BELFAST

RELIABLE

NEWS

“We done an exhibition about the Pound Loney, which was a very small Catholic community at the bottom of the Falls Road that was uprooted and Divis Flats was built on top of this really old community. There’s this old woman coming in and she was standing crying, she was about 80 odd years of age. And I went up to her and I says, ‘Are you ok, I noticed that you’re upset.’ And she says to me, ‘Son, I just seen a photograph of a little boy that I had,’ and he had died when he was something like eight years of age. And she never had a photograph of him. One of her neighbours had put the photograph in the exhibition. That to me was the essence of community photography.”

Sean McKernan, co-founder of BELFAST EXPOSED

17 BX!

Sean McKernan presenting poster of first exhibition by BELFAST EXPOSED

Photo school back in the 1990s was all about contemporary – interpretive, non-descriptive but conceptual and at best serial – photography. With the help of books, exhibitions and endless discussions we were slowly ground into ambassadors for the imagery reflecting the school’s brand in the international contemporary photography scene. That was all very well, but I got bored easily and I had to come to Belfast to experience the wealth and satisfaction deriving from an art that back in Switzerland was all but inexistent, the community arts.

The arts have always been used, in and after conflict, to explore controversial issues, accommodate competing narratives and give the voiceless a platform. For people affected, hurt and damaged by conflict, to express themselves within a safe space can’t be underestimated as it proposes an alternative to violence, an opportunity to understanding, and can support the process of healing.

The many clashes with community arts activists fighting for their recognition, though, laid bare the Arts Council’s idea of culture, favouring the Ulster Orchestra and the Lyric Theatre over any form of working-class background arts. Its delegitimisation of art forms emerging from politically, socially and economically marginalised sections of society was creating significant barriers for working-class communities to accessing the arts, leaving them with no means of communicating beyond or even within their own community.

“It [the arts] was so removed – it was irrelevant to the lives of most people in disadvantaged marginalised society. Where I came from, the arts were non-existent.” Sean McKernan

The Arts Council in the 1980s wanted to keep the community arts sector out of the established arts. Addressing issues such as inequality, discrimination, state violence – questioning social issues affecting a large section of society on a daily basis rather than high-culture themes – it was perceived as an inferior art form. Giving a voice to a story within a community for a community was seen with suspicion if not outright contempt by the people outside the arts and if the voice was coming from a nationalist community, the accusation of siding with terrorists was imminent. Political art was perceived as divisive and disruptive and the Arts Council turned its back on it altogether, finding it too hard to deal with the realities of a divided society and an imperial watchdog.

Remembering the GIBRALTAR THREE, Mairéad Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage, West Belfast

The Troubles were in full blow when in 1988 the WEST BELFAST FESTIVAL/FÉILE AN PHOBAIL offered the community an alternative to riots that usually took place around the internment bonfires – a reminder of the biggest injustice perpetrated against the Catholic population since the British Army’s OPERATION BANNER launched in 1969. It was the year of the assassination of three IRA members by the British Army in Gibraltar under very suspicious circumstances and loyalist Michael Stone’s subsequent killing of three mourners on Milltown Cemetery at the funeral of two of the GIBRALTAR THREE, resulting in the execution in broad daylight and media coverage of two British Army corporals who drove into the funeral of one of Stone’s victims. The people of west Belfast thereafter were described as savages by British media. Photographer Sean McKernan remembers:

“Gerry Adams called together about 25 people who were engaged in Arts, cultural activities and he put forward this idea of a festival taking place over the 9th of August which always was a challenging time. You had the internment parade and after the speech, half of the crowd, all the young people attacked the British army, the police, riots kicked off, buses were burnt, all hell broke loose and on the back of that there was more shootings, bombings. So what Gerry at the time was thinking is that the 9th of August is going to be a very difficult time for the West Belfast community because of the tensions and the vilification, the accusations that we’re all savages. It was a very intelligent manoeuvre: we’re gonna try deal with this culture of violence and rioting, let’s do something positive to stop that.”

So the festival came about. It was a very successful week-long happening with simple events such as egg and spoon races, street parties, a concert and a parade up the the Falls Road – a vehicle to help local groups to do their own thing and it sure helped to calm the rioting and the tension down. Like in so many other walks of life, instead of shutting up, people worked their way around the status quo by self-organising and innovation in order to articulate their communities’ needs and views. Quite a few established positions in the arts today have their roots in the long years of communal activism, volunteering and determination of people who believed that what they had to say was worth hearing.

80s night, Falls Park, WEST BELFAST FESTIVAL / FÉILE AN PHOBAIL

The British Army’s level of force mainly against the Catholic working-class people – using plastic bullets against the civil population; shooting unarmed people; torture of prisoners; colluding with loyalist paramilitaries; falsifying evidence – clearly violated democratic standards which the government had a keen interest of keeping from the outside world. What they wanted the world to see was a peacekeeping army fighting the IRA, a terrorist group with no legitimate grievances and a lack of community support.

“Those in positions of power, both in government and the media, have proved most reluctant to provide a full picture of events in the North or their context, and have made considerable effort to prevent journalists, dramatists and film-makers from exploring the situation from any angle other than that favoured by the British establishment.” Liz Curtis, 1984

By regulating and controlling the media independent reporting, with a few exceptions, was as good as inexistent. The Catholic community – censored and silenced – not only grew away from the state even more but also from TV, radio and national newspapers. When in 1981 Bobby Sands MP died after 66 days on hunger strike, international media was parachuted-in to capture a bit of controversial history. A key experience for Sean:

“They had a stand full of the world’s press, there must’ve been at least a hundred photographers, cameramen, covering this major event. I looked around and I couldn’t recognise anybody that I knew from where I live or anybody from Belfast, and that struck a cord with me, in a sense that nobody was documenting this event that lived and grew up here in the area I lived. I felt that there’s a need for people to take some control and to document purely for posterity. Here was a major historical event happening and I felt it wasn’t being covered. Even to this day, it’s very rare to find any photographs taken by local people from the hunger strike period.”

Northern Ireland was one of the most photographed places in the world during the Troubles and the imagery saturating the world’s media was one of visual trauma. Bombs going off, riots, violence, devastation – common pictures of war from another zone of conflict seen through the lens of professional war photographers often lacking context and subtleties of the region and its people. On the back of the social trauma of the hunger strikes coupled with the vocal isolation of the Catholic community, teacher, trade unionist and community activist Danny Burke and his pupil and photographer Sean McKernan initiated BELFAST EXPOSED, an exhibition with over 600 photographs taken by local people from both sides of the sectarian divide, reflecting the experience of Belfast from the inside. They too, photographed riots and violence. It was happening in their streets. But the vast majority of images were pictures of another Belfast, of birthday parties, street characters and architecture. Pictures of gritty Belfast humour and reality of the common working-class experience of unemployment, poor housing and social deprivation. Everyday life tinged with political violence. Seamus Heaney described BELFAST EXPOSED as ‘a marvellous moment’ and remarked on ’the powerful, democratic feel running through these photographs.’

Sean McKernan with picture of Danny Burke at original 1983 BELFAST EXPOSED exhibition, © Sean McKernan

Exhibition panels from original 1983 BELFAST EXPOSED exhibition

In 1983, BELFAST EXPOSED was planned as a one-off event, an exhibition in the Conway Mill in west Belfast. But it was so successful that it travelled nationally and internationally up to 2001. There were no taboos of what was shown. No censorship whatsoever. People were allowed to put up photographs of IRA funerals, UVF murals, sectarian killings – nothing was a ‘wee bit too gory, too republican or too loyalist’, the whole idea was to confront this sense of self-censorship and the censorship imposed by the mainstream media. Some people would take offence at one or the other picture. Instead of removing these pictures, the offended were encouraged to participate, to bring their own images to counter or confront the image that has done offence. BELFAST EXPOSED would offer cameras and basic training, so everybody could tell their story without being censored.

BELFAST EXPOSED was a cross-community project, with exhibitions and workshops across the sectarian divide. But in the early days, Danny Burke and Sean McKernan worked from the Falls Road, the heartland of Irish republicanism and on various occasions they were accused of being a front for the IRA. A personal vendetta between a powerful politician and Danny Burke, who in the 1970s had been associated with the republican movement but had moved on since, led to BELFAST EXPOSED being banned from the leisures centres and all funding was withdrawn. To level accusations of involvement with the IRA. was dangerous in an environment like 1980s Belfast, where people got themselves killed for no other reason than their religious background:

“For a politician who should be aware and responsible because of the position of authority, to level accusations was tantamount to giving the green light for the UVF, UDA to come along, ‘ok, let’s kill somebody in BELFAST EXPOSED, because Belfast City Council politicians accuse them of being involved with the IRA. To have that hanging over you, that somebody in the City Council was accusing the project to be an IRA front BELFAST EXPOSED mainly by contributing their work to the exhibition. We were just used as an easy way for politicians to reenforce their own bigoted stance. By having this ‘oh, we’re attacking the IRA.’, maybe they thought will get them some more respect and some more votes.” Sean McKernan

The ban led them to have a one-day protest exhibition outside Andersonstown Leisure Centre. In front of the press they publicly refuted the dangerous allegations of IRA. involvement and flagged political bias. ‘BELFAST EXPOSED is banned by City Hall because it originated in West Belfast’ and ‘BELFAST EXPOSED banned by City Hall’ it read on a board. They asked for an apology and a lift of the ban what eventually happened. Soon after, BELFAST EXPOSED moved out of West Belfast into the city centre –

“If we are to keep our premises in West Belfast, it would fuel the nay-sayers who were saying it was a West Belfast republican scheme. We would be victimised because it happened to originate in West Belfast. If it had originated in the Malone Road, the University, or some neutral place, by two people who weren’t from West Belfast, we wouldn’t have gotten all these accusations. We would have got more support quicker. So I said to Danny, that we really want to be a neutral organisation in the eyes of the public, we needed to be in the city centre to be accessible by everybody, north, south, east and west.” Sean McKernan

The owner of their new premises in Donegall Street was the COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRELAND, and of course, some people suggested that they were a communist party front.

Protest exhibition by BELFAST EXPOSED in front of Andersonstown Leisure Centre after being banned

By 1992, bigger premises were needed and BELFAST EXPOSED moved to King Street where for the first time they had their own gallery and where legendary parties took place. Meanwhile the Cathedral Quarter was developing fast and Sean, now the director of BELFAST EXPOSED, was urged to move back into the area. There was a lot of gentrification going on and the arts were used as an economic tool to develop a run-down area into a thriving commercial space, with the government benefitting of the rates from restaurants, bars and hotels. Trying to secure some of that gentrified future prosperity for BELFAST EXPOSED, Sean discussed with various funders the benefit of a bar or restaurant licence and was told it was a non starter. Since the arts obviously weren’t supposed to reap any of their own crops, wouldn’t be given the chance to become financially independent, wouldn’t be allowed to get away from governmental funding/control, after 18 years Sean decided to leave BELFAST EXPOSED.

Today’s BELFAST EXPOSED GALLERY is Northern Ireland’s first contemporary photography gallery, a nice and safe, contemporary, uncontentious middle-class project. It epitomises gentrification in all shape and form. In 2001, with a new management, they moved back to Donegall Street into a fancy building, got rid of the history, the legacy and everything that the original BELFAST EXPOSED ever stood for, no mentioning of Sean McKernan, co-founder of the whole project, no recognition – but they kept the archive and they kept the name.

“It felt like a total slap in the face for anybody that was involved. They totally discarded the whole ethos, using all that work that was done over 20 years, like ok, this is great, we’re here now, let’s go down this nice contemporary route which wasn’t anything new. We would never approach these galleries, because it was a different style of photography. A different concept. Our concept was about using photography to highlight social issues, to highlight campaigns, and to give people the opportunity to have a say in their own communities, to have their say about what was happening in a very divided city, we were trying to bring people together through photography and also to deal with realities, to deal with social issues. That changed within a few years into a very nice, flowery, non-challenging style of photography.” Sean McKernan

‘Gold Rush 69’ and UDA mural, Shankill

‘Night Taxi’ mural by Dan Kitchener, Enfield Street, Belfast

There was a controversial scheme after the GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT – ‘Re-imaging Belfast’ – replacing paramilitary and other contentious murals with undisputed historic scenes, comic figures, flowery landscapes. Raw reality of everyday life in Belfast was replaced by a new vision of a commercially successful, thriving, culturally and artistically mature city that doesn’t want to be reminded of the dark days. The old BELFAST EXPOSED must have met the same fate.

“I had arranged an exhibition in Washington DC, I had the largest public union in America come up with funding to have the exhibition in their headquarters next to the White House. That was the last time the BELFAST EXPOSED exhibition was shown. In fact, that exhibition and some of the old boards of the original exhibition were found in the skip outside the gallery of BELFAST EXPOSED. Basically, that’s what happened to the BELFAST EXPOSED exhibition.” Sean McKernan

The total disregard for all the hard work that has been done building up the project to where it was in the early 2000 and simply being written out of contemporary BELFAST EXPOSED's history, coupled with an inactive archive and abuse of copyright issues, sees for unfinished business. Meanwhile, Sean continues to work with communities in the spirit of the original BELFAST EXPOSED, while running his own gallery SHOOT BELFAST and selling and exhibiting his own work nationally and internationally. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself at a BX party – not quite the legendary King Street kind of party, as I’m told again and again, but hey, it’s BX!

Film shoot for short film by Sean Murray

Community exhibition in Lenadoon, Sean McKernan and Frankie Quinn, original BELFAST EXPOSED photographer

Exhibition at Screening of LYRA by Alison Millar

Sean’s photographic contribution for the movie LYRA by Alison Millar

BX!

A big THANK YOU goes out to Sean, who’s been so supportive throughout the process of BELFAST RELIABLE NEWS. I wouldn’t be where I am without him!i

CBC News, Guardian, Irish Central, Irish Examiner, Irish News, Irish Times, Liz Curtis, The Propaganda War, 1984
Winston Irvine, Gauntlet Thrown Down to Custodians of Arts in Northern Ireland posted on FB by Eamonn Mallie on 17 Aug 2017
Sean McKernan, Interview on 1 August 2022
Northern Visions, In Our Time – Creating Arts Within Reach, 2011
Northern Visions, A Century Later: The Day I Captured Life, 2013

Irish News, Irish Times

“In 2011, the Queen of England, for the first time of a century came for a visit to Dublin and at a banquet in Dublin castle she had to give a speech and she opened up with ‘A Uachtarán agus a chairde’. Uachtarán is the word for president. It derives from the word ‘uachtar’ which means cream. You milk a cow, the cream goes to the top. And the president is at the top. You don’t need a separate word for president when you can say ‘that one who has risen to the top’ by using the word ‘cream’.”

Colm Mac Aindreasa, child of the Shaw’s Road Project and native Irish speaker

16 Roots

Irish Language Act protest, Belfast

You can tell a Swiss writer from a German writer both using the High German language by the flow, the precision of words, the construction of a sentence, by the overall tone and rhythm of the text. Even if the Swiss author doesn’t employ vernaculars, the language comes across rather descriptive than sharp and distinguished. As if a Swiss story needs more time and space than a German story.

Something similar could be said regarding the Irish English, the so called Hiberno-English or Anglo-Irish, where the English language is amalgamating with grammars and narration of the Irish language. “We’re not long after finding that you weren’t in bed.” “Sure didn’t I take my own mother’s name and never any harm did it to me.” “Is he in? He’s not but he bes here every Friday.” “That was me sitting in the middle of my dinner.” “I went to the shops, so I did.” Even if you don’t have any Irish, that’s how the English here works. A flowery English, found in the works of Irish writers and praised for by the international literary world. It uses imagery, comparison and analogy demanding creativity to express yourself and a broad mind to understand and make sense of what is being said. The English language, in contrast, has a word for everything. Every possible situation, emotion and scenario finds a precise definition, requiring knowledge to let it blossom.

Cultural values and mentalities are reflected in the use of language and you have to understand the underpinning context in order to do translations any justice:

“When you translate the Irish word ‘Rí’ – a Rí in Irish was an administrator of the tribe. A Rí in Irish was elected by the Thuath [the people, the tribe]. The Rí was not a law-maker, he was a law-giver. When you translate the word ‘Rí’ into English it translates as ‘King’. A King, he’s royal descent. It’s a God-given right to rule. It’s the law-giver and the law-maker. Totally different societal and most particularly power relationships. The minute you describe a Rí a King, you change everything. The Rí is given the power that he never had as a Rí but he does have as a King.” Jake Mac Siacais, Director of Forbairt Feirste

An Irish Rí has got nothing in common with an English King. The concept of a Rí embraces something very different from the concept of a King. Therefore, translating Rí to King ignores and devalues the culture embraced by the Rí.

Eithne, figure of Irish mythology, Teach Eithne, New Lodge, Belfast. Painting by Danny Devenny.

Since the Norman invasion into Ireland sometime in the late twelfth century, Ireland’s been struggling in one form or the other against exploitation, subjugation and conquest, trying to prevent the overthrow of its social system, its values, and its identity. British imperialism – with its inherent assumption of cultural superiority – did not recognise the Irish as equals and it was the English colonial spree of the fifteenth century and onwards which saw English, Scottish and Welsh farmers being given the good land to strategically subjugate the unruly Irish. All over Ireland, but especially in Ulster, plantations started to emerge on the land that the Irish previously owned and the planters, the now inhabitants, began to introduce a new way of life, a different culture and an alien language.

Britain eventually gained control over the whole island of Ireland. It brought in the Penal Laws which outlawed everything Irish and Catholic, everything that didn’t conform to the established Church and the Queen’s English. It denied Catholics ownership of land and livestock, to vote and to be educated about their religion. Speaking Irish was made illegal, leading to generations of parents not speaking to their children in order to protect them from punishment in school. To succeed in life and progress in the official world, you had to speak English.

Penal Cross, Catholics’ secret mass stone, Co Monaghan

Falls, West Belfast

The Great Hunger or the so called Famine –
“There was no famine, the Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes, all of the other food, meat, fish and vegetables were shipped out of the country under armed guard to England while the Irish people starved.” Sinead O’Connor, Lyrics from ‘Famine’

The Great Hunger from 1845 to 1849 was being used to full capacity to coerce the Irish into renouncing their identity. Soup kitchens were denying food to Catholics unless they converted to Protestantism. Convert to Protestantism or starve. Renounce your identity or starve. Speak English or starve. It’s the thing a coloniser does. Make the native people feel bad about their own culture, persuade them through military, legal, economic, social and every other means to abandon their language and culture and adopt the ways of the oppressor.

“Military conquest is not enough. If you want the whole of the territory you must destroy not just its territory, you must also destroy its soul. And any indigenous culture will have its soul built around its language. The English knew that early on. They moved towards suppressing the language, as they did in Scotland, in Wales and elsewhere. ‘Destroy the local culture and then they will have nothing to do but become like us.’” Colm Mac Aindreasa

For the colonial project to succeed it was essential to make the natives despise their own culture. To understand that being Irish was shameful. They were taught contempt for their own identity. It was backwards, associated with poverty, remoteness, farming, no education. The unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Lord Craigavon, in 1936 cynically stated that,

“What use is it here in this progressive busy part of the Empire to teach our children the Irish language? Is it not leading them along a road which has no practical value? We have not stopped such teaching; we have stopped the grants – simply because we do not see that these boys being taught Irish would be any better citizens.” Lord Craigavon

Politicisation of Irish has deep roots in colonial history. After Partition in 1922, the new government in the north strategically frustrated efforts to keep the language alive by banning it from the curriculum in schools, burning Irish language books, removing funding, ignoring the wish of students to learn the language. Never sounding like the British and missing a real sense of their cultural inheritance, the Irish grew up with the sense of being less than the British, of being second-class citizens.

Throughout the decades, various Irish language activist groups have done their best to keep the language alive and to reintroduce it into society. There’s an expression in Irish that says – ná habair é, déan é – don’t say it, do it! In 1969, just when the Troubles were about to kick off, that’s what a group of working class families were doing. With no funding, they built a mini-Gaeltacht in west Belfast – a row of houses and a primary school consisting of a portacabin – where the official language taught and spoken was Irish. The unionist government threatened them with prosecution should they ever try to set up an Irish school but as the six counties tumbled deeper into turmoil, “prosecuting a small group in west Belfast for setting up a school that didn’t speak English was pretty low on the list of priorities” and the state was trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening, as Colm states.

Colm Mac Aindreasa

The Shaw’s Road project was trying to establish a non-political Irish-speaking community. They were referred to as ‘The Irish Houses’ by the community around them who didn’t really understand what was going on there. They were those weirdos who spoke Irish to what point escaped them. But that was to change with the evolving trauma of the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes where Margaret Thatcher’s government let ten people die just to then quietly give up their brutal stance on the treatment of political prisoners in Northern Ireland.

The collective trauma of the hunger strikes led to a massive shift in the nationalist community mindset. Anger and hatred towards everything that Thatcher represented led to even soft nationalists becoming more Irish or ‘not British’. Never has Britishness been more rejected than during that period. This new sense of identity manifested itself in a hype of everything Irish. Pubs and clubs started beginner classes for the Irish language and Irish dancing and traditional music replaced the Top of the Pops in these venues.

