about it? If you can even vote, you have no real representation in the government of the country where you live. Want to march or protest? Go ahead. You'll have to deal with the police or the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which was typically 90% Protestant and convinced by their own government that Catholics needed to be kept in line.
Things might have been just fine in the Republic of Ireland by the time we got to the late 1960s. They were anything but in Northern Ireland.
In the late 1960s, a series of non-violent protests inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States were staged in Northern Ireland. The protesters and marchers were often students and they were met with violent resistance, either by the RUC or first by a paramilitary Protestant organization like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) or the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) and then the RUC. In some cases, it appeared that the RUC deliberately waited until the UVF or UPV had a shot at the marchers first before moving in.
I know what you are thinking: why are there paramilitary organizations attacking and beating non-violent student protesters? There just are. And they probably exist to this day along with caches of weapons ready for any sign that it's time to remobilize and start killing the other side.
The British Government's response to all of this was to sit and wait until it got really bad, which it did in August of 1969 in Derry. For three days, rioting and conflict between the RUC and residents of the Catholic bogside neighborhood raged, with residents setting up barriers and obstacles to maintain what they referred to as Free Derry. After that, the British government sent in troops. In response, the IRA, which had been dormant but certainly not extinct, remobilized. The Troubles had started. And that's pretty much where my childhood picks up.
We picked three places to engage with the struggle for Irish independence and The Troubles: Dublin, Belfast and Derry. We planned to visit Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, site of the executions following the Easter Rising of 1916, but that didn't work out for reasons I will expand on later. We did see an original copy of the 1916 Proclamation in the museum (we saw another at Trinity College's Old Library) but did not visit the spots where events following the rebellion actually took place.
But Belfast and Derry gave us a lot to think about.
We spent our four nights in Belfast in the city centre, close to pubs and restaurants and all manner of Game of Thrones sights. We wanted to see the parts of Belfast where the roots of The Troubles were buried deep into the subconscious of the population, but that was definitely not the city centre. It was also probably (in our mostly-uneducated-but-right opinion) not a place to just roam around by ourselves. So we took a taxi. Not just any taxi. A black cab set up specifically to take us to some spots in the city where the impact of The Troubles could be felt. And driven by a guy who had lived through the whole thing.
A couple of hours after we checked in to our hotel, Robert showed up and piled the three of us into his cab.
For the next 90 minutes or so, we were driven around mostly residential neighborhoods and were told tales of how things worked back in the 1970s and 1980s and how they work today. I say work today because it was clear from listening to Robert that there are people all over Belfast in Catholic and Protestant communities who haven't accepted that The Troubles are really and truly over.
In that hour and a half, we saw lots of walls and fences. We passed through gate after gate after gate to move between neighborhoods. We saw murals boasting of victories over neighbors and advertising violence against fellow citizens. We drove past propaganda and graffiti. We talked about segregated schools based on what particular brand of Christianity your parents practiced. We heard stories that made no sense but which we didn't doubt were true and tried to make a some sense of it all. It was difficult because honestly, it makes little sense whatsoever.
We spent time with Robert in Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. We got out of the car and stood and walked and listened and looked. We listened to Robert but we also listened to and saw nothing. No activity whatsoever. Maybe it was because it was a Friday afternoon and kids were at school and adults were at work, but there was nobody around except for us. And no sound. It was eerie. It was like everyone that lived there was waiting for us to go away.
On the Protestant side of the city, we gazed at giant murals covering the ends of buildings paying tribute to fallen servicemen or celebrating William of Orange's victory at the Battle of the Boyne. We did this while Robert told us about likely arms stashes and what could happen if you strayed from where you were supposed to be and how the gunmen would get away. Yeah, the silence didn't make that talk any better. I was waiting for a gunshot to ring out, despite the fact that it's been about 20 years since this war had stopped.
