In the Fall of 2012, I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers.
I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it. It was “writing with light.” I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, and upon. And so it was that I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol on a Thanksgiving afternoon, eventually sitting below a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I don’t know how long I sat there, just thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying us (the way he does when he forgets to be a grumpy old man) with Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of today’s holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving had something to do with my moment of transcendence looking up at the shimmering leaves, but that would not have been true. Even after living in America for over twenty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. It amuses me still that some of my American friends are surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland. Christmas is the holiday that warms us, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I may even have found the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
Remembrance helps us to learn about our shared history, that includes people across faith and ethnic backgrounds. There’s no point in a shared history if we forget about it.
An October 2012 YouGov poll commissioned by British Future, a non-partisan Think Tank dedicated to exploring national identity, the very crux of who we are, reveals that less than half of respondents aged 16 to 24 can identify 1914 as the year World War I broke out. More than half are unaware of the contributions of other countries to the British war effort. Australia, Kenya, India, Canada . . . all sent men, money, and munitions. In fact, during World War I, over 1.3 million Indian soldiers volunteered to fight. In World War II, that number doubled, but over the past century, we appear to have lost sight of what Shiraz Maher describes as a “remarkable template of civic cooperation . . . between different races and religions, united by common purpose.” It has disappeared in history.
Today marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and brings with it an opportunity for remembrance beyond mere commemoration, an opportunity to consider the poppy, worn proudly by my grandfather who fought The Great War, as a symbol of remembrance. It would never have occurred to him that the poppy pinned to his lapel might cause offense to anyone in Ireland. Lest we forget, the Irish died in the trenches along with the British. But the poppy – like the shamrock, the pink ribbon, the wedding ring, the star-spangled banner – is a contentious and complex symbol, and the debate still roars over whether or not it should be worn in Ireland. For some, it represents British imperialism, and wearing it is akin to endorsing and glorifying British soldiers who, on a Sunday in 1972, during a Civil Rights march in the Bogside of Derry, shot into a crowd of unarmed and peaceful civilians, killing thirteen of them.
Twenty seven years ago, on the night of the Enniskillen bombing, far from home at the McNicholls Arena in Denver, U2 took to the stage with this:
“Well here we are, the Irish in America.
The Irish have been coming to America for years Going back to the Great Famine, When the Irish were on the run from starvation And a British government that couldn’t care less
Right up to today you know, There are more Irish immigrants here in America today than ever Some illegal, some legal A lot of them are just running from high unemployment.
Some run from the troubles in Northern Ireland From the hatred of the H-blocks and torture. Others from wild acts of terrorism Like we had today in a town called Enniskillen Where 11 people lie dead many more injured On a Sunday Bloody Sunday …”
https://youtu.be/4xwDK36_REA
In the middle of the song, sick of the killing, Bono had this to say. I consider it a seminal moment in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, in my own history, and it rings in my ears on this Remembrance Sunday:
And let me tell you something . . . I’ve had enough of Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home…and the glory of the revolution…and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don’t talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where’s the glory in that?
Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don’t want. Sing ‘No More!’
A decade later, he sang the song again, turning it into a prayer for Omagh, where the Real IRA loaded a non-descript car with 500 pounds of explosives, parked it in the middle of the little market town, where it exploded, killing twenty-nine people and injuring hundreds. I will never forget the Omagh bombing. It happened during my daughter’s first trip to Ireland. Not quite eight months old, she was the surprise for my mother’s 60th birthday party. I remember that night holding her tight while watching the news in my parent’s house, the accounts from witnesses who were devastated by the blood that flowed in the gutters, the pieces of people on the street: “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. People were lying on the floor with limbs missing and there was blood all over the place. People were crying for help and looking for something to kill the pain. Other people were crying out looking for relatives. You could not really be trained for what you had seen unless you were trained in Vietnam or somewhere like that” recalls one of the volunteer nuns on the scene at Tyrone County Hospital. A war-zone. A killing field.
The Omagh list of dead “reads like a microcosm of Troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60:40 Catholic:Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive.”
How could Omagh happen after Enniskillen, where twenty-seven years ago, at 10.43AM the IRA detonated a bomb without warning, killing eleven ordinary people and injuring sixty:
I don’t think there’s a family or community or a parish anywhere in Ireland that wasn’t touched by the great wars that didn’t have family members, members of the community who lost lives or who suffered in those wars. This is part of our shared history and I wanted, and the Irish government wanted to be part of sharing that remembrance.
But every newspaper story was more about the fact that Mr. Kenny did not wear a poppy, the wreath of green laurel he laid for the Irish government, incongruous among the crimson poppies.
Today, for the first time in sixty years, Ireland takes part in the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, with Irish ambassador to Britain, Dan Mulhall, placing a wreath of green among the wreaths of poppies.
