Kate O'Hanlon, who ran a hospital AE on the Falls Road for 16 years of the Troubles, has written a book about her chaotic career, writes Susan McKay
ONCE, JUST ONCE, in 1971, she took half a valium, and once she locked herself and a team of doctors and nurses into a broom cupboard and broke open a bottle of brandy.
For the rest of her 16 years running the AE department at the Royal Victoria Hospital on Belfast's Falls Road, Kate O'Hanlon managed without resort to drugs. Now 77, and disabled by arthritis and back pain, she has her own trolley of drugs. It sits by the large television in her splendidly untidy flat in Belfast.
"You can have some," she jokes. "There's plenty." The bad back was an occupational hazard for nurses of her generation, she says. "Nowadays there's health and safety and regulations and you can complain. We just got on with it."
It was the bad back that led to her retirement in 1988, after a consultant looked at her X-rays and told her that if she was a horse he'd shoot her. She is clearly in great pain, and cannot walk unaided, but offers tea and a very good class of chocolate biscuit, straight from the packet. She pushes a half-eaten mouldering apple aside with her china mug.
"I can't cook," she says defiantly, and shows me a fridge magnet that says, "a clean house is a sign of an empty mind", and another that says "Last time I cooked, hardly anyone got sick". She never married. "I am an unclaimed treasure," she says breezily. There are dozens of photographs on the walls of friends and relations.
She turns off University Challenge. "The girls are getting walloped," she says. Her brother rings, and she tells him she'll call him back. "I'm here talking to a girl from a high-class newspaper," she quips, and turns to me. "Now. What do you want to know, dear?"
Why she took the valium in 1971, and why she never took another one, I reply. "It was after the McGurk's Bar bombing," she says. "Did you ever see the television pictures from that? There was a woman up on top of the rubble in a red dress. That was me."
She had been driving back to her home off Atlantic Avenue on the Antrim Road that evening in December when she heard the bomb. The pub, on North Queen Street, was just a few streets away. "It was dark, but there were lights at McGurk's. People were digging with their bare hands. They were desperate."
Thirteen people were killed that night and many more injured. It was by far the highest death toll of the Troubles up to that time. The UVF was responsible, although, as O'Hanlon points out, the authorities claimed for years it was the IRA. A riot broke out after the bomb, and a gun battle. One of those O'Hanlon helped was a drunk who had been down an entry and had been grazed by a bullet.
"I got him into the ambulance and all he was worried about was having to leave his carry-out," she says. "He escaped from the hospital and ran back to get it." They took down a Christmas banner that had been put up in casualty. It said: "Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men." On her way home, she was stopped at an army checkpoint. One of the officers from that regiment had been shot dead in the disturbances after the bomb.
One of those hospitalised was the bar's owner, Patsy McGurk, whose wife, daughter and brother-in-law were among the dead. "And there was wee Mr Irvine as well. He had been holding his wife's hand under the rubble, but she died," she says. The following day, an IRA bomb killed Mamie Thompson, a member of the Salvation Army, at the organisation's Belfast headquarters. Her husband was injured. "So we had three newly bereaved widowers on the ward," says O'Hanlon. "One of the nurses, a lovely girl, said to me, 'Sister, I don't know how I am going to get through this day.' I said, 'I don't know if I can either'." They split the Valium.
The Royal had all the specialists needed to deal with the sort of extreme injuries the Troubles produced, and thousands of victims of the violence were brought through its doors, along with all the "ordinary" casualties of urban life. British soldiers were based in the hospital. There were gun battles in the grounds. A former police reservist who was an ambulance man was shot dead at his desk. Gunmen hunted members of the security forces through the corridors. A consultant treated the injured after a bomb, not knowing that his daughter was among the dead. O'Hanlon saw and had to deal with the most horrific injuries, and many times she had to break the news to families that their loved one had not made it. How did she cope?
"There was no counselling, but we coped because we were all together. You had porters and domestics and nurses and doctors and consultants, and we would all talk together," she says. "There was a great team spirit." The domestics, many of them older women, were particularly strong, she says.
There were also pantomimes and discos and wine and cheese parties and shows. "Any excuse would do," O'Hanlon says. A stately figure now, she recalls taking part in the dance of the cygnets in Swan Lake, dressed as a domestic in curlers and with a mop. The brandy in the broom cupboard incident, however, was unrelated to festivities. That came about after a rumour went out that there had been a riot among internees at Long Kesh, and that seriously injured prisoners had been brought to the Royal.
Hundreds of angry women descended on the hospital, searching for their men, and hurling abuse. An English consultant was called a "bloody Brit", and O'Hanlon, in her red uniform, was called "a red bloody bitch of a Prod". Of all the terms of abuse flung at her over the years, this, she says, was the best. She decided it was time to get her staff to safety. Hence the broom cupboard and the brandy. A doctor declared it to be the best of cognac, walked out and got hit on the head.
O'Hanlon is, in fact, a Catholic, with a priest for a brother. She was born in Belfast's Markets area. Her father managed a wholesale fish mart. Uncles ran bars with mahogany and brass and mirrors where hard men drank, such as Silver McKee. Sam Thompson's anti-sectarian play, Over the Bridge played at the local theatre. She remembers the Blitz in 1941, when German bombs over Belfast killed 600. Her family had moved to the Antrim Road by then, and the air-raid shelter at the bottom of her street was hit, killing everyone inside. She remembers lying under the table, terrified. She was clever, and her father wanted her to stay at school. She thought she might train as a teacher. But when she was 14 and he was just 54, he died suddenly. She was the eldest, with four younger brothers, and she had to go to work in the office at the mart. "The money smelled of fish," she says.
She went to night school to study secretarial skills. However, 15 years later, she decided she'd become a nurse. At 27, she was the oldest of the students, and one of just two Catholics in the class. Friendships formed then have lasted a lifetime.
Conditions were austere, and wages low. "We were naive," she says. "It was only when men started to nurse that they demanded fair pay." She believes she may have been discriminated against because of her religion when it came to promotion, but decided not to fight it. As a sister, she became known as a formidable figure, seeing off drunks, armed men and film crews when necessary.
The famous consultant William Rutherford once remarked that running casualty was simple: "You have to love everybody; you have to listen to everybody; and, when in doubt, you just do what Sister O'Hanlon tells you."
She got an MBE, has a lifetime achievement award from the Royal College of Nursing, and is a Dame of the Order of Malta.
She's spoken about the "Belfast experience" at nursing conferences around the world. It was as a member of a UN delegation to Gaza and the West Bank that she developed a passionate opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinians. "We got our eyes opened," she says. "It is unbelievable what they have been made to suffer."
She's enjoying all the razzmatazz around the launch of her book. "It's the best of a laugh," she says.
Sister Kate - Nursing Through the Troublesis published by Blackstaff Press