Recently I found a little pile of old floppy disks, I wasn’t sure what was on them really, so I bought a little drive to read them. Scraps of writing as it turned out, predictably. I read this and realised that another 11 years had passed since I wrote it. In retrospect, some of it was prescient, some was wrong, and some may yet be right. But anyway, here’s what I wrote:
‘Now that we are approaching the ten year anniversary of the IRA cease fire, it’s difficult to know how to feel about it. Should we celebrate? Should we feel conned that the violence carries on, albeit small-time crook-style for the most part? Maybe we should be confused that we have still suffered atrocity while the ceasefire holds, or relieved that the cease fire has held in spite of that? Perhaps we should be angry that so little progress has been made politically, or again relieved that the cease fire has held in spite of that? Or should we try to see through the half empty glass of our frustration, and accept that progress has been made? Ten years before the ceasefire, the idea of all of the parties even being in the same room was unthinkable, let alone the scale of cross border cooperation we have seen, and the recognition of certain aspects of cultural identity and history, both officially and - more importantly - in the subconscious of the general population. It is an ugly word ‘cessation’, all soft edges - a hiss of a word - it doesn’t trip well off the tongue or nestle comfortably in the ear but what we say is far more important than how we say it. In the context of our history, cessation has probably – depressingly - been the best, most positive word of my lifetime.
It was an amazing feeling, then; of optimism. I remember very clearly hearing it that summery morning. I was in Omagh. I got up out of bed and realised there was no milk for my cereal, no bread for my toast. That was the way I was living then. I headed out to the shop, a ten minute walk down the road. Now bear in mind that this was a 21-year-old, three years into a four year degree course at a Scots University. Loaded magazine was new, and was more or less where I was. That generation. That time. I was in Omagh - yes, you remember Omagh - for a couple of weeks painting white walls white and was spending most of the time catching up with my next door neighbour Damien who I hadn’t seen for years, but who, along a different path, had more or less reached the same place in life as me. Girls, Music, Footy, Beer. Politics barely registered a blip on my radar, in fact I think I had long given up on politics because in that place I knew that nobody was saying anything that I was interested in hearing. The political situation around us had made us, my generation anyway - or my peers, apathetic before we had started. We hadn’t even really given up on it, we just never took an interest because we knew from the start that it was hopeless. Maybe that was just me. But anyway it was an amazing feeling hearing the words.
I was walking along the pavement, past the Murphys’. Damien’s dad must have been fixing his van or something because he had it down the side of the house with the doors open and the radio on loud, I think he was underneath it. The sun was shining bright that day, already high in a crystal-clear 9/11 sky, the grass of the Murphy’s lawn dazzlingly green against the red bricks and the near-white pebbledashing of the house. Through the gap between Murphys’ and McKays’, over the roof of the van, I could see the town, and beyond it the smooth deep-green sweep of the Sperrins. I was in the middle of a long summer break, so things were good already, and then I heard the radio shout up at me from Murphys’. The IRA had declared a “complete cessation of military activity”. Stopped me clean in my tracks. I listened for a minute to hear more, confirm what I heard was right. Gerry Murphy emerged from behind the van.
“Morning!” I shouted down to him. “D’I hear that right?”.
“IRA ceasefire…” He replied, going about his business, “..you did, aye.”
He was the first person to say it in my memory. IRA ceasefire.
“Amazing.” I thought out loud, “Peace in our time?/!” It was somewhere between a question and a statement.
“Maybe, William. Maybe.” He went back around the back of the van out of sight and I carried on down the road, towards the shop and a pint of milk, for my cereal.
