An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  In Belfast, both men and women tend to be soft-spoken, direct, honest, bawdy, and intimate. Surprisingly, you encounter very little bitterness or self-pity. Instead, a manic good cheer often holds sway, particularly during the evening hours. Everybody seems to have a heightened awareness of the passing seconds, and a determination to squeeze all the juice from them. But at the same time no one is romantic about living on the edge; rather, people worry about becoming inured to the misery around them, about losing the ability to feel. In every neighborhood, regardless of its religious bias, I found a powerful craving for the ordinary, for normal life—for peace.

  Still, the city can be so pleasant that an illusion of normalcy sets in. On those warm spring mornings, I’d leave the Wellington Park and walk down University Road and Great Victoria Street toward the center, going by Queen’s, where students were hustling to classes, and then passing through Shaftesbury Square, where workmen in overalls were hammering away on a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, piece by franchised piece. Usually, the sight of creeping Americanism is appalling, but Belfast is so insular that the presence of Colonel Sanders can be viewed as a healthy sign. As an old plumber said to me once at the Crown, “Maybe we’ve been blowin’ up the place to let a little light in.”

  Of all the spots where the hopeful light shines, the city center is the brightest by far. It’s a pedestrian shopping district about a mile square, bounded on every side by a spiked iron fence. To enter it at any point, you must go through a gate, where civilian search officers stand guard. Ten years ago, everyone was stopped and frisked; packages were unwrapped, the contents of purses dumped out, and men had to empty their pockets. A Catholic from the Falls Road, in the heart of the ghetto, might be strip-searched, merely because of an incriminating address on a driver’s license. People darted in and out on business, rarely lingering for fear of being the victim of a paramilitary operation. The area was deserted by five o’clock in the afternoon, and at dusk the gates were locked, allowing the Army to begin its ceaseless patrols.

  But now, because Belfast is much more stable, the center is animated and upbeat, with shoppers eating pizza and ice-cream cones, resting on benches, or gazing into windows. Land Rovers circle, soldiers march, police in flak jackets gather intelligence, but they lose their intensity in the sea of human energy swirling about them. In most department stores, the security is less intrusive than at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. On corners, newsboys hawk the Belfast Telegraph, crying “Te1-ly! Tel-ly!” in the nasal voices of Dead End Kids, while disgruntled gamblers emerge from betting shops, blinking, cursing, and casting scraps into the gutter. The scene looks so calm and unthreatening that you get lulled into thinking that the Troubles must be easing; but then, inevitably, something happens to remind you where you are.

  * * *

  The first person to be murdered while I was in Belfast was Terry McDaid, an unemployed Catholic bricklayer. He lived uncomfortably close to a Peace Line in Tiger’s Bay, a Loyalist stronghold, and while he was watching TV with his wife and his parents, sipping a cup of tea before bed, two gunmen broke into his house and shot him at point-blank range. The killers, who were rumored to belong to an outlawed paramilitary group, fled in a stolen Cortina and ditched it off the Shankill Road, in hardcore Protestant territory.

  According to the Royal Ulster Constabulary investigators, the murder appeared to be sectarian in intent, committed solely to produce a wave of fear and bad blood. McDaid had no ties to the I.R.A. or the Republican cause, and was known as a quiet, unassuming fellow who tinkered with cars and machines and liked to take his children swimming.

  In the morning, I expected the city to be paralyzed, but everyone was carrying on in the usual way, riding buses to work or to school, and I began to understand how ritualized terrorism has become in Northern Ireland, and how few people are directly endangered by it. The impression you get abroad is that anybody in town is fair game, and though that may have had some validity in the past, it doesn’t anymore. If you avoid certain tense areas, such as the Falls and the Shankill, your chances of being harmed are minimal. The number of civilian deaths has dropped steadily in recent years, and in 1987 only sixty-six civilians died. Even this figure is misleading. When a psychopath runs amok, he often does so within the handy framework of the Troubles (as Michael Stone did in Belfast, throwing grenades into the crowd at an I.R.A. funeral), and this can skew the statistics.

