Eamonn McCann: ‘How did I get to be 80? This doesn’t feel like 80 is supposed to feel’

Eamonn McCann is 80 – and he can’t quite believe it.

“How did I get to be 80?” he asks, breaking into laughter as The Irish Times arrives to interview him at his home in Derry’s Bogside. “This doesn’t feel like 80 is supposed to feel.”

For a man who has spent many of those years doing what he wasn’t supposed to, one suspects this is exactly how the 80-year-old McCann should feel; he is still, as he puts it, “going against the established order of things, and taking joy in doing that”.

Such has been his life; one of protest fuelled by his socialist convictions, hatred of injustice, and the sheer excitement of rebellion, all played out against the backdrop of convulsive changes in Northern politics and society.

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In McCann’s 80 years, he has watched Northern Ireland transform from a place where sectarian discrimination was woven into the fabric of the state, through the rise of the civil rights movement and the collective trauma of the Troubles, to the acceptance of the principle of powersharing between communities with, the current hiatus at Stormont aside, a Nationalist first minister.

I was 11 years old, and I suddenly realised, I remember this being a flash to me, that we are looked down on

In all this, he has played his part; he helped spark that civil rights movement, was present on Bloody Sunday and subsequently became one of its most prominent campaigners and, almost 50 years after his first electoral defeat – to John Hume – finally won election as a People Before Profit MLA in 2016, aged 73.

With the clarity of hindsight, it is tempting to believe he could have done little else, yet just as the times he lived in have shaped him, so too has this self-confessed “outsider” shaped them.

“‘I’m Eamonn McCann and I’m from Rossville Street’,” was his answer to the priest who, on his first day at secondary school at St Columb’s College, asked all the new pupils to give their names and where they were from.

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“I can remember it clearly to this day, he said, ‘Rossville Street, that’s where you wash once a week’.

“I was 11 years old, and I suddenly realised, I remember this being a flash to me, that we are looked down on.”

Later the pupils were addressed on their “mission … to see if you had a vocation to become a priest … and also, to produce the next generation of leaders of the Catholic community, lawyers, doctors, politicians, whatever”.

“So, your destiny was placed in the context of Northern Ireland history, right from the very beginning.”

Yet McCann’s involvement in the civil rights movement happened by chance. Living in London and with a relationship and a job he loved, he came back to Derry in 1968 only because his sister Bridie – who had emigrated to Canada – was home for a visit.

“I was working for the Greater London Council parks department as a gardener, pruning and transplanting trees … we had stencilled on the side of our Transit van, Dendrologists Are Go, because Thunderbirds was very big at the time, and we would drive through London like that early in the morning, we loved that.

“But my mother was very strict on the phone, so I came back for a week.”

During that week he bumped into Dermie McClenaghan, who would become a lifelong friend; he was on his way to block a road with a caravan in protest at the local authority’s refusal to give a local Catholic family a house.

“He said, ‘Will you give us a hand?’, and I says, ‘right’, and off we went. Sure, what else would I say?

“And then just one thing led to another.”

It led to his first arrest. “The first political charge I was involved in was obstruction under the Road Traffic Act,” McCann explains with relish.

It also led to more protests. He was arrested again that summer following a sit-down on Derry’s Craigavon Bridge, and was one of the organisers of the march in the city on October 5th, 1968, which is often regarded as the starting point of the Troubles. In the years since, his name has become forever linked with places and episodes that have become part of Northern Ireland’s history: Duke Street, Burntollet, the Battle of the Bogside.

There is a glint in McCann’s eye as he remembers it all; he is back on the barricades of ‘68, with all the optimism and bravado of youth. “I had to, obviously. You couldn’t walk away.

“It was certainly one of the formative periods of my life. It’s not that I haven’t done more important things, or that personal relationships haven’t been more important, but as a wee chunk of my life for two years – and I suppose you idolise things when you look back on them – it was good.

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“All those things were exciting, and they were all new.”

