|
The
Easter Monday Commemoration in Derry was a larger
event than I had anticipated. Perhaps because its
organisers are the 32 County Sovereignty Movement
I usually half-expect that the public interpret this
to mean that no more than 32 should turn up at the
group's rallies. Bodies strategically squeezed by
the peace process live an anorexic existence, forever
faltering on the edge of abyssal isolation. Competing
with those who have been funded by the prosperous
and the powerful to turn their face against republicanism
and divest themselves of any radicalism is an uphill
battle. In the case of the 32CSM, there are few votes
for war. People register with their feet and usually
stomp away in the opposite direction. The movement
is numbers repellent.
In
any event, myself, my daughter Fírinne and friend
Shando arrived in the afternoon, and after meandering
through Derry streets we found Creggan Shops where
the parade was due to assemble before marching off
to the City Cemetery. On arrival I noticed the Telstar
Bar. It was where I had a few pints one cold November
Sunday afternoon in 1992. Then, I was along with Seamus
'Scotchy' Kearney from South Derry. We had met in
the blocks and were now literally tasting and swallowing
freedom together. Before going into the bar we were
told the locals termed it Palm Springs, as the palms
of coat pullers were often thrust in front of drinkers.
Taking Fírinne inside to let her use the toilet, I
saw no tappers but little else had changed. It provided
an appropriate backdrop to the day’s proceedings,
given how so much else had remained the same. Brits
still here, RUC still hounding republican marches,
prisoners still inside - and all those lying in their
graves for a united Ireland that nobody any of them
knew will ever see.
Such
was my genuine surprise at the size of the crowd -
two to three hundred was more than I expected to turn
up - and the fact that there was at that point no
familiar faces I commented to Shando that maybe it
was the Sinn Fein commemoration and we could end up
like the two British Army corporals at Casement Park
if somebody were to shout, ‘there’s two
republicans, kill them.’ But he too had been
through the bar to use the loo and being more attentive
than I had noticed a poster on the wall advertising
Gerry Kelly as the speaker on Easter Sunday. The Sinn
Fein event had taken place the day previous so they
may all have been off at the Cenotaph while we stood
in Creggan. As Kelly is a faithful follower of the
Adams-Goulding strategy, I commented to Shando that
he had probably just read something out from a 1977
copy of the United Irishman and neither he nor the
crowd had been any the wiser.
While
we were standing waiting for proceedings to get underway,
a colour party emerged from what appeared to be an
alleyway. Responding to commands barked out in Irish
it seemed to lurch rather than march across open ground
to the point where it would head the parade towards
the cemetery. Only one woman in a phalanx of perhaps
15. This group were certainly not for letting go of
republican tradition easily. She was at the back and
masked - only that her comrades too had their faces
covered I quipped hers could have been a burka. By
this time Marian Price and others we knew had gathered.
Republicans that I at any rate did not agree with
but republicans nonetheless. There would be no scowls
cast in our direction or murderous mutterings about
stoning us under Gerry-A-Law for our adulterous ways,
for having been unfaithful to Stormont, and for having
an affair with radical ideas.
The
march had barely started before the cops were announcing
that it was illegal and that anyone taking part was
liable to prosecution. Alex Levin said of Germany
that illegality is minimal because it is against the
law - it works the opposite way here, something Marian
Price, to much applause, took up during her address
to the crowd in the cemetery: ‘we don’t
ask permission from the RUC to honour our dead.’
Different speakers read out messages from the variant
of the IRA supported by her group along with a statement
from republican prisoners. It could have been Belfast
in 1974.
As
the crowd clapped so did Fírinne. At three years of
age she hadn’t a clue but I reckoned she had
the wit to know if I were to take her sweets away
from her and told her that I was only pretending to
put them beyond use, she would have howled her protest
to the heavens. There are some things that even babes
won’t fall for.
At
one point I drifted up to visit the graves of the
two INLA hunger strikers from Derry, Patsy O’Hara
and Micky Devine. No Derry IRA volunteers died during
that strike but I spent some time thinking about George
McBrearty and Pop Maguire, gunned down by the SAS
in the midst of the furore produced by hunger strikers
dying. They had taken to the streets as our comrades
and were as much the victims of the British government
policy of the era as those who died within the prisons.
Young men, their lives wrenched away from them in
their prime. What parade would they have attended
had they survived? But they did not have the chance.
And now we had gathered to honour them. Former protesting
prisoners poignantly remembering those who had died
in support of us. Had they only known how little the
party they were effectively launching with their own
blood would gleefully settle for, would they have
ventured out that day?
During
her oration Marian Price hit out at the media presentation
of the conflict. She maintained that her movement
would never accept a partitionist assembly and that
the Northern state was irreformable. She promised
unremitting and ceaseless resistance. As I listened
to her I cast my memory back thirty years earlier
when in an English prison she was been violently force
fed every day along wither sister Dolours, Gerry Kelly
and Hugh Feeney. A Chinese wall may separate her views
from my own today but at least I knew I would not
hear her tell us that she had starved for Stormont,
had never been in the IRA, or that she had only gone
to England for the Cheltenham Races and had inadvertently
been caught up in a dastardly republican plot to bomb
the British capital.
In
a strange twist Fírinne picked up a flower that had
become detached from its chosen spot and told me she
would give it to her mother. People come to graveyards
to place flowers, not take them home with them. My
three-year-old daughter’s innocent gesture moved
me. I wanted it to symbolise a reversal of the order
of things.
I
was glad I went, but had second thoughts about having
brought my daughter. At the cemetery I met old friends
from the prison. They were not supporters of the 32
County Sovereignty Movement but like myself wanted
to stand in the company of other republicans and remember
those who had failed to complete the journey we had
made, even if it was only back to where we had started
out, give or take a few reforms along the way. An
hour later as we stood on a beach in Donegal alongside
Tommy Gorman, my abiding sentiment was one of relief.
I at least had walked from the cemetery holding my
daughter’s hand. I had survived the H-Blocks
and the vibrancy of life that I could feel coursing
through her veins was proof of that. We were three
ex-blanket men, the product of cells where visibility
was restricted to 12 feet, society's past. Fírinne,
Shando's children, Tommy's grandchildren all playing
together in the sand in front of an ocean, its contempt
for limits so striking, are society's future. Beaches
not cemeteries are where Fírinne will spend her future
Easters.
She
gave her mother the flower.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
