The Control Zone: Growing Up Amid The Chaos Of The Troubles In Northern Ireland
To coincide with Dua’s Monthly Read for June – Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keeffe – Northern Irish poet and artistic director Maria McManus writes about the impact a childhood against the backdrop of Northern Ireland Troubles had – from the thrum of soldiers’ boots and bombings to the “changing lexicon of the ordinary”…
The paradox about the presence of security forces is that the more of them there were, the less safe you felt. Anywhere in the North of Ireland remains riven with such contradictions. Understanding that this is both omnipresent and multi-dimensional is a fundamental starting point for anyone interested in this odd little corner of the planet. For it is also an ordinary and unremarkable place. It is fractured, wounded, scarred. The people are tender, hyper-sensitive and hyper-vigilant, and blunt, unpretentious, and effervescent with fun, creativity, generosity and spontaneity. Kindness and cruelty can sit cheek by jowl. We are both open and closed.
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My infant daughter woke screaming in the night. She’d had a nightmare that there were soldiers in her room. She was less than two years old. I returned to my bed, bringing her with me.
“It’s gone beyond a joke when the child is waking in the night screaming that there are soldiers in the room. That’s fuckin’ it now. I’m done. We’re out of here.”
My partner rolled away and with a dryness typical of Belfast people muttered,
“That’s nothin’. I remember wakening up and there were soldiers in the room.”
This was the late 1980s in Belfast. It was a city of villages, and communities within communities. My husband, daughter and I lived in a handful of streets close to the Ormeau Bridge in the south of the city. Lower Ormeau.
Every house in the district closed their curtains at the incoming dusk. It was the same all over the city, all over ‘the North’. The soundscape of the city thrummed – helicopters, boots, running feet, sometimes shots, or the boom of bombing, sometimes riots, stand-offs with the police and army, or with Orange parades.
Hearing became the dominant sense in the darkness – onto the street, into the alleys. Radio and telephone landlines were the anchor points for breaking news.
I grew up in Enniskillen, a market town near the border. When I’d been the same age as my infant daughter in the late 1960s, there was peace. Well, relative peace. I tended to be solitary and to disappear. There were eight children under 11 years old in my family. It was a rowdy and crowded house. We were feral children, tracked by a headcount at mealtimes. In between meals, if I was being looked for, I was to be found in small dark spaces – the hot-press, the bottom of wardrobes, under a bed, behind a sofa or the floor-length curtains of the living room. Once, I ran naked in the long grass of the field at the back of our house.
I remember a time before ‘The Troubles’. I know I know this because I remember it changing in the late 1960s and the early ’70s, and because new words entered the lexicon of the ordinary. ‘Mammy, how’d you spell, helicopter?’ There were other words too: soldier, squaddie, internment, sangars, grenade, Saracen, riots, barricades, and balaclavas. There were also plenty of ‘fuckin’ bastards’ at ‘fuckin’ checkpoints’ all of a sudden. There were new words like assault rifles, sawn-off shotguns, machine guns, grenades, Armalites, gelignite, Molotov cocktails. Later, Semtex, missiles and Kalashnikovs.
Our games changed: play was influenced by television – shows including The Virginian, Bonanza, Casey Jones, Champion The Wonder Horse, Lassie, and The Banana Splits. But the new games were ‘secret armies’ and ‘cops and rioters’.
‘What is a secret army?’ I once asked my brother.
‘It’s like the IRA,’ he said.
‘But what’s the IRA?’
Evening television broadcasts were interrupted by police messages, informing keyholders of businesses to check their premises for firebombs and incendiary devices. Sometimes it meant that my father left the house to return to his business, other times he may not have even arrived home, but such TV announcements triggered dread, fear and anxiety.
‘Control zones’ were introduced to towns and cities. Steel barricades manned by armed police or soldiers checked the identity and driving licences of anyone driving into commercial areas. Cars left unoccupied caused security alerts: including the closure of shops, detours, an evacuation of the town, controlled explosions carried out by robots and army bomb disposal units on suspect vehicles. It seems absurd to me now, but it was normal to be left sitting in the car in a control zone – a child was considered living proof that there was no bomb in the car.
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On 1 May 2024 the Troubles Legacy Act became law – and the British justice system slammed shut another door on all those seeking truth and justice for past murders. It is effectively an amnesty for paramilitaries and security forces alike. Families, victims and survivors are relegated, again, to absorb the aftermath and carry the disproportionate weight of loss, pain and anguish on behalf of all of us.
I think often of those murdered in the Troubles. I think of those who loved them. I remember some were murdered by the Republicans, some by Loyalists, many were murdered illegally at the hands of the State.
These were real people, ordinary people, living unremarkable lives. These were people who kissed their children and went to comfort them in the night. These were people, sitting having yarns at the hearth, sleeping in their beds, having pints in the pub, tending to cattle, working on building sites and in factories, or delivering the post. These were people drinking tea in cafes, or driving home, or opening the front door responding to a bell. People doing ordinary and unremarkable things, in what should have been an ordinary place. We would rather have been ordinary and unremarkable. So, when you look at here, keep the filter of your gaze soft. And, if your heart lurches as if to break a little… let it.
Images: Alamy
