for everyone who was separated from their families at Christmas. We all bowed our heads and said our prayers; but secretly, year after year, I prayed selfishly and most fervently that my family and friends would stay safe, and that it would all be over soon. The last lines of my ‘Notes from 1971‘ entry reminded me of the bleakness of that Christmas:
This Christmas Day was celebrated by the internees with a hunger-strike, by people in Andersonstown keeping a 24-hour fast outside the church, by 4,000 people who gave up their homes on Christmas Day to defy the army and to walk 10 miles to Long Kesh – and by 14,000 British soldiers, separated from their families to keep a riot-torn city at peace, for as long as is possible here.
Not long after my sixteenth birthday, and within weeks of internment being introduced, I made up my mind that I was going to ‘break out of it all’ and get a taste – if only for a month or so – of the world I glimpsed through the pages of Jackie. I wanted to go somewhere bright, sunny and normal; somewhere with no explosions, no bomb scares and no one getting shot. Neither I nor anyone in my family had ever been on a plane or gone to a country where English wasn’t the first language but that didn’t deter me; if anything, it encouraged and excited me.
When my friend Suzette, who was a student nurse and lived nearby, presented me with a new diary for Christmas, I resolved to be faithful to it. I looked forward to 1972 being my year: I would turn 17, get a part-time job, be transformed from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan and finally find romance, travel and a promising new future.
End-of-year news programmes reminded us sombrely that 150 people had died violently since internment was introduced five months earlier. Naïvely, though, and with the optimism of a schoolgirl who had nobody belonging to her killed or in jail, I was convinced that Northern Ireland would soon settle down and the bloodshed stop.
Even in the bleakest moments of the autumn and winter of 1971, I could not have envisaged the violent depths into which our society was about to plunge headlong. I could not have foreseen the catastrophic repercussions of events like Bloody Sunday. In my political ignorance, I would never have dreamed that within a few months the Unionist-controlled Northern Ireland Government would be replaced with Direct Rule by the British Government at Westminster.
I stayed true to my diary, however, and recorded diligently, with just a few exceptions, my days and nights during what turned out to be the bloodiest year of Northern Ireland’s notorious Troubles. The account I unearthed after almost 40 years is not a history: it is the diary of a 16-year-old schoolgirl, woven through with her teenage hopes and fears. The savagery it evokes shocks and appals me, as does its evidence of how speedily and easily a society can violently implode.
It teaches me that the passage of time may soften the stark images and dull the strident sounds of our violent history. It can allow the ‘truth’ about our past to be distorted. My diary, though, is unsparing. With its brutal candour, it has proved more trustworthy than memory.
CHAPTER 1
‘Wish something big would hurry up and happen.’
‘Happy New Year, everybody! Happy New Year!’ As the clocks struck midnight, my parents and I joined friends in a house not far from our own in West Belfast and celebrated being alive. Two doors away from our own home was about as far as we dared to venture.
As the adults clinked glasses ‘To 1972!’, the bombers heralded the start of another year in a way with which we were becoming all too familiar. ‘Happy New Year, Belfast,’ indeed.
Sat, Jan 1 – New Year’s Day
Had arranged to go to Dublin for the day with Suzette and got the 8.00 a.m. train. Had a great day there – an atmosphere of freedom and light-heartedness, completely opposite to the atmosphere of death and fear we left behind us.
We welcomed New Year in down in McGlade’s and it came in with a bang! Eight explosions rocked the town between midnight and 12.15 ...
Aunt Jo telephoned to say she was coming tomorrow – something to brighten up the day. Washed my hair and spent the night playing Cluedo by the fire.
Only one explosion tonight – reported as a quiet night.
Sun, Jan 2
Auntie Jo, Uncle Jim and family came down from Navan and we persuaded them to stay overnight. Huge Civil Rights Association march planned today to Falls Park. (Ban on marches until February). Daddy and Uncle Jim accompanied it. When it reached the barracks, negotiated with the army – and marchers walked by on the pavement. Estimated crowd of 3,000–5,000.
Murky day and we decided to go to have a look at Long Kesh. About 9 miles outside Belfast.
Very desolate countryside – terrible atmosphere of loneliness and security surrounded the camp. We couldn’t see the actual cages – approximately 2 miles inside the main gates.
At the moment, it is 2.00 a.m. Just going to bed – very conscious of military activity up and down Fruithill Park. Puzzled by this because it is unusual in our street.
We were lucky. A row of sedate, solid houses with mature well-kept gardens lined each side of ‘our street’ as it climbed up gently from the busy Andersonstown Road, the main thoroughfare through nationalist West Belfast. On the crest of the rise, the street appeared to merge with the grassy, lower slopes of Divis Mountain, one in the chain of hills that border that part of Belfast. Although right in the heart of a nationalist area, which was seldom out of the news, Fruithill was relatively insulated from the turmoil that was steadily encroaching on the sprawling housing estates all around us.
Internment had changed all our lives and few nationalist districts escaped the violent reaction to its introduction the previous August. It was impossible for anyone going about their daily business in the west of the city to avoid the strife and unrest that had begun to consume the area: the shooting, rioting, stone-throwing, hijackings and burnings.
Although she had lived in Belfast for nearly 20 years, my mother, Maura, was a relative stranger to such a troubled environment, having been reared in the rural tranquillity of the Cooley Peninsula, across the border in the Republic. She met and fell in love with my Falls Road-born father, Jim, while they were working together in the Civil Service in industrial, post-war Belfast. They spent all their married life in Andersonstown, 50 miles and a cultural world away from her family home on the southern side of the magnificent, fjord-like Carlingford Lough.
Over the space of ten years my parents had five children: me first, followed at regular intervals by my four brothers: John, Aidan, Jim and finally Paul. The rest of my mother’s family – her parents, four sisters and one brother, Seamus – all remained in the South. The youngest, Briege, became a nun, joining the Convent of Mercy in Dundalk in the week my mother married. The other sisters left Cooley and reared families in Sligo, Dun Laoghaire and Navan. As the situation in the North deteriorated, they grew understandably more and more reluctant to visit us.
On one of those seemingly interminable days that follow Christmas, we were glad to have her second youngest sister, Jo, and family visiting from across the border in County Meath. I hadn’t seen real daylight since I woke, as a sullen, grey sky hung low and heavy over Belfast. The Christmas decorations, already losing their sheen, looked jaded and out of place but Catholic tradition dictated that we should wait until 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, before taking them down.
Our
