Mary Holland + David McKittrick are two of Northern Ireland's better
journalists. These articles are taken from todays Irish Times and
the Independent.
Anarchy fills a
political vacuum
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By Mary Holland
"Nobody can understand what is going on here. You and I can't
understand it and the watching world looks on with disbelief."
This utterly baffled comment was made earlier this week by Jane
Kennedy, junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office. Of all the
thousands of words written and spoken about the standoff at the Holy
Cross primary school in Ardoyne, these are some of the most
depressing.
Ms Kennedy is responsible for security in Northern Ireland and, in
the absence of the Secretary of State, appears to be the public face
of the British government there. As an ugly situation threatens to
spiral out of control, it is time for someone to explain to Ms
Kennedy what is happening in north Belfast.
One of the first rules from the child's guide to Northern politics,
dating from many years before the Belfast Agreement, is this: when
the political process falters, violence moves in to fill the
resulting vacuum. Things fall apart, etc.
The political process has been seen to stumble over and over again in
recent months. The resignation of David Trimble as First Minister;
the wrangling over paramilitary weapons and the IRA's "on again, off
again" relationship with the De Chastelain commission; the failure of
the UUP and Sinn Féin to endorse the new proposals for policing - all
these factors have contributed to fears that the Good Friday
agreement is going nowhere and that peace itself is at risk.
Some people would pose the question, "What peace?" They point to the
ugly pattern of attacks on Catholic homes and businesses across the
North, the flaunting displays of loyalist paramilitary strength on
the Shankill Road. How would the two governments have reacted, they
wonder, if the bomb planted at the Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle
had exploded and resulted in carnage on a par with Omagh?
At the same time, the intimidation and punishment beatings doled out
in the name of neighbourhood justice continue unabated. This is what
happens when politicians back away from their responsibility to keep
dialogue and negotiation alive, even in the most bleak circumstances.
In recent weeks only the SDLP, with its brave decision to support the
new arrangements for policing, has shown the kind of leadership
necessary to move the situation forward.
David Trimble has given a grave warning that the violence at the Holy
Cross primary school could spread. At the same time, the UUP leader's
response to the growing crisis is to hold talks with the Rev Ian
Paisley to agree a strategy on policing.
Under pressure from his own anti-agreement refuseniks, he continues
to balk at the one step which could provide a new basis for policing.
The republican movement, both wings, has problems of its own. The
continuing violence against Catholics has made it much more difficult
for the IRA to make any move on weapons. To do so would undermine its
claim to be the sole defender of the nationalist community.
It's to the considerable credit of the republican leadership that it
has managed to hold the line in areas like Ardoyne, when the IRA must
have been under enormous pressure to retaliate in kind against
loyalist attacks. The loyalist strategy has clearly been designed to
tempt the IRA back to war, but that fact can't have made it any
easier to restrain the activists at grass-roots level as yet another
Catholic family has been forced out of its home.
That said, it is still depressing to listen to Martin McGuinness
present such a partisan view of what has been happening in the
Ardoyne. He is, of course, quite right to give comfort to the parents
and children at the heart of the dispute. But as Minister of
Education he might have served the cause of peaceful progress better
if he had used his considerable clout to persuade them to follow the
advice of the school's board of governors and use the less
controversial back entrance.
I understand very well the objections that would have been made by
some parents - no sneaking in by the back door, etc - but such a step
could have helped to defuse the situation and avoid further
unnecessary trauma for the children. In this context a word of praise
for the police would not have gone amiss, though that is probably too
much to hope for at present.
The awful clashes outside the Holy Cross school reflect a much wider
problem. David Ervine has described them as "a cry for help from the
loyalist community". There is no doubt that Protestants living in
areas like north Belfast feel under siege, but the lack of leadership
from their own politicians is one of the factors that makes them turn
to sectarian confrontation. The pity is that such tactics, not for
the first time, have led to a PR disaster which will exacerbate their
sense of isolation.
By far the most pressing need in Northern Ireland now is for a return
to real and visible politics. The events in Ardoyne have underlined,
yet again, that the only alternative to dialgoue and negotiation is
anarchy. Politicians in Northern Ireland have to be told, by both
governments, that it is time to get back to work. Let us hope it will
not take another Omagh to spur Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair into
reasserting their commitment to the Good Friday agreement.
Heart of Darkness
Even seasoned observers have been shocked by the latest outbursts of
sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland - not just because of their
ferocity, but because the territorial issues at stake seem so petty.
Yet there is an obscure logic to north Belfast's savage turf wars.
David McKittrick offers a macabre guided tour
06 September 2001
The heroic struggle to stop small girls attending school
The girls of Holy Cross primary school in the Ardoyne area of North
Belfast are not the first four- and five-year-olds to have been
thrust into the front line of Northern Ireland's long-simmering
conflict.
