Partition dominated the experience of northern nationalists in the
20th century. Danny Morrison looks back on how 30 years of struggle
brought about change and eventually empowered nationalists and
republicans
My Uncle Harry, reminiscing to me many years before his death, told me
a story about the time he was on the run in Belfast in the 1940s. One
of the safe houses he stayed in belonged to a republican sympathiser
from Sandy Row who was in the RUC. One morning, in the early hours, he
was disturbed by the noise of a squad car suddenly pulling up outside.
He immediately jumped out of bed and pulled on his pants. He was
climbing out the window when the door burst open and there stood a
breathless RUC man, his host, who was on night duty.
He could hardly contain himself with laughter.
``Guess what, Harry! I just had to call in and tell you! We're on our
way over to the Falls to raid for you!''
The story now sounds apocryphal, but so many fantastic things have
happened down the years since, half of which can never be told, that
one never knows. It appealed to me because it had all the ingredients
of a noble story: the hero on the run in a dark age, battling for
freedom against incredible odds, finding sanctuary with the enemy who
turns out not to be an enemy after all but an honorable and brave
human being with a sense of humour. If only more RUC men were like
that, I thought, rather naïvely. But one quickly grows up at the end
of an RUC man's baton, quickly loses one's romantic view of human
nature.
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That silly mantra of unionists - Sinn Féin/IRA - has come home to
haunt them because it lends to only one interpretation - the
guerrillas fought and now the guerrillas, not just Fenians, are about
the place and in government. This attitude of unionism still has the
potential to bring down the Agreement but cannot alter the fact that
this is the endgame
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Even though I was born in the early fifties, my sense of an age or
period considerably predates that. From listening to one's parents,
aunts and uncles you felt as if you knew what the blitz had been like
or the rationing. Names like Rocky Burns and Tom Williams were spoken
of with awe and admiration, even by people who didn't believe in the
IRA but who still subscribed to a view of history called the
nationalist experience. The McMahon killings, the pogroms of the
1920s, were as if recent memories. And there was always a climate of
fear, which suited those in power as it meant they only had to resort
to some actual violence occasionally.
As nationalists saw it, they were born into the Black North because of
partition, because of the Truce and Treaty. They were losers. Their
votes meant nothing. In the eyes of the state, a céilidh dance was a
suspicious gathering, and a hurling stick looked very like an IRA
rifle. If you had any sense you'd get out - or, in the fifties and
sixties, get an education, then get out.
We were the fourth green field, still in bondage and we pined for
justice. The proudest date was Easter 1916, when Irish men and women
once again rose against British rule and restored pride and dignity.
The Tan War period was viewed heroically (the more inglorious actions
being glossed over). I could never get to grips with the politics of
the civil war, and for many years I foolishly thought it had been
fought over the single issue of partition! Like most republicans from
the Six Counties, I viewed the South - which I derisively called the
Free State - with ambivalence, trying to separate the good people from
the bad state. My Uncle Harry, who lived in Dublin, cursed the guards
in Irish because he thought that the greater insult.
The common people of the South were our natural allies, if only we
could get through to them. Weaving in and out of the history of their
state was the story of the IRA. Men and women who believed in the
Republic as proclaimed. Killing and dying. Going to jail for their
political convictions. Maintaining structures. Passing on the torch of
resistance. It was they and their comrades in the North who inspired
the reorganisation demanded by the bloody events of August 1969.
Out of the pogroms of 1969, the denial of civil rights and state
repression, came the armed struggle. Came 30 years of conflict, packed
with narrative but with the true stories coming in second to
government lies. Remember them? The Derry marchers with nail-bombs in
their pockets; detainees puncturing their own eardrums; unarmed
Volunteers going for their guns whilst crashing RUC checkpoints; Sinn
Féin intimidating people to vote for it!
Probably the biggest hypocrites and greatest fools to have emerged
over the past three decades have been that little coterie of
revisionist journalists and historians who cannot spot the simplest
contradiction in their own position. Attacking Irish nationalism for
its alleged narrow-mindedness and sectarianism, they actually served
only to encourage those very vices, self-righteousness and
intransigence within unionism. The revisionists provided not one
answer to the problem. As the critic Denis Donoghue noted of such
people: ``Nationalism is a fine flower, so long as it grows in Israel,
Tibet, Poland, and Lithuania.''
But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, in this case,
the unionist cause with their waffling apologists in the `Sunday
Times' and `Indo'. This country belongs to unionists and nationalists
alike; but from the unionist perspective, the IRA waged a ferocious
campaign the magnitude of which was out of all proportion to any sense
of injustice nationalists could possibly have felt. The IRA destroyed
their towns and killed their sons and daughters who wore the uniforms
of the RUC and UDR.
Republicans, not surprisingly, view the struggle differently, as
mainly a 30-year story of a community's endurance in the light of
state terror and assassination. A story of the courage, sacrifice and
suffering of supporters and Volunteers alike; about life on the run or
on active service against a superior enemy; long-term imprisonment;
dramatic prison escapes; hunger strikes to the death; arms smuggling
under the noses of superpowers; intifadas; street protest movements.
And the remarkable story of the survival, rise and success of Sinn
Féin.
The republican struggle has given nationalists a palpable
self-confidence for the first time since 1921. And the versatility of
the Republican Movement, its decisiveness and daringness in going for
the Good Friday Agreement, this major, but incomplete breakthrough,
has changed the dynamics of politics on this island.
That silly mantra of unionists - Sinn Féin/IRA - has come home to
haunt them because it lends to only one interpretation - the
guerrillas fought and now the guerrillas, not just Fenians, are about
the place and in government. This attitude of unionism still has the
potential to bring down the Agreement but cannot alter the fact that
this is the endgame.
Regrettably, along the road, some comrades, beginning with the 1986
ard fheis, dissented from majority opinion in the Movement over
differences in strategy and principle, later the cease-fire and the
way forward. By the time they come around to recognising the changed
circumstances it may be too late for some of their activists. Yet if
we republicans are to successfully draw a line through the past, we
must also be concerned for the release of the last of the political
prisoners.
One summer evening in 1973, myself and Seando Moore (`The Child' as he
was aptly nick-named) were walking around our Cage in Long Kesh. We
were having a light-hearted yarn after having just come from a long,
boring political meeting. Seando suddenly stopped, looked at me and
said half-satirically, ``And what do you think, Dan, of a
Thirty-Two-County, Democratic, Socialist Republic!''
``That would be wonderful,'' I replied.
d so it would, I still think after all these years.
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