Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

belfast: a woman’s story

206 belfast: a woman’s story Estelle Shanley Risk and courage confront women every day in ways never experienced by men. In the rearing of children women become multi-faceted, while men generally live lives tackling one task and achieving one goal at a time. Men, not fragmented by the daily grind of bringing up children, are able to focus on their careers and are not easily distracted. In their lives, both genders take risks and display courage in different ways. For women, it is behavior largely intuitive, and for men, deliberative. In the spring of 1980, nine young Catholic Irishmen, incarcerated in Long Kesh, a notorious British prison in Northern Ireland, made international news when, within days of each other, they displayed both courage and risk in launching a hunger strike. Their protest was simple but went unheeded by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the English Parliament. Rather than allow Irish prisoners to wear non-prison garb, identifying themselves as political and not criminal prisoners, the British government remained mute as nine men died within a period of weeks. In May of that year, as an Irish-born journalist living in the Greater Boston area, I was dispatched to Belfast to cover the death of Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die. Sands was 27 years old, self-educated, intelligent, and common among Northern Ireland Catholics, he was politically radicalized by British rule in Ulster. He wrote poetry in prison, issued political statements in English and Gaelic, and in an historically unprecedented move in Ireland won election to the British Parliament, no small accomplishment from prison. As in most triumphs over the British government, it was a momentary victory. I was born, reared and educated in the Republic border town of Dundalk, County Louth, barely three kilometers from the Ulster border. Dundalk lies halfway between Dublin and Belfast on the east coast, a fifty-mile-journey to either city. Our family grew up amidst the politics of the North and viewed the Irish Republican Army (ira) as the voice of patriotism, the engine to remove the British out of Ireland. The occupation of the six counties by Britain was an old and bitter historic wound. Our childhood was filled with stories of political discrimination and the cruelty of the English, who among other crimes seams of our lives 207 exported food from Ireland while several million Irish men, women, and children died of starvation or immigrated during the famine of 1845. When assigned to Northern Ireland, I was forty years old, married, and the mother of three high school daughters. We lived in Burlington, a suburban town eighteen miles north of Boston. I arrived in Belfast as Bobby Sands reached his sixty-third day on hunger strike. His eyesight was gone and unofficial medical reports indicated he was in the last stages of renal failure. His parents and family members were at his prison bedside and a Catholic priest made frequent visits giving Sands communion and administering the Last Rites, the sacrament for the dying. On my Aer Lingus flight, Boston to Dublin, I pondered the role of the Church. A young man, a political prisoner, electing hunger strike, taking his own life in a willful act of death by starvation. Clearly the Church was condoning his suicide by not withholding the sacraments, in effect blessing his decision. At the time, I saw this as a clear religious conflict since the Church placed such a high value on the sanctity of life. As a child living in Ireland I learned that the Church forbade a Catholic burial for those who committed suicide. The North of Ireland, historically never calm, has experienced ongoing political strife for decades. Catholics were discriminated against, and bitterness escalated between Catholics favoring unity with the Republic of Ireland in the south and Protestants determined to maintain their ties with the United Kingdom. During the sixties and into the seventies, turmoil, violence, and controversy escalated as Mrs. Thatcher and her Parliament ignored pleas from the Irish to grant prisoners political status. The prime minister also rejected pleas from Amnesty International and other peace-seeking groups across the world. I arrived in Dublin and with transportation provided by Martin Naughton, a lifelong friend and influential businessman both in the North, and Republic of Ireland, went to Belfast. His parting advice was to stay clear of risky situations , cover the story, and get the hell out of the mayhem that was sure to come as one...