The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Longtime observers interpret this as a kind of progress, because at least opponents aren’t maiming or killing one another. The Nationalists get the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which wasn’t celebrated until 1998, the year the Good Friday accord was signed. The Unionists get July 12, and so on. Public safety, one reason to limit shared space, is no mean goal in a province still grieving for the 3,500 killed and many more maimed in thirty years of the Troubles.

  What is disturbing about segregation in Northern Ireland is not that there are tradeoffs; it’s that the people entrench themselves in segregated communities, and many of their leaders help them do it. For Americans, one analogy is to imagine what the South might look like had federal courts not forced integration in the face of violence. Certainly the civil rights movement alone would have made some gains. But it’s also likely that states would have adapted in different ways, with some investing in segregation as a way of stemming violence. “Separate but equal” would be thought a virtue, not the disgrace we now understand it to be.

  The most famous interface has a peace wall that separates the lower Springfield Road, part of the Catholic Falls, from the Protestant Shankill. The wall was never meant to be permanent. In 1969 it was a stretch of barbed wire hastily rolled out by British troops after clashes between Unionist and Nationalist communities left tiny Bombay Street a smoking ruin. Then came temporary dividers, then concrete topped by metal sheeting and more barbed wire. Today a memorial marks the rebuilt Bombay Street, where new row houses back onto a wall that is more than 40 feet high and is under twenty-four-hour TV police surveillance. Still, projectiles make it over. Residents encase their back porches in metal cages for protection.

  Daniel Jacks is a pink-cheeked Republican who works with a cross-community peace project. When there is trouble, he says, kids born after the IRA’s formal ceasefire in 1994 usually create it. “They don’t really remember what it was like during the Troubles, but they think it was cool.” “Recreational riots” are frequent, he says. They happen when young people agree over Facebook or Bebo to start a melee.

  A 2009 study by the Belfast-based Institute for Conflict Research found that kids still identify themselves along sectarian lines. It’s a question not of religious doctrine but of belonging—your people versus mine. When it comes time to confront, these young people are as handy with the slurs as their grandparents might have been, hurling such epithets as Huns (referring to the German origin of the British royal family) and Prods or Fenians (supporters of a united Ireland) and Taigs (from the Irish name Tahdg) along with bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails.

  Most locals lament sectarianism and the walls. But they don’t want the walls removed. “Hugodecat,” posting on the popular political blog Slugger O’Toole, put popularly held feelings into this May 31 post:

  I live on a peace line, and like many of my neighbouring home owners, we are quite happy to see it stay. It means that when trouble does brew we can sleep soundly and not worry about bricks through our windows and arson attacks. But I do understand that in many ways the walls are divisive, allowing the sectarian louts to perpetuate the myth that the human beings on the other side are somehow a different species.

  In June the province watched aghast as the worst rioting since the Troubles put East Belfast under a pall of greasy gasoline smoke for several nights. As the long summer day dimmed, youths with their faces masked under balaclavas pelted Catholic homes in Short Strand, just steps away from the city’s busy Central Station. Police riot vehicles went up in flames.

  Many put the responsibility for the virulence of sectarianism squarely at the feet of Westminster, Stormont (the provincial parliament), and the province’s leading political parties. Protestants align increasingly behind the Democratic Union Party, and Catholics back IRA-linked Sinn Féin. A media-friendly cordiality goes on display when blood has been spilled. For instance, after the dissident Republicans known as the Real IRA murdered a Catholic police officer in April, “Shinner” Deputy Prime Minister Martin McGuinness, a one-time chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, urged people to provide the police with information. “These are people who are pledged to destroy the peace and destroy a peace process that many of us have invested much of our adult lives in trying to bring about,” he said during a press conference.

