THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503170760
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM MCANULTY
LENGTH: Long : 202 lines
The last time I saw Sean Savage was outside St. Paul's Church in West Belfast in 1978. The next time I heard his name, I was on St. Paul's Boulevard in Norfolk 10 years later. It came on the National Public Radio news.
``Three IRA members shot dead in Gibraltar,'' they reported.
I knew right away it was him. He fit the profile: one of the many intense young Irish nationalists I grew up with in West Belfast and left behind when I came to Norfolk 17 years ago.
``Don't look back,'' he had told me in that final conversation. It was a piece of advice commonly offered in Ireland to those making the emigration choice.
Advice I've always ignored.
Although the trips back home have become less frequent over the years, growing up in Belfast has been too vivid an experience to set aside lightly. I went back again in January, the first time in five years.
The press has reported on the dawning of a new era of peace for the British-ruled province. But, like all true Northern Irishmen, Catholic or Protestant, I am skeptical. We know that before Beirut and Bosnia, there was Belfast.
On an impulse, I decided to see for myself.
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I remember a childhood full of Cadbury's chocolate bars and fish on Fridays; endless northern summer evenings and short, dark winter days; day trips to Cave Hill with its panoramic views of Belfast Lough, and outings to the seaside at Bangor. And rain, always rain.
The Christian Brothers at St. Finian's Elementary School taught us reading, writing and arithmetic with a strong preference for rote learning. Curriculum enrichment meant learning to recite all 32 countries of Ireland in alphabetical order. I'm still a wiz at world capitals.
The highlight of the week was ``nature study,'' brought to us by BBC Radio, always listened to with arms folded and heads down on the desk. After school we played soccer in the park, handball against gable walls and street games called knock-door-run-fast and kick-the-tin.
At 11 years old, we took the national qualifying exams, the infamous ``eleven plus.'' Passing meant admission to an academically oriented ``grammar'' school for the 20 percent or so deemed able. Failure meant a vocational education until age 16 - a cruel fate in our area of 50 percent unemployment.
The word was that a thin envelope in the mail was bad news - that the thick ones contained details on how to enroll at a grammar school. I distinctly remember the morning my eleven plus results arrived. From the top of the stairs I could see clearly that the lone envelope in the hallway below was a thin one. It was the first time I ever heard my own heart beat.
The truth of the matter was that all the letters were of the same width. ``I am pleased to inform you'' were the words from the Ministry of Education that determined my future. Most of my friends' read, ``I regret to inform you that you have failed to satisfy the Inspectorate.'' Callous words to an 11 year old. I'm still not sure exactly who the Inspectorate were, but they were not happy with the efforts of eight out of every 10 children they encountered, and they didn't mind telling them so in writing.
Sean Savage read their words, and I remember they had a profound impact on him. Always shy, he became even more so, the kind of kid who hides upstairs when visitors call. ``The quiet fella,'' my mother used to call him; an unlikely ``hero'' for Ireland.
The eleven plus was the biggest thing in our lives, and it separated me irrevocably from most of my childhood friends. They went their way and I went mine.
My way was to St. Malachy's, a grammar school in north Belfast. Getting there meant walking along Dover Street, through the neighboring Shankill area and into my first awareness of the city's sectarian divide. Union Jacks and pavements painted red, white and blue boasted the Shankill residents' loyalties. Graffitied walls bluntly proclaimed, ``No Pope Here!''
The late '60s brought ``the Troubles'' - street riots and burning buses; the British Army and rubber bullets; and nights lying awake in the dark, listening to the distant sounds of automatic gunfire. I remember that my journey to school doubled in length at that time - the direct route through Shankill was no longer a good idea.
Then off to Queen's University in the leafy south end of the city, with summers spent working in America. The urge to be out of there, followed by the immigrant's yearning to return. Such homesickness was easily dispelled by quick visits to a world of car bombs and sectarian assassination; Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants.
While I was at university, Sean Savage collected unemployment, taking his place with all the others on the ``dole queue.'' Somewhere during those years, he got involved with the IRA.
I encountered Sean's mother in the street on my last visit back in 1989. I could tell she wanted me to say something, so I did. ``Sorry for your trouble,'' I think it was. What do you say to someone whose son goes off to Gibraltar to blow up a British Army marching band and doesn't come back? ``I never knew,'' she told me. ``He was so quiet.''
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On this visit, the transformation of the downtown area is immediately apparent to me. The steel security gates that ringed the entire city center to thwart car bombers have been dismantled. Royal Avenue and Donegall Place are thronged with shoppers. It is difficult to move around in crowded upscale stores. The whole central area has an air of prosperity, changed from a place of aging department stores and bombed-out shops to one of crystal malls.
My skepticism wanes. I'm impressed, but still not convinced, because I know that this city center of British department stores and American fast-food outlets is only one face of Belfast, and it is not the face that had made world news for the last 25 years. That place is West Belfast.
