A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  Paisley was the new watchword, among us sceptics and reformers, for utterly abhorrent attitudes. Larger than life, a figure of fun, a cartoon Covenanter, yes; but also a purveyor of poisonous doctrines, a dangerous throw-back and demagogue. ‘That noisy preacher,’ John Hewitt called him, adding another epithet: ‘old-fashioned’. Paisley stood for everything that was wrong with Ulster. The travel writer Dervla Murphy, who visited Belfast in the mid 1970s7 and attended a Sunday sermon at Paisley’s ‘Free Presbyterian’ church on the Ravenhill Road, felt, as she watched him perform, that she was ‘in the presence of pure evil’. And not without cause. ‘We must attack the people – the people who represent the anti-Christ in our midst! Be violent for Christ’s sake’: this was among the calls to arms assaulting the congregation’s ears. Incitements to hatred filled the air. Disbelief and despair filled Dervla Murphy.

  My friend Douglas Carson, a Protestant liberal soon to become a radio producer with the Taig-ridden bbc, and his friend Erskine Holmes, equally liberal, took one look at Paisley’s antics at the time and joined with the bulk of the populace in consigning the blazing cleric to some abysmal realm of sectarian malevolence and indigenous benightedness. Paisley was the millstone round liberal Ulster’s neck. He was going, if he could manage it, to drag the whole province down. ... Years later, in a conversation with Douglas, I listened to him express a rueful amusement, shared by me, at the way things unfold. ‘Who’d have thought,’ he said (or words to that effect), ‘that one day Erskine would be driving the one-time bugbear of all of us through the battlefields of the Somme; or that the same Paisley would sit with my wife and myself in our front room drinking tea and talking knowledgeably about art and books.’

  Douglas went on to describe an occasion, a funeral at May Street Presbyterian Church, at which Paisley was also present. The one-time scourge of popery, it seemed, was pleased to draw attention to May Street’s ecumenical past. It was, he said, the only Presbyterian establishment in the city in which a Catholic Mass had once been celebrated. This happened in the 1920s, when the then incumbent, the Reverend Alexander Wylie Blue, had offered it as a temporary facility to a local Catholic priest whose own church was destroyed by arson. It was a brave and neighbourly thing to do – and the odd thing was that Paisley appeared to approve of the gesture.

  At some point – I am not sure when – the Reverend Ian Paisley emerged from his time warp and went from maleficent to avuncular. What brought about the colossal change I don’t know, but it’s possible that Sinn Féin had a hand in it. Following his very public show of camaraderie towards Martin McGuinness, Paisley could hardly assume the old-fashioned demonic mantle again. Or, as commentators trying to make sense of Paisley in the past had surmised, it may have been a case of a split personality, with the more agreeable portion finally winning out over the rest. He remains larger than life – but perceptions of him have become enlarged in their turn, to take account of complexities and contradictions (my mantra) in Northern Irish life.

  Between the innocent ameliorative impulses of the early 1960s and the slaughterhouse strategies of the following decade, a great gulf opens up. An unprecedented change of atmosphere occurred. Violence and the threat of violence underlay everything, and a concomitant laxity in everyday activity came to the fore. While politicians and others in positions of power desperately sought to contain ‘the situation’, fighters on the ground, fellow-travellers, and, indeed, large sections of the populace, veered between bleakness and implacability, and a full immersion in a kind of dance-of-death furore. A tit-for-tat killing frenzy overtook the North. Housing estates all over the province got into the grip of a pulverisation mania. Things were torn apart. The old Ulster decorum became a laughable figment of an unimaginable past. And the worst occurrence of all was the alignment of paramilitary and criminal activity, to the point where the two became one and the same thing.

  The journalist Kevin Myers was based in Belfast during the 1970s, and has recorded his shocking experience of the city in a memoir, Watching the Door (2006). It’s a vivid account of the badness of Belfast, gangs and bangs and guns and torture and lamentation, with copious sexual shenanigans thrown into the mix. (When churchly restraints went by the board, they departed with a vengeance.) Myers watched Belfast disintegrate around him. His profession sends him hot-foot to the scene of every atrocity, every place of perdition. And he manages to get himself on the wrong side of everyone, so that the whole of Belfast seems out to get him. His book takes the form, by turns, of unnerving comedy, terrorist imbroglio and bedroom escapade. It presents a version of a Belfast gone berserk. And however much he jazzes up its scenes of depravity, Belfast remains for English-born, Irish-affiliated Myers ‘an evil place’.