We also passed more Union Jacks on that drive than I have ever seen in a single location. They seemed to serve no purpose other than to mark territory. It's overkill and intimidation. I've never felt a flag be so menacing. Oh...and that Battle of the Boyne victory. 1690. Not a typo. Not supposed to be 1960. Sixteen. Ninety. Let it go. Protestants still wave it in the face of the Catholics every July when they have a parade in celebration. Like it's even relevant any more.
On the Catholic side of town we saw more murals and monuments immortalizing fallen martyrs killed in the cause. The portraits and names on the walls were offset from a neighborhood named Bombay Street in a small court. The mood here was somber considering the entire housing development had been set alight one night by Protestant mobs hell bent on taking revenge over the riots happening in Derry. Riots going on in another city two hours away seems like no good reason to me to burn a neighborhood less than a mile from where you live. But that's what happened. Senseless.
To get to the Catholic neighborhood we had to drive around one of the Peace Walls, barriers erected to keep the two sides away from each other. There are 50 or more of these things. located all around Belfast. They were initially built in a few locations in the 1920s and 1930s but they were erected in force in 1969 after the start of The Troubles. They were literally put in place to keep people from fighting and killing one another because they happened to believe in religion (the same religion by the way) a little bit differently.
The photograph above seems to show a concrete section of wall about maybe 12 or 15 feet high topped by a metal section maybe another 10 tall above that and then finally a maybe 15 to 20 foot high open metal fence. It seems to show that because that's exactly what it is. The concrete portion is the first wall. But people wanted to fight so badly that the height wasn't sufficient. So the government extended it. And it still wasn't high enough to stop people from throwing or slingshotting (or catapulting in Ireland) stones and other projectiles over the top.
This is all crazy, right? Right on the other side of the Peace Wall are the homes on Bombay Street. And the wall isn't enough. The houses right next to the wall have metal fencing over their windows because despite the 45 or so foot high fence, there are people on the other side determined enough to chuck stuff over the giant wall.
So here's what we've discovered so far. There are two sets of people who share the same religion but differ on the precise interpretation of that religion. Same God. Definitely same God. They are both likely working-class peoples yet they are investing significant time, effort and likely money figuring out how to bomb, shoot, burn, maim or just plain kill someone who looks like them but just believes in a Pope (or doesn't...depending on which side you are coming from). It can't be that we are still invested in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, can it? That seems a little farfetched.
It's messed up, right? Like really messed up. It would be easy to dismiss the insanity of all this and tell both sides to forgive and forget if it weren't for people like our driver, Robert. For him, the consequences of this war / disagreement / whatever you want to call it are super real. His father? Killed by the IRA. Brother-in-law who was a member of the RUC? Killed by the IRA. Robert himself? Three attempts by the IRA to kill him. It seems easy for someone like me, who has no real skin in the game, to take the position that what they are doing to their neighbors is ridiculous. Not so easy if you have had family killed over being the wrong religion. Or whatever it is they are really warring about.
So how the heck did it get this way in the first place? I mean I understand the conflict was divided along religious lines but I don't really still believe it's about religion. The answer may lie in the Museum of Free Derry. If we didn't read every word in that museum, we came pretty close. There were a few sentences on the walls that hit home pretty hard.
If there's a more effective museum in delivering a message than the Museum of Free Derry, I don't know where that museum is. This place was phenomenal! The entire building is devoted to telling the story of what happened in Derry on Sunday, January 30, 1972, including the events leading up that day and the aftermath. That day is otherwise known as Bloody Sunday, and to many of us it was made famous by the U2 song of the same name on their 1983 War album.
Bloody Sunday started as a peaceful protest march on the streets of Derry under the close watch of British troops. Eventually, some of those troops opened fire on the crowds of people. In all, 28 people were shot and 14 died either that day or later as a result of their injuries. The soldiers claimed the protesters had guns and bombs and that they were under attack. Oddly enough, no soldiers were killed or injured in any significant way.