Lest we forget that war is not over, security is tight in the United Kingdom on this Remembrance Day, with the threat of a terrorist attacks weighing heavily following the recent arrest of four men allegedly planning a series of attacks with today’s ceremony in Whitehall a possible target,
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive, I imagine he would have been wearing his suit, medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners at the Enniskillen Cenotaph. Granda never forgot the wars. He made sure I remembered too.
Because of Granda, I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our walks down the Moss Road. At just 25, he had been part of that “template of civic cooperation.” Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was shipped off to France, where he fought, scared yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele. For untold miles, he crept through the muck, weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times. Too, he told of the hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm, of the thirst and weariness that almost broke him.
Private James McFadden
My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged on the banks of the Moyola River, fishing, or cutting turf at The Moss. All these years later, it saddens me to picture him far away from the bluebells and foxgloves that once lined winding lanes to houses along the Broagh road. By the time I was doing O-level English, learning by heart much of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s own story of the “war and the pity of war,” fought on faraway fields, in particular, of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France, I imagine they felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the stream, followed by a horror that would haunt Granda into old age. I shudder to think of him cupping the water in his hands, bringing it up to his face, then noticing it was tinged with red. Flowing in the foreign water was also the blood of a young German soldier who had died not too far away. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details in a voice I can still hear. I can see his beautiful eyes, twinkling the same blue as mine, his checked shirt, and the tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand.
I remember how Granda liked his tea, with only a drop of milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with a little slurp. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over his signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced those checked shirts were his way of remembering what he wore, how we was, as a young immigrant in America. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. My mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to my grandmother’s funeral seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.
Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he carried barley sugar sweets deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.
As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of the young Seamus Heaney who lived just down the road and often sped by on his bicycle, red hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:
“My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf.”
And so on this Remembrance Sunday, I am remembering Heaney and my grandfather and the rhythm of so many lives changed by war.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The immigrant’s heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland.
— FORMER IRISH PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE
Continuing to pay tribute to the Irish Diaspora, President of Ireland, Mary McAleese visited Phoenix, Arizona in December 2008. Moving through the crowd gathered at the Irish Cultural Center, she greeted many of us personally, even obliging me with a photograph when I told her where I was from. “Martin” she said to her husband, “Come you here for a photo with this girl so she can send it to her mother.” The three of us, all graduates of Queen’s University of Belfast, smiled for the camera on that chilly morning in the desert southwest, proud of the narrative we shared.
Yvonne Watterson with President of Ireland, Dr. Mary McAleese, Dr. Martin McAleese ~ Phoenix, Arizona 2008
Later, addressing a a crowd of about 400, Dr. McAleese acknowledged the Irish Diaspora as well as the return to Ireland of over 100,000 émigrés in the previous five years. I don’t think any of us – including her – would have predicted that in the remaining years of her presidency, we would see so many of those young people return from Australia, America, Canada, and New Zealand, only to find themselves once again forced to leave. For us, it seems emigration is the default response to hardship. Soon, the Celtic Tiger would be licking its wounds, and the President’s aspirational vision of a “golden age of affluence,” a dream deferred with devastating impact.
Like me, Mary McAleese was the first in her family to attend college, to learn an alternative way to move through treacherous waters.
Our faith in winning by enduring most
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.
from THE CANON OF EXPECTATION, SEAMUS HEANEY
As a scholar, with the “crowbar” of an educated mind, McAleese was well equipped to respond differently to the challenges placed before her, particularly those that for decades has poisoned the minds of young people in Northern Ireland. Fitting, then, that she declared the theme of her presidency – Building Bridges. In her Inaugural address, she thanked the countless immigrants who make up the Irish Diaspora, scattered far and wide across the globe,
. . . whose letters home with dollars and pound notes, earned in grinding loneliness thousands of miles from home, bridged the gap between the Ireland they left and the Ireland which greets them today when they return as tourists or return to stay. They are a crucial part of our global Irish family. In every continent they have put their ingenuity and hard work at the service of new homelands.
Like many of them, I felt I had no choice but to leave because of possibilities diminished and promises broken in Northern Ireland over the course of my first twenty-seven years. At the same time, I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America. I was always eager to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk,” but although I have now spent almost half my life in these United States, there are still unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a viceral longing for “back home,” for the very things that sent me away in the first place, the rain, the low-hanging clouds, the lack of anonymity.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
It is only a door.
It is only a door.
The rare cloudy days in Phoenix remind me of Irish weather. Today, I find myself recalling a rainy afternoon in a classroom in Antrim Grammar School. I am sixteen years old, having a bad hair day, reading and underlining in red, bits of George Moore’s short story, “Home Sickness.” It is the tale of an Irish emigrant, James Bryden, who works in the Bowery in early twentieth century New York. He falls ill and on his doctor’s recommendation to take a sea voyage, decided to see Ireland again, an Ireland he has since romanticized. When he returns to his village, he is forced to confront again the harsh realities facing the peasants and the disillusionment with Ireland gives way to a yearning for the America he has left behind. The slum in the Bowery now transformed in his memory, he wholly rejects the prospect of spending his life in Ireland with Margaret, a woman whose memory will return to him many years later when he is old, back in the Bowery, with a wife and family:
There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself and his unchanging silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills.