  In a barbershop that afternoon, a fiftyish barber put scissors to my hair and shyly explained why he had no desire to visit San Francisco, where I live. “I’d be skeered of the earthquakes,” he said, in thick Ulsterese, proving again that the idea of risk is relative. There are virtually no homicides in Belfast, no muggings or drive-by shootings, and none of the bizarre mass murders that make America so distressing. Furthermore, the violence has a recognizable rhythm, much like a poker game, rising or falling as the stakes change, and you can almost predict when an incident will occur—although you never know for certain who or what has been targeted. If an uneventful week passes, you can feel a growing tension in the streets, and everybody starts to be more cautious. There are more troops around, more R.U.C. vans and coppers on the beat, and they keep multiplying until something explodes.

  For an outsider, it was fascinating to watch the press deal with McDaid’s murder, transforming the poor victim into a martyr. His picture was featured on every front page, sometimes next to a photograph of his wife in her wedding gown. He looked curly-headed and inoffensive, a typical enough lad of twenty-nine. The actual killing was described in gruesome detail: we learned that the children slept through the shots, that McDaid’s mother was nicked in a leg, and that his widow tried to battle the intruders by swinging around a vacuum cleaner. The locals seem unable to get enough gossip about the private lives of the lately departed. All the papers cater to this taste, adopting a confidential tone.

  The murder was reported to be especially irritating to the R. U .C. because it didn’t follow the established pattern—McDaid had been chosen at random. Such random killings used to be standard, but they’ve almost vanished from the terrorists’ repertoire, partly because of the efforts of the British to make the city safer, and partly because of the way the leading paramilitary groups are currently conducting their business.

  For instance, a subgroup of the Ulster Defence Association, the Shankill Butchers, once made a career of slaughtering Catholics by slitting their throats, but since 1979, when eleven Butchers were sentenced to life imprisonment, attacks on innocents have been few and far between. Instead of wreaking havoc, the U.D.A. now squirrels away the money it skims from its drinking clubs and its protection rackets, while simultaneously burying caches of arms in sympathetic rural villages against the possibility of an Armageddon. The U.D.A. isn’t revolutionary or idealistic; it most resembles a Chicago mob of the nineteen-twenties, dispatching thugs to sell “insurance policies” to publicans and shopkeepers.

  The Irish Republican Army also profits from illegal schemes, but its devotion to its long-standing campaign to drive out the British cannot be questioned. At its core are a handful of canny veterans, who identify themselves with liberation movements worldwide and offer a philosophy that is a poorly digested bit of Marxism. Divided into cells, the I.R.A. is highly disciplined, and controls every downtrodden Catholic neighborhood, punishing petty crooks and unruly juveniles by kneecapping them, sometimes with bullets or a Black & Decker power drill. The degree of crippling one receives is supposed to reflect the gravity of one’s crime. Anybody who fails to heed such a warning may wind up floating in the black waters of Belfast Lough.

  The I.R.A. has a revolutionary manual, the Green Book, and its members look to it for advice on everything from munitions to resisting police interrogation. Such interrogations can be brutally sadistic, for the R.U.C. uses beatings, threats, humiliation, and other kinds of torture to extract confessions. I heard stories about prisoners forced to stand naked for hours in a winter chill, about bashings with cords and
truncheons, and about men having to subsist for months on a diet of cold oatmeal and warm water.

  In the face of such treatment, the Green Book urges a volunteer to remain “COOL, COLLECTED, CALM, and SAY NOTHING.” The bulk of the I.R.A.’s money still comes from partisans in the United States, who are often bilked into thinking that they’re giving to widows and orphans, not to terrorists. Each member of the organization receives a small weekly stipend of about thirty-five dollars, and from supporters in the community he may get free groceries and amenities, and plenty of free drinks.

  The military arm of the I.R.A. is known as the Provisional I.R.A., or Provos for short. The Provos can do crackerjack work, but they also botch their missions. After I left Belfast, a Provo bomb meant for a British patrol on the Falls Road accidentally blew up at a leisure center, killing or maiming several children and adults; a bomb meant for a High Court judge killed a Protestant family of three instead; and a bomb meant to destroy a military vehicle in County Tyrone failed to detonate because cows chewed through its green detonator wire. In each case, the I.R.A. made its excuses, but it remains dedicated to violence and explains its errors by saying that accidental casualties happen in any war.

