It is January 5, 1976 at the end of a work day, and sixteen men are in a red minibus on their way home from the Glenane textile factory Four of them get out at Whitecross. and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and whether Manchester United or Liverpool will make it to the top of the First Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered – brothers John Martin, Brian and Anthony Reavey, and brothers Declan and Barry O’Dowd and their uncle Joe shot dead by the Glenanne gang near Gilford. Naturally, the way none of us would have been at the time, the men aren’t alarmed by the red lamp swinging up ahead near the Kingsmills crossroads. They had expected increased security following yesterday’s murders – and this is South Armagh. This is “bandit country.”
What words work for what happens next? The men are ordered out of the van by gunmen in combat jackets who have been waiting for them in the hedges. This is not a British Army checkpoint. The workers are told to line up and put their hands on the roof of the van. They are asked to state their religion – Protestant or Catholic. There is only one Catholic among them, Richard Hughes, and when he is asked to identify himself, his Protestant workmates are terrified. In their dread, in their desire to protect him, they cover his hands with theirs.
It is this moment that is forever lodged in a tight space in that corner of my heart that never left Northern Ireland. It is this moment – this split second of humanity – that Seamus Heaney recollects in his 1995 Nobel lecture
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA
All in vain. In less than a minute, ten of the men are gunned down and left to die on the side of a road slippery with rain and blood.
Tit-for-tat.
Forty-seven years later, the sole survivor, Alan Black, seeks no revenge. A survivor – and a witness – he is often stuck in those moments when, shot 18 times, he was left for dead. Every January, he finds himself going “into countdown mode — I look at the calendar and at the clock and think to myself ‘the boys have only five days or five hours or five minutes to live’, right up to the time of the ambush.” He seeks acknowledgement and justice for the boys and their families. He seeks answers that may never come.
These men are known to me only through the tiniest details from a Belfast Telegraph article written over a decade ago “Joseph Lemmon, whose wife was standing over their tea as he died; Reginald Chapman, a Sunday school teacher who played football for Newry Town; his younger brother Walter Chapman; Kenneth Worton, whose youngest daughter had not even started school; James McWhirter, who belonged to the local Orange lodge; Robert Chambers, still a teenager and living with his parents; James McConville, who was planning to train as a missionary; John Bryans, a widower who left two children orphaned; and Robert Freeburn, who was also a father of two. The van driver, Robert Walker, came from near Glenanne.”
The answers may never come, nor justice, given what many of us expect with regard to the Legacy Bill. We know families of victims have waited decades for truth and justice. We know some have died, old and heartbroken, without answers or acknowledgement. The truth – and acknowledgement of wrongdoing – demands courageous and arduous work that can be trusted. It demands a commitment to accountability, and an assurance for everyone – everyone – that the historical record will stand the test of time. As Susan McCay once reminded us “The absence of reconciliation has never been more starkly apparent, and as usual, those most hurt in the past are hurt again.”
What also remains for us and what belongs to us, is humanity and courage on the side of a country road in South Armagh forty years ago. We would do well to hold on to it.
The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is, and that such decisions should remain between patients and their doctors. Today’s Supreme Court opinion will live in infamy as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights.
~ Hillary Clinton, June 24 2022
The headline in newspapers around the world today – including The Irish Times – is some version of this: Roe v Wade: “US supreme court strikes down abortion rights – Biden says decision to overturn 1973 ruling ‘taking the country back 150 years.”
Four years ago, the Irish national paper was focused on a different story, when President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins signed into law the Thirty-Sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, repealing what until then had been some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. It was a seismic moment for Ireland, a moment to also acknowledge how things had changed for women over the previous 50 years – at work, at home, in the bedroom, and even in the pub.
