Derry City, 1968-1998
The streeling wind
blows in from the west
with the smell of the smokestacks
and ingrained poverty;
the sudden tears, unwelcome,
sting in my staring,
unblinking eyes: I see
the same old streets, unchanged,
the rain-streaked heartless
bricks and stones, the geography
of sorrow. From here, No. 21,
Aunt Molly kissed Uncle Pat good bye
and never saw him again;
Pat was drowned in the freezing seas
on the Murmansk run, back then
in the cold dark days of war,
days before I was even born or thought of,
a war that was being fought
for freedom
for democracy
and for the rights of the downtrodden;
a war, I am told, we won,
and which never changed
local conditions
one little
bit.
O there was laughter there
in the soft Derry air
and me Daddy
met me Mammy
which was an all round
good move, considering
I might not be writing
these words; nor, gentle friend,
you reading them otherwise.
I cannot pretend
that we lived in comfort and ease;
we could not, there could be no surprise
that we were all so poor in money.
Everybody, same as us, was poor,
subject to the same old squeeze.
In the latter end, dear honey,
my Mammy would always say,
we have love, thank God above.
But no such thing as freedom,
or none my Daddy could see or smell.
God rot these people, may they burn in hell,
he'd say when the whiskey took him.
Look at me brother, Pat,
drowned for their feckin Empire,
and there with poor Molly beyond,
evicted from the house after forty year,
Empire me parliamentary arse!
O, says Molly, they gave him a medal!
Well, you can't eat a feckin medal, darlin' dear,
when the landgrabbers start actin queer
and tear the roof down over yez!
Ahh, ye'll come in and bide with us.
So she did.
My Daddy could be loud and quirky quare
but he had good bones within him.
Growing up, in the meantime,
was a noisy, happy, skeltery affair
of music, friendship, football and girls,
The Beatles and the Stones,
Lulu and the Searchers,
Marianne Faithfull,
Donovan, the Animals,
Jeff Beck and the Yardbirds.
Girls, football and music,
with school and the parents
and the bloody old priests
interfering. That was until
we saw Martin Luther King
on our black and white TVs
and thought,
if he can, why can't we?
That's how it started.
I don't know how
things became so bad so soon:
peaceful marches
became angry demonstrations,
and when the police attacked,
demonstrations became riots.
Vicious, horrendous beatings
moved on to murder.
It was hard, at first, to understand
the speed of regression
to age-old ethnic hatreds,
but at the time, I well recall,
it shocked and surprised us all.
The long sullen decades
of second-class status
in the north of our divided nation,
the apartheid little mini-state,
the bit that refused to become Irish,
didn't quite prepare us
for the overwhelming violence
with which that state reacted
to the hopeful, local imitation
of events in the USA: No way
was it ever going to work.
The people in power
were not dull-minded or stupid;
just like the planters
of the Old American South,
or like the whites in South Africa,
they were quite well aware
that their lives of wealth and privilege
were based on social injustice.
But they did not care.
This system was their system
and they would do anything,
anything and everything,
to keep it in place.
In Ireland, the unresolved past
never never goes away:
memory becomes a living thing
and rarely ever fails to bring
back red-eyed living demons.
Enter ... the IRA!!
But ... there was no IRA,
or hardly one to speak of :
"I Ran Away", was the local jeer.
In Belfast, the mobs were raging out of hand
and the police were siding with them.
Every long night was a night of fear.
Something, obviously, had to be done.
So, if you forget everything else
you hear, just please remember this:
the IRA didn't start this thing,
it was the local communities, reacting
to mobs, and the out-of-control police.
I know, because when
I tried to join the so-called IRA
with pals from pick-up rock'n'roll bands
and local football teams,
the queue stretched along the street
and around three corners.
It was the strangest thing:
when you finally got to the table
they wouldn't swear you in
unless your Daddy was in it before you
or a teacher or a priest said something for you.
Keeping out the riff-raff?
Jayzus Christ, God Almighty,
how in the hell can we win a war
with this crowd of bozos?
The Provies (Provisionals)
took care of that, kicked out
this useless shower and took over;
but it was still several months
before we finally had enough guns,
and it wasn't till early seventy-two
that Irish-America at last came through
and sent the first AR-18 Armalites:
deadly, sweet, and oh so neat!
Now we had better assault rifles
than the British Army. And they knew it.
(The Brits had come over in late '69
when the police had been beaten back.)
They said they'd come over to Keep the Peace
and everyone, at first, believed it:
well, not for long. They'd been sent in,
wouldn't you know, to maintain the status quo,
and put down the fuckin Paddies.
Same old, same old story!
Look at these people. Just look at them!
(I don't mean the professional British Army,
they are the military Premier League),
but just look at their political leaders....
The Americans bring out the National Guard
to support the civil rights movement.
The Brits send over their well-trained Army
to support the corrupt local state.
As far as the fighting went,
the tactics were pretty simple:
hit them and hit them and hit them again.
What the logic requires,
relentlessly, cold-bloodedly,
is to hit the occupation forces.
They symbolize the oppressive State,
everything you despise and hate.
Hit the soldiers. Never let up.
Each day, lads, you can kill a few!
(But ... you start to sympathize
with the bastards: they are,
after all, the same age as you).
Then, perhaps more wisely,
you focus on economic targets,
blow up the financial heart of London
with ten-thousand pound bombs,
and scare away all the foreign banks.
After a few painful hits in the pocket,
the "suits", the enemy civilians,
initiate reluctant "talks".
You win if you can just hold out.
You win if you refuse to lose.
You win if you keep hitting back.
It seems to me that terrorists
are the midwives of ex-colonial nations:
the Old-IRA, the Mau-mau,
the Haganah, the Irgun,
the FLN, the Viet Cong;
and, of course, the Minutemen
of Lexington and Concord.
That's how it started.
Now, we're told, it's ended
Thirty-some years later
you wonder
was it worth it?
All the dead pals, the funerals,
all the bad things
we did ourselves.
I don't know.
This, however, I do know:
when you begin to rationalize
murder, so-called military action,
there is, for want of better words,
an abstention of guilt: people
call it patriotism, or the national will,
but this is just mental novocaine.
It is lies and evasion. It attacks
only symptoms, not the source of pain.
Today, for example, when I look at Iraq,
at the endless, hopeless murder,
I can't help but remember
our own little war,
bad enough at the time.
Should you ever have the misfortune
to take part in a war at first-hand,
always, always bear in mind
that the politicians and all the other people
who send you out to fight
sleep at home at night,
and each, for all his thunderous rage,
never once sets foot on a battlefield,
and dies, in the end, of old age.
And bear in mind this, too,
that the memories
will continuously come back at you.
The awful memories
will always keep coming back at you
again and again and again.
They will take on a life of their own.
They will never leave you alone.
-------------------------------------------
An Doire (the oak grove) dedicated to St. Columb, one of the early Irish saints, was anglicized into "Derry" and later became "Londonderry" when the guilds of London subsidized 17th century Protestant settlements after the local Irish residents had been displaced. The city was subject to a famous siege in 1689 when the Williamite garrison held out against the forces of James II. With a population more than 70% Catholic (Derry looks to Donegal in the Irish Republic) it still retains an iconic hold on the Ulster Protestant mentality. They will never let it go, which leads to all kinds of problems.
Derry City information:
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