Our first walk was along the Shankill with half our students and Mark, a 24 year veteran of the British army. He would lead us through the loyalist, unionist side of the wall until he handed us off across the gates to the nationalist, republican Falls Road side.
Mark was righteous in honoring the crown and Irishmen who’d died during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, and he spoke venomously of empowered republicans who’ve ever since been murdering and fighting and have paid no political price and stand in the way of peace, refusing to accept realities. But he spoke with as a great a sorrow before a wall of the Ulster Volunteer Force, masked and armed and ready to rise up once more. He called them terrorists, as willingly and bitterly as he’d branded the IRA. This meant that he clearly presented his loyalist argument to our jury of students before resting his case to opposing counsel at a Peace Wall gate—yet he laced his proud memorializing and blaming with a line he hadn’t provided two years ago, and that, for me, was his loudest and most undermining idea: How do we move us all along towards peace, he said, when we’re constantly reminding, remembering, glorifying, blaming? The little children are looking. Stop saying we had no choice when you take up arms.
The more consistent thread was an unapologetic, severe argument for British Northern Ireland: to reunify Northern Ireland, the IRA was willing to destroy its economy, its buildings, its morale, its grandmamas, kiddies and babies, and the murderers and terrorists—responsible for specific, knowable deaths and horrors—are now in Stormont, in charge; meanwhile, the Brits of Northern Ireland only ever wanted to keep homes and people safe. In a few months, the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will arrive, and, he asked, what has it brought us?
He came by his bitterness honestly—both his father and brother murdered, and his own body the target of three killing attempts, resulting in a seven month coma, prosthetics, and the loss of two toes.
The most undeniable thing Mark described was that wall and its effects: On one side, 100% of the people are Protestant; on the other, 100% Catholic. Not a single Catholic on the Protestant side, he claimed, and not a Protestant to be found among the other. Everyone locked in by the wall, everyone locked out, the gates slamming shut every night at nine. Each side has its own shops, its own schools and nurseries, its own churches and even its own buses. Before 1969, Mark said, we shared drinks, friendships, and handshakes. Now there’s the wall, seven kilometers long and three meters thick, its first brick laid in 1971. And has it fixed anything? No, we just keep building it higher. First in ’93, and then, the Good Friday Agreement, did it mean the wall could come down? No, in 1998, they just raised it higher. The children are playing in their own playgrounds and taking lessons in their own schools. The kiddies aren’t playing, nor praying, nor eating, or learning together. The next generation is already locked in.
The idea of separateness is incredibly vivid. And when he toured us through the central blocks of Shankill Road, its angry murals a little like the martyrs’ row on the other side but also bellowing in its thick-font accusations (“PROBABLY THE UK’S WORST EVER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY,” “SINN FEIN/IRA VERSUS ISIS,” “SINN FEIN/IRA’S SLAUGHTER,” “CHILDREN MURDERED BY SINN FEIN,” “30 YEARS OF INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER BY THE SO-CALLED NON-SECTARIAN IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS”). This vitriol of victimization made bright Mark’s words elsewhere: How do we move this along when we’re constantly reminding, remembering, glorifying, blaming?
Mark walked us through the gates that would close at night and open at seven each morning and took us to Pader, who’d been 16 years imprisoned for killing an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Pader provided not only a contrast in perspectives but demeanor, giving nods to us and laughing, and calling out to all the passersby. Haven’t seen you in a bit, Pader. Yeah, cuz’ I’ve been avoidin’ ya! Heya, Pader? How are ya? Magic, Patrick. Magic. Just telling them all about how ya fucked the British all on yer own.
But the things Pader was describing were dead serious, too. The contrasts he provided to Mark’s story were several. First, he and other nationalists were insistent that their argument was not about religion but colonialist occupation. We saw this in the murals up and down Falls road—images touching on Palestinian plight, American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid heroes, Cuban revolutionaries, and many other peoples rising up against post-colonial structures. He wore a green keffiyeh around his neck, stark against the Israeli flags on the Shankill side. Second, he and other nationalists shared the argument that they were fighting back against the most sophisticated government and military in the world, and as such, violent acts were acts of war and political in nature.
Two years ago, Duncan Morrow of Ulster University described it this way: Each side says, We can’t trust the other. Here’s the proof: Awful things They did to us. And here are heroic things we did to defend ourselves: no recognition that their awful acts and our heroic acts are the same—you did it because you believed what you were fighting was much worse.
Pader also gave us a first hand account of the hunger strikers of Long Kesh, where he spent 17 years and the first person he met was Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die. Pader was member to the no wash protests, throwing shit and piss out cells and having it thrown back to them, forced in turn to cells burning with pure undiluted ammonia. They broke their windows for air and then suffered the blowing winter. Pader described being beaten repeatedly and intimate, violating searches that left him bleeding from his anus, and that included oral searches immediately after, the screws using the same fingers in the mouth.
But there in the prison, republicans also read and taught each other history, theory, philosophy, gaining both a principled and tactical understanding of their cause in what they called the University of Revolution. When Pader said this, I recalled the remarkably similar story I heard from Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was interned for almost three decades: Mandela and other political prisoners were brought daily to a limestone quarry where they were made to chip rock with a pickaxe and shovel, despite the useless of this limestone, which was too flaky. It was there only as a source of a hard labor—eight hours a day in any weather. There were no gloves, no eye protection, sun reflected off the white stone at every hour, and eventually the dust clogged Mandela’s eye ducts so that he was no longer able to express tears when he cried. But something very important happened at the quarry, our former prisoner guide said. Education was critical to hope and survival, and a cave, which was used for lunch and bathroom breaks, became “the classroom.” But they held their urine so they could keep the cave dignified and clean, and there, the cave became the university of life.
We left the separated tours for an integrated panel discussion with Gerald, formerly of the IRA, Jim, UVF, and Lee, British army. What we learned there especially was how much violence and seething resentment may well have its source in economics: West Belfast presents two working class neighborhoods trapped without viable opportunities forward to security and pride but those offered freely and charismatically by the local gangs. UVF. IRA. If they’d replaced the factory at Mackey’s with a university, as once was maybe going to happen, rather than a wall, if someone had invested and provided both educational and economic opportunities rather than spending all that money on the Titanic Museum, what might have happened for these two communities?
Lee, the former British soldier, said he had more in common with Gerald and Jim as working class men desperate for purpose than he did with his own Boris Johnson (that vile dog with a face only two cousins could create). Instead, we are drawn to these militaries and paramilitaries, where we are brutalized and punished until we learn to respond quickly to orders; we are pumped with righteous patriotism; and we learn the mindset of we’re good, they’re other.
This post integrates material from both the entry corresponding to the Coiste event two years ago and a post from South Africa in 2018.
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