Of course subconsciously I assumed that this would mean that everyone else would follow suit, that this would be the end of all of it. That the other Republicans would fall into line, and the Loyalists after that. The Loyalist paramilitaries were after all largely reactive. They existed - in my mind - for revenge, to defend or protect ‘their people’ I suppose they would say, against the Republicans. And once the guns had been put away, the table was clear, not so much to make peace, just to work out the details. I suppose it had been coming but to hear the words, to actually hear it. It’s difficult to remember now how big a feeling it was, how big a thing. I didn’t really know how to comprehend it, like a weight lifted off, a weight that I hadn’t even known was pressing down was lifted off. But it didn’t feel at all like a bad feeling had gone away, it wasn’t relief. It was fresh hope; it was a new feeling of good; of positivity. Completely new; completely good; completely hopeful. I couldn’t think about it properly, I couldn’t understand that all of the bad was over, all the killing was over. I had stupid thoughts - what will they fill the local news with, along with more valid, reasoned ones - what was going to happen next?
I realised, depressingly, as I walked down to the shop and back that morning that I had never given any thought to what would happen in Northern Ireland when the fighting stopped, I suppose because I never thought it would. I started to wonder about that. It is difficult to explain that feeling, it’s impossible. To explain to someone who has not, how it is to have lived in a place where, as long as you’ve been there, there has been a conflict underpinning everything else. The cultural identity, social conditioning, political ideology, and even the spiritual maintenance of the individual have always been impossible to extricate from each other, have always been pre-determined by birth more or less. If you take away the reason for that - the conflict - on the face of it you are taking away everything that everyone born into it has ever known. A sobering thought in ordinary circumstances, but for us it was a new beginning, a fresh start, a hopeful future. Peace, at last. Any new socio-political and cultural birth that came of it was likely to be exciting and inclusive, a new opportunity for everyone, so any apprehension was heavily outweighed by excitement. That was the way I felt, and that was the way it should have been.
I caught a bus to Belfast that day, and I noticed in very clear focus how even the landscape had been poisoned by our conflict. Things I saw every day but took - sadly, in retrospect - for granted. Graffiti on walls yes, but much more profoundly than that, the coloured kerbs marking out ‘our’ territory from ‘theirs’ or vice versa, the army helicopters descending over Omagh and disappearing among the trees around the barracks in the town, armour plated police vans, watchtowers and fortifications, the great grey flatness of the Maze prison outside Belfast. All of this now had a chance to change. Passing Milltown Cemetery on the left as I approached the end of the motorway - sun glinting off the headstones - and thinking as I always did, and I suppose I always will, of the gruesome pictures of Michael Stone firing randomly into the crowd of mourners - stopping to turn and throw a grenade back towards them - and hoping and believing that here was a chance that we, or the younger ones than us, would never have to see those things again. But those images, those memories, were also a useful reminder that to stop doing something evil, is not the same as doing something good, a terrorist should not be thanked for putting down his gun, that this optimism should not be channeled into some twisted gratitude for the very people that had dragged us down and down for twenty five years. People who had hardened into stone the attitudes and distrusts which we most needed to change. It was all about moving forward. It is all about moving forward.
Seamus Heaney wrote a short essay, ‘Cessation 1994’, celebrating the event, an essay of optimism and hope which reflected my, and the general, feeling that day but with a perspective that I couldn’t share. The perspective of someone who remembers the time before, when barriers were being broken down by artistic and cultural initiatives, and a willingness of people to open themselves - perhaps guardedly - to the idea that there were two cultures intermingled here, that there was legitimate diversity. A time when that diversity was becoming able to be seen as something enriching, something to embrace rather than something to fear. He writes:
“I went outside to try to recollect myself and suddenly a blind seemed to rise somewhere at the back of my mind and the light came flooding in. I felt twenty-five years younger. I remembered what things had felt like in those early days of political ferment in the late sixties. How we all were brought beyond our highly developed caution to believe that the effort to create new movement and language in the Northern context was a viable project.
But as well as feeling freed up, I felt angry also. The quarter century we have lived through was a terrible black hole, and the inestimable suffering inflicted and endured by every party to the conflict has only brought the situation to a point that is politically less promising than things were in 1968.
At that time there was energy and confidence on the nationalist side and a developing liberalism – as well as the usual obstinacy and reaction – on the unionist side. There was a general upswing in intellectual and social activity, the border was more pervious than it had been, the sectarian alignments less determining.”
