Showing posts with label Police Service of Northern Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Police Service of Northern Ireland. Show all posts

Thursday 22 October 2015

Sectarianism And Decent Bombers

English: The "peace line" or "p...
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.

Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

Gerald Lynch features in my first three books, a violent and drunken Northern Irish spy. Well, a well-mannered and teetotal one would be a bit less fun. His appreciation of Lebanon's sectarianism is visceral because it mirrors his own experiences growing up during 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland.

It's not until you drive through a wee township bedecked in fluttering Union Jack pennants, bunting and flags, with kerb stones painted red white and blue and murals on the walls that you begin to appreciate the strength and depth of feeling still in the North. Even the nomenclature is loaded: Northern Ireland or the North - or N. Ireland? I say Derry, you say Londonderry. And the next township down the road will be themed green white and gold, although you won't typically find as much bunting and never painted kerb stones in the Catholic areas. They're just more, well, Irish.

I recall my amazement standing by the 'peace wall' in Belfast (pictured above). Dividing Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, these walls or 'lines' are found in several places in the north and are mostly higher than the Israeli separation wall. That's pretty mad, no? They're being torn down, but in the meantime have become something of a tourist attraction. Which is at the same time sort of nice and a tad perverse.

The conflation of politics and religion is absolute. Republican Nationalist Catholic, Unionist Loyalist Protestant. The conflict between these two communities goes back centuries, old wounds have never quite healed and unfairnesses never quite been forgiven, let alone forgotten. But in the past twenty years, as in Lebanon, the peace has held. The marching season is an annual incitement, a national holding of breath as everyone in their right minds hopes that it'll pass without incident or a descent into chaos. But with a little give and take, perseverance and a shared will to avoid falling back into the violence and repression, the communities of Northern Ireland have managed to preserve their mutual accommodation. It hasn't all been plain sailing, by any means.

A great deal of the credit for even getting us here belongs to a dead woman. Mo Mowlam was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 1998 and was instrumental in pulling together the Good Friday Peace Agreement of that year. Remarkably, she achieved her feats of diplomacy knowing she had brain cancer, a fact she kept secret until forced to respond to the charming British red top newspapers, who were hurling jibes about her dumpy appearance. Her memoir, Momentum, is an exhilarating read, packed with the personality of a straight-talking, no-nonsense woman of remarkable character. Sadly, insanely, the book is out of print. Reading it was one of my more enjoyable research tasks working on A Decent Bomber.

All of this, inevitably, forms the backdrop to the book. Pat used to make bombs for the IRA and doesn't want to do it again. His old mate Brian MacNamara is in politics these days and doesn't need bombs going off, particularly as MacNamara's boss, Sean Driscoll, is standing for election. Former 'freedom fighters', they'd rather not get involved in Pat's upset apple cart and the looting of arms caches* they'd pretended weren't there any more. And then there's Boyle, the boy who watched his da shot by the IRA, who turns into an angry copper...

MacNamara pressed his hands together between his legs. ‘There were plenty big daft lads. On both sides. We depended on them.’
‘Well this one shot my Da. Dropped him there in the garden. Bang. Not even bang bang. Just bang.’
‘I’m sorry.’ MacNamara struggled to still his twisting hands, to lay them on his knees. He caught Boyle’s sideways glower.

Boyle focused back on the road. ‘Sure you are.’

Pat's loss from 'the troubles' still hurts him today. So does Boyle's. They find themselves pitched together, working to face a new threat from outside that, ultimately, unites them. I had never intended the book to be a moral tale about reconciliation, but it's in there somewhere. Inevitably, someone, somewhere will take exception to something I've written in the book, because passions still ignite and feelings still run deep. Twenty years, as anyone in Lebanon will tell you, can pass in the seeming blink of an eye.

But the vast majority of people in both communities never wants to go back. That alone is reason for enormous optimism. And if you do find something you don't like in the book, get in touch. I'll be happy to talk about it. Because, let's face it, when we stop talking is when we're in trouble...

* Demonstrating, once again, that truth is stranger than fiction, two separate arms cache finds were made in Ireland and England earlier this year. Given I'd worried about the unlikely nature of this aspect of my fiction, I was oddly a little relieved when they turned up!

Monday 11 August 2014

Belfast: Of Marches, Parades And Protests


We put away a serious Irish Breakfast Merchant style, then took to the rainy streets to clear our heads having put in a considerable amount of 'research' at various venues, a team effort that concluded at The Spaniard, the nearest thing to a Hamra bar to be found outside Hamra. Belfast's weekend nightlife has got SO much of Beirut about it - the same frenetic, buzzed vibe packed with shiny, happy people and dotted with oddballs, eccentrics and generally eclectic splashes of colour in the serried hordes of overdressed fellas and half-dressed Lovely Girls.

A glorious evening, not without its subsequent toll exacted on Mr Potato Head.

We started spotting coppers dotted around, our first thought being maybe TK Maxx had been turned over by some enterprising souls as we - and the rest of Belfast - were busy carousing. And then a column of white PSNI (Police Service Northern Ireland) Range Rovers filed by, all black cages and white concrete roofs. Yes, I kid you not, concrete. They each weigh six tonnes and are designed not to be a pushover. These babies are riot equipped and if we didn't by now work out something serioo was up, the appearance of two water cannon tankers put things beyond all doubt.

I wandered up to one of the clearly hundreds of officers on duty, little clumps of them at every street corner, huddled in shuttered shop doorways away from the rain. What's the craic? I mean, it's nice of you chaps to be putting on the Range Rover Fan Club annual gathering but...

They were happy to chat: they were all on time and a half or double time, but none of them were particularly pleased at spending most of their Sunday arsing around in the downpour waiting for 4,000 marchers protesting internment (the controversial imprisonment of suspects without trial employed by the Brits during 'the troubles' in the 1970s) and the opposing marchers protesting the protests against internment.

'Put it this way, when I've finished being dressed up like a Ninja Turtle this afternoon, I'll pulling on me jeans and shirt and going for a load of pints an' try and catch up on me weekend,' one chap told us. They were all cheerful, approachable and open - pretty impressive PR for a force created out of the sectarian disaster that was the infamous RUC - and all clearly had no time for the marchers or their opponents, seeing it all as a throwback out of pace with the movement of the times.

'Who wants this? Who, our age - with a life and kids and a future - wants to go back to this?'

I have to say, I never thought I'd see the like on Belfast's streets these days. Roads blockaded with Rapid Response Unit Range Rovers, phalanxes of cops in high-viz gilets and bullet-proof armour festooned with batons, CS gas spray and radio handsets, the lot. 'Yeah, I know. Forget us, you didn't see us. This isn't Belfast, our beautiful city.'

Well, it's all a bit, you know, Gaza... 'Don't. We've got a cruise ship in full of Israelis. You couldn't write this stuff...'

We missed the march, or parade or protest or whatever it was they were calling it. Unlike last year, when 56 cops got pounced by a group of loyalist protest protesters ('swhy we're all deployed here so early this year, we've got over a thousand officers on extra duty today. What a waste of money we could be using for schools or hospitals, eh?) it went off peacefully with only a couple of minor injuries.

It all felt a little like a tourist attraction, but then again we were just tourists anyway. We heard an Italian tourist ask a copper, 'Which side is protesting?'

'Both, love. It's always both.'

From The Dungeons

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...