Confronting Brexit & my Identity Crisis

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Editor in Being young, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, Borders, Brexit, Dispatch from the Diaspora, EUFA Cup 2016, IRA, Loughinisland, Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland, Sport, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, The Troubles, World Cup Football

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Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

~ Robert Frost

Less than a week ago, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Let that sink in. I haven’t – yet. Buoyed – and delightfully distracted – by the progress of both the Ireland and Northern Ireland football teams in the 2016 UEFA European Championship, I have yet to absorb the ramifications of Brexit. It’s complicated, because it concerns who I think I am. Let’s face it, my cultural identity has always been a bit suspect, depending on who might be in the room. Declarations of nationhood have always raised an eyebrow – British, Irish, Northern Irish or an Ulsterwoman – and, casting a wary eye over the past 40 years or so, could also be dangerous, if not fatal. I have been away for a long time, yet I have not forgotten the bombings and bullets, and roadblocks and the border, or the subtle (and more overt) means we employed to determine one’s religion – one’s fate.

In May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who lived there, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland often display a mutual need to know, from the start, about a person’s background, so they are safe to continue in the conversation and in the wider relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” I too have danced this dance, taking cues from our last names, the names of schools we attended, the way we pronounce an “H” to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties? to determine the borders between us.

So who am I? Well, to the chagrin and confusion of some friends and family back home, I consider myself Irish first – and European – and British too, but only when it’s convenient. My “documentation” suggests a split identity. I have an Irish passport, but because I was born in Northern Ireland, I may also carry a British passport. If I’m honest, the latter has been more for the sake of expediency at airports. A resident in America, my permanent residency card clearly states Ireland as my country of birth, but my birth certificate states my birthplace as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Sometimes, I am considered one of her Royal Majesty’s subjects; other times, I am not, like the time a waiter in a bar at Heathrow Airport refused to accept my money because, although Stirling and legal tender, it was printed on a Bank of Ulster note. My money had identified me as something other than acceptable to him.

I have never forgotten the way he made me feel, and in the moments after the news that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the EU, I felt something akin to that way again. Sickened and scared. I didn’t want to leave the EU. Northern Ireland didn’t want to leave either as evidenced by its vote, but here we are. Out of it. It is early days, of course, and we’re not sure what it means. How could we? Our destiny appears to have been an afterthought. Still, some of my younger friends back home and my American friends here, are telling me to calm down. Don’t panic. Why panic?

Why panic?

To explain, I need to go back – to a place of panic, to the country that made me, to a border and men with guns asking to inspect our papers or rolling below our car to check for a bomb underneath it; to men in uniform examining my daddy’s driving license to confirm – presumably – that he wasn’t a terrorist. Does that elicit a little panic? It should.

The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has all but disappeared in recent years, in large part because of our common membership in the EU and EU laws enacted from 1998-2014, the most recent of which confirming what we all know – that we have a long way to go in terms of reconciliation. Accordingly, funding from the EU has supported much of the Peace Process, recognizing that it will not happen overnight. Sensible people know that once a wall, a border, goes up, it takes time to tear it down. It becomes a part of our external and internal geography, at once keeping us apart and a part. Therefore, it makes sense that the EU would formulate long range plans such as its current PEACE IV project intended to run through 2020. It was designed to promote reconciliation through targeted engagement with young people, education, and the creation of shared spaces in areas most affected by the conflict.

We were making slow and steady progress. Look at us now! Northern Ireland is a tourist destination, and even though I don’t watch Game of Thrones, I smugly boast to my American friends that I am from County Antrim where much of it is filmed. Belfast, where I lived in the 1980s, is now a bustling cosmopolitan city. No more armed security checkpoints, no more a “no go” area – the time has never been better to visit, urges National Geographic. The Good Friday Agreement and EU laws contributed to the creation of this Belfast that I love so well, so why wouldn’t we want to remain in the EU? It gave us the kind of city we could only have dreamed of some forty years ago.