Commemoration for Thomas Ash who died on hunger strike in 1917 after having been force fed, Ballymurphy, Belfast

The Belfast Story, Maddens Bar, Belfast

U16 County Hurling Championship Final, Ruairi Og v Rossa, Dunloy

Sinn Féin campaign poster, New Lodge, Belfast

The anti-British sentiment of that time, this sudden mutual understanding of Irishness, harmonised with Sinn Féin’s political line and gave the party a major push. They quickly adopted the Irish language, creating bilingual election documentation despite the fact that most of the people had only basic Irish if any. Sinn Féin’s success in adopting the Irish cultural identity galvanised unionist objection of everything Irish – in particular the language – and alarmed the British government into ‘counter-investment’ by finally funding Irish medium education and creating the ULTACH trust for cross-community Irish language programmes, devaluating Sinn Féin’s political leverage as the lone arbiter of Irish cultural identity. Historically supporters, they jumped on the Irish language bandwagon driven by the blanket protestors when it became politically useful to them, whilst the Shaw’s Road families have been quietly planting a seed twenty years ahead.

Not everybody had the privilege to learn Irish after a good night’s sleep in a warm bed and a hearty breakfast. Many of today’s Irish speakers didn’t go to Irish dancing and language classes in their social club around the corner. They were teaching each other from prison cell to prison cell, first through the door and then – after the guards threw boiling water through the door scalding their bodies – out through their windows. The blanket and later no-wash protest which evolved into the hunger strikes was on and the protesting prisoners found themselves in a cell naked, with a mattress, three blankets, a chamber pot and a gallon of water. No pens, no paper, no radio, no exercise, no nothing and under these circumstances they set up their Irish language classes. They learned their Irish in the ‘Jailtacht’ as opposed to the ‘Gaeltacht’ and for that they deserve nothing but respect.

“When we arrived in the H-Blocks, which was a totally different kettle of fish [from the Cages, where the prisoners availed of political status and had access to Irish media and the Gaeltacht, exclusively Irish speaking cages], Bobby Sands functioned as an education officer. During the breaks when the screws went off to their meals and when they went away in the evening, we would jump up to the door and teach Irish. We had a basic class, an intermediate class and a high class. The transmission of news from cell to cell could only be done in Irish. Orders were only issued in Irish. There were five who didn’t want to learn Irish. So people with Irish had to translate to them. But after five years on the blanket they all ended up fluent Irish speakers despite themselves.” Jake Mac Siacais

Educating themselves in the Irish language and culture not only put them at an advantage over the wardens in a practical sense, it also boosted their morale, realising how the human spirit can triumph over abhorrent surroundings.

“I think that what the H-Blocks did was they inculcated a massive love for Irish amongst prisoners. And they also taught us that the liberation of an individual and then the liberation of the community comes through the reversal of the colonisation process. And so to role back the conquest you needed first of all within yourself to de-colonise your mind. You then had to de-colonise your community.” Jake Mac Siacais

Jake Mac Siacais

The Irish language has a widespread symbolic significance in the nationalist community whereas unionism – especially on a political level – shows nothing but contempt for the language and culture. The Arlene Fosters (feeding the crocodiles) and Gregory Campbells (Curry my yoghurt) of this world appear to be uneducated and ignorant not knowing their own background. Was it not the Protestants, the Anglo-Irish of the 19th century, who did most to try to revive the Irish language. Was it not the Reverend Rutledge Kane, Grand Master of the Orange Order, taking up the post of secretary of the Gaelic League to promote the Irish culture in the face of its massive decline. Did not the Gusty Spences, David Ervines and Billy Hutchinsons of the loyalist prisoners learn the Irish from their republican counterparts, acknowledging an Irish element to their identity. Was it not in 2011 their own monarch, Queen Elizabeth, beginning her speech in Dublin Castle in Irish – A Uachtarán agus a chairde, President and friends. A number of Orangemen are fluent in Irish. The Irish language wasn’t politicised by Irish speakers, it was politicised by the unionist state of the late 1890s when they started to disassociate themselves from rural Ireland exchanging their ‘loyal Irishness’ – Irish people loyal to the monarchy – with ‘Britishness’ – people of cultural supremacy.

‘Maintain our [British] Culture’ election poster, Shankill, Belfast

Larne

Sinn Féin’s growing popularity during the painful and violent period of the hunger strikes in the early 1980s, aggravated unionists’ proclamation that Irishness meant Sinn Féin, who of course to their mind was a terrorist organisation. To this day, unionism parallels Irishness and the Irish language with republicanism and republicanism with terrorism, though, finally, that narrative is being contested from within the unionist community as well.

“Irish was never the affront I took it to be. It was my culture that supplanted Irish, burying it in the peremptory administration of imperial bureaucracies and commerce. I cannot relate to the dislocation and alienation that native speakers must have experienced. Yet, I do recognise the loss. I do feel the narrowness of my inheritance. Irish is not my language, but it’s part of my story, too. In opposing the Irish language, we oppose a part of ourselves.” Richard Irvine, Teacher

Political unionism’s deep hatred for the Irish language, claiming it undermines their Britishness (any form of expressing Irish identity is a threat to British cultural hegemony), discriminates against them, turns them into second-class citizens – that age-old fear of the unknown and terrible lack of generosity denies their community to embrace an identity that belongs to everybody and enrichens a society altogether. Ignorance only feeds uncertainty and insecurity and today’s grassroots unionism knows.

Irish Language activist and unionist Linda Ervine, sister in law of the late loyalist paramilitary turning politician David Ervine, runs TURAS, an Irish language project on the Newtownards Road, in the heart of Protestant east Belfast. TURAS upholds the ethos that the Irish language is not a threat to the unionist identity or antithetical to Britishness but rather a contribution to the linguistic diversity of these islands, part of a continuum of Celtic languages such as Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. It brings people together and Linda is adamant that this is the perfect medium for reconciliation. The message seems to catch on, it’s said that the fastest-growing cohort of Irish language learners is now amongst Protestants.

Irish Language Act protest, Belfast

Irish Language Act protest, Belfast

It has taken an awful lot to move towards a situation whereas the Irish identity as a whole has a good chance to become legally recognised. It’s yet to be seen how it’s all going to play out, but on May 25, 2022, the IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE (NORTHERN IRELAND) BILL was introduced in Westminster. It will grant the Irish language as well as the Ulster Scots official status in the north of Ireland, as did the GAELIC LANGUAGE ACT 2005 in Scotland and the 1993 WELSH LANGUAGE ACT in Wales.

The repeal of the ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE (LANGUAGE) ACT (IRELAND) dating from 1737 will allow Irish to be used in the Stormont Assembly and to register births, deaths, marriages and wills in Irish and if it does succeed –

“This could be an historic day when being Irish is no longer a crime, I will be allowed to speak Irish in court. It legitimises the language and therefore me and my identity which did not exist prior to now. People have been arrested and prosecuted for refusing to speak English with police and in court in the past. I’ve had full legal status as a speaker of English but as an Irish speaker that aspect of my identity has always been legally denied me until now. I hope we have finally taken that last step to re-legitimising Irishness in this country.” Colm Mac Aindreasa

An estimated 17,000 people took part in this May’s Irish language protest march. Over 7,000 children are enrolled in Irish medium schools and the boys and girls who live in today’s 22 houses on the Shaw’s Road don’t see themselves as special, living in the Gaeltacht, it’s just a home where they speak their language which happens to be Irish. In a way, that’s what the Shaw’s Road project was all about from the start: normalising the language and accepting it as part of life. More and more people in these parts of the world understand that.

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An extra THANK YOU goes to Colm Mac Aindreasa and Jake Mac Siacais for their generous time and unique insight into aspects of their lives as a native Irish speaker growing up in Belfast’s own Gaeltacht and a former prisoner discovering the love for the Irish language in prison.

Choyaa, The Orange Order’s complex relationship with the Irish Language, Slugger O’Toole, 12 January 2020
Niall Comer, posted on FB by Cormack Buzz Ó Briain, 24 December 2019
Colm Mac Aindreasa, Interview on 25 May 2022
Jake Mac Siacais, Interview on 27 May 2022
Scéal Phobal Bhóthar Seoighe – The Irish Houses, BBC iPlayer, 16 March 2020
Andrew Walsh, From hope to hatred – Voices of the Falls Curfew, 2013
Jaira Wilsey, Surnames in Northern Ireland: A key to history and identity, 2013

CBC News, Guardian, Irish Central, Irish Examiner, Irish News, Irish Times, Rebelnews

“When a city is re-developed a pattern of life is laid down for at least a century. I find myself in disagreement at the proposals that the divisions in the community should be accepted as a feature of life which must inevitably persist for a hundred years or more. ... This seems a counsel of despair. The word ghetto has been lightly and loosely used in the past. These proposals would give the name substance, and would attract criticism from all over the world.”

Anthony Hewins, Office of the United Kingdom Representative in Northern Ireland, 1971

15 Divide

Peace Wall Cupar Way, West Belfast

It’s been estimated that between 1969, on the outbreak of the Troubles, and its heights in 1976, more than 60,000 people have fled their homes because of sectarian violence, intimidation and fear. The attacks on Catholics and the burning of Bombay Street in 1969 initiated the biggest inter-city migration process western Europe has ever seen since World War 2. Where before people lived side by side in some kind of peace, they now would seek the sanctuary of single-identity estates. Persistent disproportion and inequality in housing distribution facilitated Protestant refugees finding a new home with relative ease while Catholic areas were already over-crowded.

If the homes of leaving Protestant families haven’t been completely destroyed in order to prevent any Catholics from moving in, they were squatted by those Catholic families that couldn’t find refuge in clearly designated Catholic areas, contesting of course the existing boundaries between the two communities. Because these areas were still perceived as Protestant territory, the authorities couldn’t just allocate the freed houses to the displaced Catholics. The looming threat of Catholics spreading into Protestant areas had to be stopped or rather controlled to prevent confrontation and violence to erupt. The solution seemed to have been found not by building houses but by letting the highest ranks of army and security forces – quite outside of public view – get involved with assessing security issues and planning decisions, leading to permanent inter-community barriers and therefore fixing the boundaries of disputed borders for good.

Short Strand, East Belfast

Duncairn Gardens, North Belfast

The military’s divisive security-planning policy that transformed Northern Ireland into a war zone included heavily fortified police stations, army observation posts on roof-tops of residential tower-blocks and the now dismantled watchtowers which in 1986, to the dismay of neighbouring residents in South Armagh, interfered with their signal on TV during the World cup in Mexico.

Oblivious to history and make-up, Belfast’s tribal logic was lost on the soldiers stationed there to support the local security forces. This was a problem. The Victorian-era gridiron layout of the city, where roads were connected throughout the neighbourhoods, made travelling by car from, through and to different areas easy and most paramilitary attacks were carried out using cars. This was a problem. Thus, besides getting a grip on community boundaries, the militaristic redevelopment strategy of the 1970s and 1980s was all about control over pedestrian and vehicular movement as well as army access into housing estates.

Open-ended road networks were being closed off and divided into cul-de-sacs, rendering car-escapes almost impossible and frustrating normal everyday access into the areas to this day, as all intuitive understanding of the neighbourhood is gone. Dead-end alleyways and single entries would lead into courtyards – intimate residential clusters – where a non-resident stands out immediately. The scheme was sold as slowing down traffic and offering the residents safety, peace and some kind of ownership over their area. While this would have been welcomed in principle, the security aspect wasn’t lost on the residents and they complained about feeling under surveillance from security forces and neighbours.

Crumlin Road, North Belfast

Falls, West Belfast

Springmartin, North Belfast

Ardoyne, North Belfast

Disruption of and obstacles on through-roads confront residents with long journeys and dependency on cars just to get to the shop around the corner. If you want to go from the WELCOME CENTRE to the Presbyterian Church situated within a hundred metres on the one and same road, you’ll be sent through the Catholic Falls over to the Protestant Shankill in order to get to your destination – unless you’re lucky and the newly transformed gate on Townsend Street is open. Then you can also just stroll over. It won’t take more than two minutes.

Security-focused redevelopment made use of everyday architecture creating buffer zones such as shopping centres, roads, industrial zones, hotels, recreational space or tight hedgerows to reinforce spatial division between nationalist and unionist communities and would keep undeveloped land or derelict areas unused instead of building houses for communities in housing distress. These hidden barriers remain largely unrecognised as such but play their role in dividing communities and hindering access to the city centre.

Probably the most persistent barriers rest in people’s minds. Separated by walls and other dividing structures, Protestants and Catholics live in close proximity without necessarily interacting with each other at all. Knowledge of past violent events and injustices build on mutual generational distrust, impacting on movement and behavioural patterns and leading to so called activity segregation. People take detours to avoid certain areas, they refuse to go to the adjacent park perceiving it to be a Protestant park. Instead of using the bus around the corner, they walk a longer distance to the bus servicing areas within their comfort zone. There might not always be a physical barrier between communities, but history, events and memory provide for invisible demarcation lines.

New Lodge/Tigers Bay, North Belfast

Ardoyne/Woodvale, North Belfast

These hidden barriers and invisible boundaries continue to encourage conflict-era behaviour and keep society’s mindset trapped in time. They’ve become part of the communal fabric, normalised, people just live with it, though they affect their lives and wellbeing – even the DUP’s Nelson McCausland in his former role of Minister for Social Development agreed –

“There are still areas blighted by dereliction and decay, with empty houses that are boarded up and land that lies derelict and undeveloped. These problems drag a community down, becoming magnets for anti-social behaviour and dumping. They blight the lives of residents.”

However, these less visible barriers are not evaluated conflict-related divisions and there’s no specific governmental body assigned to tackle the issue, quite unlike the clearly visible and in 2021 officially recognised 59 peace walls owned by the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (DoJ) and the 20 peace walls owned by the HOUSING EXECUTIVE – out of the close to 100 identified by the BELFAST INTERFACE PROJECT in 2019. While the structures were put up for protection and safety, it’s well been documented how people living in the shadow of peace walls are more likely to battle physical and mental health problems. About one in five receive anti-depressant medication compared to one in eight for the rest of the population. Educational attainment lies low, economic achievement stays persistently below average, and violence and anti-social behaviour projects high above other residential layouts.

Launched in 2012, the PEACE BARRIERS PROGRAMME funded by the INTERNATIONAL FUND FOR IRELAND pledged to have the barriers down by 2023. While various political breakdowns and instability around Brexit and the Protocol are vamping up division anew, tensions in interface areas have always been high. It’s not pure sectarianism, but mainly boredom, general frustration, the desire for some ‘craic’ that gets the kids going. Nevertheless, many interface residents favour the dismantlement of the barriers – although, alas, not in their lifetime and by 2022, 46 of the barriers are still standing.

It’s a sensitive task, reaching the point where communities feel safe enough to discuss options of removals or alterations of barriers. It requires a deep understanding of complex issues, as well as a clearly outlined socio-economic after-care package. Most of the negotiations happen on grassroots level with dedicated members of the community working tirelessly building up mutual trust. The BLACK MOUNTAIN SHARED SPACES PROJECT and the DUNCAIRN COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP’s successful engagement with interface communities has, for example, seen some easing of physical division on the Springfield Road in the west and in North Queen Street and Duncairn Gardens in the north of the city.

Mesh fence replacing corrugated steel wall in Duncairn Gardens, North Belfast

Low garden fence replacing high peace fence, North Queen Street, North Belfast

Prior to the change, residents of North Queen Street didn’t use there front door and garden. With the replaced fence, which is barely recognisable as a peace wall, came more room and just the other day a barbecue was simmering on a grill in one of the residents’ new gardens. Replacing the four metre high wall required the windows and doors being enforced with security glass but for the first time in thirty years the sun shines into these homes unhindered.

The dismantling of a huge corrugated steel wall replaced by a transparent mesh fence gives way to a panoramic view from loyalist Tigers Bay into the republican New Lodge. There’s no opening through the scaled-down barrier but floral landscaping along the fence and a wandering gaze into the unknown space beyond maybe help to alter feelings of fear and held prejudice against that unknown community on the other side –

“My mum always told me: never go through that entry. But little did we know it was a Catholic area, you know, we were just told we were never allowed to go through. But of course me and the sister and a wee friend stuck our head round the wall to see, you know, what is going on round here. But everything just looked normal to us.” Woman from East Belfast

Erected in 1989 to protect residents, the partial removal of the three metre high security wall facing the police station on the Springfield road is a significant step forward for the Springhill community. The only fly in the ointment, a good part of Gael Force Art/Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly’s Palestinian mural is gone too.

Mesh fence replacing concrete blocks, Springfield Avenue, West Belfast

Bimper Archer, Anti-social behaviour triples at so-called peace walls, Irish News, 13 Nov 2019
Bimper Archer, Barriers to peace still, Irish News, 16 Nov 2021
Belfast School of Architecture + the Built Environment, Hidden barriers, SuperStudio 3 + 4
David Coyles, Brandon Hamber, Adrian Grant, Hidden barriers and divisive architecture, June 2021
Nick Garbutt, Who plans Belfast?, ScopeNI, 12 Dec 2014
Nick Garbutt, Defensive planing – how the military shaped Belfast, ScopeNI, 5 Jan 2015
Rita Harkin, Anything goes – architectural destruction in Northern Ireland after the Troubles, 2014
Andrew Sanders and Ian S. Woods, Times of Troubles. Britain’s War in Northern Ireland, 2012
Andrew Walsh, Belfast ‘69: bombs, burning and bigotry, 2015

Belfast Interface Project, Belfast Telegraph, Irish News

“At the very start of Noah going missing I put my trust as a member of the public in the authorities. I knew no different. My eyes are wide open now. This investigation, my mind is blown by how little the police seem to have done. We as a family have done quite a bit of investigation ourselves and we dispute their line of inquiry.”

Fiona Donohoe, mother of Noah

14 Qualm

NOAH?

In the summer of 2020 Noah Donohoe, a 14 year old boy from south Belfast went missing while on his way to Cavehill to meet his friends. After an extensive six-days search he was found in a storm drain in an area of Belfast unknown to him. The pathology report states that Noah had drowned. He was naked. His computer has been found – a drug addict tried to sell it. His bicycle has been found in an area Noah wouldn’t have gone to. Parts of his clothes were found. Witnesses had seen him running up the street naked. CCTV footage shows Noah distressed and exhausted. As a legacy of the Troubles, Belfast is heavily equipped with surveillance but there’s a whole stretch where CCTV footage of Noah is missing. Noah was a Catholic boy of mixed race, happy and popular in school, he loved sports, basketball and his cello. He never gave his mommy Fiona any bother. The police very early into the investigation said, no foul play was at stake. Noah might have fallen from the bike, hit his head, got confused, went into the storm drain and drowned. They never took rumours of Noah having been drowned in a bath tub and loyalist paramilitary involvement seriously. The water in the storm drain has never been compared with the water in Noah’s lungs.

P.S.N.I. STOP HIDING NOAH’S KILLER, New Lodge

It is a very sensitive and controversial inquest and many unanswered questions, investigative shortcomings and a looming PUBLIC INTEREST IMMUNITY (PII) certification request by the police in order to withhold evidence that – in their estimation – could be damaging to public interest feeds into presumptions of loyalist paramilitary machination. The most common reason for a PII request is paramilitary, intelligence or informer involvement.

Noah went missing in a staunchly loyalist area where sectarian and racist attacks do occur but where a community centre immediately organised a search operation and locals dropped off provisions for hundreds of people from all over the town searching for the mixed-race Catholic boy – testament to community activism, so typical for Belfast working-class communities. They gathered day after day until the police urged the public to leave the search to professionals.

HUBB Community Resource Centre, east Belfast

Search party, east Belfast

Entrance to Noah’s school, St Malachy’s College, north Belfast

Noah’s mum is still hoping to get to the bottom of her son’s death. Whilst the police try to nurture the narrative of misadventure or even suicide, suspicions of a much darker story circulate amongst the people in Belfast – a story so many families have fallen victim to in one or the other way – the story of paramilitary power, information and infiltration. It happened during the Troubles and it’s still happening within the republican NEW IRA or the loyalist UVF and UDA. Protection for information. There is no proof of paramilitary involvement in Noah’s death. There’s only a lot of loose ends, coincidences and a police force that considers to refuse disclosure of certain evidence.

Paramilitary groups represent themselves as the harbingers of justice in communities with a policing vacuum by going after the hoods, the joyriders, the petty thieves, the drug addicts, the dealers and everyone that steps out of line. They impose discipline on the area. They say they’ve been put under pressure by the community to do something about crime because the police are ineffective. Weekly reports on punishment shootings and beatings are normal. It’s swift justice versus state bureaucracy. An acceptable way of punishing criminals.

“Masked men forced their way into a home and beat and shot a teenager.” Irish News, 15 Feb 2022
“Two men dressed in black clothes took the man into an alleyway and shot him in the left leg. It was not clear last night if the shooting was by appointment.” Irish News, 27 Oct 2020
“Deaghlan Collins (30) was shot twice in the legs on Springfield Road after being chased from outside a fast-food outlet. He was under threat from an armed group.” Irish News, 20 July 2019
“The man, who was in his thirties, suffered life-changing injuries when he was shot three times in the legs.” Irish News, 2 Oct 2019

This vigilante justice has brutalised society. It’s taken for granted that being shot in the knees and ankles is what happens. And if the paramilitaries command you to a certain place at a certain time, instead of going to the police and ask for protection, you’ll take a few painkillers and fresh underwear for the hospital and show up. Shooting by appointment, they call it.

