Book Read Free

1972

Page 32

by Morgan Llywelyn


  “I’m glad you didn’t tell me that. I expected to get well, so I did.”

  Father Aloysius said, “There’s proof of the power of faith, Terry.”

  “Proof that I’m a better doctor than you’ll admit,” his friend replied.

  If the priest was aging badly, Terence Roche, whose appearance had repelled Barry when they first met, was surprisingly improved. His voice was still a dull monotone, but he was sporting a set of gleaming white false teeth and there was a definite sparkle in his eyes.

  “I’ve taken a wife since I saw you last,” he told Barry over dinner.

  “Congratulations, Terry. Will I meet her?”

  May Coogan gave a sniff as she set a platter of chops on the table. “Chance’d be a fine thing. The new Mrs. Roche isn’t one for mingling with the lower classes.”

  Terry Roche frowned. “She’s not like that and you know it. She’s just shy.”

  “And a Prod. I don’t know why you couldn’t marry one of your own people.”

  “I love my wife, May,” Roche said softly.

  The housekeeper swallowed hard. Colour flooded her face and she retired in confusion. When the time came for serving the pudding the priest went into the kitchen and brought it back himself.

  Shortly after the meal the doctor excused himself and went home. Barry and Father Aloysius settled down in the parlour for a long talk. Barry asked, “Why is May so upset about Terry’s new wife?”

  “She’s always fancied him herself,” said the priest. “I’m sure you noticed when you were here before.”

  Not a bit of it. Maybe I’m no good at recognising the signals people give out. Are they like a code?

  THE following morning the priest’s old Morris Minor grumbled like a living thing, threatening to die on every incline as they drove through the Sperrin Mountains. “Must be IRA transport,” Barry muttered.

  “Sorry? I couldn’t hear you over the sound of the engine.”

  “You didn’t miss anything, Father. I was talking to myself. Do you never do that?”

  Father Aloysius, who was gripping the steering wheel firmly with both hands, nodded toward a little plastic statuette of the Blessed Virgin affixed to the dashboard. “I have her to talk to,” he said.

  Barry turned to look at him. “As a matter of interest—does she ever answer you?”

  “Of course she does.”

  “How?”

  “Deep in my soul.”

  “The spirit within,” Barry murmured.

  “Sorry?”

  “Something I’ve heard my mother say. I wish she could meet you.”

  By the time they reached the designated meeting place in a field outside Coalisland, a large crowd had gathered. More were arriving every minute. The day was warm and partially overcast. A fitful sun flitted in and out of the clouds like someone peeping through the curtains of a stage set.

  Father Aloysius parked the car on a rise at the edge of the field. As he and Barry got out, the priest said, “Help me find some rocks to put behind the wheels. I don’t trust the handbrake at all.”

  When they were sure the Morris would not roll backwards, Barry took out his equipment. He loaded his two cameras and put extra rolls of film in his pockets. “I think the best way for me to do this is to walk with the demonstrators, Father,” he said as he slung the cameras around his neck. “Can you meet us in Dungannon when we get there? Or do you want to join the march too?”

  “My heart does, but my feet don’t.” Father Aloysius gestured ruefully toward his feet. His black leather shoes were deeply slashed over the instep. “I’m not up to much walking anymore, that’s why I needed the car. Until he saw the condition of my feet the bishop wouldn’t hear of it, but one look at them convinced him; the poor man suffers dreadfully from bunions and hammertoes himself. I’ll see you off with my blessing, then I’ll be waiting for you in the Square in Dungannon. I think it’s only two or three miles. Can you make it that far?”

  “I can of course, it’s a doddle. I’m sorry for taking you away from your parish for a whole day, though.”

  “Nonsense. I belong here too.”

  As the crowd continued to grow, Barry scanned faces intently. There was no sign of Séamus McCoy or any of the IRA men he knew. This truly was a march of the people. By the time they were ready to move off, the demonstrators numbered several thousand men, women, and children. Barry photographed young mothers holding small sons and daughters by the hand. “It’s for them we’re doing this,” one woman stressed. “Everything is for them.”

  AUSTIN Currie, who had organised the event, circulated amongst the marchers, giving encouragement, though they hardly seemed to need it. Excitement was running high. People were laughing and joking as they passed flasks of hot tea around. “Is there nothing stronger, Liam?”

  “Not until Dungannon. We’ll celebrate in Dungannon.”

  Someone else remarked, “The Prods aren’t going to like this much. They think they have an exclusive right to march in this province.”

  When the signal was given they formed a column eight to ten deep and moved away up the road. Still laughing, still high-spirited. Barry walked at the edge of the crowd so that he could photograph individual faces.

  This is the way we’re going to do it, he said to himself. One step at a time. No guns, no bombs, no violence, just the will of the people.

  A ray of sun danced briefly on the curls of a little blond girl a few steps ahead.

  They had gone no more than half the distance when Barry saw the priest’s car approaching, far too fast for the country road. Father Aloysius turned into a farm lane and waited until Barry came up to him. “I thought I’d better warn you,” he said in an urgent voice. “The RUC intends to re-route the march because the Protestants are staging a counter demonstration. You won’t be allowed into Dungannon Square. It’s their territory, you see.”3

  The priest saw his friend’s eyes go from hot to cold in a blink, as if he had undergone a radical change in internal temperature.

