And So It Goes

The Taxi is on its way. In a few hours the Aer Lingus flight will be taking off from Belfast, heading for Shannon and then Chicago. This is the fourth time in less than a year I'll be saying goodbye to Northern Ireland. Only this time it's different. This time I'm determined not to come back. I like too many people here. I don't want to see them get hurt. I've written enough obituaries already.

The situation continues to grow more absurd, more brutal, more hopeless. I keep thinking of a line from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Katharine Ross had dodged around Bolivia on horseback with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, helping them stick up banks, watching people get shot down. Earlier, she had warned Newman and Redford that she would leave before the end. "I don't want to watch them kill you," she said and they understood. Once you heard Katharine Ross say she was going home, you knew that the movie was over except for the final shoot-out.

Well, that's the way I feel now as I sit here in the Europa hotel, waiting for Leslie Dunne, the hall porter, to call and tell me the cab has arrived. It's all over but the final shoot-out. I don't want to see the blood bath.

It's strange. Now that I'm leaving, it isn't the big crowd scenes I'll carry with me. I found them difficult to visualize even hours after they'd occurred. There are shouts, curses and screams. There are dull explosions of the Webley & Scott pistols that fire bone-breaking rubber bullets at 110 miles an hour; popping sounds from CS-gas-canister launchers; the dull thud of exploding nail bombs. The images blur. Of all the crowd scenes, I recall two almost trivial incidents:

A riot in the Creggan district of Londonderry that lasted seven hours. I am standing against the wall of St. Mary's Church, watching the British soldiers who are pinned down behind their plastic riot shields by a barrage of rocks hurled by a mob of hundreds. A boy, no more than 12, scurries past me, bent over to keep out of the line of vision of the soldiers, who are separated from us by a low brick wall. He carries a milk bottle with a long wick in his left hand. It is half filled with gasoline. He hurls it at the soldiers, using both hands with the sweeping motion of a hammer thrower. The fire bomb explodes in the midst of the soldiers, setting two of them afire momentarily. The crowd (continued on page 116) And So It Goes (continued from page 113) stops throwing rocks to roar its approval and to taunt the two now-terrified soldiers.

Another riot at the Unity Flats, a Catholic enclave on the edge of the Protestant Shankill Road area in Belfast. It is a Saturday afternoon and the Protestants are marching past the flats on their way home from a football match. The shouting and the rock throwing go on until dark. This happens every Saturday in Belfast and the television crews are always there, waiting for what might turn out to be the climactic riot of the season. This time, a middle-aged woman with a florid, hate-filled face stands on the street corner in the midst of the mob, shouting at the residents of the Unity Flats. She is screeching at the top of her lungs:

"Oh, we'll fuck the Fenian bastards. We'll fuck the Fenian bastards. . . ."

A major of the British grenadiers, dressed in battle jacket and plaid dress pants, walks through the crowd and stops in front of the woman. He places his walking stick right on her shoulder to assure he will get her full attention. "See here, madam," the major says, "this is all going to be very low key here today. All very low key. Do you understand?"

No crowd scenes. But I do remember the faces. So many of them. Now every time a name pops into my mind, a face comes with it, as though it were a passport photo sitting in front of me.

I still see Jim McCrea's weather-beaten face looking out at me from under his tweed cap. He is about 50 years old and his tall, spare figure is topped by a full head of gray hair that sprouts from under his cap. McCrea makes his living digging graves in the Milltown Cemetery, Belfast's burial ground for the I. R. A. He is Catholic, but he expresses no great partisanship about the troubles. He prides himself on being good at his job.

We were standing near an open grave McCrea had just finished digging for Tony Henderson, a 20-year-old I. R. A. man who had been killed a few days previously by a gun blast in the head. "What do you think of it all?" I asked.

McCrea acted as though he didn't understand the question. But he answered another that he apparently wanted me to ask. "When we cover him over," McCrea said, "his body will be about five feet down. That's pretty good, when you consider there are three I. R. A. men already down there under him.

