The Writing on the Walls

November 11, 2022

It was an overcast Sunday afternoon in October 2022. In St. Tiernach’s church in Clones, Co. Monaghan, the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation sponsored a service for the families of victims of the Troubles. It was impossible not to be moved by their stories, the river of sadness cascading through the decades, its tributaries permeating every heart.

Sad, murmuring congregants filtered out through the arched doorway, the vicar enthusiastically shaking hands with everyone. Evidently, his church had not been this full in a long time. When I told him I was from Vancouver, he practically squealed with delight.

Outside, people stood chatting quietly in small groups. A tall man in a dark suit approached me. He was tall and fit-looking, with tightly cropped hair. Some reflex told me he was a security guard, and I was about to be waylaid. After all, as a (former) Catholic at a Protestant service, I was an impostor. Outdated thinking—but old habits die hard.

Nigel, as I later came to know him, couldn’t have been more charming. He may have overheard the vicar’s squeal, or perhaps he noticed how lost I looked. Whatever the reason, we struck up a conversation. My instincts were off the mark, but not too far: he was a police officer—though, he added quickly, never a member of the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was disbanded in 2001. No doubt he was aware of my origins as soon as I opened my mouth: even after decades abroad, I still sound like a Southerner.

            He had lost an uncle in the Troubles, and later a work colleague standing next to him in the doorway of a pub in Belfast. It was a professional hit, he told me: the gunman wore a white wig and crouched low to maximize the harm to his victim.

As a detective sergeant responsible for child welfare, Nigel worked in areas of Belfast where deprivation, crime, drugs, and the legacy of bitter conflict made a toxic cocktail. Now, as the UK economy faltered and the fallout from Brexit took hold, resentment between communities was building. “I’ll tell ye, David,” he told me, “I’ve seen more sectarian hatred in the last wee while than ever before.”

            I visited Nigel a few weeks later, and he took me on a tour of Belfast, on a day when sunlight drizzled over the lawns of perfect professional homes in well-to-do areas, where sectarianism was negligible. In past years, these neighbourhoods would have been Protestant-dominated, but affluent Catholics had now moved in. It could have been a lovely suburb in any city.

Loyalist Wall in Belfast

            But in Belfast, things can change in the space of a block. Before long, I could feel the tension  along the Crumlin Road, the Shankill, and the Falls, where massive murals proclaimed enduring loyalty to King Billy, or Bobby Sands, or any one of a hundred heroes on either side. Here, the Troubles had been preserved in concrete, as former IRA men, paunchy and grey, toured the murals with groups of Germans and Americans. Troubles tourism.

Mural on Falls Rd, Belfast

No Surrender in Derry

Continuing the Fight

I had seen similar scenes in Derry, where posters in Loyalist areas depicted hooded men and threats of renewed conflict, and Bogside murals encouraged passersby to “salute the men and women of violence.”

Bogside, Free Derry Murals

Bogside Poster

 How real was all this? Were the murals community art, a macabre tourist attraction, or a symptom of real divisions, today? What if we tried to tear them down, as we tear down statues of slaveowners or former heroes whose values offend us? Of course, the reaction is predictable: the murals are icons of a perverse heroism. Nobody is tearing them down anytime soon.

Progress is being made, though, to reconcile the two tribes, or better still, to make tribalism obsolete. Alongside present-day bigots, I met couples from mixed marriages who were transcending the old divisions, victims whose only wish was for peace, and others who refused to define their identity by their religion. But it all feels painfully slow. Over 90% of Northern Irish students still attend segregated schools. In class, teachers avoid talking about the Troubles, so students have nothing to contradict whatever bigotry they pick up outside.

            Meanwhile, nationalists are triumphant: so close to their dream of a united Ireland that they feel they can almost touch it. “We’re flyin’ towards a united Ireland,” an aging republican told me. Their dream is Loyalists’ nightmare. Brexit, demographic changes—over half of the Northern Irish population is now Catholic—the rise of the republican Sinn Féin party, and the global downturn all make working-class Protestants increasingly desperate. Many feel that Catholics have been granted too many favours, and—with good reason—fear the UK government will betray them.

