Reflections on the Irish Conflict: An Expository Essay

September 1978 is forever seared in my mind because it was the day I witnessed a brutal murder and it was also the day I met PTSD.  More on this later. Conflict is one of the essential ingredients of life- indeed a conflict-less existence may create a sea of stupefying apathy- whereas its excess, accentuates our personal stressors,  overwhelming us with disorientation, angst and grief. As humans we seek the optimal yin and yang, for such a balance is rather like a search for an emotional holy grail. Happily, as children we are largely self-immune from the torturous tentacles of this demon conflict, as we blissfully sleep comatose to our households’ financial worries- the nadir of the stock exchange, the “casino-like spike” of utility bills, perhaps (and fortunately, not in my case) the wounds of our parents’ dissolving marriage, the rhythm of foreign natural and human tragedies, or even (for some time at least) the tribal wars of sibling rivalry.  

However, the consensus of modern research is that childhood is not indeed the sacrosanct crucible of emotional protection so many of us have natively striven to sustain. Indeed, we now believe that even the tiny, vulnerable foetus in the mother’s womb, is surreptitiously absorbing the toxic poisons of every variety of environmental stress, augmenting any genetic or even chemical sickness that may naively be passed by mother to blastula.  

My namesake, veteran broadcaster, Joe Duffy (with distinguished fellow journalist, Freya McClements), authored the monumental Children of the Troubles. This amazing and thoughtful meta-biography tells the untold story of the children killed in the Northern Ireland conflict. A complete study, of course, should include all the child victims of this grisly conflict, including those killed in terrorists’ incidents south of the border, such as the peculiarly brutal, un-forewarned, Dublin/Monaghan bombings. It also incorporates visiting children killed on our shores, like the tragic Spanish novices of Omagh’s sickening atrocity. However, a refresh of this chillingly carnal vignette of senseless barbarity, re-inspires my own childhood recollections of the same conflict.  

Growing up perched on the apex of the border, my childhood too, was unavoidably maimed by the atrocities of all sides- aggressive soldiery from the British and Irish armies, and intrusive police officers of both jurisdictions- neither (frankly) very people-friendly. I was just too young to recognize the recondite fear agog in the sentry’s eyes, and that some of these so-called alien bombardiers, were barely adults. I too was oblivious to the aggressive condescension and subterfuge of terrorists of different nomenclatures, and the travails of a nasty, aclavistic almost primordial conflict which just seemed like a real-life incarnation of Dr Who, to the “childhood me”. As this wonderful BBC classic science-fiction re-generates David Tennant in his return as the Doctor, I look back on how these occupying, militarized bodies metamorphosized in my back yard, and in the tiny fields of my father’s farm, becoming the Daleks and Weeping Angels of my childhood.  

Often coldly de-emotionalized in camouflaged gear and lensed helmets, these legionaries might as well have been extra-terrestrials from space craft, as from any mortal land. When they did occasionally speak, their accents were so foreign to me they might as well have been Cybermen, or the Silurian or even the Sontarans of Dr Who, and their Chinooks could equally have been flying saucers, for all I as a child, understood. Even the Irish forces, often from as far away as Cork and Kerry (which could as well have been another country to me as a kid), sounded like no halberdier from my native Donegal!  

As throughout  my childhood, I was subsequently, and “ever-emotionally” looking out for these war machines, in my adult life I came to understand that bullets travel not just geographically, but temporally, and as Jack Kenny, father of child-victim, James Kennedy says, “some of these bullets never stop travelling! “ On the fatal day of 15 Aug 1969, little nine-year-old Patrick Rooney became the first child victim of this brutal conflict, one of 186 children who would die whose lives are memorialized in the Duffy/McClements interviews of over 100 families. It is impossible to describe the reside of emotional dead tissue of trauma, cruelly calcified in survivor’s minds, that, even now, decades later, so stubbornly cannot de-compose. 

They remind me of some flashes of my own intimate childhood retrospection- hearing  the bizarre double clump of the grisly Claudy bombings (a truly “cross-community” massacre of the innocents) or the horrendous scream of the massive statute of Londonderry’s Governor Walker, being unceremoniously toppled from above Derry’s Catholic Bogside (where he had stood for centuries, aloft like some gargantuan gargoyle, sternly resisting the nationalists consigned ignominiously beneath.)  Native Roman Catholics were traditionally prohibited from living in the old city or in plantation towns. Or the sombre day of wailing ambulance siren sounds of Bloody Sunday, which saw fourteen innocent victims, peacefully civil rights marching, brutally murdered by state forces in Derry.  