  Was this true? Others, like the poet Carol Rumens, came to Belfast braced for the worst, but found instead leafy suburbs, gardens, cedar and larch and fuchsia, places where ‘peace, and love, and money, are made’. Places where ordinary people got on with their ordinary lives, disregarding as far as possible the grim backdrop; where burnt-out cars and shattered buildings were emblems only of a distant derangement. Well, fairly distant. There were reverberations. Many standpoints were shaken. The breaking point for a lot of liberal-minded people occurred at the moment when dissent became accommodating of carnage. Republicanism was then seen to have parted company with idealism.

  Sometimes a small occurrence was enough to tip the balance in a previous sympathiser. For example, I date my mother’s disillusionment with romantic Ireland and its freedom-fighting partisans – I date her disillusionment to the moment when, with disgust and exasperation, she watched a couple of gun-toting whippersnappers, twelve or thirteen years old, hanging around by 551’s back gate in St James’s Avenue. (She’d gone into the garden to hang her washing on the clothesline.) The two swaggering juveniles were flaunting their weapons and glorying in the sense of aggrandisement thereby conferred on them. ‘Mine’s bigger than yours,’ she may have heard one claim, accompanied by giggles. And, ‘That’s the ira,’ my mother snorted later, in sardonic mode. (And yes, I’m bearing in mind young Bertie Tipping and his involvement in illicit activity of the early twentieth century – but I believe, or choose to believe, that a structure and discipline existed at that time very far in spirit from the dislocated ’70s.)

  Imagine you’re a Catholic housewife living in Belfast in 1970, and your sense of justice is constantly violated by one instance of discrimination after another. Your children coming home from school are attacked by thugs from a different school, while your co-religionists are burned and blasted out of their homes. You have statistics concerning Catholic unemployment and belittlement at your fingertips. You’re Catholic by upbringing, and allied with that portion of the populace nurtured on a litany of wrongs, while actually undergoing ever more colossal wrongs – though your own lineage, if you cared to look at it, is far from being an ethnically unbroken story. ... This, at least, is true of the two young women whose experience of unionist inclemency I’m about to relate. (Not that being Catholic in the church-going sense is paramount in the evolving political standpoint of either. That’s not what the conflict is about. It’s about social justice, and putting a stop to terror in the streets.)

  One of these young women is my cousin Margaret, my Auntie Eileen’s daughter, and of all of us Blacker descendants, the one who is most in line with the Tipping tradition. The other, whom I called Olivia8 in Asking for Trouble, is my old school friend and fellow-Dominican-convent-expellee. These two have found themselves living next door to one another in Andersonstown, and quickly become friends. They have in common membership of the People’s Democracy student-run body, and a burning aversion to the way the state of Northern Ireland is run.

  There are protests everywhere. In the news is the attack on a republican funeral by a Protestant mob who tear the tricolour from the coffin and carry it away in triumph into their own back streets where it’s set alight. Police monitoring the funeral move in to make arrests, but not of the aggress
ors. They swoop instead on young males wearing black berets and what are later described as ‘army style’ jackets, these garments supposedly proclaiming membership of an illegal organisation. (No one doubts that this is the case, but what gets the goat of concerned observers is the partisan nature of police and army responses.) Black berets, combat jackets: add a guard of honour equipped with hurley sticks, and the thing goes from a funeral to a quasi-military parade. Or so it seems to those who attach a provocative rather than an emblematic significance to the hurley sticks.

