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Combatants to Comrades: Personal Stories of a Protestant and a Catholic Involved in the Ireland/Northern Ireland Troubles Who Now Work Together for Peace |
To the Catholics/Republicans/Nationalists, it's Derry. To the Protestants/Unionists/Loyalists, the same city, Northern Ireland's second-largest, is Londonderry.
Here are voices of one Protestant and one Catholic who were deeply involved in the Troubles, and the peace process that followed.
These stories were gathered from presentations to students from the University of Massachusetts attending an extended program on the Irish peace process at Inch House Centre for Irish Studies (htp://www.inchhouse.com), in County Donegal on the Republic side of the border, but only a 20-minute drive from Derry/Londonderry, supplemented by private interviews. All quotes were gathered in May, 2012.
Italics are my comments. Non-italic is as close to the words of the speakers and interviewees as possible—SH
John Guthrie
I'm a Protestant born into a working-class family in 1960…
1969, the Troubles started. Before that was the nearest thing to peace that you had in Ireland, and I was able to freely associate with whomever I liked, except for July and August…[when Protestants] celebrate the victory of King William III over Roman Catholic James II at the Battle of Boyne, 1690. And that's where the Troubles started. It was a struggle for power, who was going to become King of England. There was an inbred fear in the Protestant people of Roman Catholics. From the early 1700s to the present day, Protestants were told they couldn't trust Catholics. Under the Penal Laws, Catholics couldn't get an education, couldn't own a horse valued at more than £5, couldn't pass land down to their heirs.
I can't say that the same hatred of Protestants existed in the Catholic community. I don't believe the Catholic Church was preaching hatred against Protestants.
The Troubles happened because of the Civil Rights movement in the US at the time. But when the Catholics felt they could get more education, etc., the government at the time saw this as a threat. There was gerrymandering. And starting in 1969, Protestants were not allowed to associate in any way with Catholics… At 9 or 10, it was difficult to understand why yesterday I could play with wee Paddy down the street, and today I can't. We're being told by our parents, our political leaders, our educators, and our church leaders, 'don't trust them, they'll knife you in the back. Give them an inch, they'll want a mile.' And if I tell you something for long enough, you'll begin to believe it. So we began to believe maybe there is something strange and different about these Catholics…
In the 1960s and 1970s, the housing was substandard. We didn't even have indoor toilets. At 2-3 o'clock on a cold November or December morning, when you have to pee, it's not pleasant running through the frost, with no light. That was the same for Protestants and Catholics. We were equally as poor. But because Protestants had smaller families, whatever income was coming in was spread a bit farther. So Protestants were seen to be better off. They were better off, because Protestants were guaranteed employment. Therefore, Protestant kids didn't need to be educated. We used to be able to leave school at 14 and go off to work. Then they started raising the age (slowly). The school door opened, the kids flowed out, and the factory and shipyard doors opened, and the kids flowed in—if they were Protestant. When the Catholic school doors opened, they took a sharp left turn and got third-level education. The Catholic Church was forward looking and saw that education would come back ten-fold. So the Catholic Church preached the need for education and supported third-level education. Where it could be afforded, that was fine. Where it couldn't, the Catholic church aided.
And it worked. Catholic kids got their education, and they were having businesses, and coming back to their home city. And there was a wealth unknown to the Protestant people. All of a sudden, the Catholic community were a lot better off than the Protestants. And a lot of Protestants even today believe the worst thing that ever happened was that Catholics got educated.
Many families were affected directly by the Troubles. They were injured, lost members of their family, lost homes and businesses. I wasn't directly involved in anything like that. But a lot of the kids I went to school with became members of the Loyalist paramilitary. There were something like 3000 killed during the Troubles. Northern Ireland has only 1.5 million people. Per capita, that would be like millions in the US.
There were 34 in my [high school graduation] year, 1976. There are seven of us left. Some did die by natural causes, some were killed in accidents, but the majority lost their lives to the Troubles. Some took their own life because they couldn't live with what they'd done. 27 out of 34. It's a very sobering thought.