To visit Northern Ireland without visiting West Belfast would be to avoid the issue. The section has always been the city's Irish working-class area, dating from the 18th century, when the flax and linen mills were established. The major route into the heart of the area is along the Falls Road, which still carries a constant stream of crowded black taxis into the neighborhoods where Citybus once refused to go.
Gaelic signs and tricolor flags of the Irish Republic emphasize that this area does not consider itself part of a British province. I board a taxi in Castle Street, and the driver immediately picks up on my half-Irish, half-American accent. ``Welcome back to the reservation,'' says he, setting off.
The trip is indeed to a separate place, a place Sean Savage would know well.
I soon see the concrete and steel ``peace lines'' along Dover and several other streets. Twenty-five years later, they continue to separate West Belfast nationalists from the enclave of pro-British ``loyalists'' living in the Shankill area. The taxi continues past Catholic schools, the unemployment office, St. Paul's Church and a multitude of tiny, drab shops.
The only visual relief is in the frequent and colorful wall murals: ``Our day will come!'' reads one, accompanied by a heroic figure looking skyward. ``He's not your son, but what if he was?'' asks another depicting an imprisoned hunger-striker. And still there, after all these years, emblazoned on the cemetery wall: ``Is there a Life before Death?''
There is still an air of lawlessness in West Belfast, which is not surprising, since the police are largely unwelcome. Indeed, the Royal Ulster Constabulary's station looms like some gothic fortress from the set of a Batman movie, sandbagged against sniper fire. High steel fences have been erected to deflect mortars. It would take an assertive individual to approach that building to report a stolen bicycle.
The taxi stops at Falls Park, and I get out to watch a Gaelic football match in progress. On the sidelines, a man shouts encouragement while drinking openly from a whiskey bottle. I am mesmerized by the sight of a teenager in the background tearing up the park's wet sod on a motorbike. What is evident is that no one else gives any indication that the boy's behavior is abnormal. My reference to the vandal on the bike draws only blank looks and an ``I suppose you're right'' response, but I sense that they are only humoring ``the Yank.''
A tinkers' camp is on some waste ground just outside the park. The tinkers, so called because of their tradition of fixing (or ``tinkering with'') machines, are the Irish gypsies, ``the travelling people,'' not Europe's Romanies. Their encampments typically resemble a trailer park situated at an auto junkyard, making them unwelcome visitors throughout Ireland. The tinkers are frequent visitors to West Belfast, however, taking advantage of the breakdown of civil authority there.
My most bizarre memory of the trip is of a ragged young boy, about 9 years old, emerging from the tinkers' camp on an equally ragged horse and asking, ``Hey mister, how many laps of this park makes three miles?'' Trying to be cool, I answer, matter-of-factly, ``About two,'' and he immediately gallops off on the first circuit, perilously close to the fans watching the Gaelic football game. Where's a camera when you need one?
Yet, despite the disorder, West Belfast is an area of great energy and spirit. The people have courage and determination, and not an ounce of self-pity. Here, too, there is hope that ``the Troubles'' are over, but while people are tired of it all, and desperate for a better future, they want ``peace and justice'' for the approximately 40 percent of the province's population who identify themselves as Irish. As an old neighbor of mine put it: ``We need a peace the dead can live with.''
Undeniably, though, people on both sides are more hopeful than I can recall. The London Times reported Jan. 1 that, according to a Gallup poll of 47 countries, the Northern Irish have emerged as the people with the most optimistic outlook for 1995. Yet those who seek a solution to the Troubles have their work cut out for them. Outside West Belfast, a myth has arisen that ``if only we had peace, this would be a great wee place to live in.'' But it never was. Before ``the Troubles,'' Northern Ireland had the worst economy in Western Europe. Its plight is camouflaged now by high numbers employed in security-related jobs. The expected ``peace dividend'' actually could be negative in economic terms, or simply limited to the absence of violence.
The province does have natural beauty, a scenic coast road, vast lakeland and wild stretches of moorland and upland. The Mountains of Mourne still sweep down to the sea, and there are still 40 shades of green in the Glens of Antrim - but Northern Ireland is no sunshine state. As the locals are fond of saying: ``You can't eat scenery.''
Driving to the airport at the end of this nine-day visit, I wonder: Will the cease-fire last? I really hope so, but it's hard to know what will happen until they talk specifics. West Belfast is still a separate place, where the people are uninterested in returning to the old, failed arrangement. At the end of the day, the challenge facing those who seek to settle the Irish Question is the same as it has always been, namely to concoct a solution assuring parity of esteem for two separate traditions. I wish them well.
Any success, unfortunately, will be too late for the thousands of innocent victims of this conflict. And too late also for Sean Savage and all the other ``heroes'' of this city.
``Don't look back.'' As always, I remember these words when it's time to leave again. The plane lifts off, turns over Belfast Lough and away from the Irish coast.
I look back. MEMO: Tom McAnulty is an administrator with Norfolk Public Schools. He
emigrated from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1978, when he was 25 years
old.
This story won first place for nonfiction in this year's Irene Leache
Literary Contest. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Tom McAnulty
Snapshots from 1962 and 1969.
by CNB