In Europe (102 page)

The bomb that exploded here on the busy Saturday afternoon of 15 August, 1998 was made from Semtex, artificial fertiliser and motor oil. It took the lives of Brenda Devine, twenty months old, Oran Doherty, a boy of eight, Samantha McFarland and Lorraine Wilson, two seventeen-year-old girlfriends, and twenty-four others. It was a last-ditch attempt by the Real IRA, a radical splinter group, to block the peace process. It had the very opposite effect, and united all Ireland in abhorrence.

Omagh was the worst outrage of the war: two whole housing blocks were blown up. It was also one of the most cruel: a warning had been telephoned in beforehand for another location, so that many people had crowded together at precisely the spot where the bomb actually exploded. Everywhere that afternoon parents were out shopping with their children, to buy new uniforms for the start of the school year. ‘I saw people with protruding abdominal wounds,’ one policeman said. ‘We used Pampers Nappies from Boots to staunch the bleeding.’

The infirmary looked like a field hospital at the front lines. Thirty children lost their mothers. The toddler Brenda Devine was buried in a little white coffin, carried by her father. Her mother had burns over two thirds of her body, and knew nothing about her daughter's funeral. Brenda had been asked to be a bridesmaid; her mother had taken her into town to buy new shoes for the wedding.

Belfast is the city of fences: barbed wire around schools and neigh-bourhoods, armoured barriers around police stations, metre-high constructions around every clubhouse. Even the traffic lights are protected by iron screens. On Dublin Road, all niceties have been burned away by thirty years of war. Crumlin Road consists largely of burned-out shops and Protestant flags: the smaller the bay window, the bigger the flag. Only Wilton Funeral Directors is still in tip-top condition. The Good Friday Agreement, a historic ceasefire according to all concerned, has been in
place since April 1998. It was then, for the first time, that David Trimble's Unionists agreed to share power with Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin. For the first time too, the IRA announced that the force of arms was to play no role in this new situation, in which ‘Irish republicans and Unionists will pursue our different political objectives as equals’.

On Shankill Road, a group of about twenty men are marching through the quiet Sunday afternoon with their sashes, cockades and bowler hats. They parade along behind a British and an Irish flag, with two drummers and an accordionist out in front, behind them about a hundred grey, worn-out men. There is not a single young person to be seen.

The evening news according to ITV Ulster on 30 October, 1999:

Gerry Adams says that the peace process is in trouble again.

Gerard Moyna of Belfast has been sentenced to seven years in prison after a Semtex bomb he was transporting through the city went off prematurely.

Victor Barker, the father of a twelve-year-old boy killed in the Omagh bombing, wants the damages committee to pay back his son's tuition, all £30,000 of it. ‘After all, it's done us no good,’ Barker says.

Preparations for Halloween have begun in Londonderry, ghosts look out of the windows, children run screaming down the darkened streets.

The Reverend Clifford Peebles has been arrested; he believes that the Protestants of Northern Ireland are one of the last, lost tribes of Israel. He has been charged with possession of a home-made pipe bomb.

The very first victim of the new Irish civil war was John Patrick Scullion, aged twenty-eight, a warehouse worker. On the evening of 27 May, 1966, as he was stumbling drunkenly down Falls Road in Belfast, he shouted at a passing car: ‘Up the republic, up the rebels!’ A little later he was shot and killed outside his door. His Protestant killers said later: ‘We had nothing against him. It was because he shouted “Up the rebels!”’

The choice of Scullion as victim was typical of this civil war: he was not a militant, not a member of the IRA, he was simply an ordinary citizen who made the wrong gesture at the wrong place. The war has often been characterised as an explosion of sectarian violence, a seventeenth-century religious feud with a new look, in which many Northern
Irish took part passionately. In reality, it was the very opposite, right from the start.

In 1968, when the new civil war broke out, the traditional Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods of Belfast intermingled, mixed marriages were becoming common, religious fanatics and sectarians were regarded as loonies. Sociological research between 1989–95 showed little prejudice among the older generations, in contrast with those who grew up after 1968. A good forty per cent of the Northern Irish surveyed said they wished to be associated with neither the Catholics nor the Protestants.

What suddenly turned Northern Ireland into a war zone was therefore not latent, widespread religious tension, but the disastrous spiral of violence in which the IRA, the Protestant Unionists, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British troops became entangled.