Schooling in Northern Ireland was segregated from the age of four years old. That's still the case. Only when they get to third-level education do they begin to reintegrate…
I left school in 1976, with little or no qualifications—the least that I could get away with. But I didn't need it, I knew I was going to get a job. I wanted to go on to 3rd-level education, but there wasn't the funds available. And there was an attitude, why are you superior to everyone else? You'll go out and work and contribute to the family income. The shirt factories were the major employers, and I went and worked at one. But in the early 1980s, all of that disappeared. It was cheaper to have those shirts made in Kuala Lampur or Morocco or Beijing. They stopped building ships in Belfast. The engineering jobs disappeared. And all these jobs were held by young Protestants who were thrown onto the unemployment lists. And not only were they unemployed, they were unemployable because they had no education. Their right of passage came around and bit them on the ass…
And the unemployment benefit was nominal, at best. A few pounds a week. To these guys who had been earning fairly decent wages, all of a sudden they found themselves with no money in their pockets. The paramilitaries realized that the young Protestants needed a way of making money, and many of them were suckered in. Go shoot a Catholic, we'll give you £75, and we'll take care of your family if you get caught. When the government is paying you £10, £75 sounds like a lot of money…
People were being blown up or shot. But it wasn't my family they were shooting. And a lot of people were thinking like that. And we very quickly became acclimatized to violence. You'd hear the newscast about the latest bombing, and you'd say, 'shut up and get to the sport.' It was part of life.
It was in the world of work that I realized these Catholics are no different than I am, they didn't have horns and tails and their eyes weren't set in. They were equally as badly off as I was, they had no facilities either. I began to think, 'were all these people lying to me all these years?' I'm 17, 18… I was sick and tired of going out to the pubs and clubs, and constantly looking over my shoulder. I used to go into a pub and either sit facing the door, or a mirror, because I could see behind me. And when I learned to drive, I had to go out and check under my car.
It was just at that point that America was talking about peace in Northern Ireland, because the IRA had declared cease-fires. It was wonderful! It was safe to go out. I thought, why can't it be like this all the time?
So very slowly, little seeds were starting to grow. My generation was starting to think, enough's enough. You can only dig a hole so deep, and then you start to dig your way out. American and Europe were promising money if we made peace. There will billions of pounds waiting if we worked on peace and reconciliation. But one of the strands was you had to work on cross-community. Oooooh dear! We have to talk to Catholics. to Feinians. To the enemy.
You have to wear a school uniform, so just by looking, you can tell if a kid is Catholic or Protestant. And I was going home one day, and out stepped these guys in military uniforms and blaaclavas—ski masks. I'm in a Protestant uniform, going through a Protestant area to my home, so I thought they were Protestant paramilitaries. It was generally accepted that these guys could stop you at any time and question you. My parents always told me, don't give these guys any reason to hurt you. If they ask questions, answer politely. So I gave them my name. 'Where are you coming from?' 'School.' 'Where are you going to?' Home.' They asked, 'what Church? I said 'Christ Church.' They said 'No! Are you Presbyterian?' I said 'no, Church of Ireland.' And I got half a brick in the side of the head. I woke up three hours later in hospital. They weren't the brightest bulbs and thought Church of Ireland was Catholic. That was my first introduction to the Troubles.
But cuts heal. We hadn't a clue what peace and reconciliation was. But we realized Catholics were getting boatloads of money, and we were wondering how they were getting it all. So what do we do? The obvious thing is we're going to talk to them. Yeah, but they're going to laugh at us. We've been persecuting them for 800 years. But we were given contact details for a person "on the other side," and we did. We were pleasantly surprised. They invited us across and said come over, we'll talk to you and we will help you. And we thought, what a wonderful way to draw people in and shoot them.
But they were true to their word. We were able to draw some funding to employ a worker, and we got a rare Protestant with a degree. And we formed a long-lasting relationship with that grouping on the other side. But we were castigated by our own community. I had to move house four times in three months. They tried to shoot me, tried to blow me up, tried to burn me to death, attacked my children, tried to break into my house.
