Читать книгу Crossing the Line - Martin Dillon - Страница 10

Prologue

Growing up in 1950s West Belfast, it was natural to feel trapped by the physical contours of the city and stories of its troubled past. In the Falls area, Black Mountain rose above the narrow, intersecting streets of Protestant and Catholic enclaves. A few years before I came into the world, the mountain offered nightly shelter for families hiding from German bombers pounding Belfast. The city being an industrial hub for the British war effort suffered terribly during the Blitz whereas the Nazis spared Dublin because it was neutral territory.

My grandfather, Patrick Dillon and his brother, John, fought bravely on the Normandy beaches, yet their sacrifice was somehow diminished in Protestants’ eyes because many Catholics throughout Ireland were branded as anti-British. That perception of Catholics was not entirely true but, like so much history in Ireland, myths trump facts. Interestingly, more Catholics than Protestants on the island fought and died in the ranks of the British Army in the Second World War. It is equally the case that there was profound anti-Britishness throughout Ireland, which Republicans transformed into a pro-Nazi mentality.

It was manifested in the refusal of the Dublin government to cede important ports to Britain to make it easier to defend Allied shipping in the Atlantic from German gunboats and submarines. Members of the IRA even met leading German military figures, convinced if Germany won the war the IRA would be considered a friend and ally. The most egregious example of pro-Nazi sentiment was the decision by Irish leader, Éamon de Valera, to open a condolences book at the German Legation in Dublin so people could express their regret at the death of Adolf Hitler.

In my youth, I knew little of the intricacies of the war period as they related to Ireland, yet I was familiar with my tribe’s attachment to Irish history. I refer to ‘Irish history’, and not ‘the history of Ireland’, to confirm that what I learned from an early age was either written or passed on orally by those defining themselves as Irish. In Belfast, you learned history sitting on your grandmother’s knee, or in my case from the De La Salle Brothers in St Finian’s primary school on the Falls Road, where my fellow pupils included Gerry Adams, a future IRA leader.

In St Finian’s, the past was a potent recounting of Ireland’s brutal colonization by the British. Tales of the slaughter of men, women and children, ordered by English generals like Oliver Cromwell, made Irish rebels of old and IRA gunmen of the twentieth century seem god-like and heroic. Built into the narrative was an understanding the Northern Ireland State was illegal, and its institutions, especially the judiciary, as well as the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its paramilitary force, the B-Specials, were mechanisms for oppression.

Our eyes were directed towards ‘The South’ as the finest example of how people lived in freedom. Some Catholics from my grandparents’ era referred to that part of the island as ‘The Free State’, which was its official title after independence from Britain in 1921. It remained within the British Commonwealth until 1937 when it was declared a sovereign nation with the Gaelic title, Éire. In 1947, it became the Republic of Ireland, but most Northern Protestants continued to call it Éire as though in doing so they were reinforcing the point it was Irish and separate from British-controlled Northern Ireland. In my childhood, I never heard a Protestant refer to it as anything other than Éire or ‘The South’. Calling it ‘The Republic of Ireland’ or the ‘Irish Republic’ was taboo among many Protestants. ‘The South’ was shorthand for a political perception that the South and the North were equal entities, which of course was silly, given the fact that Northern Ireland comprised only six of the island’s thirty-two counties and was not a sovereign state. Power over it lay with successive London governments. It was, therefore, hardly surprising Northern Ireland’s children were confused when the other part of the island was treated to a variety of names. As a child, I imagined the border separating the two parts of the country had to be so high no one could see over it.

Being a newly created state, the Republic of Ireland was not as wealthy as Northern Ireland, which was heavily subsidised by the British Exchequer. Nevertheless, Belfast Catholics were quick to point out that Catholics south of the border were ‘richer’ because they could freely express their political opinions, practise their faith openly and play Gaelic games on Sundays. In contrast, in the North, or ‘The Black North’ as many Catholics across the island called it, Protestants held power through gerrymandering, discrimination in public housing allocation and the use of the Special Powers Act, a piece of legislation that provided the majority Unionist government of Northern Ireland with excessive police powers, including the use of internment without trial. Unlike Catholics, Protestants called Sunday the Sabbath and celebrated it by closing everything but churches. In parks, children’s swings were locked, and elsewhere, cinemas, pubs and shops were shuttered. My lasting childhood image of Belfast city centre on Sunday afternoons was a sad and profoundly silent place. Still, a few Catholic districts in the west of the city were especially noisy on Sundays, when Gaelic football or hurling games were played in Casement Park in the Andersonstown area, or in two smaller parks off the Whiterock Road.