"Twenty-one years, I've been working here. It's not so bad. There's no great supervision. I make eighteen pounds a week and the ground's good. There's places you could work where the ground's like heavy clay. Sticks to your shovel. This is almost like sand. But maybe that's because we open it up so much."

I lost sight of McCrea during the funeral. There were more than 1000 I. R. A. supporters gathered around the grave and the final words were said by a fat man in a black-leather coat named Malachy McNally. He looked and sounded amazingly like Jackie Gleason would if Gleason had a Northern Irish accent. "We do not grudge, O Lord, that the flower of our youth has been placed here in the last eighteen months," McNally intoned. "The tragedy is that a man must be prepared in this day and age to lay down his life in the cause of Irish freedom. As the great Terence Mac-Swiney said: 'It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will win.' "

There were a few seconds of silence as McCrea and three assistants moved forward and began shoveling dirt over the coffin. Then McNally concluded the service: "Farewell, comrade," he said, the tears streaming down his cheeks. "Angels guard thee."

That was the last time I saw Malachy McNally. He was one of the first people lifted by the British when internment was declared on August 9, 1971. He has been held in a cage at the Long Kesh prison outside Belfast ever since. McCrea still digs graves at Milltown. I have seen him at many funerals since that day. He always gives me a formal nod when he sees me, as if the two of us share a deep secret.

I remember asking McCrea on the day of the Henderson funeral just how long it would take to chisel Henderson's name into the I. R. A. monument above the graves. "Little more than two hours," he said. The other day, I noticed that the man who engraves the names was 25 behind.

I'll remember Jim McCann and his brother Brendan, too. The morning after the police captured Jim trying to fire-bomb Queen's University in Belfast, Brendan came to tell me about it. "We'll need about fifty pounds," he said, "for little odds and ends to take to James up in the Crumlin Road Jail and for money to hire a lawyer." He settled for ten pounds. Four hours later, he was on the phone. He was in a pub around the corner and he was in deep trouble, he said.

When I arrived, Brendan was sitting at a table. He was leaning forward, with his head cupped in his two puffy hands. "I'm such a lonely man," he said. "There's my old brother James. He's the tower of strength, and he's sittin' up in the Crumlin Road Jail. And what am I doin'? All I'm doin' for him is sittin' here nursing this awful head of mine. It's the drink, you know. It's the drink that's got me feeling this way. If only my head would stop pounding."

A dark-haired young woman came through the door of the pub, headed toward Brendan with a determined step. Attached to each of her hands was a small child, a boy on one hand and a girl on the other. "Brendan," she said coldly, "Brendan, you're little better than a criminal. What did you do with the money?"

Brendan looked up. He gave the girl a helpless look, spreading his hands in front of him. "Deirdre," he began, "as God is my judge, I didn't take any money that wasn't mine. And all I did with it, anyway, was buy fruit and newspapers to take to James and your brother Peter up in the Crumlin."

"Brendan, you're twenty-nine years old. You're a married man with four children and you haven't been home to your wife in two days. You haven't been home since you came to my house and talked my mother into giving you that ten pounds you promised you'd take up to the jail to give to the boys for fags and things they need."

"Deirdre, love, let's not go on like this about things you don't understand. I went up to the jail and I took with me all the newspapers and magazines a man could find. I took fruit and I even took three bottles of lime juice laced with vodka."

Brendan shrugged his thick shoulders and threw up his hands. "Wouldn't you know those guards would suspect something from the likes of a McCann? They wouldn't let me leave the lime juice. So what could I do but drink it myself? Deirdre, you understand these things, don't you, love?"

Deirdre sat there across from Brendan, glaring. The waitress came to the table. Brendan's face brightened. "There's a good girl," he said to the waitress. "Bring Deirdre a vodka and peppermint. I'll have another Guinness, too. I do believe my head is beginning to feel a little better."