I moved to a mixed area because it was safer and that's how I wanted my kids to grow up. I got employed by the local council. Sanitation worker, and on the cleanup crew following terrorist incidents. The IRA killed two Ulster police, put their bodies in a booby-trapped car, and then called the British. The explosion killed four soldiers. I was on call for the cleanup. It is not nice to peel pieces of flesh off the wall of a building and place it into a plastic bag and write a number on it and hand it to some guy who takes it away to examine it. And then it hit home, I don't want any more of this, from anybody. I got involved pretty much at the start of the peace process, which grew from the ground up. It was John Hume who said, I am going to talk to Gerry Adams and bring Sinn Fein to the table. And all of a sudden, things started to move. And things were wonderful for a while.
But during the very first assembly, we had the Omagh bomb, the worst atrocity in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We don't know if they phoned in an incorrect warning or if it was misinterpreted, but the police moved people toward the bomb. 29 innocent people were killed, and two eight-month-term twins. That was carried out by the so-called real IRA.
That was the final straw and led to the peace we have today. Your then-president Bill Clinton came with the First Lady and held the hands of people in Omagh and grieved with them. But they came back a second time, not as a President and Frist Lady, but as Bill and HIllary Clinton, no cameras allowed. They cried real tears and were genuinely sympathetic. This was when the Senate was debating what he did or didn't do with Monica, and he was here being a genuine human being. People of Omagh feel he was a saint. And he urged the politicians to do something. He told the leader of the Protestants to go to a Catholic funeral and say something, and he did. And then we [could get to where we are today].
The Real IRA bobmed a fishmonger in Belfast, August 1993. to destroy the peace and generate Protestant retaliation. The Protestants did retaliate, on 31 October 1993. They chose Halloween because everyone gathers for parties. A pub in a village six miles east of Derry was having a Halloween party. They were told this was the HQ of the local IRA, and they were told this would be a "soft target." A herd of Loyalist paramilitaries went to this bar, kicked in the doors, stood in the doorway and shouted "trick or treat." And they sprayed the bar with gunfire. They reloaded and sprayed the bar again. The guns jammed on the third time, and they made their getaway. That took all of about five minutes. And after those horrendous five minutes, nine people were dead. Eight Catholics, one Protestant.
They made their escape at 10:20. Two hours later, I was arrested and charged with the nine murders. I was taken to Armagh in handcuffs to be interrogated by the REC. They said I was the Supreme Commander of the Ulster Freedom Fighters. I can't even command the respect of my dog! They said I may not have pulled the trigger but I ordered the murder. I was arrested because my car, which I had sold that morning, was used as the getaway vehicle.
As far as the police were concerned, I was guilty. They interrogated me for three days. They could give the guys in Guantanamo lessons. Their first words were 'confess now, because we're going to beat a confession from you.'
All through the Troubles, Protestants had heard [and disregarded] complaints from Catholics about police abuse. We felt if you're in jail, you must be guilty. But there is no smoke without fire. I was innocent. So innocent that I didn't want a lawyer. I didn't need one; I didn't do anything. But these guys believed I did. They threw everything under the sun at me. They denied me food. There was light deprivation. They used noise pollution. I wasn't permitted to wash, to use a toilet. They threatened to arrest my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law. They threatened to have my children put into care. By the third day, my words to the lead officer were "look, you ignorant bastard, give me a fucking piece of white paper and I'll sign the bottom, and you write whatever the fuck you like." I was prepared to sign a blank confession because at that point, spending the next 225 years in jail was preferable to more interrogation. And it was at that point that I felt those young Catholics were right. Because these guys were capable of anything. Thankfully, I did have a lawyer, who advised me not to admit to doing anything I didn't do, and not to sign anything, and he would get me out that evening. And he did keep his word. I was released without charges, but they still hold my DNA and my fingerprints on file. I lost 56 pounds in two weeks, because of the stress that caused me. I didn't sleep properly for 18 months. Every time I closed my eyes, I would hear the bolts.
My politics changed at that point. Because tomorrow, if they decide to have a united Ireland, I will work for a united Ireland. But if that doesn't work, in 50-60 years, we can go and look for another model of government.