Even more, my own personal witness in September 1978, of dear Brian Russell, guiltless, Protestant civilian searcher, who always had a kind word for the “teenage me” as I was searched on my way to A’ Levels at “Derry Tech”. I will never forget Brian, wickedly murdered by IRA snipers, (who flaccidly apologized they were aiming solely at British Army “Redcaps”) in Derry. In my sleep I sometimes see his blood-scarred faced, partially covered by a dirty over-coat, the soldiers trying vainly to reach his stricken body as the warm blood surrounded us, refuging in the army sangar. 

However, if I must speak of conflict, I reflect in childhood memory rather on its converse-  (the seemingly exotic) portrait of a young and beautiful, freshly coronated, Queen Elizabeth II, (now sadly passed from us) which hung likes some foreign treasure, in the porch of our resolutely Ulster-Scots and Protestant neighbours. And I am comforted that my family never regarded these fellow and kindred Donegal people as usurping planters, for as father used to say, “at some point in history our ancestors were likely all planters of some kind, we probably all out-bid or out-manoeuvred ourselves unto somebody’s little farm…and we are short enough alive on this earth not to treat everyone with the dignity they deserve. Please, children, always egregiously respect human life, although the farm animals in our field often times show more natural compassion than those who misleadingly call themselves humans!”

You are gone Brian but your memory is still here with me, and with it the troublesome ghost of PTSD. Can I exchange your goodness for the apparition which comes to me, fatigued at night? Is there a way to preserve your well-intended public service while banishing from my night thoughts, the sickness of that traumatic afternoon in Derry? My night landscape is forever haunted by that gruesome second. Your shadow inhabits my sleeping landscape like some ghoul at the foot of the bed. Can I (somehow) enunciate that which was noble about your time on earth, while extricating the evil of your death? 

If I cannot, I am condemned to re-live your passing like a sickly horror movie- caught forever in freeze-frame. The flicker of your dying body stalks my mind in forensic filmography. It replays that terrible moment and robs me of peace. You had the sudden terminus of ballistics, while I have the long death of PTSD. On that day we both suffered entombment. You lost your mortal life. I endured the theft of my teenage innocence. Somehow, in my unconscious thoughts, I am always a teenager transfixed in the frenzied wild-eyed camera of that day.

Dear Brian

I hope you’ve reached the very Heaven my dear mother and father were convinced of, and where they thoroughly merited a plush, chic, mid-town address. We trust you are as happy as them and blissfully at peace. You deserve recompense for the callous atrocity you endured. It is the 28 September 1978. It is 3.35pm and I am on my way to “Derry Tech” where I’m eagerly doing my A’ Levels, and hoping to launch-pad an exciting college life. I’m bored by the miniscule picturesqueness of an Arnsberg and Kimballesque village, a typical rural Irish childhood.

Even the deceptively bigger lights of an otherwise lugubrious Derry City, have me agog! I’ve long felt suffocated by the predictable, dull sameness of our little hamlet in the Donegal foothills. The mixed religions of a Technical College feel somehow like “forbidden fruit”. The few Protestants I had known before were the aloof, shy, elderly Presbyterian crofters near my father’s little farm. In Derry my newfound pals- impressively out-going Methodists and Anglicans from places like Sion Mills, Eglington and Kilfennan are intriguingly alien, alluringly bold and different. I even know an Indian girl at college whose parents came over from Calcutta and now own a clothing emporium. The Troubles have also cast a sombre, foreboding, funereal gloom over everyone, and I’m aching with the excitement of moving on.  We young folks had no time for old men’s wars.

It was a day ostensibly like any other that was swiftly to prove a day, resembling no other. At that moment in the vacant street near Wellworth’s Supermarket, everything was reassuringly the same, but in that split second, it could never be the same again. I remember a single shot, but then (a teenage kid) my ballistics lexicon derived lackadaisically from Cowboy movies. I slumped instinctively unto wet pavement. My ears hurt and yet the bullet seemed more of a muffle than a barrage. I heard the frightened soldier’s shout. Somebody said, “the  fucking shooters still up there”.

It seemed to take an age for help to arrive. When it did,  sirens blaring, led by a Saracen Army Ambulance, far from pacifying us, they were like an inquisitorial Gestapo. As a teenager, I little knew that immediate bystanders were predictably,  law-enforcement’s prime suspects. Those already at the scene were automatically,  “potential accessories to crime”. A well-dressed man with a posh English accent came from nowhere and fired questions at us, unambiguously as “the accused”. Frightened looking, youthful soldiers, held their guns in our faces. I could smell gunshot residue and oil. I could barely catch my breath and (as I recovered some dignity) I could see my hand bleeding from the serrated surfaces of the military hangar. I feared I was going to be arrested and manhandled away in handcuffs. It was the death of teenage innocence.