I wonder if those who voted so vehemently to leave the EU stopped to consider the price of peace – and perhaps more importantly – if the UK would continue efforts to maintain what we have already accomplished. Did they stop to consider the possibility of a return to the way things were, to the reality of Northern Ireland’s past, to the devastating loss of life during The Troubles, some 3637 people killed and God only knows how many more horribly injured, such as these following the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant in Belfast in 1972, when I was just nine years old:

One girl has lost both legs, an arm and an eye. Her sister has lost both legs. A male victim lost two legs, and a female lost one leg and one arm. Another female lost one limb, and three of the injured have lost eyes.

Did some of those who voted to leave also forget that the violence and pain of our Troubles was not confined to Northern Ireland? England – the mainland – suffered too. Horribly. Rewinding the mental tapes, I recall black and white news reports of Aldershot, of cars packed tightly with explosives that blew up outside The Old Bailey and in Whitehall; The M62; bars in Guildford, then Birmingham; and, Warrington, Canary Wharf, and Brighton. And more, so many more. Following one of these atrocities, I recall someone on the radio remarking that it “would give the Brits a taste of The Troubles.” Let that sink in.

Why panic?

I can’t help it. Sitting in my Phoenix living room, shortly after the results of the EU referendum were announced – and knowing that my mother and father and my friends back home would be waking up to the news – Martin McGuinness called for a border poll on a United Ireland. An unrealistic and opportunistic move, but still it awakened in me the fear of a return to the Northern Ireland of my childhood, to the violence which ripped so many of our families apart.

And I wept.

In the days before the Referendum, I had been ecstatic, rejoicing along with thousands of football fans – the Green and White Army and the Boys in Green – as both teams from our tiny island made it to the Round of 16 at the EUFA European Championship. Hailed as the best fans in the world, we sang through every match, singing on even in defeat, long after the final whistle:

Such pride. The last time I experienced such a feeling was in 1994. A visit back home had coincided with the miracle of Ireland qualifying for the World Cup. The country was jubilant, its factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in plenty of time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. We had thought of going out to the pub to watch the first-round match, but my father convinced us to stay at home, have a few jars, and watch the match from the comfort of the living room. So we gathered around the TV and held our breath as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. Like Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series, we were afraid to look.

The second half of the match was well underway when two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub back home – The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men who had gathered around the bar to watch Ireland NWS_2014-06-09_NEW_014_31936901_I5 take on Italy. They killed six of them, and according to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was 87 years old, someone’s grandfather, the oldest victim of The Troubles, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup. In the same moments, the delighted Irish football team was making its way out a Giants Stadium awash in green, held aloft by the chants of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by news of what had happened in a country pub back home.

Six minutes into Ireland’s match against Belgium in France last Saturday, football fans were asked to stand in silence to mark the 22nd anniversary of the murders of those six men slaughtered in the Heights Bar. I thought of their families and all that had been lost, of recent painful revelations about collusion, of reconciliation as a still-elusive thing. I thought of how far we had come, that Northern Ireland’s youngest football fans have never known a bomb scare, a security checkpoint, a civilian search. I thought of their grandparents and their parents – people my age – who are still anxious and recovering from decades of sectarian tension. Traumatized by it, but hopeful, in large part because of the symbolism of an open border and the free movement across it afforded by membership in the EU, that we were well on the road to recovery.

Now what? Given that immigration is at the crux of the Brexit vote, then it would make sense presumably for the UK to restrict its border with Ireland (still a member of the EU). What will that mean for Northern Ireland and its precarious peace? Early days, I know, but I also know that the Peace Process is still relatively new, with The Good Friday Agreement signed only in 1998. We are still figuring out how to live in peace, many of our walls are still erect. And yes, for the most part, the violence has ebbed, but the distrust and suspicion remains, creating a breeding ground for the kind of panic that has settled in my chest. What was possible seems to have been snatched from us.

We were only just beginning . . .

The rather patronising English joke used to be that whenever the Irish question was about to be solved, the Irish would change the question. And now, when the Irish question seemed indeed to have been solved, at least for a generation, it is the English who have changed the question.

