It was this story, delivered in Robert’s signature south Derry monotone, that had my dad in literal and figurative stitches in the amputation ward. Despite being a Catholic who loved and admired Pope John Paul II, who had even sent two of his daughters to sing for the man, my dad found the whole thing unaccountably hilarious for exactly the same reason I did: so many horrific, depressing and awful things have happened in Northern Ireland in his lifetime that whatever joy can be taken from incidents in which no one was physically harmed will be seized with both hands.
Contradictions like this – my extremely Catholic father laughing his head off in a hospital bed at news of Protestant slaughtermen mocking the pope’s death – are hard to explain to people who aren’t from Northern Ireland. There’s a gallows humour that freaks them out, and they don’t know how they should react. Sometimes I think the only good thing about being from Northern Ireland is that, unlike people from everywhere else, I’m not inherently scared of Northern Irish people. We are the coeliac vegans of the UK and Ireland; whatever you offer, we might take offence. Part of it is due to people’s perception of us as either humourless, recreationally offended victims, or violent psychopaths incapable of getting along with each other.
Robert, while a dear friend of my father’s, was also a committed loyalist who belonged to the Apprentice Boys of Derry, a Protestant fraternal organisation similar to the Orange Order. They march through Derry every year to commemorate the 1689 siege in which the Protestant inhabitants of the city’s walled section successfully repelled the Catholic forces of King James, keeping it Protestant in the process. The Apprentice Boys have traditionally been regarded with resentment and hatred by the city’s Catholic majority, since they celebrate the imposition of centuries of religious suppression. The ideals of Protestant supremacy espoused by such orders were effectively the law in Northern Ireland well into my father’s lifetime, barring Catholics from prominent positions and trades, and withholding civil and political rights. Housing provision for Catholics was infamously appalling, and since only property owners could vote in local elections, the entire Catholic population of Derry was effectively disenfranchised until the late sixties.
My father didn’t have an inalienable right to vote until he was very nearly thirty, while my mother’s parents, who never owned a house in their entire lives, were in their late fifties by the time they cast their first local ballot. The Apprentice Boys’ own marches, once highly contentious in Derry, have become less so of late, although there’s really little to be said in defence of an organisation that still doesn’t admit Catholics and bars its members from attending Catholic services or events. Despite all this, my father refused to judge Robert, or anyone else, based on their membership of this or that organisation, in a belief that life was too short to start pulling at these threads, since such things were as much grounded in circumstance, parentage and tradition as hard-felt convictions one way or the other. For me, and people of my generation, this stance was simultaneously weirdly admirable and maddeningly complacent. For my father it was nothing more complicated than knowing a person by their deeds rather than their political stripe.
*
The Derry Journal,
Tuesday 30 August 1988
WEEKEND OF CHAOS
Derry was returning to near normality yesterday after one of the worst weekends of violence in recent years. During the widespread disturbances a RUC man was injured, a customs post was destroyed, seven houses were badly damaged and 21 stained glass windows were destroyed in St Columb’s Cathedral by an IRA bomb, and Derry City centre was thrown into chaos by a series of bomb scares and hijackings … on Friday night a masked man in a black Mazda car drove into a filling station on the Northern side of the border at Molenan Road and fired four to five shots into the air shouting bomb warnings at two border customs posts before driving back into Donegal.
About an hour later a loud explosion was heard in the Letterkenny Road area. The area was sealed off on both sides of the border by RUC and Garda personnel and on Saturday morning it was discovered that the unmanned British customs post at Molenan had been destroyed.
The IRA claimed responsibility for both explosions.
When the IRA detonated a bomb at the top of our road on 27 August 1988, it wasn’t particularly big news. Not to me, certainly, since I was just shy of my third birthday, but neither to the watching world. The above snippet from our local paper came out four days later, and limited the mention of the ‘Molenan Road’ explosion – our explosion – to about fifty words, sandwiched in between other, more notable incidents from ‘one of the worst weekends of violence in recent years’. As someone who spent so much of his life struggling for the praise, adulation and attention I deserved, I find it typical that even the IRA bomb that damaged my house was considered insignificant in comparison to other more impressive bombs with which it had to share its moment. I hear you, plucky little bomb. It’s also typical that the only thing my dad deemed worthy of comment when I dug up this article was the fact they misspelled the name of our street, Mullennan Road.
The explosion took apart the customs post which was, in reality, little more than a prefabricated hut that you could have talked into coming down. Maybe that’s what the ‘shouted bomb warnings’ were an actual attempt at achieving. Since the building had the structural density of a pack of Super Noodles, the explosion ejected quite a spectacular amount of debris, and bits of badly made building flew into our field. These included, most pleasingly of all, a wall that had a lavatory sink still attached. We were home at the time, although our three eldest were holidaying in Wicklow with Mammy’s friend Patricia. The army cordoned off the area and, fearing that unexploded ordnance might still be nearby, evacuated our house. We spent the next few days at my grandfather’s in Fermanagh, expanding the population of his small council house – two elderly people – to eleven and a half, with the addition of seven children under ten, plus Daddy, and Mammy, who was just recently recovering from cancer treatment and also seven months pregnant with Conall.
This was all deemed so uninteresting that I wasn’t even told about it until my dad mentioned it well into my twenties, in the sort of offhand way you might tell someone who was sure they’d never ridden a donkey that they had, in fact, ridden a donkey, but when they were too young to remember it. Even Shane was unimpressed when Mammy rang Patricia to tell her about it, to the extent that he tried to one-up her news by telling her Patricia added fresh bananas to the Weetabix every morning, a worldly affectation that was quite exotic to us; certainly more so than some bomb or other going off.