  Not everyone takes this view. A particular cause of anger is the Special Powers Act and the way it facilitates unwarranted arrests like those noted above. People passionate about justice are constantly inveighing against this Act which is not perceived to operate in an even-handed way. When the black-beret-hurley-stick contingent comes to trial, a ‘Special Powers’ protest by disaffected women is set to take place outside the Chichester Street courthouse in Belfast. Among those intending to join in the protest are next-door neighbours Margaret and Olivia. In a gesture of defiance against the system, they will wear a version of the jackets invested by the Royal Ulster Constabulary with an insurrectionary significance. A number of hurley sticks, sardonically brandished in the hands of some as ‘offensive weapons’, will complete the protestors’ tableau – though, if trouble ensues as it is almost certain to do, it is possible that this satiric touch will succumb to the needs of the moment and lose its symbolic edge.

  Indeed, what Margaret and Olivia find when they arrive at the spot on the appointed morning in February, is a minor riot already in progress. Two rival crowds, mostly women, have assembled on opposite sides of the street. They are Protestants fully in favour of arresting and trying ira suspects – the more the better – and their Catholic, or quasi-Catholic, counterparts, incensed by the onslaught on their legitimate gathering, and not slow to respond to traditional insults. It isn’t long before dirty Fenian gets and bloody fucking Orange bitches are jammed together in a wild indigenous fracas. Police intervention doesn’t achieve a lot. Screaming women hurl themselves on two policemen, enabling a few of their captured friends to break free and disappear into the crowd. Another woman being taken into custody is suddenly bashed in the face by a huge white plastic handbag wielded by a roaring opponent, towards whose assault on their captive the forces of law and order turn a blind eye. Olivia and Margaret, looking on with a measure of bemusement and understanding the impossibility of staging the proposed ‘peaceful’ demonstration, decide to make themselves scarce.

  At this point things take an alarming turn. Olivia is carrying a bag containing three hurley sticks which are poking out at one end. A large rough female in the crowd, catching sight of the sticks, starts shouting and pointing: ‘There’s another couple of them bastard Fenian scum. Tear the fucking faces off them! Don’t let them get away!’ Before they can get away an inspector appears by their side and informs them they’re under arrest. A small local drama involving factions and overreactions is about to be played out. The two women are taken to a nearby police station and charged with behaviour contributing to public disorder, and with being in possession of the ubiquitous ‘offensive weapons’. Along with twenty-nine of their fellow would-be demonstrators, some of whom are exhibiting a degree of truculence, they’re stripped of their outer clothing – clothing retained as evidence, and later described by the trial judge as ‘having a military or a paramilitary connotation in the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland’ – and, once solicitors have been contacted and bail arranged, sent home without adequate protection against the freezing cold of a Belfast February.

  Certain instinctive actions of the Royal Ulster Constabulary were apt to cause outrage in the bitter past, when the force’s reputation for impartiality was not high. The way they would jump in any cat-and-dog situation was easily foretold. The courthouse protest and its chaotic outcome was witnessed by a number of lawyers, Protestant and Catholic, who later issued a statement condemning police leniency towards the attacking faction, not one of whom ended under arrest. Indeed, ‘the ruc mixed jovially with the unionist crowd’,9 the statement averred. Its conclusion, that ‘legislative reforms are but an empty formula when the administration of justice by the police and courts is so blatantly one-sided and unjust’, was not referred to during the subsequent trials. Nevertheless, you can read into this statement the faintest possible note of hope for the distant future – beyond the cataclysm – when a change of heart, or at least a change of orientation, will come into being. The uncouth, vicious thing deplored by the novelist Benedict Kiely (see Chapter 8), with its raison d’être in killing, maiming and destruction, isn’t itself quite dead in the North at present, perhaps, but it’s only a shadow of its former sectarian self.

  Neither my cousin nor her friend believes they will wind up in prison following the abortive courthouse protest. They enter the courtroom, when their case comes to trial, expecting a fine and rap on the knuckles. What they get instead is a sentence of six months in Armagh gaol. The trial has proceeded in accordance with the guiding principles adumbrated above. Why were these women arrested in the first place? Because, said the officer in question, ‘in my opinion the hurley sticks were offensive weapons, and in combination with the jackets, likely to cause a breach of the peace’. (Never mind that ‘a breach of the peace’ was strenuously under way before they came anywhere near the place.) When Counsel for the defence wants to know ‘why all the arrests were carried out on one side only’, he gets a somewhat evasive reply:

  ‘I did not want to escalate the situation so I only made arrests where a breach of the peace seemed likely.’