Such has been the eternal appeal of the “transgressive”; the night in 1956 when Rock Around the Clock was shown in Derry, he and his brother stood on chairs to peer through the skylight of their attic bedroom and watched two champion Irish dancers “jiving up Rossville Street with about four or five hundred people in the crowd … it was incredible, a dancing riot”.

I’ve always felt more comfortable among the outlaws, and there are always outlaws, no matter where you are

Remembering, McCann beats out the rhythm on the arm of the chair. “‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock’ – wow, that was just so liberating.”

“I loved all that, and I loved the jukebox in Jimmy McCarry’s shop, and I loved the rebellion in it, I loved the fact it wasn’t Irish … it was this simple stuff which was different to us and which came from romantic America.”

Even as a child, says McCann, he was “always a wee bit outside the centre … I was never part of the establishment. I always felt authority was a challenge.

“I’ve always felt more comfortable among the outlaws, and there are always outlaws, no matter where you are.”

This, he learnt early. His father Edward was “a Labour man” whose heroes were Dr Noël Browne, who attempted to bring in the Mother and Child Scheme, and Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service.

“The majority of the people in the Bogside would have seen themselves as nationalists. My father once said, years later, proudly, that there never was a nationalist vote went out of this house.

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“I knew through my father that the Tories had opposed the National Health Act and he would never forgive them for that … those were the issues, not Partition, even though of course we were against discrimination, we were the subjects of that, but the way out of that was always through the Labour movement, as far as my father was concerned.

“I got that at a very early stage, and I’ve never lost it, and I wouldn’t, not just out of fealty to my father, but just that it became ingrained upon me.”

McCann’s convictions have been just as ingrained; he is a lifelong socialist and trade unionist, a believer in class unity rather than sectarian division.

He has also been unafraid to hold unorthodox or unpopular views. At the time of the referendum he supported Brexit – though not any hardening of the Border – out of opposition to what he calls the “racist, neo-liberal elite” of the EU, and he also opposed the Belfast Agreement because he believed it “enshrined sectarianism”.

He lists example after example contradicting the “two-communities model of Northern Ireland society … it was never the case simply of two different chunks of people, and never the twain shall meet.”

He tells of his mother Elizabeth, from the parish of Warbleshinny – “isn’t that a wonderful name?” – in the Co Derry countryside, and her religiously “mixed” primary school where she received what would now be termed an integrated education, and their breadman in the Bogside, who the young McCann met “with an Orange sash on” when he sneaked into the city centre on the day of the Apprentice Boys march.

“I thought, I’m done for now. And he came up, ‘Young McCann, are you enjoying it? Tell your mammy I was asking for her’. I thought, ‘I got away with it!’ Wee things like that give a slight chink to your assumptions.”

Derry, he admits, “certainly shaped me”. He loves the city, its people and its contradictions. “You can over-analyse things, and I do all the time, but that’s all part of growing up in a place where you can express yourself at the same time as you feel oppressed.”

It is no wonder, then, that Bloody Sunday had such a deep impact, not least because it happened “literally on the street that I was born in and grew up”.

He becomes emotional as he describes how “it wasn’t just shock and grief, it was personal. Bloody Sunday was personal to the whole of the Bogside.

“Bloody Sunday was done in broad daylight, by men in British army uniforms using Nato-issue self-loading rifles, lethal at 1,000 yards, and they were shooting across the street.”

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McCann went on to become the chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, which campaigned for and was eventually granted a second inquiry into the killings; in 2010, McCann stood with the relatives of the victims and the injured on the steps of the city’s Guildhall as they were declared innocent.

It was a moment of collective catharsis, a “huge achievement for Derry”, says McCann. “It needed a significant achievement, and it needed an achievement wider than Derry to match the effort that had gone into achieving the inquiry.”

Bloody Sunday – and the achievement of the Saville inquiry – was a turning point for McCann; asked to pick out others, he speaks of meeting his partner of 40 years, Goretti Horgan, and the birth of his three children, Kitty (an Irish Times journalist) and Luke – both with late journalist Mary Holland – and Matty, his daughter with Horgan.

