From the Argument of Force to the Force of Argument

               When Jon McCourt left the main hall here where we’re staying in the St. Columb’s Park House last night at nine, our kids were thronging him. They didn’t know nor did I the quality and experience of the man John Harken had brought to us.

              He’s flown throughout the world to share his story, which is that of a children’s home and the high profile campaign he led to end their abuses, and no less the arc of murderous violence to peace—what he names as the argument of force to the force of argument. What follows is my record of his talk.

              When I stood on the street with a machine gun in my hand at 17 or 18, there was no other option. I turned 70 in December. The last 54 years of my life have been dedicated by the years before that. I grew up on the west side of the River Foyle. And since then, I’ve traveled the world. I’ve visited many of recent history’s conflict zones—Russia, Chechnya, the Balkans.

              I left the children’s home at 13 years of age. All the ten years before that I was shut behind a gate, behind a wall, behind a fence. They called people like us outsiders.

              This is how I arrived. At three years old, Ballykelly was the northern-most, western-most air force base in all of Europe. My father had been on a mission in the Second World War and was shot down, and yet he decided to join the air force again only to be hit by a car. When my older two brothers told my mother what had happened, my mother went into early labor, and she too ended up in the hospital. With no parents at home, we were sent into care. This was the decision of the parish priest and meant to be temporary.

              I’ll never forget the crunch of the gravel on the driveway in to the children’s home. This was a 280 acre farm, with huts in the back of a great, big Georgian house. When we arrived, one brother went up the stairs, another brother went down, and I went in through the front door. I didn’t see my brothers again for eight years.

              Every kind of abuse happened in that home. And every kind of abuse, I had either experienced myself or seen happen to someone else. The Sisters of Nazareth considered us defects of society, called us bastards. What we experienced at their hands caused a third of the children to take our own lives.

              As for myself, I learned that if I was sitting and reading a book when the nuns came into the room, they’d overlook me. I felt guilty that they went on to hurt someone else, but was glad in the moment at least it wasn’t me. The home averaged 120 children a year with two nuns running each of the three separate blocks. We all learned to keep our mouths shut.

              I learned the life of surviving and deception.

              It was a great teacher, Betty Johnson that got me interested in words on the page and in stories. I might have read a book twenty times, and I could just open the book to any page and just love where I was in it. I was fortunate to be a pretty good student; so when I left in 1965, I was ready for school outside. School was a breeze for me. Then, when I was 16 or 17, I started working with a friend’s father, one of the top welders in the country.

              I was in class for the first time with real, live Protestants. They weren’t trying to convert me at all; they just wanted to talk about girls and books and sport, which suited me fine.

              In the school, there was a room where you could get coffee and cigarettes, and I saw a poster for a civil rights march in Derry. Back at the home, I had the shit beat out of me and I was locked in a cellar just for reading the newspaper, and here was a civil rights march. And what was that? Civil rights? That’s Martin Luther King stuff. What are we talking about here, in Derry?

              So I ask about it, and start talking to a guy about housing, talking about jobs, about votes. My future’s already made out: I’m working with a welder, living in a place with a couple others. But I’m curious. I arranged to meet a Protestant friend across the river. We’re standing and chatting, and I realized the crowd there was going to a football match, not the march.

              Then I saw the grey trucks. I never saw so many police men in my life. Where I grew up, people weren’t afraid of police—they were afraid of the priests: if something went wrong, we didn’t go to police—we’d go to the priests. I heard a roar, and the roar I heard was police beating people at the march and firing their water cannons into the crowd. That was my introduction to civil rights in Ireland.

              By the time the march reached Guild Hall, the crowd had dwindled down to a hundred people as others went to the hospital or went home for dry clothes. A man was speaking about houses and jobs, and I was getting bored. 

              But then another man starts talking about Guild Hall, and he’s starting to make sense: At the partition of Ireland in 1922, Catholics made up 70% of the island. But gerrymandering ensured majorities were maintained by Protestants in the North. And here in Derry, too, gerrymandering of the North Ward versus the South Ward meant we had a nationalist majority by population but a unionist majority by council. Particularly after the Second World War, money was allocated for public housing, but they weren’t building houses for Catholics, and because only householders could vote, they kept Catholics out of the votes. As a direct result of that, I spent ten years in a children’s home. It took my mother ten years to get enough points to get a house and therefore to get us back.