The British government investigated immediately and cleared all troops of any wrongdoing, believing their stories wholeheartedly with little dispute. The investigation lasted 10 weeks and included paraffin testing to identify lead residue on clothing of 11 of the deceased. 10 of the 11 tests were negative. There was also clear evidence that some of those killed were shot in the back. The names of all the victims on that day are on the Bloody Sunday Obelisk Memorial in Derry. Seven of the 14 were aged 19 or younger.
In 1998, the British government took another pass at the investigation. It lasted 12 years and produced very different results. Even with decades-old (rather than really recent) evidence, the investigation concluded the shots fired by the troops that day represented nothing but cold blooded murder. Prime Minister David Cameron in commenting upon the report called the actions of British troops that day "unjustified" and "unjustifiable". The Museum of Free Derry ends with a video of the story of the end of the second inquiry. It provides incredible closure to the story.
When studying the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, it is easy to take sides. The story there is of an historically and institutionally oppressed minority of the population protesting peacefully and facing violent response from both local and state law enforcement and armed civilian groups that could literally get away with murder time and again. On the face of it, the struggle for equality for Catholics in Northern Ireland is remarkably similar: the Catholic population was deliberately denied rights and suffered violence and oppression at the hands of the RUC, British troops and local armed paramilitary groups like the UVF and the UPC.
But The Troubles were different from the Civil Rights Movement for one reason: the Irish Republican Army, the same group that made me terrified of Irish people as a child.
From the very beginning of the Easter Rising of 1916, the war between armed groups on both sides of the conflict in Ireland and Northern Ireland was brutal. The IRA's tactics in targeting civilians just simply working for the British government and their methods employed like kneecapping (being shot in each knee and sometimes the elbows and ankles as well) to inspire terror in anyone not actively collaborating with their cause are legendary.
I'm not saying the ferocity and cruelty the IRA brought to the fight was not matched by the other side because it was. To combat the Easter Rising, the Royal Irish Constabulary (the predecessor organization to the RUC) established a Special Reserve made up entirely of World War I veterans so affected by the trench warfare in Europe that they welcomed any opportunity to be as violent as they could be. This unit, named the Black and Tans after the color of their uniforms, was deliberately established to face violence with more violence.
I'm also not necessarily faulting the IRA for targeting innocent civilians in their fight and I can't believe I just wrote that. After all, the RUC and the British government, particularly by allowing private paramilitary organizations to operate without any real punishment, did the exact same thing. There may be shades of grey here but there is no real high ground to be claimed on either side. The real losers of The Troubles were the people not involved in the fight that were killed or the regular people and families living in the center of the conflict whose lives were ruined or hijacked just because they happened to live in Belfast or Derry or wherever. The IRA's participation, though, puts blood on the hands of both sides.
Considering my childhood and what we were taught as kids about the IRA, I have to say it was jarring to see "IRA" graffiti out in the open in Derry. This is an organization that killed people just to terrify other people. By that definition, they are a terrorist organization. Plain and simple. Hold that thought just for a few paragraphs.
Our last stop on our Black Taxi Tour was at the Sinn Fein headquarters, which was the political arm of the IRA, or maybe the other way around. On the side of that building is a mural showing Bobby Sands, an IRA volunteer who starved himself to death over a 66 day period in 1981 to protest his incarceration as a common criminal and not a prisoner of war.
Hunger strikes were a brutal and (at least in the 1970s) very public way to make a point. They involve fighting against the urge and need for food and having your own body cannibalize the fat and then muscle off your frame to keep your brain alive as long as possible. It causes bodily function failure, tooth loss, blindness and ultimately death which was the fate of Sands and three other IRA hunger strikers that year.
But while Sands was starving himself to death, the IRA was still out there being the IRA. The most senseless act of violence perpetrated during the strike was the murder of Joanne Mathers, a 29 year old mother of one working as a census worker in Derry. She was shot simply because she was collecting census forms from houses and the census represented in the eyes of the IRA a system of British government oppression.