“My mommy was ‘where are you going?’ I was like, ‘no, I’m just down a bar.’ So I went down, had a few wee pints, got a wee text and all, and I walked over at me own. I was like ‘mate, I hope you’re not trying to pull a dirty one, here, shoot me with a bigger gun and all?’ He was like ‘I’m not, kid, I’ll look after you, I’ll look after you.’ And he showed me the gun in his hands, it was a hand-sized gun. He didn’t lie to me, like. He didn’t. He told me to lie down and bite my arm. I heard the first one and I thought like, wow. He was like, ‘did it hit, did it hit?’ I said ‘of course it did, just do the other one!’ I did do bad shit and I accept that. I got shot four times.” Anonymous victim

DRUG DEALERS WILL BE SHOT, AAD! (Action Against Drugs), New Lodge

HOUSE BREAKERS (will be shot), Larne

Cisco, Ballymurphy

The UVF and the UDA recruit young members by selling drugs and let them get into thousands of pounds of debt. Then they can choose between becoming foot soldiers for the organisation’s money laundering and extortion business or being beaten up, banished or shot. People say, ‘it’s not part of my life’. Societal shrug is the reaction. But it’s not just about the person who gets hurt and maimed for life. It’s about sending out a message to the whole community. It’s about saying, ‘we run this place, we are in charge’. This way they maintain their coercive control they need to be able to reside and exist in these areas. They are tightening their grip on communities who are in fear to speak out against them.

Andrew Peden lost both his legs in a loyalist paramilitary attack. He knows the perpetrators but will never seek justice. He’s afraid for his family. Hugh Brady is a former republican prisoner turned community worker. He would rather be dead than tout on armed republicans. The worst thing an Irish person could be accused of is being an informer. Be it on political grounds – as it is the case in some republican areas where the security forces are the enemy – or pure fear of retaliation, people in working-class communities with paramilitary presence almost never go to the police.

TOUT (Informer), New Lodge

PEOPLE SHOULD NOT INFORM, Falls Road

PSNI NOT WELCOME IN ARDOYNE

Toni Johnston-Ogle made an impressive exception of the rule when she stood up against the UVF, accusing them of months of intimidation culminating in the stabbing of her father Ian Ogle in 2019. She believes that her community in Cluan Place will never forgive them and is hopeful that people will rise up. Close to 2,000 mourners attended the vigil – a strong sign of support for a brave person who is ready to confront the power structures of east Belfast’s paramilitaries.

It took the police four days to admit that it was the UVF, who was behind the Ogle-murder when everybody around knew it right away. Why are they so slow in admitting to paramilitary involvement? Who or what are they trying to protect? MI5 infiltration in various groups is not just a memory, the latest exposure of agent Dennis McFadden within the New IRA is an ongoing case. Is it right to gloss over an investigation in order to keep the identity of an informer or agent hidden? Is it more important to keep an operation involving agents or informers going than giving a grieving family justice and closure? How far will they go to protect their sources? As it stands, using the paramilitary power structures constitutes an integral part of politically rubberstamped policing practice creating a murky justice wish-wash. This is not good enough and won’t make people feel safe to come forward with information. It’s exceptionally hard for Fiona Donohoe to bear the silence surrounding her son’s death knowing there’s people out there willing to help but too scared to speak out.

“There’s anonymous phone calls with people saying they have information but they have to keep their families save. They never call back. I just pray that someday somebody will do the right thing and come forward to give information. There’s more good people on both sides and it’s just a minority that poison a community.” Fiona Donohoe

More than 280,000 people have signed a petition for the police to release the files on Noah Donohoe uncensored. NOAH’S ARMY, a formation of friends, sympathisers and human rights campaigners, is supporting Fiona in her battle to get justice for her son. Not allowing to be silenced, Toni and Fiona show courage and determination on their journey against societal apathy and political status quo.

NOAH’S ARMY campaigning for justice, Belfast

Justice For Noah campaign, New Lodge

Ian Ogle remembered one year on, east Belfast

Since the signing of the GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT, a lot of money has gone into helping paramilitary organisations transition to peace. Those groups who moved on, and there’s a lot of people who’ve played a positive role and done a lot for the peace process, they moved on a long time ago. What is left is criminals.

“We need to move away from the language of paramilitary and Troubles romanticism. What we’re talking about is gangsterism, criminals terrorising and controlling their communities. For children and young people to escape from power and from that control, there’s an awful lot to be done. And also in order for these communities to feel strong and safe enough to come forward and to say, you have no place here. But that can only happen when there’s confidence particularly in the police and social services that they will actually keep them safe.” Koulla Yiasouma, Children’s Commissioner

Transition cannot continue indefinitely, but 24 years on, money from Westminster still runs into the hands of the groups. It seems that violence pays.

Trevor Birney, Above the law, Documentary, RTÉ, 2015
William Crawley, Is eradicating paramilitarism how we build a shared society? Talkback, BBC Radio Ulster, 29 Sep 2017
Fiona Donohoe, Interview with James English, Youtube, 30 Jan 2022
Stacey Dooley Investigates, Shot by my neighbour, BBC, 2018
Stephen Nolan, Paramilitary Punishment, The Nolan Show, BBC Radio Ulster, 15 Oct 2021
Sinead O’Shea, A mother brings her son to be shot, Documentary, 2019

BBC News, Belfast Telegraph, The Guardian, Irish News, Sunday Life

“And at one point Pat was talking about his community and what they suffered and how he felt. How he cared about them. And I saw in him now a man with a story, who suffered, who struggled. He’s not just the man who planted that bomb. I didn’t meet him to change him, I didn’t meet him to get an apology. I met him just to see him as a human being. Because he was THE most demonised person in that time. And that wasn’t gonna help me. But it would help me to see him as a human being.”

Joanna ‘Jo’ Berry

13 Reconciliation

Patrick Magee

In 1984 a bomb went off in the Brighton Grand Hotel where the Conservative Party was hosting their conference. Over thirty people were injured and five died: Muriel MacLean, Jeanne Shattock, Roberta Wakeham, Eric Taylor and Anthony Berry. The main target, Margaret Thatcher, walked out of the blast unscathed. The IRA claimed responsibility and Patrick Magee, the only ever convicted person for the bombing, ended up with multiple life sentences in prison. He served over fourteen years when paramilitary prisoners whose organisation had signed up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement were granted an early release. Around 500 loyalist and republican volunteers walked through the prison turnstiles before completing their sentences. In 1999, Pat Magee was one of them.

Ex-prisoners play a crucial role in creating conditions for peace, a fact that is often overseen. Former prisoners helped to bring about the West Belfast festival as an alternative to the confrontational bonfires that were lit annually to commemorate internment. During the Holy Cross dispute in 2001, when loyalist residents tried to prevent Catholic girls to walk through their street in order to get to school, ending up with the army having to escort them, it was mainly down to former prisoners that the months-long gauntlet-running came to an end. Prisoners were not merely released, many involved themselves in some sort of community work, focusing on young people and interface violence, increasing cross-community interaction, trying to contrive situations to get people together.

Ex-Prisoners Interpretative Centre, Woodvale Road, Belfast

Being involved in cross-community tension transformation doesn’t necessarily imply discarding key ideological views or decrease inter-community distrust. Polar ideological opposition between former enemies often remains, despite the willingness of line-crossing, engagement and openness to dialogue. They work with each other without trying to persuade one another of their respective believes. Or as a UVF-member states,

“I firmly believe that there are differences that I have with republicans and nationalists that are never going to be resolved. But my relationship with them has been transformed from one of demonisation and just wanting to destroy them, to trying to create a society in which we can live together and have those differences.”

There will never be an agreement on history narratives and that’s not a solely Northern Irish experience. The peace process with the GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT at its heart has somewhat ironically consolidated difference by institutionalising ‘Otherness’. Instead of tackling the fundamental issues of division it went for appeasement and accommodation which surely ameliorated the situation in a sense that it brought an end to open war and facilitated political participation for all, but – for the sake of peace – pushed basic grievances under the carpet and kept the unionist and nationalist communities segregated.

Catholic and Protestant side of Alexandra Park, Belfast

There are sports clubs and the arts and there are welfare organisations and community centres promoting cross-community engagement and inter-community care. However, a hurt people can’t heal on the shoulder of civic society when the political agenda doesn’t support it. Right across the divide, families still seek for answers on why or how their loved ones were killed, injured, punished, targeted, disappeared, defamed, locked up, interned or otherwise banished. The past hasn’t been dealt with properly and it lies there, underneath, nagging and to resurface and to become the question and pain of the next generation.

“Dealing with the legacy of our past and building meaningful reconciliation is complicated and delicate. If we are to unite hearts and minds and nourish a genuine hope for lasting peace and reconciliation in Ireland, then we have to work together on healing the legacy of our shared past, because peace can only flourish in the light of knowledge, truth and justice.” Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Armagh

The British government is doing the very reverse. With a blind-eyes-deaf-ears-and-concealment-of-truth-strategy it is planning to implement a statute of limitations to end all prosecutions of military veterans and ex-paramilitaries for Troubles incidents predating the GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT 1998. It’s been complaining about the ‘witch hunts’ and ‘vexatious prosecutions’ of soldiers now in their 70s, 80s and 90s. The reality is, the British government doesn’t lose anything by granting paramilitaries amnesty but risks its reputation if details around army and MI5 proceedings during the Troubles emerge. British state violence, collusion with loyalist paramilitaries and sectarian manipulation shines an uncomfortable light on the government. So the secretary of state Brandon Lewis and his boss Boris Johnson say that prosecutions don’t work, don’t do justice to the people, there is too little evidence after such a long time, and that amnesty is a great idea, it will allow the people to draw a line under the past and help them to move further along the road to reconciliation.

March for Truth, City Hall, Belfast

Memorial for the victims of the Sean Graham bookies shooting in 1992, Belfast

Even though there are groups who support the soldiers in some ongoing inquests on legacy issues, the legislation is opposed by all the main political parties at Stormont, the Irish government, the Church and victims’ and survivors’ groups from all sides. All the covering-up, frustrating and undermining of successive attempts to get justice doesn’t make the families go away. They understand the challenges in decade old cases. They understand that the likelihood of getting actual prosecutions are slim. But justice is not simply getting a conviction, it’s a process and it’s truth-finding, as the recent Ballymurphy inquest illustrates. No soldier will go to jail for the killings of 11 people in 1971. But it was publicly and officially acknowledged by Justice Keegan that the victims were all innocent and not members of the IRA posing a threat and therefore gunned down lawfully, as was the army’s version. After 50 years the stain on the reputation of the deceased and their families has been lifted. And there are many more like the Ballymurphy families who have yet to get truth and justice for their loved ones.

“Forgetting is not an acceptable, or even possible, response to a history of conflict. Forced amnesia leaves a deep societal instability. The assault of organising forgetting re-victimises and re-traumatises the victims and survivors of conflict. Wounds left untended, and unacknowledged, make it even more difficult to ease the tensions of a deeply divided society.” James Waller, Author

Press conference of the Ballymurphy families after the ruling in court

Ruling of ‘innocence’ announcement at Ballymurphy inquest, Belfast

Conflict is damaging to all people, no matter the side they’re on. Public acknowledgment of the suffering is an important part for societal recovery. Moving away from a world, where retaliation and revenge are accepted forms of expressing anger and grieve towards a peaceful society means to remember the harms done and pains suffered. To remember what has been forgotten, covered up, denied and silenced. It helps to understand each others’ experiences and facilitates empathy for the Other as the quite remarkable story of Jo and Pat illustrates.

Patrick Magee was out of prison for about a year when he heard that a person who lost a relative in the Brighton bomb wanted to meet him. As somebody who had caused injury and suffering he felt compelled to meet this person. It would be a contribution to the peace process and a chance to maybe explain and put the republican armed struggle into context. A subject close to his heart, he also wrote a book on the misrepresentation and demonisation of republicans, called GANGSTERS OR GUERRILLAS? – unfortunately out of print. But Jo Berry wanted more than just meeting the perpetrator, more than explanations, she wanted to put a face on the enemy and see his humanity and so she decided to listened carefully and to ask questions and at some point she started to talk about her dad, Anthony Berry.

Republicans felt demonised, censored, their perspective not understood, overall dehumanised by the Other. But Pat started to realise that he, as a republican, had been doing the same with their perceived enemies: they were oppressors, fascists, those culpable for the conflict because they had all the power. They were legitimate targets, not humans – a narrowing perspective in order to function in conflict, and in Pat’s words, ‘thought-terminating clichés’. Listening to Jo talking about her father, the values he lived by, the grandad to her two daughters he would never be, the close relationship she had with him – it was then that something shifted in Pat’s awareness and it dawned on him that he had killed not just a member of the enemy, but Jo’s father. A human being. And probably a fine human being, considering Jo being such a fine woman.

“Something has unveiled in that moment for me and I think that’s been at the heart of our – for sure my – journey ever since. Trying to get a wider perspective of those we were in conflict with and understand their pain, their side of it, their story. Now I had learned from the experience of meeting the Other, and in my former ignorance, delusion, arrogance, I hadn’t foreseen how valuable and how liberating that lesson would be in terms of my own humanity and perception of the world.” Pat Magee

Pat’s motivation moved away from a solely political obligation to a personal need for understanding and to listen and hear what Jo had to say. And he became a good listener, someone who would notice and care – someone to trust.

“After three hours I said to Pat I’m gonna go now. And he said to me ‘I’m really sorry I killed your dad. And I said something to Patrick that I don’t think he understood at the time, I said ‘I’m so glad it was you’. His preparedness to engage, to feel the emotional impact, to actually know he killed a human being, and all that means is huge. And I acknowledge that. I felt like I had broken a taboo in society but I knew I wanted to go back.” Jo Berry

Despite the fact that Pat had killed Jo’s father, despite all the differences, they continued to meet and further their dialogue. After 21 years and hundreds of conversations, it’s still not easy. Calling it friendship seems to be most inappropriate but there’s a depth of trust and a readiness to engage in direct and painful conversation with each other again and again. Jo remembers being on a plane with Pat, going to a peace conference to give a talk and Pat was teaching her to do cryptic crossword puzzles.

“We’re just like two friends looking at a crossword puzzle. And on one level, that is very normal, but it’s not normal. It doesn’t feel like I’m just seeing anyone. Because, he did plant that bomb to kill my father but he is also the man who’s engaging me for 21 years, who I’ve travelled with and we’re changing the story. And for changing that story, I feel like something is healing deeply inside myself.” Jo Berry

That deep healing Jo is talking about doesn’t necessarily mean that she has forgiven Pat. There’s a lot of pressure around forgiveness. People have given up their religion because they were angry and couldn’t bring themselves around to forgive. Jo prefers the concept of empathy, which she feels is empowering and can actively heal rifts and divisions between the parties. Empathising means putting yourself in the Other’s place. Knowing more about Pat’s community, Jo started to wonder, had she lived his life, would she have made the same choice? Realising that, there was nothing to forgive, only understanding empathy. That’s how she felt with loyalist volunteers and British soldiers she was engaging with in conflict transition workshops as well. Pat himself would never ask for forgiveness:

“What I’ve done in the past was in full conscious. What I can say is that I’m conflicted because of that past. I can’t forgive myself, because I don’t know what that means. The best I can hope for is through this process of re-engaging with the past that I can somehow be less conflicted about this.” Pat Magee

The political and societal inequality that lead to the armed struggle, Pat believes there was no other way. He continues the republican struggle by confronting the post-conflict narrative of those who wouldn’t give the republican perspective any legitimacy. He engages in difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths. It’s about empathy and understanding. In Northern Ireland the physical conflict has more or less ended but there’s tension under the surface and things are still raw. Pat’s notoriety that accompanies him to this day in certain places along with his republican stance might make it hard for some people to accept him as an ambassador for peace. Something he had to painfully realise when the charity CAUSEWAY ceased to exist within weeks after it was launched. The interest was there but the political situation of the time and the outworks of a divided society made it impossible for the Protestant and loyalist population to attend the venue with Pat Magee at its centre.

Jo went on to establish the charity BUILDING BRIDGES FOR PEACE and Pat’s been working with her. Together they’re giving talks and workshops around the world, underlining the charity’s vision of peace in the world through a non-violent way and understanding the reason for violence. Jo and Pat’s journey is remarkable and it is possible and generally evokes hope that damaged relationships from conflict can be restored. There’s no way around dealing with the legacy of conflict. It’s essential on a personal, political and judicial level. Simply telling the people to draw a line under the past doesn’t work.

Jo Berry and Patrick Magee

If you want to learn more about a very personal process of reconciliation I suggest you read Patrick Magee’s latest book WHERE GRIEVING BEGINS.

Marie-Therese Fay, Mike Morrisey, Marie Smythe, Northern Ireland’s Troubles, 1999
Patrick Magee, Where Grieving Begins, 2021
Patrick Magee, Interview, 20 May 2021 / 8 Feb 2022
Pat Magee, Jo Berry, The Journey – 21 years after the first meeting, Youtube, 24 Nov 2021
Peter Shirlow, Jonathan Tonge, James McAuley, Catherine McGlynn, Abandoning Historical Conflict?, 2010
James Waller, Irish News, 16 Aug 2021

Irish News

“At nights we stand and look up at the stars, and beg the moon: ‘please tell us where they are; ‘cause you’re the only friend who saw them die and the only friend who now knows where they lie.’ So many questions keep runnin’ thro’ our heads and at times our hearts still won’t believe you’re dead. But, if and when we fin’lly bring you home,
oh you’ll never ever ever rest alone”

Extract from the song YOU’LL NEVER DISAPPEAR, composed by Malachy Duffin

12 The Disappeared

Confirmed and assumed burial locations of four IRA victims

Ireland is well known for its vast bogland where people dig for peat to heat their homes turning them nice and cosy. Seamus Heaney composed his famous poem ‘Bogland’, tales have been told and myths of the otherworld handed down the family line. They preserve thousands of years old chunks of butter and mummified bodies – witnesses of the past. Miles from any town, remote wasteland or noman’s land, bogland also served as perfect burial ground for people killed during the conflict. Shot and secretly interred for stealing, informing, betraying. That’s what the republican paramilitaries said. The truth of it has been accepted, disputed, confuted or buried along with the sixteen (official) victims that became known as THE DISAPPEARED. It happened in the 1970s and 1980s but didn’t reach public conscience until 1999, when the IRA acknowledged the majority of the killings.

The disappearances took place in a vicious political conflict and the IRA made it perfectly clear to their volunteers and the wider republican and nationalist community what to expect if they step out of line. Informers were the lowest of the low, grassing on their own community, they were despicable. Punishment by court martial and execution or if they were lucky expulsion from the country were part of the IRA’s constitutional means to defend the war of liberation. The atmosphere was tense, dark, frightening. A lot of the rules had gone.

In 2014, the remains of Brendan Megraw were found in Oristown Bog, Co Meath

“Resting momentarily on a wall of the bridge, I ponder on the confluence of channels as the River Cor flowing below marks the border. A short distance to the north where Armagh meets Monaghan, it will merge with another river and then, further along, between Tynan and Caledon, with yet another. Both those rivers are called the Blackwater, one rising on Sliabh Baegh on the southern side of the Clougher Valley and flowing through Monaghan’s Tydavnet, Monaghan and Donagh parishes, the other rising on Murley Mountain and flowing through the Clougher Valley and marking the boundary between Tyrone and Monaghan. Two rivers with the same name is surely a prime example of the duplication brought about from partition of the island.”

Darach MacDonald, 2018

11 The Border

River Blackwater, Caledon, Co. Tyrone

It was in May 1921 that Ireland became effectively two. One accommodating the Catholics, the other the Protestants. The south was finally free to go back speaking irish, playing the bodhran, do their native thing and the north got itself busy clearing the road to be as British as Finchley. Neither would have to talk to each other ever again and peace would finally be established on this war-ridden island. A clear cut – if only it wasn’t for the Catholics in the province of Ulster – too small a minority to ask for anything such as civil rights, yet big enough to be feared to do just that. So to assure the unionist people of the North and himself, first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, later Lord Craigavon, established a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant People’.

Both states were busy tinkering away on their constitutional fantasies, both treated their religious minorities with contempt and they both mostly ignored each other. Through hostile laws empowering the Catholic Church, the 10 per cent Protestant minority in the south declined to a mere 5 per cent over the years and the north’s one third Catholic minority was dealt with solid unionist supremacist politics which denied them as good as everything except breathing. Partition was a divisive action and produced divided understanding.

To consolidate unionist control, the north made do with only six counties of Ulster, out of the nine. Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal with their many Catholic inhabitants were pushed back to the south. No boundary commission was going to change anything and the initial temporary border based on 13th Century county boundaries making its way with remarkable disregard through fields, farms, homes and villages, still runs its arbitrary course today.

Brian McKinney made the mistake of stealing from paramilitaries – weapons, according to the IRA, money according to the family, that he spent on a pair of shoes for a mate and hamburgers and Chinese take away. They came after him and he paid it back, thinking that was it, when it wasn’t. A week later the IRA took him over the border to Colghagh Bog from where he was recovered in 1999, 21 years later. His mum Margaret said that it was like murdering a child,

“I never thought that there was anything seriously wrong with him, just that he was very childish, but when he was fifteen he was diagnosed with a genetic condition, he had the mind of a six year old. My Brian was just five foot tall. He had chronic asthma and a wee learning disability, God love him. He was naive and easily led. Brian was a threat to no one.”