Of all the places that have been scarred by the Troubles, North
Belfast is the most violent, with well over 500 deaths to date. Many
a child has been splashed with blood from their dying father after
gunmen burst into their house and opened fire. Others have been on
the streets while the army and IRA fought gun battles. Some were
caught in crossfire; others have lost fathers or brothers. Even here,
however, the violence is particularly concentrated in a few areas,
notably Ardoyne.
Ardoyne
When children are out playing in the evenings, on their bicycles and
their pink roller skates, parts of Catholic Ardoyne can look
reasonably normal. But then the glimpse of a 20ft-high metal peace
line serves as a reminder that on the other side of it is a hostile
Protestant presence.
Even more striking is the sight, on the wall of an Ardoyne Sinn Fein
office, of a long list of IRA members and civilians killed in the
immediate vicinity. The wall does not, naturally enough, list those
who have been victims of the IRA, but it gives a sense of how many
members this community feels it has lost.
There are more than 120 names on the list, ranging from IRA members
to old ladies killed by stray bullets during gun battles. This is a
compact area: if a cross were set out at the scene of every death,
the place would look like a war cemetery. In the worst of times, in
the 1970s, a three-way war was fought out on these streets, involving
the army, the IRA and the loyalists. People here typically know
dozens of men who were killed, scores who went to jail. This is tough
paramilitary territory. There is no pressure for decommissioning
here: on the contrary, most local Catholics and Protestants want the
IRA and the loyalist terrorists to hold on to their guns.
The Catholic parents and the protesting Protestants who are involved
in the present dispute have all lived through three decades of
conflict. They all grew up with troops on the streets, with violent
deaths, with social deprivation, high unemployment and general
alienation. They, too, were children who were exposed to repulsive
violence. Some have coped with this extraordinarily well, but others
have built up reservoirs of searing hatred. In the Ardoyne
confrontation this is particularly evident on the Protestant side,
where such inarticulate rage has given rise to behaviour that has
shocked the world.
Beneath the bigotry lies an intense loyalist feeling of loss and
defeat. One part of Ardoyne Road is bedecked with republican flags,
while the other is smothered in red, white and blue and loyalist
paramilitary emblems. Protestants can remember when there was far
more red, white and blue and much less green, white and yellow.
Catholic Ardoyne then was a nervous ghetto, surrounded by a sea of
orange; today it is expanding, brash, assertive and demanding its
rights.
This helps to explain why many Catholic parents now insist that their
daughters should go to their school by the front door, and not by the
longer route that takes them to a more discreet, and indeed safer,
side entrance. That route, they insist, means going back to accepting
second-class citizenship.
Today, it is the loyalists who see themselves as an embattled
minority, endangered by the growing Ardoyne. Many Protestants have
moved away, so that those remaining describe themselves as 1,000
Protestants facing 7,000 Ardoyne Catholics. The appalling behaviour
of the protesters stems not just from bigotry, but from fear. The
Catholics are taking over, they say; they are "getting in
everywhere," they are forcing Protestants out. It is this sense that
explains much of the violence in this and other parts of north
Belfast over the summer.
Crumlin Road
Yet although this is the key to this year's outbreaks, it is only one
part of a mosaic of reasons for violence in the area. A drive of a
few hundred yards takes an observer down the Crumlin Road to another
flank of Ardoyne, and to the exact point where the Troubles first
flared in 1969.
An official report into that outbreak of violence concluded: "The
classic communal pattern emerges starkly – the two communities
exhibiting the same fears, the same distrust of lawful authority.
Catholics and Protestants were haunted by the same ghosts."
At that spot things became so bad, with assassins darting across the
Crumlin Road to kill with comparative ease, that the two sides and
the authorities opted for complete segregation. At first this was
achieved by walls of rusting corrugated iron. But in time these were
replaced by what might be called "designer" peace lines, little mini-
gardens constructed of tasteful brick, draped with creepers and
climbing plants to camouflage their real, grim purpose.
Shankill
The Shankill district, to the south, is a real mess. The grimy
remains of July bonfires are still scattered around, and many cramped
Victorian houses still survive in the side-streets. It is a
demoralised district, much reduced in size, much of the fierce, old
pride gone.
The fact that some loyalist paramilitary warlords have taken to large-
scale drug-dealing has sapped communal morale even further. Vicious
feuding between rival groups has resulted in more than a dozen deaths
in recent years. These lethal turf wars have subsided for the moment,
but they led to local convulsions as people associated with the two
main groups, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer
Force, were forced to move home. The Shankill streets are festooned
with loyalist flags, but today their function has changed: now their
primary purpose is to proclaim which streets are to be regarded as
the property of the UDA, and as a tacit warning to the UVF to keep
out.
