The war on England’s doorstep

The ‘Derry Girls’ mural, taken by me. This hilariously irreverent show, set in a Catholic girls’ school during the 1990s, treats the background of the Troubles with a lot of sensitivity.

Last month I spent five days in beautiful Northern Ireland, catching up with my family there.

During my time in ‘Norn Iron’, my brother took me to visit Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast. Crumlin Road is a grim Victorian prison now become a tourist attraction. It has a harrowing history, including the atrociously brutal treatment of child prisoners in Victorian times. Seventeen hangings took place at Crumlin between 1858 and 1961: the condemned prisoners are buried in unmarked graves in the prison compound. During the Troubles, Republican and Loyalist prisoners were held there – separated, of course, otherwise they’d have killed each other.

I bought a book in the giftshop, Malachi O’Doherty’s The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland on the brink of civil war, 1971-2. A riveting, powerful read. O’Doherty’s family were Catholics from West Belfast. They rejected the violence of the IRA and refused to be drawn into the maestrom, yet the maelstrom was all around them. As a young journalist, O’Doherty had to walk a tightrope between the tensions erupting within his own community and an increasingly miscalculated and hostile British response. As a Catholic, he also experienced prejudice.

As a teenager and a young woman, I was very familiar with IRA atrocities (not forgetting the crimes committed by the Loyalist paramilitaries). I remember the UK bombings. But O’Doherty brought home to me the sheer horror of the thousands of sectarian murders committed over those three decades. Fathers shot dead in front of their children, brothers gunned down in pubs. RUC police officers blown up in their cars. The revenge killings, the tit for tat. The ruthless punishments and executions carried out by the paramilitaries on informers, or people they suspected of being informers. The mothers who disappeared. The young lads tasked to make bombs, killed when the devices exploded by accident. A toddler, 18 months old, pushing her dolly in a pram alongside her sister as they went to the corner shop to buy sweeties, killed by an IRA sniper’s stray bullet. Little Angela’s death caused huge revulsion throughout Northern Ireland – but the injustice of Bloody Sunday had yet to happen, resulting in hundreds of young men committing to the IRA cause.

There was a war on England’s doorstep all those years, a war we knew about, a war which would sometimes come home to us when an outrage was committed on the British mainland, yet always remaining remote. That kind of sectarian hatred and violence hadn’t existed in England for 300 years (more or less). But it was all too real in Northern Ireland.

And yet Northern Ireland never tipped over into complete civil war, and O’Doherty gives a simple but profound reason as to why he thinks that was. He believes that the people of Northern Ireland, despite the bitter politics of their divided communities, didn’t WANT to be torn apart, or to tear themselves apart. I will add my own limited observation: as terrible as the Troubles were, they were also localised. Belfast and Derry were epicentres: but I was in peaceful County Down in the summer of 1987, and you’d never have guessed there was a war going on. I should point out that County Down was solid loyalist country, peopled by farming families who went to Ian Paisley's church, so at that time I was experiencing Northern Ireland through a very particular filter.

It is very good to be challenged by what we read. The Bible itself can be very challenging, in a number of different ways. When our perceptions and assumptions are challenged, it’s an opportunity to grow in wisdom and insight and gain more understanding about the world and the human condition and our own deeply held blind spots.

What book(s) have helped to change your perception of the world?

And does your own writing contain challenges to someone's worldview, in an overt or subtle way?

I’m a Licensed Lay Minister in the Diocese of Rochester. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.