My passport says I'm British, but I know I'm an Irishman.
AM I still a Protestant? Yes, by accident of birth. Am I still a unionist? Yes, but I believe in a different union: the union of Ireland. You can't have a state within a state. It would be like Wyoming trying to rule Massachusetts. Am I still a Loyalist? Yes, I'm loyal to those who are loyal to me. And I believe the way forward for us is if we can take the religion out of politics, the politics out of religion, and both out of education.
Jon McCourt
I've spent the last 32 years as a volunteer with the Peace and Reconciliation Group in Derry. 32 years in which I believe every day we've been involved, we've made something change. We've helped alter a situation.
1979, coming to 1980, just before the first hunger strike. We had a war still going on, people dying on a weekly basis. We had 5-6000 soldiers on the streets, over 600 policemen, for a population of around 100,000. And they could call in an extra thousand police and up to 20,000 soldiers if they felt they needed them.
My initial purpose wasn't to stop the war, but to make war not the only option…
My father was knocked down and had brain injuries. My mother was eight months pregnant with my younger sister, and she went into labor.
Somebody made a decision that temporarily we'd go into care. That temporary care lasted ten years. I was brought up in a boys' home…I didn't meet my two brothers until I was in that home seven years. We were separated. I was put in the juniors, my older brother was in the middle section, my little brother in the nursery. They took away our names. I was #10…
I came out of there when I was 14, My mother got a house in public housing, and we lived in the Craggin, the housing estate [housing project] that overlooks the city…
Because I was tall, I played basketball. By the time I came out of the school, I'd been given a scholarship to an engineering school, and I thought, I am set for life…
Class started in September. Someone put a poster about a civil rights march in Derry, October 5, 1968. Civil rights—that's Martin Luther King territory, what's that got to do with us? They were talking about jobs, housing, and votes. But I was living in a 3-bedroom house; it had nothing to do with me. I was 17 and too young to vote.
But I'm curious, and took a walk over to the demonstration, on the other side of the river. Local government didn't want a bunch of Fenians in the middle of the sacred city of Londonderry, so they banned the march. I had prearranged to meet up with a friend—a Protestant. We stood around figuring out what to do. Then I saw the big police tenders drive past with 10 or 15 police in each. They went off across the bridge. I turned to my Protestant friend and asked if he was going with me, and he said no. I didn't see him again for 35 years.
The Catholic community had had more fear of the priests than the police. We'd had no contact with them. We had no crime. There hadn't been a murder in Derry since 1923. Nobody broke into houses. They had closed two police stations for lack of use…
I was heading across the bridge and then I heard screaming, saw water cannon spray. The police were beating people back across the river—the cream of Catholic society. I followed this demonstration. It had started with about 400; there were 200 left, and they made it to Guild Hall [a major Derry civic building]. They took it inside to a dance hall in a hotel. They were talking about police brutality, and then they started talking about local government, the economy, gerrymandering, and the connections between these.
Derry had had a 70% Catholic majority since time immemorial, but from 1922 to 1972, that majority never had a majority on the City Council, because the government drew the electoral boundaries.
In the North Ward, 6000 people, the business community, predominately Unionist, were entitled to eight representatives, and they elected eight Unionists.
The South Ward was 90% Catholic, high population density. 12-13,000. They elected eight Nationalists. But the East Ward elected four more Unionists, with its 60% Unionist majority.
Our council buries the dead, sweeps the streets, supplies services, sets the tax rate. But uniquely in Northern Ireland, the local council and the mayor were responsible for the allocation of housing, and whether housing is going to be built.
There was always a property qualification in voting. So the 70% Catholic majority—how do you stop Catholics from voting? You don't build houses for Catholics.
And out the window went the engineering career and all the rest of it. I spent ten years in a boys' home because my mother couldn't get a house in Derry, as a Catholic. So I started marching, waved the placards, sang the songs. We ended up almost with a weekly riot after the protest march.
