IN CONVERSATION WITH RICHIE FITZGERALD SURFING AND THE TROUBLES

Before Richie Fitzgerald and Gabe Davies put the wave on the map, the quaint village of Mullaghmore in Co. Sligo was world-famous for something else.

On a sunny August morning in 1979, Lord Mountbatten, second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, boarded his fishing boat in the village’s small harbour and headed off for the day. Fifteen minutes later, a remote-controlled bomb exploded on board, killing Mountbatten and three of his passengers, including an Irish teenager named Paul Maxwell. The Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack.

The fallout from the incident marked one of the most high-profile episodes in the long and bloody chapter of British and Irish history known as ‘the Troubles.’

The conflict was fought between ‘unionists’ or ‘loyalists’ – who mostly identified as Protestant, and wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and ‘nationalists’ or ‘republicans’ – who mostly identified as Catholic and wanted to expel the British to create a united, independent Ireland.

Beyond deep-seated cultural differences, entrenched by centuries of battles, and their competing visions for the future of the island, there were more immediate, tangible reasons for the conflict. By the mid-1960s, Catholics in the North faced substantial discrimination at the hands of the Protestant-led devolved administration, with restricted access to housing and employment.

The Troubles erupted after a series of campaigns by civil rights protesters to end this discrimination were met with violence by loyalists. Over the following years, paramilitary activity intensified on the streets and in 1969, British troops were sent in to calm tensions and restore peace. However, their perceived allegiance with unionist factions quickly led the conflict to intensify.

Over the next three decades, thousands of lives were lost, including many civilians in a constant campaign of streetlevel warfare. The IRA planted bombs across Northern Ireland and later in mainland Britain. Loyalist paramilitary groups retaliated with violent attacks, while the British Army rounded up suspects, imprisoned them without trial and gunned down protesters in the street.

By the time the signing of the Good Friday Agreement finally brought a measure of peace in 1998, the majority of people in Northern Ireland, Britain and the Republic deemed the conflict to have been a brutal and senseless endeavour.

Surfing’s development in Ireland tracks closely to the timeline of the Troubles, with the first local communities beginning to emerge in the mid-60s. Initially, they were focused in the northwest of the island, with Portrush in the North and Bundoran just over the border in the Republic serving as the epicentres.

Although far from the cities, these coastal towns were by no means detached from the conflict. In 1972, Time Magazine called Bundoran a ‘favourite frontier sanctuary of gunmen’, while British government documents identified an ‘active service unit’ in the town. Conversely, Portrush was known for fierce unionism, characterised by exuberant loyalist parades.

The small amount of writing that exists on the subject of surfing and the Troubles claims sectarianism never factored into the development of the sport or the culture. Easkey Briton – noted surfer, scholar and child of Ireland’s first surfing family – for example, writes that:

‘During the height of the conflict, surfing had an ability to transcend Nationalism and identity politics and bring together a mix of surfers from ‘North’ and ‘South’, from Protestant and Catholic communities for surfing trips, events and competitions.’

I wondered how surfing managed to unite such seemingly disparate groups, existing in such close proximity to the conflict. Seeking answers led me to Richie Fitzgerald, one of the country’s most preeminent wave riders and a passionate keeper of Irish surfing history. After growing up in Bundoran in the ‘70s and ‘80s, his family opened up the first shop in the region, which quickly became a hub for visitors and locals alike.

In the early 2000s, he pioneered tow surfing at Mullaghmore alongside Gabe Davies, subsequently bringing the wave to the world’s attention and laying the foundations for the surf culture that continues to flourish there to this day.

Five years ago, he relocated to Victoria, Australia, which is where I found him, early one August morning, as we connected via Zoom for an in-depth conversation about his experience of surfing during the Troubles.

Let’s start with your childhood Richie. What was that like?

