An Irishman's Diary

The truth about people's lives and our society often lie not in the front-page items but in the small and ill-considered items…

The truth about people's lives and our society often lie not in the front-page items but in the small and ill-considered items filing the odd crevices in a news page. What is actually more significant in the long term: the Sheedy affair, which day and after day covers acres of newsprint, or the single-paragraph child-abuse stories from the courts? The latter shine a searchlight into the dark realities of Irish life which should in time revolutionise our attitude to child-rearing and sexuality.

Sheedy, by comparison, is a midsummer snowflake.

It is in the small news items that one can detect the coming earthquake; the seismologically sensitive chickens panicking in their hen-run inhabit the filler paragraphs of a newspaper. These are the items which historians tend not to read, yet vast insights are available through the tiny lens they provide on society. Take, for example, the following item in this newspaper from February, 1939:

Posting bills

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"A 16-year-old Belfast youth, Michael Smith of Ton Street, was sent to jail for three months today for an act likely to cause disaffection after he had refused to recognise the court. The boy refused to give bail for good conditions. Constable Murdock said that he saw two boys pasting up bills in Smithfield. The bills in the name of the Irish Republic demanded the release of all Republican prisoners in Northern jails. Smith when caught had in his possession 44 of the bills. Thomas O'Malley, Norfolk Street, who was similarly charged, also refused to recognise the court and was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment with hard labour."

Who was - or indeed, is - Michael Smith? He would be 76 today if he were still alive. And who might Thomas O'Malley have been? His age wasn't given, but since the accused were said to be boys, he was probably about 17. For the heinous offence of sticking up posters demanding the release of republican prisoners, this youngster, with no prior convictions cited, received one year's imprisonment, with hard labour - and hard labour in those days truly meant hard, with harder rations in between. How could young Thomas or his family do other than hate the political system which treated him with such barbarous savagery? And how insecure must a political system have been that it should have so maltreated youngsters? And did anyone in authority even begin to register the grotesque disproportion between the so-called offence and the punishment it earned?

That deep emotions were running through this Ireland of 60 years ago, and involving an extraordinary selectivity of perception, is quite clear. Young Smith and O'Malley were not imprisoned in the midst of a paramilitary vacuum. The IRA, much to the satisfaction of its chums in Berlin, was bombing civilian targets in Britain and murdering ordinary English people about their daily business.

Hospital committee

On the same page which recorded the fates of Messrs Smith and O'Malley, another modest story reported that Clare Mental Hospital Committee (no less) in Ennis was demanding the release of IRA prisoners in Ireland and Britain. "Republican Ireland would never be at peace while one sod of the soil of Ireland was held from her people," said Sean Hayes, a member of the hospital committee. "Today men are languishing in English jails and in the North of Ireland because they are advocates of Irish nationality."

Well, not really just advocates; it was not advocacy of a cause which had got them into trouble but an unfortunate tendency to blow things, and people, up. But of course the perceptions from Clare Mental Hospital were not quite the same as those from a Belfast magistrates' court. And we know all too well how perceptions and memory alter according to where you stand. Later that year, two IRA men, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were executed for the Coventry bombing in which they were only peripherally involved.

Republican Ireland remembers them and their "innocence", though they were part of a larger IRA conspiracy to cause explosions; it does not, of course, remember 21 year-old Elsie Ansell, whom they were convicted of murdering, or any of the other four people instantly killed in Coventry, any more than today it remembers the names of any of the two dozen people butchered in Birmingham or the blameless revellers who were slaughtered in Guildford or London (or indeed, any of the dozen or so unarmed, working-class Catholic men who have been murdered by the IRA during the current ceasefires).

Sense of grievance

But those grand events conceal rather than reveal the greater truth about the nature of Northern Irish society and which was made evident in the shocking sentences imposed on two teenage boys 60 years ago. How many other such lads were so dealt with? How great was the resulting sense of grievance, forgotten in detail but remembered in accumulated weight in nationalist areas of the North? And how much did this application of injustice for political and sectarian purposes, incessant, insidious and often unseen by outsiders, stoke up the fires which erupted in the North 30 years ago? We all might wonder how the violence in the North could last as long as it did. The answer probably lies not in the large headlines of the troubles, but in the tiny, forgotten paragraphs in the decades which preceded them. In those neglected lines sits the real window into the past.