Although 21, Peter Wilson had learning difficulties and the intellect of a 14 year old. He was talking about joining the army – a Catholic boy from west Belfast – there was an innocence about him. When he didn’t come home from playing football in the park, against all odds, the family started to think he might have gone away with the army anyway, because

“he had stayed with the army for five days. He wasn’t arrested but rather went voluntarily, he was interested. They kept him for most of the week in the guise of letting him see the base and telling him about army life but the real reason was that they wanted to get information out of him about the IRA. Back then the army and the police were recruiting informers all the time.” Patricia, Peter's sister

The IRA accused Peter to be an informer, shot and buried him at a picturesque beach on the Antrim coast and kept quiet about it. That was in 1973. His remains were found in 2010. The family spent many days on that beach, unaware of Peter’s presence. It comes as a comfort to them that during all that time they were so close. They now have a grave to visit, Peter is reunited with his mum and dad, but that beach in Waterfoot is his real resting place, he’s been there for so long. It’s become a place of memory. A terrible beauty that preserves the truth of violence.

Peter Wilson was found in 2010 in Waterfoot, Co Antrim

In 2003 Jean McConville was found on Shillington Beach, Co Louth

The same organisation that took on the role of protecting the tight knit Catholic communities from attacks executed the people from within that community they thought were informers. The volunteers were part of that community, maybe a neighbour or former classmate. They would sit beside the victims’ families at mass, they would be their taxi driver or standing in front of them at the grocer’s. The stigma of having a relative that is accused of being an informer would be isolating, the whole community would be cautious, trying not to be associated with you. In violent conflict, asking questions, speaking out and challenging the dominant power can be dangerous. So instead of offering support and assistance, people mainly tried to stay away from these dark things and avoided the bereaved.

“We were warned against asking too many questions about what might have happened or who might have taken him. But what were we supposed to do? It was complete insanity, my son had just vanished off the face of the earth and we were expected to do nothing about it. The way that we were treated, especially having no one to turn to.” Margaret McKinney, Brian’s mother

Silence was everywhere. In the neighbourhood, the church, at work, within families themselves. They were told in various ways not to ask questions and they were misled into believing that their loved ones were still alive. For decades the wives, parents and children lived in a sort of purgatory, surrounded by fear, uncertainty, shame, hope and desperation, unable to grieve or move on.

“I never went to the media or pointed the finger at those who might have taken him. I had to be careful for fear my other sons would get into trouble. This went on for years - years of silence, years of not knowing, no information, no sightings, no body and no grave to visit.” Mary, Gerry Evans’ mother

It’s hard to tell what the thinking was behind the IRA’s strategy to disappear the victims. Why putting the families through that ordeal of not knowing what had happened to their loved ones? Was it not enough to take them away from them? Some of the disappeared hailed from distinct republican families themselves. Disappearing an alleged informer might have been in the families’ interest, saving them from the embarrassment of having a tout amongst them and being ostracised by the community. But in the end, however way you want to argue, it was cruel, inhumane and it took its toll on the families in terms of their mental and physical health and their family life in general.

Latest search for Columba McVeigh at Bragan Bog, Co Monaghan

Search crew for Columba McVeigh at Bragan Bog, Co Monaghan

While republican paramilitaries pulled the trigger, the state’s and security forces’ involvement can’t be dismissed. For the sake of getting information about the IRA they recruited people, mostly young and naive men from the republican community, using all kinds of methods, cajoling, bribing and compromising, not shying away from planting false evidence in order to coerce and threaten them into collaboration. A responsibility the state to this day doesn’t fully acknowledge but cost the lives of young men such as Columba McVeigh, who was murdered and disappeared for admitting to the IRA to be a British army agent with instructions to infiltrate the republican army. He was a 19 year old boy with learning difficulties and hardly any meaningful information for the British state.

Columba is one of three disappeared still missing. The latest search at the remote Bragan Bog in Co Monaghan ended in 2019 without a result. As part of the peace process the INDEPENDENT COMMISSION FOR THE LOCATION OF VICTIMS’ REMAINS (ICLVR) was established. All information given to the Commission is entirely confidential, it can’t be used in court and anonymity is guaranteed. People with information for the Commission cannot be prosecuted.

Information is mainly coming from the republican movement, with which the Commission has established an absolute trusting relationship in the more than two decades of their existence. The ICLVR’s head of the investigating team Geoff Knupfer, and media adviser Dennis Godfrey, who is also a member of the board of the WAVE TRAUMA CENTRE, which was instrumental to get the ICLVR started are adamant that if Columba was buried where they are told, they would have found him. The problem is that memories might not be totally accurate after all that time, let alone the amount of stress involved during the operation in pitch dark night. Also the landscape might have changed. Trees grow, tracks disappear, buildings are gone.

Geoff Knupfer and Dennis Godfrey at the Stormont Hotel

Outside Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten, Robert Nairac, the British army captain of the Grenadier Guards, is the highest profile case. But the one the Commission has the least information about. Not enough credible information to start digging at a certain location anyway. It’s said that he was abducted from a pub in the north of Ireland and killed right over the border on a field or in a forest. Common sense says he won’t be too far away from that area, as in those times, driving around the border with a body in the back wouldn’t be particularly clever. There have been a lot of allegations flying around all these years that he was involved in various atrocities. But Geoff Knupfer says that Nairac wasn’t in Ireland when some of these crimes occurred:

“Books have been published and articles have been written and of course people read the books and repeat them and forty years on, just everybody assumes it’s fact. It’s terribly difficult to try to counter and I guess it causes problems over the years, as people say to us, ‘why would I want to help, this man was a criminal, he was a villain.’ When actually there is no evidence to support that. I think there are difficulties because he is a British soldier.”

Dennis Godfrey joins the conversation –

“Some of those stories whereby he was put through a meat grinder, that’s been discounted. We don’t take that seriously anymore. For a whole lot of reasons, not least for a practical one.” Dennis Godfrey

“We have been absolutely assured by senior republicans that this didn’t happen. And I’m prepared to say that. Not by who, but that. The people who were involved at the time were trying to get the security forces off their backs.” Geoff Knupfer

So there you go. The myth that keeps coming up leaving a wee niggle of doubt – gone and dusted.

The Three Steps Bar in Drumintee, South Armagh, from where in 1977 Robert Nairac was abducted

The region around Ravensdale Forest in Co Louth where Robert Nairac is believed to be buried

During the conflict, one of the most drastic accusations in the republican tradition was to be called an informer and outside the republican movement to be an IRA member. The consequences in both situations could be lethal. People joined paramilitary groups who under normal circumstances wouldn’t have gotten involved, but still, many of the disappeared do not fit with the typical image of a victim. They would still be at the bottom of the victim hierarchy as the issue of victimhood is connected to the concept of innocence. Legitimate victimhood is a contested category and a complex issue in post-conflict Northern Ireland:

“One of the central areas of contention is the definition of who constitutes a legitimate victim, and specifically, the attempted differentiation between innocents and those who perpetrated violence. Those who were involved in criminal activity and those who were actively involved in the IRA do not fit easily with the notion of the innocent victim. Those who were involved in informing would have been seen as deserving of some form of punishment by most Republicans. The disappeared reflect the practical difficulty, especially in the messy reality of conflict, of the perpetrator/victim, innocent/guilty dichotomies, and shows how subjective ‘innocence’ can be as a concept.” Lauren Dempster

With the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT in 1998 things began to change. The republican movement shifted away from violence towards the political arena and acknowledged the existence of THE DISAPPEARED. Their families established a campaign to get the remains of their loved ones back. They employed their collective identity – THE FAMILIES OF THE DISAPPEARED – to speak to wider society about family relationship and the importance of Christian burial. They appealed to common cultural values. By leaving out anything political and focusing on the humanitarian nature of their campaign, the sympathy for the victims and their families spiralled upwards and got a lot of support.

Shrine for Columba McVeigh at Bragan Bog

Before his recovery in 2017, the family of Seamus Ruddy lit candles, gathered wild flowers and left a crucifix at the site where he was assumed to be buried. They brought soil from their mother’s grave to mix it with the local soil and brought local soil back to reunite mother and son in a symbolic gesture. Unlike in many other western countries, rituals around death and burial remains a major event in Ireland. Susan McKay says that –

“the idea of not allowing the families to recover the bodies so that they can give them a proper Christian burial – there’s not allowed to be any closure because there isn’t any ceremony of death. It’s the inhumanity of it, and also the absolute disrespect in a culture – the Republican culture – which highly regards the rites of passage of death.”

Brendan Megraw’s mother, like many other mothers, put her son’s name on the family gravestone hoping to have him reunited with them if not in life, at least in death. She died before he was found. Each year on All Souls Day THE FAMILIES OF THE DISAPPEARED gather to remember their loved ones. Silenced through the IRA for so long, they speak out by walking in silence to the steps of Stormont where they lay down their wreath with three remaining lilies for the still missing Columba McVeigh, Joe Lynskey and Robert Nairac. Many mothers and fathers have gone to their graves with broken hearts, but the next generation takes over. There is no closure until all remains have been recovered and returned to their families.

For now, it’s unfinished business –

13th annual All Souls Silent Walk

13th annual All Souls Silent Walk

The ICLVR can be contacted:
Telephone 00800-55585500 / International +353 1 602 8655
E-mail information to Secretary@iclvr.ie / By post to ICLVR PO Box 10827

Lauren Dempster, Transitional Justice and the ‘Disappeared’ of Northern Ireland, 2019
Dennis Godfrey, Geoff Knupfer, Interview on 22 January 2018
WAVE Trauma Centre, The Disappeared, 2012

Al Jazeera, Belfast Telegraph, Irish Independent, Irish Times, Telegraph

11 The Border

River Blackwater, Caledon, Co. Tyrone

Border crossing, Foyduff, Co. Armagh

Border crossing, Foyduff, Co. Armagh

According to Fintan O’Toole, there are 208 official border crossings (and an infinite number of unofficial ones) on the 310 miles border from Carlingford Lough to Lough Foyle in Derry – compared to around 137 on the entire Eastern flank of the European Union, from the Baltic all the way down to Turkey. Most of the time the border is invisible, in a river, a field, squiggling through forests and small country roads. It just goes all over the place and only the changing of speed from miles to kilometres, the yellow road marks and the remarkable frequent appearance of the ‘town’ Amach give away that you’ve crossed into the other jurisdiction. (One can hardly blame Jacob Rees-Mogg for not visiting the border during Brexit negotiations, because

“doing so wouldn’t offer any insight beyond what one can get by studying it. Going and wandering across a few roads isn’t going to tell me anything about that further.”)

But the border is not only a series of mostly invisible crossings. It’s a witness of disrupted identity and lasting trauma. It divided functional communities and alienated people with identical beliefs, attitudes and traditions. Whereas people were going to the closest town unhindered, now they had to get off the bus at customs, walk over the border and board another bus, that town was now in a foreign country. Many a thriving small town has gone to sleep losing their natural footfall to different currencies and custom rules – and the Troubles which turned the Irish border into a militarised frontier of checkpoints and the border towns into fortified army camps.

Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh

Border crossing, Carlingford, Co Louth

The heavy army presence at the border during the Troubles, their watchtowers, helicopters and very sophisticated surveillance technology could not stop the IRA from crossing the border at any given time (just as it didn’t stop any security personnel by that matter). It’s as porous as a Swiss cheese and simply unpoliceable. And yet with Brexit and the uncertainty over the outcome of the protocol negotiations the threat of a hard border on the island of Ireland creeps back into the political arena and the hearts and minds of the people on this island.

The Chief Constable Simon Byrne scratches his head over the potential of having to police the border and waits for answers from London. THE SCOTTISH POLICING FEDERATION has expressed concerns for the safety of officers sent to Northern Ireland. They have been reassured that they would be well looked after. Some sales of disused border police stations have been halted by the PSNI in case they need to turn them into fortified customs posts. The crime reporter Allison Morris, was pointing out that –

“Anyone who thinks these buildings won’t become targets, just as they were during the lifetime of their original use, is living in Brexit la la land. Placing police back into a security role in border areas as protectors of customs posts is a propaganda dream for those who would like to see a return to conflict in Northern Ireland. A hard border is a lottery win for the dissidents who have been using Brexit as a recruiting sergeant.”

And in the words of life-long political activist Eamonn McCann –

“If you have border installations, people will shoot at them — that’s a certainty. The people who shoot at them will not represent a majority, but how many people does it take to organise and carry out an ambush? Maybe four or five people. And once these installations are shot at, they will have to then be defended by soldiers, etc. It has been reported that they are going to bring in 4,000 police officers from England, Scotland, and Wales to patrol the border. Like fuck they are. How much are they going to pay them to leave their homes and go out there and stand on the border?

Unlike organised crime driven by money, paramilitary groups need a story to justify their cause and they will use Brexit as their narrative. The threat of violence, should new infrastructure be erected at the border, has been heavily discussed since Brexit negotiations have started and in 2019, the UK changed their legislation from COUNTER-TERRORISM AND SECURITY ACT into COUNTER-TERRORISM AND BORDER SECURITY ACT, allowing the security forces to search anybody without reasonable suspicion within one mile of the border. The communities around the border, that are primarily Catholic and nationalist, will be treated differently. Not a great recipe for peace on the island of Ireland, as history tells. Now it hasn’t been used yet, but it’s there, oven-ready, so to say.

Border protest, Killeen, Co. Armagh

Border protest, Killeen, Co. Armagh

Border protest, Kelly’s Cellar, Belfast

To prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland, EU regulatory checks on certain goods from Britain are now being made at Northern Irish ports such as Larne, creating a border between Britain and Northern Ireland. It doesn’t take a genius to see anger rising in loyalist/unionist communities who believe that in this case, they are treated differently from the rest of the United Kingdom which makes them somehow less British than the British on the actual island of Britain. The protocol is cutting them off their mother land and pushes them towards a United Ireland. They won’t admit it, but the very thing that should have steadied the position of Northern Ireland within the Union – Brexit – is now turning against them, making a border poll and a possible reunification with the south more probable than any IRA campaign throughout the 100-year-existence of Northern Ireland ever has. The law of unintended consequences.

Unionist/Loyalist ralley, Ulster Hall

One has to listen hard to hear a leading voice that would reassure the loyalist working class, the community most vulnerable to be exploited by paramilitaries or politics. Whilst the leader of the DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST PARTY, Jeffrey Donaldson, exercises in sable-rattling by declaring to walk away from devolved government if the UK/EU don’t do what he wants – scrap the protocol – leaving Northern Ireland once again without an assembly, the LOYALIST COMMUNITIES COUNCIL, an all-male organisation representing paramilitary groups that should have left the stage a couple of decades ago, threatens Boris Johnson to end the ceasefire and admits to violence on BBC RADIO ULSTER –

“The protocol gives effect to the Irish nationalist position at the expense of the unionist position. This undermines the basis on which the Combined Loyalist Military Command agreed their 1994 ceasefire. If the EU is not prepared to honour the entirety of the Agreement then it will be responsible for the permanent destruction of the Agreement.” – “If it comes to the bit where we have to fight to maintain our freedoms within the United Kingdom then so be it.”

Riots at interfaces, burning cars, bus stops and buses in recent weeks and months have been linked to loyalist anger at the protocol. During the hijacking of a bus, the driver was informed that this was the start of a campaign against the NORTHERN IRELAND PROTOCOL. The bus driver managed to get out before the bus was petrol bombed and set on fire. It’s been the fourth bus so far this year. A loyalist source from the responsible PROTESTANT ACTION FORCE said, that if the protocol doesn’t go, a few burning buses will only be the tip of the iceberg.

Riot on Lanark Way, Belfast

Leftovers of car, Tigers Bay, Belfast

Tigers Bay, Belfast

Unionist tension and anger and nationalist concern and growing impatience are palpable these days. The uncertainty over the direction of travel for Northern Ireland puts the region on stand-by. If the negotiations on the protocol end up fruitless, what will happen to the north? Will there be some kind of land border anyway, upsetting the border communities and the nationalists? Or will it stay in the Irish Sea, keep upsetting the unionists? Will the economy get worse? Will Stormont close its doors for good? Will the six counties of Ulster glide back to conflict and violence? Iain Turner who’s got quite some inside knowledge of the UVF, the paramilitary group most likely to resume to violent measures should Northern Ireland’s constitutional integrity be further challenged by the protocol, is not that worried. While not disputing that there could be some violence and disruption, the analogy ‘going back to the dark days’, in his view is exaggerated. The people got far too used to peace, they won’t return to a sustained, structured violence like in the 1970s to 1990s.

“Of course it’s extremely upsetting when your car is burned out, but people need to maintain some calm perspective, a burning car is not the same as a 500lb bomb going off in the city centre. We have to see that we don’t get carried away in covering that sort of thing, we’re far away from where we were during the Troubles. Buses being burned was a daily thing and it was by far the least disturbing of all the violence that was going on then. It has to be put in context to where Northern Ireland has come from and where it is now.”

Some unionist politicians seem to love adding fuel to fear and anxiety around the protocol. The people are told that their British identity is being eroded and next thing will be a United Ireland. The fearmongering, the portentous speeches, paramilitary shows of strength, political undermining of contracts and agreements – it’s working up people’s emotions. Under the protocol, Northern Ireland remains inside the EU’s single market for goods, offering business unique access to both the European and Britain market. Northern Ireland could become a hugely attractive investment location. Some businesses already secured a spot in the region, creating jobs and opportunities. With certainty on the protocol, industrial renaissance for the north could be on the radar. It’s for sure possible to find solutions on trade. But it’s what is in the hearts and minds of people, that is the problem.

Tigers Bay, Belfast

Borderland: Policing the Border, The Dark State, 1 November 2021
Darach MacDonald, Hard Border, 2018
Eamonn McCann, If you have Border Installations, People will shoot at them, Jacobin Magazine, September 2019
Allison Morris, Brexit-at-any-cost strategy hasn’t been thought out, Irish News, 3 October 2019
Paul Nolan, Running out of Road, Dublin Review of Books, June 2021
Fintan O’Toole, Brexit: Ireland and the English Question, Youtube World Affairs, 12 October 2018
The UVF: From 1966 to the Northern Ireland Protocol, The Dark State, 5 August 2021

Belfast Telegraph, Guardian, Irish News, Irish Times, London Review of Books

“Damp on the wall, so she climbs into bed with mummy. There’s four in the bed and the little one said, I HATE IT HERE. With sunken eyes, she’s sleep deprived. She goes to school but she’s behind.”

Poem by Fionnuala Kennedy, based on a Belfast teenage girl, 2019

10 A Home

Hillview site, north Belfast

According to the NORTHERN IRELAND HOUSING EXECUTIVE, by the End of March 2021 there were 43,971 households on the social housing waiting list with at least 24,717 children under 18 years amongst them. Two thirds are considered to be in housing stress and are on the transfer list because their home is not safe or suitable and they need to be moved. Over half, and at least 14,000 children, are deemed full duty applicant homeless, living in hostels, in overcrowded apartments, staying with friends or family on sofas or in houses with issues such as damp and serious disrepair. The huge lack of social homes results in thousands of families living in dire housing circumstances, in short term private landlord properties which they can’t afford and get them into debts and in the worst case scenario, on the street.

The government’s focus is set on short-term maximising of capital, visible when counting cranes and high-rise glass structures in the city centre and around the dock lands, rather than investing into the future of children from marginalised backgrounds and thus into social equality and stability. Just like so many other European cities. The problem with development in Northern Ireland is that it is linked to so called normalisation and the move away from violence.

The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 came with a reward for building peace, the peace dividend, which is predominantly visible in the emergence of expensive tourism attractions, new shops, hotels, upmarket restaurants, luxury apartment blocks and office buildings. Development at the heart of peace, conflict transformation in its neo-liberal prime. Nothing to be snubbed upon, considering that in the past people had to go through army turnstile checks entering the city centre, which was completely dead at night. People are grateful having what other cities have. After decades of conflict Belfast’s city centre was run down and development with help from the peace dividend is welcome. The problem is, it comes at a price.

PPR campaign for social housing on Hillview

Carrick Hill social housing campaign

Whilst money of the peace dividend goes into gentrification – middle-class consumerism as harbinger of a shared post-conflict society – the gentrified areas expand into working-class communities with much need for social housing. For them, the promise of a peace dividend improving their lives does not materialise. The city’s forward moving struggle with the trauma of conflict plays out in their much deprived communities, attributing to a widespread notion that the peace process is a middle-class endeavour and sectarianism a prevailing working-class phenomenon. A stereotypical concept that let’s politicians and decision-makers off the hook way too easily.

For the first time, a Minister responsible for the DEPARTMENT FOR COMMUNITIES, which is responsible for housing in Northern Ireland, admitted to a housing crisis, calling the current system broken and the religious inequality in housing allocations worrisome. The average need of social housing in Catholic areas is 1,041, according to Housing Executive 2018/19 figures. In Protestant areas it’s 40. Nonetheless, more land is proportionally purchased and social homes are being built in Protestant areas. The UNITED NATIONS confirmed in several reports: sectarianism remains institutionalised and disparities between Catholics and Protestants still persist. A rather damning situation, considering that the unfair allocation of social housing played a big part in bringing along the Civil Rights Movement 50 years ago – and eventually led to the Troubles.