I was born in ‘74 and grew up in the middle of Bundoran – it’s kind of like a mini-Newquay by comparison, but with waves of consequence. Our family was just one of those outdoor families. I know it’s very trendy now and everyone’s very outdoors, but we were the exception back then. I have vivid memories, even in the late ‘70s, of being out on the beach in hail, rain, sleet, snow – just swimming, spearfishing and picking crabs out of rock pools.

As I got older, the beach was my meeting point, to see the boys, go for a cycle, meet girls, so I just naturally got into surfing at a young age. Rossnowlagh, just up the coast, was one of the original focal points of Irish surfing. There was a small hardcore community there, but until the early ‘80s in Bundoran, there weren’t many locals taking to the waves.

Tell me a bit more about the history of Bundoran as a place. Bundoran, like anywhere in Britain and Ireland, has millennia of human history. In 1771 The Earl of Enniskillen built his summer residence there, giving birth to the modern town. With that, years later, came the railway line which vastly increased its popularity. So Bundoran was originally a town for Irish ascendancy, it was a resort town, known for the health benefits of clean coastal air and seaweed baths.

Then during the Boer Wars and into WWI, there was a large British Army camp set up on the outskirts. My parents lived in Bundoran before the Troubles, and it was a very mixed town, but the Troubles polarised everything. Because we’re right on the border, it suddenly became a destination for mostly Catholic people from Northern Ireland who were just trying to escape the horribleness that was going on there and that influx is how it garnered its modern reputation as a republican town. Now, we weren’t Derry or Belfast, but by fuck we felt the reverberations of the violence that was going on there. Everything came down to us over the border. Gunmen on the run, ill-gotten republican money – anything you can imagine was taking place in Bundoran during that time.

Where did you and your family stand within the ideological divide?

I grew up as accepting as it was possible to be in those days. My mother was raised Catholic, but she had lived in the UK since her early teens. She became a naturalised American citizen after many years of working in New York. My dad was born in New Jersey, to a hard-working Irish immigrant family. Weirdly, for the 1930s, his family emigrated back.

“Boxing each other over waves in tropical paradise? Grow up! Come and try driving through a UDR checkpoint when you’re from the Republic of Ireland with a provisional licence.”

It was against the grain as millions would go to America from Ireland and almost no one would come back. My parents were very progressive for the time regarding the political and social upheavals in Ireland. They taught me to try and understand everyone’s corner. Encouraging me to read the republican side, the loyalist side, the British side, the Irish side and then make an informed decision.

And was that attitude typical among the people you grew up with?

Absolutely not, many opinions were polarised and viciously sectarian. When we went up to Portrush, you’d see guys in Rangers tops, British bulldog tattoos, Union Jacks. While at home in Bundoran it was all about the Tricolour, Bobby Sands and ‘up the IRA.’

The irony was that when you stripped the colours off these people, they were from a very similar demographic. The thing is, the Troubles were just the latest incarnation of hundreds of years of British and Irish struggle and Protestant-Catholic sectarianism. And if there ever had been any honour in it, by the time they reached their peak, it was long gone. It had descended into a vicious civil war; indiscriminate murder, money rackets, drugs, prostitution, illegal fuel, robbery. When women and children were getting blown up and soldiers were shooting innocent people in Derry, it was very hard for a decent person to see any legitimacy in either side’s cause.

You know Blounty [Dave Blount, fellow Irish big wave surfing pioneer] always said to me that he never looked at other surfers as Protestants or Catholics. He just saw them as longboarders, short boarders and bodyboarders. Now that’s a beautifully utopian view. But Blounty grew up 200 miles south in Tramore. And this isn’t to belittle Blounty’s philosophy – he’s one of my best mates – but most of what he saw of Northern

Ireland was on the RTE or BBC news. For us growing up so close to it, you felt it. I knew people involved in it, still do. People who have got a lot of marks against their names. But I also had friends with family who served in the Irish army, the British army, the RUC [Northern Ireland’s police service - the Royal Ulster Constabulary]. On the other side of the coin, I had friends at school who later became actively involved in the IRA. But through surfing, I had a lot of Protestant friends. The best man at my wedding was Adam Wilson, a Protestant fella. He was one of my best mates from Portrush, Adam’s a lovely very vibrant character. But, if it wasn’t for surfing, we would have never been friends, ever.