~ Fintan O’Toole

Remembering Ian Paisley & Dreams Deferred

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Editor in Aging, bombing, Children of The Troubles, Death and dying, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, IRA, Irish Diaspora, Martin McGuinness, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Peace, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, UVF

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!970s Northern Ireland, forgiveness, Martin McGuinness, Paisley, Sinn Fein, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, The Wayside Halt, Ulster Workers Strike

I suppose if you live long enough, almost nine decades, all is eventually forgiven. At least that’s what the obituaries for Rev. Ian Paisley suggest. Like many of us, I was raised to observe the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” credo, to speak no ill of the dead, but in the days since Ian Paisley’s passing, I have grown increasingly vexed over the glowing online obituaries, the over-the-top eulogizing of a man, who from the year of my birth until the year I left Northern Ireland, railed against the Catholic church, spewing hate and bigotry – brilliantly – and inciting countless followers to violence.

I did not know Ian Paisley as a father and a husband. I know nothing of the way he conducted his private life. I empathize with his grieving family and friends – he was an old man and in poor health when he died. As well, I feel compelled to comment on his public life which splashed noisily onto mine and the lives of so many ordinary people living in Northern Ireland, people who wanted peace some forty years before the fragile state of it in place today, people who were denied it in large part because of Paisley’s immovability, his fire and brimstone ferocity, his rabble-rousing. Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, writes that for decades:

Ian Paisley was seen as part of an intractable and unending problem in the North of Ireland. But in the end, he made a powerful and determined contribution to resolving that problem and pointing to a new way forward based on dialogue, respect, partnership and reconciliation.

Unlike McGuinness, I am not a politician. I am a teacher who began her career in a Belfast classroom, where students revered Paisley and openly despised Catholics. Where did that hatred come from? Much of it was fueled by the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. In that classroom, I had a daily opportunity to observe what happens to a country when the hearts of its young harden, and I cannot forgive Ian Paisley for his part in that. I read recently that the best age to learn a new language is 11-13, early adolescence. Thus, it saddens me to consider the opportunities squandered by Paisley and his ilk. When he was at the height of his power, he had so many chances to to teach the language of peace and understanding, but he chose not to, and he stood by that choice for too many years of turmoil and bloodshed.

I know of course that my opinion of Ian Paisley probably doesn’t matter much. I know that in spite of being told to do the decent thing and to say nothing against a man who cannot defend himself in death, I feel a profound sense of obligation to speak publicly about the impact of his thundering, virulent attacks on Catholicism, liberalism, the Civil Rights movement, mixed marriage, and homosexuality, because he played a starring role in the destruction of dreams of peace and unity for so many of us. Along with the black and white images of The Troubles that flicker still in my memory – the banging of the bin-lids, the soldiers on street corners, the bombed out shops and the panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes, I can hear Ian Paisley roaring from our television set, his violent rhetoric scaring the little girl I once was.

There is no doubt, as the obituaries reveal, that Paisley, the “Big Man from Ballymena” (who called himself a child of God) was a masterful politician. More than most, he knew how to work a room, how to whip a crowd into a frenzy, how to frighten his followers into believing that their cultural heritage, their very way of life was at risk, and, he knew how to step back, absolved of any responsibility for what they might do. He was instrumental in bringing Northern Ireland to a standstill – “a constitutional stoppage” – through the Ulster Workers’ Strike (UWS) of 1974.

Forty years on, and on the other side of the world, I cannot write about the UWS without writing about what happened on May 24, 1974 at The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena, the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look.

The Wayside Halt will forever linger in a corner of my consciousness, refining my sense of who I am. My father told me not too long ago that on that May evening in 1974, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because dad was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined. Before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican,Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.

Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.

Ian Paisley – man of God – did not attend their funerals. Intransigent and unyielding, it would take another quarter of a century of bloodshed – a lifetime – before he would accept the Good Friday agreement and share power with his former Nationalist enemies as First Minister in the new devolved government.

Too late for the Byrne brothers and their families.

Too late for me.