The revolt had begun in the 1960s as a moderate reaction to Protestant intimidation and discrimination. In 1967, a number of Catholics, inspired by the student protests elsewhere in Europe, set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Associaton (NICRA). Taking American civil rights activists as their model, they applied peaceful means at first: demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins. For those in power in Ulster, however, this was taking things too far. On 5 October, 1968, a NICRA march in Londonderry was broken up heavy-handedly by police; the demonstrators fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails. The maniacal Pope-hater, Reverend Ian Paisley, fueled the fires even further, his Ulster Protestant Volunteers began terror-ising the Catholic neighbourhoods, and the IRA came back to life.

On the surface at least, the conflict in Northern Ireland resembled the one in the Basque Country. The movements in both places fought for their own rights. But whereas the issue for the Basques has been the preservation of a vanishing people, for Northern Irish Catholics it was about the ascendancy of a majority that was not yet recognised as such. The Catholics produced more children than the Protestants, they were the winners in a demographic sense, but they remained oppressed. The routes taken by the traditional Orange marches are telling in this regard. Until far into the twentieth century, the Protestants marched only through Protestant neighbourhoods. Gradually, however, those same neighbour-hoods became populated by Catholic families; the routes, though, remained identical to what they had been thirty years before. Detours from the
ritual path, after all, would have amounted to a recognition of the fact that those neighbourhoods were no longer predominantly Protestant.

The Catholics increasingly came to regard the marches as an annual provocation, the supreme symbol of discrimination and humiliation. And so, in summer 1969, things erupted: the Protestant marchers in Catholic districts were pelted with stones and bottles. The neighbourhood riots grew into small-scale popular uprisings. British troops were called in, and within a few months the violence had escalated into a civil war that would last for more than three decades.

At first most of those killed were Catholics: the retired farmer Francis McCloskey, who wandered into a riot on 14 July, 1969, had his skull bashed in by the police; contractor Samuel Devenney, father of nine, died three days later from injuries sustained in an attack by the RUC in April; bus conductor Samuel McLarnon was struck down in his own living room by a police bullet.

The British government decided to knuckle down in Northern Ireland. Catholics briefly hoped that the British would rescue them from the harassment of the Protestant militias. But soon the situation deteriorated even further; in 1972, 467 people were killed in bombings and shooting incidents; in 1973 that figure was 250; in 1974, 216 people were killed; in 1975 it was 247, and in 1976 the death toll was 297. Belfast became a war zone, neighbourhoods were cordoned off with barbed wire, sentry posts and armoured cars. Successive British governments proved unable to mediate. During their terms of office (1974–9), Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and his successor James Callaghan allowed the situation to get completely out of hand. Countless IRA suspects were imprisoned without due process. Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that her ‘own instincts were deeply Unionist’. With only a tiny majority to keep him in power, her successor, John Major, was entirely dependent on the Unionist MPs. In 1984, more than a third of all adult Catholic males in Ulster were unemployed. For years, the annual death toll hovered around eighty. Only after Tony Blair's Labour government came to power in May 1997 was there room for a breakthrough.

Compared with many other twentieth-century conflicts, the civil war in Northern Ireland was relatively limited and isolated. The extent of the drama only becomes clear when one sees how small Ulster really is: not
much larger than Friesland province in the Netherlands. The conflict there nevertheless has claimed more than 3,500 lives, and left at least 30,000 people injured. Around 1995, one out of every twenty inhabitants of Northern Ireland had been the victim of a bombing or a shooting, one in five had witnessed a bombing, and the same number knew someone in their immediate surroundings who had been killed or badly wounded.

The lives, long and short, of the 3,637 victims to date have been detailed in the encyclopaedic
Lost Lives
, including the circumstances leading up to their deaths: militancy, camaraderie, loyalty, revenge, brotherly love, the luck of the draw. The book had just come out when I was travelling around Ulster, and everyone was talking about it. With its 1,630 pages, it was the result of eight years of research by a little group of independent journalists. Its impact was shattering.