Brendan finally went to the jail the next day and got straightened out with his brother Jim. I went along with him. Jim McCann's face appeared desperate. "They'll have to kill me to hold me in this place," he said. "I promise you now. I'm getting out."

Two months later, he did escape from the Crumlin. Someone smuggled a file to him and he was able to open the bars on the window of his cell. He made his way to the outer wall, climbed it and came face to face with a British sentry. Incredibly, the sentry thought Jim was part of (continued on page 194) And so it goes (continued from page 116) a work detail. He nodded, then walked away. Jim McCann leaped off the wall and trotted through the streets of the city to a place where he could hide until he could be taken across the border, dressed as a priest.

Bernadette Devlin and the Reverend Ian Paisley are recognized on sight. But whenever I think of either of them, I see two other faces. Neither of these two faces has ever been in the Irish Times or the Belfast Telegraph. One belongs to a great admirer of Bernadette's. It will never be in a newspaper now. He is dead. His name was Eddie McDivitt and he was 28 years old when he went down.

I had gone to Strabane, a tiny border town 14 miles south of Londonderry, to hear Bernadette speak from the steps of the town hall there. I arrived more than an hour early. Already, the narrow street fronting the old building was almost filled.

McDivitt, known by nearly everyone in Strabane as "the wee dummy," was wearing a red shirt and was back against the brick wall of a building directly across the street from where Bernadette would speak. One of the organizers of the rally pointed him out to me. "There's one of Bernie's greatest fans," the man said. "Eddie McDivitt never misses a speech Bernie gives here, even though he can't hear a thing she says. Deaf and dumb since birth, he is."

McDivitt remained against the wall, smiling and waving at people in the crowd. He seemed to know everyone. A little later, Bernadette was driven through the crowd to within a few feet of the town-hall steps.

She delivered a speech about the rights of the working class that was received with great enthusiasm by the predominantly Catholic audience. Bernadette is a good street speaker. She moves her arms and changes position continually, like a busy welterweight fighter. She has a method of delivery that makes each member of the crowd believe he or she is being addressed personally.

No one was more enthusiastic about Bernadette's speech than McDivitt. He applauded loudly whenever he saw others begin to clap and he shouted his approval in an untranslatable bawling sound.

"We have one thing in common with the people of Derry and the people of Belfast," Bernadette said, her voice full of scorn. "We are all sick and tired of being stepped on by the corrupt regime of the six counties. We have lought for our survival up in the Bogside at Derry and down on the Falls Road in Belfast. And so now we're not asking.

We're demanding that internment be ended immediately."

The crowd roared in the afternoon sunshine. Bernadette stood there glowering, looking even more angry and determined than she does in photographs. Several men formed a barricade and helped lead her back to the car parked at the foot of the steps. The crowd surged forward, each man and woman seeking to shout a greeting or obtain an autograph. McDivitt tried to push his way through the crowd, too, but couldn't make it. Bernadette's car moved off before he got close.

Within a few hours of Bernadette's leaving Strabane, the trouble started. First target for the mob was the drapery shop of Gilbert Bruce, a Protestant who had refused to shut down his shop to protest internment. His place was burned to the ground. After this, cars were turned over and set afire to form a barricade at the town's main intersection.

The British army moved in. First they fired rubber bullets, then CS-gas canisters. The crowd retreated slowly before them. Prominent in the crowd was Eddie McDivitt, the town dummy.

Eddie crouched in a doorway when a soldier fired a rubber bullet that struck the wall above him and bounded away. He ran to retrieve the bullet and ducked behind a hedge to look at it. He was pleased to have such a trophy. He waved it high above his head and then pointed it mockingly back at the soldiers, as though it were a pistol. "Drop that weapon and put up your hands," Eddie was ordered by an army officer speaking over a portable hand mike.