  Barry turned toward the crowd. “Do you hear that?” he shouted. “Dungannon Square’s Protestant territory. We’re not welcome in our own land!” His voice was rolling thunder.

  The expressions on faces in the crowd changed. Hardened. Even the children seemed to stiffen their spines. Barry turned back to Father Aloysius. There was a dangerous glitter in his eyes. “Looks like we’re going anyway,” he said jauntily.

  Beads of nervous perspiration began to form on the priest’s forehead. “I’ll stay with you as best I can, but be careful, this is the north.”

  Barry gave a snort. “You think I don’t know that?”

  When the marchers entered Dungannon they saw people watching them from the windows, but the streets were almost deserted. They walked through the town in a silence broken only by the sound of their feet. As they approached Dungannon Square, a fully armed phalanx of RUC men in uniform blocked their way.

  Firm faces. Determined faces. The faces of men prepared to do their duty.

  I wonder if any of those men were at Brookeborough?

  Out of instinct, Barry reached into his pocket for the Mauser. Then he remembered that the pistol was still in Clare. Under the mattress with Ned’s rifle.

  At that moment a man in the middle of the crowd began to sing the anthem of the American civil rights movement. The other demonstrators linked arms and joined in. A rousing chorus of “We Shall Overcome” rang through the disapproving streets of Dungannon.

  A grandmother with thinning white hair and most of her front teeth missing tugged at Barry’s elbow. Her face was a road map of hard times. “Will you link with an old woman?”

  He turned and smiled down at her. A warm, slow, lover’s smile, as if the two of them were all alone and she was the most beautiful girl in the world. “There aren’t any old women here,” he said gently. “But I’ll be proud to link with you.”

  As he tucked her arm through his, the years fell away from her face.

  WORK
ING one-handed, Barry took picture after picture, aiming the camera back and forth between the resolute marchers and the angry human wall that opposed them. An RUC officer noticed what he was doing and shouted at him to stop. “I’m with the press!” Barry roared back. “You want the world to know you’re afraid of the press?”

  The officer gave him a hard stare but did not repeat the order.

  Although Barry’s leg had begun to ache, he ignored it. He kept on taking pictures until the demonstrators, content that they had made their point, turned and marched back the way they had come. Still singing.

  Father Aloysius had parked a hundred yards from the Square. When he saw Barry he opened the car door and beckoned him to get in. Barry shook his head. “I’m going back with them,” he called to the priest. “All the way.”

  WHEN he returned to Dublin to develop his pictures Barry still felt something of the euphoria he had enjoyed—they all had enjoyed—on the walk back to Coalisland. The sense that anything was possible.

  He put together a portfolio of photographs from the demonstration, including dramatic long shots to illustrate the size of the nationalist crowd and close-ups revealing expressions of naked enmity on the faces of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

  To accompany the photographs Barry wrote an explanatory text which concluded: “The civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland is growing out of the anger and frustration of the ordinary people. Its inspiration comes, not from the writings of Pádraic Pearse and James Connolly, but from Terence MacSwiney, the Irish republican lord mayor of Cork who had died on hunger strike in England. In his inaugural speech MacSwiney had said,”This contest of ours is not on our side a rivalry of vengeance, but one of endurance. It is not they who can inflict the most, but they who can suffer the most, who will conquer.”4

  Chapter Thirty–three

  BARRY sent the Coalisland-Dungannon portfolio to an agency in America that had purchased some of his photos in the past. He was elated when the article was sold in its entirety to a Sunday supplement. Its publication, he felt, vindicated the choices he had made. With his camera he could do more to support the struggle than he had ever done with a gun.

  The correlation with the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., was too obvious to ignore. Barry’s photo spread helped attract international attention to Northern Ireland. News editors in the Republic also began to take an interest.

  In October a group of Derry Catholics joined with local trade unionists to plan a march through the city, protesting sectarian discrimination in housing and employment. Because they had the support of several liberal politicians, RTE sent a television team to cover the event. Two days before the announced date, the minister for home affairs banned the march. Four hundred demonstrators turned up anyway. This time the RUC did not attempt a passive blocking action. Instead they trapped the marchers between two police cordons and attacked them with batons and water cannon.1 More than a hundred demonstrators were injured. Pictures of Gerry Fitt, a West Belfast MP, with blood streaming down his face from a head wound were relayed around the world via television.

  That night there was rioting for the first time in the Catholic Bogside area.

  “I fear things may get worse,” Father Aloysius wrote to Barry. “I pray there is no more violence, but the mood in the streets is not good. Civil rights groups are being organised throughout the province. Perhaps most alarming is the fact that foreign journalists have begun to arrive. They would not be here if they did not expect trouble. As I do,” the priest added sadly. “God help us all.”

  Barry packed up his cameras and headed back to the north.

