Fenian memories of a British failure

Dear reader, I know exactly where I was fifty years ago today.

The 13-year-old me was on a Doig’s Tours bus with my late mother heading into Belfast.

The Burns and Laird boat to Dublin had been discontinued, so we had to travel via Larne.

My mother reckoned that going on a Monday would be quieter given that it was still the drum banging season in Narne Arne.

Obviously, Bridget had not been in the loop about Operation Demetrius!

By the time the coach arrived in Béal Feirste, the place looked like an uprising was happening.

It was.

Beware a risen people.

Just sayin.

The Brits said that the objective of the internment swoop was to “ flush out the IRA”.

Well, it certainly worked because the Óglaigh had been flushed out onto the streets, and they were shooting at the British Army!

Indeed, by the time that bus with a Tricolour emblazoned on that side had passed Gallaher’s tobacco factory, the nationalist areas were smoking.

Dear reader, this was the era of Brigadier Frank Kitson.

The counter-insurgency guru was the main man in Belfast in 1971.

His colonial war theories were being put into practice to quell the natives of Ballymurphy and New Lodge.

It was a SAS strategy: Slaughter And Slander: The Ballymurphy Massacre, McGurk’s pub bombing and Bloody Sunday in Derry are only a few examples of his theorising in action.

The men who were scooped up that day were beaten and abused by the Brits.

A  few “guinea pigs” were selected to be subjects in a torture experiment.

Of course, only those at the heart of the British state would have known about that as hundreds of Irishmen were being rounded up that day across the Six Countries.

My mother and I made it to Dublin and got onto the train at the station named after Seán Heuston.

It was a clue to an earlier chapter in our island story.

The final destination was Westport, the father’s town.

Herself was there to meet us at the station.

During the Tan War, her husband had carried dispatches on the same railway line up to Dublin.

The destination of these vital comms was GHQ IRA and this fella.

Every dispatch was a potential death sentence if he had been discovered by the Tans.

The only reason that this Fenian exists is that my grandfather was too clever for the Brits.

During that two week holiday, I noticed that my grandmother never missed an RTE radio news bulletin.

They were dispatches from the frontline, and she needed to know every single detail of what was going on in the North.

An aul fella came to the house one night to discuss the situation with herself.

Her nosey grandson was introduced to the man as the only child of her deceased firstborn.

As I recall, I was asked if I liked school in Scotland.

I told him that I didn’t.

My hair was ruffled, and I was duly dismissed from the kitchen.

I was 13, but I would have passed for ten, and the grown-ups had to discuss important business.

However, I  wasn’t having this at all.

So I set up an observation post in the hallway.

As she fussed over the tea, she couldn’t hold back the question any longer.

“John Joe, ammunition? Do the lads have enough ammunition?”

“Ah, they do in fairness, Julia”, said the old Republican who might have been in a position to know these things.

She handed him a plate of tea brack and another question from the Cumann na mBan veteran.

“Land mines? They’ll need land mines!”

In 1971 it was half a century since Crown Forces had been on the streets of her town, but she had not forgotten what that meant for the people in the Six Counties.

This was the generation that the Revisionists largely could not reach.

For her, the IRA was the IRA.

The fellas in Ballymurphy with M1 carbines taking on the Brits that day were no different to the army that had ambushed the Tans at Carrowkennedy fifty years earlier.

Internment was meant to be a knockout blow that would finish the IRA in the Six Counties.

Well, you know how that worked out.

Locking up people in Ireland without due process has a long and ignominious history.

I do not know if this book is still in print, but it should be.

I’m proud that I was honoured to count the author as a friend many years after that day in Belfast.

He has gone now to his rest eternal these past twenty years or so.

I’m told that he reached the rank of Brigadier.

Evening all…

On the back page of John’s book, he mentions “from Frongoch to Long Kesh”.

As I look back now, the internment operation in the North must have made my grandmother think about her late brother Michael and his time as an internee in Britain.

The old Stormont polity that controlled the British Army on this day, fifty August 9th 1971, is now dead and not coming back.

I won’t be around fifty years from now, but I hope that my trio will be, and I’m sure as I can be, that Partition on this island will be a thing of the past.

History forgotten is a betrayal.

History remembered is a weapon.