  Yet there is also a stubborn unwillingness to accept that some of the past’s gruesome acts poison the present. The 1984 killing of Mary Travers is emblematic. She was a twenty-three-year-old primary-school teacher born and raised in Belfast. Her father, Tom, was a magistrate. That may not seem a dangerous profession, yet the Travers family was Catholic. To the IRA, any Catholics working for the state, especially the justice system, were traitors. A murder team shot the Travers family as they left church, injuring Tom and killing Mary. IRA militant Mary McArdle was quickly arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life. In May 2011 controversy erupted after McArdle—released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement—was hired as a top adviser to Sinn Féin Culture Minister Carál Ní Chuilín. Mary Travers’s sister, Ann, gave a heart-wrenching interview to news channel UTV. “I just feel physically sick, disgusted,” she said. “I think about Mary every day. Then I hear one of the people involved in her murder is given a well-paid job at Stormont and it all comes crashing back.”

  On the one hand, Sinn Féin insists that McArdle did prison time and worked on the party’s peace-building projects. Yet that is a coldblooded response to a family—and a people—still in agony. None of the actual shooters were ever identified or charged (McArdle was part of the getaway team). For her part, McArdle called the killing “a tragic mistake” and expressed regret but never apologized. A Belfast Telegraph editorial said the statement fell “far short of what is required . . . The clear inference is that had Mr. Travers died and Mary been spared then the murderous mission would have been deemed a success.”

  Combatants are understandably the first to justify their actions, the first to close the door on the past, and the first to accuse victims who want to revisit the past of wasting everyone’s time. Yet victims have given up more than anyone for peace and have so far received the least in exchange. In this case, the Travers family hasn’t even received elemental justice.

  One of McArdle’s staunchest defenders is Gerry Kelly, a Shinner assemblyman who represents North Belfast. In 1973, Kelly planted four bombs in London, killing one person and injuring hundreds. On the other side of the interface, former Loyalist gunmen continue to “speak for” Unionist communities that at best see the gunmen as necessary evils—and at worst thugs who also traffic drugs, run prostitutes, and carry out criminal vendettas cloaked in patriotism. To be sure, barring anyone with a paramilitary past from working is foolish. At the same time, allowing assassins to go free is abhorrent.

  There is some good news along the River Lagan. Despite the summer’s riots, violence is sharply down. The British troops that once patrolled are long gone. Most former gunmen and bomb makers have retired; many do good and necessary work in their communities or abroad as peacemakers. Although the Real IRA continues to launch attacks, no one doubts that the peace process is robust.

  The unfortunate truth is that increased segregation may just well be the price of peace. Americans can hardly be surprised, since many of us have lived in communities segregated by race since before the Civil War. When one delegation from Israel visited Belfast recently, a friend told me that the earnest visitors grilled their Irish hosts for the secret-sauce recipe that brought peace to this corner of the Emerald Isle. Only partly in jest, my friend merrily replied, “Build a wall. It worked for us.”

  J. MALCOLM GARCIA

  Now Ye Know Who the Bosses Are Here Now

  FROM McSweeney’s

  THIS YOUNG MAN sitting beside me, eyes tearing, balls of his feet bouncing ceaselessly off the pavement, tells me that he knew Paul Quinn for seven, eight years. Friends, so they were. Through school and driving tractors together and running bales in the summer.

  H
e played soccer the night Paul died. Paul watched the game until halftime, left for something to eat, came back to pick his friend up. This young man, his feet still tapping the ground, eyes saucers of pain, tells me it doesn’t go away, that sound. The sound of batons and metal pipes striking Paul and Paul screaming and then not screaming.

  (The police say they have intelligence that my life is under threat.

  I understand.

  Don’t use my name.

  I’ll use a letter. C.

  Aye.

  Take me back to that night.)

  It’s October 20, 2007. About 5:30 P.M. A good evening. Good enough, like. Not hot, not cold. C and Paul don’t have plans after the game. Just spinning about, like. Shooting the craic. Driving the back roads of their Northern Ireland village, Cullyhanna. They decide to stop at Paul’s house and get on his computer and mess about. Bored with that, they drive around Cullyhanna again.