  ‘You did not consider that remarks shouted by the opposite side were likely to lead to a breach of the peace?’

  ‘There were slogans and counter-slogans and cat-calls and jeers coming from both sides.’

  There were indeed, so there were, but to say so doesn’t explain the heavy hand clamped down exclusively on one side of the Chichester Street battleground. And for some of the protestors anyway, ‘sides’ were beside the point. When it comes to Olivia’s turn to give evidence, she is asked straight out: ‘Was the purpose of the hurley sticks offensive?’ ‘Certainly not,’ comes the sturdy answer. ‘We merely intended to use them as symbols.’ ‘You did not consider that they might be offensive to the Protestant faction?’

  ‘I was protesting against legislation that affects everyone,’ Olivia declares. ‘I do not consider that I belong to one particular religious faction.’ It’s the thin edge of a socialist-feminist-republican wedge, the voice of a new liberal Ulster, People’s-Democracy-derived (though not, alas, the voice of all the courthouse demonstrators, some of whom are stuck fast in the old denominational sheugh). And much good it does her. ‘Six months,’ the judge pronounces; and Margaret the same.

  Shortly before the end of Margaret’s prison sentence, I accompany her father, and my mother, on a visit to Armagh. ‘The incongruously handsome women’s prison’, to quote the poet John Montague10 is situated in the town itself, on the south side of the Mall.11 Built between 1780 and 1820, facing Francis Johnston’s courthouse, it is one of the great public buildings of Northern Ireland. But architectural concerns aren’t uppermost in any of our minds at the time. The building is not looking its best. A few days previously, the Provisional ira had blown up a couple of cars belonging to prison warders in retaliation, they said, for the ill-treatment of those locked away inside; and broken glass and debris from the explosions are strewn about the place. All the prison windows facing the Mall have boards nailed across them.

  The prison’s forbidding entrance is furnished with a peephole through which we are scrutinised before being admitted, by a wardress, into a large tiled hall with a number of archways leading off it. Seated on a couple of chairs against a far wall are two impassive fat women wearing bedroom slippers and slowly consuming enormous ice-cream cones. Male warders stand about jangling bunches of keys. ‘Surreal’ and ‘oppressive’ are word
s that spring to mind. The whole interior of the place is dank and gloomy. Whenever we venture a comment during the twenty minutes or so we’re kept waiting – which isn’t often, as we’re somewhat unnerved and apprehensive – our voices resound off walls imbued with extremes of ancient tension and distress. A constant ringing of bells makes you wonder which miscreants are being summoned to perform what punitive undertaking. Well, I’d hardly expected the atmosphere to be encouraging, had I. But I don’t like the way you are made to feel you are downgraded as a human being simply by association with your particular inmate. And what makes it all the more aggravating is the fact that our inmate has committed no crime in the first place.12

  A sour-faced female warder – ‘screw’ – arrives and conducts us through the hall and into a small courtyard. We walk in silence. Pleasantries are not exchanged. Suddenly Margaret appears from another direction, accompanied by a wardress of her own. My poor cousin is clad in a shapeless green gingham skirt folded over at one side, a pink blouse and a thin navy cardigan. These are prison-issue clothes, distributed to inmates on arrival at the gaol, and after a strip-search has been carried out. Underneath the terrible outer garments are large blue knickers elasticated round the legs, and a patched-up bra with different cup sizes. Black laced shoes and brown lisle stockings augment the austerity picture. Margaret does not seem low-spirited, though, despite the awful circumstances. Her robust approach to life has stood her in good stead. She’s been able to shrug and go through the experience, deriving from it whatever benefits she can. Unlike a number of her fellow-prisoners, she hasn’t given way to violence (smashing up her cell) or hysteria. She’s acquired a certain skill in sewing shirts and mailbags, in wall-, floor-, and lavatory-cleaning. Prison life is just an ordeal to be got through, days ticked off on a calendar pending the moment of release. It is also a republican rite of passage, aligned to the old resistance-and-endurance model which has long kept revolutionary aspirations on the go.