A lot of people seem to attribute surfing’s ability to steer clear of sectarian strife to the creation of an all-Ireland surf team, encompassing both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Can you tell me how that came about?

It was an active decision from the very outset of the Irish Surf Association, which when I first got involved, had Brian Briton and Roci Allen at the helm. Brian is from the famous Briton surfing family – he’s Easkey’s uncle. He was a businessmansurfer who rose to become Chairman of the ISA. He was a Catholic man from Rossnowlagh. Then you had Roci Allen, who was the vice-president, and he was a Protestant fella from Enniskillen.

Now it’s hard to comprehend, because nowadays there is a lot more talent from Co. Clare and a lot more southern influence in general. But, for the first few decades of surfing in Ireland it was very northwest centric. You had Portrush in the North, which was predominantly Protestant, with Strandhill, Bundoran, Rossnowlagh just over the border being predominantly Catholic. These two areas were where most of the Irish surf team came from.

Brian knew those small surf towns were the epicentres, but that they were split across two different countries, two different religions, two different jurisdictions. You know everything was indicating that these places are diametrically opposed. So Brian knew Irish Surfing had to be inclusive, secular and non-aggressive by design. It wasn’t easy, I remember there was a push for a while for Northern Ireland to branch off. It was mostly to do with finance because there was so much money being pumped in from Britain. So it would have been financially more beneficial. But Brian knew that couldn’t happen. He really was the driving factor. And as a result, we all surfed for Ireland, under the Tricolour. But you didn’t throw that in the Protestant boy’s faces, and they didn’t throw it back into yours. It’s incredible really, in the middle of the Troubles, that you had guys from loyalist backgrounds surfing under a flag, which at the time, was considered a vivid portrayal of nationalism by many.

And did you ever witness any sectarian tensions flare within the team?

Only ever once, when I was a junior. We were on a team trip to the European Surfing Championships and one of the Protestant boys took a bit of umbrage to the Tricolour. He wiped his hands on it – used it as a towel. He was being a bit of a dick, but we don’t have that American thing about the flag being sacred. One of the southern boys piped up and there was a bit of handbags at dawn, pushing and shoving. Brian Briton heard it and he came over in a whirlwind. He says, ‘Right you two, you’re on the first flight home tomorrow. This is not creeping into Irish surfing. No republicanism, no loyalism. You can have a bit of craic, but not this.’ And that’s the only time I heard or saw it in any of the Irish teams I was on over the decades. Brian Britton passed away a few years ago, but he deserves an awful lot of credit for holding Irish surfing together.

But you’d have a bit of craic? So it wasn’t like the cultural differences were this unspoken thing?

Oh no, not at all. Ahh, I have a million anecdotes. During the Troubles, I grew up in a big Georgian house in the middle of Bundoran where our surf shop is now. There was this huge room at the top of the house where you could sleep as many people as you wanted. It was like a train station. We’d have visiting English surfers in there, my sister’s boyfriends, an Aussie surf traveller, someone down on their luck, it could be anyone – my mum was very open and giving when we were growing up.

A lot of surfers would come down from the North – a real mix of Catholic and Protestant boys – and they would all stay at our house. My mother, Jesus Christ, she was a funny woman. She used to come in on a Sunday morning when we were all hungover and say ‘Right then, Catholics, get up! Get out to mass. Protestants, you can sleep on, but have breakfast ready for us all when we get back!’ And that’s as true as I sit here! There was a lot of funniness in it all.