Further down towards the city are Crumlin Road prison and courthouse,
buildings whose descent into disuse might paradoxically be seen as a
sign of progress. The prison and the court, where hundreds of Ardoyne
republicans and Shankill loyalists were locked up and convicted, are
now closed and crumbling. Some of the yellow weeds sprouting through
their railings and gates are now seven-feet high, testament to the
fact that, for all its failings, the peace process has had its
successes. Things may still be bad on the streets, but murders and
murder trials are no longer a daily occurrence.
Almost right next door on the Crumlin Road is the Mater Hospital,
where thousands of Troubles casualties were brought. In 1976, a
killing took place within the hospital itself, when loyalists shot
dead Maire Drumm of Sinn Fein in one of the wards.
Antrim Road
A further 100 yards down the road, a left turn brings another
reminder of how much worse things used to be, for the nickname of
this stretch of the Antrim Road was Murder Mile. The New Lodge Road,
on the right, was the most dangerous street of them all, with at
least 25 people dying there (mostly in the 1970s).
They included Gunner Robert Curtis, the first serving soldier to die,
who was struck in the heart by a bullet from a Thompson sub-machine
gun 30 years and seven months ago. Today, the soldiers have largely
disappeared. So have the Protestants who used to live there: a one-
time Protestant church, its parishioners gone, is now a furniture
showroom.
Further along the Antrim Road, the scene becomes more middle class as
Murder Mile is left behind. There are still some reminders of
violence, however: it was here that the Catholic solicitor Pat
Finucane was killed by loyalists. He was eating a Sunday meal with
his wife and his three young children when the loyalists burst in and
shot him 14 times.
This is a prosperous area, with leafy avenues and fine, big houses,
some with splendid views over Belfast Lough. But here, too, the story
is one of Protestant flight, for the Protestant middle classes have
almost entirely upped and left, decamping to satellite towns such as
Carrickfergus in County Antrim. There were no violent clashes, no
ugly scenes in the streets: the Protestants simply collectively
decided they did not like the way the neighbourhood was going. Their
homes are now occupied by upwardly-mobile Catholics.
Glengormley
A couple of miles further out, the Antrim Road reaches the suburb of
Glengormley. Catholic expansion has reached it, too, leading to
violence there in patterns which can be traced with depressing
precision.
It was a Protestant area, but the appearance of Catholic schools and
various other premises began to change things. In 1975 a workman
named Gerald Alphonsus De'ath was helping to build a Catholic school
in High Town Road when he picked up a vacuum flask. It was booby-
trapped and exploded, killing him instantly.
Just a month ago loyalists shot dead, close to the school, Gavin
Brett, a Protestant teenager they mistakenly believed was a Catholic.
Many Catholics live in Glengormley now, and more are moving in: the
gunmen were expressing rage at this, and trying to stop the influx.
Such murders do not work, since although they cause much human
misery, they never do succeed in reversing the religious trends. The
growth of the north Belfast Catholics, and the draining away of
Protestants, is irreversible.
Loyalists have also targeted the local Catholic church. The visitor
who follows the sign for St Bernard's travels down a pleasant,
winding lane, to find a school and a collection of outbuildings,
together with two parking spots that are still marked "priest".
But St Bernard's is not there any more: where it stood there are now
only small heaps of rubble, with a sign saying: "Dangerous building –
keep out." The church was burnt to the ground.
Shore Road
Driving along Belfast Lough back to the city centre, the visitor
passes through what is almost the last sizeable section of north
Belfast under Protestant control, the Shore Road. The journey begins
badly, with a burnt-out pub, and things do not improve.
There is a great deal of loyalist graffiti, with stretches of
kerbstones hundreds of yards long painstakingly painted red, white
and blue. The paint has been put on by heavily tattooed men and
youths, who insist on tattooing not just themselves, but their
districts as well.
These people see themselves as having their backs to the wall. Their
politicians have delivered little or nothing to them, they feel; the
peace process is just one-way traffic, benefiting only the
republicans the and nationalists.
Their sense of loss is palpable, and so, too, is their sense of
bafflement about what to do about it. Protestant-dominated Ulster is
largely gone, certainly in north Belfast, and those diehards who
refuse to move out think of themselves making a last stand, as in the
Alamo.
Their problem is that they are prepared to resort, as they have at
Holy Cross school, to methods which are almost guaranteed to repel
the rest of the world, rather than to gain its sympathy.
After 30 years of the Troubles, they have yet to learn this lesson,
and it is too late to learn it now. They are a lost people, mourning
their lost status and their lost territory, and fighting for what
looks increasingly like a lost cause.
― stevo, Thursday, 6 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)