It was interesting to read about that movement, something I wasn’t previously aware of. That there was a time when - had it not been for the, at best, clumsy heavy handedness of the authorities and a hard core of charismatic but deeply conservative politicians ferociously opposed to change - a trust, maybe even just a curiosity in each other, was forming, which, allowed to flourish, might have generated a populist movement towards an equal and inclusive society and away from the distrust and fear with which we have been crippled ever since. It’s easy to understand the anger. Ten years on, I wonder what Seamus Heaney thinks now, what thought will race to the front of his mind when he ponders that it was ten years ago that he wrote those slightly worn-down but optimistic words – will he feel angry again that again - from a position of such promise, we are slowly walking in the same frustrating, excruciating circles.
But perhaps we should have realised - when by lunchtime on the day of the announcement, little politicians with their tight lips and tiny minds, were bickering about the meaning of the term “complete cessation” - that this would not be an easy ride. I said earlier that what we say is more important than how we say it, but this was a good reminder that in the realm of the politician, how we say it is often more important than saying anything at all. To me, this refusal of some to embrace what could only in the wildest stretch of even the narrowest-minded imagination be seen as a positive step, without suspicion and new conditions attached, was only annoying. Whether “complete” means “permanent”? That was not my initial reaction, but then I didn’t have any vested interest to protect, except a desire for peace, a desire that became much stronger – or maybe that only for the first time truly crystallized – now that it no longer seemed an impossibility.
Easy to remember, and easy to be angry - looking at things now - that the wave of opportunity wasn’t taken, that the momentum we felt then has died away and what is left in it’s place is the very definition of stagnation. It’s always easy to recall the moments from our past, high and low, but what is difficult is the more-or-less flat line that connects those moments, the times when time is the only thing that changes, and when we allow the wave to roll away it’s difficult to maintain the momentum on our own. But we must. Finding the answer is the hard part, because in the wait, as the frustration builds, we find ourselves slipping back into the old suspicions, falling back behind the same barricades, singing the same old songs again. We find ourselves becoming again what we were before. Finding the answer is the hard part. But we must.
And as for the anniversary of that day, perhaps we should mark it, not with hyperbole and nostalgia, but with another step forward; a new thinking that moves us to the next stage. It is our right to feel that we are at peace now ten years on. It is our obligation to bring that peace - or to bring ourselves - into the normal world. It’s not unusual to see the irony in politics, how the ones with the responsibility of making life better are often the ones with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. To some extent this irony has existed in Northern Ireland, but our irony has been starker still. Virtually by definition, the men and women charged with finding common ground between the extremes in Northern Ireland, have been the representatives of those very extremes. That a deep rooted prejudice against - or distrust of - others has been a precondition for many in finding a place at the table where discussions on the overcoming of these distrusts would be held. So in the end perhaps we have to take responsibility, the ones who were never entrenched enough to have a voice before are the ones who have to stand up and move this forward now, into a world of normal cultural issues, normal social issues, normal politics.
Perhaps the politicians of Northern Ireland do not represent the people, or the people’s interests, they only represent the peoples’ feelings or apprehensions on one single issue. It is a bizarre fact, that when the Northern Irish public go to the polls, they do not consider the economic stability of the province, the state of health and education provision. They vote only with their fear of ‘the other side’, the unknown. To give them their due, in many cases our politicians have come far, they have finally broken down some of those old self-imposed boundaries. But they have had their due. They have had it in spades, they have been congratulated and celebrated, cheered by crowds, welcomed by Presidents and honoured by the Nobel Foundation. Maybe the ones who took us this far really have no more to offer, their presence alone aggravates too many old wounds, scars on the heart that will never heal while every news bulletin beams those bitter old faces back into our homes. Those reminders of the pain. Maybe their politics are backward-looking now, and it’s time they were left behind by the middle ground, because in the end nobody who defines themselves by their differences from others, can govern a place containing both.
