Forty years ago today, in the midst of what were long known as “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the first hunger striker died. His name was Bobby Sands.
I was there when it happened. It was the ugly climax of a culture of hate. And it left me wondering from that day on, would the hate ever ebb?
It didn’t feel like it would that night. There were riots in Belfast. The molotov cocktails were blinding. The tear gas was suffocating. The gunfire was deafening.
And the cost was nauseating. In one monstrous moment out of many, my camera crew and I were in a Catholic neighborhood and heard a crash. We ran around a corner to see what it was. Despite the violence all around them, a Protestant milkman and his son, faithful to their customers, had been making pre-dawn deliveries. They got hit by a molotov cocktail, their three-wheeled milk truck went up in flames and wrapped itself around a tree. Both the milkman and his son were mangled and scorched. And dead.
It was an ugly end to two tranquil lives. What kind of hate must the firebomber have felt to make that happen?
A day later, I went as a reporter to Sands’s wake. I saw him in his open coffin. So did thousands of his fellow Catholics who lined up for block after block to make him a martyr.
It was an ugly corpse. Starved and dehydrated. His body had withered, his organs had shut down, his eyes had gone blind.
It was an ugly death.
Followed by nine more. The aim of the IRA— the Irish Republican Army to which Sands and his fellow hunger strikers belonged— was to oust predominantly Protestant Great Britain off the island and unite with the Catholic Republic of Ireland to the south. However, at the prison near Belfast known as Long Kesh, the alleged aim of their self-imposed starvation had been more modest: to be treated as political prisoners, not common criminals.
But the British government wouldn’t grant that concession to men it charged as terrorists. Eventually, those nine additional hunger strikers died like Sands.
How strong was the hate they must have harbored to make the decision to let that happen?
But the Troubles were like a long-lasting 9/11. Hate was endemic in their lives. The Troubles were a simmering but ceaseless war in which more than 3,200 victims died. And the people of Northern Ireland toughed it out for generations. Although it wasn’t true of every parent, many Catholics taught their children to hate Protestants, and then in time, those children taught children of their own. Just as many Protestants taught their sons and daughters to hate Catholics, which they then passed on from their generation to the next.
This helps explain something I saw during a riot one night following another hunger striker’s death. My crew and I ducked into an alley to get out of the line of fire and almost tumbled onto a group of kids playing their equivalent of cowboys and Indians. Except it was Catholics and Protestants. They were slinging miniature molotov cocktails at each other. And swearing the same foul slogans they could hear just around the corner, where a bona fide battle raged on the street. Hate was growing right there in that alleyway.
The irony is, although the Troubles often are described as a religious war, a Northern Irish friend of mine told me when I was last there to shoot a documentary nine years ago, “None of the bomb throwers on either side ever graced the door of a church.” The reality is, this was warfare between Catholics and Protestants over who would police the population, who would get the good jobs, who would control the government.
And yet the hate, the venom, the vitriol I saw while covering the Troubles was as bad as anything I ever saw in warfare between tribal sects in Africa or Islamic sects in the Middle East. Enough so that I always said, if they couldn’t find their way to peace in the heart of the British Empire, there was no hope anywhere else.
Time has passed and I was wrong. As my friend there wrote me only today, “We just get on with our lives.”
From the days when you couldn’t go downtown to buy a pair of shoes without being patted down for guns or bombs hidden on your body, the steel barricades and sandbags, the metal detectors and barbed wire and army checkpoints that once surrounded downtown Belfast have disappeared.
And from the days when burned-out bombed-out no-man’s-lands separated the Catholic side of certain streets from the Protestant side, so-called “peace walls” went up in their place.
Some neighborhoods still are segregated by these walls— as are some schools, which actually have to apply for “integrated status”— but it is more a cultural separation than military.
The on-again off-again Northern Ireland Assembly, built after nervous negotiations more than 20 years ago on the principle of power-sharing, is on again, if sometimes still tense.
Employment laws mandate proportionate representation of Catholics and Protestants in companies and agencies of a certain size.
People who once would just as soon spit on each other as shake one another’s hand now mix, without necessarily even knowing the religion of people right next to them.
It is a long transition from war to peace, and the people of Northern Ireland still are dancing on a pinhead. To this day you’ll see Ireland’s flag flying in Catholic neighborhoods, Britain’s Union Jack over Protestant homes. And you’ll still see murals on the fences and the faces of Belfast’s brick buildings, some glorifying Catholic militias, some glorifying Protestant militias, all reminding whoever’s watching that deep-seated hostility hasn’t disappeared.
But in the forty years since Bobby Sands’s death, Northern Ireland has moved far closer to a state of peace than a state of war. That alone is a sea-change. As my friend also wrote, “There is a lot of cross-community work going on that never makes the papers.”
It gives me faith that in other conflicts around the world, conflicts that seem incapable of resolution, maybe there is an iota of hope after all.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.