  In some quarters, there is a naïve belief that the I.R.A. is invincible, but that isn’t so. The group was almost defunct in 1969, when the Troubles began; its arsenal consisted of just ten rifles. The British deserve credit for reviving the Republican dream, since England’s indirect rule in Northern Ireland had so abused the civil rights of the Catholic minority—denying it jobs, education, and decent housing—that the I.R.A. hardly needed to recruit.

  The first British soldiers to invade Ulster were a walking advertisement for the opposition. It’s not difficult to imagine how out of context they must have looked, marching down alleys and cobbled lanes, past horse carts, peat-roofed cottages, and gangs of awestruck kids. The soldiers rousted old married couples from their homes. They pushed around priests and women, and tanks began to roll through districts where nobody owned an automobile. All the prejudices of the realm were made manifest, and law-abiding citizens, people who had always paid their taxes and saluted the Queen, picked up rocks, bottles, and bricks and started hurling them in outrage and self-defense.

  The ranks of the LR.A. soon swelled to bursting, but it had no single leader and didn’t yet see itself as a guerrilla band. Factions fought for control of the organization—and for control of the cash pouring in from overseas. In the early seventies, the Provos, responding to Loyalist atrocities, embarked on a disastrous campaign of car bombings and blowing up places of public assembly, like hotels and restaurants, many of them in the city center.

  The campaign is supposed to have been devised by John Stephenson, who was born in England, of an Irish mother, and who turned Republican while doing time with some LR.A. boys in Wormwood Scrubs prison, changing his name to Sean MacStiofain. (A Belfast joke has it that the worst Irish are always Englishmen in disguise.) Many civilians died in the bombings, and sympathy for the I.R.A.—and contributions to it—took a serious dip. A paramilitary group, too, must respect the bottom line, so the I.R.A. refined its methods, eliminating a source of bad publicity, and these days it tries to hit only representatives of the Crown while they’re unarmed, off duty, or asleep.

  * * *

  In Catholic West Belfast, I became friendly with Laura Mcllhennon, an American who is married to a native of the city and has a house off the Falls Road. Before I visited her, I was advised to be careful. In the Falls, there’s a casual air of menace that a stranger recognizes immediately. You feel that a single false step might lead you down the wrong path. The look of the area is also disconcerting. Some blocks are ravaged, strewn with trash, marked by half-demolished buildings, boarded-up windows, piles of broken glass, and walls covered with pro-Republican graffiti. Wherever you go, people keep an eye on you, trying to figure out your purpose, wondering if you’re with the security forces. Sinn Fein, the political arm of the I.R.A., has its headquarters in Andersonstown, a neighborhood in the Falls, so surveillance throughout the area is heavy and incessant.

  Laura lives in a part of the Falls called Clonard, or sometimes Little India, because the streets have names like Bombay and Kashmir. Her house is similar to those around it, built of brick the color of ashes, and fronting on a ribbon of concrete sidewalk. Her street is narrow and seldom carries any traffic, so on nice afternoons women sit outside on kitchen chairs, taking a break from the dusting or the cooking to smoke a cigarette. There is an ease to such moments, a familiar intimacy reminding you what a tightly knit community the Falls is, with mothers living three doors down from daughters, and almost everybody having at least one relative within shouting distance. The nearness of kin is a great comfort, and even when people earn enough money to move to a better part of town, they do so reluctantly.

  Rain or shine, children are always running around on Laura’s block, both boys and girls, dozens of them, playing tag, kick the can, and other games. For the most part, they come from families struggling to get by, and they look their best in school uniforms, all polished and rosy-cheeked, but at other times you can read the poverty and neglect in their soiled T-shirts, ragged trousers, and dirty faces. There’s a lot of rough wrestling, pushing, and shoving among them, and they swear vigorously, too. Once, I saw a bunch of tough little boys pretending to be soldiers, chasing a lame old dog and taunting it with sticks. When the dog howled, they just laughed and kept after it, driving it down an alley.