When major Gaelic games were scheduled, the pavements on the Falls Road filled with throngs of men and boys, too poor to pay for a bus ride. Though my father was one of those men, he claimed shoe leather got him to the game quicker than a bus. The return journey was often depressing because local football and hurling teams rarely matched the skills of teams from the island’s other provinces. I was always bemused by the playing of ‘The Soldier’s Song’, the Irish national anthem, before games because the majority of spectators knew only a few familiar lines or phrases of it in Gaelic, especially the closing lines, which were always sung with gusto. Had the games been held in Dublin, more people would have been able to sing the entire anthem in Gaelic. As a friend of mine later explained, Catholics in Northern Ireland liked everything Gaelic except the language, while Catholics on the rest of the island learned Irish at school and rarely spoke it.

I often overheard adults talking politics in my childhood, but it was in primary school where history and social awareness were defined for me. I took the De La Salle Brothers at their word when they taught me history because they had a most persuasive way of getting their message across. They used thick leather straps to beat knowledge into your hands or legs if you displayed little aptitude for learning or if your attention waned during lessons. I acquired one of their straps decades later and its construction impressed me: several machine-stitched layers and a perfectly formed handle. It was indeed a formidable weapon when wielded by a Brother keen to dispense raw justice. The prospect of being battered with a strap encouraged me to pay attention in class. When my homework required me to learn chunks of Patrick Pearse’s speech over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa, I devoted hours to the task.

Catholics of Ireland revered Pearse, considering him one of the most prominent revolutionaries of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, which paved the way for the eventual end of British rule in twenty-six of Ireland’s counties. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was a rebel from an earlier generation and the first Irish Republican to organise the dynamite bombing of English cities in the 1880s. After he died in exile on Staten Island, New York, in 1915, the Republican movement shipped his body home for a majestic burial. It was a stunning public relations coup for a movement which needed a spark to ignite a dying political passion.

Pearse, a schoolteacher, poet and devout Catholic, was chosen to deliver the graveside oration in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, where O’Donovan Rossa was buried. The oration would become the centrepiece of Irish Republican rhetoric and, in the decades following, the Christian and De La Salle Brothers made sure every pupil familiarised themselves with it.

By their promotion of Pearse’s idealism in the Northern Ireland of the early 1950s, the Brothers became the vanguard of the blood sacrifice tradition of an Irish Republicanism that would find fertile ground two decades later in the emerging Provisional IRA. When the Provisional IRA took to the political stage in 1971, some of my classmates from the early 1950s played prominent roles, in particular Gerry Adams. Four decades later, when I went to interview him, he invited me to go next door to St Finian’s, our old primary school, to look at some photos of us when we were students there.

As we walked through the narrow stone entrance of the school, which had remained unchanged architecturally for half a century, I expected to inhale the smells of stale milk and urine, which permeated the schoolyard all those years before. Now, the crates of empty milk bottles were gone, but the toilets still faced some of the classrooms. Students met Gerry Adams with smiles while I received curious stares when we entered the main building. Boys as young as five gave him admiring glances and reached out to shake his hand. After we looked through our class photos, he whispered with a wry smile it was time for the Angelus. I was somewhat speechless, having forgotten the prayers of my childhood. But, when the bells of nearby Clonard Monastery rang out, memories of me reciting the Angelus floated back. It was a prayer devoted to the time the Virgin Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel and told she would bear a child. In the 1950s, pupils stood up in every classroom throughout Ireland to recite it. I now found myself standing alongside Gerry Adams at the head of a class of seven-year-old boys, their hands clasped in devotion. He led the prayer while I bowed my head, embarrassed as I stumbled over the words. A line of it struck me as emblematic of what I was witnessing, ‘And the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’

Gerry Adams and the pupils spoke it with such requisite reverence, their eyes closed, heads bowed ever so slightly. When the prayer ended, boys reached out to touch Gerry like pilgrims touching a relic in the hope of being transformed. They were thrilled to be close to their hero in the flesh and were trying to come to terms with the sheer joy of it. The historian Thomas Carlyle said history is like a letter of instruction handed down to us. It is charred and burned and pieces are missing, making it difficult to read. In Ireland, people never faced that problem. The oral history tradition, which was handed down to them and fed their understanding of the past, was vivid and seemingly complete. Looking at Gerry Adams and his young admirers, I saw how the past was made more enticing by the presence of a living icon instead of the dead ones whom I was once encouraged to imagine. As I left St Finian’s that day, I thought of the ‘Angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell ringing out in the foggy dew’.

We are witnesses of Time with a duty

to reflect the past without bitterness.

– Martin Dillon