WELL, I’m back in one piece from my travels round the north of Ireland with a stage play, despite the theatre company manager’s best efforts to terminate my existence with her erratic driving, and my own tendency to wander into areas of Belfast that would deter a regiment of Gurkhas.
I have chronicled many of my experiences on this page over the last six weeks, but there were one or two events which I felt it safer not to mention until I got back on Scottish soil.
On one occasion, I was taken to a pub frequented by topers of a nationalist persuasion. When I went to the bar to order a drink, I found myself standing next to a grizzled gentleman I remembered seeing a few nights earlier in another tavern.
When I said as much to him, he said I might well have seen him there as it was a place he used often enough. He didn’t seem too eager to continue our conversation, so I bade him farewell and returned to my friends’ table.
It wasn’t until the following day that one of those friends said: “I didn’t want to say anything to you last night, but that bloke you spoke to at the bar was Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber.”
It’s not often one finds oneself in the company of someone who tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher, but that’s Belfast for you.
A few days later, my friend told me he was back in the same pub with a mate of his. Magee was there again. When my friend’s pal recognised the former IRA man, he insisted on shaking his hand and offered to buy him a drink.
The modern-day Guy Fawkes politely refused the offer, but he did agree, rather reluctantly, to pose with his awestruck admirer for a photograph. It was a clear case of one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter.
This adulation for former paramilitaries is much more widespread across the Irish Sea than you might think. While I was over there, a young boy made the newspapers when it emerged that he was the only pupil in his primary school to pass the 11-plus exam. When a reporter asked the wee chap what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said he wanted to be an ex-prisoner.
Even at his tender age he must have noticed that men who had spent several years in Long Kesh were treated like movie stars in their own communities, with people falling over themselves to shake their hands and buy them as much drink as they could handle.
On another night, I was introduced to a man who regaled us with the tale of the night he was apprehended by the security forces while in possession of a large rifle. As the forces of law and order approached, one of the gunman’s pals shouted to him to hide the gun down his trousers. He was unable to oblige as he was clad only in a pair of boxer shorts at the time.
A few days later, I saw a picture of the same man in a Belfast newspaper next to a story that revealed he had been part of a Provisional IRA unit that had been caught in the act of abducting a member of a dissident republican paramilitary organisation that was opposed to the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland.
Compared with the 30 years of the Troubles, or what nationalists prefer to refer to as “the conflict”, Ulster is certainly more peaceful than it was, but it’s still a pretty scary place. In recent months, there have been over 40 punishment beatings and more than 60 shootings.
We gave a performance of the play in Newry just two nights after dissident republicans had exploded a massive car bomb in the town. One such dissident was sentenced a few weeks ago to 12 years in jail when he was found guilty of manufacturing bomb-making materials in a farmhouse not far from Newry.
He had been using an industrial-sized coffee grinder for his lethal work. Perhaps when he ordered the coffee grinder the security forces became suspicious. Anybody ordering an industrial-strength coffee grinder in south Armagh is much more likely to be a terrorist than someone with a serious caffeine addiction.
Everywhere you look in Belfast you are reminded of the city’s recent violent past. There is a plaque on the wall of a pub near where I was staying commemorating the deaths of seven men and boys, one as young as 15, who were killed by a bomb planted by loyalist paramilitaries at the height of the bloodshed. Fresh flowers are left underneath it every day.
It’s hard to believe that there are some people who want to plunge the province back into that cauldron of hate, but the evidence seems to point to a growing number of dissidents intent on doing just that.
On a personal level, I was deeply saddened when I took a walk over to the part of Belfast where I spent much of my early childhood. It was the street where my grandmother lived. My parents left me with her when I was about three while they went off in search of work in London.
The street was a lively and vibrant place, with a butcher shop, a greengrocer and a chip shop with the best fish suppers for miles around. My granny would give me sixpence and I would charge over to the chippy and watch fascinated as the owner sliced buckets of potatoes and dipped the fish in batter before tossing it into the molten lard. I can still smell the delicious aroma.
As I turned the corner into the street, my jaw dropped. Built across the middle of it was a massive brick wall. All the shops were bricked up, as was the school on the corner. It seems that since one half of the street was Protestant and the other was Catholic the authorities decided to keep them apart by erecting a dividing wall. To make way for the wall they had bulldozed my granny’s house out of existence. Where it stood is an ominous-looking turnstile, the only means of access to the Catholic end of the street.
I didn’t have the nerve to use it. I retraced my steps, leaving a big piece of my childhood behind me.