Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
political bonds lie, their cultural bonds rest much closer.
Rather than seeing the Ulster divide in religious or cultural terms, it makes more sense to view it in terms of identities that have been created by perceptions of history, by economic and political relations, and by a rejection of the other side’s identity: whatever they are, we are not. Protestants in areas such as the Shankill might have lived lives culturally similar to – and as economically deprived as – their Catholic neighbours, but members of the opposing communities have very rarely worked together towards shared goals. Their tribal identities have not allowed it.
From the Shankill, my taxi driver and I drove across the divide onto the Falls. The atmosphere here is slightly less intense, but the sense of republican identity is as strong as its equivalent on the other side. Just as the Shankill grew up on the old route between the Protestant counties of Down and Antrim, so the Falls grew up on the route out to the Catholic west, and it was populated by workers in the many mills that were built nearby. The Falls saw a great deal of street fighting in the early days of the Troubles, becoming a rallying point for republican resistance to the state. In the words of Provisional IRA hero Brendan Hughes, it was where the belief arose, in 1970, that ‘We can beat these fuckers.’ On that occasion, as so often, the ‘fuckers’ were the British army, who had raided the Falls in an attempt to remove a cache of weapons.
A visit to the Irish Republican History Museum, in Conway Mill, just off the Falls Road, is a memorable experience. At first sight it is a frightening place, full of guns, rubber bullets, prison doors, and clothes worn by the Provisional IRA. It feels like a sinister chapel, Armalite rifles and prison-carved harps in place of crucifixes and stained-glass windows. I have rarely been so self-conscious as I was in my first few minutes in this place; I felt as though I was wearing a Union Jack waistcoat as I wandered about, peering at artefacts and nodding at people who were drinking tea at a small table. I looked around the well-stocked library, then I walked into a recreated cell from Armagh Prison. After a while the place began to seem less like a shrine to violence and more like a focal point for the community. Its custodian is a friendly man, happy to explain the local perspective, and it became clear that the museum’s intention is not to intimidate or to glory in brutality. Just as one side feels at the mercy of its enemies, so can the other, and this place reflects the fear and pride of a beleaguered people. In the end it is an interesting and well-run local museum with little chance of government funding.
When I first visited the Republican Museum, the Real IRA killings at Massereene barracks had not yet occurred. When I returned months later, with a peaceful future looking less certain, the place unnerved me a little once more. It had not changed and its custodian was as thoughtful and generous with his time as he had been on my first visit. But much else had changed, including my attitude to my work. What had begun as a history project, its subject matter more or less packaged, now felt like current affairs muddled with uncertainties. The guns were no longer just museum exhibits. The past and the present were blurring.
Seventy years ago Harold Nicolson wrote, ‘The Irish themselves have no sense of the past; for them, the present began on 17 October 1171, when Henry II landed at Waterford. For them, history is always contemporaneous and current events are always history.’ Walking around parts of Belfast, glancing at the murals and graffiti, it can seem as though the rebels of 1916 have only just risen, and the Somme is still being fought. Sometimes, in ordinary conversation, history comes tumbling out of people. The partition of Ireland or the Siege of Derry can appear as relevant to someone’s state of mind as something that happened that morning. But the versions of the past that you will hear are unlikely to coincide. Identities do not allow it.
There is a Northern Ireland neologism, ‘Whataboutery’, that is used to describe the bouts of accusation-slinging that characterize local politics. When a politician from one side charges the other side with some wrongdoing, the matter will rarely be discussed rationally. Instead it will be answered with a corresponding accusation: ‘What about such and such injustice?’ Whataboutery is symptomatic of the chasm in the interpretation of history that exists between the communities. In Northern Ireland, it has been said, there is no one history. Indeed the Tower Museum in Derry makes the point graphically – it displays the story of the period between 1800 and 1921 along two parallel walls, one from the unionist-loyalist perspective, the other from the nationalist-republican perspective. You can walk down the middle and take your pick. By the same logic, the actions of the dissident republicans ought to be sending the politicians scurrying to their entrenched positions, from where they can interpret events accordingly. But that has not been happening. In the aftermath of the 2009 killings, the politicians have appeared united. The Reverend Ian Paisley, a man often blamed for kindling the fire that led to the Troubles, announced, ‘There is grieving, there is despair, but beyond the despair there is being born a spirit of unity that we have never seen before.’ If he is right – and the very fact that he is saying it suggests that he might be – perhaps this spirit of unity could create a single history in Northern Ireland, a single wall in the Tower Museum. The past might be consigned to the past. If that were to happen, then I would love to revisit the Shankill murals and the Irish Republican History Museum, emotive reminders of a shared turbulent story.
It will take a lot to create just one history, however. The sense and depth of history arises out of continuity, out of a firm linkage of people to place. In parts of Northern Ireland surnames have remained constant for many hundreds of years, and this has created a society where family and community count for a great deal. As one nationalist put it, ‘When we want to get something done here, we phone a cousin.’ In the north, four hundred people can show up to a funeral, and when somebody is shot dead the lives of hundreds can be directly affected. With this continuity comes a sense of history and identity that is rarely questioned.
One Belfast man, whom I met early on in my travels, gave me a warning: ‘All that everyone will say to you here – no matter how much of it seems to be foregrounded on fact – it’s all subjective experience. None of it is true. There is no truth in this place. Anyone who gives you the true version, well, you know immediately not to trust them.’ He had offered me a liar’s paradox: if a Northern Ireland man tells me that in Northern Ireland people don’t tell the truth, how can I believe him? Riddles aside, I was to hear many ‘true versions’ over the coming months, from the senior politician who cheerfully informed me that Catholics cannot be considered Christians, to the ex-IRA man who was certain that the British government retains a strong strategic interest in Northern Ireland. A lot of the time, however, these ‘true versions’ would consist of interpretations that sounded plausible until somebody else said something just as plausible but wholly contradictory. I was to find myself deluged by such declarations of identity. At times I would listen with interest, at other times with weariness – and sometimes with something close to jealousy. Louis MacNeice wrote of his native Northern Ireland:
We envy men of action Who sleep and wake, murder and intrigue Without being doubtful, without being haunted. And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim’s face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives.
It is quite possible for an outsider to feel envy in the province, a place seemingly free from doubt. My own world of moral equivalence, where one is not encouraged to pass judgement on the beliefs of others, can seem, by comparison, to be a place without conviction. How fortifying it must be to have something always to believe in, and somebody always to react against. Is this what Dominic Behan wrote about in his lovely song, ‘The Patriot Game’: ‘For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing, it banishes fear with the speed of a flame, and it makes us all part of the Patriot Game’?
Now flip the coin. Perhaps Northern Ireland is a place where judgement is too readily passed. It has produced people prepared to die, prepared to cut off a hand for the cause, but not prepared to make lesser compromises. A weaker identity might produce a stronger society. One Belfast republican told me of time spent, many years previously, in Coventry. There he became friendly with a local Labour Party activist, but he could never understand how someone could be politically active in a ‘twilight city’ where nothing ever happened, where the construction of a zebra crossing was held up as a political achievement. For many in Northern Ireland, politics is not about the mundane or