Catholic New Lodge, north Belfast

Protestant Tigers Bay, north Belfast

Tomas locking the gate between the New Lodge and Tigers Bay for the night

The conflict has led to many people living in single-identity neighbourhoods, as a means of feeling safe. In the same time, the Protestant population is steadily declining while the numbers of Catholics and those who identify with neither religion are growing, which means that suitable housing for the mainly Catholic families on the waiting list is in Protestant areas. For Protestants, it’s a hard deal, as Professor Gaffikin from QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST observes,

“Many unionists [mainly Protestants] may see that as incursion onto what was formally ‘their’ land and thereby see it as a physical, visual representation of the political loss of ground that they think they have experienced in their politics and culture. The metaphorical political loss of ground is now being manifest in the physical loss of ground.”

Aware of the electoral impact in their constituencies a change of demographics can have, little is it surprising, when die-hard unionist politicians promote fear and hate in regard of any attempt to build new social housing in or near a Protestant area. In 2019 – after a previous withdrawal of plans following a meeting with senior unionist politicians – work on new homes on Clifton Street has finally started. With the Orange Hall and the traditional marching route down the street during the Twelfth, the location is known as a parading flashpoint and officials of the Orange Order promptly claimed that the City Council didn’t recognise the sensitivities of the area with regards to cultural expression and that the street should be renamed Sectarian Street. Implying of course, that with the new homes, anti-Protestant activities such as attacks on their marches will increase and therefore endanger the Protestant culture.

Clifton Street, north Belfast

In 2017, the Police rapped the doors of four Catholic families, informing them that they were in danger after receiving threats by a loyalist paramilitary group. They left Cantrell Close, a social housing development project with the aim of ‘creating a new, united, reconciled and shared society’. People were too frightened to be interviewed on camera, including Protestant residents who supported their Catholic neighbours. In 2019, a couple with a Catholic-sounding name in a Protestant neighbourhood have been left terrified for their safety after the graffiti ‘24 hours to get out’ appeared at their door. The police informed them that they had to remove the graffiti themselves – a sensitive issue in Northern Ireland – and provided them with a booklet on self protection and the advise to spend the night somewhere else. In 2021, the UVF and UDA placed a Catholic single-mum-of-three under threat, telling her she was not wanted in their Protestant estate. The family had only moved in a few weeks ago, after they were offered the house by the Housing Executive. A few of many more incidents.

According to the PROGRESSIVE UNIONIST PARTY's Dr John Kyle, there are criminals who see being part of a paramilitary organisation as a way to make money and to exercise and gain power:

“If they realise that there are negative feelings towards newcomers they will exploit that for their own ends and they will often sail under the flag of a paramilitary organisation because it gives them a great sense of authority. Paramilitaries should have left the stage, we should be in a post-paramilitary phase now, but the reality is that they haven’t.”

New loyalist paramilitary mural in Carrickfergus

When homeless Catholic families turned down home offerings in areas defined by loyalist paramilitary emblems, the Housing Executive concluded that ‘choice’ was one of the reasons why Catholics sit longer on waiting lists. An argument emphatically contested by Daniel Holder, Deputy Director of the COMMITTEE ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE,

“The obvious reason why many Catholics cannot move to areas where there is loyalist paramilitary activity is that they fear they will encounter sectarian intimidation. It’s shocking to insinuate that Catholics face extreme housing inequality about of some sort of personal choice. There needs to be an urgent review into how racist and sectarian intimidation in housing is being handled."

There is a long history of community tension resulting in peace lines in the form of fences, walls, gates, parks or wasteland, keeping Catholic and Protestant communities apart. Any changes require political and community agreement.

Peace wall New Lodge/Tigers Bay

Mackies site, west Belfast

Hillview site, North Belfast

THE PARTICIPATION AND THE PRACTICE OF RIGHTS (PPR) organisation has been campaigning for a long time, in order to get social homes built. With various artistic and activist interventions they keep putting the focus on empty land such as Hillview in the north and Mackies in the west of the city. Both sites are situated in areas with an immense demand for Catholic social homes but they’re said to be functioning as buffer zones between the divided communities. In 2017, Hillview was granted planning permission for a retail-only development and in 2018, regarding Mackies, the BELFAST CITY COUNCIL published the plans to create new shared space in an area affected by segregation by building a walking and cycling pathway for the health and well-being of the citizens. In the same year, the same official body passed a motion stating:

“The Council recognises that we are in the midst of a housing and homelessness crisis. The Council recognises the impact of homelessness on the children of Belfast. On three separate occasions in the last 10 years, the UNITED NATIONS has intervened, urging the Westminster Government and the devolved Stormont Executive to intensify their efforts to address and overcome persistent religious inequalities in social housing.”

Despite many affirmations of prioritising the issue of homelessness, political will seems to be lacking behind political status quo and economic greed. Pádraig Ó Meiscill from EQUALITY CAN'T WAIT/PPR spells it out clearly:

“What seems to be blocking the resolution of this crisis is two things. One of them is old fashioned bigotry to which the people in the north are very familiar with. It dictates that the wrong kind of people can’t get homes in the wrong kind of area because that upsets the electoral balance. It used to be called gerrymandering. I’m not sure if this term is still applicable, but it’s certainly an injustice. And the second issue is rampant speculation. Developers across the city who see dollar signs in building hotels and multi-story car parks and see only problems with building houses.”

Build Homes Now! campaign by PPR at City Hall

Equality Can’t Wait campaign by PPR at the Housing Executive

They have come in many colours, the PPR campaigns for basic human rights – the right to a safe home in this case. The Hillview site has been taken hostage with families and children building and drawing their own homes, resulting in a wider poster campaign. The Mackies site’s been sunflower seed-bombed to raise awareness of the Sunflower (social housing) project on the site. Serious feasible studies and plans for social housing on Hillview and Mackies have been delivered. The Housing Executive’s been invaded and political parties have been met in City Hall. Numerous videos, poems and performances are out there to watch. The YES MEN have been invited for a political stunt at a conference which resulted in a legal threat issued by no other than the City Council. Nonetheless, they keep on fighting. The public space is the stage, politicians and official decision makers the targets, we – the public – are there to take notice, share and participate. Because, the YES MEN said,

“This is important, it needs to happen. And not only that it should happen, but that it could happen, if enough people pressure the City Council and the government on it.”

I’d like to conclude this broadcast by reciting another part of the poem by Fionnuala Kennedy, based on and performed by Abbie Morris:

“She’s thirteen. She can’t remember when she realised it wasn’t normal. It’s always been temporary – ‘just for now’, ‘it’ll get better’ – and then there’s her friends. It’s embarrassing to say, I LIVE IN A HOSTEL. You can’t stay or come over. The panic, the fear – of what they’ll think when they hear, we’ve been homeless for years. So she makes excuses, she lies and after a while they stop inviting her over because she never returns the favour.”

Build Homes Now! campaign by PPR on Hillview

Build Homes Now News, NVTV, 2 May 2019
Conor McFall, Gentrification in a post-conflict city: the case of Belfast, 9 February 2018
Fionnuala Kennedy, www.nlb.ie/video/video-2021-05-plan_vest_fund_build_-_a_poem
PPR, Response to Belfast City Council consultation, 24 October 2019
PPR, Waiting for a childhood to call their own, Youtube, 19 Oct 2018
Rory Winters, The Detail, 19 February 2020 – 2 March 2021

BBC, Belfast Telegraph, Irish News, Irish Times, PPR, Slugger O’Toole

09 Untouchable

“As children and as teenagers they were told that they were less than others. Significant numbers have
struggled all their lives with depression and addiction. Many now look back sadly on failed marriages and broken relationships. And larger numbers are now proud grandparents, contented with the achievement of creating and holding their own family, in spite of growing up without being taught about family life. They are victims but also survivors. They hold a wisdom. Things they have learned from their own brokenness; how to be strong in the face of adversity; how to recover from separation and disruption; about the loss of control; about isolation and, perhaps worst of all, about what it means to live a life trying to recover from being violated in the most intimate of ways. Many got on the Liverpool boat at 16 years of age and have never come back. But most have lived their lives here, though their stories have been largely invisible to us.”

Brendan McAllister, Interim Advocate for Victims and Survivors of Historical Abuse, 2020

Kincora Boys' Home, East Belfast

Lord Mountbatten loved Ireland. ”No place has thrilled me more,” he wrote to his wife Edwina, when he first laid eyes on Mullaghmore and CLASSIEBAWN CASTLE in Sligo. He thought the Irish were his friends and it’s said that he held sympathetic views on the republican demands in the North of Ireland. But the royal family wasn’t welcome. Mountbatten ignored the emphatically expressed warnings of the Gardaí, not to holiday in these parts of the world and eventually paid the ultimate price. The IRA blew him to kingdom come while he was out on his boat SHADOW V lifting lobster posts. With him were his fourteen year old grandson Nicholas, fifteen year old Paul who’s said to have been a paid hand and Nicholas’ grandmother. That was in 1979.

The Newtownards and then Upper Newtownards Road cuts right through East Belfast and straight into STORMONT, the Northern Irish Parliament. After two arson attacks in the last two years, a Victorian-style building half way up the road is waiting to be demolished to make place for a new apartment block. The KINCORA BOYS' HOME for troubled teenage boys was closed in 1980, after it emerged that at least 29 boys have been sexually abused during their stay there.

In close vicinity, East Belfast’s long-established four-star PARK AVENUE HOTEL opposite the STRANDTOWN HALL – home to the VICTORIA ULSTER UNIONIST ASSOCIATION and since 2008 also the ULSTER UNIONIST PARTY – also stands empty and could be razed to the ground. Given its location, the hotel was very popular with unionist politicians. Richard Kerr was in KINCORA. In 1977, at age 15, he and a friend were taken to the hotel. They were given drinks and

“there was other gentlemen there. And then he would say to me ‘we have somebody nice, why don’t you go up and spend some time with him, he’s got a gift for you.’ And we would perform oral sex in one of the rooms of Park Avenue Hotel. My friend said ‘it’s always best to say nothing, Richard. Nobody is going to believe you.’” Richard Kerr

Park Avenue Hotel, East Belfast

Europa Hotel, City Centre

Richard and some other boys were taken to the EUROPA HOTEL in the city centre which ran the WHIP AND SADDLE BAR, a notorious meeting place for older men who were sexually interested in younger men. To QUEEN’S COURT in Bangor and to GIRTON LODGE next door of STRANDTOWN HALL. They have been taken over the water to London where they were introduced to the world of Westminster and they have been trafficked to CLASSIEBAWN CASTLE, into the arms of Lord Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, former chief of the defence staff, first sea lord, the last viceroy of India, Prince Charles’s favourite uncle Dickie, whose homosexuality and fondness of underaged boys was an open secret.

Even though rumours of a paedophile ring in the top echelons of society have been circulating for years, the supply of young boys from Northern Ireland went unhindered and became quite legendary in homosexual upper-class circles. They were exploited and groomed into male prostitution and that’s what their lives became. They were given a bit of money here and a wee gift there but above all, they were told to be quiet. The rather unliterate teenage boys with dysfunctional or no family were no threat, as Clint Massey, also a former KINCORA resident, explains:

“I wasn’t able to tell anybody what was happening at the time. I was sixteen, I had a social worker, a young woman of 22 years, different era, you didn’t mention things like that. Just outside the door of the home, it was on the verge of civil war at times. There was armoured cars roaming the street. So it paled into insignificance when you saw the big picture. And nobody would want to listen to somebody like myself.” Clint Massey

The big picture would imply Orangeism, Unionism, Paramilitarism, Royalims, MI5, MI6 and the British government. Clint Massey might have had a point assuming that he and his fellow abuse victims are just small fish in the big sea of a dirty war with powerful pawns – an unpleasant situation emphatically denied by consecutive inquiries and evenly emphatically researched and exposed by various renowned investigative journalists like Joseph de Búrca, Lyra McKee, Andrew Lownie or Chris Moore.

Cassiebawn Castle in County Sligo

Entrance to Cassiebawn

Stormont

KINCORA BOYS' HOME was closed in 1980 after three senior care workers were convicted of abusing boys at the home. William McGrath, the housefather, was one of them. He was an Orangeman and a preacher and the founder of a small, odd loyalist paramilitary group called TARA. McGrath also liked to have his sectarian views heard by preaching the doomsday scenario with the IRA and republicans and Catholics in general at the centre of it. He saw himself as a soldier in the battles of the Lord, preventing the pope ’enslaving the people of God.’ Through TARA he enticed young Protestant men into homosexuality and potential blackmailing, as male homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland until 1982.

There was power and authority that came from within Orange lodges. William McGrath was the leader of Orange Lodge 1303, he was the leader of TARA and he was also well connected to political unionism. He was a powerful man who claimed that he was an agent providing intelligence on loyalist politicians to MI5 and MI6 and that only he knew the whole truth about KINCORA. He took that truth to his grave. However, fact is, that MI5 did run an agent inside TARA gathering information on William McGrath and it was well known to the authorities what was going on inside the walls of KINCORA. Intelligence officers from all sorts of security departments tried to blow the whistle, but they were either told to forget about it by their superiors, or if they were senior army officers themselves, such as Colin Wallace who was with the ultra secret PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS UNIT (PSYOPS), they were vilified and taken out of the picture by fabricated and false accusations, which, in Wallace’s case, landed him in prison.

“I can only conclude, who ever did stop action being taken had considerable power. That must have been from London. I can think of no one in Northern Ireland who would have had that level of authority. My job was to fight terrorism. Kincora was only a small but very distressful sideline and I find it frustrating more than anything else because it should have been very easy to resolve.” Colin Wallace

Wallace was able to clear his name. John McKeague, notorious paedophile loyalist paramilitary of the RED HAND COMMANDO and Robert Bradford MP were not so lucky. They were both shot dead by MI5 agents within the IRISH NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY (INLA) and PROVISIONAL IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY (PIRA). McKeague threatened to talk about KINCORA, should he ever be arrested and Bradford, the outspoken unionist politician, knew things and was a liability. The paramilitaries have been highly infiltrated by the state for a long time. According to journalist Dónal Lavery, the Anglo-Irish paedophile ring included Lord James Molyneaux, Enoch Powell MP, Doctor Morris Fraser, Lord Mountbatten and more people with real sway and clout in society.

“They were protected by the state via the Intelligence Services and their exposure was legally barred on grounds of ‘national security’ in various instances. Essentially, they were practically ‘untouchable’, and could literally get away with all sorts of serious crimes.” Dónal Lavery

The paedophile ring was shielded by MI5 and MI6. But state intelligence also used the network by luring targets like unionist politicians, Orangemen and loyalist paramilitaries into so called ‘honeytraps’ – young boys in hotels made ‘available’ to them – and recording the ‘event’. The threat of being exposed made the members of the paedophile ring vulnerable to blackmail and MI5/MI6 weren’t shy to use their leverage forcing them ‘to do their bidding’.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

The KINCORA-victims have been denied to be part of the London-based INDEMPENDENT INQUIRY INTO CHILD SEX ABUSE (IICSA) established in 2014. What they got is the local HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONAL ABUSE (HIA) inquiry, which lacks the authority to summon people to give evidence as well as to wave the protection of the OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT that allows the government to basically deny access to certain documents if it deems them a national security threat. It also dismisses claims of senior politician-involvement in an Anglo-Irish paedophile ring. Instead, the HIA prefer to keep it local and are happy with the three convicted staff-members back in 1981. It also rejects the allegations that UK security forces knew about the abuse but instead of intervening, used the information to coerce the involved into political or otherwise adherence. Attempts to establish the truth about British state collusion and what went on in KINCORA have so far been blocked and the scale of MI5/MI6 involvement is still unclear.

Sensitive government records regarding Northern Ireland affairs can be kept secret for 30 years. They are held at the PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE OF NORTHER IRELAND (PRONI) in Belfast. Every year official records are being reviewed and some made publicly available. In January 1982, after the trial of William McGrath, Joseph Mains and Raymond Semple, the press started to report on KINCORA. However, files on KINCORA have been prominently absent when documents from 1982 were declassified in 2012. A list of closed files held by PRONI show that some of those files will not be reviewed before 2067 and 2085.

Mullaghmore Bay

The Irish government says that the murder of Lord Mountbatten is still an active case, that’s why no files can be released. According to Northern Ireland journalist Martin Dillon,

“The Garda never closed the Mountbatten file, because they believed it was a wider conspiracy and they were hoping someone would rat out the people up the chain of command who ordered it.” Martin Dillon

The people of Northern Ireland have had a difficult experience when it comes to truth and justice and to what the state agencies have been allowed to get away with and cover-up. And what victims have not been allowed to have: truth and justice. And while the wall of official silence keeps hiding the many secrets of KINCORA, the former residents of this institution just want to see that building gone. They want to be able to pass by and see an empty space. Then they know that it’s gone.

Kincora Boys’ Home after another arson attack

Joseph de Búrca, The Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, Village Magazine, 2 April 2020
Andrew Lownie, Who really kiled Mountbatten?, Sunday Times, 25 April 2021
Lyra McKee, Angels With Blue Faces, 2019
Chris Moore, Spotlight: MI5’s Paedophile Orphanage, 2014
Kincora child abuse victim calls for wider inquiry, Youtube 2015
VIP child abuse: remembering Kincora, MI5 and the CSA cover up, Youtube 2015

Belfast Telegraph, Independent, Irish News, Irish Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph

“Instead of saying: what is your identity and are you willing to die for it, you said: what could you live with? What kind of thinking about identity would be ok so that you can actually get back to some kind of normal life. And what it came up with was a very, very brilliant, delicate, complex arrangement which said: Everybody in Northern Ireland has a right to be – and this is the quotation from the Good Friday Agreement – The birthright of everyone in Northern Ireland to be Irish or British or both, as they may so choose. Very radical rethinking of what identity means. Your identity might be multiple; it’s a matter of choice – so therefore it’s in your head – and because it’s in your head, it could change. It’s contingent. It’s open.”

Fintan O'Toole, 2018

08 Flags

Joe, Ardoyne

It’s summer in Belfast, Twelfth of July, the streets unusually deserted. On a bench in Royal Avenue sits a middle-aged couple, the man’s head on the woman’s shoulder, asleep or crying or just hungover, I don’t know. To their feet lie a few union flags. The night before England has lost against Italy and instead of ‘coming home’, victory went to Rome. Now and then you hear the roaring of a Lambeg drum and some militaristic flute-tunes. The usually never ending number of loyalist marching bands, Orange Order dignitaries, Unionist representatives and hundreds and thousands of spectators parading away on this day of the year is reduced to a few scattered bands and a sleeping couple. Despite the pandemic, the unionist community felt the need to take to the street. Controlled – and vehemently underpinned with ridiculously huge structures for bonfires and over-diligent flying of flags in all sorts of districts. It’s still the biggest celebration of the year. But –

Orange Order celebrating the Twelfth of July

In a country which has suffered invasion, famine, political struggles, civil war, massive emigration and deprivation of all kinds, celebrations can either unite or divide, depending on why and how you celebrate. Do Protestants this time of year celebrate their culture? The survival of their community that perceives itself constantly under threat? Or are they triumphing over the Catholics whose King James in 1690 lost against their King Billy who established Protestant hegemony in Ireland? Denying Catholics the Gaelic language and their own teachers, or indeed for them to own a horse worth more than five pounds? Excluding them from army, civic and political life, disadvantaging them in lease and inheritance law, letting them starve unless they’d abandoned their faith? One side’s celebration can be the other side’s enthralment.

Clearly, Protestants identifying as Unionists and Loyalists feel betrayed by the outcome of Brexit negotiations which sees a border not between the EU and the UK but between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They feel abandoned by a prime minister who doesn’t care all that much about their part in the Union. They see demographics shift, Catholics and ‘Others’ showing for a clear majority and they dread any discussion about a united Ireland. Their superiority affirmed in a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ clearly belongs to the past, even if this hasn’t entered the psyche of die-hard Unionism whose mindset meanders between 1998 pre-Good Friday Agreement, 1969 pre-Civil Rights Movement, Partition in 1921 and the Siege of Derry in the seventeenth century. The problem with the siege-mentality is that it leads to defensive thinking.

Mural of King Billy in Larne

Glynn

Clough

Political Unionism seems to have a problem with the idea of a shared and equal society. It fears conceding the existence of Others. The proliferation of unionist and loyalist flags, banners and painted kerbstones assert the superior position of Britishness within mixed residential areas and shared spaces in general. In the view of the majority of people it’s an eye-sore, it brings down the value of property and it’s intimidating, as a resident explains,

“This is deliberately done so that certain sections of the community can mark out their territory and to intimidate people who live there, especially nationalists [and therefore most probably Catholics] who are moving into that part of town. This has only started within the last few years.” Irish News, 21 June 2021

The claim that shared space doesn’t have to be neutral space has lead to families fleeing their homes under threat from loyalist foot soldiers, to riots, destroyed property, injuries and fed up citizens. Because this marking out of territory has the support of paramilitary groups, neither police nor government are particularly keen on doing anything about it and even though Northern Ireland has enjoyed relative peace for over twenty years, demand for single-identity housing remains steady. So called paramilitaries still create a culture of fear.

“LA”: Loyalist Area. Entrance of Catholic Holy Cross Primary School for Girls, Ardoyne

“No Taigs” (Catholics) in a new shared space project in loyalist area, Tiger’s Bay

The PSNI refuses to remove flags as long as there is no concern for public safety and no criminal offence has occurred. But in Northern Ireland, what flag is flown where, when and how is a sensitive issue, provoking a range of strong reactions. When in 2012 the City Council reduced the days of flying the Union flag on City Hall, all hell broke loose, with thousands of loyalists taking to the streets, protesting and rioting. The protests got smaller in numbers but not in persistence. A handful of dedicated objectors still make a weekly appearance, hanging up their paraphernalia at the gates of City Hall.

