ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE

It hasn’t been an easy time to raise political arguments. I was on UTV’s Counterpoint programme the Thursday after the Greysteel massacre and had sharpened my thoughts in advance for cut-and-thrust interplay with ex-UDA chief Glen Barr, Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionists and Mark Durkin of the SDLP.

But then Michelle and Ian Williamson and Mena Donnelly spoke and I knew that I couldn’t slice into anybody else’s argument just then. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, and I wasn’t able to anyway.

Michelle and Ian’s mother and father had been killed in the Shankill bomb, Mena’s father-in-law at Greysteel, and all three of them spoke with that astonishing, quiet decency that we have come almost to expect from people whose happiness has been suddenly shattered in the violence here.

It has sometimes seemed to me when people have said those noble, forgiving things – that they don’t feel bitter and want to appeal for no retaliation – that they have been speaking from a standard approved script, that it’s become a sort of television ritual after each atrocity, this recital of saintly forgiveness, because who knows what to say in the middle of such hitherto unimaginable grief, but even so you have to be saying something, and it’s easiest to repeat what you remember others in the same situation saying to general approbation.

I’d seen Michelle on television immediately after the Shankill bomb and she had said that of course she was bitter against the people who had done it, and it struck me at the time that it would have been eerie if she’d said anything else. But now she said, on the programme and off-air, that she wasn’t bitter any more, that she’d used all her bitterness up, she had none left in her. She looked across at Mena and said, The men who did that to your family weren’t acting for us. I was sitting just behind and between the two of them and there was no doubting she didn’t speak from any internalised script but from the sweetness of her heart.

She was petite, as they say, with sallow skin and a mass of dark curls, and smiled apologetically and complied when the floor-manager asked if she’d take off a bright sweater which was too “hot” for the cameras. She was only about 20. She explained that her mother and father had gone out on the day of the bomb in great form because they were about to move into a new house. Their mission up the Shankill was to buy curtains.

I stopped to talk with her after we finished transmission but couldn’t think of anything and just clumsily gave her a hug and said, ‘You know . . .’, and she said, ‘Yes, I know. Thank you very much’. Imagine that. She said, ‘Thank you very much’.

I headed off straight after that because I felt too inadequate to remain in her company because I was crying and I definitely wasn’t going to stay like that in the presence of Campbell, Durkin and Barr. Gregory, true to form, had harped on a bit during the programme about Protestants being done down in Derry over the past 20 years but nobody took him on.

I headed up the Strand Road towards Peadar O’Donnell’s and then the Dungloe Bar telling myself to wise up about these fits of weeping and wondering if I’d take a bit of stick for not taking a tougher political line. But everybody in the Dungloe where they’d been watching said, There was nothing you could say.

On the following Sunday I walked down from Creggan to the Guildhall Square with a march organised by Sinn Fein to draw attention to collusion between the British security services and loyalist paramilitaries and in solidarity with the beleaguered Catholic communities in west and north Belfast. It was one of those days of thick freezing-damp air when you’d far rather have been indoors watching United versus City live from Maine Road, which probably helped account for the middling-at-best turn-out of maybe 500.

Joe Austin, a Sinn Fein councillor from North Belfast, was the main speaker, gaunt and terse and raising the only laugh of the day, or the week even, when he referred to, John Adams . . . I mean Gerry, and somebody shouted, Aye, Gerry Hume, which could all be taken as a Freudian slip if you were searching hard for something unconsciously significant.

On the way down I’d lost step with the Socialist Workers’ Movement comrades I’d been walking with and fell in with my friend Daisy Mules who is a member of Sinn Fein and also treasurer of Derry Trades Council. She introduced me to Bobby Lavery alongside her. He’s another Sinn Fein councillor from north Belfast. Earlier this year, Loyalist paramilitaries had come to kill him and when he wasn’t in shot his son dead instead.

I know who you are, he said. I know some of your aunts on the New Lodge Road.

I know you, too, I responded, I’m sorry about . . . He cut me short, not in any unfriendly way, nodding, Aye, Aye.

It was the only Sinn Fein march I can remember which didn’t have a tricolour on it and didn’t finish with the Soldier’s Song. There was no mention from the platform of a united Ireland or Brits Out. Joe Austin said that what we wanted was an end to unfairness, in employment and everything else, and recognition of the nationalist identity.

After the meeting I drifted part of the way back up to the Bogside with Tony Doherty, who asked me what I’d thought about the Counterpoint programme. Tony’s father was Paddy Doherty, one of the 14 men gunned down in Rossville Street by the Paras on Bloody Sunday. I mumbled that I hadn’t felt able to say much.

You couldn’t have said anything, he agreed. It was just very sad listening to that young couple from the Shankill. Just very, very sad.

That’s mainly the way it was. Sadness overlaid with sadness overlaid with sadness until everything else in us was almost smothered in it. I’d been out at Greysteel doing a piece for the Sunday Tribune on the Friday night, hanging around outside the Rising Sun with my tape-recorder and interrupting the quiet reveries of the queue which was constantly replenished with people coming to contemplate the banks of flowers and the wall festooned with condolence cards and mass cards and messages of sympathy. Nobody refused to talk with me, which was amazing enough in itself, although this didn’t yield a piece of contrasting colours since everybody had more or less the same expected things to say.

I presumed to knock on the door of the house which was nearest to the Rising Sun and had a light on and was welcomed in to tea and slices of cake. The man of the house had been in the pub when the killers struck, had come face to face with them. His wife was a Protestant. His children were Catholics. His eldest had the date set for marrying her Protestant fella.

