Belfast Days. Eimear O’Callaghan

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he received my manuscript. Conor, Lisa Hyde and Maria McGuinness have earned my deepest gratitude for all they have done to make this book the best it can be.

      My dear friend and long-suffering colleague Paul McFadden accompanied me on each step of this journey, reading and re-reading every line of each page. He restored my faith in the book when my belief faltered. For his endurance, judgement and candour, I am forever in his debt.

      Finally, and most importantly, I have to thank my family. I will always be grateful to my parents, Jim and Maura, for loving and protecting my brothers and me during the darkest days of Northern Ireland’s history and for encouraging in me a love of the written word.

      This book would not have been possible without the enduring love and support of my husband, Paul McElhone, and our next generation, Maura, Paul and Orla, of whom I am so proud. Thank you all for waiting on me patiently through long days and late nights. A special thanks, too, to our old dog Dustin for keeping me company when the others went to bed.

      Thank you all for convincing me I could finish the book and for being a daily reminder of why it matters.

      The events in this book are recorded as the young diarist learned about them, and any inaccuracies are due to the turmoil of the times. In two cases names have been changed.

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      ‘Prayer is our only hope, seeing we haven’t got a gun!’

      It was in June 2010 – just days before the British Prime Minister delivered the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry – when I stumbled across my old diary, stuffed into a battered briefcase in a spare-room wardrobe. The spine of the journal was faded and frayed, its well-thumbed pages grown dull with the passage of time. The edges of the six glossy, paper butterflies which I pasted on to its cover as a teenager were beginning to curl up and crack, but their colour was as vivid as when they first caught my eye four decades earlier.

      I was shocked by the terror which cried out at me from the squiggly handwriting on the page where my record of 1972 happened to fall open: ‘May 30 ... Came to bed convinced that prayer is our only hope, seeing we haven’t got a gun!

      The spidery, childish handwriting in faded blue ink stopped me in my tracks. What, in God’s name, was going on in my 16-year-old mind that made me even think about having a weapon? I couldn’t turn a gun on anyone, even if my life depended on it. Yet in West Belfast in 1972 – as a skinny, timid, Catholic teenager, with big, curly, ‘70s hair – I was confiding to my diary that prayer was the second-best option.

      If we had been relying on my prayers to save us back then, God help us. I was just a month short of my seventeenth birthday when I penned that desperate entry in my red Collins notebook. I had seldom resorted to prayer except when pleading to St Joseph of Cupertino for help in my O-Level exams the previous summer:

      O Great St Joseph of Cupertino, who while on earth did obtain from God the grace to be asked at your examination only the questions you knew, obtain for me a like favour in the examinations for which I am now preparing ... St Joseph of Cupertino, pray for us. Amen.

      I was a sixth year pupil at St Dominic’s – Belfast’s largest Catholic girls’ grammar school – where academic success was all-important. My classmates and I used to pass the grubby, dog-eared prayer to St Joseph between us at exam-times – a picture of ‘the flying saint’ in religious ecstasy on one side, the miraculous prayer on the other – since part of the deal we agreed with the saint was ‘to make you known and cause you to be invoked ...’.

      By the late spring of 1972, I would have made any deal God wanted so long as He protected us from the horror which began enveloping Northern Ireland after the Stormont government introduced internment the previous August. I said more prayers and made more promises to ‘the Man above’ in the first five months of 1972 than in all my previous sixteen and a half years. I kept on praying throughout the summer, into the autumn and all through the winter as violence escalated to a level which would remain unparalleled in the 30 years of ‘the Troubles’.

      As curiosity subsequently lured me deeper into the diary, I sought out with interest my entry on Bloody Sunday, that awful day in January when members of 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen civil rights marchers in Derry. I turned back to the first page and embarked on a journey of rediscovery which would gradually explain my teenage desperation in over two hundred scribbled pages.

      Notes from 1971: December 25th 1971

       On looking back over the past year it is very difficult for anyone not to be filled with a great sense of sorrow, pity and failure. Sorrow, because of the great amount of damage and pain which has been brought to Northern Ireland during 1971 as a result of a long period of injustice and oppression, by a section of our community.

       Pity for the families of those people who have lost their lives through shooting and bombing, and pity for the 500 families who spent this Christmas Day without fathers and brothers, because they have been imprisoned without trial in Long Kesh and Crumlin Road internment camps. Internment was introduced into this part of the United Kingdom by Brian Faulkner on August 9, 1971 and its results were tragic ...

      By the time my O-Levels came around in the summer of 1971, Northern Ireland’s political foundations were shaking. The mainly nationalist clamour for civil rights, which first manifested itself on the streets in the late 1960s, had unnerved the unionist majority, leaving many of them fearful of being coerced into a United Ireland. Vicious sectarian clashes between Belfast’s Protestant and Catholic communities became commonplace. The British Army, which had been welcomed into Catholic areas in 1969, was by then the target of an increasingly ferocious IRA campaign – and met fire with fire.

      Declaring in August that Northern Ireland was ‘quite simply at war with the terrorist’, the Unionist Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, invoked the Special Powers Act and granted security forces the power to arrest and detain people indefinitely without trial. His decision to introduce internment proved to be disastrous, fanning the flames of republican aggression rather than quelling them. In the two years before detention without trial, fewer than 80 people were killed. By the time I started keeping my diary – just five months later – the death toll had risen to 230.

      With growing bewilderment I started to read the pages of my rediscovered journal, some crammed with entries scribbled hastily in biro, others crafted neatly with my treasured Sheaffer fountain pen. I slowly began recalling the solitary hours I would spend filling out line after line in my eight-by-ten foot square bedroom. But the words and sentiments belonged to a person, place and time I no longer recognised.

      On the first page, in the top left-hand corner, I had written ‘Received from Suzette, Christmas 1971’, alongside my name and address. My parents christened me, the eldest of their five children and their only daughter, with the ancient Irish name, Eimear. They loved the sound of it and its origins in the Celtic myths and legends associated with Cooley, my mother’s birthplace in the Republic.

      The years have given me the confidence to appreciate and even be proud of my name but I can still feel, as though it was yesterday, how the colour would rise in my cheeks, and my mouth would start to dry, as I waited my turn to introduce myself to a group of strangers. Even with new teachers at the start of term in St. Dominic’s, the conversation was usually the same:

      ‘And what’s your name?’

      ‘Eimear.’

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