by Pete Hamill
IV.
BELFAST
On the last day, the Saracens still moved through the city with their guns bristling and the eyes of the soldiers alert for sudden movement, while people stood on the streets in sullen hostility. The prisoners were still behind the wire at Long Kesh and Magilligan; there were still Irishmen stuffed in the hold of the prison ship Maidstone, standing in the Belfast harbor, within sight of the country they loved so much they were willing to die or be jailed for it.
A department store had been blown up, a bank raided, soldiers fired on in some country town.” Once again, it became devastatingly clear that reporters are essentially tourists at other people’s tragedies.
And yet when you prepare to leave this tragic country, there is always a sense that the story has not been fully told, that there is neither language nor sufficient compassion to properly spin the tale. The country hurt Yeats into poetry. It has not changed. Not in 50 years. Not in 300.
I wish I had been able to tell it all better, to explain that what is happening in the northeast corner of this island off the shores of Western Europe has something important to say to those of us who live in America. All the big abstractions are in it: the need for justice, the oppression that can lead men to violence, the destruction that always follows when decency and human goodness are set aside with contempt and bitterness.
But this is also about men who cannot feed their children and have seen them go off to Australia and America and Liverpool for five generations, and have decided at last that no more children will have to abandon the country in which they are born.
If that takes the Thompson gun, if it takes gelignite in the night, if it takes membership in the IRA, no matter; in Andersonstown, the Belfast stronghold of the Provisional IRA, there is 41 per cent unemployment among heads of families; but they are not leaving. They are prepared to die on their feet in their own land.
The story is also about women: easily the most extraordinary group of women I’ve ever met. Their men are in the concentration camps, or on the run. But go down into the Bogside in Derry, move through Ballymurphy and Andersonstown and Ballymacarat in Belfast, and you will see women holding it together; they paint the walls white in the afternoons to make the British soldiers better targets at night; they bang the garbage can lids when the soldiers approach, to warn the IRA men that the soldiers are coming and the arms must be stashed or used. They manage families, and have time for tea and gossip; but they are the iron of the Irish rebellion. In Edward R. Murrow’s phrase (used about the British in 1940), they are people who have decided to live a life, and not an apology.
Northern Ireland means something to Americans because much of what is happening here is happening in other forms in the United States. “We’re the blacks of Northern Ireland,” one young Irishman said to me. And there are of course parallels to the black experience in America. In Northern Ireland, Catholics are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The artificial barrier of religion is used in the same way that the artificial matter of skin color is used in the United States, to separate working men from each other, to the advantage of a few.
In fact, since 1969 there have been no direct clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. There has been an urban guerrilla war between the IRA and the British Army; there has been much destruction of property. But there have been no true religious riots, no more than there were actual race riots in America during the late 1960s.
A number of blacks employed violence against property and against authority, an authority they believed was corrupt and oppressive; but there were never any large confrontations between blacks and whites. The IRA men are now essentially doing the same thing, with the large differences being that they are fighting in a much smaller country and they are a much larger minority in Northern Ireland than the blacks are in the United States. But their basic motivations, like those of the blacks, are economic. They are poor; they are the men of no property, and they want to live decent lives.
At present, the IRA are winning their guerrilla war. Even with internment, even with the presence of 15,000 British troops, the men and women of the Provisional wing of the IRA are continuing to fight. It is not just the killing of British soldiers by which you measure their effectiveness; they are also destroying the economy of the country.
They are winning because they are not losing. When a band of urban guerrillas can hold off the British Army and provide protection for their own people while causing extensive damage to the opposition, they are winning.
When I first went to Northern Ireland in 1963, the IRA were considered a tiny band of dreamy fanatics. That is no longer the case.
The two most recent events that insured their continued existence were the start of internment on Aug. 9 last year, and the killing of 13 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. Those killings ended any possibility that the general Catholic population could ever accept the authority of the Northern Ireland government at Stormont, and destroyed any vestigial belief that the British Army was there in a spirit of fair-minded good will.
After Bloody Sunday, it was up to the IRA to fight on forever, if necessary, because there seemed no other choice.
They will not have to fight on forever, of course, because the British government will not be able to sustain the Northern Ireland situation much longer. Public opinion polls show that a majority of British people want the troops out of Northern Ireland.
The Heath government is floundering around in multiple crises: Rhodesia, the miners’ strike, the great power shortage, and unemployment that has passed 1,000,000 and is climbing. Before this year is out, and probably sooner than later, the war in Northern Ireland will go to a conference table.
At that conference table, everyone who might upset a settlement must be represented. The IRA will be there, because, like the Viet Cong, they have bled for the right to be there. The militant Protestants will be there, so that their suspicions about the motives of the Catholic South can be eased; in talks with literally hundreds of Catholics in Northern Ireland, not one ever said that he or she would like to do to the Protestants what the Protestants have been doing to the Catholics for so many years. Not one argued for union with the Catholic South on terms dictated from Dublin.