Flag protest

For mainstream Unionism, the union trumps all. That’s the one thing you’ve got to be firmest on. Questioning it feels like a threat. Alas, no volume of drum-beats, no muscular displays of paramilitary strength, no rallies or flags will prevent Unionism from becoming an ever bigger minority in the north of Ireland. Looking to the past and holding on to far gone values isn’t going to persuade a younger, more open-minded, better educated and less sectarian generation to follow them into the drenches of the ‘US’ and ‘THEM’ battlefields. They might rather shout ‘OTHER!’ or even ‘BOTH!’ The narrative of monolithic identity – Irish/ Catholic/ Nationalist/Republican and British/Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist – doesn’t reflect Northern Irish society anymore. According to the latest NORTHERN IRISH LIFE AND TIMES SURVEY some 42 per cent of the participants define themselves as neither unionist nor nationalist and 36 per cent identify as Northern Irish (compared to 29 per cent British and 25 per cent Irish). If this trend will be reflected in next year’s election, is yet to be seen.

On a simplistic notion, Unionism is on the defensive, backwards and narrow minded. It dreads modern ideas or to compromise. Being at loggerheads with Nationalism comes as the natural comfort-zone default-position. But challenged from within their own is betrayal, the challenger a ‘Lundy’ – according to Robert Lundy who in 1688 or so almost gave in to Catholic King James. In that politics, Lundy is still a very alive insult. But the ‘Lundies’ within Unionism start putting their heads over the parapet, as Susan McKay experienced during researches for her new book NORTHERN PROTESTANTS – ON SHIFTING GROUND,

“Several people were not able to use their own names, because their opinions are not committable with the no surrender attitude. But still, there are more people who are willing to identify as being Lundies. Who are willing to say we CAN compromise. Who say, look, it’s not all no surrender, fight or be beaten. There is no going back to an era where one people dominated the other and they just have to put up with it.” Susan McKay

Unionist left-wing dissenters are advocating values like social solidarity, economic justice, outward looking internationalism. Not necessarily deviating from unionist values, they see themselves as a bridge over to Catholic and secular republicanism. Of course they’re going to threaten the real kind of die-hard Unionist and is less reflective of working-class areas, where monolithic identity allegiances pretty much prevail.

An outspoken Lundy at the moment would be Toni Ogle who’s father last year has been beaten to death by people of his own community. In these working-class communities the attitude would be to stay quiet. It’s Omertà. Silence. Don’t talk to the police. You don’t tout on your own people. Though ‘Tout’ and ‘Lundy’ is not exactly the same thing, they both refer to somebody who is challenging hegemonic power structures from within and this can put you in a vulnerable if not dangerous position.

“Tout was a bad word. It stank of shame and brutal retribution. It sprawled obscenely across gable walls, inviting trouble, turning nods and smiles to cold glares of suspicion. Tout could stick to you like wet tar.” Jenny McCartney

Robert Lundy was able to escape before the mob could get him, during the Siege of Derry. Many today’s ‘touts’ weren’t that lucky, they had been kneecaped, banished, tarred and feathered and tied to a lamppost, humiliated and for everybody to see what can happen to you if you stray off course. However, on INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY Toni spoke out. She said that if fighting for justice for her daddy makes her a tout, then she is a tout. It’s a brave thing to do, speaking out against your community. And it’s happening more and more, especially amongst working-class women.

New Lodge

Justice for Ian Ogle, Cluan Place

Emma de Souza, Irish Times, 18 June 2021
Chris Donnelly, Slugger O’Toole, 30 May 2018
The Irish Celebrating, 2008
Jenny McCartney, The Ghost Factory, 2019
Susan McKay and Claire Mitchell, Interview with Mark Caruthers in Red Lines, 5 May 2021
Martin Ó Muilleoir, Irish News, 1 July 2019
Fintan O’Toole on Brexit, Youtube, October 2018

Belfast Telegraph, Irish News, Irish Times

Special thanks to the Ireland-based Swiss journalist Martin Alioth for sharing some of his extensive understanding of Irish politics and culture over a delicious meal back in 2018.

“But most importantly, the tactic is out of state control. The mainstream media is vetted and controlled. Putting
a message on the mountain breaks that near-monopoly of the state. It disrupts their message that the partition of
Ireland is normal. You have to look at it and you have to think about it; whether you agree with it or not.
It does what the state does not want to happen: it prompts people to ask questions.”

Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly, 2019

07 The Mountain

Black Mountain

Something you can’t miss on your visit to Belfast is the vast amount of murals. Some political, some militaristic, some artistic and some just genuine graffiti. It’s a landmark to this day, and you can book a Black Taxi Tour to get an idea of the history of these murals. But if you happen to be in town when GAEL FORCE ART take to the Black Mountain, you’ll get a glimpse of the most genius and beautiful form of public activism and art. Using huge letters and flags and emblems, all cut and stitched up by the group and its community, the message they have for Belfast and the world is towering over the city for a few hours, before it’s taken down again.

It all started during the first Hunger Strikes in 1980. In a climate of a hostile government and an ignoring media-body towards nationalist views. It was a time, when a good part of the population simply didn’t have a public voice, not in Stormont, not in Westminster, not in Dublin and for sure not in the British media. Not having the media on your side or worse, having a media that’s working against you, is a disadvantage. The ethos of the British media was: The British army and the British government are fighting a terrorist campaign, they are the good ones, never the baddies. It’s all ‘democracy’ against ‘terrorism’. And the world was going to adapt this narrative – except for 1984 communist Albania who saw the conflict in Ireland in another perspective:

“The freedom-loving forces of Northern Ireland are responding to the savage violence of the British police and occupying forces with a resolute struggle.”

The lived experience of the nationalist working-class community, the discrimination, unemployment, poverty and foremost the constant harassment by the state forces were rarely talked of. The journalists often got their information from the army’s media office and only few took the effort to seriously scrutinise it. However, a member of a nationalist working-class community was not to be trusted. It had to be somebody not so ‘other’, a priest maybe, or a well educated middle class Catholic, if any credence was to be granted to their story. Sociologist Frank Burton, who spent several months living in Catholic Ardoyne, noted:

“In Ireland this category of the credible contains, preferably, the non-Irish and the professional classes. Thus, if allegations of British army brutality are to be taken seriously by the media, either the reporter should have personally witnessed the incident in question, or the condemnations should be voiced by an ex-British soldier living in the North, or by a doctor, lawyer or priest.”

It’s the colonial approach of misinformation about what’s going on and silencing a community by bans and total disregard in order to keep them inferior. As a consequence, the complex voice of Irish Nationalism is trapped and represented through the outsider’s distorted narrative. And as it’s widely known, the media has a very strong influence on public perception.

To not have a voice, to not being recognised, you’re becoming a victim. Art is an important tool to give the silenced a voice. To express their feelings. It’s the community voice. Republican prisoners understood that the struggle will continue post-prison and skills were needed to pursue a non-violent conflict. Educating yourself in arts, history and the Irish language was seen as an act of resistance. Ex-prisoner of war Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly taught himself how to draw whilst jailed in Long Kesh.

“The British media were never going to fairly represent our point of view. So we needed to do it ourselves, in the murals, presenting republicanism and Irish identity in a positive light, standing up to the anti-Irish propaganda we were hit with 24 hours a day, every day. You weren’t in it to be an artist, you were in it to get the message out.” Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly

It was during the first hunger strike in 1980 that nationalist Belfast saw murals in favour of the republican struggle go up. But Mo Chara wanted to reach out beyond his community. He felt that the whole of Belfast and indeed the rest of the world deserved to be informed about what was going on in the prison of Long Kesh. To highlight the hunger strike, a group went up on the Black Mountain, dug a 10 x 6 meter big ‘H’ – the shape of the prison-wings in Long Kesh – into the ground and filled it up with lime. The huge ‘H’ was telling the world that there was support for the prisoners and ultimately, that there was another story to be told than the version of official bashing news. That’s how the Black Mountain became GAEL FORCE ART’s recurring canvas for highlighting human rights issues in the 40 years to come.

BBC Broadcasting House

The mountain

The flag

The gorse

The slope

GAEL FORCE ART, through murals and messages on the mountain, is regularly highlighting issues that affect the community. Sectarianism, military occupation, discrimination, unemployment, MI5, collusion, ‘shoot-to-kill’-policy, lethal plastic bullets, Diplock courts. But also Independence for Scotland, Catalonia, Irish language, Palestinian rights, the Queen, RIP Mandela and Justice for the schoolboy Noah who was found dead last year. Just to name a few. And there’s a lot of issues that they still need to cover.

Mo Chara listens to the people in his community. What are their issues, what is upsetting them. It really comes from them. And it’s the community that helps by donating paint for murals, fabrics for the flags and emblems, offering their labour, and climbing that mountain or holding the scaffold for a mural. Without the community he couldn’t do it.

One does not need to go far to find evidence of the strength of social bonding and a strong sense of community identity in Belfast. During the Troubles the community would offer volunteers on the run entrance into their houses. They would remove street signs to disorient British patrols and they would rattle the bin lids to sound the alarm. When a bomb went of in west Belfast, a suspect hunted by police and army ran into a neighbour’s house, the home of an 80 year old, very fragile woman. With her consent, he lifted her up, ran into the chaos of the bomb site and told the ambulance staff that she had been injured. So she was off to hospital and he was away out of sight of his pursuers. That’s how far community relations were going and still go, also for different reasons.

GAEL FORCE ART & BDS Belfast

UN Resolution 194 – The Right to Return

The colonial structure of British power in Northern Ireland didn’t imply equal rights for Catholics. They didn’t have the same access to jobs, housing, thus no access to the ballot box, as only house owners were allowed to vote. They didn’t have access to governmental power, therefore were not able to have a voice. They were not allowed to their own official identity. It keeps a people small, if you deny them equality. Through their past experience of being treated as second-class citizens, nationalists and republicans tend to identify with other repressed peoples who are fighting for their rights.

The murals in nationalist neighbourhoods talk of armed struggle for human rights all over the world. The murals on the loyalist side talk about the struggle to defend their status quo. On both sides there are militaristic murals – reminders of the past. But there’s a tendency of new militaristic murals going up, mainly if not solely in loyalist areas. The loyalist and unionist community clearly feels under threat. They fear the possibility of a united Ireland. They fear everything Irish introduced into legislation, like the long overdue Irish Language Act. They feel – understandably – abandoned by the British mainland, with that quack of a prime minister. The common feeling is one of loss. Loss of identity, loss of once held privileges (especially the unionist political- and middle-class), loss of their way of life, their British culture. Any advance of nationalism is seen as not a right that Nationalists might hold, but as a concession that is being made by Unionism.

The basic problem is, that the nationalist/republican community is in a struggle and the unionist/loyalist community is in a struggle. They have very different political views. They have different understandings of the past and they are promoting different ideologies. The two struggles are diametrically opposed to each other. So defining a shared vision – it’s also a struggle.

Mural by GAEL FORCE ART in Springhill

“In passing this mural, pause a little while, Pray for us and Érin, Then Smile”

“Still Loyalist – Still British – No Surrender”

“We are the pilgrims, master: We shall go always a little further”

After the peace process, the militaristic murals began to be a problem and the British government started to pour large sums of money into a ‘re-imaging’ programme: doing away with murals that reminded people of the Troubles and replacing them with pleasant, positive imagery more appropriate to a ‘normal society’. Replace them with flowers, abstracts, happy school children, historical events – anything that doesn’t challenge the state. Just get rid of political murals as they raise dangerous issues.

But to worry about what’s on these walls is denying that there is still conflict. There is still division. And it’s not only ideologies, that divide the people. It’s also serious economic and social neglect as well as the failure to tackle legacy issues in a meaningful manner. You’re not gonna change anybody’s mindset by painting over paramilitary murals. You need to feel safe to question your attitude and the respective communities need to feel confident to stop being on the watch. People need to have a future, have a choice. They need to be accepted and respected for who they are and what they represent. The murals disappear when the community decides that their job is done and other issues need to be highlighted. And maybe, some need to stay. They are part of the history of these communities. That doesn’t mean that flowers and colourful abstracts or smart graffiti shouldn’t have its place, but if there’s a town with enough walls, it’s Belfast!

New Lodge

Liz Curtis, The Propaganda War, 1984
Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly, A Larger Canvas, NVTV, 2015
Seosamh Mac Coille, Cathal Woods, An Pobal a Phéinteáil, 2019
Tim Maul in Interview with Willie Doherty
David Miller, Don’t Mention the War, 1994
Peter Shirlow, Jonathan Tange, James McAuley, Catherine McGlynn, Abandoning Historical conflict?, 2010
Valeri Vaughn, Art of Conflict – Murals of Northern Ireland, 2012/13, Youtube

06 Journey

“As horrible as the conflict was, something good came out of it: a very strong sense of community. It’s not that evident today, probably due to technology and individualism. But people here are very good in social bonding.”

Gary, 2017

March for Truth

A Bloody Sunday March for Justice has taken place in Derry on Sunday, 27th of January 2019. The shooting and killing of 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry by the Parachute Regiment on Sunday, 30 January 1972 has gone down in history and is known all over the world as Bloody Sunday. Movies have been shot and songs have been sung and books and poems about that day have been written. And finally, after decades of campaigning and fighting and refusing to be silenced or appeased, the families of the murdered see the British Army in court in the form of an ex-paratrooper in his seventies, known as Soldier F.

Soldier F was a squaddie in the Parachute Regiment, a regiment with a reputation for using excessive physical violence. The commander was General Robert Ford. And whilst Ford died in 2015, Mike Jackson, second-in-command and present throughout the whole shooting, is still very much alive. Jackson made sure that the media’s version of events was in favour of the army, claiming that they only returned fire. His narrative went around the globe and innocent civilians were branded IRA combatants shot in action. Their innocence was eventually vindicated, but Jackson never admitted to any fabrication of evidence.

Sir Mike Jackson has since risen through the ranks to become boss of the Parachute Regiment, commander of the British Army on the Rhine, NATO chief in Kosovo, then Chief of the General Staff – Britain’s top soldier. He is still interviewed in the media about military action and the morality of war. Unsurprisingly, the top brass gets off scot-free while the lower rank take the rap. Jackson and his fellow senior officers were far more to blame for the massacre than the men who pulled the triggers. Soldier F is nobody that matters.

Support for Soldier F in the Shankill area

Millisle Stands With Soldier "F"

Many unionist and loyalist communities show their support for Soldier F but they are not asking for the commanders and generals to be in his place. The controversy over Soldier F’s trial is not about shifting responsibilities, it’s an outcry against denouncing the British Army in general and goes all the way back to green and orange and to the question of who’s got the right to be a victim.

The British government is keen on white-washing numerous atrocities committed by the British Army during the conflict in Northern Ireland. One of its favourite instruments is playing innocent and dumb, incorporated beautifully by former Secretary of State Karen Bradly, when she was stating that killings during the conflict by soldiers and police were not crimes and that they acted under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way. While she was speaking, the court in Belfast under Justice Siobhan Keegan heard evidence from a man remembering what he had seen on the day he was shot as a nine-year-old child by a British soldier during what has become known as the Ballymurphy Massacre.

On the morning of Monday 9 August 1971, a heavy handed army marched into Catholic areas arresting men indiscriminately, on unfounded claims of IRA affiliations. The British government had launched Operation Demetrius, the introduction of internment, which resulted in a three-day shoot-out by the Parachute Regiment – one of the most elite units in the world, trained for high intensity warfare and with the motto ‘Ready for Anything’, and the death of ten civilians. Then army captain Mike Jackson briefed the media with a fairytale about an IRA battle implying that the dead were volunteers killed in action. Only that they were not. They were ordinary civilians. They were:

FATHER HUGH MULLAN (38), FRANCIS QUINN (38), DANIEL TEGGART (44),

JOAN CONNOLLY (44), NOEL PHILLIPS (19), JOSEPH MURPHY (41), JOHN LAVERTY (20),

JOSEPH CORR (43), EDWARD DOHERTY (31), JOHN McKERR (49)

An eleventh man, Paddy McCarthy, died from a heart attack after some soldiers subjected him to a mock execution. Eleven families lost loved ones and 57 children lost a parent.

Mural of the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971

The Ballymurphy Massacre is not as well known as Bloody Sunday but momentum has risen since the Attorney General ordered a re-opening of the inquests into the circumstances of the deaths, army procedures, the significance of the media, and more. After a major delay the hearings started in November 2018 and for a hundred days Coroner Justice Siobhan Keegan heard evidence from hundreds of civilian, military and forensic witnesses. The most senior former soldier to testify was General Sir Mike Jackson. But not even hardened human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield got him to admit to obvious breaches of the British Army’s policies and allegations of cover-ups of what happened in Ballymurphy. Jackson thought it all preposterous and concluded by saying that the British Army don’t do conspiracy. Which earned him dismissive laughter from the audience.

For the families the hearings were an emotional rollercoaster, as John Teggart, whose father was among those killed, puts it:

“We thought we were hardened campaigners who had heard everything and knew everything, but it was an emotional rollercoaster from the very start once we entered the court and heard the finer details from eyewitnesses about how our loved ones died. When you heard their details and saw them reliving what they had seen, you could see that they were traumatised by what they had seen.”

On one occasion there was a two hours delay because M156, a former soldier, tried to get full anonymity while in the witness box. Most of the witnesses from the army enjoyed partial anonymity, meaning that their names were encoded and they were screened off to the public during the hearing, but visible to the immediate family members in the stand. While waiting for something to happen, the people around me were chit-chatting about the looks of Grace Kelly and Michael Mansfield. An old man in elegant outfit distributed sweets and another man snored heavily in his chair. It was an overall warm and relaxed atmosphere, as if they’ve met for coffee instead for hearing about the killing of their loved ones.

This mood would change to agitation and anger once M156 made an appearance and started his statement by retracting from what he once said and not remembering anything. According to a former sergeant it would be standard practice for soldiers not to cooperate with inquests by saying they had no memory. Another way of non-cooperation would be ignoring the invite to the hearing and therefore delaying it. Let the victims die and then it will be over with.

I was in court for three days and heard several former soldiers, one of them an army chaplain, resort to their bad memory. Whilst I don’t think it impossible to forget certain things in the course of almost half a century, many claims of bad memory just felt wrong. How can you forget whether you’ve seen somebody being shot or not. Statements are not logic, contradictorily, evasive. The chaplain cannot explain why he didn’t go to the hall where the dead were to give them their last rite, the soldier forgot his password when confronted with a computer, and another one changed his mind about what regiment he was in altogether. The three D’s: Delay, Death, Dementia.

Not everyone was so unhelpful. A former army medic remembered being asked to plant bullets on the clothes of the civilian victims. He refused to do so but didn’t report it to the higher-ups. You just didn’t do that, go behind your own. It would have been difficult to stay in the battalion, not playing along.

March for Truth, North Belfast section

March for Truth, North Belfast section

March for Truth, North Belfast section

March for Truth, North Belfast section

Families and communities walked from almost all parts of Belfast to the city centre demanding truth and justice after continued failure of implementing the Stormont House Agreement struck in 2014, defining mechanisms for how to deal with the past. The deal included provision for setting up a Historical Inquiries Unit (HIU) in order to investigate Troubles-related deaths, an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval an an Oral History Archive. But London is keen on limiting historical investigations and would rather see an amnesty for British soldiers than prosecuting them in courts and admitting to strategic, callous behaviour. So the institutions are not in place, the money is not secured and the families are confronted with yet more delay.

The human drive for truth and justice doesn’t decrease in the face of injustice and it doesn’t go away with generations dying. The trauma is passed on to the next generation and the next, building on that intergenerational trauma so well know in Northern Ireland. Many activists for truth and justice were born after the conflict. They’ve known their murdered relative only from stories. And yet they feel the pain and want their families to be respected. They keep on the fight, campaigning and making themselves heard.

Michael Mansfield and Padraig Ó Muirigh, solicitors

Activists of the Springhill Massacre Campaign

“People power is grassroots movements of which there are large numbers, and they have grown over the period I’ve been practicing. To get communities to come together to press for justice because there was this unspoken belief the British system of justice will produce the goods but of course, gradually people realised: the system wouldn’t do it. The system will be forced to do it, if those usually who have been the victims of injustice decide not individually, but collectively, that they will stand together to shame authorities eventually into doing something. Because of course you want the truth for yourself but that is a truth you want to hand on to the next generation. You provide an example to the generation and all those generations that comes behind. That actually, you can do something. It’s not the ballot box, at the end of the day, nor is it the armalite that actually brings about the change. It’s the conscience of people deciding that they not gonna take no for an answer. The Bloody Sunday families did the same in Derry until eventually they got cross party support for a public inquiry. And a public inquiry which actually at the end of the day had a very distinct finger pointing exercise at certain members of the military of what was done on the streets of the United Kingdom. Truth and justice they go together as Martin Luther King pointed out many times.” Michael Mansfield

These were the words of Michael Mansfield, the human rights loyer involved in the Ballymurphy Massacre, at the launch of the Springhill Massacre campaign at the Cultúrlann in February 2019. After the Bloody Sunday campaign made it as far as an actual court trial and the Ballymurphy Massacre campaign to the re-opening and conclusion of new inquest, the Springhill Massacre campaign is waiting for an inquest hearing date.

