Today let's turn our attention away from politics here in the U.S. All the talk of another American civil war is such a downer. A civil war wouldn't be between red and blue states. It would be between red and blue neighbors and neighborhoods.
Is such a thing possible? Yes. That was Ireland during "The Troubles."
But then, after 30 years, came the Good Friday accords.
Gerald Murphy was born into a huge Irish Catholic family, the eighth of nine kids. He retired from his career as a high school English teacher, but still writes short plays for schools and community theaters. He used to write satirical posts on the Next Door site with a narrator voicing quirky ideas. That ended. He was kicked off the site after neighbors complained. They didn’t recognize satire or his light-hearted touch.
Guest Post by Gerald Murphy
Faith and Begorrah
Faith and Begorrah
My mother had a brogue. She came over from Northern Ireland when she was 19, but no matter how hard she tried, she could never lose it, although it did soften a bit by the time she was in her 60’s. But it never completely disappeared.
“I hate it when I ask a clerk a question in a store around here and he starts with the ‘Faith and Begorrah’ nonsense! Do they think that’s funny? Well, it’s not funny! Not a bit. Besides, no one ever said that in all the time I was in Ireland. ‘Faith and Begorrah’ indeed!"
Years later I got to test the truth of this when my wife and I visited Ireland. We started in Dublin and made a clockwise circle down to Cork and then up the west coast to Galway. Ireland is so tiny that we made our way to the Northern Ireland border in less than two days. We heard no “Faith and Begorrahs.”
The town of Strabane was our introduction to Northern Ireland, or “Ulster,” as the “Prots” call it. This was 1993, six years before the Good Friday Peace Agreement, so we were stopped and searched by British soldiers at the guard tower before we could enter. Seeing British soldiers set me back a bit, but that’s the way it was that year. The towers were at all the border crossings, bristling with soldiers and automatic rifles. The towers were accepted by the Protestants and hated by the Catholics (or the Prots and the Papists as they called each other).
The Papists want to make little Ireland one country, while the Prots were happy to keep Ulster in the UK. Both sides looked alike, talked alike, and had shared values in all but religion. But they hated each other because of that one sticking point. And neither side missed an opportunity to stick it to the other side. And both sides were able to find plenty of opportunity.
When I met my cousin Finton there, he had just gotten out of the notorious “H Block” prison in Belfast. He was in his late 20s, and he claimed he was totally innocent and never should have been in jail. All he had done was move a few rifles from the Republic. “Without any weapons, how will we protect ourselves?” he asked.
Most of my other cousins found him to be a "pain in the arse." He had gotten into all sorts of scrapes all his life. And besides, he had a drinking problem. They said Finton pretended to be an IRA soldier, but he was really just a ‘"eckin’ eejit" -- someone who wasn’t disciplined enough to be a real part of the struggle.
But he had spent five years in prison, and that gave him some respect, especially with the young men in the area.
I was curious about H Block and asked Finton how he survived it.
“It was terrible at first,” he said. “I was in a tiny cell with no one I knew, and half the place was Unionist thugs prowling about looking for someone to beat up. The IRA guys were just as bad if you didn’t know them. Both sides found ways to kill informers.
I was scared out of my mind."
“What was the worst part?” I asked.
“If you were Catholic, like me, you had to follow the IRA rules, which were the opposite of prison rules. You had to refuse to work, and you could never say 'Sir' to the guards. And some of the really hard IRA guys refused prison clothing, which meant they stayed naked all the time. That was a bit much for me, but I followed the other rules.”
“How did the guards handle this?” I asked.
“Some of them were used to it. You know, just trying to earn their pay with as little hassle as possible. But this one guy really liked to take it out on me. He was on the night shift and every night as he passed my cell he would bang the bars with his little truncheon and scream at me how he would kill me if I ever made it outside the Maze. This was every night. You’d think I’d get used to it, but I never did. After a about a month of this, I was going crazy with fear and desperation.”
“So what did you do?”
“It was easy to find out who the IRA leaders were because they all had a certain look about them. Like you didn’t want to mess with those guys. But I finally got the gumption to seek one out. Turned out he was a nice guy and he sympathized with my problem. He told me, ‘Just hold on a bit more and we’ll figure something out.’
A few days later I was out in the yard when he stopped and handed me a slip of paper. It had an address on it. ‘What should I do with this?’ I asked. He smiled at me and said, 'When the feckin’ pile of shite comes by tonight, just hand it to him.'
"I couldn’t figure out how an address could solve my problem, but when the ‘feckin’ pile of shite’ came by that night, I called him over and gave it to him. He read it and he immediately changed his attitude. 'How’d you get this?' he asked.
'It’s a message,' I answered. 'from the IRA.'
“You mess with my sister and I’ll kill you,” he warned.
"So it turns out the address was for the guard’s sister and her family. And now the guard knew the IRA had the address of his family and he knew what that meant.
"All this happened at the end of my first month in H Block.
"I was never bothered again.
"Faith and begorrah!"
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“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
― William Butler Yeats
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