I said a few paragraphs ago that seeing "IRA" graffiti was jarring. I was no less shaken by murals painted on the sides of buildings showing men in gas masks with bombs proclaiming that the Ulster Volunteer Force will defend their homes if anyone threatens them. This is current, not a remnant of the past that hasn't been painted over. There were (and are, if Robert is to be believed) terrorists on both sides of this conflict. My labeling the IRA as a terrorist organization doesn't mean that I support the other side. I could easily argue that civilian based terrorist organizations that are tacitly supported (or at least allowed to operate) by the government are even worse.
Sometimes travel makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes that's good. It builds character and makes us better able to deal with new situations. Chasing The Troubles made me a different kind of uncomfortable but it was worthwhile just the same.
Some of this came from my own bias as a kid growing up English. I was really not thrilled about being inside the Sinn Fein headquarters and I really didn't want to take the postcard of Bobby Sands that the woman in the store offered us. She did it with the best intentions. I just didn't want to deal. Throughout our black taxi tour there was a palpable sense of danger and conflict, although I'm sure it was imagined on my part. I felt similarly in Derry, although I'm sure it's because I felt like I had a sign on my back saying I was born in England. My own imagination, I'm sure.
I walk away from this experience unnerved by what both sides of this conflict did to each other and to people who had no involvement whatsoever. I'm embarrassed by what my home country did in the name of keeping all their territory intact and under control on their terms. But more than anything else considering that neither side really got what it wanted, I'm thinking how senseless it all was and how all the old feelings are still there. It's been more than 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement essentially ended the conflict but I think Robert's right that there are people on both sides ready to start killing each other again. It's clearly going to take more than a generation to kill this thing completely.
Oh, and of course, Irish people are not stupid, just like Polish people aren't stupid. The only thing that's really stupid are the biases we carry around with us. Sometimes when we are kids we can't help it that much. As adults we can't continue to do that to ourselves and others, particularly our children.
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| Belfast. William of Orange mural on the left. The FTA appears unrelated to the Troubles. |
Call me ignorant here but I assumed that the split between Ireland and Northern Ireland had been in place for a long, long time. It hasn't. Try since December of 1921. For many Irish people, that agreement was a long time coming. For some, it came way too soon. The event that precipitated that split was the Easter Rising of 1916, although really it had real tangible roots a couple of years prior, just before the outbreak of World War I.
In 1914, the British Parliament approved the idea of home rule for Ireland, all of which at that time was under control of Great Britain. Home rule isn't independence; it means that the country would be legislated by a separate governing body (a separate Parliament) located in the country itself, rather than being legislated from London. Scotland and Northern Ireland have this same arrangement today. Then war broke out and the enactment of home rule was forgotten in favor of stopping Germany from taking over all of Europe. Priorities, right?
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| The 1916 Proclamation. One of 2,500 original copies in the Kilmainham Gaol Museum. |
The executions didn't work. Instead of making people afraid, they seem to have steeled their resolve. Some Members of Parliament elected in Ireland after the Rising refused to sit in London. Instead they set up their own Parliament in Dublin and authorized mobilization of guerrilla-style warfare against Great Britain. The group carrying out the war was the Irish Republican Army, formed from a number of different militant groups and re-branded with a new name. Less than six years later, they had won. And Ireland became an independent country.
Mostly, that is. Not the whole island. Six of the thirty-two counties in the north of Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland (initially the Irish Free State) had been created, just not as everyone wanted. But instead of carrying on the fight to get those last six counties, the newly created Irish Parliament devolved into bickering between themselves about whether they should or should not have agreed to the 26 in the first place. Eventually they moved on.
Northern Ireland didn't.
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| The wall painted to announce the entrance to Free Derry. |
Unlike in the rest of the United Kingdom, the right to vote in Northern Ireland resided with property owners only. Property ownership was in part granted through Government-directed housing allocations, which favored Protestant applications over Catholic applications. How did they do this? Simple. Most of the government employees were Protestant. By design, not by accident. And if there was any other assistance needed, voting districts were carefully gerrymandered to ensure that the votes of the Catholic population were marginalized to the greatest extent possible. In the city of Derry, for example, the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants by about two to one, yet the Ulster Unionist Party was in charge.
