Pete Hamill on Northern Ireland, Mother Jones 1999


With any luck, the 17th century has finally ended in Northern Ireland. There may be some isolated killings, driven by motives of personal vengeance or unforgiven sins. With any luck, such acts will be confined to relatives only, not driven by the mandates of shadowy organizations. There might be quarrels over old grievances that spill out of pubs or playing fields. In the human race, stupidity dies hard. But if luck holds, and common sense, day by day, asserts its dominion, there will be no more killings driven by history.

For in the North, history is a curse. When I first went there in 1963, a son of Catholic parents born in Belfast, I was engulfed by the warmth of family, of laughter, of songs and pubs and the lore and legends of neighborhoods. I had known people like these (and Catholics and Protestants mixed together in the places where I went) since I was a boy in Brooklyn. My father, Billy Hamill, was with me, home from America for the first time in 28 years in America, and I met his twin brother, Frank, who had stayed behind, and men with whom he’d played soccer, including the novelist Michael McLaverty.

But after a few days, I began to sense the continued presence of another template. The older Catholics lived with memories of pogroms, marring recent history in the 1920s and 1930s; the Protestants I met insisted that such sectarian craziness was part of the dreadful past. But both worried about the emergence of a fundamentalist preacher named Ian Paisley, who was reviving the old hate-drenched bombast. Whore of Babylon.
Mobs back on streets. No IRA. Officials. On May 7, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (newly created at a meeting in the Standard Bar on the Shankill Road) tried to petrol bomb a “Catholic” pub near the Shankill. Instead, the petrol bomb landed in the home of an elderly woman named Martha Gould, burning her to death. She was a Protestant. On May 27, a Catholic was shot and killed. John Scullion, not an IRA man. Then on June 26, three Catholics shot, md one, Peter Ward, died of his wounds. Three men arrested and convicted. One, Hugh McClean, said: “I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him.” Di was cast. with But behind all that surface

The crucial year was 1966, and again, the past made its dreadul presence felt. There were two 50-year anniversaries: of the Easter Rising in Dublin and of the battle of the Somme.