Opinion

Tom Kelly: Our peace is still plagued by our terrible past

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

Soldiers on guard in August 1969 on a corner of Leeson Street and the Falls Road in west Belfast as British troops were deployed onto the streets of Northern Ireland as part of Operation Banner. Picture by PA Wire
Soldiers on guard in August 1969 on a corner of Leeson Street and the Falls Road in west Belfast as British troops were deployed onto the streets of Northern Ireland as part of Operation Banner. Picture by PA Wire Soldiers on guard in August 1969 on a corner of Leeson Street and the Falls Road in west Belfast as British troops were deployed onto the streets of Northern Ireland as part of Operation Banner. Picture by PA Wire

WHEN the British government finally decided to send troops into Northern Ireland in 1969, the then home secretary James Callaghan wryly said going in was the easy bit but getting out would be a totally different matter. He wasn’t wrong.

As the grainy colour TV images show, the Catholic community initially welcomed the troops but it was a short-lived honeymoon. The move itself was a necessary one as Northern Ireland was in the throes of civil war.

There was large-scale displacement of families. Homes were burnt out. Sectarian flashpoints were at every interface. Riots and hijacking were routine. And of course the barricades went up. Although intended to be temporary, they are now part of the physical infrastructure of Belfast – ridiculously known as the peace walls.

Fifty years on and those walls have got longer and higher. Acres of derelict land remain waste ground and empty to ensure a buffer zone between divided communities. Fifty years on and Belfast’s sectarian trenches have got deeper. Policy such as it is appears to be one of appeasement rather than upset the fragile demographics of certain places.

The soldiers that arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969 and those who arrived later came from Victorian backstreets quite similar to those in Belfast. They came from places in the north of England which had sweet FA but high unemployment and arrived in a city in the same state of deterioration and dereliction. They should have found some empathy with the locals but instead they found naked sectarian enmity. Strange though that even in the darkest days of the Troubles and at a time when we were most estranged from crown forces, whenever the news told of a soldier being shot, my nationalist grandmother used to remark as she clicked her Rosary: “God love him – for he was some mother’s son.”

The reality was then and is now, soldiers are not police. Unfortunately the RUC back in the day were not much of a police force either. So a deadly combination of untrained soldiers and a discredited police service was always going to find themselves alienated from those they were meant to protect and serve. It was into this world we had to navigate. Bored soldiers randomly stopping and searching kids. Taunting their detainees with Paddy and Mick jokes. The RUC spent much of its time bunkered in stations. And when they did go out it took a platoon of soldiers to protect them. The random nature of terrorism back then meant that it was a risk even to go shopping.

That it all came to an end with a fizzle rather than a bang was a relief to all.

And then we had our recent spate of bonfires – loyalist and republican. It seems we have learned nothing from the past 40 years. It is still about poking each other in the eye. Sectarianism in Northern Ireland has become an addiction, every bit as dangerous and more widespread than drink or gambling. This defining of culture through what are actually celebratory hate fests is dragging us back.

The young people in parts of Newry and north Belfast have taken recreational violence to a new level of seasonal madness. In Belfast the bonfire builders even ordered takeaways to be consumed on site.

In north Belfast groups of feral youth held off the tactical support units of the PSNI. The police failed an important test of serve-and-protect. The residents being terrorised by these teenage hoods and halfwits have been let down by officialdom, police and politicians alike.

And course, just when one thought things couldn’t get any worse, a tuppenny ha’penny flute band from Larne risks years of good relations in the city of Derry by insulting the families of Bloody Sunday victims. 

A bit like the play Monsters, Dinosaurs, Ghosts, our peace continues to be plagued by the past.