Don't like that if you're Catholic? What can you do about it? If you can even vote, you have no real representation in the government of the country where you live. Want to march or protest? Go ahead. You'll have to deal with the police or the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which was typically 90% Protestant and convinced by their own government that Catholics needed to be kept in line.
Things might have been just fine in the Republic of Ireland by the time we got to the late 1960s. They were anything but in Northern Ireland.
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| Driving around Belfast in a black cab. Story chasing. |
I know what you are thinking: why are there paramilitary organizations attacking and beating non-violent student protesters? There just are. And they probably exist to this day along with caches of weapons ready for any sign that it's time to remobilize and start killing the other side.
The British Government's response to all of this was to sit and wait until it got really bad, which it did in August of 1969 in Derry. For three days, rioting and conflict between the RUC and residents of the Catholic bogside neighborhood raged, with residents setting up barriers and obstacles to maintain what they referred to as Free Derry. After that, the British government sent in troops. In response, the IRA, which had been dormant but certainly not extinct, remobilized. The Troubles had started. And that's pretty much where my childhood picks up.
But Belfast and Derry gave us a lot to think about.
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| The Museum of Free Derry. One of the best museums I've visited recently. |
A couple of hours after we checked in to our hotel, Robert showed up and piled the three of us into his cab.
For the next 90 minutes or so, we were driven around mostly residential neighborhoods and were told tales of how things worked back in the 1970s and 1980s and how they work today. I say work today because it was clear from listening to Robert that there are people all over Belfast in Catholic and Protestant communities who haven't accepted that The Troubles are really and truly over.
In that hour and a half, we saw lots of walls and fences. We passed through gate after gate after gate to move between neighborhoods. We saw murals boasting of victories over neighbors and advertising violence against fellow citizens. We drove past propaganda and graffiti. We talked about segregated schools based on what particular brand of Christianity your parents practiced. We heard stories that made no sense but which we didn't doubt were true and tried to make a some sense of it all. It was difficult because honestly, it makes little sense whatsoever.
We spent time with Robert in Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. We got out of the car and stood and walked and listened and looked. We listened to Robert but we also listened to and saw nothing. No activity whatsoever. Maybe it was because it was a Friday afternoon and kids were at school and adults were at work, but there was nobody around except for us. And no sound. It was eerie. It was like everyone that lived there was waiting for us to go away.
On the Protestant side of the city, we gazed at giant murals covering the ends of buildings paying tribute to fallen servicemen or celebrating William of Orange's victory at the Battle of the Boyne. We did this while Robert told us about likely arms stashes and what could happen if you strayed from where you were supposed to be and how the gunmen would get away. Yeah, the silence didn't make that talk any better. I was waiting for a gunshot to ring out, despite the fact that it's been about 20 years since this war had stopped.
We also passed more Union Jacks on that drive than I have ever seen in a single location. They seemed to serve no purpose other than to mark territory. It's overkill and intimidation. I've never felt a flag be so menacing. Oh...and that Battle of the Boyne victory. 1690. Not a typo. Not supposed to be 1960. Sixteen. Ninety. Let it go. Protestants still wave it in the face of the Catholics every July when they have a parade in celebration. Like it's even relevant any more.
On the Catholic side of town we saw more murals and monuments immortalizing fallen martyrs killed in the cause. The portraits and names on the walls were offset from a neighborhood named Bombay Street in a small court. The mood here was somber considering the entire housing development had been set alight one night by Protestant mobs hell bent on taking revenge over the riots happening in Derry. Riots going on in another city two hours away seems like no good reason to me to burn a neighborhood less than a mile from where you live. But that's what happened. Senseless.