  Then Anthony, a friend, rings Paul. Anthony says some bulls is coming to his father’s fucking farm this evening. He needs help cleaning a pen.

  C and Paul mess about for another five minutes. Then decide, Fuck this, we have to help Anthony. His farm is near Castleblayney, just over the border in the Irish Republic, the “Free State.” On the way, Paul has second thoughts. Take me home, he tells C. He can’t be bothered. Fucking cows. C can’t be bothered either. But it won’t take long, C says. How long can it take?

  (I thought it was funny that Anthony called Paul.

  Why?

  He would have called me, usually. I was closer to him. I thought to myself, He couldn’t get through on my phone so that’s why he called Paul.)

  At the farm C and Paul park outside a shed where Anthony is to meet them. Still light out. Around ten to six, so it was. No one in sight. They stop, look around, pondering like.

  A yellow lorry stands down a ways. Bright yellow. C walks toward it. He’s almost reached it when a man wearing a black mask, black jacket, black jeans, and black boots jumps out at him, shouting You fucking scumbag bastards!

  C turns around, yells at Paul.

  Go! Run, run, run!

  Three more masked men come at C from his left. More are running out from behind hay bales. Another three, from other directions.

  (At first I thought it was a joke, like.

  A prank?

  Yeah, quite a joke, Anthony, yeah, good on ye.)

  C shoves one of them away, but there are too many to fight off. Other men are on top of Paul. They drag C and Paul into the shed, hitting them with iron bars. Shouting, You bastards!

  Three or four men stay on top of C until someone comes over and drags him into a pen. He sees Anthony tied up next to another one of their mates, Connor. On their knees, faces against the wall. Someone kneels on C again. Shouting, Shut it, shut it, shut it!

  C can hear them bashing Paul about. He hears the whoomp, whoomp against his friend’s body, hears Paul screaming, Stop, stop, fuck, fuck, stop, stop!

  Then he stops screaming.

  (Just stopped, like. All of a sudden.)

  But they keep hitting him. Two minutes more, at least. Then they stop. The air still. The men breathing hard through their masks.

  (Did they say anything?

  Now ye know who the bosses are here now. Shouting, like. Now ye know!)

  I am staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Crossmaglen, a small town fifteen minutes’ drive from Cullyhanna.

  In 1969, at the start of the Troubles, the police barracks here was attacked by the IRA. In 1971, British Army soldiers killed a Crossmaglen man who they wrongly thought was armed. The killing drove many young Catholics to join the fight. The community became much more insular and suspicious of outsiders. A characteristic it retains to this day.

  With my long beard and ponytail, I stand out. People ask one another, Who’s the hairy man walking about Crossmaglen and Cullyhanna?

  The name sticks.

  Hey, Harry, a man shouts to me one day, what about ye?

  You enjoying your stay, are you, Harry? another man says.

  What about Obama, Harry? Cheeky bastard, wha? declares a third.

  But when I bring up the subject of the Paul Quinn killing, the good humor disappears and we quickly find something else to discuss.

  However, if, at the end of the day, I meet someone alone in a pub or on the road or leaning on a fence post and considering the hazy distance across the field before them, when the evening hour has slowed and hesitates between light and dark and what lurks beneath the surface rises more easily, then I find people willing to talk about Paul.

  Paul was a cheeky lad, so he was, Harry.

  Good with his dukes. Wouldn’t back down, don’t you know. Not one to be pushed about, our Paul Quinn. He took a lot but didn’t like someone with no authority telling him what to do. That was his downfall, aye.

  Cullyhanna is naught but a church, a pub, and a convenience store. Everyone knew Paul. Everyone knows everybody. There’s so-and-so’s son. People look at their neighbor now and wonder, Was ye part of them that done him? People look at themselves and think, What could I have done to stop it?

  Them boys who done Paul, they lured Anthony and that other boyo, Connor, to that shed by promising them some work. They broke Connor’s ankle, so they done. Anthony cracked, then, made the call.

  What would any of us have done had we been him?