In the late 1960’s, I was a little girl concerned mostly with riding my bike and making daisy chains. I was often oblivious to The Troubles that dominated the news and even more so to the double-standards that affected the women in my life, most of whom were stay-at-home mothers. Most of them didn’t drive, a few worked outside the home, and I don’t remember ever seeing any of them go to the pub by themselves. I know now that this wasn’t because they were too busy doing other things; it was because it was considered unladylike for women to drink beer in pubs – and out of pint glasses. In fact, some pubs wouldn’t even admit a woman unless they were chaperoned by a man, and legally they could refuse to serve pints of beer. It wasn’t until the Equal Status Act of 2002 that this practice was outlawed, thanks in no small measure to women like Nell McCafferty who led a group of thirty women into a Dublin pub, where they bellied up to the bar and each of them ordered a brandy. After the drinks were set up on the bar, the group ordered a single pint of the black stuff. Upon being refused a Guinness by the bartender, the women drank their brandy and walked out – without paying.
The double-standards and the discrimination didn’t stop there. Women working in civil service had to resign from their jobs when they got married, the rationale being that they were taking a job that would otherwise go to a man. It wasn’t until 1977, when I was a teenager, that the Employment Equality Act removed the “marriage bar” for women.
Because of Ireland’s family laws, women had few rights at home.The law did not permit them to seek restraining orders against abusive husbands. Because a woman could not own a home, her husband could sell it without her consent. If she was being abused, therefore, her only option was to leave her home or return to her abusive spouse. Domestic violence in Ireland wasn’t recognized in Irish statute until theFamily Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act in 1976 with the introduction of the first civil remedy for domestic violence, enabling women to seek a a restraining order. That same law also granted Irish women the right to share ownership of he family home. And, it wasn’t until 1985, around the time I graduated from university that Irish women could legally ‘choose’ their official “place of residence.” Previously, it was wherever her husband lived. And, until 1974 with the passage of the Social Welfare Act, only fathers could collect the payment of state subsidized children’s benefits.
This notion that a married woman was considered neither legally or economically distinct from her husband was deeply embedded in Irish law. Thus social and legal inequality flourished – in the boardroom, the courtroom, the bedroom. Women couldn’t sit on juries until 1976, they couldn’t get divorced until 1997, and they couldn’t refuse sex with their husband. It wasn’t until 1990 that marital rape was deemed a crime, and they couldn’t buy contraceptives. The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalized the import, sale, and distribution of contraceptives illegal. AIDS was now a fact of life – globally – yet the sale of condoms was illegal in Ireland except under very limited stipulations. In 1985 the law was amended to permit the sale of contraceptives to anyone over 18 but only in the pharmacy. I remember finding out that Dublin’s Virgin Megastore was prosecuted for selling condoms in 1991, an illegal practice, until later that same year when the sale of contraceptives was liberalized. By that time, I was far away in America and married. I’m ashamed to say I was unaware of the decades of struggle that had secured all I was taking for granted – contraception, divorce, jury duty, property ownership, pints of Guinness in a sports bar. That struggle was happening in America too.
Fifty years ago, American women were fighting hard for many of the same rights that eventually came to their Irish counterparts. In 1968, there were no federal laws to stop employers from firing a woman if she became pregnant. Most women could not apply for a credit-card without having their husbands co-sign. signature. President Lyndon B. Johnson would eventually sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action plans for hiring women, and a year later, California adopted the country’s first “no fault” divorce law, allowing divorce by mutual consent.
In 1969, the woman who would almost five decades later become the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, Hillary Clinton, was the first student to address the graduation class of Wellesley College at commencement. This woman would subsequently warn us that the decision of the United States Supreme Court On January 22, 1973, in favor of “Jane Roe” (Norma McCorvey) – which held that women in the United States had a fundamental right to choose whether to have abortions without excessive government restriction and struck down Texas’s abortion ban as unconstitutional – would be overturned, as it was today.
It is chilling to observe the hypocrisy of the Republicans celebrating the end of Roe v Wade, those who call themselves “pro-life” while at the same time opposing the very programs that nurture life – food stamps, funding for child-care, maternity leave for both women and men to name a few. The truth is they don’t care about life, do they? They care – maybe – about potential life, but not the life being lived by real live people no longer in the womb. It’s unrecognizable, this America, where my own daughter now has fewer rights than her grandmother in Northern Ireland.
