Borders

I went north with two of my roommates and two German friends. One of my roommates was from Antrim, and we were to stay at his parents’ house over Easter. The rest of the long weekend we were staying in the empty dorms at QUB, where our host had gotten his undergraduate degree.

We drove north from Cork in a German car in a good mood, stopping to take photos of tourists’ points of interest and having lunch somewhere in the midlands. It took us the better part of the day to reach the border at Newry, and when we did, we saw it in all of its late eighties glory. There was a fortified roadblock manned by nervous looking kids who were younger than us. They had German shepherds and mirrors on long poles. They had very large assault rifles that they never put down. The kid with the thick Cockney accent approached the passenger side of the car, insisting that the window be rolled down, and assuming that the driver would be there because the steering wheel is on the other side of German cars, like American cars. Our friend Kieran from Antrim was in the front seat and rolled down the window and leaned back so the soldier could talk to the driver. The German driver was challenged with English, so we assumed the native northerner would do the talking. He never said a single word. The soldier got flustered talking over him and went around to the other side of the car. By this time his compatriots had taken the license number to run through the computer and had not found it listed, because the car was registered on the continent, not in the islands. This brought on the dogs and the mirrors. I felt bad for the kid because he couldn’t make himself understood and he didn’t know what to do with us. Then I realized that if he got too upset then we might have more problems than he did.

Eventually it was communicated that we were tourists from the south, and that we all originated in other countries. The native northerner just nodded when asked if we were all foreigners. They made note of it and let us through. Once we were through the checkpoint the driver had some very choice words for Kieran, mostly monosyllabic, but we got the gist that he was upset that assistance was not forthcoming. Kieran explained that it would have been more problematic if he had offered his assistance because they would have demanded his ID and seen his Catholic name and gotten it into their heads to keep them all for questioning until they sorted out what was going on. This guy was the most disingenuous, down to earth person who you knew could never ever, entertain the thought of deceiving anyone, but this act had come as naturally as laughing at a stupid joke to him- he was conditioned. That was our first impression of Northern Ireland; guns, dogs, tension, and conflict. For the rest of the weekend that impression was not to change.

As soon as we passed the checkpoint we could tell the country was different. It had a much bigger feel to it. There were bigger buildings, bigger houses, wider streets, working traffic lights, and the townships we passed through were better developed. The mailboxes were all red and the police wore different uniforms; the branding of the nation was distinctly different.

My memory here is imperfect, so please take the following glimpses of memory and impressions:

Helicopters: We got into the city and Kieran directed the driver through a maze of city streets precisely to the University where we would stay. Once we got into the city we could hear helicopters overhead. This was a sound we hadn’t heard for months on end in the south, because there were no helicopters in Cork, for ambulances or for reporting the traffic. The helicopters in Belfast were military helicopters that stayed low to the ground and patrolled constantly. The helicopters we had heard back home were completely different. Comparatively, the British Army helicopters were behemoths that made a terrible racket. The helicopters didn’t stop flying the whole time we were there. They made it hard to sleep.

Paisley: One day while traipsing around looking at things we saw a large gathering of people. They had gathered to hear the Reverend Ian Paisley speak. We got near enough to hear that we couldn’t understand his accent. Kieran understood him, but did not want to listen. He translated some bigotry for us and soon we were queasy from knowing that his audience believed his tripe. Kieran told us that Paisley was the safest man in Belfast because he cast his people in such a bad light for the international media. I got the idea that his people, like white South Africans or Israeli settlers, felt so secure in the rightness of their actions that they just didn’t care what anyone thought.

Police Station: There was a police station directly across from the University. It was a fortress. It had high walls and blast proof windows. There was concertina wire all around the top. The personnel going in and out were armed to the teeth, in stark juxtaposition to the gentle gardai we had seen down south, holding the leashes of attack dogs. The constant drone of the helicopters overhead completed the picture. The impression was one you could imagine from an old film about the Nazi occupation of Paris. Even I felt a psychological impact from the overt show of force. It was not left to the imagination that the “government” could perpetrate acts of violence against the population at any time.

Barfight: I saw the first barfight I had ever seen in a three story pub near the University. They had a traditional pub on the first floor, the second floor was like a disco, and the third floor had a live band. Kieran knew one of the guys in the band so we went to the top floor for a few beers and some relaxation. I got bored and went to the bogs, winding my way down the stairs to look in on the other two bars for the hell of it. While I was in the stairwell between the second and third floors (the Irish would say the ground floor and the first story) a squad of police in full body armor and face shields crowded the landing and burst into the disco level. They left one guy holding the door open, and no sooner had they entered than they were leaving, with two flushed and dishevelled young men restrained and being removed not under their own power. I looked out the window and saw the armoured car that awaited them, running and with the hatch open with an armoured rifleman standing guard. I learned that this was barfight between two individuals fighting over a woman (surprise, surprise), but that they were known to be from different camps. In my mind these police may not have been the good guys, but they were definitely professional and efficient. I returned to the third floor and raised a glass and toasted with the Irish, “Slainte,” and Kieran immediately said, “Cheers,” loud enough to be heard by anyone who had heard me. I found that I was not particularly good at being oppressed.