Such a peace conference must lead to the final end of the British presence in Ireland and the creation of a new state. The tough, hard people of Northern Ireland have fought for too long to see their fight usurped by the comfortable middle-class bureaucrats of Dublin.
They want a new Ireland, not simply an Ireland in which the six counties in the North are tacked onto the South. A peace conference would almost certainly lead to an all-Ireland constitutional convention, with full representation for every possible point of view, from right-wing fascist to the Maoists and the great majority in between. And from that convention will come the new Ireland, shaped and led by the Irish.
All of this assumes that there is reason and compassion in London, which might be a false assumption. But if Heath and the British government keep on this way, there is no prospect for anything except more killing and more destruction. Until the day when reason prevails, the fighting will go on.
V.
There are no Saint Patrick’s Day parades in the Ireland of Gerry Adams. There are no leprechauns. There is no green beer. There are few toora-loora-loora sentimentalities, no room for sure-and-begor-rah stage-Irishmen. Gerry Adams lives in the real Ireland, and it’s a very dangerous place.
“I suppose there’s a 90 per cent chance I’ll be assassinated,” Adams said in early 1984, “and that upsets me on a human level.”
On March 14, 1984, some of the people who would like to permanently upset Adams on a human level made their move. In broad daylight in the shadow of the Victorian city hall in Belfast, three members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Protestant paramilitary group, came roaring from a side street in a gray Cortina and fired nine shots at a car carrying Adams and three friends. Adams was shot in the neck, right sho
ulder and upper arm. But this time, to the dismay of his enemies, Adams would live.
At 38, lean, bearded, tweedy, he is the head of Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Party (IRA) in its fight for a unified Ireland. He is the elected member of the British Parliament from West Belfast, although he refuses to swear an oath of loyalty to the British Grown and formally take the seat. Adams is a republican, with a small “r,” and a socialist. And though he is capable of self-mocking laughter, dark ironies, private humors, Gerry Adams is a very serious man.
Some of that seriousness is evident in the major facts of his life. Consider just one: from 1970 to 1980, Gerry Adams, the son of a day-laborer, spent 4V2. years in British prison camps without ever coming before a jury. During that same decade, he was on the run for 14 months, always moving, wary of informers, hunted by British Army agents and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which is the British-financed police force in the six counties of the North.
It was a heartbreaking decade in modern Irish history, and Adams was an intricate part of its numerous tragedies. He was a close friend of Bobby Sands, who died in a hunger strike, and he knew most of the others who followed Sands to the martyr’s grave. Many of Adams’ other republican friends have been killed, maimed or imprisoned in the grueling war that started in August 1969. Some have given up, left the field of battle, stepped away from the movement, emigrated. Adams struggles on. Dismiss him as a romantic revolutionary, say that the dream of a united Ireland is hopeless, that Irish nationalism is an anachronism, but you must give Gerry Adams this: he has not chosen to live an easy life.
“Adams speaks with the authority of his experience,” a Dublin newspaperman told me. “That’s his advantage over all other politicians in this country, north or south. He has paid a stiff personal price for his beliefs, and that can’t be taken away from him.”
In the years since the 1981 hunger strikes, Adams has led Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone” in Irish) to a prominent place in Irish politics. Sinn Fein has broadened its base, rolled up large votes, and begun to build a Tammany-style service organization, with six advice centers in West Belfast alone. It now seems possible that Adams might supplant John Hume, of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), as principal representative of the Catholic nationalist side of the northern political equation. At the same time, Sinn Fein has become more active in the 26-county Republic to the south, battering heroin peddlers in the slums of Dublin, trying to channel the anger and disillusion of unemployed Irish youth into politics, presenting an alternative to what Adams calls “the tweedledum and tweedledee” of the Republic’s two major political parties.
“I think we’ll do all right in the next elections,” Adams says. “We’ve got a few things going for us.”
There are a number of people who believe that Adams is a mere front man for the IRA, if not its actual leader. Since membership in the IRA would send him to jail, the truth might not be known until the war is over. But to some extent, the question is academic; Adams frankly, warmly, openly supports the IRA.
“If a section of the Irish people chose to resist by use of arms the British presence in Ireland, as needless to say they have chosen to do, generation after generation, then politically I will, of course, defend their right to do so.”
He is obviously aware of the terrible excesses of the war, the often murderous stupidity and carelessness, the outrages of the bombing campaigns. “I would certainly not attempt to justify any action in which civilians are killed,” he has said. “I naturally regret very much all such deaths. But since it’s not the policy of the IRA to kill civilians, I could not condemn them for accidental killings. In any war situation, civilians unfortunately suffer and die.”
And he adds: “The presence of the gun in Irish politics is not the sole responsibility of the Irish. The British were responsible for putting it there in the first place. And they continue to use it to stay in Ireland. No amount of voting will get them out.”
When Pope John Paul came to Ireland and delivered a homily on the need to end the violence, Adams said:
“I believe the Pope left a bigger, greater challenge to the Catholic Church than he did to the republicans. In principle, most republicans would agree with what the Pope said, but republicans don’t see themselves involved in violence. They see themselves involved in a perfectly legitimate struggle. I’m sure that if the Pope was asked for an opinion on an armed Communist takeover of some country, he would say it was quite legitimate to use force to resist it, and our opinion is that it is quite legitimate to resist the armed takeover of our country.”