How can I talk so glibly about the last day of your thirty fleeting years on this lonely planet? You were no saint and this is no hagiography. Reading between the lines- your politics- or maybe your naïve adolescent behaviour (untrusty or incognito) - did not even meet the allegedly un-exacting standards of army reservists. Allegedly, you proved unsuitable, even upon the precursory scrutiny of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR.) These local part-time soldiers, almost exclusively Protestant, were the military equivalent of the “B Specials”. That infamous sectarian reserve police force, hastily recruited and shabbily trained, filled the gaps in the drip-effect of “troubles” casualties of fatalities and injuries, in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

It is always maintained by nationalists and republicans, that this force was bigoted and biased against Roman Catholics from its inception, and that the UDR and the “Specials” were the worst of all. In juxtaposition, many boys, like myself found an unexpected but colloquial decency from these kindred Ulster securocrats, while (typically) mostly British soldiers spat racist insults at us. Honestly, if we had to be searched, we’d far rather endure a plain-spoken Ulster Prod than a cocky “soldier Brit”. I remember you Brian, and you seemed a decent sort. Of course, we knew you were Protestant- what Catholic would take a security job at the height of “the troubles”?

Well to be fair, the auxiliary military and policing system was created at the very inception of Northern Ireland, to maintain state security. How else would it not be implicitly biased, if its objective was to help protect a political entity, Catholics largely despised? Its avowed purpose (after all) was to maintain law and order in a statelet in which most Catholics felt imprisoned. It implicitly blocked their rather messianic aspiration for a united Ireland, brim-full of promised milk and honey? Then Brian, there is your strong association with the Orange Order (formed in rural Ulster to defend Protestants against a perceived marauding threat of native Irish Papists) and, of the Black Preceptory (an elite wing of this same sectarian fraternity) and who were the most conspicuous official mourners at your so tragic funeral.

To Catholics of course these loyal orders might as well be the notorious KKK of white separatist USA who tortured the liberated black slaves, and helped imbed racism in the kernel of a supposedly equitable American way of life. We thought of them only with repugnance, as the ANC did Terblanche’s Fascist Afrikaners. Unlike the KKK, the Northern Irish state actually celebrates and attributes official status to what most Catholics perceive as a “dad’s army” of sectarian cranks. The Northern Ireland Office allows them to march publicly across the territory of Northern Ireland, albeit now only on certain designated routes and days (and contentiously regulated by a Parades Commission.) Most Catholics still regard such marches as a gesture of primeval triumphalism. I know enough from my Donegal roots that for most Protestants, Orangeism is just a family tradition- not a schismatic fetish. Moreover, with virtually no Masonic Orders in Northern Ireland, Orangeism is one of the few social boltholes for a preponderantly Protestant and male police.

To people who believe Orangeism is just recusant bigotry (as most republicans do) there is little point in saying that, to many, the same orders are also a quasi-devotional, humanitarian body which raises millions for charities every year. But this is only a mere footnote in my canonical epistle to you Brian, for what I really and only want to say is, like the thousands of other murders in this brutal conflict, you never deserved to die. Ultimately, and perhaps unwittingly, and with few economic alternatives, you became a kind of security operative. Once blemished by a short-lived UDR sojourn, you had few other career choices. That fatal decision to continue as a quasi-securocrat, unfairly put you in the line of fire. Forced by job-scarcity and the fiscal bleakness of rural Ulster, you had so few other chances. The state effectively marched you out to the IRA firing-line. You thought it was safer than the UDR, and faced only with the dole, instead, signed your own death certificate.

Being a “civilian-searcher” was explicitly high-risk, because they operated out of RUC barracks, and (so supposedly) collaborated intimately with authority. Ostensibly, they were permitted information on warrants for arrest, for example, so they could assist the police tracking fugitives. For the same reason, in those days, we did not even have Catholic traffic wardens. Catholics would probably look at your record and say there were rumours of sectarianism. Because of your Orange credentials this was mentioned in the news at the time. That analogy is a prejudice associated with Orangeism that I would readily disprove in the case of my farmer neighbours- devout Christians and life-long Orange Brethren, who offended no-one, and honestly wouldn’t hurt a fly. I saw no evidence that you were in any way biased. You were kind, courteous, even-handed, friendly. If one was checked passing the city centre, we far rather chatted to you than the army who would frisk you like you had leprosy and say, “Now Fuck-off, dirty Paddies.”

But who of us is free of fault, authentically guiltless, assuredly innocent  or snow white and pristine? What gives us any right to make ourselves executioner of a fellow human or even a humble beast of the field? So forever more, my own personal witness in September 1978, is of you,  Brian Russell- guiltless, Protestant civilian searcher, who always had a kind word for the “teenage me” as I was searched daily en route to college. I will never forget you  Brian, wickedly murdered by IRA snipers, (who flaccidly apologized they were aiming solely at British Army “Redcaps”) in Derry or Londonderry (probably your nomenclature of choice.)