Attitude and Safety: By the end of our time in Belfast my American friend and I had been travelling for the better part of a week without the benefit of razors or Laundromats. We were both poor college kids who had been living in Ireland for some time. We had supplied ourselves with a lot of clothes that were appropriate to the weather by patronizing the second hand clothes stalls at the quays in Cork. Because of this we were dressed in the fashion of poor Irishmen. We are both ethnically Irish as well, so we looked very Irish. One day in the city we were away from the rest of the group and we were standing on a street corner where one of the many armored cars had stopped at a light. The top hatch gunner was riding at his post and had looked down on us and started to make the sheep noise, “Baa, baa, baa-aaa.” This is a common insult in Ireland; I don’t think I need to explain it. It struck me that he was insulting us because we were Irish, or rather, he thought we were Irish. He certainly wasn’t fooling around like you would with an old friend; he was trying to separate us from him, dehumanizing us so that us “Paddies” would be OK to shoot. After all, he had come all that way and done all that training. The light turned and the armored car sped away before we could assimilate what had happened and react. It was a good thing, too, because I’m sure one or the other of us would have done something rash. I hated him, and by extension everybody like him. In that minute I hated the police holed up in their fortress, I hated the military on the ground and in the air, and I hated all the people who looked like regular people but who were secretly hating me because of my name and my look. I was fully prepared to perpetuate the cycle of violence, because I was angry, and I didn’t even lose a family member or get wrongly incarcerated for any length of time. I had a much lower tolerance for it than I had encouraged northerners to have in prior political conversations.

Later, it may have even been that very same day, my friend and I were lost wandering aimlessly around the city. As it turns out, Belfast in ’88 wasn’t the best place for that. We wandered down a long lane that had nobody on it. The evening gloaming was coming on, and nobody was out. There were graffiti on the walls and trash in the gutters. We walked slowly, trying to get our bearings, but still looking like the world famous Irish poor. We came to the end of the side street and found light at the juncture of a larger, if not major, thoroughfare and turned to get our bearings again. In the shadows in a doorway there was a sniper crouching, and following us with his scope, his rifle trained on our backs or heads. We talked each other around the corner, and I was angry again.

We went to shop for comic books and browsed Kieran’s favorite comic shop for about an hour. Then next day, in the dorm at QUB, we saw the same wall we were leaning against on the TV news, covered with the blood of a bombing victim.

When we were in Kieran’s hometown, a village really, preparing for Easter mass, we were pretty far from any large city, but we were in the same area as Enniskillen, where a major bombing had taken place a year earlier. As we walked to church with all the other families dressed in their Easter best we were eyed by police and soldiers with rifles, assault weapons, and attack dogs. They were not there to protect us, they were there to protect themselves from us. The IRA bombing was wrong and bad, but being marched to church like a prisoner of war was also wrong.

Impact: When I returned south and spoke to my cousins about the trip they spoke to me as one would to a school child who is first discovering that the world is not fair, or to a junior high kid who was jilted at his first dance. They were life long veterans of the conflict, but in a much different way than the people in Belfast. They were tired of the Republican factions in the north trying to drag the whole country into a conflict that would surely extinguish its sovereignty. They wanted to move past the armed struggle and towards a lasting political solution, and all of their arguments were logical and well thought out, and sensible. But something I have not forgotten is the visceral reaction to the insults, the implied authority over life and death, the imposition of a false fealty to an obvious oppressor. I got the feeling that if I were raised there and had to choose between living like that or any other alternative, that I may have chosen any other alternative.

When I returned to the U.S. and tried to talk to the “Irish” in Massachusetts I got no condescension to my naïveté. They could not understand what I was talking about at all. They could not formulate informed arguments one way or the other. They had no context from which to frame their perspective. They knew generally that long ago the British had done bad things, but they didn’t know what the bad things were and they didn’t know about the bad things done by the Irish against the Irish. What I found most shocking was that most Irish-Americans didn’t realize the scope of the troubles. In Ireland we would hear about a killing in the north almost every night on RTE 1. Eventually I stopped talking about it. In the later years of my late brother’s life he became intensely interested in his Irish heritage, but by then my ardor for the social justice aspects of the originating culture had cooled.