Photo credit: Rob Youngson / Focus Features
Ulster Rambles BY DAVID MacCONNELL
I WOULD LIKE TO WISH A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOUSE ALL. I DO HOPE YOU HAVE HAD A GREAT START TO 2022. FEBRUARY WILL BE LOOMING LARGELY IN OUR LIVES HERE IN W.A. NO MATTER WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS, IT MOST LIKELY WILL BE BETTER IN EVERY WAY THAN WAS THE CASE IN IRELAND (ESPECIALLY ULSTER) IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES. I have to confess here that I left the Province at that time for three years and lived in Spain. I never knew what I had missed or how fortunate I was until recently when I found a book by Kevin Myers called Watching the Door. To be honest, I thought I had read it some years earlier but either I had forgotten all of it (unlikely) or I had borrowed it and had to return it before I had read it (equally unlikely). The book is as much an unbiased account of the happenings there (mostly in Belfast and Derry) as you are going to find. The introduction to the book goes roughly like this. Watching the Door is the work of a lost young man, Kevin Myers, who drifted into a war zone, made it his home of sorts and somehow managed to stay alive while endangering himself many times. He graduated from UCD with a history degree and was lucky enough to be hired as a journalist for RTE, where he was a lowly dogsbody sent to the North where no one else (sensibly) wanted to go. Due to his carefree attitude, he was absorbed quickly into the local community and soon became privy to the secrets of Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries alike. I quote,
58 | THE IRISH SCENE
‘In his darkly funny account of life on the streets, Myers evokes with searing clarity a society on the brink of civil war.’ He found the knack of talking to loyalists, provos, paratroopers, squaddies, the RUC, the UVF and other organisations that were around at the time. He drank in the many different sectarian pubs and was more than lucky quite a few times. His father had worked in Dublin and Belfast but (wisely) left for England after the Second World War so Kevin was brought up and educated in England. Kevin was a good name to have in Belfast. It was a Catholic name yet he could get away with it in Protestant areas because of his English accent. The book’s title continues with the following: ‘Cheating DEATH in 1970s Belfast. Sex, drink, betrayal, cowardice, bravery, more drink and beyond all this, always, the violence... This book stinks of the truth.’ It is truly a remarkable account of the many atrocities that occurred at that time, but I would like to point out that most of those happenings occurred in very distinct areas of the city. Other parts were (relatively) much safer and people in those places watched the news in horror as did many people from around the world. A recent film, “BELFAST”, about life in Belfast in the late sixties was more my cup of tea, or should I say pint of Guinness. Celebrating Northern Ireland, the film was written and directed by Kenneth Branagh and it stars Caitríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan and Ciarán Hinds. Branagh describes it as his “most personal film”. It is set in the 1960s and chronicles the life of a working class Northern Irish family from the perspective of their 9-year-old son Buddy during the late sixties. Buddy’s father Pa, or as I would have called him Da, works overseas in England, while the family - Ma, elder brother Will, and paternal grandparents Granny and Pops - live in Belfast. I must confess that I have never heard of the name Buddy but I suppose it might have been chosen as it has neither a Protestant nor Catholic connection... well not to my mind! On 15 August 1969, a group of Protestants stage a riot on Buddy’s street, attacking homes to intimidate the local Catholics, who happened to live in a Protestant area and were accepted as one of the community. In response, the townspeople set up a barricade on the street to prevent their return and Pa returns home from England to check up on the family’s wellbeing. The family attends church, where the minister delivers a harsh Paisley-like speech; the rhetoric