Ostensibly, Bryden’s story is that of a malcontent for whom the grass is invariably greener on the other side. But I suspect a similar tension lurks in the heart of every Irish immigrant, and with age, grows a desire to hold on to home or some pleasant version of it – from a distance – bringing to mind the tension Joseph O’Connor describes in his introduction to Ireland in Exile: Irish writers abroad.
You might be coming home for Christmas, or a family celebration, or a funeral, or to see a friend. Or you might just be coming back to Ireland because you’re so lonely and freaked-out where you are that you can’t stick it any more, and you need a break, and you’d sell your Granny to be back in the pub at home by nine o’clock on a Friday night, having fun and telling stories.
And there it is, this IDA poster, illuminated at the end of the corridoor that leads from the airbridge gates to the arrivals terminal; the ghostly faces of those beautiful Young Europeans. It always seems poignant as any ancient Ulster saga to me, this pantheon of departed heroes, so hopeful and innocent, frozen in their brief moment of optimism.
And you meet your friends the night you get home, the people who stayed behind . . . about half an hour before closing time, you find yourself looking around the pub and becoming frantically uptight. You’re feeling completely out of place, you don’t know why. It’s weird. You don’t get it. But somehow, despite the ceol and the caint and the craic, something is wrong. You’re home in Ireland, but you’re not home really. London is still in your head, on New York, or Paris. But you’re in Ireland. How did this happen? It’s not that you’re unhappy exactly. But it’s just not right. You take a swig of your drink, and the music seems louder. You close your eyes and try to fight back the almost overwhelming urge to be somewhere – anywhere – else. And you realize in that moment that you really are an emigrant now. And that being an emigrant isn’t just an address. You realise that it’s actually a way of thinking about Ireland.
~ JOSEPH O’CONNOR
Perhaps that is why I write in this space that has no borders other than those I build around it. It is a blog about being homeor maybe finding home. And, there’s no place like home – its books and music, its warm fire, the sound of it settling, belonging in it . . .
It didn’t start out that way. It began with my hoping I would catch the very best words about breast cancer and save them in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid, ready to release them whenever they were needed. And then it was the place to which I turned when Ken died, when the grief balled up in my chest like a sharp stone. The fast and furious flurry of euphemisms that followed the cancer diagnosis and then Ken’s death ten months ago were replaced at first with something more closely resembling the routine of someone forced into a kind of exile. For a time, I felt as though I had been banished to a new country that required me to be bolder and braver than ever before, an immigrant once more, even a bit like Rip Van Winkle, no longer as sure of what awaits when I wander down once-familiar roads.
But who wants to spend a happy hour talking about fear and uncertainty? Nobody. I don’t. So we don’t. It’s awkward. I don’t look afraid and uncertain. (But then you aren’t there in the morning when no-one but me is looking in the mirror). So I write about it, but only when I forget that life is for the living, and it is brief.
If you have visited this blog, you know I consider it a home away from home, a safe place to fall where I can put my feet up, have a beer or a hot Powers, and listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers all day long if I feel like it. I don’t have to keep it clean. I don’t have to check the mail – I don’t even have to open the mail. If I don’t feel like company, I don’t have to answer the door. If I want to throw a party, I can invite people from all over the world. If I want to be alone with my angst the way I did a million years ago, rambling into my diary in the wee hours, I can do that too
Mind you, the best part about this virtual world might be when, every once in a while, it collides with the real one. Magically, these known strangers are in real time – Lesley Richardson sitting across the table from me in a snug at The Crown Bar and later with Fiona McLaughhin at Home in Belfast. The Blarney Crone and her sister at a restaurant in my Phoenix neighborhood, Nick McClelland and his wife and children filling my house with laughter and Northern Ireland colloquialisms over pizza and beer.
Surreal and real, it is as if we have known each other a lifetime, our worlds at once expanding and narrowing right in front of us, reminding me again of what Mary McAleese said about the Diaspora:
. . . something palpable in the Irish psyche nudges us to be and keep on being community to one another. A deep appreciation of the emigrant experience and an affinity with a sense of Irishness – however that is interpreted – are defining characteristics of the global Irish family. Our culture and heritage are powerful instruments of connection.
Why all this talk of Diaspora today? First, the blog has made it to the final round of the 2014 Blog Awards Ireland competition in the Best Blog of the Irish Diaspora category sponsored by the Irish Dairy Board. It is a lovely thing to know that there are readers for whom this corner of the blogosphere represents the Irish abroad, and I am delighted with the recognition.