Grant [Robinson], Adam [Wilson] and all the proddy boys would come down [from Northern Ireland] when the waves were pumping. They’d come to the surf shop because they needed a pair of booties or some wax for a dawn session. And I’d stop them at the door and I’d go, ‘say ‘I love Catholics’, and they’d say, ‘Ah fuck off will ya’ and I’d be like, ‘say ‘I love Catholics’ or you’re not getting into the surf shop.’ And they’d say ‘Fucking hell…’ you know, under their breath ‘I love Catholics’ and I’d let them in. So there was a lot of funny shit that went with it. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand, because it’s such a juxtaposition. Everything was so dire; Ireland was on a freight train to oblivion, the economy’s fucked, people being blown up left right and centre, everyone’s emigrating. It was a very dark time, very ominous, but within that, the slagging and dark humour from both sides was unbelievably funny. That’s the real essence. For the small community of surfers, it provided the perfect escapism from all the madness and killing going on up north.

When we’d go to events, both domestically or overseas there would also be the best camaraderie between members of the Irish surf team. I always remember Andy Hill at the World Championships in Lacanau in 1992. Andy was a really good surfer – head and shoulders above the crowd in Ireland. Going into the event, the favourite was the then-current Australian champion, a fella called Grant Frost. Andy drew him in his second heat and he went out and beat him and beat him well! Here’s Grant Frost, a cool Aussie at the top of his game, probably looking at his round two heat and saying to himself ‘A surfer from Ireland? This is going to be easy, he’ll probably be on an eight-foot mini-mal going over the falls.’ And then Andy paddles out and wins convincingly. We had such a laugh as a team that night.

What about outside of the Irish team? Did everyday surfers mix as freely and without conflict?

It’s hard for me to mention names here, but I remember being out surfing in town one day in the late ‘80s and I knew one of the boys in the water was in the RUC in Northern Ireland. One of the other guys in the water – who was one of the original surfers in Bundoran – was as IRA as they come. And they were just surfing the main beach together. And your kind of going, this just doesn’t make sense.

Now I would have never got any stick over having proddy mates. Because even though we didn’t come from a Republican family, we were local. But I had friends who were tied up with the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) – a monstrously antiCatholic organisation – and I used to go to East Belfast and hang out with them and no one ever said boo to a goose to me there either, because I was one of the boys. They were into surfing, and I was into surfing. And that was enough.

I remember going to a club in Bangor one night, which like many venues at the time, had the shadow of paramilitary group involvement. You’d have all these loyalist bouncers selling drugs and deciding who got in. Now, I was a boy from down south in a Protestant heartland, but because I’m with the right boys – the loyalist boys who all came down surfing – not a word was ever said to me. I mean we’d have a bit of craic, I’d say ‘You dirty fucking prods, you wouldn’t spend Christmas you miserable bastards,’ and they’d say, ‘Go home and make your Semtex bombs you bastard, with your fucking 19 brothers and sisters,’ you know, all of that. But it was just mighty slagging.

The main question this leaves me with is how was it that surfing in Ireland possessed this great unifying power? Because it’s not like it had that ability everywhere in the world. For example in Hawaii, where conflict existed between the ‘Haoles’ and the indigenous population and in the Basque country too, there are stories of surfing localism underpinned by nationalistic sentiment.

Well, with ETA (the Basque separatist organisation) there was the occasional explosion and killing. People always drew comparisons with Northern Ireland, but it was nothing really compared to what was going on at home. As for the Hawaiians, they had fucking white sand beaches, sunshine, palm trees and they were walking around in flipflops!

I’ll tell you a story. One day in the early ‘90s, I had to drive over to the east side of Belfast to pick up an old girlfriend from the George Best airport. I was driving a blue panel van with a southern Irish registration plate. At the time you just didn’t go into East Belfast if you had a southern reg, or if you were a Catholic. But I had to pick up my girlfriend. Her flight was getting in at six in the morning, so I drove up from Bundoran really early. On the way, I took a wrong turn off the main road and got lost. It was all a maze of red-bricked houses, with bollards at the end of the streets to stop people getting car bombs in, or making a quick getaway after a shooting.