A wall can come down in a minute or two. But reconciliation takes generations. Time is not on the side of the peacemakers.

The Magical Line

“If ye ask me, the border’s a magical line,” said Colin. I was in a trendy café in Derry/ Londonderry. Colin, the barista, had just asked me to stop interviewing his customers. I told him why I was doing so. “It’s a divided city,” he said, with an apologetic shrug. Colin, born Protestant but brought up Catholic, now lived twenty minutes’ drive away, in the Republic. He loved it there: away from the UK Tories’ increasingly chaotic kingdom, he felt he could count on the government of the South “if everything goes bad,” as it increasingly looks as if it could.

 The walled city still has something of a siege mentality. It’s not hard to know when you’re in a Protestant part of the city: kerbs are painted red, white and blue; murals and posters commemorate Loyalist heroes, British soldiers and Protestant civilians. Across the city, in gruesome symmetry, the Catholic Bogside area displays Republican heroes brandishing guns and exhorting neighbours to support the violent struggle.

 Away from Derry, in Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh, a mixed Protestant-Catholic couple told me how their families and friends were completely supportive. They went to twelfth of July parades together, where he marched and played the Lambeg drum and she, a Catholic, enjoyed the family festivities. He would good-humouredly tease her mother, a devout Catholic, over Catholic rituals. For her part, she gave back her share of banter and sometimes accompanied them to Protestant church services.

 Later the same evening, I interviewed two sisters, aged eighteen and seventeen. They were middle class, blond and pretty, just emerging into adulthood. At the start, I didn’t know whether they were Catholic or Protestant. I asked them whether they played sports. They did. Gaelic games? No: back in the day, they told me, Gaelic games were set up for the children of the IRA. Oh, I said dumbly, you are Protestant then? They nodded. Would they ever marry a Catholic? No. Never.

 At the time, a storm was brewing. In Dublin, the Irish women’s soccer team had qualified for the World Cup. In the euphoria of dressing-room celebrations, the team chanted a pro-IRA slogan. The chant was caught on video and went viral. To anyone victimized by the Troubles, it was beyond offensive. To diehard Loyalists, it confirmed their siege mentality; the Belfast Newsletter published a pie chart showing how IRA violence was responsible for the majority of victims, including Catholic victims.

 Among moderates in the South, the incident caused soul-searching about sanitization of the brutal past. Yet the past has never really been dealt with. The Good Friday Agreement that (mostly) ended the violence was an outstanding example of the power of politics and goodwill in a seemingly impossible situation. Yet it did not solve the underlying problems: the divisions persist and, like marsh gas, they bubble up occasionally with a putrid smell.

 Whether it’s the Troubles in Ireland or Canadian residential schools, those who have not been victimized can never truly understand. After a generation, memories become abstract things, detached from the reality of experience. Yet when you talk to people, reality comes through, cold and hard. I will never forget the steely blue eyes of that teenage girl as she told me, with absolute conviction, that Gaelic games were for children of IRA supporters.

 Progress has been made in reconciling communities, but the machinations of Brexit have stalled and even reversed it. It is a fiction to say there is no hard border in Ireland: the border separating communities may not be physical, but it is hard as granite. The magical line—the line that separates us from the past—can only be crossed with great effort.

The Border’s Many Faces

October 3, 2022

From the east coast, the journey to Clones takes you first along speeding motorways, then to winding backroads, through small towns boasting little more than a pub and a church. Behind the scrabbled hedges that line the road lie rolling hills of dank green sod and mud, populated by cattle and sheep, and the occasional home.

I travelled to this small border town for a remembrance and thanksgiving service hosted by the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation, an NGO that provides support for the families of victims of the Troubles. Arriving just as the service started, I caught an address by Michael, the son of a Garda (police in the South), whose father was killed by a bomb in 1972.