Eddie couldn't hear the order, of course, and the soldiers were too far away for him to read their lips. He continued to smile and wave the rubber bullet. An army marksman, using a .303 rifle with a telescopic sight, fired a shot that smashed into Eddie's forehead. He was still smiling as he fell to the ground.

Ian Paisley is a different matter. In a strange way, he and Bernadette need each other. If Paisley didn't have Bernadette and the Catholic Church to attack, where would he be? If Bernadette hadn't had Paisley and the British army as targets, she would never have been elected to Parliament.

Paisley is the more entertaining, even attacking Protestants for having what he calls "ecumenical intercourse with the scarlet whore of Rome." Outraged at a scheduled meeting between an Ulster bishop and the Pope, Paisley once flew to Rome. He was thwarted by the Vatican guards, whom he later described as "blaspheming, cursing, spitting Roman scum."

Paisley mesmerizes his followers. He is a marvelous sight at the head of an Orange march. They call him the Big-Fellow. And he certainly is that, standing 6'4" and weighing better than 250 pounds. His facial appearance is truly unusual. In profile, his vague eyes, prominent nose and protuberant lips make him look like something copied from an ancient Roman coin.

I'll never forget a visit I made to his Martyrs' Memorial to hear his Sunday-night political sermon. The church, built by Paisley's followers at a cost of $420,000. seats more than 1000. There is never an empty seat. The church looks out onto a vast stretch of grass-covered parkland on the predominantly Protestant east side of the city. The Union Jack flies from a flagpole on the front lawn.

It was the only church I'd ever attended where there was a total hush even before the service began. When Paisley finally climbed the five steps leading to the pulpit, the only sound in the whole church was the clatter of his shoes on the steps and a few scattered coughs that echoed in the huge room. "We are here," Paisley began in his booming orator's voice, "to speak about a common ground on which all men of Ulster can be united and settle their differences." Hundreds of heads nodded agreement.

"I'd like to go to Armagh and shout in the papist cardinal's ear," Paisley shouted, "to tell him he is a sinner. I'd like to go to Rome to shout it at the Pope. 'You have all sinned! You have all sinned!' Then I'd go to the Protestant bishops and shout it in their ear, too. All men are sinners and nothing but fuel for hell. The only way men can be saved is by going back to the truth of the Holy Bible. And that is how we can find common grounds for our political differences in Ulster, too." Everyone in the church continued to nod, as though convinced they had just listened to the final solution.

Now it was time for the evening collection. They call it a silent collection, because Paisley requests that only paper money be contributed. A pound note is the smallest paper-money denomination in Belfast. At exchange rates at the time, it was worth something more than $2.40. "This morning, at our eleven-thirty service." Paisley said, "we were able to collect five hundred pounds for our church building fund. I trust that you here tonight will be able to better that mark."

Paisley opened the hymnbook on the lectern in front of him. He raised his arms, indicating it was time for song. "This is a grand old hymn," Paisley said, "and I want you to all stand and sing and throw your hearts and minds into it with all your spirit." (continued on page 254) And so it Goes(countinued from page 194)

Organ music flowed over the congregation. Voices began to boom as the collection baskets were passed around:

"I love to tell the story, 'Twill be my theme in glory To tell the old, old story Of Jesus and his love."

Paisley directed his flock to sing this chorus over and over. For perhaps 15 minutes they went on this way, with Paisley urging: "When we get to the last line, sing out Jesus and sing out love. Sing it out. Talk to Christ Jesus and earn the gift of his love."

The service was over. Paisley climbed down from his lectern. The congregation drifted out into the street. Many of them boarded buses that had transported them as much as 50 miles. "Dr. Paisley is right," the woman whose face I won't forget said to her husband as they headed toward their car. "The Catholics must be stopped."

In truth, Paisley had said nothing about stopping the Catholics. He had talked about love and unity. In Northern Ireland, people hear what they want to hear.