  A modest package of reforms intended to defuse the situation was announced by Terence O’Neill on the twenty-second of November. The Belfast Telegraph commented, “In just 48 days since the Derry march, the Catholic community has obtained more political gains than it had in 47 years.” But the announced reforms were not sufficient to undo generations of injustice.

  Eight days later Ian Paisley prevented a civil rights march planned for the city of Armagh. Before the demonstration could get under way, Paisley arrived in Armagh together with carloads of his followers armed with stones and cudgels. To avoid violence, the organisers of the march backed down.

  Members of the IRA from both sides of the border were now joining civil rights groups in large numbers.

  ON the ninth of December, O’Neill made a speech on television in which he described Ulster as being at the crossroads. The northern premier urged restraint and civility, describing a unionism armed with justice as preferable to one armed merely with strength.

  But he said nothing about one man, one vote.

  WHEREVER Barry went into the Six Counties he was aware of building tension. The genie was out of the bottle. Nationalists were beginning to sense their power. Unionism was beginning to feel threatened.

  Confrontations became more frequent.

  As a cameraman covering potentially volatile situations, Barry developed a gut feeling for the mood of a crowd. The higher the adrenaline level, the more distance he put between himself and his subjects. A crowd was like a wild animal: familiarity made it more tolerant. When they were used to seeing him he could move closer without causing a reaction. Yet he never let himself forget what he was dealing with. The RUC in particular hated photojournalists and did what they could to make his work harder.

  However, he no longer bothered to disguise himself. He was now well-enough known to feel relatively safe from attack, though he almost hoped someone would try. If they do they’ll be sorry, because I’ll fight back.

  Oh yes. I’ll fight back.

  It was still there, the deeply embedded warrior persona which had been part of him for so long.

  A new organisation had appeared, calling itself the People’s Democracy and largely composed of Catholic students from Queen’s University, Belfast. They decided to stage their own version of the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in the United States. The students hoped to force London to become involved in the Northern Ireland situation as the Selma march had drawn Washington into the civil rights struggle.

  Their plan was to march from Belfast to Derry, a distance of some seventy-five miles. Austin Currie and a teacher of French called John Hume, who was vice chairman of the newly formed Derry Citizens’ Action Committee, tried to discourage the idea. They feared the march would pass through loyalist areas and thus be highly provocative.

  When he heard this Barry lost his temper. “What about the hundreds of Orange marches that parade through Catholic areas every year, banging their drums and shouting their triumphalism? I suppose that’s not provocative?”

  He was glad when the organisers of the march announced that it would go ahead.

  Knowing he would never be able to walk seventy-five miles in four days, Barry obtained a map of the route and sought out Séamus McCoy. It was easy enough to find him—all one had to do was make enquiries at the Felons’ Club on the Falls Road.

  “I need the use of a car for four or five days,” Barry explained to McCoy, “so I can follow the march.”

  The older man squinted in thought for a moment. “A pal of mine has a Volkswagen we can borrow, but there’s a catch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My friend doesn’t know you, so I suspect I’ll have to do the driving.”

  “Admit it, Séamus. You’re just eager to drive a car.”

  “Aye. If I wasn’t in the Army I’d have a wee car of my own by now.”

  “And a wife too?” Barry asked innocently.

  “You can laugh now, Seventeen. But your day will come. I promise you, your day most definitely will come.”

  ON New Year’s Day, 1969, between twenty and thirty young people prepared to set off from the City Hall in Belfast.2 A small police escort had been assigned to them. The event drew little attention from the citizenry, though some well-wishers came forward with sandwiches and packets of soup which they could boil up on the way.

&n
bsp; A crowd of Paisleyites was also present, waving the Union Jack and shouting insults.

  The “Long March,” as the event was being called, was not considered a major news item. Barry Halloran was one of the few photographers who were there for the beginning. He had no difficulty mingling with the students, who, edgy with excitement, were talking to anyone who would listen. Their conversation was revealing. They were not marching on behalf of a united Ireland. All they were seeking was equality with every other citizen of Northern Ireland.

  Britain insists that this is part of the United Kingdom and the Catholics in it are British subjects, thought Barry, so they have a perfect right to expect equal treatment under the law. Something they have never received, any more than the Negroes in America have.

  His attention was drawn to one girl in particular, a petite redhead who could not have been more than twenty-one. The look in her eyes made him think of Joan of Arc. As Joan must have looked before she was betrayed. Before she was burned.

  A few minutes later McCoy drove up in a borrowed Volkswagen Beetle. He was grinning with proprietary delight. Barry folded his long legs uncomfortably into the small space and prepared to assume the role of navigator. “The route of march is much longer than it need be, Séamus. According to the map, they’re taking a lot of detours to avoid loyalist strongholds.”

  “The Paisleyites will seek them out anyway,” McCoy predicted. “The poor sods aren’t carrying any weapons to defend themselves with. It’s damned brave of them, if you ask me.” He slammed through the gears and tromped down on the accelerator.

  “If this is how you’re going to drive, I think I’m the brave one,” Barry gasped.

  “Nonsense. The automobile a man drives reflects his personality, and I’m aggressive.”

 

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