Michael was sixty-eight. He painted a picture of his early life, how his family had lived a humble existence in a region where there were few jobs to be found. The explosion was as sudden as it was devastating. It separated his father’s flesh from his bones; barely alive, he was taken to hospital and died that evening. Michael’s voice broke as he recalled the tears, the solemn funeral, the death march of the Gardaí.

The shock waves lasted much longer. Michael suffered pain that few of us can imagine, retreating into a dark place for twelve years. The shadow of the 1972 bombing led to another kind of death in Michael, before spreading onwards to his own children.

Near Crossmaglen, a border town known for its republican leanings, I spoke with Pat Kelly, perhaps the world’s greatest hoarder. Inside his shed, a mini-museum boasts a collection of grenades, uniforms, guns, bullets, posters, banners, and photographs of the border area. “I was involved,” he said with a proud grin, pointing to a black-and-white photo of his younger self removing border installations with a digger. At other times, they blew up fortifications, which would be rebuilt by the British Army the following day.

At a new shopping mall in Dundalk, I chatted with Fergal, a man in his twenties. He travels to the north regularly, to shop or go to a club in Newry. Recently, he was stopped by the Gardaí on his way back. He was indignant; Fergal had never known a border to exist and, unlike his elders, had no memory of facing the muzzle of a gun through the car window. Alison, also in her twenties, said, “I heard there was a war once,” and told me how she liked to shop up north. She had never met a Protestant, but she was sure they were very nice people.

As I left the church in Clones, a tall, fit man in his fifties approached me. Nigel, who had lost two family members to the IRA, was standing beside a friend in a doorway in Belfast when his friend was shot dead. “He was a big man, and I saw the gunman crouching down so he could get him in the stomach,” he said. Today Nigel is a police officer. You’d think he has seen the worst of it; yet today, he told me, he sees more sectarian hatred in young people than ever before.

There is no single border. For some it might as well not exist; for others, it pulses with meaning. Brexit has aroused tensions that never really went away: in the land where Game of Thrones was filmed, the sleeping dragon has one eye open.

The Phantom Border

September 25, 2022

It’s Sunday morning, and I am not going to Mass. That’s nothing exceptional here in the new, secular Ireland—but religion still defines communities along the border.

“Ye know,” says Kenny, “in the State schools they teach the counties of Northern Ireland as FAT LAD. In the Catholic schools, it’s FAT DAD.” When I look a little confused, he winks at me. “Ye know—Derry, right?” We are in Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh, where Kenny is Director of an NGO supporting victims of the Troubles.

Oh, right; I get it. I suppose you have to be from this part of the world to get the point. FAT LAD is Fermanagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Londonderry, Armagh, Down. But, though Londonderry is the official name, it’s Derry to Catholics—a naming dispute that goes back to 1613—so for Catholics, you have “D” instead of “L”.

It seems silly, but here, small details have big consequences. Even before I met Kenny, I knew from his name that he was Protestant (though he did assure me that there were some Catholic Donaldsons around). In his forties, he sits behind a plywood desk at the back of a warehouse. When I enter the dimly-lit office, he rises—he is taller than I imagined from our Zoom calls—and comes around to welcome me, with a beaming smile.

He is full of stories. His was one of the few, beleaguered, Protestant families in Crossmaglen, the heart of what came to be known as “Bandit Country” for its Republican leanings during the Troubles between the 1970s and the 1990s. He received plenty of abuse, and had no hesitation in reminding his abusers that his family had been around for twelve generations, while theirs were “cattle thieves who were bucked out of Scotland only six generations ago,” he grins.

You may think of all these distinctions as ancient history, but they are very much alive here on the border—a phantom border that doesn’t exist in physical form, but lives on, like a dormant virus. “Ninety-five percent of those crimes [in the Troubles] have never been solved,” said Kenny. What does that do to a small community, when you know that the man who killed your father, your uncle, your sister, walks free and drinks in your local pub?

The 1998 peace agreement may have put a halt to the violence, but it solved nothing. Protestants and Catholics still don’t mix, and 90% of children in Northern Ireland go to schools dominated by one religion. “Integrated” schools are rare. The regional parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, has been suspended because of differences over Brexit—differences that, like all politics here, are underpinned by loyalties to one side or the other.