I remember, too, a long talk I had one night with Billy Irwin, a stern-faced little man who admires Paisley a great deal but professes that he is a political and religious moderate. Billy is 57 and, like so many Protestants, considers himself more English than Irish. "Sure enough," Billy said, "we were brought up under the Jack and we love our country. I went to fight in the British army during World War Two. And where does the I. R. A. think they come off, anyway? When I was fighting the Germans, they were feeding the German submarine crews that used to put into Donegal Bay. That's part of the bitterness, too. They've always gotten along with the Germans."

Billy is typical of many who haven't taken part in the street fighting as yet but who see no way out other than civil war. "I hate it all," he said, "but I can't leave. All me money's in my home. And I'd have as good a chance of selling it and getting my money now as I would of selling a block of cells in the Crumlin Road Jail. So what do you do? I'm not a coward. When a man threatens me with a gun, I know what I've got to do. I've got to get a gun of my own."

Perhaps I met Billy at a bad time. His house is on the border line of a Catholic-Protestant neighborhood. Raiders from the Catholic side have repeatedly tried to set it afire. Perhaps that's why I remember him as the man with the angriest eyes I've ever seen.

All the other faces I take with me out of Northern Ireland are in turn sad, desperate and frightened.

I'll never forget the look that came over the face of Father Felix McGuigan when I asked him about the death--six months before--of one of his best friends, Father Hugh Mullan. Father McGuigan's eyes bulged. His expression became firm. "I'm afraid I can't say anything about that," he said. "You see, the inquest hasn't been held yet."

I had spoken with Father McGuigan just a day after it happened. He couldn't talk about it then, either. Now, six months later, it still had him tied in knots.

Father Mullan, a curate at Corpus Christi Church in the Ballymurphy estate in Belfast, had been shot to death, either by Protestant gunmen or by members of a British paratroop unit on August 9, 1971, during the fighting that broke out following internment.

Father Mullan was a tiny round man with a bald head and an infectious laugh. He had a natural rapport with children. He could play the guitar and carry a tune. Father McGuigan and John McKenna were with Father Mullan the day he died. All three were in McKenna's living room crouched on the floor, trying to avoid the rifle fire that kept zooming over the McKenna home from Protestant-dominated streets on either side of it. McKenna remembers that the shots were being fired not only by members of the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force but by soldiers as well.

It was just past suppertime when the event that triggered Father Mullan's death occurred. Carrying a small child, a man tried to cross a weed-grown field directly in front of the McKenna house and was struck in the back by a bullet.

Father McGuigan saw him fall and raced through the door, intending to administer the last rites. He ran only a few steps and then turned and raced back. He didn't have the necessary vestments with him. "Don't worry, Felix," shouted Father Mullan, racing out into the field, "I'll do it. I have mine."

Father Mullan ran to his car, pulled a stole from a small black bag and began running across the field toward the wounded man. "I saw Father Mullan go down right after he got into the field," McKenna remembers, "and I thought he was a goner. But he got right up again. He had only tripped. He was carrying a white handkerchief and waving it over his head and he kept running until he reached the wounded man and knelt down beside him. Can you imagine they let him get all the way there and then they shot him?"

But that wasn't the end of it. Frank Quinn, 41, another member of the Corpus Christi parish, ran into the field to assist Father Mullan. Quinn was killed instantly by a bullet that struck him in the back of the head. Gerald Mooney, a 28-year-old former British soldier serving as a first-aid man, dashed out into the field next. He made it to Father Mullan's side. "I lifted the priest and cradled him in my arms," Mooney recalls. "He was praying to himself and when he realized I was picking him up, he shook his head and said: 'No use, lad. Run for it. Save yourself.' The shooting grew heavy then and I had to drop Father Mullan and dive for cover. I could see the bullets hitting all around him. Then he groaned one last time and that must have been the bullet that killed him, because he was quiet after that."

For a long time after Father Mullan's death, a sign was posted on the spot where he died, this is the place where father mullan was shot dead by british soldiers for trying to help people move from their homes, it read. The sign was crudely printed, as though it had been done by a child's hand.