I thought as I left that the right journalistic thing to do would be to do a piece about them. They’d have made a brilliant story, especially with a picture, if I’d be able to coax them that far.

It wasn’t delicate sensitivity or any consideration of ethics which dissuaded me from pursuing this, but a feeling which was beginning to weigh more heavily that this theme of people intermingling easily with one another and of shared sorrow triumphing over hatred and division, although in harmony with the immediate, emotional facts of the matter, was operating as something of a lullaby, too, soothing us towards a dreamy, devoutly-wished disregard for the ugliness which still outcropped all around.

I wrote a piece for the Tribune trying to acknowledge that the Catholics and Protestants of the area around Greysteel did indeed feel for one another, but making the point, too, that politically they didn’t feel as one, and couldn’t, because there are no political mechanisms here for giving sentiment of this sort a common expression.

So I wrote that while the people of the area were “striv(ing) to believe what is most benign, for the consolation it might bring . . . it is difficult to discern channels for expressing in politics this sense of togetherness . . . There’s still ‘both sides’ in it.”

Those bits were cut out, mainly because I delivered the copy late and at greater length than I’d been asked for, which is a bad habit of mine. But it may have been, too, that the particular paragraphs were selected to be struck out because, instinctively as it were, someone felt them inappropriate, negative, unhelpful. Which may also be a decent feeling, wanting to emphasise how people ached for the pain of it all to end, and to diminish the difficulties as far as was possible.

The horrors of the Shankill and Greysteel, and everything before and in between and since, did deepen the desperation with which people on “both sides” wanted peace, and I’d felt that, too, felt immersed in it, but I was aware, also, that each side was searching separately for its peace, and because of searching separately was foredoomed to failure.

One of the reasons for the intensity of the emotional expressions of togetherness has been precisely that there are no structures for expressing togetherness in any more practical way. People do not weep together as a prelude to coming together politically but because they feel that they cannot come together politically.

A young fellow I met in a pub just along the street from the Rising Sun, a Catholic, told me that he had gone to a mixed school and still counted as many Protestants as Catholics among his friends. He had been in the bar of the Rising Sun and had rushed to the lounge as soon as the shooting stopped, to find his best Catholic friend gurgling his life out on the floor, and flesh and blood splattered everywhere. He was emphatic that this wouldn’t put awkwardness between himself and his Protestant pals. On the contrary, he insisted, it had made him more sharply and clearly aware than ever that the Protestant people were not involved in or responsible for these murderous attacks on Catholics.

“That scene was a million million miles away from the thinking of the Protestants I know.”

And of course he was right. But would he be more likely to vote unionist with them as a result of the experience, or they to vote nationalist with him? Could we reasonably expect Michelle Williamson to become a nationalist on account of her bereavement, or Mena Donnelly a unionist?

When people say that good might come from the evil we are going through they mean that a settlement might be brought nearer. But all the settlements we are offered involve a re-calibration of the existing political system, the striking of a new balance between nationalism and unionism. In each scheme, the “two sides” would compete for (increasingly scarce) resources. Political debate within each community would centre on which group or party would most vigorously and effectively advance that community’s interests relative to the interests of the other.

But this is what is happening now. This is “the problem.”

There are no structural links or ideological channels connecting the shared emotion of the past month with the political system here. The political system cannot provide a means of bringing Michael and Mena together. They can only come together and share in a sense of themselves outside the political system.

This is not to say that the sense of sharing we have sometimes felt over the past few weeks could not be expressed in politics. It is only to say that it cannot be expressed through the present political system: that we need politics which enable people here to identify themselves other than by reference to the community they come from. This is by no means impossible.

Every poll, survey and piece of academic research into attitudes here, as well as my own experience, tells me that a majority of Catholics and a majority of Protestants would prefer to live in mixed estates, send their children to mixed schools, have jobs in mixed workplaces – if this were possible. The people who suffer most from a transformation like this.

The deeper down you are plunged into poverty in either community the more segregated you are likely to be. If you leave your local school and can’t get a job, or can only get a “job” on one of the myriad make-work schemes which are almost invariably community-based, you can slouch your way through life here hemmed inside into your own community. Thus, the people with most reason and right to be angry at the way the system has treated them are the least likely to have clear sight of a non-sectarian way to remedy the reasons for their anger.

There’s nothing wrong with people here being angry. What’s wrong is that the anger is too often directed against one another.

We don’t need a new, more subtle and sophisticated, fairer way to manage our sectarian society. We need a great angry crusade against the causes of sectarianism. Against poverty, and the powerlessness and unfairness which goes with it, and the new measures devised almost every week now to drive working-class people even deeper into poverty.

Any such crusade is certain sooner or later – most likely instantly, as a matter of fact – to come into direct conflict with the State. We would be confronted by the law and the repressive forces of the State. It is at that point that it will become possible for us together to resolve the problem of the association of one community with loyalty to the State and of the other with hostility to the State.

Many Republicans know that it is not possible for them within the parameters of their own politics to carry their project much further forward. That’s the main reason the politics of their parade in Derry were so subdued. And many Protestants know that the game’s up for the Ulster-is-British brigade.

We need an alternative axis for political organisation. We will have class struggle or we will have sectarian war. We will stop fighting one another not when we stop fighting but when we start fighting together against the State and the disturbed and divided society from which all this insane evil bubbles up.

We will have socialism, or we will have barbarism.