But more than that, today would be Ken’s birthday. It is the first without him, and it is surreal. Since she could hold a pencil, my daughter drew pictures for her daddy. She’d scour antique shops with me trying to find the perfect gift for the man who told her to tell her mother not to get him anything.
Ken understood – perhaps better than anyone – that the cancer altered our life together; it altered me. He understood that when I retreated to this timeless space, that it was to reconnect with the girl I used to be and the country I left behind. Even though the blogging often excluded him as I spent so much time in my own head, he made coffee for me on Sunday mornings and left a glass of Old Vine Zinfandel on my desk, just to get the juices flowing. When I finished a post, I would always read it to Ken first. God love him, he sat through thousands and thousands of words about breast cancer, bad hair days, and Belfast, long rants about menopause and motherhood and having it all or not having it all, about Seamus Heaney and back home, about brown paper packages tied up with string the way my mother still does.
Sometimes he’d get misty eyed, but mostly he’d find something to laugh about and tell me to keep on keeping on. So it is the laughter I remember most, and for that Sophie and I are grateful.
This one’s for him.
xo
one of the things Sophie loved about her beloved daddy
I suppose if you live long enough, almost nine decades, all is eventually forgiven. At least that’s what the obituaries for Rev. Ian Paisley suggest. Like many of us, I was raised to observe the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” credo, to speak no ill of the dead, but in the days since Ian Paisley’s passing, I have grown increasingly vexed over the glowing online obituaries, the over-the-top eulogizing of a man, who from the year of my birth until the year I left Northern Ireland, railed against the Catholic church, spewing hate and bigotry – brilliantly – and inciting countless followers to violence.
I did not know Ian Paisley as a father and a husband. I know nothing of the way he conducted his private life. I empathize with his grieving family and friends – he was an old man and in poor health when he died. As well, I feel compelled to comment on his public life which splashed noisily onto mine and the lives of so many ordinary people living in Northern Ireland, people who wanted peace some forty years before the fragile state of it in place today, people who were denied it in large part because of Paisley’s immovability, his fire and brimstone ferocity, his rabble-rousing. Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, writes that for decades:
Ian Paisley was seen as part of an intractable and unending problem in the North of Ireland. But in the end, he made a powerful and determined contribution to resolving that problem and pointing to a new way forward based on dialogue, respect, partnership and reconciliation.
Unlike McGuinness, I am not a politician. I am a teacher who began her career in a Belfast classroom, where students revered Paisley and openly despised Catholics. Where did that hatred come from? Much of it was fueled by the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. In that classroom, I had a daily opportunity to observe what happens to a country when the hearts of its young harden, and I cannot forgive Ian Paisley for his part in that. I read recently that the best age to learn a new language is 11-13, early adolescence. Thus, it saddens me to consider the opportunities squandered by Paisley and his ilk. When he was at the height of his power, he had so many chances to to teach the language of peace and understanding, but he chose not to, and he stood by that choice for too many years of turmoil and bloodshed.
I know of course that my opinion of Ian Paisley probably doesn’t matter much. I know that in spite of being told to do the decent thing and to say nothing against a man who cannot defend himself in death, I feel a profound sense of obligation to speak publicly about the impact of his thundering, virulent attacks on Catholicism, liberalism, the Civil Rights movement, mixed marriage, and homosexuality, because he played a starring role in the destruction of dreams of peace and unity for so many of us. Along with the black and white images of The Troubles that flicker still in my memory – the banging of the bin-lids, the soldiers on street corners, the bombed out shops and the panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes, I can hear Ian Paisley roaring from our television set, his violent rhetoric scaring the little girl I once was.
There is no doubt, as the obituaries reveal, that Paisley, the “Big Man from Ballymena” (who called himself a child of God) was a masterful politician. More than most, he knew how to work a room, how to whip a crowd into a frenzy, how to frighten his followers into believing that their cultural heritage, their very way of life was at risk, and, he knew how to step back, absolved of any responsibility for what they might do. He was instrumental in bringing Northern Ireland to a standstill – “a constitutional stoppage” – through the Ulster Workers’ Strike (UWS) of 1974.
Forty years on, and on the other side of the world, I cannot write about the UWS without writing about what happened on May 24, 1974 at The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena, the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look.
The Wayside Halt will forever linger in a corner of my consciousness, refining my sense of who I am. My father told me not too long ago that on that May evening in 1974, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because dad was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined. Before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican,Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.
Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.
Ian Paisley – man of God – did not attend their funerals. Intransigent and unyielding, it would take another quarter of a century of bloodshed – a lifetime – before he would accept the Good Friday agreement and share power with his former Nationalist enemies as First Minister in the new devolved government.
Too late for the Byrne brothers and their families.