  Laura’s house dates from the turn of the century. She paid about sixteen thousand dollars for it in 1986, using the proceeds of an inheritance. It’s three stories high and shares common walls with its neighbors. The rooms are compact and have low ceilings. You walk directly into a parlor furnished with a couch, two armchairs, a stereo, and a TV. On some shelves are books pertaining to the Troubles, including three histories of the I.R.A. and two biographies of Ian Paisley. There’s a small fireplace, and Laura burns coal and peat in it every winter—peat is cheap and sweetly aromatic.

  A plate-glass window looks out onto the street, and when somebody goes by on the sidewalk, which is flush against the house, he seems to be striding right through the parlor. A kitchen, tidy and functional, is behind the parlor. It has a door that opens onto a cement backyard, maybe five feet by ten feet, but the door hasn’t worked properly since a soldier kicked it in during a raid. The view from the kitchen is of Mackie’s, a foundry the I.R.A. keeps bombing, because it hires many more Protestants than Catholics.

  On the second floor, up a treacherous staircase, are two small bedrooms and a bath. More stairs lead to an attic, which is slowly being remodelled and turned into a study. In all, the house is pretty and adequate, if a bit cramped—probably an average accommodation for a family in the Falls, although many people are renters, not owners. The poorest Catholics, those who depend on welfare, would be delighted to have it, since at the moment they must live in government-owned blocks of flats around town.

  Those flats are overcrowded and run-down, as hideous as our worst urban-housing projects. Pipes leak, rats and mice scurry about, toilets overflow and are never fixed. An apartment suitable for two might be home to six. It might have a broken stove, and no electricity or central heating. The roof of the building might well be full of holes. Every complex of flats is packed with alcoholics and teen-age hooligans, and the R.U.C. is constantly on patrol, often provoking the violence it ostensibly seeks to contain.

  Laura is in her early thirties, bright, independent, and articulate. She met her husband, Barry, six years ago, when she came to Belfast as a graduate student to do some research toward a master’s degree in Irish history. Barry used to be a butcher, but then was unemployed for more than two years, having got tired of cutting meat. He worked at a shop in a Loyalist district, and it took him an hour and a half to get there by bus, and just as long to get home. One evening while he was waiting at the bus stop somebody took a shot at him for no reason, further reducing his
interest in the commute. For several months he was on the dole, making almost as much as he did on the job. He played a lot of golf—it’s a passion in Ulster—and talked of going into the catering business, but in July he got a job as an on-site technician for a construction firm.

  In 1978, when Barry was twenty-two, he was arrested for throwing a petrol bomb during a riot, and was imprisoned at Long Kesh, which is known as the Maze, on account of its H-block shape. (A petrol bomb is gasoline mixed with soap shavings in a glass bottle; a saturated rag serves as a wick.) He spent almost four years there and briefly shared a cell with Bobby Sands. For about half his term, he was “on the blanket,” joining more than three hundred other Catholic prisoners in a protest against being denied Special Category Status—a status that allowed men to wear their own clothes, move about freely, and, in general, be treated like political prisoners, not ordinary convicts. Refusing to put on a uniform, Barry went around naked under an Army blanket, rarely washing his hair or bathing. Even with the protest, his sentence should have been much shorter, but there is nothing logical, or even very fair, about the British treatment of protesters.

  At Long Kesh, the guards were mostly Loyalists, and that added to the tension. They assumed that anyone from the Falls must be a Republican and quite possibly in the I.R.A.—an assumption that’s as wrong today as it was then. There are people in Clonard who despise the I.R.A. and wish it would disappear, but they don’t speak out in public, for fear of reprisal. A large percentage of the youngest prisoners had no political beliefs at all when they were jailed. They had tackled a soldier or run a barricade in the heat of a moment, and they were shocked at being dealt with so severely. (Protestants, too, have been arrested for rioting, but in much smaller numbers.) Once the men were inside, living in miserable conditions and being pushed round by their keepers, they were easy prey for Republican propagandists and quickly became radicalized, learning under the tutelage of seasoned professionals to hate the British.