Even as things stay the same, everything is changing. Immigrants from conflict-torn parts of the world are settling in this superficially peaceful area; yet since 2016, Brexit has threatened new trouble. Just this week, we learned that Catholics now outnumber Protestants in the North; nobody yet knows what this will mean in a state that was built by Protestants, for Protestants.

Back in the South, I have coffee at a local golf club with my sister Barbara. A chunky fruit scone sits between us, dusted with icing sugar and flanked by cream and jam. A former TV personality, Barbara has travelled widely and is worldly and cosmopolitan.

“Would you like the Protestant side, or the Catholic side?” she asks, knife poised to cut it horizontally. She’s joking of course, but she reminds me that in our home in the South, the Catholic side of the bread was the round top, the Protestant side the flat bottom. I have no idea why. But details matter, on the phantom border.

The Past Is a Different Country

September 18, 2022

            Sometimes, I feel like Wile E. Coyote in those old roadrunner cartoons, when he chases the clever bird over the edge of a cliff and keeps going, as if he still has the ground beneath him. He stops in midair, looks down, sees the abyss below, looks at the viewer; only now does gravity kick in, and he careens to the bottom of the chasm. Splat.

            A border is like that—a moment of inertia, a transition from one state to another. For the coyote, it’s not a happy transition. For some, it can be an escape, as it was for my mother when her family fled Belfast for the Free State in 1922, and as it is today for Ukrainian refugees fleeing war. For others, it is a business transaction, as it was for many of us amateur smugglers when there was a physical border separating North and South. Not everyone was amateur, though: many stories made their living on arbitrage by shipping anything—petrol, sugar, pigs— back and forth. For still others, its very existence is offensive, as it was when borderers blew up border installations as soon as they were erected by British troops.

For me, the border was a portal to a different world. We used to look to the North as a haven of liberalism, wealth and enlightenment compared to our Catholic-Taliban Republic. Suffering, we were told, was a virtue, a message reinforced by regular beatings at the hands of Christian Brothers and their ilk. But across that line, they had free orange juice at school, contraception, and health care for all.

In the sixties, when we went to Newry for groceries, I would be let loose to roam the town. I immediately headed for the newsagents, where I could buy Galaxy chocolate, which I knew would taste smoother than you ever dreamed, and Maltesers, which melted in your mouth, not in your hand. I knew this because, living near the border, I could see them advertised on British TV. I would buy comics, the Hotspur, the Beano and the Dandy, to read and re-read over again. On the streets, red telephone boxes, the Union Jack, and images of the sparkling queen, in place of the Pope, Pádraig Pearse and JFK, our own king of sorts. And I would see sinister men on street corners cradling submachine guns: the B-specials. I knew nothing of them, except that they were “black”—referring not to their ethnicity, but to their Protestantism, which meant I should be afraid of them. I avoided their gaze and quickly passed on.

The Troubles eventually put a stop to the grocery run. In the space of a few months, it became too risky to be seen driving a car in the North with southern plates. The border now became a wall rather than a portal.

After I emigrated to England, in 1974, it all came to mean little to me other than as a subject I could hold forth about in pubs. I had little empathy for those whose lives were being torn apart as I pontificated to the ignorant Brits.

All’s different now, yet somehow the same. The South is liberal and wealthy, though it might be a stretch to call it enlightened. The phantom border—no longer there, but nonetheless real—is a zombie that won’t completely die, feeding on the brains of those who live along its length. What is it like there now? How does it feel to be a borderer, to live in liminal space? Is it like the coyote, defying gravity as long as you don’t look down? If you try to forget the past, can you create the future?

I have little nostalgia for my childhood home: its everyday violence, its obsession with past rivalries, its Taliban Catholicism. I long ago accepted L.P. Hartley’s aphorism that the past is a different country—yet Ireland is not finished with me. As I revisit the village where I grew up, I want to understand what it is to live on a border between the past and the future, where love, hate, hope and despair intersect.