Irish people have learned to live with violence

Press, 21 August 1984, Page 21

Irish people have learned to live with violence

Fifteen years ago this month British troops were rushed into Northern Ireland. SIMON HOGGART of the London “Observer,” who was there, went back to find out why, half a generation later, they are still there.

The grounds of Government House, Hillsborough, about 10 miles from Belfast, are magnificentrather like Buckingham Palace gardens, though conceived on a far grander scale. There are lakes so wide you cannot see across them on misty mornings; shining lawns which look as if they are shaved every day; banks of trees piled up towards the sky like cumulus clouds, rose gardens, follies and endless saplings, mostly planted by the more obscure members of the Royal Family whose relationship to the Queen one can never quite remember. There is also the largest rhododendron bush in the United Kingdom, 83 metres round, big enough to hide a battalion of infantry, which it possibly does. Through the night each nook and dell of the grounds is invisibly illuminated by infrared light; robot TV cameras pan across the lawns; small groups of policemen lug their machine guns through the bosky glades. This is nature green in tooth and claw, Stalag Luft 111 designed by Capability Brown. Such imperial grandeur is usually designed to impress a subject people, a lesser breed within the law: in this case the Protestants of Northern Ireland. On the day I visited Hillsborough a group of mayors and their spouses, by chance all Protestants, had been invited to a reception given by Christopher Patten, one of the ablest of the British Ministers who since 1972 have been shipped over to govern Northern Ireland like young district comissioners. Most of his predecessors have attracted a measure of odium for some decision or other, and Mr Patten was particularly reviled for allowing Londonderry Council to change its name to “Derry.” The distinction is purely symbolic, and so of overwhelming importance. Angry Protestants marched behind banners labelled “Patten: Papist Appeaser.” For a short spell he was the object of obsessive public loathing. In Andy . Warhol’s future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. In Ulster, everyone can be hated for 15 days. Yet here were the mayors, all Protestants, some of them supporters of lan Paisley, gathered .in the drawing-room, sipping polite glasses of sherry, waiting their turn to be photographed (for the “Ulster Tatler”) with the Minister and his wife. The Pattens are an unpretentious couple, yet amid all this hushed respect, they began to appear faintly regal. Portraits of past governors in full regalia line the walls; clearly some of the

guests would have been pleased if Patten’s head, too, had been festooned with ostrich feathers. I had returned to Belfast for a first long trip since I stopped living and working there in 1973. Mainly I wanted to find out how the Troubles had lasted for such an extaordinarily long time; more than twice the length of the Second World War 15 times longer than the civil war in the South which followed partition. There are grown-up, married people in Ulster who have no memory of a time before this war, youths now in prison who were not yet at school when the British Army arrived. I suspected, and partly confirmed, that the reason was the most depressing imaginable: that the violence continues because most people now find it tolerable and a few people wouldn’t have it any other way. Over on the mainland we tend to assume that Ulster is a horrible iilace to live, where violent death aces everyone every day. Far from it. There has been only one year, 1972 in which the number of people killed in the Troubles has been greater than of those killed on the roads. Better police work, seat belts, and the breathalyser have brought this figure down to 173 last year, compared to 77 murders. But of these latter victims the great majority were soldiers, policemen, or terrorists. The startling fact is that the average innocent, uninvolved Northern Ireland civilian is roughly 10 times more likely to be killed by a car than by a bomb or a bullet. If he lives outside the Catholic ghettos of West Belfast, the rural border country, and the streets of Derry, then his chances are overwhelmingly better than that. In 1970, Reginald Maudling came to Belfast as Home Secretary and was abused for talking about an “acceptable level of violence.” For a Protestant farmer in Armagh murdered because of his religion, for a young squaddie from England shot by people he despises for a cause : he does not. understand, for. a boy blinded by a plastic bullet, for a policeman’s widdw, there is no acceptable level of violence. But for 95 per cent of the population, that point has already been reached. For darker forces, like the more ruthless IRA men, there is the anxiety that we might be reaching an unacceptable level of peace. The centre of Belfast is the usual mixture of familiar shops, punks, drifting litter, people with pmched faces who do not get a proper diet—in short, much like any large

British city these days. There is still the “Cage,” the high fence which cuts off the centre, but nobody bothers to frisk you as you pass through it. Searches have been reduced to a vague glance at people’s shopping bags and a friendly pat on the back, the vestigial reminder of some halfforgotten ritual. In the ghettos, the changes are more subtle. When the troops first arrived in ; 1969, they built ramshackle “peace lines” to separate the two sides — do-it-yourself Berlin Walls of corrugated iron and planking which straggled across warring parts of the city. Now there are huge fortifications, three metres of thick concrete topped by another metre of ribbed steel, each costing between a half and a million dollars. What is most chilling is that they are permanent. The old piles of scrap metal and wire carried the hope that things would improve soon; these new walls could last forever, and might very well have to. The streets themselves are even more depressing. In the past four years the British Government has spent a total of $6OOO million on housing in Northern Ireland. The architects have produced what may be the finest council houses in the United Kingdom. They are sturdy, handsome, and built to last. If you look closely, you can see that almost all of them are built in a ring, set at angles to each other so that they curve round in a seamless circle. Two men with rifles at the entrance to each of these circles could seal it off and prevent anyone from getting in or, possibly getting out. Nobody in authority admits it, of course, but these may be the first dwellings built in Britain since our Civil War designed to be defended against armed attack. Sealing people off, psychologically as well as physically, is very important in Ulster. One of the bigger walls cuts through Cupar Street On the Protestant side the new' houses have been carefully decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, red Ulster crosses, dismally uninspired graffiti “Fuck the Queen” is the Catholics’ witty riposte to “Fuck the Pope”), all of them territorial markings, asserting sovereignty over a few wretched streets, like a dog urinating against a fence. Down the Falls Road, the principal thoroughfare of Catholic Belfast, almost every gable end carries a huge painting. All of them have been produced with care and a few with skill. Many of them celebrate the dead hunger strikers . of the H-blocks, whose willingness to die, whose “redemptive sacrifices,” did so much to improve the popularity of the IRA among their own people. Bobby Sands, the first to die, is always depicted in the last days of his life, before his body literally began to digest itself. It is no coincidence that his thin, bearded face, the closed eyes, and. the blanket wrapped round him like a premature shroud, resemble the familiar images of Christ before the Resurrection. These pictures are permanent too, certainly more so than the bric-a-brac, the army and police posts, the rubble-strewn sites around them. The chaps who painted these icons weren’t waiting for news of a constitutional settlement. Like the peace walls, like the “Cage” they are here at last. They don’t symbolise an imminent victory, but a permanent struggle. The most horrible thing about the hunger strikes was not that 10 young men died for the right to wear one type of clothing, but the fact that their deaths gave the I.R.A.—so they thought—the moral authority to go on killing whoever got in their way. The Church teaches that Christ died that we might live; Bobby Sands died that others might die. The circle in Northern Ireland is always a vicious one and it is always complete.