Hypocrisy is not new of course. When I was five years old, the song at the top of the charts was Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA,” a catchy cross-over tune that made her the first female artist to land at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Hot 100 charts with the same song. Written by Tom T. Hall, it was an enormous hit, exposing the small minds of a small town that is no match for a teenage girl’s widowed mother who’s accused of scandalous behavior because she wears mini-skirts and, in response, shows up at the PTA meeting to call out – by name – every member’s hypocrisy.
Coincidentally, no other female artist would top the charts until Dolly Parton in 1981 with an equally catchy “9 to 5,” an anthem of sorts for millions of middle-class white women who entered the workforce at the same moment when many of those same women were exiting marriages they had entered in the 1950s. And, in the movie of the same name, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda sock it to their boss, showing him and the rest of us that they will no longer be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”
Watching the news unfold this morning, I’m angry. We have come too far to be controlled by “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigots.” Wondering what Hillary Clinton thinks, I turned to social media to find her being right. Again.
Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is, and that such decisions should remain between patients and their doctors. Today’s Supreme Court opinion will live in infamy as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights.
What can we do? It’s not enough to just voice our opinions on blog posts and social media updates and around the dinner table. Our opinions don’t matter unless they are expressed on the ballot. Remember that most Americans did not want to see Roe V Wade overturned – at least that’s what polling data has consistently shown over the years.
Let’s sock it to ’em at the ballot box. Click here to make sure you’re registered to vote and then do it.
“This is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”
Time after time, I have stood on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is often easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about my beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland, the wee country that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter and things that need to be said out loud; and, about magic and loss.
A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland in the dark ages before the invention of products for curly hair. Born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have an artsy daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and a compulsion to write our way out of trouble.
On one of the anniversaries of September 11th Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls, then just four years old, were safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, unaware of the reports tumbling out of New York city. We were heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and transatlantic talks of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
~ Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? Maybe. Growing up where we did, when we did, confounded by the bombs and bullets, the sheer brutality and barbarism on both sides – but – we were also resigned to it, clinging to ordinary rituals and routines, that we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. Off we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
One such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. Just starting out, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. As my mother used to say, the world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and my once cherished writing ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt – and I was writing again, the way I had done in that old diary. I kept it private at first, afraid that hitting “publish” would land me in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.
But as I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer and the women who have it all and those who don’t. Cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.
Her first homework assignment was ostensibly simple – to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I promised I would print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend came along, with a plastic envelope to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a scrap of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.
Making our way up the little hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the thunderous roar of airplanes above reminiscent of the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.
There were letters and paper flowers, tiny stuffed bears on the grass below six flagpoles and candles aglow on a bright morning. I have been cleaved in two by such objects before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson I learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
In this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; and as a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, visitors fall silent and still. Bagpipes. Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as the sky airline pilots described as “severe clear” that September morning are tied around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he had come to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.
I attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole.
I said his name. Igor.
A LETTER TO IGOR
September 15 2002
Dear Igor Zuckerman
Please excuse me if I haven’t quite got your name right. It’s been running around in my head for the past few days, haunting me almost, but I’m not quite sure if it’s Zuckerman or Ziberman. Or maybe it’s Zuckleman. I do remember though, quite clearly, that your surname began with a Z.
Apart from that I know nothing at all about you; except that you lost your life a year ago, on September 11 2001. You see yours was the very last name on the list of almost 3,000 people who died with you on that beautiful sunny morning to be read out at the memorial service on Wednesday. I didn’t hear all of the names, but of those I did catch, yours has particularly affected me; probably because it took over two and a half hours to get to you. Two and a half hours of dead people. Two and a half hours before your friends and family heard someone they probably didn’t know confirm to the world that you were gone.
I’ve been wondering how you died, Igor. I know it sounds morbid, but since I heard your name, the last name, I’ve become somewhat obsessed by your death. Were you in one of the towers, or on a plane or at the Pentagon? If you were in a tower, which one was it? What floor were you on? Why were you there? Were you a businessman, a janitor, a tourist, a fireman? Did you go there every day, or was there a special reason for your visit that morning? Did you know what was happening? Did you realize that you weren’t going to get out, or were you confident that you would? Did you manage, like hundreds of others, to make contact with your loved ones? Did your death come in a lift, on the stairwell, by your desk? Or did you jump?