Father Mullan had lived next door to the McKennas. He had been a close friend as well as their confessor. All of the houses on the street were constructed within the past two years. Every house has a fine view of the Black Mountains overhead. The air is fresh and clean. The day Father Mullan died, there were 125 families living on the block and the streets adjoining. Nine months later, all but six of those families had moved out. The newly constructed homes were vacated and their doors and windows bricked over so they could not be used as bases for snipers.

And Father McGuigan, who believes that if he had come prepared with his own chasuble Father Mullan would be alive today, still refuses to talk about what happened. But he is only one of hundreds of people in Northern Ireland who have been damaged.

The manager of the restaurant in the Europa hotel is 51 years old now and she remembers the night the Germans bombed Belfast. She was formerly the manager of the lunchroom in the Grand Central Hotel, which was destroyed by an I. R. A. bomb. All she can talk about now is the bombing campaign of the Provisionals. She has reason to think about it.

"For years," she will tell you, "one of my best friends worked for me as a waitress. When I came over here to the Europa, she wanted to get a part-time job working for me. But I couldn't do it. She went on looking. Several days later, she came back to me all smiles. 'I got a part-time job,' she said. 'It's going to work out fine.' Two days later, the I. R. A. bombed the restaurant. I went to the hospital to see her. I couldn't believe it. She had lost both legs at the knees. She had lost the little finger of her right hand. She had lost one eye. She's fifty-three years old and she smiled at me and said: 'I guess I should say I'm happy to be alive, shouldn't I?' "

Leslie Dunne, the hall porter, just rang to tell me the cab is waiting. This has not been a good visit. The Europa has been bombed three times by the I. R. A. since it opened in August 1971. The windows in this room do not shut. It's freezing. The door at the end of the hall was blown out. The wind whips down the hall with a great swooshing noise. They search you every time you enter.

My shoes are missing and the manager says I shouldn't worry. Probably someone has taken them as a joke, he says. It is not an answer that makes me feel much better. The shoes are gone rather than shined and it's I and not the Europa's manager who will be wearing white Adidas jogging shoes with red and blue stripes on the plane across the Atlantic. Oh, well, writers are supposed to be eccentric.

There is only one stop I want to make. I want to go up to the Clonard district, the great stronghold of the Provisional I. R. A., and see Lilly Hannaway before I leave. She lives in a depressing 100-year-old tenement on Cawnpore Street and she has been fighting the British for most of her 52 years.

Lilly Hannaway will never stop. Her husband, Liam, was picked up with the first batch and interned in Long Kesh prison camp. So were her three sons, Dermott, Terry and Kevin.

I'm in luck. Lilly is home. She looks tired but defiant. The imprisonment of the men in her family has hardened her. It has broken her heart and turned her life into a lonely, dreary ordeal. She lives for the day they will be released. She visits them at every opportunity, taking them encouraging news about the success of the bombing campaign. Then she returns to her tiny living room, sits in a chair and waits. "It broke my heart the day they came and took my men," she said, "but we're going to win in the end. Of course we are. This is our country, isn't it? Even if all we get when it's all over is enough ground to bury ourselves with."

It is a Saturday morning. My cab-driver is a Protestant. He has been terrified to drive his cab into the Clonard district, which is a well-known Catholic ghetto. Now that we are out of the area, he feels relieved. "We'll never give in to them," he says. "You can see what they're like. You've been here long enough. You've seen it, haven't you? They won't work. They don't keep their houses clean. They drink too much and have too many children that they won't care for. We'll never give in--even if we have to do them all in before it's over."

A soft rain is falling. The Divis Mountains are covered with green. The cab stops in front of the airport terminal. "Doing an article, are you?" the cab-driver says. "Here's my name and address. Send me a copy, will you? But for God's sake, don't use my name. You'll get me killed."