What comfort those empty terrorist platitudes to your wife and two tiny kids, your parents and extended family! In my sleep I sometimes see your blood-scarred faced, partially covered by a dirty over-coat, the soldiers trying vainly to reach your stricken body, as the warm blood trickles towards us, refuging in the army sangar. In shock, I can almost feel a heightened sense of smell and sound, and the world around me seems crazy. It is like a scene from Apocalypse Now and I hear a whirling helicopter above and think I’m dead and it must be Vietnam.

On that day your blood first softly spattered the pavement, but weirdly little, less than the clean butchering of an old sow on my uncle’s pig farm. Shamefully I thought of Heinz Beanz and Spaghetti Westerns. My mind was a whirl of thoughts, gyrating around like a child’s wobbly toy, so my head could not settle. When I calmed down, the street previously awesomely quiet, was now mad, with people running in all directions, and army frantically raiding shops across the adjacent  “convenience’s square”. I remembered William Street was often called “Lavatory Street” after its public toilets closed for good. The troops concluded a sniper had got unto a high-point across from Wellworths. Their hysterical shouting in shrill British tones, revisits me in my dreams. My headspace vacillates from a crude image of your sunken shape on the ground, and this frenzied invader army’s follow-up. Sometimes I see your bloodied torso at the foot of my bed, and when I become conscious, I have to will this unwelcome intrusion away. I think of your sacrifice. My personal, incessant PTSD horror movie, on loop. No way to press stop.

That day is forever seared in my mind like blood-red rain, spitting across tarmacadam. Yet when I got over my shock, I could see that the plasma volume was surprisingly sparse, and the palette oozing from you, an ominous, saturnine haemoglobin. A single loud bang, yet not high-pitched. The human ear instinctively swaddling the sound to protect the ear-drum, and yet I could feel the cochlea pop. In one fatal, well-aimed shot, the terrorist sniper claimed your life as a sadistic kill and plunged your family into a life-time’s grief. Such is the legacy of aclavistic conflict, and yet the state sought to label these events a mere domestic contingency. On that day, I found the crime scene as forensically brutal as any hunting safari. You were the innocent prey.

However, if I must speak of conflict, I reflect in childhood memory rather on its converse. I conceptualize (to my child’s mind) the seemingly exotic portrait of a young and beautiful, freshly coronated, Queen Elizabeth II (sadly passed from us.) It hung likes some foreign treasure, in the porch of our resolutely Ulster-Scots neighbours. It would equally have done so at your family’s hearthside Brian, as a member of the exuberantly royalist, “loyal orders”. And I am comforted (Brian) that my family never regarded our fellow and kindred Donegal people, as usurping planters. Which one of us is responsible for all the evils of history, Ulster or Gael, native or newcomer? As dad used to say, “at some point in history our ancestors were likely all planters of some kind, we probably all out-bid or out-manoeuvred ourselves unto somebody’s little farm…and we are short enough alive on this earth not to treat everyone with the dignity they deserve…”

So, Brian, when I think of your dying body, desperately manipulated hours in vain, by doctors at Altnagelvin Hospital, until the last tincture of pulse had drained away, I remember my dear father. With each conflict atrocity he’d urge us,  “Please, children, always egregiously respect human life, although our farm animals oftentimes show more natural compassion than those who misleadingly call themselves humans!”  In the toledot of heaven and earth, violent perpetrators bring shame to the very Septuagint of anyone’s faith. And so, I decry your brutal public execution, Brian. I truly hope we will all meet again in my beloved late parent’s heaven, that will celebrate the innocent, forgive the guilty and condemn such androphene brutality, from all the woebegone corners of the world. 

NOTES

·        This is the tragic story of a civilian searcher murdered by the IRA while he carried out security duties supervised by the British Army in Derry, in 1978. A heart-felt piece like this, and even a photograph already in the public domain, nevertheless contains the potential to unintentionally re-traumatise its victims. Therefore, I apologise, in advance, for any unintended hurt. In this creative writing exercise at Cambridge, this short essay will only be circulated for the purposes of peer learning and critical review among the embedded class participants and expert tutors.

·        This essay is intended as a component of a much larger future piece of writing. The author conducted between 1986-2022 over 300 victimologies of victims and survivors of the Irish conflict, running to over 600 hours of interviews. These form the Martin Duffy Collection at National Museums, Northern Ireland. Parts of the collection have been digitalized under the British Library, “Saving our Sound” Collection.

·        This photograph was provided by the victim’s family to feature in the Belfast Child Collection. The nomenclature and inscription were made by the authors of that Collection.