Memories

Sectarian Violence in Belfast

Those Darkening Days

When I was young an aunt told me about a troubled time in Belfast years before, with gunmen shooting down the streets. She died in 1968 and had she lived another year she would have experienced the outbreak of far greater violence.

In August 1969 my wife and I were over on a visit from our home in Edinburgh, where we had lived for somewhat less than two years. There had been rioting in the Bogside area of Londonderry and the violence now spread to Belfast.

I saw a factory near the Catholic Falls Road that had been set ablaze, and the next night Protestant rioters set fire to many Catholic owned pubs. Mobs also attacked Catholic houses and set fire to them.

Standing outside my father's house I could count the fires of seven burning pubs. Two were just yards away on opposite sides of a nearby street and I took a picture of them.

I often then did some driving for my father when I was over on holiday. On this occasion I picked up guests for an early morning Catholic wedding. To get into their housing estate, I had to negotiate barricades that had been built across streets. The sense of fear was palpable.

On a subsequent visit to Belfast I drove the firm's van to deliver wreaths for a funeral in the Catholic Ardoyne estate at the top of the Crumlin Road. I could see people observing me and one tall young man in particular stood and watched with suspicion as I delivered the flowers.

I was in Belfast again when Internment was introduced in August 1971, and soon afterwards I described my experience in a letter* to my sister. It was a policy with which I agreed at the time but subsequently came to seriously doubt. The Maze prison where the IRA members were interned without trial became a source of grievance and a symbol of resistance.

In addition to the personal events I describe in my letter, another event that same autumn that moved me deeply was the shooting of a child in the Falls Road area of the city. The shot that killed little Angela Gallagher was a ricochet from a bullet intended for a soldier. After watching the funeral on television and seeing the father with the small coffin, I wrote a poem as some release for my feelings**.

On 21st July 1972*** violence came close to our own family circle. A large IRA car bomb was placed near a fruit and vegetable shop on the Upper Cavehill Road where my sister-in-law worked. A fourteen year old boy called Stephen Parker, the son of a Church of Ireland minister, ran in to warn them and then out again. The bomb went off and he was killed. The owner of the shop was badly injured and died about a year later.

My sister-in-law was also quite badly hurt. Her injuries would have been more serious had not the shop counter sheltered her from the worst of the blast.

* See 'Threatened' above.
** See 'Buried Innocence' in 'Poems of Youth and Age'.
*** This became known as Bloody Friday. Twenty two bombs were placed around Belfast killing 9 people and seriously injuring one hundred and thirty.