Take lost life number seven, the first child to be murdered: Patrick Rooney, nine years old, schoolboy, killed on 15 August, 1969 by police bullets while lying in his bed. His mother would later lose a whole series of friends and relatives; because of this book, all those connections have suddenly become clear as well. The chain reactions of revenge, back and forth: in January 1976, three Protestants were murdered in a bar by IRA supporters; in revenge, six Catholic men were shot and killed in a living room during a ‘post-New Year sing-song’ around the piano; in response, the IRA machine-gunned a van carrying ten Protestant workers close to Kingsmills. Nineteen lives lost within a week. The grisliest details: limbs that flew over rooftops, decapitated victims. The weapons: baseball bats, butcher's knives, pistols, fire bombs, fertiliser bombs, machine guns, Semtex bombs. The nightwatchman Thomas Madden, tortured by Unionists, screamed:‘Kill me, kill me now!'The heroic deaths: the woman who threw herself in front of her husband, a soldier, during an IRA attack. The deaths from sorrow: Anne Maguire, whose three children had been killed in 1976 and who cut her own wrists four years later – there was no life for her without her babies. Those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong moment: the old woman in a pub who was struck by a gas bomb. The brutal errors: the IRA gunman who burst through a door, shot the father of the family and then cried: ‘Damn it, wrong address!’

The IRA and other republican groups accounted for most of the casualties: 2,139. The Protestant Unionists were responsible for 1,050 killings.
The British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary killed 367 people. The majority of the victims were, as noted, not activists. An increasing share of the violence, in fact, served only to maintain the groups’ internal authority. The tables drawn up in
Lost Lives
speak for themselves: 115 IRA members were killed by the police and the British Army, 149 by the IRA itself, 138 Catholic citizens were killed by actions taken by the British Army, 198 by the IRA.

Worth noting in this regard is the story of Jean McConville from West Belfast, a young widow with ten children, born Protestant but married to a Catholic contractor. The couple lived in a Protestant neighbourhood at first, but were harassed there so badly after 1969 that they moved to a Catholic section of town. In early 1972, her husband died of cancer. Soon afterwards, during a skirmish outside her house, she provided assistance to a young British soldier who had been wounded in front of her door. For the IRA, that deed of compassion was reason enough to put her on its blacklist. On 6 December, 1972 she was abducted and beaten for several hours. She escaped, but the next evening, while she was taking a bath, four young women entered her home and dragged her outside. Her eldest daughter – fifteen at the time – had gone to the chip shop, the youngest children clung to their mother and begged the women to let her go, the older children were hysterical with fear.

They never saw Jean again. The children kept quiet about the kidnapping for several weeks, and tried to survive on their own. Finally, welfare bodies pulled the family apart. For the children, that was the start of a year-long odyssey from one orphanage to the next.

Lost lives. Just outside Belfast, at the foot of a road embankment, lies a wilderness of tall grass, crooked stones, rusty iron and grey Celtic crosses: Milltown cemetery. To the left lie the republicans, finally in possession of their full names and ranks, as in a real war cemetery. ‘Capt Joseph Fitzsimmons, killed in action, 28 May, 1972, IRA’;‘Officer Danny Loughran, People's Liberation Army, murdered 5 April, 1975 by NLF’; ‘Joseph and Pete McGouch, “One day I will walk with you …”’

On 16 March, 1988, the Unionist Michael Stone disrupted an IRA funeral here with shots and hand grenades: three dead, sixty wounded. He had thrown his hand grenades too soon. ‘If they had exploded in the
air, he would have killed a great many more republicans,’ his sympathisers complained later. Stone is still their hero.

Lost lives. ‘We have good hope,’ says Teresa Pickering. ‘But there isn't a family in Northern Ireland that hasn't been damaged.’ Teresa is a mother of three, one of countless women who have had to pilot their families through this war.‘Whole groups of boys were always on the run, including my own seventeen-year-old brother. There were always people hiding out, police raids, arson.’ She tells me about how one night three British soldiers forced their way into her home one night and pulled her out of bed. ‘I was puking with fear.’ She had to hold down two jobs, because the men of the family were no longer bringing in money. Her sister and her baby were caught in the crossfire, her brother was sentenced to life imprisonment. She got married, her husband was sent to prison, a life of arrests, searches and caring for prisoners. ‘The strange thing was: at the same time, we just lived on as normally as possible, like everyone else. That was pure survival instinct.’