I was shitting it, lost down these little streets in a southern plate panel van that probably looked as dodgy as it gets. I was thinking I’ll be lucky to get out of here without getting two bullets put in my knees and my van set on fire. And that’s the truth. That’s the way it was. It was before mobile phones and all the shops were closed, with steel shutters on the front. Eventually, I saw this guy unlocking his shop and I just pulled up next to him. I said, ‘Alright mate, I’m fucking lost, I can’t get out of here.’ He looked at me and looked at the van and heard my accent. He goes, ‘Son you need to get the fuck out of here. Get in that van, don’t stop for anyone. Now, what you need to do is drive down here, turn right, turn left, turn right...and you’re out.’ And I did, I got out. He was probably a raving loyalist, but he saw my predicament and probably saved me from a lot of shit.

A couple of years later, I was paddling out at Pipeline with Gareth Llewellyn, a Newquay boy, it was a good day at Pipe. Johnny Boy Gomes comes up, and he’s like stewing about the crowd – you can hear him sort of snorting. And at the time Johnny Boy was a big dude in the surfing world, you know I think he won the Pipe Masters that year. He goes, ‘Hey bra, where you from’ I was like ‘Oh, um, Ireland,’ and he goes, ‘Never fucking heard of it bra.’ Gareth, not wanting to be outdone, goes ‘Alright I’m from England mate,’ and Johnny goes, ‘Then why don’t you fuck off back to England man…’ He was really intimidating in the water. But honestly, if you’d got lost in East Belfast, or been pulled out of your van and searched by the RUC at a military checkpoint, Johnny Boy Gomes in his fucking flip flops and board shorts didn’t scare you one bit. Boxing each other over waves in tropical paradise? Grow up! Come and try driving through Belfast or going through a UDR checkpoint when you’re from the Republic of Ireland with a provisional licence. Then tell me you want to have a fight over a wave. Do you know what I mean?

You’re saying that the stakes were too high to let any conflict in…

Yeah, exactly. With all that violence and death, surfing offered a relief, an antidote and a safe space for surfers from the North. It also helped that surfing wasn’t tied up in history, you know. Cricket in Ireland was a Protestant sport, GAA is all Catholic up north, soccer was a Catholic working-class sport down south; so every sport had a tag and a history. But here was surfing, it didn’t have a track record as a Protestant or a Catholic sport, it wasn’t associated with the Union Jack or nationalism. And it didn’t hurt that we had world-class surf all along Ireland’s west coast. You know, if we’d had shit waves, the Northern boys wouldn’t have been coming down and those friendships would never have developed.

That’s one of the things Adam Wilson told me too, that surfing forced you guys to meet and experience the lives of people that you wouldn’t have otherwise. He said a lot of the conflict that was going on in Belfast and Derry would have been at least partially derived from the fact those people were kept apart.

Yep, kept apart by physical walls and prejudice. If you take people who don’t have a lot – don’t have purpose, money, work – and put a big wall between them, it all festers and leads to the attitude of ‘your struggles are all the fault of those Protestants on the other side.’ And then you have the Protestants saying ‘this country belongs to us, those Catholics are cockroaches.’ It just becomes a vicious generational cycle of hatred. When you have that, it’s ‘never the twain shall meet’. That was 99% of it. And surfing was the 1% that totally bucked the trend.

It tore down the wall?

Yep exactly. Surfing created an environment and an atmosphere that transcended the differences and allowed everyone to let their guard down. You knew everyone had a background –something that they may have been fiercely loyal to. Or they may have been more neutral like Adam and me. But when you watch someone paddle into a 10-foot beast and get spat out of a really deep barrel, all that rubbish was just washed away.

We knew we were surfing some of the best waves in the world and then there was the classic good Irish craic with the proddy boys in the pub afterwards. We were really different to them in many ways, but surfing was the common denominator that superseded everything. It was a different time that’s hard to reconcile in our modern Ireland. On reflection I’m glad I grew up back then, there really was nowhere else in the world with a surfing environment quite like that.