To get to the Catholic neighborhood we had to drive around one of the Peace Walls, barriers erected to keep the two sides away from each other. There are 50 or more of these things. located all around Belfast. They were initially built in a few locations in the 1920s and 1930s but they were erected in force in 1969 after the start of The Troubles. They were literally put in place to keep people from fighting and killing one another because they happened to believe in religion (the same religion by the way) a little bit differently.
The photograph above seems to show a concrete section of wall about maybe 12 or 15 feet high topped by a metal section maybe another 10 tall above that and then finally a maybe 15 to 20 foot high open metal fence. It seems to show that because that's exactly what it is. The concrete portion is the first wall. But people wanted to fight so badly that the height wasn't sufficient. So the government extended it. And it still wasn't high enough to stop people from throwing or slingshotting (or catapulting in Ireland) stones and other projectiles over the top.
This is all crazy, right? Right on the other side of the Peace Wall are the homes on Bombay Street. And the wall isn't enough. The houses right next to the wall have metal fencing over their windows because despite the 45 or so foot high fence, there are people on the other side determined enough to chuck stuff over the giant wall.
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| The other side of the Peace Wall. Note the extra protection for the houses in the back. |
It's messed up, right? Like really messed up. It would be easy to dismiss the insanity of all this and tell both sides to forgive and forget if it weren't for people like our driver, Robert. For him, the consequences of this war / disagreement / whatever you want to call it are super real. His father? Killed by the IRA. Brother-in-law who was a member of the RUC? Killed by the IRA. Robert himself? Three attempts by the IRA to kill him. It seems easy for someone like me, who has no real skin in the game, to take the position that what they are doing to their neighbors is ridiculous. Not so easy if you have had family killed over being the wrong religion. Or whatever it is they are really warring about.
So how the heck did it get this way in the first place? I mean I understand the conflict was divided along religious lines but I don't really still believe it's about religion. The answer may lie in the Museum of Free Derry. If we didn't read every word in that museum, we came pretty close. There were a few sentences on the walls that hit home pretty hard.
"Unionist leaders ran the north on the basis that to give something to the Catholics was to take it away from the Protestants. Working-class Protestants were urged to see equality for Catholics as a threat to their position."
"In August 1963, 200,000 civil rights supporters gathered in Washington to hear Martin Luther King proclaim "I Have a Dream," and Bob Dylan unveil "Only a Pawn in Their Game," highlighting the manipulation of the white poor by racist politicians."Look, I know only one of those quotes was specifically about Northern Ireland but it seems pretty clear to me that the reason working-class Protestants wanted to keep the Catholics oppressed was because the people who were running the country (the Ulster Unionist Party) were telling them to do it so the Party could remain in charge. And they fell for it. Essentially they got the poor Protestants to side with the rich in power against people who likely had way more in common with them than the government did. Kind of sounds familiar in the 2019 version of the United States to me.
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| The Bloody Sunday Obelisk Memorial, Derry. |
Bloody Sunday started as a peaceful protest march on the streets of Derry under the close watch of British troops. Eventually, some of those troops opened fire on the crowds of people. In all, 28 people were shot and 14 died either that day or later as a result of their injuries. The soldiers claimed the protesters had guns and bombs and that they were under attack. Oddly enough, no soldiers were killed or injured in any significant way.
The British government investigated immediately and cleared all troops of any wrongdoing, believing their stories wholeheartedly with little dispute. The investigation lasted 10 weeks and included paraffin testing to identify lead residue on clothing of 11 of the deceased. 10 of the 11 tests were negative. There was also clear evidence that some of those killed were shot in the back. The names of all the victims on that day are on the Bloody Sunday Obelisk Memorial in Derry. Seven of the 14 were aged 19 or younger.