After disturbances in Lenadoon, where the army prevented Catholic families from moving into their allocated houses, because of threats by loyalist paramilitaries who regarded the estate as their own territory, the situation quickly escalated with soldiers firing rubber bullets. On Sunday 9 July 1972, the ceasefire that was in place between the IRA and the British government ended. While the fighting in Lenadoon raged, other areas of Belfast remained relatively quiet. Until around 9pm, when without provocation or warning several British army snipers opened indiscriminate gunfire on residents moving about the Springhill area. By the end of the night five innocent civilians were dead. What followed is just all too familiar with the army distorting the course of events and calling the victims gunmen. They were:

JOHN DOUGL (16), MARGARET GARGA (13), FATHER NOEL FITZPATRICK (42 ),

PADDY BUTLER (38), DAVID McCAFFERTY (15).

Mural of the Springhill Westrock Massacre in 1972

Time and again, the British army escaped justice. It is widely accepted that had they been stopped and exposed by the judiciary, other massacres could have been prevented. But with the British army’s narrative on fighting gunmen and the legal system’s unwillingness to scrutinise the army’s version by ignoring eyewitnesses statements, the same regiment that was responsible for the Ballymurphy massacre, only half a year later travelled to Derry leaving their mark in form of Bloody Sunday. Springhill followed a few months after and in 1973 it was the New Lodge Six that went down in the state killings’ history book. And this is just to mention the events that so far have been granted leave to a new inquest. Never was there any arrest, the state could kill with impunity, either in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries or single-handedly.

Since then many books have been written about state killings and several inquiries have been conducted, uncovering bit by bit the extend of the state’s involvement in sinister undertakings. But there’s still a long way to go and the government needs to fully accept its responsibility in the conflict. It’s still the case that evidence is being destructed or concealed by the Ministry of Defence and the Police in order to hide their part in deaths that to this day are undissolved and brushed under the carpet. Legacy is at the centre of the entire criminal justice system and politics, as Mark Thompson from Relatives for Justice says. As long as these cases are not looked at, as long as the families are denied justice, there will be no reconciliation and no peace in this society.

Mural of the New Lodge Six Massacre in 1973

Memorial of the McGurk Bar Massacre in 1971

Victims of state killings and collusion with loyalist paramilitaries

Ballymurphy Inquest, Facts and Figures Briefing, 2018
Ciaran Cahill, Reports from the Ballymurphy Inquest, Facebook, 2019
Kelly McAllister, A Report from the Ballymurphy Inquest, 17 January 2019
Michael Mansfield, Speech at Springhill Massacre Campaign Launch, 26 February 2019
Padraig Ó Muirigh, Ballymurphy Independent Panel / Solicitor’s website
Mark Thompson, Speech at Springhill Westrock Commemoration, 7 July 2019
Springhill Westrock Massacre July 1972, Time for Truth Pamphlet

BBC, Belfast Telegraph, Guardian, Hotpress,
Irish News, New York Times, Rebel, RTE

05 1861

“The fundamental issue is not not that they speak for the voiceless. That voice has thundered through the ears of women for hundreds and thousands of years. That point of view is not voiceless. It has been the predominant voice of Hierarchies, of Church, of Patriarchy, of State, of Imperialism, of Racism, of Capitalism, for as long as they have been here. These people who control that voice, why are they afraid?”

Bernadette McAliskey at the Rally for Choice 2019

Handmaidens in Lisburn

At midnight on 21 October 2019, abortion in Northern Ireland has been decriminalised. The Victorian-era, 158-years-old Offence Against the Person Act (1861) had to bundle up and leave the stage and the agonies of a woman facing a jail sentence of up to five years for obtaining online abortion pills for her teenage daughter – or in the words of the charges ‘procuring and supplying a poison with intent to procure a miscarriage’, were over. For the first time in six years, the woman could go back being the mother she was before the weight of the looming judgement started to hang over her every minute of every day of her and her family’s life. She could finally move on.

Refusing bodily autonomy leads to nothing but suffering. In 2012 Savita Hallapanavar was diagnosed with an unavoidable miscarriage but was denied an abortion because the doctors were afraid to intervene as long as there was a foetal heartbeat. They could have faced prosecution for illegal abortion. That climate of fear cost Savita her life.

In 2014, a pregnant woman was declared brain-dead but again, because there was a foetal heartbeat, the doctors could not switch off the life support system as this would cause the death of the foetus. Instead of having an end of life with dignity, the woman’s body became an incubator for the foetus. The family had to go to court to end that grotesque situation.

Nevertheless, in 2019, the unimpressed DUP health minster in the north tried to alter the prison sentence for health professionals who failed to adhere to the restrictions or didn’t report (suspected) illegal pregnancy terminations from five to ten years.

Pro Choice rally through Belfast

It was a momentous and historic day, the 25th of May 2018, when the south of Ireland repealed the 8th Amendment and made abortion accessible to pregnant people and it was clear by then: the north – the only place in Europe besides Malta still dwelling in earlier centuries – is next. The fight against the establishment, against sexism, against austerity and against oppression has seen the formation of one of the most dynamic and youthful movements in Ireland. A movement that unites Protestants and Catholics alike.

The fight for the basic human right of bodily autonomy has seen protest marches, acts of civil disobedience, artistic comments and performative activism. The socialist-feminist group ROSA was aiming to raise awareness of the availability of abortion pills online by staging a protest at the Belfast Laganside Court where the trials of the women who took or procured the abortion pill took place. Some activists took safe but illegal abortion pills in public. The police tried to arrest one of the women but had to give up with all the commotion going on around the protest and contented themselves with arresting the robot that deliver the pills instead. To be honest, I don’t think their heart was really in it.

Pro Choice rally at Laganside Courts

Arresting the robot

Attempt to arrest a protester

You cannot force people to be pregnant when they do not want to be. Yet, all executive parties except for Sinn Féin are either quiet or openly against the law that since 31 March 2020 allows abortions under all circumstances up to twelve weeks. And yet, even for Sinn Féin to join the pro-choice campaign took quite a while. Gerry Adams made it quite clear that only if it can be of use to Sinn Féin’s primary cause – a united Ireland – will they campaign for other issues like abortion:

“I merely point it out as an example of an issue which cuts across the strategy of a successful national liberation movement which must be to rally the broadest mass of the people around certain fundamentals and upon an easily grasped programme of points on which people can agree. We need to avoid issues which are too local, partial or divisive.” Gerry Adams

Ok, that was in the 1980s and Sinn Féin have changed their stance on several issues meanwhile, but nevertheless, it only jumped the pro-choice-wagon once it was well rolling and once it realised that its original anti-abortion stance doesn’t sit well with their younger voters.

Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill at a Pro Choice rally at City Hall

Sinn Féin MLA Francie Molloy missed the train. He kept loyal to his views, opposing abortion even in the case of risk to health for the pregnant person. His stance earned him a visit from the handmaidens who were travelling on ROSA’s Bus4Choice through the north towards Derry. Sadly he wasn’t in his office when they arrived in Cookstown, nor were his co-dinosaurs Edwin Poots, Paul Givan and Jefferey Donaldson from the DUP in Lisburn. Thank god for the likes of Jim Wells, who in his one-man performance explained that dinosaurs never have existed and that every pregnancy was a gift of God. The irony of the dinosaurs was lost on him and so was Topcats – God love him.

Topcat Jim Wells in Lisburn

Handmaidens in front of Sinn Féin office in Cookstown

Jim Wells sounds like I choir boy when you have to listen to other DUP officials such as Ballymena councillor John Carson who claimed that the coronavirus pandemic was God’s judgment on Northern Ireland for introducing abortion and same-sex marriage and that the Covid vaccines were made from the stem cells of aborted foetuses. And whilst Arlene Foster, the DUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland admitted that Carson was wrong, she affirmed that they will do everything in their conscience to protect the lives of the unborn. (I find it very interesting how the DUP and cohorts demand to have parity with the UK and seem to accept new threats of violence if the Irish Sea Border is going to stay, now that Brexit-reality starts to dawn on them, yet, they cry the loudest when it comes to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland which treats the people of Northern Ireland equal to the people of Britain. One people, one Union. A United Kingdom. This deserves deeper scrutiny.)

Even though abortion on request up to 12 weeks is now legal, abortion services have not yet been set up. Delaying access to abortion services in the north keeps pregnant people from the north travelling to Britain or the south of Ireland to have an unwanted pregnancy terminated. But not everyone can afford to travel. Not everyone can be absent for several days. Not everyone has the mobility or the right to travel. It’s a slap in the face of those who are already disadvantaged and underlines the discrepancy of middle-class and working-class realities. I’d like to quote Judge Horner’s comments in the Belfast High Court in 2015

“If it is morally wrong to abort a foetus in Northern Ireland, it is just as wrong morally to abort the same foetus in England. There can be no doubt that the law has made it much more difficult for those with limited means to travel to England. The protection of morals should not contemplate a restriction that bites on the impoverished but not the wealthy. That smacks of one law for the rich and one law for the poor.” Judge Horner

The pro-life voices are fighting the new law with all their might. The DUP, the Presbyterian and the Catholic Church, all kinds of activists and a former ombudswoman are calling for the repeal of the hard won abortion legislation. They say that an already beleaguered health staff should not, on top of a pandemic, have to cope with the introduction of abortion and they encourage them to refuse to take part in terminations stating their religious believes.

Pro Life rally on Customhouse Square

The pro-life group PRECIOUS LIFE lately took the fight against the new abortion legislation back to the streets, setting themselves up in front of City Hall, holding up placards with very graphic images of aborted foetuses. Some of these images can be pretty gruesome and certainly have the potential to retraumatise women who have had miscarriages or abortions. But of course, that’s the point. I could not disagree with these groups more, but I guess they have the right to make their voices heard. The freedom of expression is one of the most important and fundamental human rights and people do not have the right to not being offended.

But it’s reassuring and encouraging to see how many young, colourful, loud people counter them in joyful celebration and take to the streets every time there’s a call. At the Rally for Choice in 2019, Bernadette McAliskey said something that resonates in Belfast more than anywhere else:

“The faces I’m looking at are gloriously young and female. Young women in their twenties, straight people, gay people, bi people, trans people. The majority of the people waling into the other direction were older. And male. That’s a new interface. The new interface isn’t about which geographical location in Belfast or Northern Ireland you came from. What electoral district you might be in in terms of sectarian interfaces. Very clearly this new interface is between those who fundamentally believe in the right of individuals and human beings to exercise freedom of choice.” Bernadette McAliskey

Pro Choice rally through Belfast city centre

Pro Choice rally at City Hall

Pro Choice rally through Belfast

Bernadette McAliskey at Pro Choice rally on Writers’ Square

Pro Choice rally through Belfast city centre

By the way, the Catholic Church did not always condemn abortion totally. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that in the case of a boy the soul entered the body at 40 days of pregnancy and 80 days in the case of a girl. And even if intentional abortion was always an offence against God in his view, until before the point of ensoulment it was less so.

Eleanor Crossey Malone, The Socialist, 2018
Madeleine Johansson, YES for REPEAL, 2018
Bernadette McAliskey, Speech at Rally for Choice, 2019
Susan McKey, Pro-Union Non-Unionists, 4 March 2021
Peter Tatchell, Talkback BBC Radio Ulster, 25 Feb 2021

BBC, Belfast Telegraph, Guardian, Irish News,
Jacobin Magazine, Rebel, Workers Hammer

04 Tell

“There is no human situation so miserable that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a policeman.”

Brendan Behan

Before I took two months off to come to Belfast to work on my photographic project on divided societies – which of course was nowhere near finish after the two months, in fact, I’m still here – I’ve spent a lot of time reading. I loved the danders to the library through early morning Zurich, descending to the underground levels of the old building and walking through endless corridors of shelves full of books. Politics, history, military, art, literature, law, anything broadening my mind regarding Irish complexities was welcome. The history of Ireland is primarily a history of exploitation, famine, migration, and demands for independence. After so many dives into stories of colonialism, miscarriages of justice, doomed battles and human suffering, I subconsciously read my way into the literary section, though ignoring Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, straight into crime fiction’s haven. Probably muttering on an even deeper subconscious level Walter Benjamin’s

"No matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime."

When I walk into NO ALIBI on Botanic Avenue – THE bookshop for crime fiction, THE bookshop for inspiration, one of the few survivors in this neoliberal rage against small business and independent thinking – I can choose from a wide range of award winning local crime fiction writers. That hasn’t always been the case. For a long time crime fiction was snubbed upon, wouldn’t have been accepted in the grand world of high literature, and the same verdict fell on romance, science fiction or graphic novels. This literary bias mirrors an underlying class bias, a much bigger issue here in Belfast than in Switzerland. (I have to say that my mum, a professional bookseller herself, looked down on crime fiction wholeheartedly, though this had nothing to do with class snobbery but with her inability to bare the suspense.) The situation has considerably improved and it’s widely accepted by now, that the best crime novels are written by working-class writers and feature working-class heroes with working-class villains that chase each other in blue-collar towns and estates.

Until the early 1990s, many thrillers on Irish matters were written by non-Irish people characterising the Irish as the jolly ploughboy, the Irish rebel, the romantic gunman, the brutal and misguided terrorist. In prison for bombing the Brighton Hotel in 1984, Pat Magee wrote his PhD on the representation of Irish Republicans in Troubles fiction. Most striking, he found, was that

"Britain is rarely depicted as part of the problem; never mind, as republicans would argue, the problem. Various permutations of the formula reveal a blarney-spouting thug with a ‘ferrety look’ and halitosis or ‘the Fenian world of rotten teeth and puffy botched skin’. In this murky light, the violence attributed to republicans results from an ingrained bloodlust and is not the effect or symptom of profound political grievances."

It’s much harder to explore and express what has happened by drawing from experience, talking about things that you know, feel, smell, fear, live through than helping yourself to widely recognised and accepted narratives. But cliche is dangerous and turns quickly into banalities. It is important to contest prejudices and stereotypes by humanising the characters and correct misrepresentations for the sake of adequate understanding.

Belfast, an economical mecca in the empire turning provincial backwater after partition and war-zone during the conflict. A bleak, eerie, ghostly place, with military structures, soldiers and helicopters, eternal rain and fog, bomb sites and a dying industry. A place where suspicion, fear and violence were moulding hearts and minds and dark things were happening – a perfect location for crime stories. But there was a very defined lack of interest from editor, to writer and reader to delve into dark things when what you had outside your door were dark things happening and where you had to consider your word carefully.

“Many of us walked a tightrope with the IRA at one end, and the British Army and loyalist paramilitaries at the other. You had to be careful abut what you said and wrote. Words could kill. If you said the wrong thing, you might never be seen again. The phrase whatever you say, say nothing was a mantra for survival.” Sharon Dempsey, writer

(Something that journalists, solicitors and politicians still need to consider today, if they don’t want to get into the backsight of officially disbanded but still existing paramilitaries.)

But it’s not just the paramilitaries or non-Irish upper-class that made it difficult for the crime fiction genre during the best part of the last century. There was also State and Church. Rigorously they spread their protective wings over a potentially mislead people by confiscating immoral crime novels from ferry passengers at the ports. There you go.

Over twenty years into the peace process, society based on tit for tat, based on revenge and vengeance merge into a more civilised society where the responsibility for revenge is passed to the state. Writers obviously feel more at ease to explore the violent past in a new imaginative form, navigate this potential minefield and retelling the story of Belfast. With time and distance it’s easier to tackle sensitive issues that haven’t completely gone away. People have suffered, people live with trauma as a result. It’s not something to make light entertainment out of. And it’s not something that a portion of Irish humour would shy away from. Something I learned at NOIRLAND, the crime fiction festival that in 2017 took place at the most bombed Hotel in Belfast – the EUROPA.

Adrian McKinty grew up in a Protestant housing estate during the Troubles but eventually moved to Australia, where, in order to write, he pulls down the shades and puts on a soundtrack of gusty rainfalls.

He is the author of the Sean Duffy thrillers, a series of books where the hero, a Catholic policeman in the 1980s is confronted not only with a civil war in the streets of Belfast, but with sectarian skirmishes from within his workspace and threats from the republican as well as the loyalist paramilitaries. During an interview with Martin Doyle, book editor of THE IRISH TIMES, Adrian pointed out how much fun it was for him to create

this character:

MARTIN DOYLE
Was Sean Duffy always going to be a Catholic policeman?
ADRIAN McKINTY
Oh absolutely. I was going to put him up in my house where I was born and grew up, I was going to put him in my street as well, with all my neighbours under fake names and I thought: What would annoy those neighbours the most? Well first of all, he’s gotta be a Catholic. That’s gonna really really tick them off. Second of all, he’s gonna be a policeman, they’re not gonna like that. A Catholic and a policeman, he’s gonna have authority over them, that’s gonna tick them off. And third of all I’m gonna make him bohemian. This middle-class guy, bohemian, he knows who the Velvet Underground are.”

During the Troubles, Catholics made up only around 7% of the police force. For Catholics, it was a dangerous career move, not only because policing in a war zone IS dangerous, but because it wasn’t in the IRA’s ethos to take part in protecting a state that in their view – and in the view of about a third of its population – was illegitimate. Or as Sean Duffy in GUN STREET GIRL stoically puts it,

“It certainly didn’t help that I was a Catholic. A Catholic in Carrickfergus was bad enough, but a Catholic policeman? My life expectancy could be measured in dog years.”

Whilst this line really makes me laugh, the situation today is not altogether different, if not as harsh, not as obviously absurd anymore. The Royal Ulster Constabulary is now the Police Services of Northern Ireland and Catholics make up around 32% of the organisation. On the upper echelons Catholics (as well as women, but that’s not a Belfast speciality) are a rare species.

The threat against Catholic police officers from dissident republicans, who didn’t buy into the peace process, is still ongoing. In 2010, a bomb under constable Peadar Heffron’s car exploded and left him with an amputated leg. The year after, constable Ronan Kerr was killed and in 2009, constable Stephen Carroll responded to an emergency alert where he was shot dead. In this specific case it’s not so clear who really was behind the attack. Two men are in prison, but the case is weak and talk of miscarriage of justice is loud.

After the PSNI replaced the RUC in 2001, a 50/50 recruitment policy – one Catholic recruit for every one person from a Protestant or other background – was set in place, it ran until 2011. Today the numbers of Catholic recruits are falling dramatically and the call for a return to 50/50 comes not only from nationalist politicians, but from the Catholic Primate Eamon Martin himself. Another plan to push the numbers is to establish a Catholic Police Officers Guild to provide pastoral care for practising Roman Catholics in the police service. And by the way, with only a few more Catholics, the PSNI GAA might even survive.

Back in the days, local authors were told to place their stories in Glasgow or Liverpool. Nobody wanted to be reminded of Belfast, that desolate failure of a town, that awful place where all the terrorists come from. They didn’t see how inspiring this – in their view – societal and cultural backwater was. How an artist could meander through the darkness of a society pushed to the extreme, and explore it forensically. How a talented writer could turn horrific realities into suspense and entertainment without trivialise the actual event. Crime calls for a dark city full of lost and hopeless souls. Belfast lends itself to crime fiction.

With the end of daily acts of sectarian violence and relative peace in the streets of Belfast, there is now space for dark writing.

Paul Burke, Nothing in Isolation: Irish Crime Fiction, The Troubles and The Last Crossing, 08/05/2020
Sharon Dempsey, Nordy Noir Knocks at the Door, 01/01/2019
Aaron Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969, 2005
Patrick Magee, My Troubles with fiction, 22/10/2015
Adrian McKinty at NOIRLAND, 28/10/2017

03 Lost

“And then you start calling them ‘wee bastards’ because they keep you awake at night. Part of you wishes they’d just crash and get it over with, and let you go back to sleep.”

Belfast Resident H

"This is Gerry Adams..."

When Gerry Adams made his election stunt for Sinn Féin, driving through the neighbourhood with a soundsystem on top of the car, he was met with flying recycling bins by local youth. I wouldn’t read this as a political statement from young people to the former president of Sinn Féin, former internee at Long Kesh, partisan for the nationalist cause and crucial contributor to the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process. I don’t think, that these kids are interested in politics. I think they are bored out of their heads. And I know from experience that boredom can foster your fantasy, it’s a good precondition for creativity.

So if some youngster came up telling me, this was all performance art, well, why not. After all, trying to kill some politicians up in Stormont was said to be performance art and I must say, the leftovers of my wheelie bin are beautiful objects. Though as little the Stormont performance artist’s performance was appreciated by the public, these boys and girls fall on deaf ears in the neighbourhood when it comes to their art.

Wheelie Bin

A group of kids have dedicated themselves to bring havoc into the neighbourhood. They steal cars and motorbikes using them for joyriding. They take your wheelie bin and burn it in the middle of the street, trying to attract the police in so they can have a wee riot. They hijack cars at knife-point and they beat each other up at interface flashpoints. Masked boys and girls, some aged as young as eleven, attack police with bottles, bricks and petrol bombs. They have no fear of any authority.

You can find it in every city of the world, you’ll find it in the deprived areas of these cities. Young people in deprived areas tend to have a hostile relationship with the police. What’s different is the situations that spark those events and the readily politisation of it. Summer is always a good time, when Loyalists and Unionists celebrate an event that four hundred years ago resulted in the subjugation of the majority of the people of this island. And when Republicans and Nationalists commemorate the introduction of internment in 1971, which resulted in people being locked up for an indefinite time, the majority of them innocent.

