Dark days in Ulster

J. Anthony Gaughan

This is a reprint of a book published in 1978. Two years previously acclaimed travel-writer Dervla Murphy, who had cycled through some of the most exotic places in the world, visited Northern Ireland.

That year the violence in the area had reached a crescendo. The Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the crown forces were head to head with no holds barred. Murphy’s account in her diary of her experiences during her visit remains one of the most insightful records of the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

At the outset Murphy acknowledged her republican background – her father and grandfather had been republican activists. She also admitted that until then she had spent just 36 hours of her 44 years in Northern Ireland.

This was to give a talk in Enniskillen and as soon as possible she was on her way home. As she pedalled across the border on her visit she admired the rolling farmland, contented cows, quietness, hay smells and churns by the roadside. She ruefully remarked that there was nothing to mark the border, and that if there were it would long since have been blown up.

Soon after arriving in Belfast, Murphy cycled into one of the strongholds straddling the sectarian divide. She found the gruff honesty of members of the Orange Order congenial and the coarseness and ignorance of loyalist paramilitaries off-putting.

Evil

Attending a service conducted by Rev. Ian Paisley in his Martyrs Memorial church, she was appalled by his bigotry and ranting calculated to arouse hatred. She noted that it was the only time during her visit that she felt she was in the presence of evil.

Murphy’s penchant for dropping in to the local for a pint proved useful as she rode across West Belfast. Seemingly most of the fortified pubs in the area were run by supporters of the ‘Provos’.

On hearing her accent patrons were suspicious and defensive. However, she did succeed in engaging in a number of conversations on the bar stool. She was presented in stark terms with the single-minded policy and strategy of the PIRA. 

While some of those who spoke to her regretted the killing of civilians by the PIRA, they all applauded their success in bring down the Stormont government from which non-unionists were never to get justice.

In Derry, Murphy found the confrontation between East and West Belfast replicated somewhat in the divide between the Waterside and the Bogside, but for her Derry was different. The Catholics had a swagger about them. In the Bogside there was the huge notice: ‘You are now entering Free Derry’.

It was a city of masterful women, and it was the mothers who were most influential in whether their sons joined the ‘organisation’ or not. The author interviewed families with divided loyalties: one son serving in the British army, another ‘with the lads’.

At Crossmaglen Murphy found an area under siege: the army confined to their barracks, helicopter flights and armed patrols, the locals under constant surveillance. The main topic of conversation was the frequent destruction vindictively caused to homes during house searches by certain regiments.

Throughout her account the author assumes the British perspective on the conflict in Northern Ireland: just a religious problem with political overtones whereas the Irish Nationalist view is that it was a political problem with religious overtones, the only ultimate solution to which is British withdrawal. 

Notwithstanding Murphy’s uncritical acceptance of the British analysis of the “situation in Northern Ireland” her tract of 1978 richly deserves to be re-printed..