The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland on the Brink of Civil War, 1971-72 by Malachi O'Doherty

Author:Malachi O'Doherty [O'Doherty, Malachi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, Ireland
ISBN: 9781838951221
Google: FHhDzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2021-09-15T23:26:25.982110+00:00

It’s Normal Now

I had come of age to the realisation not just that I was vulnerable but that the whole society in which I lived could crack and split apart, that the buses could stop running, there would be smoke on the breeze, news coming through about the dead, and those who might have been dependable supports were instead threatening and dangerous.

I was so young that the men of the neighbourhood remembered me as a child and I remembered them as strong and admirable; now they were crazy, building barricades, unloading rifles from a van across the street.

And though I had regarded the police as distant I had not thought of them as troublesome. But what would have happened had I called them and said I know where guns are hidden? An army raid might have left bodies on the street and I would have been responsible. I was in a society in which I had no reliable bearings, no authority to turn to or even to obey.

And routinely on the news, after reports of further madness, there would be statements by politicians about the courage and dependability of ‘our forces’, ignoring the role they played as irritants.

But still the sun came out.

When the film makers and novelists try to recreate that time they often get it wrong. Yes, there were times when the very air was tense and you seemed to know as soon as you stepped out the front door that the sky was leaden with worry.

But still there was the pub and the walk to the shops, the laughter about other things, the day you walked up the mountain paths you’d used as a child and saw Scotland in the blue haze. There were still other things on television apart from the news.

And when Northern Ireland’s violence featured, even in 1972, very early in the Troubles, the newsreader would drop tone, almost sigh, expecting the national audience to be bored.

The pathetic fallacy, the device in Shakespeare in which even the heavens respond to the madness below, is richly deployed in historic documentaries about Northern Ireland. The brief cuts and the managed pace and the dramatic delivery of the presentation tell you that events you already knew about, had lived through, had a potent significance you didn’t quite catch at the time.

But the failure is in the recall of the programme makers. They miss the point that most of life was not absorbed in the background drone of tension.

Yet, I think now that we who lived through it fail to admit to ourselves how bad it was, as we allowed ourselves to forget it at the time. There was always an early recovery from shock. Was this resilience or self-delusion or just the momentum of the new normal?

People are conditioned to play down their own suffering by fear of seeming to upstage those who have suffered worse. No one wants to be thought an attention seeker by proclaiming how shaken they were by a bomb exploding nearby when someone else was killed or crippled by that bomb.

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