In 1998, the British government took another pass at the investigation. It lasted 12 years and produced very different results. Even with decades-old (rather than really recent) evidence, the investigation concluded the shots fired by the troops that day represented nothing but cold blooded murder. Prime Minister David Cameron in commenting upon the report called the actions of British troops that day "unjustified" and "unjustifiable". The Museum of Free Derry ends with a video of the story of the end of the second inquiry. It provides incredible closure to the story.
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| The H-Block Memorial, Derry. In memory of those IRA volunteers held as criminals, not prisoners of war. |
But The Troubles were different from the Civil Rights Movement for one reason: the Irish Republican Army, the same group that made me terrified of Irish people as a child.
From the very beginning of the Easter Rising of 1916, the war between armed groups on both sides of the conflict in Ireland and Northern Ireland was brutal. The IRA's tactics in targeting civilians just simply working for the British government and their methods employed like kneecapping (being shot in each knee and sometimes the elbows and ankles as well) to inspire terror in anyone not actively collaborating with their cause are legendary.
I'm not saying the ferocity and cruelty the IRA brought to the fight was not matched by the other side because it was. To combat the Easter Rising, the Royal Irish Constabulary (the predecessor organization to the RUC) established a Special Reserve made up entirely of World War I veterans so affected by the trench warfare in Europe that they welcomed any opportunity to be as violent as they could be. This unit, named the Black and Tans after the color of their uniforms, was deliberately established to face violence with more violence.
I'm also not necessarily faulting the IRA for targeting innocent civilians in their fight and I can't believe I just wrote that. After all, the RUC and the British government, particularly by allowing private paramilitary organizations to operate without any real punishment, did the exact same thing. There may be shades of grey here but there is no real high ground to be claimed on either side. The real losers of The Troubles were the people not involved in the fight that were killed or the regular people and families living in the center of the conflict whose lives were ruined or hijacked just because they happened to live in Belfast or Derry or wherever. The IRA's participation, though, puts blood on the hands of both sides.
Considering my childhood and what we were taught as kids about the IRA, I have to say it was jarring to see "IRA" graffiti out in the open in Derry. This is an organization that killed people just to terrify other people. By that definition, they are a terrorist organization. Plain and simple. Hold that thought just for a few paragraphs.
Our last stop on our Black Taxi Tour was at the Sinn Fein headquarters, which was the political arm of the IRA, or maybe the other way around. On the side of that building is a mural showing Bobby Sands, an IRA volunteer who starved himself to death over a 66 day period in 1981 to protest his incarceration as a common criminal and not a prisoner of war.
Hunger strikes were a brutal and (at least in the 1970s) very public way to make a point. They involve fighting against the urge and need for food and having your own body cannibalize the fat and then muscle off your frame to keep your brain alive as long as possible. It causes bodily function failure, tooth loss, blindness and ultimately death which was the fate of Sands and three other IRA hunger strikers that year.
But while Sands was starving himself to death, the IRA was still out there being the IRA. The most senseless act of violence perpetrated during the strike was the murder of Joanne Mathers, a 29 year old mother of one working as a census worker in Derry. She was shot simply because she was collecting census forms from houses and the census represented in the eyes of the IRA a system of British government oppression.
I said a few paragraphs ago that seeing "IRA" graffiti was jarring. I was no less shaken by murals painted on the sides of buildings showing men in gas masks with bombs proclaiming that the Ulster Volunteer Force will defend their homes if anyone threatens them. This is current, not a remnant of the past that hasn't been painted over. There were (and are, if Robert is to be believed) terrorists on both sides of this conflict. My labeling the IRA as a terrorist organization doesn't mean that I support the other side. I could easily argue that civilian based terrorist organizations that are tacitly supported (or at least allowed to operate) by the government are even worse.
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| Bobby Sands. Hero or no? To me, it's a no. |
Some of this came from my own bias as a kid growing up English. I was really not thrilled about being inside the Sinn Fein headquarters and I really didn't want to take the postcard of Bobby Sands that the woman in the store offered us. She did it with the best intentions. I just didn't want to deal. Throughout our black taxi tour there was a palpable sense of danger and conflict, although I'm sure it was imagined on my part. I felt similarly in Derry, although I'm sure it's because I felt like I had a sign on my back saying I was born in England. My own imagination, I'm sure.