  Everyone keeps an eye on our Father Cullen. They tell the Quinn family, Father Cullen’s talking to so-and-so. Maybe they done it. Maybe they’re asking forgiveness. Father Cullen says our humanity has sunk to a new level.

  What they done to him you wouldn’t do to a dog. Beating him like that. Pipes and bats with nails in them. Breaking every bone in his body below the neck, so they done. The word got around. Young man battered to death. Just twenty-one. The savagery of it.

  Sinn Féin says no Republicans were involved. Ludicrous. They know that if another crowd did that to a Catholic boyo, the IRA would have stepped in and dealt with them, ceasefire or no ceasefire. But the IRA hasn’t stepped in. No Sinn Féin counselor came to the Quinn house to pay their respects to a Catholic family that lost a son to murderers. Very strange. Normally they arrive quick like, if for no other reason than to get their picture taken for the newspapers.

  Maybe they didn’t mean to kill him. Maybe they meant to leave him in a wheelchair to look out a window for the rest of his wee life. A message to other young people born after the Troubles. Look at Paul Quinn and remember: respect the IRA. Whatever they planned, they beat our Paul to death, so they done.

  There were good men in the IRA when the struggle was going on. It’s the bad men that remain. They want to keep control. Like dogs killing sheep. Bolder and bolder. If they hadn’t a killed Paul, they’d a killed others.

  Kids today, the Troubles are forgotten history. It’s something they read in a book. They don’t remember it. Some asshole says he used to be somebody in the IRA, who the fuck are they, wha? Kids used to think, When we grow up we’ll be one of the boys. But the new generation says, No we won’t. Fuck the IRA.

  It’s created a void, so it has.

  Paul was born in 1986 and raised on a farm in Cullyhanna, in County Armagh. By the 1990s the South Armagh Brigade of the IRA had grown to about forty members. Thomas “Slab” Murphy, an alleged member of the IRA’s Army Council, has been the organization’s Armagh commander since the 1970s, according to British security personnel.

  The South Armagh Brigade has not confined itself to paramilitary activities. Irish and British authorities accuse it of smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of gasoline and diesel north across the Irish border every year. As much as 50 percent of the vehicle fuel used in Northern Ireland has been estimated to have been obtained in this way. Gas is cheaper in Ireland proper.

  Paul’s parents, Stephen and Breege, were never involved with the IRA, they tell me. They would stop and listen to news reports about a pub bombing or attacks on the RUC and then get on with their day. Paul never called
Breege mum. Just Breege. That was his way. He’d call and ask about dinner and pretend to be somebody else. Make up an accent, like. Every night before going to bed, he would shout Au revoir.

  French for goodbye, you know, Breege explains.

  He had a jolly way. He would always buy a chocolate and a drink and put change in the charity box in town. He’d help old folks carry their bags, so he would.

  When Breege stood by the sink he’d come behind her and lift her up. He was just full of life and was all the time smiling. Even when she gave out a scolding, he’d smile.

  He loved to hear drinking stories about his father. He would come home and tell Stephen what he’d heard and watch his face turn red. He enjoyed listening to old men talk to other old men. All those stories and the laughter. It never was serious talk.

  He liked having his potatoes peeled for him.

  Mommy’s boyo, Breege says.

  Paul worked on farms. He also drove lorries for smugglers. Sometimes he came home and the house filled with the smell of diesel.

  Smuggling was always a way of life, Stephen says. When I was a wee thing, my father smuggled, and his father, and his father before him. Where there’s a border, there’s smuggling. Only way to make a living. Is it criminal? Then you’d have to call everyone a criminal. Everyone.

  Stephen was fixing a wall with some other fellows the day Paul died. Looking at it more than fixing it, truth be told, Stephen says. Paul came home in a car belonging to a friend and stayed long enough to make a bacon sandwich. After he ate, he said he was going to pick someone up. Siphoned some diesel from a petrol tank near the driveway, maybe a gallon, and then drove off. Stephen watched him go and never saw him alive again.