I stayed true to my diary, however, and recorded diligently, with just a few exceptions, my days and nights during what turned out to be the bloodiest year of Northern Ireland’s notorious Troubles. The account I unearthed after almost 40 years is not a history: it is the diary of a 16-year-old schoolgirl, woven through with her teenage hopes and fears. The savagery it evokes shocks and appals me, as does its evidence of how speedily and easily a society can violently implode.
It teaches me that the passage of time may soften the stark images and dull the strident sounds of our violent history. It can allow the ‘truth’ about our past to be distorted. My diary, though, is unsparing. With its brutal candour, it has proved more trustworthy than memory.
CHAPTER 1
‘Wish something big would hurry up and happen.’
‘Happy New Year, everybody! Happy New Year!’ As the clocks struck midnight, my parents and I joined friends in a house not far from our own in West Belfast and celebrated being alive. Two doors away from our own home was about as far as we dared to venture.
As the adults clinked glasses ‘To 1972!’, the bombers heralded the start of another year in a way with which we were becoming all too familiar. ‘Happy New Year, Belfast,’ indeed.
Sat, Jan 1 – New Year’s Day
Had arranged to go to Dublin for the day with Suzette and got the 8.00 a.m. train. Had a great day there – an atmosphere of freedom and light-heartedness, completely opposite to the atmosphere of death and fear we left behind us.
We welcomed New Year in down in McGlade’s and it came in with a bang! Eight explosions rocked the town between midnight and 12.15 ...
Aunt Jo telephoned to say she was coming tomorrow – something to brighten up the day. Washed my hair and spent the night playing Cluedo by the fire.
Only one explosion tonight – reported as a quiet night.
Sun, Jan 2
Auntie Jo, Uncle Jim and family came down from Navan and we persuaded them to stay overnight. Huge Civil Rights Association march planned today to Falls Park. (Ban on marches until February). Daddy and Uncle Jim accompanied it. When it reached the barracks, negotiated with the army – and marchers walked by on the pavement. Estimated crowd of 3,000–5,000.
Murky day and we decided to go to have a look at Long Kesh. About 9 miles outside Belfast.
Very desolate countryside – terrible atmosphere of loneliness and security surrounded the camp. We couldn’t see the actual cages – approximately 2 miles inside the main gates.
At the moment, it is 2.00 a.m. Just going to bed – very conscious of military activity up and down Fruithill Park. Puzzled by this because it is unusual in our street.
We were lucky. A row of sedate, solid houses with mature well-kept gardens lined each side of ‘our street’ as it climbed up gently from the busy Andersonstown Road, the main thoroughfare through nationalist West Belfast. On the crest of the rise, the street appeared to merge with the grassy, lower slopes of Divis Mountain, one in the chain of hills that border that part of Belfast. Although right in the heart of a nationalist area, which was seldom out of the news, Fruithill was relatively insulated from the turmoil that was steadily encroaching on the sprawling housing estates all around us.
Internment had changed all our lives and few nationalist districts escaped the violent reaction to its introduction the previous August. It was impossible for anyone going about their daily business in the west of the city to avoid the strife and unrest that had begun to consume the area: the shooting, rioting, stone-throwing, hijackings and burnings.
Although she had lived in Belfast for nearly 20 years, my mother, Maura, was a relative stranger to such a troubled environment, having been reared in the rural tranquillity of the Cooley Peninsula, across the border in the Republic. She met and fell in love with my Falls Road-born father, Jim, while they were working together in the Civil Service in industrial, post-war Belfast. They spent all their married life in Andersonstown, 50 miles and a cultural world away from her family home on the southern side of the magnificent, fjord-like Carlingford Lough.
Over the space of ten years my parents had five children: me first, followed at regular intervals by my four brothers: John, Aidan, Jim and finally Paul. The rest of my mother’s family – her parents, four sisters and one brother, Seamus – all remained in the South. The youngest, Briege, became a nun, joining the Convent of Mercy in Dundalk in the week my mother married. The other sisters left Cooley and reared families in Sligo, Dun Laoghaire and Navan. As the situation in the North deteriorated, they grew understandably more and more reluctant to visit us.
On one of those seemingly interminable days that follow Christmas, we were glad to have her second youngest sister, Jo, and family visiting from across the border in County Meath. I hadn’t seen real daylight since I woke, as a sullen, grey sky hung low and heavy over Belfast. The Christmas decorations, already losing their sheen, looked jaded and out of place but Catholic tradition dictated that we should wait until 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, before taking them down.
Our aunt, uncle and cousins’ arrival was a welcome distraction. It didn’t take long though for a dozen adults and children to make our four-bedroomed house feel suffocating. The living room and steamed-up kitchen became uncomfortably warm and crowded.
Even at the best of times, there was little to do in Belfast on a cold, bleak Presbyterian Sunday but there was even less diversion available when that Sunday happened to be the day after New Year’s Day. My father, with his mounting concern about the developing political situation, decided that driving out to see the controversial new internment camp, in a disused RAF base near Lisburn, was as interesting a way as any to while away a couple of hours.
As we drove along the M1 motorway in our dark blue Ford Cortina, he slowed the car and pointed out the camp in the distance. Rows of blue-white lights loomed eerily through the mist and drizzle, across acres of flat, forbidding terrain. Huge spotlights burned brightly over the fifteen-foot-high perimeter fences which enclosed the wire cages and Nissen huts where hundreds of men had spent Christmas, interned without trial.
In the weeks before Christmas, I had invariably found myself drawn to detainees’ accounts of torture and ill-treatment which were being published regularly in The Irish News. But even those compelling descriptions of how the men were ‘confined to flooded cages ... with less room than caged animals in the zoo’, failed to prepare me for the bleakness of the scene on that first Sunday in January.
Jim and Paul were only 10 and 7 years old but even they knew all about Long Kesh. As soon as they made out the outline of the prison in the grey, cheerless distance, they started to sing:
Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons,
But every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
The ballad was already a huge, local hit despite being banned on official radio stations. It blared out day and night on pirate radio, in taxis, pubs and clubs, and at every get-together across West Belfast. With its emotive images of night-time raids, marauding soldiers, crying children and assaults on all things Irish, the song became an anthem and a rallying cry for a generation of young nationalists.
Mon, Jan 3
There was a mini riot around the roundabout at the bottom of the park – only thing of any interest. I felt depressed all day, the atmosphere of tension and fear of what’s going to happen got the better of me. Decided I wouldn’t go to university in Northern Ireland.