In January 1969, there was a civil frights march from Belfast to Derry. 50 or 60 at the start, maybe 120 by Derry. Six miles out of Derry is a dip in the road by a narrow, mucky river. And as they entered that small valley, the police escort magically disappeared, and Loyalists started ambushing the demonstrators with rocks and bottles.
Word got into Derry and quite a few of us were making our way out there, to Burntollet. We went on and the march got to the Guild Hall, beaten and bloodied.
January 3, 1969, the police decided they'd get their own back. They went down to the Bogside [Derry's largest Catholic neighborhood], a 100% Unionist police force, started kicking in the doors and beating anyone they found. Someone wrote on the wall, in black paint, "You are now entering Free Derry." In one night, we almost completely barricaded off an area 3/4 mile deep, 1/2 mile wide. That was a no-go area to the servants of government for the next 2-1/2 years. When the government wanted to take it back, in July, 1972, they sent 22,500 soldiers—twice the force the Americans used to conquer Falujah. With tanks and armored cars, heavy-duty machine guns. Almost two soldiers for every adult that lived in the area.
I got involved in quite a few of the riots going on in 1969. Some demonstrators were chased by police, escaped through the back door, and the police beat the family that lived there, including a three-year-old girl. The father died of his injuries. There was a lot of anger. Sammy was buried in July 1969, and the first opportunity the younger people thought we would have a chance to get our own back on the police was 11 August, when tens of thousands of "apprentice boys" came to celebrate the victory of [Protestant] King William. So that afternoon, we waited for the parade. The police turned up on time. Eventually the first stone was thrown, and then the first bottle. And then the police tried a batten charge. August 11-14, 1969 was the three-day Battle of the Bogside. They fired 3000 canisters of tear gas. There were three big blocks of apartments, 9-10 stories high. From the top, stones and petrol bombs rained down. On the third day, Wednesday, the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Unionist police] were almost beaten and they authorized use of the special constabulary. The B Specials were authorized to open fire on anything that moved in the Bogside.
When the first young soldier jumped out of the truck, no one knew that half a million soldiers' feet would be part of Britains' longest military operation, and cost 3700 lives.
And then to take the pressure off us in Derry, Belfast and other cities started rioting.
There was a sort of negotiation between the people inside the barricades and the police outside. And if there was anything that would have normally needed police, we could use the military police and not bring in the RUC.
There was talk of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus. But at 17, I felt that once I'd turned both cheeks, I had no alternative to violence. I knew the army were here to complete the job the army had started. In August 1969, I joined the IRA. And that's where I spent the next seven years. I fought, I built barricades, I spent most of my time fighting. Within six months, some of our people started dying. The conflict had an escalation over the next year, year and a half. And in response to what they saw as total breakdown, they introduced internment. Any police officer higher than an inspector who felt someone could be a threat to the security of the state—he could be held for as long as that threat existed. In 1971, in one night, they took away 400 people in 4000 house raids. They used isolation, sleep deprivation, white noise. People tied and hooded, stuck in boilers, put in stress positions—40 years later, they were using the same thing in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. There was no judge, no arrest warrant. You were just detained on the word of a police officer. No habeas corpus.
The Civil Rights Association decided to hold a big anti-internment rally in Derry January 30, 1972. This was Bloody Sunday.
There were probably 20,000 people on this march. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association didn't want a conflict with the Army, so 100-150 yards short of the army barrier, they placed their stewards to redirect the march into Free Derry. And thousands of people complied.
I'm 19, coming on 20, and I have a choice: go and listen to speeches—been listening to speeches for three years, and my view then was nothing had changed. It was more exciting to throw rocks at the army. A bunch of us broke through the stewards and ended up about 250 yards short of where the march was supposed to end. Stones were thrown, rubber bullets and tear gas starts getting fired. When they started the water cannon, I noticed they were taking the front line soldiers off the front line. They knew the ritual of this riot: someone's mother would call and they'd all go home for tea. But they were moving a different batch of soldiers in, and I knew I didn't want to be caught by these soldiers. Three minutes passed; they pulled back their barriers. The armored cars went into the Bogside and shot nine people in 18 minutes. Some of them were personal friends. The first of Peggy Deary's sons joined the IRA because the army shot his mother on Bloody Sunday, and three of her sons successively joined the IRA.