              So I started marching; I started protesting; I started making signs and placards. I also started getting beaten by batons. I turned the other cheek, but at some point, there’s no cheek left to turn. I decided I couldn’t lie down anymore: I had to stand up.

              So then I started throwing stones; and that led to building barricades. From 1969 to 1972, we closed off the whole neighborhood of the Bogside to protect ourselves.

              This was not a religious conflict. This was a class conflict. This was a political conflict with religious fault lines.

              Well, one day, the police went into a home and beat someone to death. That was the first death. We strengthened our barricades. The police showed up and rocks were thrown. An armored car drove right at our barricade but it stopped him. We beat the police right out of the Bogside.

              But then the big green trucks came. The British army had arrived! Some people were so welcoming, they brought tea right out to them. But they were there to turn the bayonets on us and finish what the police had started. And that’s the day I joined the IRA.

              I lost friends and went to many, many funerals. And I was right in the middle of Bloody Sunday. On my right, a sixteen year old boy was shot. On my left, a bullet went through a man’s nose, but the adrenaline kept him moving forward. The third guy was on my sport team. I saw a soldier shoot him, put a bullet right through his spine—the soldier walked over and put one into his back. 

              All it took was eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to turn this insurrection into a war.

              Three thousand people died as a direct result of Bloody Sunday. If it hadn’t happened, we could have finished this in the seventies. 1972, as you may know, was the bloodiest year of all. 497 people died. For you, that’s not many; the number of people who die in automobile accidents in America alone will dwarf that. But we’re a small nation of a million and a half people, and everyone knows everyone else. Everyone is someone’s friend and brother.

              They brought their war to us, and I didn’t care what the costs would be after this. I became actively engaged.

              But in 1976, I became sick with a lung infection because of the chemicals that had been used on us, and I was sent to a hospital on the other side of the border because they’d treat me there. I spent three months, a good long time to have a think. There had to be an alternative to war.

              By 1976, the old structure of the IRA had changed. The old guys had retired. I could leave. I had no control over the war. When I came back to Derry in 1977, the police who’d harassed me now left me alone.

              I wasn’t interested in all of Ireland. I was only interested in what we could do in Derry. A place burned down because a minister there had shaken hands with a priest was now rebuilt as a home for prayer and reconciliation, and this became a place for me.

              Here’s what I had been thinking: What is the greatest of all the commandments in the Bible? It is to love God with your whole heart and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But what if you don’t even love yourself? The idea puts things in a very human context: you have to have your own self worth before you can begin to love another community.

              So I began to look to things that could be fixed in my community, removing the rubble and burnt out cars, painting over the graffiti, fixing fences and fixing the gates. That’s where it started. One day people see you with a gun in your hand and the next it’s a paintbrush and you’re talking peace. How do you make peace? You do it by engaging with people. I needed only a few things to do this, some rubbers and buckets of paint. I’m standing and painting, and people walk over and say, Jon, what are you doing? And then they start to helping. This is Tom Sawyer stuff, because soon enough, people are doing the painting. People are wanting to engage. They’re wanting to make change. And they’re starting to show up with their own paint brushes.

              These are the things that make the difference.

              We started planting trees, but then we’d come back and the trees had been pulled up. The kids are pulling up the trees. So I just walked over to the boys, just to talk to them, you know. I said, Give us a hand and plant these trees. And so they did. At one point, I saw these two kids beating the crap out of each other, and I said, What’s going on? And one of the boys said, He tried pulling up my tree!

              The argument of force will get you so far. But there has to be a point where the force of argument takes over.

              I went to Stormont for thirteen years to make the argument for an inquiry into abuse. And when it happened, when it was revealed what happened, when we looked into every single institution where children were placed, there were lots of tears, lots of disbelief. It was my greatest impact, and it happened with words.

              There’s nothing you’re hearing from me that you can’t take back to Seattle. What did I learn? How do you make a people feel like they’re worth something? There is the potential for what happened here in 1968 to happen in any city of the United States. Walk into a different community, it's awkward and scary, but it’s what makes a change possible.