Rattle Away at Your Bin: Women, Community, and Bin Lids in Northern Irish Drama

Rattle Away at Your Bin Women, Community, and Bin Lids in Northern Irish Drama Eleanor Owicki In an early scene in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film, In the Name of the Father, a group of British soldiers opens fire on scrap-­ metal collector Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day Lewis) after mistaking him for a sniper from the Irish Republican Army (IRA). As Conlon races through the streets of his Belfast neighborhood in an attempt to escape, a woman mutters “bastards!” under her breath and begins to beat the lid of her rubbish bin (trash can) rhythmically against a wall. A moment later, we see another woman performing the same action, a calm but determined look on her face. Soon, the streets are full of men racing to hide weapons or confront the soldiers while the women of the neighborhood perform this uniform action, grimly beating their bin lids against walls and the ground.1 Within the context of the movie, it is clear that the women are offering a communal warning, spurring the men to take action to protect the neighborhoods from the British soldiers. We may also surmise that this is a fairly choreographed, common event; the women seem to know exactly what to do, and perform their “duty” calmly. What may be less clear to Ameri­ can audiences, however, is how pervasive this behavior used to be in Catholic Republican communities throughout Northern Ireland. Sheridan did not invent it for the film, nor was it a practice that was isolated to a few small communities. Indeed, it was one of the most common ways for Catholic women to participate actively in the Northern Irish Troubles. Between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Northern Ireland was home to a violent conflict between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Loyalists . This period, which has come to be known as “the Troubles,” saw the deaths of over 3,500 people. Although the issues at the root of the conflict were complex, they fell into two major categories: whether North­ ern Rattle Away at Your Bin      57 Ireland’s Protestant government had violated the civil rights of Catholics and whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United King­ dom or join the Republic of Ireland. Although most combatants dur­ ing the Troubles were men, women participated in many ways. This article explores the ways that one type of object reflected and shaped Catholic women’s experiences of the Troubles. As the above scene from In the Name of the Father suggests, Republican women were asked to participate in the conflict by banging the lids of their rubbish bins on the streets of their neighborhoods to raise an alarm when police or the British army were conducting raids. This paper interrogates the ways that the circumstances of the Troubles imbued these everyday objects with both sectarian and gendered meaning. This nonstandard use of household objects offered women ways to engage in the conflict while avoiding confrontation and retaining at least the appearance of their traditional roles as protectors of the hearth. In many ways, bin lids then became an iconic symbol for the “proper” roles and duties of Catholic women. After establishing the semiotic significance of the bin lid, the essay examines the ways that Marie Jones and the Chara­ banc theatre company use an onstage bin lid to highlight and subvert these meanings in their 1987 play, Somewhere over the Balcony. Chara­ banc, which was active from 1983 to 1995, was founded in order to stage the experiences of women in Northern Ireland. From the play’s first moments , the women use the associations that surround the bin lid to find spaces of freedom from their assigned roles as wives and mothers. The Catholic communities in both the Republic of Ireland and North­ ern Ireland have historically maintained traditional gender roles. As Imelda Foley observes, “the traditional role of women has been perceived as mothers and carers, as unseen supporters of fathers and husbands, keepers of hearth and altar.”2 When the Republic of Ireland wrote its constitution in 1937, it explicitly included this sentiment: “The State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without...