Bonfire in Cluan Place

Both events are marked with bonfires. One community celebrates, the other commemorates. And whilst the bonfires in the protestant areas widely enjoy the support of community and politics, the internment-bonfires are anathema to most Catholics. As the peace process proceeds, they’re no longer deemed necessary and indeed, have been replaced with the Félie, the west Belfast Festival. So when a bonfire emerged in the New Lodge in 2019, it was no political, cultural or identity statement – the kids wouldn’t be able to explain the history of internment and the Troubles – it was a demonstration of power. UTH. Up the hoods. Orchestrated by some shadowy figures, performed by the kids. And of course, the kids got into trouble when the police tried to remove the bonfire, as it was dangerously close to two highrisers.

The same problem occurs in some loyalist areas every year, when they try to outdo each other with the size of their pyres. And when they burn tyres. And the Irish flag. And the picture of Martin McGuinness. (Or dead police and prison officers respectively in catholic areas). The problem is not celebrating their culture, the problem is that some of these bonfires got hijacked by the UVF. And when it comes to paramilitaries, law and order tiptoes around in circles.

Cluan Place

Trying to remove bonfire

Interfering with bonfires on either side of the divide is a difficult task, and more often than not leads to serious trouble and rioting. For days and weeks the bonfire in the New Lodge in 2019 filled the papers.

18-year-old man left in critical condition after being stabbed when fighting broke out close to the bonfire site.
Three police officers injured after crowd hurling missiles in the hours before the bonfire was lit.
Two teenagers charged after week of rioting.
Police withdraw after contractors attempt bonfire removal.
Women and children used as shields in violence, residents told to evacuate homes.
Police apology for bonfire removal failure

In east Belfast, the council invested in environmental changes to the location of a contested bonfire, to prevent it from being put up so close to residents’ homes. In another occasion the police sent anonymous and masked contractors in to dismantle a huge pyre. When the names of some of the hired hands started to appear in threatening graffiti on the walls, the contractors didn’t come back anymore.

I can’t help but thinking of the bonfires on the first of August, celebrating the birth of Switzerland in 1291. Innocent wee things, widely secured, surrounded by people who don’t have a clue what it’s all for, but greatly enjoying a bank holiday. According to the Newsletter of Swiss Vistas,

We gather around the fire, stick lanterns in the ground, play Schwiizerörgeli –Swiss accordion, dance a little and sing our national anthem while waiting for the fire to subside so we can start grilling Cervelats – a Swiss Sausages – over the remains of the fire.

Bloomfield Walkway

Kill All Taigs (Catholics)

New Lodge

Antisocial behaviour is a noisy affair, but a disrupted night’s sleep is nothing new for the people of Belfast. Back in the days, raids by police and army and noise of rioting, gunfire and helicopters were a familiar feature in many working class communities. In recent years it has been screeching tyres, power-roaring engines and the smell of overheated clutches that make the residents’ feelings run high.

Joyriding used to be a real problem during the Troubles. People in the streets got killed, joyriders got shot dead by police and army or were punished by paramilitaries. Many young men started out in life with a prison record. With the peace process in place it has slowed down somewhat, but never completely gone away. According to an article in The Irish News in November 2019, antisocial behaviour had tripled within two years, mainly in interface areas. With so many insecurities that Brexit, Tory politics and wild lockdowns have brought along in the last few years, antisocial behaviour and joyriding is back in the streets of Belfast.

Joyriders

The Baby Survived. His Mummy And Daddy Didn’t. JOYRIDING. Where Is The Joy?

I was very impressed with the boy depicted in the mural, who lost his parents to joyriders when he was just a toddler and was then raised by his aunt. He made an appearance in order to raise awareness about joyriding. A teenager by then himself, he addressed and challenged the hoods of the community. It takes some guts in a climate where you risk being exposed if you don’t fit in or threatened if you don’t play by the book.

The pain of losing someone through a criminal act, the hurt and loss lasts forever and voices of those broken families left behind are mostly unheard. But antisocial behaviour will not magically disappear. The many problems that deprived communities are facing need to be tackled on a political scale. In 1988, west Belfast’s answer to antisocial behaviour was a festival. Féile an Phobail – The Community’s Festival. It was a huge dance night, with DJs from all over the place and free tickets given away to young people across Belfast, encouraging them to stay away from the bonfires. It’s still going strong. (That is not to say that west Belfast is free from antisocial behaviour, far from it. And sadly, it’s still deemed one of the most deprived areas in Europe.)

There are still a few of these places in the city, in catholic and protestant working class areas, with highrisers and council flats, where the council deposits trouble-makers, mainly young men who were driven out of their own community. Young, disfranchised people with mental health issues, no education, no jobs and no perspective of any change. Just thinking, that’s life. That’s all there is. The dole office, then benefits and then –

‘Welfare reforms brought in by the Conservative government have pushed many young people out of the benefits system entirely. They find themselves entitled to nothing at all unless they can show that they have been actively seeking work for 35 hours a week. Some simply stop registering. The state agencies have lost track of 40 per cent of those leaving the register. Literally, a lost generation.’ Eamonn McCann

‘ They need intervention. They need intervention socially, they need intervention medically, for mental health, addiction issues, and they also need some sort of hope and pride in the place they live. If you have pride in the place that you live in, you wouldn’t be trying to destroy it.’ Allison Morris

New Lodge Road #1

Belfast now exhibits loads of fancy hotels and restaurants. The gentrification
of the city centre is going ahead and the annex of the Ulster University is about to be completed. The movie industry is flourishing, series like Game of Thrones, In the Line of Duty or The Fall have been filmed here. Tourism is getting big, especially in the summer months and you can even get a hamburger from McDonald’s meanwhile. But as Colin Coulter, professor of sociology at
Maynooth University observes,

‘The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was meant to signal an era of economic prosperity for those working-class communities that suffered most during the Troubles. Over two decades on, this much vaunted ‘peace dividend’ has yet to materialise. A combination of persistent economic stagnation and the onset of austerity has ensured that the poverty and inequality that marked the era of political conflict continue to blight Northern Irish society.’

With the money coming from Europe and the British government, they want to invest it in something that shows. They want things to look good. Want to show progress. And the politicians play along, make the various institutions build show-programmes in order to draw that money in. They want the world to see that the people in Northern Ireland are coming together. So projects that give a strong and easy proof of progress are more likely to be funded than others. The communities outside the centre and out of immediate visibility are not the premium target.

Despite all promises. No news on that side, really.

But there is no longer much to worry about, with Brexit, that money will probably stop coming in anyway.

Colin Coulter, Northern Ireland’s Elusive Peace Dividend, 2018
Heather Hamill, The Hoods, Crime and Punishment in Belfast, 2011
Eamonn McCann, The Irish Times, 27/04/2019
Allison Morris, BBC Talkback 08/08/2019

02 Quiet

“And we must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they
depend. In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship. But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted?”

Margaret Thatcher, Speech to American Bar Association, July 1985

There’s a bit of a routine I’ve developed over the years. I listen to the radio. Talkshows. Mostly about everyday political and current affairs. It’s entertaining and it gives me an insight in what’s going on in this place, the mood of everyday life and citizen but also the role of the media, mainly the BBC. Its need to appear impartial, always operating on the equality ethos. Which of course is not possible, given the fact that we are talking about a British Network, paid mainly by the British and a handful of Irish taxpayers. Not many programs made in the North of Ireland would spark a flame of interest on the British island. Not too many people over there really care whether this wee country belongs to the United Kingdom or not. They probably think they’d be better off without it. Brexit is the latest proof of how the British live in oblivion when it comes to that part of their precious union. When even the secretary of state doesn’t know about the two main entities and their affiliations either to the Crown or to the Republic down south, well, it just seems a little bit upity to me. A bit of a colonial hangover maybe?

During the Troubles in the 70s, 80s and 90s, any journalist with a desire to keep the job, would only

report from Northern Ireland with certain safeguards in place. It was easy to get on the wrong page of the British government’s upper echelon so eager to portray itself in a positive light. Ever the peace corps, the good samaritans, coming over to settle an argument between two rivalling native tribes. Law and order fighting a terrorist gang. A friendly army drinking tea with the locals. That was the kind of picture they wanted to imprint in the spectator’s mind. There was no room for an alternative narrative, no room for reports about young unarmed men killed by soldiers, ill-treatment and torture in Castlereagh, shoot to kill policies and collusion between the army and loyalist paramilitaries. And there was certainly no room for the republican voice that could evoke the so dreaded question of WHY. To protect the people from being informed, a new legislation was introduced.

From 1988 until 1994, the Tory government put a ban on broadcasting the voices of all those who support terrorism. They were particularly concerned about television, its huge audience and the great impact of visual images. The BBC was said to be more influential than Parliament, the press, trade unions, the civil service, the monarchy and the church together. Eleven loyalist and republican paramilitary groups were listed, however, the real target was Sinn Féin, a democratically elected party and an integral part of the political process. They practically disappeared from television with a few moments of airtime that could just as well have been an episode in Monty Python’s FLYING CIRCUS. Not banning someone’s ideas, but banning the voice, it’s so bizarre and yet beautifully absurd.

Take REAL LIVES for instance. A documentary about Martin McGuinness, former IRA member turning Sinn Féin politician, and Gregory Campbell from the DUP, two politicians from two opposing parties, only that one of the parties, Sinn Féin, was under the broadcast ban and the other, the DUP, which also happened to be the leading party in Northern Ireland, was not. So whilst Gregory Campbell was free to promote the shoot to kill policy, Martin McGuinness and his wife had do be dubbed – at least partially.

“It was all really non-sensical. When you have Martin McGuinness’ wife speaking as the wife of an IRA commander, her voice is done by an actress, but when she sighs, she sighs in her own personal capacity, so it’s her real sigh.” Keith Baker

For the reporters of the BBC the ban meant a lot of complication. Keith Baker, who was Head of News of Current Affairs at BBC Northern Ireland from 1988 to 1995, remembers how they now had to decide whether the interviewees spoke in their personal or in the IRA’s capacity and what parts of the interview, therefore, had to be dubbed. So after the normally done job they now had to take the soundtrack off and find an actor to do the voice-over. Stephen Rea and Ian McElhinney were doing the voices of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness regularly. Keith liked the actors to do the voice-overs as normally as possible
– just go dadada – in order to emphasise the ridiculousness of the ban. But there was also a developing skill of lip-synching among certain actors:

“I took it as my job to make what Gerry Adams was saying as clear as possible. If he was sending a signal, that that signal should be heard. It’s a disadvantage. You don’t get the real person. And so much of politics is about what a person is saying.” Stephen Rea

I came across this story before I went to Belfast and before I got the chance to hear people like Gerry Adams or Bernadette McAliskey and others in person. My attention back then was not on the fact that all these people do have a unique way of talking and a lot of them have a capturing aura about them. My focus was on the absurdity and bizarreness of it all. Let me just share with you:

When asked on her view on violence and Irish republicanism, Bernadette McAliskey, then Devlin, former MP and still civil rights activist said

“Well, I have to put it in context. Quite honestly, if I supported it fully, if I could justify it, I would join the IRA. But since I am not a soldier, since I cannot within myself justify it, then I’m not. But I can understand it, I can explain it, I can articulate it and I can offer what I believe to be a rational way out of it, which is discussion and negotiation, wherever it is in the world.”

Only her first eight words made it into the acoustic world, all the rest was subtitled. It was deemed as being supportive of the IRA. Ah well.

It really would have been interesting to see the outcome of a lip-synched Shane McGowan in The Pogues’ Street of Sorrow/Birmingham Six.

There were six men in Birmingham
In Guildford there’s four
That were picked up and tortured
And framed by the law
And the filth got promotion
But they’re still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place
And at the wrong time...

A song about the miscarriage of justice in the case of the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four, who, after spending over 15 years in prison, were eventually freed and redeemed. (Un)fortunately, a dubbed version was never done and the song got banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority altogether.

But my all-time favourite is the IRA sausage scene in Peter Taylor’s documentary THE ENEMY WITHIN where several loyalist and republican paramilitary prisoners are speaking un-dubbed about their situation, their lives, their views and so on. As they speak in their purely personal and private capacity and not as official representatives of the IRA, UDA or UFF, talking about their membership in a paramilitary group doesn’t bother the observing censorship board. But beware, it definitely gets ticklish when the IRA food spokesman comes in, his voice had to be silenced:

IRA FOOD SPOKESMAN

The thing about the sausage rolls... they’re getting smaller. In terms of size and all that there, you know.

The quality is still alright.
PRISON OFFICER

The quality is good but they’re a bit small...

IRA FOOD SPOKESMAN

They're getting a bit small you know.

PRISON OFFICER

Yeah but they taste a bit better.

IRA FOOD SPOKESMAN

Getting a bit better.
PRISON OFFICER

They were made frozen from the British one, there’s nothing we can do with this thing, just how they’re made.
IRA FOOD SPOKESMAN

Right. There’s two things you put on, the stir-fry for the main meal last week and the fish cod type thing. ...

According to Steve Foster, the right to freedom of speech is a fundamental right, basic to human worth and dignity. Not granting that right is like treating someone with less value. It causes pain and distress. It violates their dignity as an individual and it’s damaging to society as a whole. There is a public benefit in the prohibition of torture or arbitrary censorship or discrimination. Article 15 of the European Convention – which was not yet in place during the time of the broadcast ban – recognises that different considerations may apply to the safeguarding of human rights in times of war or other situations of emergency. Any measure will need to be passed or carried out for a legitimate, and objectively justified, purpose and will also need to be reasonable and proportionate.

What personal effect the ban had on Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Bernadette McAliskey, or anybody else who was silenced, I do not know. But with the actors perfecting their accents and local mannerisms, and them coming across much more articulate than they might have in their own voice, viewers tended to pay more attention to what was actually being said. In fact, it was a big boost for Sinn Féin, as they knew how to turn the whole sorry farce to their advantage by promoting their case in America, where attacks on freedom of speech didn’t go down very well. So when Maggie in hindsight said that –

“I have no doubt that not only was it justified but that it has worked, and there is reason to believe that the terrorists think so too.”

– well, I just like to quote Keith again: “It wasn’t – aah – but they have to say that.”

Keith Baker, Interview on 6 September 2017
Liz Curtis, The Propaganda War, 1984
Brice Dickson, The European Convention on Human Rights and the Conflict in Northern Ireland, 2010
Steve Foster, Human Rights and Civil Liberties, 2008
Paul Hamann (Director), Speak No Evil, 2005
David Miller, Don’t Mention The War, 1994
Peter Taylor (Reporter), The Enemy Within, 1990

01 Welcome

Welcome to Northern Ireland, The Occupied Territories, The Six Counties, Ulster, Our Wee Country, or the North of Ireland, where the use of place-names indicates where your allegiances are and whether or not you think that the British presence on this part of the island is legitimate. Without having expressed any political view, you give yourself away. Thank goodness there’s a wee bit of leeway for the immigrant, caught up in this terminological minefield. The island has been colonised. The loss of personal, national and ethnic identity has ignited many violent conflicts – wars – with the most recent one lasting a good 30 years. About every aspect of cultural, political, societal and personal life is somehow defined by US and THEM. Despite the ongoing peace process, the Good Friday Agreement, the lack of reporting on the region abroad, peace and quiet it is not. I've been in Belfast for three years now. I've spoken to many people, read book after book, worked with local NGOs, got in touch with organisations dealing with legacy issues, walked the city from north to south and east to west. I'm doing my best to understand the pun, the craic, Belfast-English, and I've discovered a rich place. Full of history, ancient and not so ancient. Wonderful people, funny, with stories to tell that are not funny at all and empty buildings, waste land, unobstructed boardwalks along the river, the city with the most car parks in the world, thanks to the steady bombing campaign back in the time, as the local saying goes. There's so much here and I love every aspect of it, even if there's a lot to despair about. Political zero-sum-situation. Numbness. Exasperation. Injustice. Poverty. Mental health issues. The solidarity within communities and sometimes cross-community, the grass root activism across the age spectrum, the protest culture and unions that still deserve the name are an answer. It feels like people care.

The neighbourhood I live in has had it bad during the war. The Troubles. There's murals, plaques, a Remembrance Garden, annual commemorations and the Hunger Strikers on top of the tower blocks to remind and remember. On my way to a meeting with ex-prisoners I was chatting to a neighbour. She lived in this neighbourhood all her life and she was almost disgusted that I, a Swiss woman, wanted to get involved with any of it. She just couldn't understand. I've been asking myself this very question many times and never found the one catchy explanation. But it made me remember a photograph of my uncle's first child's christening – or was it his wedding? However, my grandparents stand at the very edge of the frame and don't look too happy. Apparently they were extremely upset with their son marrying a protestant girl and raising the children in the protestant tradition and they only attended the christening because my uncle threatened to cut all ties with them. I never thought much of this until I came to Belfast. It's here that I've learned about inequalities and oppression on sectarian grounds. And it's here that I've started to ask more questions about my own family background. This is not the answer to why I'm getting involved with a culture that's not mine, but it's an unexpected result of it.

I grew up in Basel, a border town to France and Germany. There was a house where you had dinner in Switzerland and went to bed in France – it's always this bit of fascination with borders. But you cannot underestimate the power of borders as well. Especially if it's an arbitrary one. People's livelihoods and human rights are in question and the consequences of that can be seen in Ireland as well as in other places of the world, such as Palestine or Cyprus. Politics are everywhere, in health, education, sports, festivities, environment, architecture, city planning and economics.

It's a question of identity.

Of this and much more BELFAST RELIABLE NEWS consists and will be broadcasted regularly. So make sure to keep in touch.

“Sir, - Ireland is an island surrounded by water. It has 32 counties and four provinces. One of these provinces,
Ulster, has nine counties, six of which are occupied by a foreign country. The occupation of these six counties was
forced on this country by a threat of war. This all happened in 1922, after the first World War when many Irish
men had been killed and the Irish leaders had been executed in 1916.”

Reader’s Letter to the editor of the Irish Times, 18/06/1996

“An Irish tourist who drunkenly mistook the Romanian parliament for his hotel has been arrested in Bucharest. The unnamed Irish national was said to be a little worse for wear as he searched for his hotel in the city’s Old Town. But rather than his chosen accommodation he instead entered Romania’s Palace of the Parliament. Interrogation of the suspect was delayed due to his excessively drunken state.”

“Ireland’s first ever academic seminar on the age-old problem of hangovers has taken place in Donegal.”

THE IRISH NEWS on 20 November and 30 December 2021

18 Closing Time

The last five years have been a rich journey through political, societal, cultural and many more landscapes on this island of Ireland. Most of my time I’ve dedicated attempting to understand and making sense of what’s going on here. I won’t pretend to much achievement in that endeavour but the love for this place grows and I often wonder why. Because it sure isn’t the weather, neither is it the free health care system. Nature and beauty are stunning but so it is in my country.

It must be the people. The people who shout and fight when having a conversation and who never come up with a straight answer but tinker seven stories into one. They love their craic. In Switzerland I’m told that I sound Irish but I don’t understand the Belfast brogue. After all this time I often laugh along cluelessly. So what is it that keeps me here besides McKernan’s home made stew?

It’s the people and their dedication to protest against the eyesore of a temporary corrugated tin wall at the Malone Road Chinese consulate. Against the height of the finished brick wall. Against the floodlights shining over the finished brick wall and the colour of the mail box after the construction of the brick wall:

the wrong red.

It’s the people who welcome you into their everyday life without asking questions. They let you in on family birthdays, weddings and wakes. You’re welcome to stay overnight and instead of bearing a grudge after you’ve broken a precious statue, they serve you a fry. The only rule: don’t ask any questions back.

It’s the women. The strong Irish women I wish not to end up arguing with. Their telling you off in no ambiguous way and yet so vulnerable in their societal role and legacy. Women in conflict and women after conflict – that’s a chapter missing. It’s missing because it’s dear to me and it needs more from me.

While I’m not short on material, and it’s been my intention from the start to dedicate a chapter to the question of a United Ireland, a New Ireland, I find myself overwhelmed with the topicality of it all. You can’t say New Ireland without stumbling over the DUP-SAYS-NO-TO-ANYTHING-BUT-UNIONIST-SUPREMACY attitude, Brexit and ultimately Partition and Colonialism. I kind of cracked after the unionists’ desire for a centenary stone at Stormont.

More topics should have been discussed here. Punk should have been a chapter. The importance of the punk movement during the Troubles, how it brought divided communities together. The local bands still performing. STIFF LITTLE FINGERS, THE UNDERTONES (minus Feargal Sharkey), THE OUTCASTS, THE DEFECTS, THERAPY?, THE SABREJETS, THE DEAD HANDSOMES and Terri Hooley, the godfather of Belfast punk. A new generation is emerging – KNEECAP from Belfast, NO COLLUSION from Derry. The Belfast punk saga has been told by musicians and regular punters – the people who ARE the story. I still need to find MY story.

BELFAST RELIABLE NEWS came to be because of the generosity of the people around me. The time they invested sharing their stories. The patience towards a never ending flow of questions. Their forbearance for cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. All the cups of tea and pints of Guinness drowned, lifts in cars offered, lending of books and summed-up opinions. Many times sensitive encounters were made possible through a trusted third party. What a support. I’d love to name each and every one, which means to list all my friends and acquaintances – I might just do that in the upcoming book that is planned for 2023.

With all of that in mind, BELFAST RELIABLE NEWS is closing its doors. But no worries, you’ll be hearing from us in one way or another soon. In the meantime let’s just say – see yous later, alright, sound sound.

Gorey