Update
Fionnaula Lenihan is an imposing figure – even now, almost bent double and crippled with arthritis in her seventies. In the parlour of her small house near where the Divis Flats used to stand, off what was once called the Falls Road in Belfast, she holds court surrounded by friends, neighbours and her family.
Everyone knows Fionnaula round here – some have known her for well over fifty years. Her admiring great-grandchildren run excitedly throughout the house but are quietened by a look from this matriarch. Her history is the history of this community, the history of this troubled place, the history of our troubled times.
We sit in her lounge surrounded by pictures of her family, her late husband and her sons, one of whose lives was tragically cut short. She has paid her dues to this community but they have repaid her too with a kindness and affection you don’t see in too many places now.
As a young girl, she played on the Falls Road and up to Andersonstown and whispers softly of a young boy she courted until her parents found out he lived in the Shankill Road. She remembers the beating and the scolding from her father – that she must never see him again because, in her words, “He’s not one of us”. In time came love and marriage to Michael, a good husband and father to the growing Lenihan brood.
Yet the memory of that first forbidden love never left her. She recalls Billy McMillen and his office decorated with the Tricolour and the Starry Plough and the Police taking down the flag. That day conceived her hatred of the RUC and the role they would play in her life.
She speaks of the Civil Rights Movement and the marches of the 1960s, marching for equal rights just as they were doing in the southern States. She recalls listening to Gerry Fitt and Bernadette Devlin and other long-lost political figures. Then, in 1969, the War between Britain and Ireland began, a turning point for the community and for Fionnaula Lenihan. A few dreamed that the Irish Army would come to Belfast and free them all from the Protestants but it never happened of course.
Instead, there was revenge. On a cold January night, the Police came and chased the last Catholic families out of the Shankill and sealed off the Falls Road and the Divis Flats. The locals fought back with stones and petrol-bombs and the Police responded with live ammunition. Officially, five died that night, Fionnaula asserts it was twelve, including children.
A few days later, Michael was sacked from his job with the electricity board. He said all the Catholics were sacked at once. The Falls Road was sealed off, under curfew but the Specials roamed the streets, dealing out their own kind of justice. One night, Michael was badly beaten for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The community tried to fight back but the Provisionals had been crushed by the Army. Small groups tried to protect their community but were found and destroyed by the Specials. Then came the worst night of all, young Robert had been playing with some friends in the streets and had been shot by a sniper The Specials would pick off one or two each night just to keep the population quiet. Fionnaula cries even now – forty years later – and shows me a picture of her angelic little boy. He had been buried in the local cemetery along with one of his friends who had also been killed.
“Eighteen months of Hell” was how Fionnaula describes those times. Food was short in what became known as the “Falls Ghetto”. Electricity and water were periodically cut and most services including post were withdrawn.
Then, one spring morning in 1972, “Operation Motorman” – shooting from the Shankill, the power and water suddenly restored, the barriers torn down and facing them the British Army. Three very large smiling paratroopers advanced down the street to cheers even as shots were heard in the distance.
“Our liberators” explains Fionnaula and holds up a picture of that day with her husband shaking the hand of a British officer. Overnight, the British Army had been ordered in to Ulster by a Government appalled by the excesses of Stormont. Craig and his clique had been arrested and would stand trial. Paisley and his cronies screamed vitriol from the side lines until Paisley himself was arrested and would spend ten unrepentant years in Parkhurst Prison.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary was disbanded and the hated Specials outlawed. The Army patrolled the streets but the resentment in the Protestant community was palpable. Vanguard fought back inciting riots while the Ulster Workers’ Council declared a General Strike. A more sinister development saw the Specials go underground forming the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force. It was again unsafe for a Catholic to be out and about too late at night in the wrong places.
Michael went back to the electricity board and was able to work with most of his old colleagues but a few would ignore him until they were thrown out. The strike collapsed when it became clear most Protestants, the Catholics and the Army just wanted normality. Vanguard itself splintered but it remained a political force.
The UDA and UVF took their battle to England but terrorism and indiscriminate shootings continued in Belfast too. The Army was forever in the Shankill Road and Fionnaula always feared July – the marching season of old before the Orange Order was banned.
Yet, as the years passed, things began to heal slowly. Vanguard became in time a political force for peace under first James Molyneaux and then David Trimble. The UDA and UVF, despite their atrocities in Britain, never came close to success. Ulster was and would remain a part of the United Kingdom. By the time Paisley returned to Ulster, few would listen to his outbursts.
The road to peace within the communities was harder. Generations of sectarianism would take time to undo. Fionnaula smiles – her grandson married a “fine Protestant girl” from Craigavon while her daughter is living with a Sikh Doctor originally from the Punjab. “A highly intelligent man who helps with my old bones” is how Fionnaula describes him and she speaks of how his family confronted the sectarian divide in post-colonial India.
The schools are now joined thanks to the British Government and Fionnaula once met the Queen herself when she came to Belfast – “we spoke as two grandmothers together, you know. Such a lovely lady and beautifully mannered”. Her other son is in New Zealand – “too far for me to travel but we have this marvellous Skype thing. I can see him on my computer. Wonderful what they can do these days.”
Going outside the house, the bullet marks in the wall are still evident. Divis is gone – “so many memories” and a new purpose-built integrated housing estate will take its place. Even the grimy roofs of the Shankill are disappearing in the wave of new investment from the US and China.
On the famous “peace wall” stand the epitaph to those who fell in the dark days of the early 70s, to Bernadette Devlin, shot down by the Specials while leading a crowd of women on Bloody Friday and to Gerry Fitt, beaten to death while in custody.
Fionnaula looks with hope to the future – “the young ones won’t have the hatred but they must have the memories” she says wisely.
Michael is gone these past ten years – he never really recovered from the beating inflicted by the Specials and he died on the way to work one day. “Such a sadness, such a loss” Fionnaula says wistfully but is that a glint in her pale eye I observe?
“That nice young man from the Shankill I courted some fifty years ago,” she smiles, “he came to see me three years ago. John, that’s his name. He’s a widower too. He comes over for tea and to talk. We could have had a fine life together and he’s company for me.”
But then that’s how it is for John, Fionnaula and many in Belfast. That curious mix of the tragic and the joyful, a lifetime of division and suffering but now, perhaps, for the first time, a real sense of hope and reconciliation and joy for the future – it’s that which permeates the Belfast air.
As I head back down the Falls Road to my hotel, I’m faced with a conflict of feelings and emotions but that’s what this place does to you and to the people. The history is everywhere but the past no longer rules the present and the future, well, the young Lenihans will write that and I’ve every confidence it will be a bright one.