Later, walking the streets of Derry, McCourt gets even more personal. For his eyewitness tour of Bloody Sunday and the Museum of Free Derry, see related story at https://frugalfun.com/bloody-sunday.shtml
That day, they brought their war to us. And we would bring our war to them. And for the next 4-5 years, that's what happened.
I spent three years sleeping in cars and ditches and sofas and not one night in bed. I got Farmer's Lung and couldn't go to hospital because the police and army were looking for me.
In 1978 I came back, intending to reengage in this conflict. But I looked at what we'd done, ten years after we started, we were in a worse place than we'd been. 20,000 army, 23,000 police on the streets, Loyalists looking for Catholics, Catholics looking for Loyalists, businesses in the old city blown up, and Derry had probably lost 300 people.
By 1974, five of my 1964 classmates were dead, and I watched three of them die. There was no investment in Derry. The shirt industry had started to collapse. By 1980, there wouldn't be a shirt industry in Derry. Our young people were without futures and without hope.
I looked and thought if we had been responsible for creating this, surely we had a responsibility for fixing it.
In 1978, I started talking with other people who had fought. We eventually looked at a small community project started by Catholic priests… And we worked with a Protestant pastor who was burned out of his house for walking across the street to wish the Catholic priest a happy Christmas.
And I realized that my community was not the only one suffering. We started taking practical steps to reengage people.
1969-76. Thousands of Protestants had left their side of the river. They had lived next door to us, worked in the same factories. And that gave us some inroad to engage with them. Eventually, questions started to be asked about what this big Fenian was doing in a Protestant area. I told them I was trying to change the condition on the ground to allow them to rebuild their lives and their community. One guy I worked with, Cecil McKnight. We were sitting in his living room, and someone walked up to his window and killed him. This was not a risk-free thing. I hadn't got a major problem with the IRA. I was clear with them that this was not about compromising their war effort, their weapons, their manpower, but about trying to create some kind of hope for our young people. So for over 30 years, that is what I did.
I've had my car burned, my house bombed, my kids beaten. Peace back then was a dirty word.
And I was pulled into the back of a car and a guy held a Colt 45 to my head. So I had a conversation with him.
Back in 1988, having had the army come kicking down my door for almost seven years in the early '70s, we decided to go kick down theirs. We were trying to divert our young people into youth projects and clubs, rather than be on the street with stones and bottles and risk being shot or run down by an armored car. We needed to talk to all the parties to the conflict, and that meant the army. After a week of going to see them, sitting at a table with the Commander of Land Forces, the equivalent of Colin Powell, who sat there and asked us how they would contribute and how we would achieve. We met every soldier who came into the city, and told them what the city was like, where the threat was. And that their behavior dictated the level of threat that would come at them. It was was very uncomfortable, and for the people training them in England, extremely uncomfortable. But it was the truth.
At that point, we had definitely started what would become the peace process.
I still remember the first time I went to the army base, and wanting to skulk down in the van so nobody would see me. But that's how change was made…
Put me back in the same place in August 1969, and I would not do one thing different. But I'd try not to lose so many friends…
I lobbied for prisoner release as part of the Good Friday Agreement, but I realized there are grieving family members who have to walk past the murderers of their loved ones. We don't get to pick. Sometimes there are very hard pills to swallow.
John and Jon shared their stories with students from the University of Massachusetts attending an extended program on the Irish peace process at Inch House Irish Studies Centre, in County Donegal on the Republic side of the border, but only a 20-minute drive from Derry/Londonderry. All quotes were gathered in May, 2012.
If you want to go deeper, visit https://shelhorowitz.com/irelands-troubles-and-the-peace-process-extended-article/2014/07/ for a much longer version. Five additional perspectives include John Hume, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in bringing the sides together…Catholic and Protestant muralists, a generation apart, who put their differences aside to paint public art together…two other activists working for justice and closure…and Tony Johnston, who runs the Inch House Centre.
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