The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

1. Mapping Moves

1 Mapping Moves = If this was Beirut we would just take you out into the yard and shoot you. You’re not going to walk out of here, but if you do then someday you’ll get what’s coming to you. We mean to get you, you murdering little bastard . You don’t come from Newry. You’re from Camlough and your mother’s from Crossmaglen. You’re a murderer from south Armagh. We don’t give a fuck what goes on in the mountains and bogs of South Armagh, or who you Provos kill out there in your gaelic shitholes, but you’re not going to bring it into Newry, Warrenpoint and Rostrevor like you’ve done; you’re not going to bring it into civilization. Eamon Collins, Killing Rage (1997) Eamon Collins was an IRA intelligence of‹cer who joined the Provisional IRA in 1979, was expelled from it in 1987, and, many people surmise , was murdered by members of it in 1999. Responsible for organizing a number of brutal murders and bombings in the 1980s, he was questioned by detectives from the RUC on several occasions. The quote in the epigraph represents his memory of one such interrogation. The RUC was investigating the murder of a Roman Catholic whom Collins had mistakenly identi‹ed as a member of the security forces, and an RUC detective uttered this statement, Collins remembers, as he presented the possible results of Collins’s refusal to cooperate. As he interrogated Collins, the RUC man drew boundaries between safe and civilized spaces, Protestant and British ones, and dangerous and uncivilized spaces, Catholic and Irish nationalist ones. He valued 23 those spaces differently, and he drew lines at which the actions he associated with “gaelic” spaces must stop. His rhetoric demarcated sites that coincided with the division of Northern Ireland made by a line provided by nature, the River Bann. Camlough and Crossmaglen, the places he associated with Collins, were west of the river. Newry, Warrenpoint , and Rostrevor, the places he associated with himself, were east of it. Ballybogoin, too, lies west of the River Bann. Map 2 shows the island of Ireland divided into its four provinces and thirty-two counties . Map 3 features the six counties of Ulster that were made into Northern Ireland in 1921. Colonizing and decolonizing meanings adhere to these maps and the territories they represent. Geography and Space The River Bann nearly bisects Northern Ireland. It ›ows from the North Atlantic and enters the northern coastline at County Londonderry , an of‹cial name not recognized by Catholics, who refer to it as County Derry. The word “London” was pre‹xed to the Irish Gaelic name for the monastic settlement in the area when the London Company established a plantation there in the seventeenth century. Catholics do not use this colonial appellation.1 For a considerable distance, the River Bann forms the border between the counties of Londonderry and Antrim until it empties into Lough Neagh (see map 3). The river ›ows south from the lough into County Armagh, sweeps through the loyalist stronghold of Portadown, then turns into the Newry canal. There it divides rural south Armagh, a notorious Irish republican terrain and Collins’s home area, from south Down, the area of Newry, Rostrevor, and Warrenpoint, until it enters into Carlingford Lough, along the north central east coast of the island. Three counties lie to the west of the River Bann: County Tyrone, County Londonderry, and County Fermanagh. The river splits County Armagh, and to the east lie County Antrim and County Down. The counties east of the river have a different demography than those to its west. The eastern region has greater population densities. Historically, it has had many more people employed in manufacturing. A map of industrial employment produced by the Royal Irish Academy in 1979 represents this clearly. Colorful circles indicating the number of persons employed in manufacturing in 1971, the period when the troubles in ballybogoin 24 The Island of Ireland: Its four provinces and thirty-two counties The six Ulster counties that comprise Northern Ireland Northern Ireland’s troubles accelerated, nearly cover Counties Antrim, Down, and north Armagh (Royal Irish Academy 1979, 69–71). The only dull brown spaces within those three counties, those indexing the lack of industry, occur in north Antrim, the Moyle District, and south Armagh/south Down, the Newry and Mourne District, the two districts...