The laughter of our children

The laughter of our children

This week saw the anniversary of the death of Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands. Those of us who lived through those times remember with clarity the ratcheting up of tension as each successive day passed and the unbending British Prime Minister Thatcher refused to compromise. When Sands died there was an outpouring of anger not just in the north of Ireland but around the world. There were also those who said that he chose the path of violence and could expect only prison or death as a release from it.

The decision taken by the British Government in the 1970s to ‘Ulsterise, normalise and criminalise’ the conflict in Ireland was taken in the cynical belief that the deaths of locally recruited soldiers and policemen didn’t hit home with the British public as powerfully as the deaths of Scottish, English or Welsh soldiers. The ‘criminalisation’ of the conflict sought to deny any political motivation to those involved and treated them as criminal gangs. Thus the British government could try to label the conflict a fight against crime rather than what it actually was; a colonial struggle fought out amid the last spasms of a dying empire. Ireland, Britain’s first colony, was likely to be its last.

Whether a man is a freedom fighter or a terrorist will always depend on your perspective. To the Nazis the French Resistance were terrorists to the British they were freedom fighters. To say that men like Sands joined the IRA for criminal gain is hard to sustain. He knew at the outset that death or a prison cell were the likely outcomes of his choices. Men like him weren’t involved in the armed struggle for personal glory or financial advantage and the British knew this but to pursue their policy of criminalisation, they needed to portray their adversaries in a certain way. Criminalisation led to the withdrawal of political status of prisoners held for offences related to the conflict. Some refused to wear prison uniforms as it was an admission of sorts that the struggle was a criminal enterprise rather than a political one. Thus the ‘blanket men’ arrived. The lyric of a song of the time summed up their defiance…

‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform nor meekly serve my time

That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight 800 years of crime.’

Any student of Irish history knows that the various rebellions and risings which occurred were not motivated by criminal intent but were in the main a response to invasion, occupation, dispossession and the deeply unfair nature of the society Britain had imposed on Ireland.

Operation Banner, the deployment of British Troops into the province in 1969 was portrayed in the British media as the good guys arriving to keep the warring tribes of Paddies from killing each other. The RUC and B Specials had lost control of the situation and were viewed as partisan by the Catholic minority in the north. The army was there to reassert control and prop up what was essentially a failed state.  Their initial welcome in beleaguered Catholic areas soon changed after incidents like the Falls Curfew, Ballymurphy Massacre, Operation Demetrius and Bloody Sunday. The army killed 306 people in the conflict, 160 of them were unarmed civilians; among this group were 61 children.

The use of sensory deprivation techniques on Republican prisoners by the British Army led to a conviction in 1971 of torture before the European Court in the Hague. This technique consisted of men being hooded and dressed in thick boiler suits and being made to stand against a wall on tip-toe and being subject to "white noise". The British military had used torture in various colonial wars - Fort Morbut in Yemen or Hola Camp in Kenya where the Army attempted to force 88 Kenyan detainees to work. They refused and were viciously clubbed. 11 men died and the other 77 suffered permanent injuries.   Caroline Elkins' details the British Army’s behaviour in Kenya in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.’ It does not make pleasant reading. One of the victims had pins jammed under his fingernails and into his body. His testicles were crushed between two metal rods. His name was Hussien Onyango Obama and his grandson was to become President of the United States.

Elkins’ book is a horrifying catalogue or murder, castration, rape and torture and yet very few people in the UK today could tell you a thing about what their army did in Kenya. They are not taught in school about the dark side of Britain’s colonial past and are instead fed stirring tales of empire building heroes. Nor are they held to account by the press which for the most part tows the party line. It was only in 2013 that the British Government finally expressed ‘deep regret’ about their actions and gave £20m in compensation to surviving victims tortured by the army.

Some of the methods used in places like Kenya were used in Ireland. The myth that they were there to act as referee in a what was essentially a local conflict is palpable nonsense. Internment for instance was used almost exclusively against one community.  As author Fintan O’Toole said, ‘Ideologically and militarily, the army was a player not a referee.’

Ordinary people were caught up in all of this and had hard choices to make. Some, on both sides, took up arms to protect their people or their political position as they saw it. Others kept their heads down and hoped the spiral of violence wouldn’t affect them or those they loved. All the combatants involved committed acts of savagery which could rightly be called atrocities. None of them emerged with a military or indeed a moral victory.

Looking back through the lens of almost forty years there are those who look for heroes or use hindsight to try to justify some of the dreadful acts which occurred. I could write a long list of atrocities committed by all sides in the conflict and none of them could be justified. Violence begets yet more violence and as with all conflicts it is the innocent who bear the brunt of the suffering. It is those innocent victims who are most deserving of our thoughts and compassion.

Bobby Sands has been described by people with very different perceptions of him this week as both a hero and a terrorist. He himself would probably dismiss either title. He was a undoubtedly a courageous young man caught up in some extremely difficult times and like many others chose to try and change society by force. Those of us lucky enough not to be faced with such choices in our lives can count our blessings.   

He is quoted as saying, ‘our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’ I hope that laughter echoes around Ireland from all its children, north and south, from all faiths and none.

We’ve seen enough tears to last a lifetime.