'He’s no longer a soldier, he’s a human being'

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland

My memories of visiting Northern Ireland as a child were of a place that was rather frightening and sinister. I was always conscious that having the wrong accent could be dangerous and because my mum is from Dublin and my dad was English, anywhere could be a problem. On one occasion while visiting with family friends from the province I wanted to see a football ground and asked if they would take me to the home of the biggest club, Linfield. ‘Absolutely no way’ was the reply, or something to that effect. Their surname was Kelly.

The one place that felt safe was the stretch of the Country Antrim coast we visited, in part because it was out of the reach of the contested flashpoint areas, being so overwhelmingly Protestant. I remember village after village decked in Union Jack bunting, which seemed quaint, and visiting the Giant’s Causeway. The countryside in Northern Ireland is stunning  – it’s the North in Game of Thrones – but the cities are quite bleak, Belfast far more resembling a northern English town than Dublin. Filled with rows and rows of terraced houses, the only way you might tell you weren’t in post-industrial Lancashire are the murals, and the walls that came to be built to separate the two sides.

I have a tendency towards doomerism but people who lament the current state of affairs forget that when people my age were growing up there was a low-level civil war in one part of the country and the Saturday news would often begin with a bulletin about multiple murders. Occasionally this would spill over into England, which the IRA began to attack in the 1970s; my uncle remembered fondly a London cabbie looking at his bag and saying 'ohright Paddy you ain’t got a bomb in that hav ya?' (Irish people doing cockney accents is always funny.) But otherwise the English tried to just ignore it.

The first time I went to post-Troubles Belfast was for a press jaunt organised by an energy drink, with an event held out in the park in the Malone Road in south Belfast (which, for those who don’t know the city, is the middle-class area where you don’t see flags).

The compere was television presenter Patrick Kielty, familiar to British viewers everywhere for his wit and charm, although most people were unaware of his tragic backstory. Kielty, who began his career on the comedy stage, is one of many people interviewed in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, one of the best documentaries of this year, and by the same team who made the equally brilliant series about Iraq. 

Although incredibly upsetting at points, the underlying message of forgiveness is deeply moving, and Kielty comes across as a thoughtful, humane man. He recalls, as a teenager at school, being called into the headmaster’s office, expecting to be told off for something, only to be asked to sit down and informed that his father had been shot dead.

Mr Kielty’s crime was to refuse to pay protection money to Loyalist paramilitaries, and running the local Gaelic football club in the village of Dundrum in Co. Down. If that sounds insane, it was a place where insanity ruled for a quarter of a century.

The series charts the Troubles from its beginning, which – without provoking any sectarian rows – was largely started by Loyalists, both the paramilitary UVF under Gusty Spence and the tub-thumping demagoguery of Ian Paisley. By the time I was growing up Paisley was something of a comic figure, and I remember watching on television as he heckled the Pope in the European Parliament, his 17^th century sectarian rhetoric utterly bemusing the continental representatives until he was manhandled out by – just to complete the bizarre scene – the heir to the Habsburg throne.

He was only comedic because by this time there were so many worse figures in the province, in particular the representatives of the Provisional IRA, which emerged out of a desire to protect Catholic areas from Protestant mobs but quickly became a monstrous terror group engaged in nakedly sectarian murder.

Among the other interviewees is June, a sweet and harmless woman who grew up in rural mid-Ulster, in a quiet village that seemed unaffected by the Troubles. That was until the IRA murdered her husband Johnnie, on his way out of a hospital where he was seeing his newborn son. Johnnie had joined the RUC to support his family but, as an IRA interviewee says, they only saw a uniform, not a human being.

The IRA man featured in the series seems mostly unrepentant, unlike the former Loyalist, something I’ve noticed in other documentaries about the Troubles. Provos rarely seem to be sorry for what they did; indeed they have become masters of the Ulster passive tense. ‘People died,’ they lament, when what they mean is ‘we murdered them’.

Loyalist terror groups were as vicious as the IRA but nothing like as smart, drawing their recruits from the poorest sections of society; they did weights in prison while their republican opposite numbers studied Marxist texts. Loyalists didn’t have the ideological discipline to maintain the righteousness of their fight and, besides, Ulster Unionists more generally seem to suffer from what many groups do when they lose their sense of legitimacy: defeated race syndrome. 

