The Heart of a Rebel

I'm just done cleaning the apartment for our inspection tonight, and I wanted to give a quick post. In my Hisory of Northern Irish Troubles class today, Danny Morrison came in to speak to us, and this man was amazing. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army, and Sinn Fein, has been in and out of jail since he was 16, took up arms against the British State, and has almost been killed more times than can be counted on one hand. I urge you, plead with you, to look this man up and read his story. Here are my impressions that I took down of him during class.

He looks like a sweet old man, but there is a wariness about him, an edge. The lines around his eyes, the deep pockets underneath them speak of more than age; they speak of life. His eyebrows furrow, and a vicious blue light comes on when he speaks of the British military: “fired CS gas in, choking babies, choking old people”. The fingers on his left hand are thin, quick, graceful…jazz fingers, and the gold band sits simple and quietly proud on that forth digit. The right hand, though, is thick, chapped red and swollen with arthritis, which I like to fancy comes from his youth. I can see him young, tall, fiercely handsome and charismatic, fumbling in a dimly lit warehouse or basement with dismantled pieces of near-obsolete guns, piecing them together Frankenstein-style, thrusting them into the hands of dewy-eyed boys. Fingers curled and aching around the trigger, tense and sore with nerves and cold, bleary-eyed from an all-night watch. He is a ghost of that boy, a skeleton onto which I can superimpose my own views. There is a shadow that clings to his whiskey cheeks, hangs around his shoulders like a shroud, and it is the blackness of what he has done: the people he has killed, the screams of terror he has elicited. But there shines a tear-silver sheen over that black, and those are his fallen comrades, the years he was starved, beaten, mistreated in prison, the broken promises, the trust betrayed, the secrets he’s hidden and uncovered. The outrage throbs. He is proud, and doesn’t apologize for what the IRA has done, for what he’s done. He is hurt, has grown old watching his friends, neighbors, family sprayed with bullets, dying and bleeding in the streets.
“You cannot push people around for fifty years and not expect a response”. Still, after all that has happened, there is a hope. He is old now, and settled, ready to accept the peace process. He got involved in the IRA when he was sixteen, just a boy interested in electronics who managed to build a radio transmitter, one that became Radio Belfast, the voice of those behind the barricades, and then slowly got more involved, stashing guns and grenades underneath his bed in his parents’ house. He was the editor of Republican News when the Blanket Protest began and continued. His job was to talk with Bobby Sands and other hunger strikers, he was a public spokesman for Sands in 1981, and attempted to negotiate for the end of the strike.
“The screws had no authority over us…I spent five years readin’ and writin’”. He was, at one time, the director of publicity for Sinn Fein, and sort of idolizes Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to a certain extent.
The contours of his face are surprisingly smooth; I find myself wishing to see a long and puckered scar running, perhaps from his eyebrow back and curving across his skull. [Had a friend who got his arm broken, and they tried to drown him in a bucket of disinfectant, and the guy had a nervous breakdown, was sent to a mental hospital] [Men put in hoods, loose-fitting clothing, subjected for ten straight days to helicopter white noise, threw them out of helicopters, letting them think they were high in the air, forced them to run across glass and barbed wire, fired blanks close to their heads] [RUC Soldier actions against his kids: Kevin, 15, on leaving a school dance was kicked so hard he ended up in hospital with a blood clot on his testicles. Liam, 11, was searched on his way to school, and he had a letter from his father in his school bag. He was forced to removed his shoes and socks in the street, and the soldiers attempted to make him eat the letter]
He regrets the death and suffering; both of his best friends were killed, one while he was attending a funeral. In his recent years, he has talked with Unionists and is able now to see things from their side of the table, and regard them as people who have also suffered losses than the faceless enemy.
“I did not act only on emotion all those years ago, though emotion did play a part; I also acted rationally”.
He is calm, well-spoken, simply clothed and unadorned. But his story is his garb, and he is dressed like a solider-king, a freedom fighter, a desperate poet, screaming, hands clenched, one around a gun, the other around a pen. He is laughing and grinning, but there are tears on his cheeks, in his eyes, and he is tearing at his hair, and the laugh might be a keening cry. He is blithe and pithy about skirting death the way he has, but still, when he gets up to walk away, his legs are stiff and uncooperative, as though there is shrapnel lodged somewhere just behind his knees.

So. There are my initial thoughts, unworked over and pretty well unread over, except to transfer them from my school notebook to the computer. I know it's no pretty piece of writing, that it's fragmented and mildly incoherent, and there are a couple images that don't make sense. But there's emotion in there, and that's what I wanted to show you, what this old man with a thick Belfast brogue was able to elicit from me, a middle-class American girl from halfway around the world. No wonder he was followed and adored by the IRA men and boys he helped to recruit, no wonder he made such an impact. I met a living, breathing piece of Irish history today. And yes, there's a poem in there somewhere, at least one, maybe two or three. Have a good day, everyone, and spare a thought for those who have lost lives, loved ones, a homeland, and a sense of self to the conflict in Northern Ireland.