I walk away from this experience unnerved by what both sides of this conflict did to each other and to people who had no involvement whatsoever. I'm embarrassed by what my home country did in the name of keeping all their territory intact and under control on their terms. But more than anything else considering that neither side really got what it wanted, I'm thinking how senseless it all was and how all the old feelings are still there. It's been more than 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement essentially ended the conflict but I think Robert's right that there are people on both sides ready to start killing each other again. It's clearly going to take more than a generation to kill this thing completely.
How We Did It
Kilmainham Gaol was active as a prison from 1796 to 1924. It fell into ruin and then was restored throughout the 1960s before opening as a museum in 1971. It's located about 3.5 kilometers west of the city centre of Dublin. Take the Luas (Dublin's light rail) to the Suir Road stop; it's about a 15 minute or so walk from there. Opening hours vary by season. Check the website for the latest information.
The property features a guided tour of the Gaol and a separate museum. The website advises you to book in advance for the guided tours and I can attest that they are right. We got there in the afternoon about 90 minutes before closing and found the tours sold out for the day. The museum does not require advance purchase and admission is free. Silver lining, I guess.
There are a number of black taxi tours that will take you and educate you about The Troubles in Belfast. We chose Black Taxi Tours Belfast and they were terrific. Robert was just a fantastic tour guide. This is definitely an experience you have to book in advance. The great thing about Black Taxi Tours Belfast was that they picked us up and dropped us off at our hotel. These kinds of experiences are only going to last so long in the way we experienced it. Once all the people who lived through The Troubles are gone, the experience won't be the same. I can't recommend these guys enough.
If you head to Derry, I'd strongly recommend a visit to the Museum of Free Derry. It's located outside the city walls down the hill to the north in the Bogside area of town (so named because the River Foyle used to flow in the area before it turned into a bog). Just start heading downhill and follow the signs. Along the way you'll pass a series of murals. Keep going past the Museum and you'll find many more.
We did not stay in Derry but took a bus day trip from Belfast. Buses leave from the Europa Buscentre right behind the Europa Hotel in the city centre. It takes about two hours each way on the bus and it's an easy trip. We took the 10 am bus and were back in Belfast before five. You won't need long in Derry if you are just going to see the Museum.
The Europa Hotel, by the way, is the most bombed hotel in the world.
The property features a guided tour of the Gaol and a separate museum. The website advises you to book in advance for the guided tours and I can attest that they are right. We got there in the afternoon about 90 minutes before closing and found the tours sold out for the day. The museum does not require advance purchase and admission is free. Silver lining, I guess.
There are a number of black taxi tours that will take you and educate you about The Troubles in Belfast. We chose Black Taxi Tours Belfast and they were terrific. Robert was just a fantastic tour guide. This is definitely an experience you have to book in advance. The great thing about Black Taxi Tours Belfast was that they picked us up and dropped us off at our hotel. These kinds of experiences are only going to last so long in the way we experienced it. Once all the people who lived through The Troubles are gone, the experience won't be the same. I can't recommend these guys enough.
If you head to Derry, I'd strongly recommend a visit to the Museum of Free Derry. It's located outside the city walls down the hill to the north in the Bogside area of town (so named because the River Foyle used to flow in the area before it turned into a bog). Just start heading downhill and follow the signs. Along the way you'll pass a series of murals. Keep going past the Museum and you'll find many more.
We did not stay in Derry but took a bus day trip from Belfast. Buses leave from the Europa Buscentre right behind the Europa Hotel in the city centre. It takes about two hours each way on the bus and it's an easy trip. We took the 10 am bus and were back in Belfast before five. You won't need long in Derry if you are just going to see the Museum.
The Europa Hotel, by the way, is the most bombed hotel in the world.
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