The programme interviews people from both sides, as well as British soldiers, initially deployed to protect Catholic communities. Footage from the times shows them to be mostly unsure as to why they are there, but as one put it, since Protestants tend to bring them cups of tea and Catholics throw stones at them, they figure that’s who their enemy is.

Among those interviewed are the son of Jean McConville, one of the IRA’s ‘disappeared’ and Alan, whose wife was murdered by the Provos; she had worked in her father’s fish shop on the Shankill Road which happened to be below UDA headquarters – the IRA bombed it in 1993, killing nine people, along with the bomber. Alan would after pursue Sinn Fein spokesman Gerry Adams with letters, and even managed to get through to a radio show where the politician was being interviewed – Adams’ face visibly darkens as he realises who he’s speaking to.

By this stage the Troubles, which had peaked in the early 1970s, had begun to intensify again. One interviewee recalls watching news of the latest horror by the IRA with his father, who comments that now some similarly innocent Catholics will be murdered in revenge – only for his dad to be one of them days later. Loyalist paramilitaries had taken to large-scale indiscriminate killing of Catholics, including the Greysteel massacre of 1993 when two gunmen walked into a pub and opened fire, killing eight innocent people. It was the day before Halloween, and the men shouted ‘trick or treat’.

This was a particularly bloody stage of the conflict, and someone calculates that had the numbers been projected onto Britain, it would have translated as 1,000 murdered in eight days. Yet peace was coming. People everywhere had had enough. Cross-community peace rallies were spreading and even the IRA, which realised it could not win any military battle, had begun to appreciate that this was no way to live.

One theory for the decline of the Troubles, one that is only half-jokingly made, is drugs, now a dreadful problem across Ireland. It is said that in the most divided towns of the provinces youngsters would mix at clubs and raves where ecstasy was taken and the ancestral hatreds drowned out by endorphin.

But even in the 1970s the hedonistic music scene was a shelter from the insanity, much of it focussed on a punk venue set up by Terri, one where both sides could get together. ‘What did you do in the Troubles?’ he ponders his children asking: ‘I would say, “I partied a lot, I did a lot of drink and some drugs, I had a good time and I didn't kill anybody.”’

The IRA announced a ceasefire in 1994, followed soon by the Loyalist paramilitaries, made permanent with the Good Friday Agreement, for which Tony Blair, John Major, Bertie Ahern, David Trimble and perhaps most of all the tireless John Hume deserve great credit. We see Kielty presenting television on the day the IRA put down their guns but he’s not ecstatic; he seems shaken and drained, and reflects that none of the English people around him seemed to understand. That’s nice, they tell him, almost like his team had won a football tournament or something. Most people in England would just rather the six counties went away.

There has been a tendency in recent weeks for online commentators to compare the Israel-Palestine conflict to Northern Ireland, and indeed Kielty recently gave a moving address on Irish television about hoping for peace. But there aren’t really similarities; the Troubles was always about the desire for dominance rather than destruction or extermination. Unlike Israelis and Palestinians, Northern Irish people get on well outside the province and their cultures – if they can even be described in the plural – are very similar. They also share a sense of humour, which tends to be quite black and bitter and which comes across in the documentary, a form of mental protection that Kielty used to great effect in his early career, sometimes appearing on stage in a balaclava.

But the most powerful message is about forgiveness. Throughout the series we see a man called Richard who wears dark glasses, but only in the final episode do we realise that he lost his eyesight as a child when he was shot with a rubber bullet by a British soldier. It wasn’t malicious - he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, like so many people - but many of us would be consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives.

But what is extraordinary is that, not only is he forgiving, but Richard seeks out the soldier, a now elderly upper-class Englishman called Charles, and befriends him. At first Charles appears quite cold and unrepentant, but as the Anglo-Saxon emotional shield comes down a genuine friendship grows, and they now meet every year. As Charles guides Richard around the spot where his eyesight was taken from him, the Irishman reflects ‘He’s no longer a soldier, he’s a human being; he’s a father, he’s a grandfather. It makes a person very real. And I think that’s a good thing.’

It is indeed. The war is over - Happy Christmas.