Adams has spent most of his life in resistance to the British presence in Ireland. He lived as a child in Leeson Street in one of the worst Belfast slums, went to St. Finian’s primary school, St. Mary’s Christian Brothers School, and first saw action in 1964, when he was involved in the Divis Street riots. These were triggered by the display of a forbidden Irish tricolor in a window, an act that provoked a brutal attack by the RUC in which many civilians were injured. Soon he was deeply involved in republican politics, reading the literature of Irish revolution while working as a bartender at the Duke of York pub on Donegal Street. In those same years, he joined committees trying to alleviate housing and employment problems in Belfast and became a founding member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. At the time, there were almost no IRA members in the North; the organization had virtually ceased to exist. Then in August 1969, Belfast exploded, and Adams joined the self-defense teams in the Catholic ghettos. In March 1972, he was interned without charges, along with hundreds of other young Irishmen, and sent to the prison camp at Long Kesh. He soon found himself in the notorious Cage 11, from which many IRA leaders were to emerge. Adams does not, however, agree with the widely held theory that Long Kesh was the university of Irish republicanism.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said one recent morning. “But I think that aspect was very much exaggerated. They’ve got to explain this so they say, ‘Well, they were all stupid, they all got arrested, they all went to jail, and in jail they all got very clever, and then they got out and caused all this trouble.’ I don’t agree with that.”
But for Adams and his friends, much of the time in Cage 11 was well spent. “It was really a matter of putting in order whãt people already knew. That was my experience. Cage 11 was actually a wee bit different from all the other cages, because it was a wee bit crazy. It was sort of a M* A*S*H camp. The rest of the camp was militaristic, regimented, like a British Army thing, with officers of the day and so on.” Adams smiled. “Cage n didn’t have any of that.”
Today, Adams works most days in Connolly House, the headquarters of Sinn Fein in the Andersonstown section of Belfast. In a large room on the ground floor, local people wait to see Sinn Fein volunteers for help with problems. Sometimes the problems involve domestic disputes, erring husbands, disturbed children, other casualties of the war. Some visitors might have problems with government agencies or conditions in government-owned housing.
“We always did some of this work,” Adams says. “But now, with electoral legitimacy, we can call up on behalf of a constituent and do the same work with some clout.”
Connolly House is located in a small area of shops and two-story houses, and it was here that Martin Galvin of Queens came to speak last year in defiance of a British ban on his presence in the northern democracy. As soon as Galvin appeared at the side of Adams, the RUC charged, smashing into Irish and American members of the crowd. One RUC man fired a plastic bullet at a 20-year-old Irishman named John Downe and killed him. The American visitors, most of whom were members of Irish Northern Aid, which supports Sinn Fein and the IRA, were shocked by the viciousness of the assault. Adams was not.
“That’s the way they are,” Adams says. He likes to point out that the British have “a political code disguised as a moral code; they can use force and nobody else can.” Noting the current discussion of “widespread alienation�
�� in the North, Adams says, “Thatcher’s way of dealing with alienation is to shoot the alienated.”
Adams clearly wants the support of Irish-Americans, but doesn’t believe Sinn Fein or the IRA should alter their goals to please potential supporters. He is, for example, frank about being a socialist, and doesn’t accept the conventional analysis that the Northern Ireland struggle is just a tribal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. He certainly doesn’t want a “Catholic Ireland” and has clashed on a number of occasions with the Catholic hierarchy. The Sinn Fein vision of a united Ireland is decidedly nonsectarian.
“Historically, the church was always in the position of being fairly divorced from the people and not being involved with them in any social issues,” Adams says. “There are all sorts of examples of absolute stupidity here. Ballymurphy, here in Belfast, has a fantastically high rate of unemployment and poverty, and it had visited upon it a multi-thousand-pound church that the people had to pay for, which didn’t even have dwellings for a priest. So now they have this big mausoleum in the middle of Ballymurphy, but the priest is still two miles up the road.”
As it did in 1916, the church has repeatedly come down hard on the IRA. “It’s a conservative church, there’s no doubt about it,” Adams says. But there have been some changes — in Irish terms, very big changes. The fact that so many priests could come out against the Reagan visit, so many nuns and sisters oppose the Central American policies — that’s a change, a big one. And there are a sprinkling of radical priests about the place. But you have to distinguish between the church and the hierarchy. I mean, I’m a member of the church, as is every other Catholic in Sinn Fein; the hierarchy is only part of the church, too.”
Religion is not, however, the critical problem. Adams says the first order of business is independence, and from that would flow an independent Irish foreign policy, built on “positive neutrality,” unaligned either with NATO or the Warsaw Pact: A socialist economy would include nationalization of natural resources, banks and major industries; limits on the ownership of large tracts of land; most of all, a planned economy.