Perhaps you were a passenger on one of the planes. That bothers me even more, Igor. Everyone has their own personal horror of that day – a moment, a memory, a story, a name, an image that will haunt them forever and flash before them for years to come when they think about that date. 9:11, a date which started off as a normal day and ended as one the world will never forget, embedded forever in history. My demon, the one that still visits me every time I see a jumbo jet soaring high above in a clear blue sky, is the image of the planes crashing into the towers. As a nervous flyer, the thought of the innocent people on all four of the planes involved in the attacks will distress me for the rest of my life. And, as a mother, the fact that there were children on board some of the flights has made me howl with rage.
But I’ve also been thinking about your life, Igor. What age were you? Where did you come from? Where did you live? Did you have a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a dog? Were you a father? A brother? An uncle? What were your passions? Your favorite film? Your favorite food? Was there a book you re-read time and time again? Were you a sportsman, Igor, or an artist; or both? Did you like to cook? Sing? Dance? Run? Were you smiling on your way to wherever you were going that morning, happy to be doing whatever you were doing? Did you look up at the deep blue sky and feel glad to be alive on such a beautiful autumn day?
And your family, Igor. Your family. I’ve been thinking about them too. Did they walk the streets of Manhattan for days with your photograph? Did they get to bury your body? How long did they have to wait before they knew you were never coming home? And how are they now; one shockingly short but painfully long year on?
I’ve been wondering what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
Some people here have been cross at the exposure of 9:11 and many didn’t want to be reminded about it last week when most of the world mourned the first anniversary. ‘What about our dead?’ they shouted. ‘What about us?’ But they’re so wrapped up in their own self pity that they’re missing the point: the dead of 9:11 are our dead. This wasn’t just an attack on the USA; it wasn’t only meant to harm Americans, rock the US administration, threaten the land of the free. It was a message to the world. It was meant to hurt us all. It was the most obvious and orchestrated single act of terrorism the human race has ever witnessed; because that is exactly what happened – the world witnessed it, with bewildered and disbelieving horror.
But perhaps that same world can turn it around, recycle the shock and fear and grief and anger to produce a global climate of trust, friendship, tolerance and respect. Wouldn’t it be great if, after that cataclysmic day, the world had said ‘stop’, ‘enough’, ‘no more’? If the terrorists themselves had become the terrified, frightened that their ultimate objective had failed? If people who hate had started to love and blame became forgiveness, and intolerance became compassion? Do you think that’s possible, Igor, my fantasy vision of a fairy tale future? It certainly doesn’t look like it right now. War is a frightening possibility, looming closer every day, and world peace seems further away than ever. I don’t know what our future holds, Igor, but I do know it’s different than the one that was lining up for us on the morning last September when you made your way towards your death under a bright blue sky.
I plan to visit New York for the second time next summer. On my first trip to the city, almost four years ago, my favorite place, the only ‘tourist attraction’ I went to twice, was the World Trade Centre. I had lunch in Windows on the World and it was honestly one of those rare ‘wow’ moments that stay with you forever. I vividly remember looking out at the myriad of buildings and bridges across Manhattan thinking: ‘it’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m here in New York drinking wine and having the time of my life.’ I literally felt on top of the world. There was something surreal and altogether magical about being there, and after that trip I always told friends who were visiting the city to go to Windows. It was my number one tip. When I return, I will go to Ground Zero, and pay my respects to everyone who died. And I’ll whisper your name Igor, and hope the wind will carry my blessing to you.
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes. CD burners, iPods, and iTunes Have taken the place Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon Enough, clever introverts will create Quicker point-and-click ways to declare One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor. But I miss the labor Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song At a time. It sometimes took days To play, choose, pause, Ponder, record, replay, erase, And replace. But there was no magic wand. It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape Was sculpture designed to seduce And let the hounds loose. A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave, A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,” Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye. The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” or something by Hank. But O, the last track Was the vessel that contained The most devotion and pain And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
In this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