“Matty wasn’t expected to live at all, she suffered brain damage, a near cot death, that was a truly terrible time.”

Horgan – a lecturer at Ulster University and well-known in Derry as an activist in her own right – he describes as “the single influence that’s more important than any other in my life”.

They still “get on like a house on fire, after all that time, which is pretty amazing. More than anybody else in the world she has shaped me, and I do love her.”

Their home is within walking distance of the house McCann grew up in; though his health has put a stop to some of his protesting and he is no longer an elected politician, he remains instantly recognisable in his uniform of black skinny jeans, black T-shirt and black leather jacket – and brightly coloured socks.

One of the things that has remained the same is that the rich are still f**king over the poor and that’s everywhere you look …

These days, there is also a stick, the result of his diagnosis three years ago with the degenerative condition ataxia, which can make it difficult to walk.

“The thing that affects me most is not apparent, it’s that I can’t write, I can’t use a pen and I am increasingly unable to hit keys.

“I find that very difficult, I find that more disabling than anything else.”

This for a man who has spent his whole life writing, as an author and a journalist; asked about his regrets, he says “I wish I’d written more. I wrote two plays which were not bad, which were quite well-received. I should have done more of that.”

As to other regrets: “I’ve had a few – I see everything in terms of songs,” he says. “I can still see the times and the occasions in which I made a complete f**king mess of things, I can still think about those things and think about what might have been if I’d got that right.”

Yet he is still protesting – over, among other issues, railways, the environment and trade union matters – “I can’t imagine not campaigning, I just can’t imagine it,” he says.

“One of the things that has remained the same is that the rich are still f**king over the poor and that’s everywhere you look … that’s the constant, the absolute constant, and it’s still going on and it’s still being justified and rationalised.”

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He retains all his youthful conviction: “I can’t say when or where, but I can say with all certainty and confidence that sooner or later capitalism will be overthrown and the agent for overthrowing them will be the working class. I have no doubt whatsoever.”

How, after 80 years, can he remain so confident? “Because I see it happening all the time.”

He gives examples, including a trade union demonstration over the health service at Belfast City Hall. “There were 25,000 people, one of the biggest crowds I’ve ever spoken to, and there was no way of telling if these were Catholics or Protestants, they were just a sea of faces.

“We went over the Border during the abortion referendum, there were Protestants and Catholics, there were women from the Shankill Road who were in Dublin, so the idea of two hermetically sealed communities, that’s never been true and it most certainly is not true now.”

What then does he make of the current political impasse? “The least popular I have ever been, or certainly in Derry, was when I took against the Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement.

“I look back, and I still think I was right, within weeks of the Agreement I said this is pre-programmed to fail.

All history shows nothing significant can be achieved without solidarity from the lower orders. That’s what changed the world, not anything else

“It was enshrining sectarianism,” he says. “It’s either co-operation or confrontation between the two identities, that’s the structure of it.

“I never thought the Assembly would last, never, and I don’t think the Assembly is going to come back again.”

So what is the answer? “Irish unity by 2030 is not going to happen … I expect there’ll be another agreement. There have always been talks, ever since the Troubles started, there’s never not been talks.

“As Winston Churchill said – one of the few accurate things he said – jaw jaw is better than war war, and that’s true, and peace is better than war.

“People like peace … people are not straining to get at one another’s throats, people do not hate, people regret the division between the two communities. They know what they’ve lost – people have lost friends, they’ve lost neighbours, and they are not all haters.”

When change happens, says McCann, it will happen through a mass movement. “One of the things I’ve got from marching is that it’s in numbers that people get a sense of their own power.

“The most radical changes of mind that I’ve observed in my time have happened in the context of the lower orders rising up, and I would hope to see that again.

“All history shows nothing significant can be achieved without solidarity from the lower orders. That’s what changed the world, not anything else.”

Can he name a theme for his memoirs, The Irish Times asks? McCann laughs. “I can’t write memoirs because I haven’t worked out yet what I want to say.” He pauses. “It’ll come to me.”